1. Fair use is 10% of a song or 30 seconds, whatever comes first, right?
2. Making ring tones out of popular songs falls under fair use.
What am I missing? Ah yes, I know!
3. Someone with a large lobbying department is not making a profit.
Don't worry. If fair-use prevents the making of a large profit, fair-use will be weakened.
A little over two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson considered copyrights as a sort of necessary evil to promote the creation of works that would (eventually) be in the public domain.
Today, copyrights exit for only three things: profit, profit, profit. The company that benefited from the vast amount of ideas that had passed into the public domain (Disney) was the company that promoted the idea of "forever" copyrights.
No, people do not need to consume cholesterol. Your body makes all the cholesterol it can ever use.
Provide your source. your body also makes Vitamins B1, B3, and B6 but you will be deficient if you do not eat enough of it. Further, that ability exists in infants from the moment they are born. Why would the need to consume cholesterol only apply to infants, in stark contradiction to many other vitamins and hormones including those I just mentioned? Or do you think cholesterol is in mother's milk out of some freak coincidence?
Perhaps its a fluke -- blood, fecal material, semen and urine all contain cholesterol (a quick google search can comfirm this). Cholesterol is *needed* throughout the body, and its no big surprise that it can be found in almost anything that comes from the body.
However, assuming that cholesterol is needed by infants (which I see no evidence of), infant nutritional requirements are different from adult human requirements. I am not an expert on fetus or infant development, and I do not know when the liver becomes fully functional at producing cholesterol.
Cholesterol is only available from animal sources. If humans needed cholesterol to survive, strict vegetarians (vegans) would be dropping dead left and right.
The vast majority of vegans do not remain that way for extended periods of time. Further, when they do binge it is often on dairy products that contain substantial amounts of cholesterol. Cholesterol is used by your body to produce lipoproteins which comprise cell membranes. All cellular growth thus requires cholesterol. Where do vegans have major problems? Reproduction and muscle growth. The number of cases of low birth weight and spontaneous abortion are quite high amongst vegans. All the medical evidence clearly indicates veganism is dangerous.
Er, what?
Vegan's major problems are B12 and DHA/EPA Omega 3's. The former is solved through B12-fortified foods, while the later is delt with by high Alpha-Linolenic Acid intakes and limiting the amount of Linoleic Acid ( or, in layman's terms -- limit the use of most fat and use some flaxseed/flaxseed oil each day. )
Before you get too smug, DHA/EPA levels in the Standard American Diet are a problem as well. The Standard American Diet is rather nasty in some respects, and is far from healthy.
For "medical evidence", try Ellis, et al, in Great Britain, 1970 -- in a study comparing 26 vegans to 24 non-vegans, other then a small B12 deficiency in 3 vegans, the vegans were healthier then the non-vegans. Sanders and Ellis, Great Britain, 1978 compared 34 vegans to 23 non-vegans and showed that all nutrients were in their normal range, even if serum B12 was low. O'Connell et al, in the USA 1989, had a study of 288 vegans and 116 lacto-ovo vegetarians, the vegans had adequate growth and no significant different in height and weight by age 10. (OTOH, Shinwell & Gorodischer, in Israel, and P.C. Dagnalie et al both showed health problems in vegan infants, but those pertained to homemade soymilk "infant formulas".)
Unfortunately, there is no large studies involving vegans compared to a non-vegan control group with a similar environment. (Vegetarians are lucky -- a large percentage of Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarian, and thus can be easily compared against non-vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists.)
As for pregnancy, in a study by Carter, et al, in 1987, involving 775 vegan women from Tennessee, the vegan diet did not affect infant birth weight, and vegan mothers had a rate of preeclampsia of 1 in 775 [0.1% of the population as opposed to 5% - 10% of normal mothers]
As a vegan, I have yet to drop dead without any cholesterol in my diet. I'm very strict about animal products, and religiously read labels to doublecheck ingredients. Tell me when I should drop dead of cholesterol deficiency, and I'll try.
Cholesterol is one of the most necessary substances in your body, particularly the brain where lipoproteins are the largest component after water.
Cholesterol that is undamaged by heat or any other energy source is necessary for human survival, and is not at all dangerous.
That is rather misleading.
Yes, people do need cholesterol.
No, people do not need to consume cholesterol.
Your body makes all the cholesterol it can ever use.
