Nobody knows how to make molecular assemblers anyway, yet alone self-replicating nano-bots. Many scientists say Drexler's ideas would not work in any case.
Look at it this way - we have self-replicating nano-bots right now - they are called bacteria. Have they turned the world into gray goo in runaway exponential growth? Are we going to be able to make more efficient nano-bots than mother nature has done in the last 4 billion years?
Bill Joy's worries about nano-bots are like saying we should stop all research into magic because we could set off a chain reaction that would turn us all into frogs. Nano-bots are FANTASY... There are much more important technological threats to the environment to worry about in the real world.
Xlib is not part of the X server, it's part of the X client. They communicate via the X protocol. If either X.org or XFree86 make changes to the protocol that the other doesn't follow we could be in big trouble (unless it's of the form "Does the server support extension blah? If so then use it."). They would be nuts to do this because Sun, HP, Apple, etc all have their own servers and client libraries and *must* interoperate with each other and linux, not to mention 10-year-old statically linked applications.
Don't assume he hasn't already investigated that issue and found out it wouldn't be a problem. Are soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan allowed to make phone calls home without supervision? If so then I can't see how homebrew internet connectivity would be forbidden. It's not like Al Qaeda is going to get any useful information by tapping into their WiFi networks (or will they?)
The problem is that most of us think "the company sucks and is worthless, so I will short it". But you're really betting that the average investor, who may be a lot more vulnerable to SCO's evil PR, is going to agree with you in the immediate future. That's a very different thing...
I doubt they glue the fan on. The HEAT SINK, yes, they glue on, and you'd probably ruin the thermal conductivity of the package if you tried to replace that.
Well, while the case has been going, on the top management have been cashing in their options as fast as they can.. That's what this is all about - I doubt they really believe their case has a chance. So what if SCO crashes and burns and Boies, et al don't get paid? They got theirs... I just hope after this is all over McBride and the others get convicted of defrauding their shareholders.
No publicly traded corporation is influenced by morality or wanting to seem the good guy. It's all about $$$. IBM wants to take on Microsoft, and they see Linux as the way to do it, so they become the champion of Linux. SCO sues them so they fight back. They aren't doing it because they want to defend innocent geeks from evil vulture-capitalist. I'm sure Darl McBride, Sam Palmisano, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs all play golf together and smirk condescendingly at us techie idealists... (Ok, maybe not Steve Jobs - he's too cool for those other guys...)
I bet for every case where a smart user gets a dumb tech support person, there are 100 cases where the user has done something dumb and the tech support is actually correct. Given that
(1) dumb tech support people are a lot cheaper
(2) smart users usually figure stuff out themselves
(3) smart users are a small minority of revenue
It probably makes a lot of sense to skimp on the tech support budget for many companies.
I can't imagine that one takes.com and the other.biz would be satisfactory to anybody. If Foo Flea Collars and Foo Post Hole Diggers both wanted foo.com I think they would be more likely to go with foofleacollars.com and foopostholediggers.com...
I think the reason.edu is useful is that there is some criterion for getting a domain. You have to be a school and it has to be some derivative of the school name. If it weren't for this we would have sony.com == sony.net == sony.edu and we would be back to a 1-level namespace.
Maybe AOL has the right idea. Just give people a keyword - no www or com tacked on. Easier to remember.
Anyway, nobody remembers URL's any more. They just Google with the company name and bookmark it.
Minor points: (1) Joseph Campbell died in 1987, and (2) the interview series with Bill Moyers was basically sponsored by George Lucas, was filmed on Skywalker Ranch, and includes lots of footage from Star Wars. I think Lucas is pretty explicit about his influences here.
It's one thing to complain about how bad these things are, especially in a forum where nobody is likely to disagree with you, and another to actually do something about it. What can we do? How about making every effort to beat Bush and the Congressional supporters of the Patriot Act in November? You can send up to $2000 to the candidates before the party conventions (I think) - why not put your money where your mouth is? Or if you are lucky enough to live in a state that is actually up for grabs (e.g. not California and New York) do some campaign work for your favorite non-Bush candidate...
I tried it with my male cat and it didn't work... Too stubborn I guess.
The way that this stuff works is by converting the urge to mark using spraying (which is not really urine, but an oily substance made by separate glands) into an urge to mark using facial hormones. That's why cats rub their faces on people - to mark their territory.
