Genes are already, and will be, protected in different ways, without needing to allow the actual patenting of a gene in a manner similar to a copyright.
Copyrights on the gene sequence will be valid, because genes are programs, they are creative works, or at least, the ones we create will be. If someone makes a gene that bears too much resemblence to yours you could sue them, much the same as if they took any written work, changed a few lines, and remarketed it. Some basic sequences will be common in all work, but so are words and phrases in written works. It's the order of these macro units that will be copyrightable.
Not only this, but with the trend in software patents, it'll probably be possible to patent some methods. For instance, producing endorphins to hide pain is a natural body process and shouldn't be patentable. Ditto with the ways the body produces endorphins. But if you had a way to produce endorphins artificials, with modified genes, your specific method would be patentable. A happy medium preventing scientific discovery about the human system from being locked away, yet rewarding the discovery of specific methods of interacting with that system.
You then go on to assert that without patents we'd be eating gourmet cornbread, but things like medication to cure Alzheimer's would never be found.
I would like to point out that patents are a fairly recent legal invention, in the scope of human history, and much innovation was done without them.
Patents are a delicate balance. Given that patents do give companies some guarantee of exclusivity, they do speed up development. But, take this to extremes. With unending patents, or patents with a 100 year period even, development would slow to a trickle because almost all inventions are based on older works, and if those works were off limits, even by inependant discovery, needless workarounds, or long waits would be the only way of bringing out new inventions.
At either end you have slowed developments, either by secrecy, or over-protection. Somewhere in the middle is the best balance. I don't think we can stick one number to this. One year of protection in the software industry is a full product lifetime, but twenty years is barely a product cycle in the airplane industry, where 777s were in development for ten or more years, and are expected to sell for 25 or more to recoup development costs. Should we use 17 years, or any other number, and stifle research in industries on either end of this, or base patent terms on a ongoing study of the field, to maintain a proper balance.
I personally suspect 3-5 years would be adequate protection in the pharmecutical industry, especially if the term had a limit on the number of years a drug could be in production and protected. Like an eight year term, or public-availability +2, to allow for testing and development, but still get generic drugs to market to allow for affordable disease fighting.
Apple should be able to protect their interface to prevent lookalikes?
The GUI is just an incremental upgrade over what went before, and Apple is borrowing many features from GUIs that other people and companies have made.
Copyrights already cover the blatant form of this, where a competitor tried to pass the OS/GUI off as MacOS X by preventing anyone from copying the look exactly. And trademark law further prevents this, and any other use of the apple symbol.
As to the features of the GUI, I don't see why they deserve protection. It's like saying someone should get patent rights on ideas, not just methods. This assumes that the majority of those ideas were actually even originally thought of at Apple, which I doubt. The world is large, and many companies, universities, and private projects have experimented with making GUIs more powerful and easy to use. If Apple gets protection for their GUI, they'd immediately lose it to the various sources they drew upon for ideas.
And this all assumes that people would be served by allowing companies IP protection for ideas. The whole purpose of IP laws is to help the public by giving companies a reason to release their works instead of hiding them. But if the public isn't helped by this, why should we consider strengthening these laws when it would only help the corporation with the most lawyers?
I say that Apple will get all the protection they need from copyrights, and that anyone intrigued by the look or functionality of the Aqua clones will probably try the Mac, where before they wouldn't have. Apples ideas will function as advertising, and status points, their reward for contributing to the gift culture we live in, and the gift culture that gave them the ideas they used to build upon.
Quit being a moron. There's nothing in my post I'd have to live in Russia to understand. Labels don't make it so.
To prove it, I'll call you a pillow. If you can read this message, obviously my labelling you as a soft fluffy thing to sit on made no change in the reality.
Obviously most people on Slashdot don't, because I keep seeing posts whereby people "prove" that communism can't work by point to Russia and China.
It's like nobody has taken a decent logic course... just because you can't prove something doesn't mean it's not so, and similarly, the lack of contradictory proof doesn't make something true.
I see religious people arguing FOR the bible by trying to disprove evolution, and anti-commie nuts arguing for democracy by showing that Russia was a sucky place to live.
Those people are proving one thing, that they just don't get it.
And for those same people... This post doesn't defend Russia *or* communism in any way. Until you understand that, don't answer.
Yawn. Get another person who thinks he gets it, but doesn't.
The USSR wasn't communist in anything but name, ditto most other 'communist' countries.
A dictator, or ruling class, can call the economic system a monkey, but that won't be what's flying out of their asses.
Nothing in communism talks about a KGB, kicking down doors and 'vanishing' people. That's something repressive government have been doing for a long time, before they started giving themselves cool labels.
Ditto with a democracy. The USA, Canada, and a bunch of European countries are fairly free, nice places to live, for the most part. But this is because the government isn't repressive, not because it's called a democracy. There are plenty of 'democracies' where citizens get to vote every few years, for the same one party, and one leader, and guess what, they don't feel very free.
You similarly can call yourself an intellectual, but until you 'get it' about how labelling something doesn't make it so, you'll still be a fool.
Not only can it just piss you off and make you stop and do something easier, but it can also lead into an eating disorder, which really isn't any different than any other compulsive disorder, but focussed on health, and thus more likely to wreak your health than some other disorder.
Diet, but don't sweat the small stuff. A hundred calories to either side is nothing. Any diet can be broken without problems. If it's a special day, have cheesecake, and if you really like it, have another. And target weights are only a rough guideline, my friend at 240 is all muscle, I am semi-soft, but we're both the same size, weight is a simplistic measure of when to stop dieting.