Cholesterol is only available from animal sources. If humans needed cholesterol to survive, strict vegetarians (vegans) would be dropping dead left and right.
I am unfamiliar with the cholesterol-depression link, so I did a quick google search. While some studies have shown a correlation between low cholesterol and depression, others have not.
There was a large Finnish study that linked depression to low cholesterol, but this was in spite of similar diets between the depressed group and the control group.
In another study I found a reference to, cholesterol-lowering drugs did not increase the risk of depression.
Correlation is one thing. Causation is another.
There are many factors that cause low cholesterol and may cause, or result from, depression. The liver produces about 800mg's of cholesterol daily, and many factors (diet, drinking, disease) can hinder the functioning of the liver.
In a similar example, low cholesterol can be linked to a higher risk of stroke -- the type of stroke that results from hemorrhagic bleeding in the brain. However, hemorrhagic stroke can be caused by low potassium levels -- which will also lower cholesterol levels.
Be careful when the mass media runs with a "health" story -- too often, the size of the study is too small to draw meaningful conclusions from, or the mass media likes to blow the results out of proportion. Remember when they reported that coffee "causes" cancer? Or that coffee "prevents" cancer? (Search for "coffee" and "cancer" at google to find both sorts or reports.)
Its good that you are taking an interest in your health and your diet. But learn nutrition from books and journals -- not from magazines, newspapers, and TV.
Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
how many gallons of gas does it take to produce one pound of vegetables?
there's petrochemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc... not to mention the cost of shipping it to the store just like all foods
In the US, its easy to demonstrate that a pound of vegetables takes less fossile fuels than a pound of meat (on average). Why? Because in the US, our livestock tends to be fattened on vegetable feed. Due to biology and physics 101, its obvious that a pound of animal feed does not translate into a pound of edible meat.
Cows can be an efficient source of food, but the only way to do that would be to allow cows to graze on land too marginal for farming (since cows can digest grass for nutrition, which humans can not). To maximize efficiency, one should raise the cow for milk, and not for meat. In the western world, this rarely happens.
There are valid criticisms against the vegetarian and vegan diets, but this isn't one of them. Hands down, in terms of resource usage, the vegetarian and vegan diets are more efficient.
If math is your weakness, shouldn't you concentrate on it?
AFAIK, the therapy for dyslexia includes reading lessons. The therapy for severe autism includes dealing with other people.
Personally, I'm pretty shy in certain situations. So I force myself to go out and say hello to strangers on the sidewalk, bore checkout ladies with chitchat, etc. If I ignored my problem, it would get worse. Will I ever reach the level of social interaction the average person has? No.
But am I getting better? Yes!
So why are you avoiding math if its your weakness?
The employer's job is to get work done for the least amount of dollars and maximize shareholder or owner value.
I've thought about this, and I do agree with you, but it all boils down to long-term and short-term.
Lets say you are company XYZ, and you have a successful line of Widget Software. When Widget 6.0 comes out, you fire all of your American programmers, take their work and specifications for Widget 7.0, and outshore it all to India.
India ends up doing all of your maintainance and development for a fraction of the cost.
Your stock market value soars. You undercut the US competition. You drive other companies out of business and destroy them.
However, in the long run, you fired your hot-shot development and coding team because they were upping your costs in the short run. When its time for Widget 8.0, a total rewrite and expansion of the product, it sucks.
Congratulations. In the long run, you screwed yourself.
I *know* that destroying the future to boost up the present happens ( re: SCO ), I just don't know how frequently it happens, or how often its done on purpose instead of by accident. My experience with management is that the bottom line tends to be their main metric of measurement, even if its hindering them in the long run.
A substantial body of opinion dates the major destruction of the Alexandrian library/museum to the late 4th century AD, i.e. a time when Christians were in charge and very concerned to discourage pagan things, which included the learning of the ancients........
Your knowledge of history is lax. The Catholic Church (as opposed to, say, the Ethiopian Church) had basically embodied the "science" of a certain group of ancients -- the Greeks.
By the time Galileo, et al, got around to challenging the Greek philosophies, the Catholic Church had adopted it as its own.
If you care to crack open a modern history book and look at some research, the "dark" ages weren't as dark as we once believed -- there was development, there were technological advances. Greek and Roman knowledge was being rediscovered, and new technologies were being adopted.
They're afraid of what someone who doesn't have benevolent intentions might be able to do with this approach.