Chicken scratch to you is a great salary to them... Also it's not just that they are cheap (given the exchange rate) - there are lots of really good engineers in India. They used to all move to the US for the good jobs but as you can imagine, that's unattractive for a lot of people with families, etc. Now they say at home and do the same job.
However the big problem with outsourcing, or any kind of distributed development, is the difficulty of managing via multiple time zones. Any project where you have to coordinate closely with other groups and work with customers in the US is not going to succeed when the developers are 5000 miles away. Routine cookie-cutter projects are another matter but those are boring anyway.
Still, in 5 years the good Indian programmers will make $50K -> $100K a year and we'll be back to normal (I hope)... At least until the Chinese outsourcing industry picks up.
It's not whether the suit has merit, it's whether they can get something out of our messed up legal system. Those are not the same thing and I guess the price at any point is the potential value of the company if they did win big, multiplied by the chance that will happen. I figured a few months ago that the "market" believed the chance of that happening was about 10%... It's just buying a lottery ticket for the investors.
My impression is that OSX has lots of backdoors because they had to make a tradeoff between shipping an OS on time and getting it perfect. I'll bet it will get more secure over time - Linux/UNIX is secure by design (unlike Windows) and it's just a thin layer of setuid utilities that cause the trouble.
On my Linux box I can put a CD in and have it automatically mounted as/mnt/cdrom. That's not a good example. What about adding new users? Can you make a bulletproof setuid useradd ? A bit more of a challenge.
Anyway, users having root access isn't a big deal. Say a user is maximally unsafe and always logs in as root. Then a virus can trash his whole OS. He will have to restore the OS from the install CD and then his files from his most recent backup.
On the other hand, say a user is very secure and there is no way for a virus to get root. So it just does a rm -rf ~. He doesn't have to install from CD but he does have to restore his files. Probably that won't be a big consolation when his last backup was 6 months ago.
I agree that copyright and patent laws have changed over the years to grant too much power to the original holder and too little to the consumer, and they could get a lot less restrictive and still stimulate innovation.
I don't agree with your "copy a vase" analogy. A better one would be a store that made you promise not to copy the vase before letting you see it...
You say that in order for something to be stolen the original owner must lose. If they are no worse off than before then nothing has been stolen. But this misses the point. The record companies are the owners of the songs. They paid the artists for the rights. Maybe they haven't paid them fairly but the artists were under no obligation to sign the contracts.
As the owners of the music they would be perfectly within their rights not to release it at all. Or to play it only in specific places and not allow in anybody with recording equipment. Etc etc.
However they decide to release the music on CD's or on an on-line store and do so under a specific license. Namely, "don't give this music to your 1M closest friends without us getting extra money". If you don't like it why did you buy the CD in the first place? If you really like the music why don't you contact the artist and convince them to release their next album for free to the world, or possibly under different terms?
If you want to listen to music for free, just say so. Admit you're breaking the law and violating the contract you agreed to when you bought the music. It won't be the first time and it won't be the last that it's happened. Admit that (in this case at least) you don't care about the law and you are just taking what you want. The world won't dissolve into anarchy because of it.
If you want to convince the music industry that they are fighting a losing battle and making things harder for the honest people who just want "fair use" of their purchases, go for it. Ask them to reform their distribution model for the 21st century. Maybe with Steve Jobs on your side you will get somewhere.
But just don't waste your time and everybody else's trying to pretend that you have a right to rip tracks from CD's and put them on P2P networks, just because "they wouldn't have gotten that revenue anyway". That's irrelevant and you make your other arguments lose credibility.
Really good programmers will always find work no matter where they live. If you can develop a system 2x faster than a 10-person team on the other side of the world (not as hard as it sounds) you will always have prospects. If you're mediocre, then yeah, you should be worrying.
Figure out some interesting and substantial program you wish existed but doesn't. Design and implement it and give it away for free. It will be a lot of fun and help others at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody knows how to make molecular assemblers anyway, yet alone self-replicating nano-bots. Many scientists say Drexler's ideas would not work in any case.
... There are much more important technological threats to the environment to worry about in the real world.
Look at it this way - we have self-replicating nano-bots right now - they are called bacteria. Have they turned the world into gray goo in runaway exponential growth? Are we going to be able to make more efficient nano-bots than mother nature has done in the last 4 billion years?
