Besides that, the filtering would work better if the editors would respect the topics. I've realized there are certain subjects that cause me to flame uncontrollably (Napster, censorware, patents, Jon Katz) and I've turned off the relevant topics but stories keep streaming through. Like the Napster story under "Money," apparently because Napster is offering money to the record labels.
Re:A flaw in the book? Or the review?
on
Rebel Code
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· Score: 3
Well, I think what you mean is that freely distributed software goes back to the ENIAC days. To me, "Open Source" is Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens asserting that giving out source code is a good business plan. Perl, BSD, Linux and the rest of the stuff the "Open Source" advocates retroactively take credit for had no origin in it. Mozilla and Eazel were genuinely created under the Open Source banner.
The same goes for the idea that software isn't free unless there are onerous conditions attached to its use. The "Free Software" people also take credit for all sorts of stuff that was written by people who were largely uninterested in their ideology (Linux, Apache), or actively hostile to it (Perl, BSD). gcc and emacs were genuinely created under the Free Software banner.
I guess it sounds like the RIAA has won, but who cares?
I don't know - I'm wondering if this was the Napster backers' plan all along. They couldn't seriously have thought the courts were going to let them operate as the world's largest w4r3z site. Hot air about how the RIAA is violating the spirit of copyright as described in the Constitution is good for scoring karma but even David Boies couldn't make that fly in court.
They built a market presence as a free service and when that came to an end, reached into their pockets to make a deal. Either they're smart or they came out looking smart.
For me, he stopped having credibility shortly after the flurry of Linux-related IPOs.
I heard him talk a year and a half ago or so. He basically gave the same line he's used since 1997, with examples of free software projects that have succeeded and theoretical assertions that open development provides a better way to run a business.
There was absolutely no acknowledgement that he's been pushing this line for years without a single prominent success, and that the project he was so eager to associate himself with, Mozilla, has nailed Netscape's coffin shut. People flame CmdrTaco all the time but at least his site addresses the failures of the open source model. Has Eric Raymond been seen anywhere near Mozilla since people started wondering when it was going to produce?
Naw, he'd rather just keep talking about Linux and Doom and his *gag* "tribe"....
I only wish I could see the smirk melting from ESR's face. What's his portfolio worth now?
Seriously.
I was genuinely happy to see Rob and Jeff get a big payday. They've created a fantastic site and they deserve wealth far more than any of the guys who started lookalike pet food or B2B sites.
But the level of arrogance in the Linux world of 1999-2000 was just so out of hand that it simply had to get spanked. If you believe in karma in the original sense, there's no way the people shouting about world domination on the basis of some slipshod desktops and clones of Photoshop and Excel circa 1993 could continue to prosper without throwing the whole universe out of whack.
The nice thing is they won't melt into the soil as easily as their unoxidated equivalent, but all radiation is still there.
Well, that's the point. No one is saying this makes the radioactivity disappears - it concentrates it in relatively fixed cells so you don't have plumes of plutonium spreading through the soil into groundwater.
The radioactive metals have to be physically taken away from the place at some point. How?
I've heard secondhand accounts of some lab that's trying to breed cleanup microbes that can migrate back to the surface. More realistically, I would guess that the soil has to be dug out.
You're right, of course. But given that Slashdot recently had a multipart Jon Katz discourse on video gamers, featuring such gems as:
gamers are often independent, strategic-thinkers and problem solvers. Their interactive instincts often collide unhappily with the traditions and institutions of a static, passive world. Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time, sparked by astonishingly inventive new technologies like the PS 2. Ready or not, they will become increasingly influential.
and
Historians and sociologists call the adult world's response to gaming a "moral panic," defined as a severe societal response to a dramatic development that elders and institutions can't control or understand, so therefore demonize and fear. Even before this, the young are increasingly coming to believe that older people have less and less to teach them.
and given that Katz routinely uses that sort of language to describe Napster kiddies, IM users and generally surly teenagers, why shouldn't people who actually know how to use their computers get a little stroking too?