During the Cold War, the Soviets had a problem keeping up with the USA's military spending on nukes.
The Soviets started to play with viruses to ensue that they could still wreck havoc if needed (since, if you are a superpower, national defense means destroying the world).
The Soviets ended up making some nasty viruses, and altering existing viruses so that current vaccines didn't work. Plus, they weaponized existing viruses (such as marburg, a relative of ebola) in order to maximize the dispersion.
With the fall of the USSR and the economic woes that followed, the location of some 'super-viruses' and viral researchers are in question.
Bah! I drive a '78 V8 318 Dodge D100 pickup that seems to have a humid/cold weather electrical issue which results in about 2 mpg when the engine is cold.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Nethack has the nice difficulty curve -- hard at the beginning, but your character's survival chance goes up post-quest and post-castle.
Been playing Dungeon Crawl lately, which seems to be more fatal then Nethack. [Plus you have Xom, the chaotic god, whenever you decide that the game is too easy.] Its damn annoying to hit dungeon level 10 or 12 and find that your character's survival chances aren't much improved since level 1.
when is someone going to put a genetic algorithm into their virus/worm?
something that mutates the worm's parameters (ports, timing delays, ip-search stratgy, etc.) so that the most virulent parameters are found by "natural selection"?
I don't think the number of infected machines in the world is high enough for successful genetic evolution. Viruses and worms are not like living organisms -- the chance of non-fatal mutation is lower. If a mutation creates an organism with a 1/2" longer neck, that organism will probably not die because of it. If a virus mutates so that an exploit code attacks a slightly different bit of memory, that virus is probably toast.
What we need for a successful 'evolution' virus it two-fold. First, their should be a different tendency to mutate different parts of its code. It should have a low chance to mutate most of its code, but a higher chance to mutate code that is least likely to result it damage. (Think "I love you!")
Second, it should act like some bacteria and find other organisms (viruses) and steal its code. Let the walking bags of mostly dirty water and their wetware develop the code. Exploit it. In this manner, its more likely that a new working exploit will be found.
Can the above be done in a viral payload? I don't know. I'm guessing that the difficulty factor is pretty large, but if someone wants to, someone will probably pull it off.
What makes you think living standards will increase in the future?
Resources are limited, energy is limited, and our population is growing exponentially.
Wrong.
While strictly, resources are limited, we are nowhere need 100% usage. Thousands of years ago, the earth's "resources" could only support a few hunter-gatherers. However, it ended up supporting a lot more farmers. (Not always successfully, as a few extinct civilizations can attest to).
As population increased, farming techniques became better. [ No, this isn't backwards. The push to utilize more efficient techniques came from a larger population. Efficiency in terms of food grown/acre has energy and time costs. Hunter-gatherers tend to have a lot of free time. Modern humans do not. And again, some civilizations didn't survive the transition. ]
Right now, we have enough food grown to feed everyone in the world. However, a lot of that food grown is converted into animal feeds. Hunger and starvation in the world is an economic, distribution, social and political problem. It is not a technological problem. (Although there may be a technological solution to mitigate some or all of this problem.)
As for population, most of the "developed" world has low or no population growth. Forcasts predict that the population in many "developing" countries will level off, and that earth will hit a population cap around twelve to eighteen billion, before falling down to a lower level.
Don't get me wrong -- we have fucked up the environment pretty badly, and we will probably continue to do so. Species will die, areas will be poisoned off, and bad things will happen. We need to learn to clean up our mess. But the sky isn't falling.
I recognize that the concept of killing people is a little much to swallow for anybody... but is anyone really asking themselves what we may think we should have done, 200 years from now? Have you ever wondered what probably will happen 200 years from now if we DO use nanobots to eliminate "undesirable" people? In 200 years, we would have higher IQ's, longer lifespans, healthier lives, and just generally a happier life. Of course, the generation responsible for it would suffer the guilt until they perish, but the next couple generations would reap the benefits.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
A lot of disorders seem to be neither pure good or pure evil. Borderline forms and certain traits of ADD and Aspergers seem rather beneficial in certain fields. Genes for some mental disordes may also be the genes for high intelligence.