Take it easy, think of everything as a rough guideline, and don't commit to a diet if you don't think you can stick with it.
Most of all, do a moderate diet to cut out problem foods, don't just restrict intake, it doesn't do anything because your metabolism kicks in, and going on and off of restricting diets will screw you up and cause major health problems later in life, not to mention that stopping a restricting diet causes you to gain weight as your starved body prepares for the next lean times.
And I love how the old, crotchety types assume that nobody can do anything without their help...
Packet sniffing is trivial, if you're inbetween the people who are communicating, and if you know what you're looking for.
I've personally seen a lot of people snag a lot of interesting stuff from the sniffing.
A friend in university wrote a program to watch for IRC traffic, it was pretty stupid, just grabbing things to the default ports, 6667 or whatever, and scanning for keywords. Found some funny stuff that way.
A guy I work with ran a small business which required net access, so they dropped the machine off at an ISP instead of getting dedicated bandwidth. Turns out all third-party machines were on the same 100mbps hub (the service was for T1-equivalent of bandwidth, so the ten or fifteen machines didn't saturate this)... They could remotely put the second network card (no idea why it had two cards.) into promiscuous mode, and by sniffing, they were able to watch all transactions from the other machines... Mostly mail servers, but a few web servers, at least one of which was taking orders. Mostly PO stuff, but still...
As long as you're inbetween the two ends, or on a hub with either end, you can see what they send, and if it's unencrypted, you can read it. Many ordering forms are still unencrypted, and if you watched for traffic to those sites, you'd probably get a few hits here and there. Not enough perhaps to justify it, compared to hacking into something to just grab a list, but...
Sniffing IS easy, and with some luck and skill, it's not hard to get stuff you shouldn't have access to.
But the compression is. Modems hold data until they have enough to compress, because if you sent every byte as it arrive, you couldn't get any compression.
If the application had a way of telling the modem 'ok, screw bandwidth, just get those last 150 bytes there ASAP' there's probably be a significant latency decrease.
The problem is that the modem can't tell a download (where bandwidth is critical) from a game, where latency is critical.
Yeah, he's rich, so he's cool for risking more money than the not-rich can.
Ummm. Okay.
If I have $5k, and risk $2k on something, does that make me as cool as Lucas? I mean, that's about the ratio. He just has a lot more to start with.
And it's not like TPM could have failed, from a cash POV. It did fail, imho, as a decent SW movie, but he still made shitloads. Moronic SW fans watched back to back for 24h, to prove some stupid point, like that they could give Lucas a lot of money.
So wow, he spent maybe a third of his own money on a sure investment, that makes him so cool.
Wow! I just paid the phone bill, *out of my own pocket*, wow, I'm an investment genius.
Could you be a little more precise here? The modem doesn't really have an idea about packets -- all that is at the PPP, IP and TCP/UDP
levels. This problem barely affects games at all -- for stream sockets, however, you have such an option. At least you have one the _other_ way (TCP_CORK on a stream socket in Linux 2.2.x), where a non-full packet is _never_ sent.
I mean, a way for a program to tell the modem to send *now*. It's possible to do this at the protocol level, but you never really know what the modem hardware will do. It'll just sit there until it feels good and ready to send. And it's usually right, it can cram more data in. But if you care about latency more than throughput...
If the only way he can parody anything is with the caps-lock key and insane, insulting rants, then he's not doing anything very intellectual.
Intelligent parody might be worth something, assholes with drunken rants, are not. It was done to death by 'comics' in the late 80s and it wasn't funny or witty then, a cut-rate parody by a moron on/. is worth even less. If his main contribution to discussions is to flame anything that moves, then he should just shut the fuck up.
Please/. people, implement/ignore, that way we can get rid of people like that.
(OT:
Since the IP of ACs is logged, as is the account of people who use the 'post anonymously' feature, a way to ignore certain ACs would be nice. The software wouldn't have to actually let us know the IP or account, it could just ban the freaking retards, like Hot Grits boy, and your favorite mr. Caps Lock with the not-so-witty rants.}
1) Skepticism is what untestable claims should be greeted with.
2) Scientists are very good at testing claims that something happens very rarely.
Ok, more detail....
For #1, many more things don't happen than do happen. For every time a bird flies by, an uncountable number of UFOs and invisible dragons DON'T fly by. If someone says that an invisible dragon flies by, only when nobody capable of testing for it is nearby, it MAY be true, but very probably is not.
Also, if that claim is testable but always produces negative results, out of line with those reported, it's reasonable to believe it's false. If your phone line had static during all calls, except that the telco people could never hear static even when placing a call from your house, they'd be justified in thinking it didn't exist. If however they merely try a few tests and don't find anything, they're being lazy in presuming it's nothing.
And as for #2, how do you think doctors discover that a drug causes side effects to one in two-hundred thousand people?
Similarly, when scientists are looking for something they have reason to believe is uncommon, they perform very many tests.
But if they're testing for something that they are told happens very often, they can conclude that (if the event is independent of their testing (ie, the static doesn't go away just because test equipment is hooked up)) the event isn't happening, or at least, not as reported.
What you attribute to the inability of science to deal with uncommon events is merely the laziness of people who don't want to investigate something that might mean them making a hundred tests over a long period of time. That's not bad science, that's bad tech support.
I'd agree that the network stack doesn't offer a lot of optimization room, at the ammount of traffic Q3 uses, the network code takes a fraction of a percent of CPU usage and usually hits the network card in under a millisecond (Based on pings I'm getting now across a lan of 2-3ms), so even if that was slashed in half, it wouldn't matter much for gaming usage.