I had to laugh at this one - I post something misinformed, someone corrects me, I respond acknowledging that he's right and provide some more information -after which *two* moderators come along and give "Informative"s to the incorrect post!
Then there was the KDE installer article where the guy the story was about got hit with an "Offtopic"...
Oh, I just meant in the context of Slashdot comments. Sure, show the Flash video to anyone who'll enjoy it. But stuff like this - being the latest luser to jump on this troll bandwagon - that's just embarassingly lame.
"All your base are belong to us" humor is now declared officially dead. Everyone remotely plugged into geek humor got their laughs out of it months ago.
Not that being plugged into geek humor is anything to brag about either, but being a wannabe is doubly embarassing.
There shall be no knights, elves, dwarves or dragons. Nor shall there be any wizards, wenches, bards, bartenders, golems, giants, clerics, necromancers, thieves, gods, angels, demons, sorceresses, undead bodies or body parts (mummified or decaying), Nazis, Russians, spies, mercenaries, space marines, stormtroopers, star pilots, humanoid robots, evil geniuses, mad scientists, or carnivorous aliens. And no freakin' vampires.
Yes!
Whenever I come across yet another game (or book) set in a thinly veiled Tolikien universe I always wonder if the designers (or author) are embarassed by their obvious failure of imagination.
In a similar vein, here's a challenge to weblog designers: stop using from-the-lame-quip dept.. Even if you're using Slash or some other Slash-like code, use a little creativity! How many identical Slash-alikes does the world need?
In fairness to Scott and Chris, I would guess that the conversation was more like Breathed saying, "OK, but don't give my information to anyone." rather than them saying, "Give us an interview or we'll publicize your phone number."
Also, many interviews of once-celebrities probably go exactly like this - this one seems worse because the interviewers feel guilty and are being apologetic in print.
That said, I have to say that while I enjoyed Bloom County in the '80s, I recently picked up an old book at the thrift shop and was extremely disappointed. It seemed completely unfunny, and didn't hold up nearly as well as Calvin and Hobbes, or The Far Side. IMHO, obviously.
Doonesbury books still make me laugh, if they're from before Gerald Ford took office. I get a laugh out of the new strips, too, but that's because Trudeau writes with such a "look how I'm capturing the cutting-edge of American society" attitude while all his topics seem to have come from a 9 month old issue of Rolling Stone.
Like a lot of Gould's writings, this piece broadly hints that:
Earlier scientists were wildly misguided, if not outright stupid or malevolent
Something entirely new is being presented here
The "roughly 100,000" number was based on an off-the-cuff calculation of dividing the estimated genome size by the size of a "typical gene." There was no assumption that humans "had to have" lots more genes than other organisms.
The idea that molecular biologists have been fixated on the presence or absence of a particular gene is ludicrous. Gene regulation, protein interactions, splice variants -- there have been thousands of labs studying these things for a decade.
In the most reasonable and widely discussed mechanism, a single gene can make several messages because genes of multicellular organisms are not discrete strings, but composed of coding segments (exons) separated by noncoding regions (introns). The resulting signal that eventually assembles the protein consists only of exons spliced together after elimination of introns. If some exons are omitted, or if the order of splicing changes, then several distinct messages can be generated by each gene.
Here's my prediction: splice variants will turn out to be nowhere near as important as he thinks. Other levels of regulation will be far more important. (It's not my impression that this is remotely "the most widely discussed mechanism," anyway.)
On a completely different topic - the fact that a system has complex interactions doesn't necessarily make it chaotic. Chaos theory has great value but it's not the answer to all, or even most, complicated questions.
No, the flag is held to the pole and also suspended from ANOTHER pole running along the top margin of the flag. No springs.
Yes, I'm trying the Bruce Perens trick of writing something completely mistaken, getting modded up, and then earning more points for responding to the person who corrects me.;-)
I found this paper (awarded the Driver Award for the Best Paper Presented to the 26th Meeting
of the North American Vexillological Association!) which has more information about the moon flag than anyone could possibly want. It's actually very interesting.