I have a short SF story that took place in a genetically-engineered future where occasionally, some families are given hyper-intelligence, at the risk of psychological instability, due to the greater good of society. You have to admit -- past a certain point, there isn't a strong correlation between a high IQ and happiness. Nor is there a strong correlation between an obsessive work habit and happiness (there is probably an inverse relationship though). Face it -- the people who do make the world what it is aren't probably as happy as they could be.
There are some disorders that we could eliminate with little or no loss and a lot of benefits. But we don't need genocide for that -- the same nanotech that can kill someone for possessing the gene could probably repair the gene without too much difficulty.
Proper typesetting is done by professional typesetting software like Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress, or even PageMaker or FrameMaker.
I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that TeX or one of its derivatives is the route if you have any mathmatical formula more complicated then a + b = c.
The alternative seems to be no driver, and the kernel becomes a useless lump of code. We cant demand that companies that produce hardware support anything they don't want too, be happy they at least give us closed drivers... 5 years ago they didnt even do that, unless it was for a Microsoft kernel.
Some of us would rather support open drivers than closed drivers. When I buy hardware, I try to buy hardware with open drivers. Why? Because it directly affects me.
Case in point: Lets say I buy a Promise SX4000 RAID5 card. It has "linux drivers". However, by linux drivers, it means that it has precompiled drivers that only work for certain kernels. Congratulations, my upgrade path is restricted.
Now lets say I buy a RAID5 card with open drivers. My upgrade path is no longer restricted.
Unless I missed it, the article fails to mention anything about Office 2003's Sharepoint portal.
[ Description snipped. ]
There's a feeling you can get during nethack (or any other good roguelike) when you're at a deep enough level and you see a new type of monster for the first time.
That feeling is "This is probably very, very bad. Run away! Run away!"
Your description of Sharepoint gives me the same feeling.
For those of us who haven't purchased MS Office yet occasionally need to read MS Office documents, there is always the free MS Office document viewers if Open Office.org doesn't do the trick.
Kids are some of the sneakiest people alive. (This is not open for debate. We were all kids once.)
This is open for debate. Just because you were a sneaky kid doesn't mean that I was.
When I was a teen, there were always those adults who were hell-raisers when they were my age. They'd look at me with a 'knowing' eye and tell me that I couldn't fool them, they were a kid once.
I didn't like it then, and now, that I'm an adult, I still don't like it.
I didn't drink, smoke, or do drugs as a teen. I didn't lie to my parents or steal. I had good grades, and obeyed the law.
Stereotypes are bad, no matter who they are applied to.
"Students learn to repeat the program's motto: ''If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it."
That is so incredibly wrong I don't even know where to start.
Don't forget: "...students are asked to write an essay 'to get the word out that downloading copyrighted entertainment is illegal and unethical,'"
Its so easy to find
an example of copyrighted music free for download that isn't illegal.
If they had this program when I went to school, I'd probably have been suspended for subversion.
Re:Anonymous Coward's Guide to Updating Debian
on
Painlessly Update FreeBSD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes APT is great. It's easy to use and requires less effort than the FreeBSD upgrade process but it's too bad Debian stable is so hopelessly out of date.
Three words: "End of Life"
If we are looking at updates, the last extended support release of FreeBSD was 4.8, which was released in April, 2003.
Its end-of-life is March, 2005.
Debian Potato was released August, 2000 and end-of-lifed in June, 2003.
Debian Woody was released in July 2002, and, assuming that tradition holds, will be supported til at least May 2005. [ Debian seems to keep security updates going for one year after the date of the next release. ]
Its rather nice not to change software in 3 years or so. ["Change" as in "new software version" -- debian does security patches, but they are backported to the version that ships with the release to minimize breakage. ]
Ne'ermind that binary upgrades are damn nice.
[ Don't feel bad -- OpenBSD has a lifespan of 1 year on its stuff, and no binary updates, which *really* annoys me -- otherwise its a fine OS which I like to use. ]
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, Alpha Centauri -- we better hope we don't go down that road.
Or do you want to be nerve-stapled just because you protested the Gov't?
So let me get this straight:
1. Fair use is 10% of a song or 30 seconds, whatever comes first, right?
2. Making ring tones out of popular songs falls under fair use.
What am I missing? Ah yes, I know!
3. Someone with a large lobbying department is not making a profit.
Don't worry. If fair-use prevents the making of a large profit, fair-use will be weakened.
A little over two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson considered copyrights as a sort of necessary evil to promote the creation of works that would (eventually) be in the public domain.