The comment on the modems is interesting, I guess with more GeForce type cards we'll see a bit of unloading of the CPU which would make softmodems less of a performance hit.
Having them software controllable definately does give some flexability, and I'm sure that some tweaking could be done, perhaps out of band signalling, where the application could flush the buffer, forcing the modem to send a packet now, instead of waiting for more bytes. Being able to control the packet sizes the modems use between themselves would offer some benefit, because you wouldn't have packets being held too long, or being split and thus taking longer.
Is the hardware (what little there is) similar enough that it's feasible to write drivers, or does every winmodem speak a different language? It would be good to have Linux winmodem support, if only to make it easier to build sub-$500 systems to be able to get more people online.
To people in India the recent (last five years) floods must seem 'biblical' in scale. Thousands died, the flooding was from horizon to horizon in some areas.
I don't doubt that flooding has always killed people, even the ancestors of those who wrote the bible. But I do doubt the forty days and forty nights, and the bit about rain covering the highest mountain.
You need fairly specific proof, not just that someone named Noah did live and did get through a flood on a raft/boat, but that he had a boat big enough for two of every animal plus food, for well over forty days.
It is widely accepted that there was a siberian/alaskan land-bridge, this isn't enough proof for Moses and the red sea... etc
You know, this proves that some moderators just don't get it.
I get massively flamed, by someone who has his caps-lock key shoved so far up his asshole it affects his ability to read my post, which would inform him that I'm not saying anything like what he thinks I'm saying.
And he gets a +1 interesting.
For what? He didn't have a properly formed sentence in his post, let alone any coherently expressed ideas.
Then I reply, tell him to piss off and stop flaming, and coherently and rationally explain why I said what I did and how it isn't what he thought.
And I get -1 flamebait.
Ummmm
Hello!?!
The ranting, all-capslock people get the negative moderation, for they add nothing to the board.
I'm not even complaining about my moderation as much as the fact that his juvenile flamebait and venom was deemed worthy of a +1 at the same time as I got a -1. That's just clueless!
As a realtime embedded guy I worked with would say, ``shows how much you know.''
I assume you're saying that much software is mission-critical.
Sure. I'll accept that. I said 'few', meaning relatively few. Even most of the people I know who write code for embedded systems don't do it for anything terribly important. I mean, what's the worst failure in a cd player, or a VCR, etc.
I don't know what you think you're proving, with the detailed message, and the chip #s, and all. I didn't say there weren't critical systems, just that there were 'few' of them.
And, next time, could you be more polite about it. You could have said "In my experience... which contradicts what you said" instead of "..shows what you know", especially because I don't think you showed that I was wrong, just that 'few' means different things to both of us.
I think that most of the slow, difficult kids you mention are going to be in special classes. The type of teaching software I'm talking about would be for average kids, not the geniuses with the hard questions, or for the slow ones who can't tie their shoes.
A lot of courses are pretty simple, they just consist of learning a new concept and practicing with it, like math, or memorization, like social studies.
A lot of this can be done on a computer, Where in the * is Carmen Sandiego is a good incentive for a bored student to pay attention to what would otherwise be dull facts.
And this isn't to say that the computer would do everything, just the fairly simple stuff, like presenting a hypertext encyclopedia article, being able to explain difficult terms, offering background if the student requests it, etc.
Students would still write essays, which would still be read and graded by the teacher. The teacher would still help kids when they had a problem beyond the scope of the program.
The idea is to save the teachers enough time that they can work on the hard questions, and deal with the difficult students, without getting ulcers from the stress, or growing to hate teaching. Removing the repetetive work seems the best way to do this. Let the students work without the teacher until they have a problem that can't be answered without the teacher.
God, I thought the guy who responded to my other message was fucking ignorant, now I discover he has a twin.
You're too fucking stupid to read, so I'll break it down into easy little concepts.
Teaching = Simple Repetetive Work + Hard Human Interaction
The simple, repetetive stuff, like showing for the hundredth time how to do a simple math problem, can be automated. That's why we have textbooks, to save a teacher from having to write this out every time, for every student.
Having a system which could do this dynamically, adjusting the course work to fit each student, and having infinite patience and the ability to show many different ways of tackling a problem, would free a teacher from having to do this. That would let teachers do the stuff they don't currently have time for, like helping kids with social development.
A question. Why do you launch into personal attacks like "your education (assuming you had any)" when you disagree with someone? If nothing else, it proves my point, that teachers are so busy with other things that they can't instill any manners, or interpersonal skills in people like you.
Sheesh. I don't normally say this to people, but you're the dumbest person I've seen in a long time. You really need medication.
Now, as to your point, if you have one in the swearing...
I stand by my statement. A well designed education program could replace what a teacher spends 95% of their time doing. The computer could present problems, and if little Johnny needed more time, the computer could give it to them. The computer could create exercises that pinpoint problem areas, and could give and grade tests. This would free the teached from doing all the dull paperwork, from writing on a board, etc. They'd be able to spend their time working on specific problem areas a student couldn't understand, or in dealing with the social aspects of teaching.
I didn't say teachers could be replaced, I said that MOST OF WHAT THEY DO could be replaced by a computer. That'd leave the teacher a lot more time for the human interaction.
MacOS is fairly stable for low-end usage. I only lock it up when I try to do more than one thing at a time. For an office worker, or a casual user, both it an Win9x are probably about the same.