Bottom line: you're right but the web site is still missing some information. The horizontal rod was not extended properly, wrinkling the flag and causing the appearance of waving. It looked better that way and later crews intentionally did the same thing.
I still haven't achieved Bruce's specialty of getting a false or heavily unfair story posted and then raking in karma by replying to 25 different flames correcting him.;-)
I saw a commercial for the Fox show where the "expert" raised the question of why the astronauts' flag was waving in the vacuum of the moon. I figured, duh, even I know the answer to that one. I was surprised to see the badastronomy response to that point, though:
Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
Isn't the real answer that the flag was made with springs so it would stand out straight on the pole? That's why it's not hanging limply.
I thought 2.0.14 predated Gnome 1.0 by almost a year, and considering that 1.0 should have been called "0.5" I shudder to think what the alpha versions were like.
Heh, I remember my Redhat 5.0 CD came with a Neanderthal version of Gnome. I spent an hour tinkering to get it to run and for the life of me I couldn't even figure out what is was supposed to do.
That was quite a desktop-friendly distro there: the fvwm95 default, WindowMaker and AfterStep setups that must have been created by searching themes.org for "fewest downloads" and KDE barred for political reasons. And the Linux zealots were already raving about how 1997(?) was going to be the year that Linux conquered the desktop. "I set up my grandmother with Red Hat and she finds fvwm95 much more intuitive than Windows....!"
Questions like 'what is a 3.9 at Stuy' worth already have answers.
Huh? Of course that has an answer -- an admissions officer at any top school can look at a transcript from Stuvesant, Exeter, Punahou, Beverly Hills High and size the student up instantly. Although the 'multiple regression model' they're using is purely inside their heads.
But what about a student from Gerald Ford High in Haystack, South Dakota? By what standard is that transcript supposed to be judged? To my mind, the students who benefit the most by standardized tests are the ones from poor or rural schools.
Anyway, as a product of a UC, I think I can state confidently that what they're trying to do is sneak racial preferences back into the system by removing absolute criteria that might embarass them.
Hey, how about an ad for Linux servers showing the mouth of a beautiful woman and the caption "Our servers won't go down on you either."
Oops, that's also been done.
Re:That's not what they mean by "unique."
on
Who Owns Your Body?
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· Score: 2
That doesn't mean you have no right to a portion of the (not inconsiderable) profits, if you own the mine
Absolutely. The review and I would guess, having read Dorothy Nelkin's stuff before, the book confuse consent with issues of fairness. There is no question that informed consent is required, although medical ethicists argue about exactly what that involves. But you have the absolute right to veto any involvement of yourself in research, and cases where that was violated are illegal and unethical. The question is whether giving consent under existing practices is a fair bargain.
They don't have to treat you. They don't have to offer you the drugs at anything approaching an affordable price. Take the example of the people on Tristan da Cunha who probably will never be able to afford the drugs that their unique genes created.
Well, somebody has to benefit - otherwise how would how would the results be worth any money?
Know what? Patients love us. When you tell sick people that you're trying to turn their suffering into a treatment they don't ask us whether we're going to make money from it, how much it will cost or what share of the profits they're demanding. They want a world where there's a cure for their condition and they're happy to contribute.
As a rule, corporate researchers offer compensation to their study populations - usually medicine or a new clinic. I know nothing about the Tristan da Cunha case, and can't say anything about the fairness of that particular project.
Re:That's not what they mean by "unique."
on
Who Owns Your Body?
·
· Score: 4
As one of those researchers, let me put this into context:
Several hundred people have a medical condition. They have blood or tissue samples taken and offer their consent to have the samples used for research. Researchers then collect data from those hundreds of samples, and spend years of 80 hour weeks and millions of dollars to draw conclusions about what is causing the problem. Pharmaceutical researchers then spend more years and hundreds of millions of dollars coming up with a therapy.
And you people think it's unfair that the people who contributed tissue samples don't collect royalties? They're getting a treatment for their condition -- or the satisfaction that at least someone else won't suffer as they have. They've made the same contribution to research as lab animals or the seaweed used to make agarose - my mice have contributed far more to my findings and have made a genuine sacrifice. If anyone is entitled to royalties, it's them.