Bill Joy's worries about nano-bots are like saying we should stop all research into magic because we could set off a chain reaction that would turn us all into frogs. Nano-bots are FANTASY
Xlib is not part of the X server, it's part of the X client. They communicate via the X protocol. If either X.org or XFree86 make changes to the protocol that the other doesn't follow we could be in big trouble (unless it's of the form "Does the server support extension blah? If so then use it."). They would be nuts to do this because Sun, HP, Apple, etc all have their own servers and client libraries and *must* interoperate with each other and linux, not to mention 10-year-old statically linked applications.
Don't assume he hasn't already investigated that issue and found out it wouldn't be a problem. Are soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan allowed to make phone calls home without supervision? If so then I can't see how homebrew internet connectivity would be forbidden. It's not like Al Qaeda is going to get any useful information by tapping into their WiFi networks (or will they?)
The problem is that most of us think "the company sucks and is worthless, so I will short it". But you're really betting that the average investor, who may be a lot more vulnerable to SCO's evil PR, is going to agree with you in the immediate future. That's a very different thing...
I doubt they glue the fan on. The HEAT SINK, yes, they glue on, and you'd probably ruin the thermal conductivity of the package if you tried to replace that.
Well, while the case has been going, on the top management have been cashing in their options as fast as they can.. That's what this is all about - I doubt they really believe their case has a chance. So what if SCO crashes and burns and Boies, et al don't get paid? They got theirs... I just hope after this is all over McBride and the others get convicted of defrauding their shareholders.
No publicly traded corporation is influenced by morality or wanting to seem the good guy. It's all about $$$. IBM wants to take on Microsoft, and they see Linux as the way to do it, so they become the champion of Linux. SCO sues them so they fight back. They aren't doing it because they want to defend innocent geeks from evil vulture-capitalist. I'm sure Darl McBride, Sam Palmisano, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs all play golf together and smirk condescendingly at us techie idealists... (Ok, maybe not Steve Jobs - he's too cool for those other guys...)
I bet for every case where a smart user gets a dumb tech support person, there are 100 cases where the user has done something dumb and the tech support is actually correct. Given that
(1) dumb tech support people are a lot cheaper
(2) smart users usually figure stuff out themselves
(3) smart users are a small minority of revenue
It probably makes a lot of sense to skimp on the tech support budget for many companies.
Maybe the virus corrupted your BIOS and/or an EEPROM on the drive (is that possible with modern drives?). Not likely but not totally implausible ...
If the multiplier was higher than 8 it's probably because some of the bits are error checking, which you don't see at a higher level than the modem
I can't imagine that one takes .com and the other .biz would be satisfactory to anybody. If Foo Flea Collars and Foo Post Hole Diggers both wanted foo.com I think they would be more likely to go with foofleacollars.com and foopostholediggers.com ...
.edu is useful is that there is some criterion for getting a domain. You have to be a school and it has to be some derivative of the school name. If it weren't for this we would have sony.com == sony.net == sony.edu and we would be back to a 1-level namespace.
I think the reason
Maybe AOL has the right idea. Just give people a keyword - no www or com tacked on. Easier to remember.
Anyway, nobody remembers URL's any more. They just Google with the company name and bookmark it.
Minor points: (1) Joseph Campbell died in 1987, and (2) the interview series with Bill Moyers was basically sponsored by George Lucas, was filmed on Skywalker Ranch, and includes lots of footage from Star Wars. I think Lucas is pretty explicit about his influences here.
> I'm "eco-friendly"!
...
You mean e-cow-friendly
It's one thing to complain about how bad these things are, especially in a forum where nobody is likely to disagree with you, and another to actually do something about it. What can we do? How about making every effort to beat Bush and the Congressional supporters of the Patriot Act in November? You can send up to $2000 to the candidates before the party conventions (I think) - why not put your money where your mouth is? Or if you are lucky enough to live in a state that is actually up for grabs (e.g. not California and New York) do some campaign work for your favorite non-Bush candidate...
I like Gerund-Oriented Programming. It's only well supported by Intercal, though
2K modem??? Try 300bps, complete with a telephone handset cradle... I had one of those connected to my trusty ADM3A back then.
Never had a cat who sprayed, huh?
I tried it with my male cat and it didn't work... Too stubborn I guess.