I'd still want an open OS even if it wasn't MS I was getting away from. Apple's "Users are too dumb to need to see X" where 'X' was most things, attitude pissed me off. I'd have been looking for a replacement even sooner than with Dos/Win3.1 (which is the era I got into Linux in) because the Mac is even more restrictive.
An open OS is also a learning tool. You can view it as the same black-box, running a bunch of black-boxes, or you can look at the source and attempt to understand it. An open OS is *always* preferable to a closed OS, all else being equal.
A lot of that is social, or will soon be irrelevant.
Who cares about running executables with an OS smart enough to spawn a restricted 'shell' to run the Frog-in-a-Blender of the week in? This is something that's only a problem because of the complete lack of security in Win9x and MacOS, the two most common user-level OSes.
People don't forward around warning in real life, or at least not to the same level as online, partly because they can't just hit 'cc' and select a whole list, but partly because 'real life' isn't something new and scary where they suspect nasty things. When students are raised with computer, and know what they can and can't do, this won't be a problem.
As for open software...
I got into programming because I could list the programs on my school's Apple//. It wasn't just a black box. At the time, it might as well have been, because basic looked like proverbial greek to me, but it gave me an incentive to learn. Without open source (in the form of unencrypted/uncompiled basic programs) I wouldn't have had the incentive to learn, because I wouldn't have known how easy it was/is.
If kids use Win9x/WinNT, everything is compiled and closed, from the OS to the programs. They can't examine any of it. With an open OS, GNU/Linux, or something else later, they'll have access to the source, and compilers, and all the tools it took to write the thing in the first place. And in any decent OS, you can tinker all you want without bringing it down.
I personally think computers can replace teachers, for 95% of the teaching that teachers currently do. It's that last %5, where a teacher can take a difficult problem and break it down in different ways, until they find one the student can understand.
I see schools of the future having most people working on the computer, with a few teachers wandering around giving support, and helping with the problems that need human assistance.
Class sizes probably don't need to change. 30 kids aren't too many to handle, if you're not run ragged trying to teach them at the same time. This would free teachers up to do more social teaching, hopefully preventing the uglier aspects of school that all of us remember.
Woz's take on schools is interesting. In the wake of Katz's HellMouth stories it seems like most people on/. probably assume schools are going the way of the dinosaur, it's interesting to see a different view.
If computers ever get to the point where you can learn 95% of your schoolwork from one, not just the rote work, but the creative, and the whys behind things, then it'll make schools drastically cheaper. A teacher is overwhelmed now with even ten kids to teach; they either have to teach slowly, or leave kids behind. And it's not the dumb ones who get left behind, it's the ones with the different questions. If 9/10 kids don't understand how to multiply fractions, and one kid is interested in finding the LCM in the least ammount of work, guess who's going to get the teacher's attention. Being able to just nursemaid children while the teaching is being done, at their own pace, is likely going to be a revolution. If nothing else, I think grades are going to be a thing of the past. They were useful when you needed to cluster people together with a teacher, but when their teacher is net accessible, and on any terminal in the school or at home, you'll be able to learn at your own pace, being grouped with peers for emotional reasons.
I like the idea of making companies liable for products that don't work as advertised. Not that programmers should be sued for every bug in a non-essential program, but software should do what it says on the box, much the same as you'd expect a frying pan to be watertight, or a CD to be round.
I think we need a Raplh Nader for this industry. Not some arrogrant fat-cat looking for news coverage by advocating government interference in something they don't understand, but an insider, someone who understands the industry, attempting to regulate it in ways that are good for the consumers, above all else.
Few computer programs are in mission-critical roles, like the brakes on a car, but people still need to be able to trust labels. If it says 'x', it should provide 'x', not 'x if y' or 'x maybe'.
It's good to see that Woz isn't depressed by outcome of the apple// and Apple's (in my eyes) spiral from leader to barely counting in the industry. Their success and failure was strongly tied to their policies on information as property. The Apple// was very successful, mainly because it was open. There were a hundred times more addons for the A2 than for the C64 for instance. But the collapse of the A2 and Mac marketshare was largely based on clones, or the lack thereof.
I'm suprised though that Woz isn't more anti-patent, considering the Apple// (and much of PCs today) could have been made impossible if some company back then had patented the use of a keyboard to convey information to a computer, or a device to continually refresh dynamic ram, or similar. Amazon's 1-click patent is about like patenting 'Return' to enter a line of text. It's getting dangerous to innovate today, patents are being used as weapons to force huge payouts, something garage startups can't survive.
It's nice to see that Woz is still where he was in the late 70s though, trying to bring computers to the people. I got into computers thanks to him, and I owe him a lot. My way of paying that back is to support all the open standards I can, GPL, Linux, etc, so that kids will always have computers as computers to tinker with, not just locked up set-top boxes.
Well yeah, I did expect there was more than one thing it could do, or it wouldn't make sense to call it an API... But, the general idea is that all the 'secure' stuff is done on the bank's servers. The only checking the client software does is to make sure all the information is there and appears to be right. As in, if they're doing anything that requires secrecy on the client end, they're doing something wrong.
And, there's never too much detail... Especially about stuff like this.
Right, if the banks refuse to release source we have to reverse engineer the program or use it as closed source. No way around it, and RedHat can't make the banks do otherwise.
But... as a previous poster said, talking to your bank about wanting the software and protocols made available might work, if you point out that open source software can be trusted in a way closed source can't. They'll be reluctant, but if they realize it's a good thing, both for the customers, and for them, because they can use it to show they're not making any horrid mistakes in their code, they might be interested.