Some random thoughts:
A big part of the problem here is that Slashdot keeps encouraging wildly false ideas about what biological findings are and are not patentable. I had an exchange with Hemos a while back where he showed that he knows what the reality is, but nothing has changed.
Also, what you're seeing here is the contempt for innovation and creation in the "free everything" mentality. Tissue sources are important contributors; the knowledge, ability and work that go into scientific discovery are valueless. Sort of like how making software or music has no value but selling CD's or T-shirts does.
If I sound irritable, it's because I'm spending Saturday afternoon in the lab curing diabetes for you ungrateful pinheads when I could be making five times as much using a quarter of my brain to reboot servers or write databases.
A story about someone protesting Nike's workplace policies that tangentially involves computers
Hey, a story with the Red Hat logo about Michael Tiemann! Could it be that they're going to be shipping a less brain-dead compiler? No, it's about -- free software and intellectual property.
There was a question posed for CowboyNeal that I really hope makes the cut: how much time do Slashdot editors spend actually reading the site they run? Does Taco even know his site has been turned into 2600 junior? I've been reading since Chips and Dips and I know it's not like he and Hemos actually believe any of this stuff.
Looking at my Slashdot front page I see the following stories:
Unfortunately, an appeals court failed to overturn copyright law.
How can I trademark my project name? (At least this guy is trying to invent his own name, not take someone else's, although the precedent he cites was a case of flat-out infringement.)
Yay! Orrin Hatch wants to restrict music copyrights.
An interesting, if incoherent, piece about supercooling atoms with lasers.
Oh, no! Someone lost a domain name that infringed on someone else's trademark! (I confess, I actually agree with the YRO crew on this one.)
Some nothing about Mir
A free ARM clone
Mozilla totters along
Oh, no! Napster users are facing prosecution in Belgium!
So, the majority of Slashdot is now devoted to demanding control of other people's creations? Am I alone in identifying with the physicists in the laser story who are actually creating something? Or, at least with the Swedish students who are legally copying someone else's creation?
Not that I'm proposing we lie down and take whatever the world gives us -- that ruling that all domain names containing "referee" are off limits is genuinely outrageous. But where did all the hackers go?
Hint to the rest of you: this has nothing to do with eliminating copyright, whether you're for or against that. Napster trading would be as illegal as it is today.
After posting this, I noticed this post and realized, "Duh! I should have removed my old preferences before complaining!" So I did a completely clean reinstall and found the same problem - text entry is white on white.
I assume this is a common problem, at least in the Mac builds, because there's nothing unusual on this box (8.6 on a b&w G3) except Kaleidoscope. If any developers are interested, let me know at the address in the screenshot and I'll file a bug report. Otherwise I'm not bothering anymore. Microsoft clearly cares about producing a quality browser for the Mac. My impression of the Mozilla attitude is that they've got their cross-platform framework and therefore don't need to pay non-Windows platforms any further attention.
I tried a nightly build (MacOS) a few weeks ago and ran into this problem. I couldn't believe they could ship a release with that bug so I when I read your post I downloaded a 0.8 package. Same problem - picture here. And Windows has the same bug? Unfreakingbelievable. Doesn't anyone use this thing?
Meanwhile, if they would just fix Mac IE's stability, it would be perfect. And Konqueror from recent CVS is perfectly usable, including for online banking and JavaScript-heavy sites. Plus it has a much more fun feel to participate in - it's a hacker project, the developers respond to bug reports promptly, I feel like I'm welcome in their community and the project advances visibly each day instead of slowly spiraling into oblivion.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides that, the filtering would work better if the editors would respect the topics. I've realized there are certain subjects that cause me to flame uncontrollably (Napster, censorware, patents, Jon Katz) and I've turned off the relevant topics but stories keep streaming through. Like the Napster story under "Money," apparently because Napster is offering money to the record labels.