Today, copyrights exit for only three things: profit, profit, profit. The company that benefited from the vast amount of ideas that had passed into the public domain (Disney) was the company that promoted the idea of "forever" copyrights.
No, people do not need to consume cholesterol. Your body makes all the cholesterol it can ever use.
Provide your source. your body also makes Vitamins B1, B3, and B6 but you will be deficient if you do not eat enough of it. Further, that ability exists in infants from the moment they are born. Why would the need to consume cholesterol only apply to infants, in stark contradiction to many other vitamins and hormones including those I just mentioned? Or do you think cholesterol is in mother's milk out of some freak coincidence?
Perhaps its a fluke -- blood, fecal material, semen and urine all contain cholesterol (a quick google search can comfirm this). Cholesterol is *needed* throughout the body, and its no big surprise that it can be found in almost anything that comes from the body.
However, assuming that cholesterol is needed by infants (which I see no evidence of), infant nutritional requirements are different from adult human requirements. I am not an expert on fetus or infant development, and I do not know when the liver becomes fully functional at producing cholesterol.
Cholesterol is only available from animal sources. If humans needed cholesterol to survive, strict vegetarians (vegans) would be dropping dead left and right.
The vast majority of vegans do not remain that way for extended periods of time. Further, when they do binge it is often on dairy products that contain substantial amounts of cholesterol. Cholesterol is used by your body to produce lipoproteins which comprise cell membranes. All cellular growth thus requires cholesterol. Where do vegans have major problems? Reproduction and muscle growth. The number of cases of low birth weight and spontaneous abortion are quite high amongst vegans. All the medical evidence clearly indicates veganism is dangerous.
Er, what?
Vegan's major problems are B12 and DHA/EPA Omega 3's. The former is solved through B12-fortified foods, while the later is delt with by high Alpha-Linolenic Acid intakes and limiting the amount of Linoleic Acid ( or, in layman's terms -- limit the use of most fat and use some flaxseed/flaxseed oil each day. )
Before you get too smug, DHA/EPA levels in the Standard American Diet are a problem as well. The Standard American Diet is rather nasty in some respects, and is far from healthy.
For "medical evidence", try Ellis, et al, in Great Britain, 1970 -- in a study comparing 26 vegans to 24 non-vegans, other then a small B12 deficiency in 3 vegans, the vegans were healthier then the non-vegans. Sanders and Ellis, Great Britain, 1978 compared 34 vegans to 23 non-vegans and showed that all nutrients were in their normal range, even if serum B12 was low. O'Connell et al, in the USA 1989, had a study of 288 vegans and 116 lacto-ovo vegetarians, the vegans had adequate growth and no significant different in height and weight by age 10. (OTOH, Shinwell & Gorodischer, in Israel, and P.C. Dagnalie et al both showed health problems in vegan infants, but those pertained to homemade soymilk "infant formulas".)
Unfortunately, there is no large studies involving vegans compared to a non-vegan control group with a similar environment. (Vegetarians are lucky -- a large percentage of Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarian, and thus can be easily compared against non-vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists.)
As for pregnancy, in a study by Carter, et al, in 1987, involving 775 vegan women from Tennessee, the vegan diet did not affect infant birth weight, and vegan mothers had a rate of preeclampsia of 1 in 775 [0.1% of the population as opposed to 5% - 10% of normal mothers]
As a vegan, I have yet to drop dead without any cholesterol in my diet. I'm very strict about animal products, and religiously read labels to doublecheck ingredients. Tell me when I should drop dead of cholesterol deficiency, and I'll try.
WHO HAS THE TIME!!!!
The malicious immorts on a mud will code drugs and withdrawels, but give enough of a "boost" to lure others to use them.
The really malicious immorts on a mud will code diseases. Just wait until your barbarian gets a nasty cold. ;)
Cholesterol is one of the most necessary substances in your body, particularly the brain where lipoproteins are the largest component after water.
Cholesterol that is undamaged by heat or any other energy source is necessary for human survival, and is not at all dangerous.
That is rather misleading.
Yes, people do need cholesterol.
No, people do not need to consume cholesterol.
Your body makes all the cholesterol it can ever use.
Cholesterol is only available from animal sources. If humans needed cholesterol to survive, strict vegetarians (vegans) would be dropping dead left and right.