The way that this stuff works is by converting the urge to mark using spraying (which is not really urine, but an oily substance made by separate glands) into an urge to mark using facial hormones. That's why cats rub their faces on people - to mark their territory.
Chicken scratch to you is a great salary to them... Also it's not just that they are cheap (given the exchange rate) - there are lots of really good engineers in India. They used to all move to the US for the good jobs but as you can imagine, that's unattractive for a lot of people with families, etc. Now they say at home and do the same job.
However the big problem with outsourcing, or any kind of distributed development, is the difficulty of managing via multiple time zones. Any project where you have to coordinate closely with other groups and work with customers in the US is not going to succeed when the developers are 5000 miles away. Routine cookie-cutter projects are another matter but those are boring anyway.
Still, in 5 years the good Indian programmers will make $50K -> $100K a year and we'll be back to normal (I hope)... At least until the Chinese outsourcing industry picks up.
History! Change it and all the unix old-timers will be confused (just look at MacOS!)
It's not whether the suit has merit, it's whether they can get something out of our messed up legal system. Those are not the same thing and I guess the price at any point is the potential value of the company if they did win big, multiplied by the chance that will happen. I figured a few months ago that the "market" believed the chance of that happening was about 10% ... It's just buying a lottery ticket for the investors.
My impression is that OSX has lots of backdoors because they had to make a tradeoff between shipping an OS on time and getting it perfect. I'll bet it will get more secure over time - Linux/UNIX is secure by design (unlike Windows) and it's just a thin layer of setuid utilities that cause the trouble.
/mnt/cdrom. That's not a good example. What about adding new users? Can you make a bulletproof setuid useradd ? A bit more of a challenge.
On my Linux box I can put a CD in and have it automatically mounted as
Anyway, users having root access isn't a big deal. Say a user is maximally unsafe and always logs in as root. Then a virus can trash his whole OS. He will have to restore the OS from the install CD and then his files from his most recent backup.
On the other hand, say a user is very secure and there is no way for a virus to get root. So it just does a rm -rf ~. He doesn't have to install from CD but he does have to restore his files. Probably that won't be a big consolation when his last backup was 6 months ago.
I agree that copyright and patent laws have changed over the years to grant too much power to the original holder and too little to the consumer, and they could get a lot less restrictive and still stimulate innovation.
I don't agree with your "copy a vase" analogy. A better one would be a store that made you promise not to copy the vase before letting you see it...
You say that in order for something to be stolen the original owner must lose. If they are no worse off than before then nothing has been stolen. But this misses the point. The record companies are the owners of the songs. They paid the artists for the rights. Maybe they haven't paid them fairly but the artists were under no obligation to sign the contracts.
As the owners of the music they would be perfectly within their rights not to release it at all. Or to play it only in specific places and not allow in anybody with recording equipment. Etc etc.
However they decide to release the music on CD's or on an on-line store and do so under a specific license. Namely, "don't give this music to your 1M closest friends without us getting extra money". If you don't like it why did you buy the CD in the first place? If you really like the music why don't you contact the artist and convince them to release their next album for free to the world, or possibly under different terms?
If you want to listen to music for free, just say so. Admit you're breaking the law and violating the contract you agreed to when you bought the music. It won't be the first time and it won't be the last that it's happened. Admit that (in this case at least) you don't care about the law and you are just taking what you want. The world won't dissolve into anarchy because of it.
If you want to convince the music industry that they are fighting a losing battle and making things harder for the honest people who just want "fair use" of their purchases, go for it. Ask them to reform their distribution model for the 21st century. Maybe with Steve Jobs on your side you will get somewhere.
But just don't waste your time and everybody else's trying to pretend that you have a right to rip tracks from CD's and put them on P2P networks, just because "they wouldn't have gotten that revenue anyway". That's irrelevant and you make your other arguments lose credibility.
Really good programmers will always find work no matter where they live. If you can develop a system 2x faster than a 10-person team on the other side of the world (not as hard as it sounds) you will always have prospects. If you're mediocre, then yeah, you should be worrying.
Figure out some interesting and substantial program you wish existed but doesn't. Design and implement it and give it away for free. It will be a lot of fun and help others at the same time.
Do you mean the slashdot web site? According to the FAQ it runs on 10 fairly powerful CPU's. That was 4 years ago though.