The same goes for the idea that software isn't free unless there are onerous conditions attached to its use. The "Free Software" people also take credit for all sorts of stuff that was written by people who were largely uninterested in their ideology (Linux, Apache), or actively hostile to it (Perl, BSD). gcc and emacs were genuinely created under the Free Software banner.
I don't know - I'm wondering if this was the Napster backers' plan all along. They couldn't seriously have thought the courts were going to let them operate as the world's largest w4r3z site. Hot air about how the RIAA is violating the spirit of copyright as described in the Constitution is good for scoring karma but even David Boies couldn't make that fly in court.
They built a market presence as a free service and when that came to an end, reached into their pockets to make a deal. Either they're smart or they came out looking smart.
I heard him talk a year and a half ago or so. He basically gave the same line he's used since 1997, with examples of free software projects that have succeeded and theoretical assertions that open development provides a better way to run a business.
There was absolutely no acknowledgement that he's been pushing this line for years without a single prominent success, and that the project he was so eager to associate himself with, Mozilla, has nailed Netscape's coffin shut. People flame CmdrTaco all the time but at least his site addresses the failures of the open source model. Has Eric Raymond been seen anywhere near Mozilla since people started wondering when it was going to produce?
Naw, he'd rather just keep talking about Linux and Doom and his *gag* "tribe"....
Seriously.
I was genuinely happy to see Rob and Jeff get a big payday. They've created a fantastic site and they deserve wealth far more than any of the guys who started lookalike pet food or B2B sites.
But the level of arrogance in the Linux world of 1999-2000 was just so out of hand that it simply had to get spanked. If you believe in karma in the original sense, there's no way the people shouting about world domination on the basis of some slipshod desktops and clones of Photoshop and Excel circa 1993 could continue to prosper without throwing the whole universe out of whack.
Speaking of ESR, he and Bruce Perens are back in the news. Gee, with journalism like this, you wonder why OSDN is in trouble?
By the way, the post about Bowie Poag is probably the funniest thing I've ever read here.
Well, that's the point. No one is saying this makes the radioactivity disappears - it concentrates it in relatively fixed cells so you don't have plumes of plutonium spreading through the soil into groundwater.
The radioactive metals have to be physically taken away from the place at some point. How?
I've heard secondhand accounts of some lab that's trying to breed cleanup microbes that can migrate back to the surface. More realistically, I would guess that the soil has to be dug out.
gamers are often independent, strategic-thinkers and problem solvers. Their interactive instincts often collide unhappily with the traditions and institutions of a static, passive world. Gamers are the new artists, visionaries, and story-tellers of our time, sparked by astonishingly inventive new technologies like the PS 2. Ready or not, they will become increasingly influential.
and
Historians and sociologists call the adult world's response to gaming a "moral panic," defined as a severe societal response to a dramatic development that elders and institutions can't control or understand, so therefore demonize and fear. Even before this, the young are increasingly coming to believe that older people have less and less to teach them.
and given that Katz routinely uses that sort of language to describe Napster kiddies, IM users and generally surly teenagers, why shouldn't people who actually know how to use their computers get a little stroking too?
I had to laugh at this one - I post something misinformed, someone corrects me, I respond acknowledging that he's right and provide some more information -after which *two* moderators come along and give "Informative"s to the incorrect post!
Then there was the KDE installer article where the guy the story was about got hit with an "Offtopic"...
Oh, I just meant in the context of Slashdot comments. Sure, show the Flash video to anyone who'll enjoy it. But stuff like this - being the latest luser to jump on this troll bandwagon - that's just embarassingly lame.
"All your base are belong to us" humor is now declared officially dead. Everyone remotely plugged into geek humor got their laughs out of it months ago.
Not that being plugged into geek humor is anything to brag about either, but being a wannabe is doubly embarassing.
Yes!
Whenever I come across yet another game (or book) set in a thinly veiled Tolikien universe I always wonder if the designers (or author) are embarassed by their obvious failure of imagination.
In a similar vein, here's a challenge to weblog designers: stop using from-the-lame-quip dept.. Even if you're using Slash or some other Slash-like code, use a little creativity! How many identical Slash-alikes does the world need?