I am unfamiliar with the cholesterol-depression link, so I did a quick google search. While some studies have shown a correlation between low cholesterol and depression, others have not.
There was a large Finnish study that linked depression to low cholesterol, but this was in spite of similar diets between the depressed group and the control group.
In another study I found a reference to, cholesterol-lowering drugs did not increase the risk of depression.
Correlation is one thing. Causation is another.
There are many factors that cause low cholesterol and may cause, or result from, depression. The liver produces about 800mg's of cholesterol daily, and many factors (diet, drinking, disease) can hinder the functioning of the liver.
In a similar example, low cholesterol can be linked to a higher risk of stroke -- the type of stroke that results from hemorrhagic bleeding in the brain. However, hemorrhagic stroke can be caused by low potassium levels -- which will also lower cholesterol levels.
Be careful when the mass media runs with a "health" story -- too often, the size of the study is too small to draw meaningful conclusions from, or the mass media likes to blow the results out of proportion. Remember when they reported that coffee "causes" cancer? Or that coffee "prevents" cancer? (Search for "coffee" and "cancer" at google to find both sorts or reports.)
Its good that you are taking an interest in your health and your diet. But learn nutrition from books and journals -- not from magazines, newspapers, and TV.
how many gallons of gas does it take to produce one pound of vegetables? there's petrochemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc... not to mention the cost of shipping it to the store just like all foods
In the US, its easy to demonstrate that a pound of vegetables takes less fossile fuels than a pound of meat (on average). Why? Because in the US, our livestock tends to be fattened on vegetable feed. Due to biology and physics 101, its obvious that a pound of animal feed does not translate into a pound of edible meat.
Cows can be an efficient source of food, but the only way to do that would be to allow cows to graze on land too marginal for farming (since cows can digest grass for nutrition, which humans can not). To maximize efficiency, one should raise the cow for milk, and not for meat. In the western world, this rarely happens.
There are valid criticisms against the vegetarian and vegan diets, but this isn't one of them. Hands down, in terms of resource usage, the vegetarian and vegan diets are more efficient.
If math is your weakness, shouldn't you concentrate on it?
AFAIK, the therapy for dyslexia includes reading lessons. The therapy for severe autism includes dealing with other people.
Personally, I'm pretty shy in certain situations. So I force myself to go out and say hello to strangers on the sidewalk, bore checkout ladies with chitchat, etc. If I ignored my problem, it would get worse. Will I ever reach the level of social interaction the average person has? No. But am I getting better? Yes!
So why are you avoiding math if its your weakness?
It's not always explicitly worded as RTFM...
I *do* tell people to RTFM or RTF FAQ. I've done it for both Linux and BSD.
I suppose that's because I'm a heartless bastard.
Even with a high-gain yagi on the roof
A what?
How does it work?
Is it better then a cheap amplified set-top antenna?
The employer's job is to get work done for the least amount of dollars and maximize shareholder or owner value.
I've thought about this, and I do agree with you, but it all boils down to long-term and short-term.
Lets say you are company XYZ, and you have a successful line of Widget Software. When Widget 6.0 comes out, you fire all of your American programmers, take their work and specifications for Widget 7.0, and outshore it all to India.
India ends up doing all of your maintainance and development for a fraction of the cost.
Your stock market value soars. You undercut the US competition. You drive other companies out of business and destroy them.
However, in the long run, you fired your hot-shot development and coding team because they were upping your costs in the short run. When its time for Widget 8.0, a total rewrite and expansion of the product, it sucks.
Congratulations. In the long run, you screwed yourself.
I *know* that destroying the future to boost up the present happens ( re: SCO ), I just don't know how frequently it happens, or how often its done on purpose instead of by accident. My experience with management is that the bottom line tends to be their main metric of measurement, even if its hindering them in the long run.
A substantial body of opinion dates the major destruction of the Alexandrian library/museum to the late 4th century AD, i.e. a time when Christians were in charge and very concerned to discourage pagan things, which included the learning of the ancients ........
Your knowledge of history is lax. The Catholic Church (as opposed to, say, the Ethiopian Church) had basically embodied the "science" of a certain group of ancients -- the Greeks.
By the time Galileo, et al, got around to challenging the Greek philosophies, the Catholic Church had adopted it as its own.
If you care to crack open a modern history book and look at some research, the "dark" ages weren't as dark as we once believed -- there was development, there were technological advances. Greek and Roman knowledge was being rediscovered, and new technologies were being adopted.