So, ask your bank. Fax the manager a letter and explain that for your security review you need to know the security procedures of the companies you're working with, like with y2k preparadness, you can't be in business if your supliers are down.
Slashdot Mirror
Genes are already, and will be, protected in different ways, without needing to allow the actual patenting of a gene in a manner similar to a copyright.
Copyrights on the gene sequence will be valid, because genes are programs, they are creative works, or at least, the ones we create will be. If someone makes a gene that bears too much resemblence to yours you could sue them, much the same as if they took any written work, changed a few lines, and remarketed it. Some basic sequences will be common in all work, but so are words and phrases in written works. It's the order of these macro units that will be copyrightable.
Not only this, but with the trend in software patents, it'll probably be possible to patent some methods. For instance, producing endorphins to hide pain is a natural body process and shouldn't be patentable. Ditto with the ways the body produces endorphins. But if you had a way to produce endorphins artificials, with modified genes, your specific method would be patentable. A happy medium preventing scientific discovery about the human system from being locked away, yet rewarding the discovery of specific methods of interacting with that system.
You then go on to assert that without patents we'd be eating gourmet cornbread, but things like medication to cure Alzheimer's would never be found.
I would like to point out that patents are a fairly recent legal invention, in the scope of human history, and much innovation was done without them.
Patents are a delicate balance. Given that patents do give companies some guarantee of exclusivity, they do speed up development. But, take this to extremes. With unending patents, or patents with a 100 year period even, development would slow to a trickle because almost all inventions are based on older works, and if those works were off limits, even by inependant discovery, needless workarounds, or long waits would be the only way of bringing out new inventions.
At either end you have slowed developments, either by secrecy, or over-protection. Somewhere in the middle is the best balance. I don't think we can stick one number to this. One year of protection in the software industry is a full product lifetime, but twenty years is barely a product cycle in the airplane industry, where 777s were in development for ten or more years, and are expected to sell for 25 or more to recoup development costs. Should we use 17 years, or any other number, and stifle research in industries on either end of this, or base patent terms on a ongoing study of the field, to maintain a proper balance.
I personally suspect 3-5 years would be adequate protection in the pharmecutical industry, especially if the term had a limit on the number of years a drug could be in production and protected. Like an eight year term, or public-availability +2, to allow for testing and development, but still get generic drugs to market to allow for affordable disease fighting.
Apple should be able to protect their interface to prevent lookalikes?
The GUI is just an incremental upgrade over what went before, and Apple is borrowing many features from GUIs that other people and companies have made.
Copyrights already cover the blatant form of this, where a competitor tried to pass the OS/GUI off as MacOS X by preventing anyone from copying the look exactly. And trademark law further prevents this, and any other use of the apple symbol.
As to the features of the GUI, I don't see why they deserve protection. It's like saying someone should get patent rights on ideas, not just methods. This assumes that the majority of those ideas were actually even originally thought of at Apple, which I doubt. The world is large, and many companies, universities, and private projects have experimented with making GUIs more powerful and easy to use. If Apple gets protection for their GUI, they'd immediately lose it to the various sources they drew upon for ideas.
And this all assumes that people would be served by allowing companies IP protection for ideas. The whole purpose of IP laws is to help the public by giving companies a reason to release their works instead of hiding them. But if the public isn't helped by this, why should we consider strengthening these laws when it would only help the corporation with the most lawyers?
I say that Apple will get all the protection they need from copyrights, and that anyone intrigued by the look or functionality of the Aqua clones will probably try the Mac, where before they wouldn't have. Apples ideas will function as advertising, and status points, their reward for contributing to the gift culture we live in, and the gift culture that gave them the ideas they used to build upon.
Quit being a moron. There's nothing in my post I'd have to live in Russia to understand. Labels don't make it so.
To prove it, I'll call you a pillow. If you can read this message, obviously my labelling you as a soft fluffy thing to sit on made no change in the reality.
Obviously most people on Slashdot don't, because I keep seeing posts whereby people "prove" that communism can't work by point to Russia and China.
It's like nobody has taken a decent logic course... just because you can't prove something doesn't mean it's not so, and similarly, the lack of contradictory proof doesn't make something true.
I see religious people arguing FOR the bible by trying to disprove evolution, and anti-commie nuts arguing for democracy by showing that Russia was a sucky place to live.
Those people are proving one thing, that they just don't get it.
And for those same people... This post doesn't defend Russia *or* communism in any way. Until you understand that, don't answer.
Yawn. Get another person who thinks he gets it, but doesn't.
The USSR wasn't communist in anything but name, ditto most other 'communist' countries.
A dictator, or ruling class, can call the economic system a monkey, but that won't be what's flying out of their asses.
Nothing in communism talks about a KGB, kicking down doors and 'vanishing' people. That's something repressive government have been doing for a long time, before they started giving themselves cool labels.
Ditto with a democracy. The USA, Canada, and a bunch of European countries are fairly free, nice places to live, for the most part. But this is because the government isn't repressive, not because it's called a democracy. There are plenty of 'democracies' where citizens get to vote every few years, for the same one party, and one leader, and guess what, they don't feel very free.
You similarly can call yourself an intellectual, but until you 'get it' about how labelling something doesn't make it so, you'll still be a fool.
Exactly. Diet is okay, but obsession is not.
Not only can it just piss you off and make you stop and do something easier, but it can also lead into an eating disorder, which really isn't any different than any other compulsive disorder, but focussed on health, and thus more likely to wreak your health than some other disorder.