Also, many interviews of once-celebrities probably go exactly like this - this one seems worse because the interviewers feel guilty and are being apologetic in print.
That said, I have to say that while I enjoyed Bloom County in the '80s, I recently picked up an old book at the thrift shop and was extremely disappointed. It seemed completely unfunny, and didn't hold up nearly as well as Calvin and Hobbes, or The Far Side. IMHO, obviously.
Doonesbury books still make me laugh, if they're from before Gerald Ford took office. I get a laugh out of the new strips, too, but that's because Trudeau writes with such a "look how I'm capturing the cutting-edge of American society" attitude while all his topics seem to have come from a 9 month old issue of Rolling Stone.
The "roughly 100,000" number was based on an off-the-cuff calculation of dividing the estimated genome size by the size of a "typical gene." There was no assumption that humans "had to have" lots more genes than other organisms.
The idea that molecular biologists have been fixated on the presence or absence of a particular gene is ludicrous. Gene regulation, protein interactions, splice variants -- there have been thousands of labs studying these things for a decade.
In the most reasonable and widely discussed mechanism, a single gene can make several messages because genes of multicellular organisms are not discrete strings, but composed of coding segments (exons) separated by noncoding regions (introns). The resulting signal that eventually assembles the protein consists only of exons spliced together after elimination of introns. If some exons are omitted, or if the order of splicing changes, then several distinct messages can be generated by each gene.
Here's my prediction: splice variants will turn out to be nowhere near as important as he thinks. Other levels of regulation will be far more important. (It's not my impression that this is remotely "the most widely discussed mechanism," anyway.)
On a completely different topic - the fact that a system has complex interactions doesn't necessarily make it chaotic. Chaos theory has great value but it's not the answer to all, or even most, complicated questions.
Yes, I'm trying the Bruce Perens trick of writing something completely mistaken, getting modded up, and then earning more points for responding to the person who corrects me. ;-)
I found this paper (awarded the Driver Award for the Best Paper Presented to the 26th Meeting of the North American Vexillological Association!) which has more information about the moon flag than anyone could possibly want. It's actually very interesting.
Bottom line: you're right but the web site is still missing some information. The horizontal rod was not extended properly, wrinkling the flag and causing the appearance of waving. It looked better that way and later crews intentionally did the same thing.
I still haven't achieved Bruce's specialty of getting a false or heavily unfair story posted and then raking in karma by replying to 25 different flames correcting him. ;-)
Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
Isn't the real answer that the flag was made with springs so it would stand out straight on the pole? That's why it's not hanging limply.
Heh, I remember my Redhat 5.0 CD came with a Neanderthal version of Gnome. I spent an hour tinkering to get it to run and for the life of me I couldn't even figure out what is was supposed to do.
That was quite a desktop-friendly distro there: the fvwm95 default, WindowMaker and AfterStep setups that must have been created by searching themes.org for "fewest downloads" and KDE barred for political reasons. And the Linux zealots were already raving about how 1997(?) was going to be the year that Linux conquered the desktop. "I set up my grandmother with Red Hat and she finds fvwm95 much more intuitive than Windows....!"
Huh? Of course that has an answer -- an admissions officer at any top school can look at a transcript from Stuvesant, Exeter, Punahou, Beverly Hills High and size the student up instantly. Although the 'multiple regression model' they're using is purely inside their heads.
But what about a student from Gerald Ford High in Haystack, South Dakota? By what standard is that transcript supposed to be judged? To my mind, the students who benefit the most by standardized tests are the ones from poor or rural schools.
Anyway, as a product of a UC, I think I can state confidently that what they're trying to do is sneak racial preferences back into the system by removing absolute criteria that might embarass them.
Oh, wait. That already exists.
Hey, how about an ad for Linux servers showing the mouth of a beautiful woman and the caption "Our servers won't go down on you either."
Oops, that's also been done.