Diet, but don't sweat the small stuff. A hundred calories to either side is nothing. Any diet can be broken without problems. If it's a special day, have cheesecake, and if you really like it, have another. And target weights are only a rough guideline, my friend at 240 is all muscle, I am semi-soft, but we're both the same size, weight is a simplistic measure of when to stop dieting.
Take it easy, think of everything as a rough guideline, and don't commit to a diet if you don't think you can stick with it.
Most of all, do a moderate diet to cut out problem foods, don't just restrict intake, it doesn't do anything because your metabolism kicks in, and going on and off of restricting diets will screw you up and cause major health problems later in life, not to mention that stopping a restricting diet causes you to gain weight as your starved body prepares for the next lean times.
And I love how the old, crotchety types assume that nobody can do anything without their help...
Packet sniffing is trivial, if you're inbetween the people who are communicating, and if you know what you're looking for.
I've personally seen a lot of people snag a lot of interesting stuff from the sniffing.
A friend in university wrote a program to watch for IRC traffic, it was pretty stupid, just grabbing things to the default ports, 6667 or whatever, and scanning for keywords. Found some funny stuff that way.
A guy I work with ran a small business which required net access, so they dropped the machine off at an ISP instead of getting dedicated bandwidth. Turns out all third-party machines were on the same 100mbps hub (the service was for T1-equivalent of bandwidth, so the ten or fifteen machines didn't saturate this)... They could remotely put the second network card (no idea why it had two cards.) into promiscuous mode, and by sniffing, they were able to watch all transactions from the other machines... Mostly mail servers, but a few web servers, at least one of which was taking orders. Mostly PO stuff, but still...
As long as you're inbetween the two ends, or on a hub with either end, you can see what they send, and if it's unencrypted, you can read it. Many ordering forms are still unencrypted, and if you watched for traffic to those sites, you'd probably get a few hits here and there. Not enough perhaps to justify it, compared to hacking into something to just grab a list, but...
Sniffing IS easy, and with some luck and skill, it's not hard to get stuff you shouldn't have access to.
But the compression is. Modems hold data until they have enough to compress, because if you sent every byte as it arrive, you couldn't get any compression.
If the application had a way of telling the modem 'ok, screw bandwidth, just get those last 150 bytes there ASAP' there's probably be a significant latency decrease.
The problem is that the modem can't tell a download (where bandwidth is critical) from a game, where latency is critical.
Yeah, he's rich, so he's cool for risking more money than the not-rich can.
Ummm. Okay.
If I have $5k, and risk $2k on something, does that make me as cool as Lucas? I mean, that's about the ratio. He just has a lot more to start with.
And it's not like TPM could have failed, from a cash POV. It did fail, imho, as a decent SW movie, but he still made shitloads. Moronic SW fans watched back to back for 24h, to prove some stupid point, like that they could give Lucas a lot of money.
So wow, he spent maybe a third of his own money on a sure investment, that makes him so cool.
Wow! I just paid the phone bill, *out of my own pocket*, wow, I'm an investment genius.
I mean, a way for a program to tell the modem to send *now*. It's possible to do this at the protocol level, but you never really know what the modem hardware will do. It'll just sit there until it feels good and ready to send. And it's usually right, it can cram more data in. But if you care about latency more than throughput...
If the only way he can parody anything is with the caps-lock key and insane, insulting rants, then he's not doing anything very intellectual.
/. is worth even less. If his main contribution to discussions is to flame anything that moves, then he should just shut the fuck up.
/. people, implement /ignore, that way we can get rid of people like that.
Intelligent parody might be worth something, assholes with drunken rants, are not. It was done to death by 'comics' in the late 80s and it wasn't funny or witty then, a cut-rate parody by a moron on
Please
(OT:
Since the IP of ACs is logged, as is the account of people who use the 'post anonymously' feature, a way to ignore certain ACs would be nice. The software wouldn't have to actually let us know the IP or account, it could just ban the freaking retards, like Hot Grits boy, and your favorite mr. Caps Lock with the not-so-witty rants.}
1) Skepticism is what untestable claims should be greeted with.
2) Scientists are very good at testing claims that something happens very rarely.
Ok, more detail....
For #1, many more things don't happen than do happen. For every time a bird flies by, an uncountable number of UFOs and invisible dragons DON'T fly by. If someone says that an invisible dragon flies by, only when nobody capable of testing for it is nearby, it MAY be true, but very probably is not.
Also, if that claim is testable but always produces negative results, out of line with those reported, it's reasonable to believe it's false. If your phone line had static during all calls, except that the telco people could never hear static even when placing a call from your house, they'd be justified in thinking it didn't exist. If however they merely try a few tests and don't find anything, they're being lazy in presuming it's nothing.
And as for #2, how do you think doctors discover that a drug causes side effects to one in two-hundred thousand people?
Similarly, when scientists are looking for something they have reason to believe is uncommon, they perform very many tests.
But if they're testing for something that they are told happens very often, they can conclude that (if the event is independent of their testing (ie, the static doesn't go away just because test equipment is hooked up)) the event isn't happening, or at least, not as reported.
What you attribute to the inability of science to deal with uncommon events is merely the laziness of people who don't want to investigate something that might mean them making a hundred tests over a long period of time. That's not bad science, that's bad tech support.
I'd agree that the network stack doesn't offer a lot of optimization room, at the ammount of traffic Q3 uses, the network code takes a fraction of a percent of CPU usage and usually hits the network card in under a millisecond (Based on pings I'm getting now across a lan of 2-3ms), so even if that was slashed in half, it wouldn't matter much for gaming usage.