Absolutely. The review and I would guess, having read Dorothy Nelkin's stuff before, the book confuse consent with issues of fairness. There is no question that informed consent is required, although medical ethicists argue about exactly what that involves. But you have the absolute right to veto any involvement of yourself in research, and cases where that was violated are illegal and unethical. The question is whether giving consent under existing practices is a fair bargain.
They don't have to treat you. They don't have to offer you the drugs at anything approaching an affordable price. Take the example of the people on Tristan da Cunha who probably will never be able to afford the drugs that their unique genes created.
Well, somebody has to benefit - otherwise how would how would the results be worth any money?
Know what? Patients love us. When you tell sick people that you're trying to turn their suffering into a treatment they don't ask us whether we're going to make money from it, how much it will cost or what share of the profits they're demanding. They want a world where there's a cure for their condition and they're happy to contribute.
As a rule, corporate researchers offer compensation to their study populations - usually medicine or a new clinic. I know nothing about the Tristan da Cunha case, and can't say anything about the fairness of that particular project.
Several hundred people have a medical condition. They have blood or tissue samples taken and offer their consent to have the samples used for research. Researchers then collect data from those hundreds of samples, and spend years of 80 hour weeks and millions of dollars to draw conclusions about what is causing the problem. Pharmaceutical researchers then spend more years and hundreds of millions of dollars coming up with a therapy.
And you people think it's unfair that the people who contributed tissue samples don't collect royalties? They're getting a treatment for their condition -- or the satisfaction that at least someone else won't suffer as they have. They've made the same contribution to research as lab animals or the seaweed used to make agarose - my mice have contributed far more to my findings and have made a genuine sacrifice. If anyone is entitled to royalties, it's them.
Some random thoughts:
There was a question posed for CowboyNeal that I really hope makes the cut: how much time do Slashdot editors spend actually reading the site they run? Does Taco even know his site has been turned into 2600 junior? I've been reading since Chips and Dips and I know it's not like he and Hemos actually believe any of this stuff.
- Unfortunately, an appeals court failed to overturn copyright law.
- How can I trademark my project name? (At least this guy is trying to invent his own name, not take someone else's, although the precedent he cites was a case of flat-out infringement.)
- Yay! Orrin Hatch wants to restrict music copyrights.
- An interesting, if incoherent, piece about supercooling atoms with lasers.
- Oh, no! Someone lost a domain name that infringed on someone else's trademark! (I confess, I actually agree with the YRO crew on this one.)
- Some nothing about Mir
- A free ARM clone
- Mozilla totters along
- Oh, no! Napster users are facing prosecution in Belgium!
So, the majority of Slashdot is now devoted to demanding control of other people's creations? Am I alone in identifying with the physicists in the laser story who are actually creating something? Or, at least with the Swedish students who are legally copying someone else's creation?Not that I'm proposing we lie down and take whatever the world gives us -- that ruling that all domain names containing "referee" are off limits is genuinely outrageous. But where did all the hackers go?
Hint to the rest of you: this has nothing to do with eliminating copyright, whether you're for or against that. Napster trading would be as illegal as it is today.
I assume this is a common problem, at least in the Mac builds, because there's nothing unusual on this box (8.6 on a b&w G3) except Kaleidoscope. If any developers are interested, let me know at the address in the screenshot and I'll file a bug report. Otherwise I'm not bothering anymore. Microsoft clearly cares about producing a quality browser for the Mac. My impression of the Mozilla attitude is that they've got their cross-platform framework and therefore don't need to pay non-Windows platforms any further attention.
I tried a nightly build (MacOS) a few weeks ago and ran into this problem. I couldn't believe they could ship a release with that bug so I when I read your post I downloaded a 0.8 package. Same problem - picture here. And Windows has the same bug? Unfreakingbelievable. Doesn't anyone use this thing?
Meanwhile, if they would just fix Mac IE's stability, it would be perfect. And Konqueror from recent CVS is perfectly usable, including for online banking and JavaScript-heavy sites. Plus it has a much more fun feel to participate in - it's a hacker project, the developers respond to bug reports promptly, I feel like I'm welcome in their community and the project advances visibly each day instead of slowly spiraling into oblivion.