The comment on the modems is interesting, I guess with more GeForce type cards we'll see a bit of unloading of the CPU which would make softmodems less of a performance hit.
Having them software controllable definately does give some flexability, and I'm sure that some tweaking could be done, perhaps out of band signalling, where the application could flush the buffer, forcing the modem to send a packet now, instead of waiting for more bytes. Being able to control the packet sizes the modems use between themselves would offer some benefit, because you wouldn't have packets being held too long, or being split and thus taking longer.
Is the hardware (what little there is) similar enough that it's feasible to write drivers, or does every winmodem speak a different language? It would be good to have Linux winmodem support, if only to make it easier to build sub-$500 systems to be able to get more people online.
To people in India the recent (last five years) floods must seem 'biblical' in scale. Thousands died, the flooding was from horizon to horizon in some areas.
I don't doubt that flooding has always killed people, even the ancestors of those who wrote the bible. But I do doubt the forty days and forty nights, and the bit about rain covering the highest mountain.
You need fairly specific proof, not just that someone named Noah did live and did get through a flood on a raft/boat, but that he had a boat big enough for two of every animal plus food, for well over forty days.
It is widely accepted that there was a siberian/alaskan land-bridge, this isn't enough proof for Moses and the red sea... etc
You know, this proves that some moderators just don't get it.
I get massively flamed, by someone who has his caps-lock key shoved so far up his asshole it affects his ability to read my post, which would inform him that I'm not saying anything like what he thinks I'm saying.
And he gets a +1 interesting.
For what? He didn't have a properly formed sentence in his post, let alone any coherently expressed ideas.
Then I reply, tell him to piss off and stop flaming, and coherently and rationally explain why I said what I did and how it isn't what he thought.
And I get -1 flamebait.
Ummmm
Hello!?!
The ranting, all-capslock people get the negative moderation, for they add nothing to the board.
I'm not even complaining about my moderation as much as the fact that his juvenile flamebait and venom was deemed worthy of a +1 at the same time as I got a -1. That's just clueless!
I assume you're saying that much software is mission-critical.
Sure. I'll accept that. I said 'few', meaning relatively few. Even most of the people I know who write code for embedded systems don't do it for anything terribly important. I mean, what's the worst failure in a cd player, or a VCR, etc.
I don't know what you think you're proving, with the detailed message, and the chip #s, and all. I didn't say there weren't critical systems, just that there were 'few' of them.
And, next time, could you be more polite about it. You could have said "In my experience... which contradicts what you said" instead of "..shows what you know", especially because I don't think you showed that I was wrong, just that 'few' means different things to both of us.
I think that most of the slow, difficult kids you mention are going to be in special classes. The type of teaching software I'm talking about would be for average kids, not the geniuses with the hard questions, or for the slow ones who can't tie their shoes.
A lot of courses are pretty simple, they just consist of learning a new concept and practicing with it, like math, or memorization, like social studies.
A lot of this can be done on a computer, Where in the * is Carmen Sandiego is a good incentive for a bored student to pay attention to what would otherwise be dull facts.
And this isn't to say that the computer would do everything, just the fairly simple stuff, like presenting a hypertext encyclopedia article, being able to explain difficult terms, offering background if the student requests it, etc.
Students would still write essays, which would still be read and graded by the teacher. The teacher would still help kids when they had a problem beyond the scope of the program.
The idea is to save the teachers enough time that they can work on the hard questions, and deal with the difficult students, without getting ulcers from the stress, or growing to hate teaching. Removing the repetetive work seems the best way to do this. Let the students work without the teacher until they have a problem that can't be answered without the teacher.
God, I thought the guy who responded to my other message was fucking ignorant, now I discover he has a twin.
You're too fucking stupid to read, so I'll break it down into easy little concepts.
Teaching = Simple Repetetive Work + Hard Human Interaction
The simple, repetetive stuff, like showing for the hundredth time how to do a simple math problem, can be automated. That's why we have textbooks, to save a teacher from having to write this out every time, for every student.
Having a system which could do this dynamically, adjusting the course work to fit each student, and having infinite patience and the ability to show many different ways of tackling a problem, would free a teacher from having to do this. That would let teachers do the stuff they don't currently have time for, like helping kids with social development.
A question. Why do you launch into personal attacks like "your education (assuming you had any)" when you disagree with someone? If nothing else, it proves my point, that teachers are so busy with other things that they can't instill any manners, or interpersonal skills in people like you.
Sheesh. I don't normally say this to people, but you're the dumbest person I've seen in a long time. You really need medication.
Now, as to your point, if you have one in the swearing...
I stand by my statement. A well designed education program could replace what a teacher spends 95% of their time doing. The computer could present problems, and if little Johnny needed more time, the computer could give it to them. The computer could create exercises that pinpoint problem areas, and could give and grade tests. This would free the teached from doing all the dull paperwork, from writing on a board, etc. They'd be able to spend their time working on specific problem areas a student couldn't understand, or in dealing with the social aspects of teaching.
I didn't say teachers could be replaced, I said that MOST OF WHAT THEY DO could be replaced by a computer. That'd leave the teacher a lot more time for the human interaction.
MacOS is fairly stable for low-end usage. I only lock it up when I try to do more than one thing at a time. For an office worker, or a casual user, both it an Win9x are probably about the same.
I'd still want an open OS even if it wasn't MS I was getting away from. Apple's "Users are too dumb to need to see X" where 'X' was most things, attitude pissed me off. I'd have been looking for a replacement even sooner than with Dos/Win3.1 (which is the era I got into Linux in) because the Mac is even more restrictive.
An open OS is also a learning tool. You can view it as the same black-box, running a bunch of black-boxes, or you can look at the source and attempt to understand it. An open OS is *always* preferable to a closed OS, all else being equal.
A lot of that is social, or will soon be irrelevant.
Who cares about running executables with an OS smart enough to spawn a restricted 'shell' to run the Frog-in-a-Blender of the week in? This is something that's only a problem because of the complete lack of security in Win9x and MacOS, the two most common user-level OSes.
People don't forward around warning in real life, or at least not to the same level as online, partly because they can't just hit 'cc' and select a whole list, but partly because 'real life' isn't something new and scary where they suspect nasty things. When students are raised with computer, and know what they can and can't do, this won't be a problem.
As for open software...
I got into programming because I could list the programs on my school's Apple//. It wasn't just a black box. At the time, it might as well have been, because basic looked like proverbial greek to me, but it gave me an incentive to learn. Without open source (in the form of unencrypted/uncompiled basic programs) I wouldn't have had the incentive to learn, because I wouldn't have known how easy it was/is.
If kids use Win9x/WinNT, everything is compiled and closed, from the OS to the programs. They can't examine any of it. With an open OS, GNU/Linux, or something else later, they'll have access to the source, and compilers, and all the tools it took to write the thing in the first place. And in any decent OS, you can tinker all you want without bringing it down.
I personally think computers can replace teachers, for 95% of the teaching that teachers currently do. It's that last %5, where a teacher can take a difficult problem and break it down in different ways, until they find one the student can understand.
I see schools of the future having most people working on the computer, with a few teachers wandering around giving support, and helping with the problems that need human assistance.
Class sizes probably don't need to change. 30 kids aren't too many to handle, if you're not run ragged trying to teach them at the same time. This would free teachers up to do more social teaching, hopefully preventing the uglier aspects of school that all of us remember.
Woz's take on schools is interesting. In the wake of Katz's HellMouth stories it seems like most people on /. probably assume schools are going the way of the dinosaur, it's interesting to see a different view.
// was very successful, mainly because it was open. There were a hundred times more addons for the A2 than for the C64 for instance. But the collapse of the A2 and Mac marketshare was largely based on clones, or the lack thereof.
// (and much of PCs today) could have been made impossible if some company back then had patented the use of a keyboard to convey information to a computer, or a device to continually refresh dynamic ram, or similar. Amazon's 1-click patent is about like patenting 'Return' to enter a line of text. It's getting dangerous to innovate today, patents are being used as weapons to force huge payouts, something garage startups can't survive.
If computers ever get to the point where you can learn 95% of your schoolwork from one, not just the rote work, but the creative, and the whys behind things, then it'll make schools drastically cheaper. A teacher is overwhelmed now with even ten kids to teach; they either have to teach slowly, or leave kids behind. And it's not the dumb ones who get left behind, it's the ones with the different questions. If 9/10 kids don't understand how to multiply fractions, and one kid is interested in finding the LCM in the least ammount of work, guess who's going to get the teacher's attention. Being able to just nursemaid children while the teaching is being done, at their own pace, is likely going to be a revolution. If nothing else, I think grades are going to be a thing of the past. They were useful when you needed to cluster people together with a teacher, but when their teacher is net accessible, and on any terminal in the school or at home, you'll be able to learn at your own pace, being grouped with peers for emotional reasons.
I like the idea of making companies liable for products that don't work as advertised. Not that programmers should be sued for every bug in a non-essential program, but software should do what it says on the box, much the same as you'd expect a frying pan to be watertight, or a CD to be round.
I think we need a Raplh Nader for this industry. Not some arrogrant fat-cat looking for news coverage by advocating government interference in something they don't understand, but an insider, someone who understands the industry, attempting to regulate it in ways that are good for the consumers, above all else.
Few computer programs are in mission-critical roles, like the brakes on a car, but people still need to be able to trust labels. If it says 'x', it should provide 'x', not 'x if y' or 'x maybe'.
It's good to see that Woz isn't depressed by outcome of the apple// and Apple's (in my eyes) spiral from leader to barely counting in the industry. Their success and failure was strongly tied to their policies on information as property. The Apple
I'm suprised though that Woz isn't more anti-patent, considering the Apple
It's nice to see that Woz is still where he was in the late 70s though, trying to bring computers to the people. I got into computers thanks to him, and I owe him a lot. My way of paying that back is to support all the open standards I can, GPL, Linux, etc, so that kids will always have computers as computers to tinker with, not just locked up set-top boxes.
Well yeah, I did expect there was more than one thing it could do, or it wouldn't make sense to call it an API... But, the general idea is that all the 'secure' stuff is done on the bank's servers. The only checking the client software does is to make sure all the information is there and appears to be right. As in, if they're doing anything that requires secrecy on the client end, they're doing something wrong.
And, there's never too much detail... Especially about stuff like this.
Right, if the banks refuse to release source we have to reverse engineer the program or use it as closed source. No way around it, and RedHat can't make the banks do otherwise.
But... as a previous poster said, talking to your bank about wanting the software and protocols made available might work, if you point out that open source software can be trusted in a way closed source can't. They'll be reluctant, but if they realize it's a good thing, both for the customers, and for them, because they can use it to show they're not making any horrid mistakes in their code, they might be interested.
So, ask your bank. Fax the manager a letter and explain that for your security review you need to know the security procedures of the companies you're working with, like with y2k preparadness, you can't be in business if your supliers are down.