They're afraid of what someone who doesn't have benevolent intentions might be able to do with this approach.
During the Cold War, the Soviets had a problem keeping up with the USA's military spending on nukes.
The Soviets started to play with viruses to ensue that they could still wreck havoc if needed (since, if you are a superpower, national defense means destroying the world).
The Soviets ended up making some nasty viruses, and altering existing viruses so that current vaccines didn't work. Plus, they weaponized existing viruses (such as marburg, a relative of ebola) in order to maximize the dispersion.
With the fall of the USSR and the economic woes that followed, the location of some 'super-viruses' and viral researchers are in question.
PBS did a good story on this awhile back.
Bah! I drive a '78 V8 318 Dodge D100 pickup that seems to have a humid/cold weather electrical issue which results in about 2 mpg when the engine is cold.
Why?
Because I support our troops in Iraq!
It's pretty hard getting that @ down to level 20.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Nethack has the nice difficulty curve -- hard at the beginning, but your character's survival chance goes up post-quest and post-castle.
Been playing Dungeon Crawl lately, which seems to be more fatal then Nethack. [Plus you have Xom, the chaotic god, whenever you decide that the game is too easy.] Its damn annoying to hit dungeon level 10 or 12 and find that your character's survival chances aren't much improved since level 1.
when is someone going to put a genetic algorithm into their virus/worm?
something that mutates the worm's parameters (ports, timing delays, ip-search stratgy, etc.) so that the most virulent parameters are found by "natural selection"?
I don't think the number of infected machines in the world is high enough for successful genetic evolution. Viruses and worms are not like living organisms -- the chance of non-fatal mutation is lower. If a mutation creates an organism with a 1/2" longer neck, that organism will probably not die because of it. If a virus mutates so that an exploit code attacks a slightly different bit of memory, that virus is probably toast.
What we need for a successful 'evolution' virus it two-fold. First, their should be a different tendency to mutate different parts of its code. It should have a low chance to mutate most of its code, but a higher chance to mutate code that is least likely to result it damage. (Think "I love you!")
Second, it should act like some bacteria and find other organisms (viruses) and steal its code. Let the walking bags of mostly dirty water and their wetware develop the code. Exploit it. In this manner, its more likely that a new working exploit will be found.
Can the above be done in a viral payload? I don't know. I'm guessing that the difficulty factor is pretty large, but if someone wants to, someone will probably pull it off.
What makes you think living standards will increase in the future?
Resources are limited, energy is limited, and our population is growing exponentially.
Wrong.
While strictly, resources are limited, we are nowhere need 100% usage. Thousands of years ago, the earth's "resources" could only support a few hunter-gatherers. However, it ended up supporting a lot more farmers. (Not always successfully, as a few extinct civilizations can attest to).
As population increased, farming techniques became better. [ No, this isn't backwards. The push to utilize more efficient techniques came from a larger population. Efficiency in terms of food grown/acre has energy and time costs. Hunter-gatherers tend to have a lot of free time. Modern humans do not. And again, some civilizations didn't survive the transition. ]
Right now, we have enough food grown to feed everyone in the world. However, a lot of that food grown is converted into animal feeds. Hunger and starvation in the world is an economic, distribution, social and political problem. It is not a technological problem. (Although there may be a technological solution to mitigate some or all of this problem.)
As for population, most of the "developed" world has low or no population growth. Forcasts predict that the population in many "developing" countries will level off, and that earth will hit a population cap around twelve to eighteen billion, before falling down to a lower level.
Don't get me wrong -- we have fucked up the environment pretty badly, and we will probably continue to do so. Species will die, areas will be poisoned off, and bad things will happen. We need to learn to clean up our mess. But the sky isn't falling.
I recognize that the concept of killing people is a little much to swallow for anybody... but is anyone really asking themselves what we may think we should have done, 200 years from now? Have you ever wondered what probably will happen 200 years from now if we DO use nanobots to eliminate "undesirable" people? In 200 years, we would have higher IQ's, longer lifespans, healthier lives, and just generally a happier life. Of course, the generation responsible for it would suffer the guilt until they perish, but the next couple generations would reap the benefits.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
A lot of disorders seem to be neither pure good or pure evil. Borderline forms and certain traits of ADD and Aspergers seem rather beneficial in certain fields. Genes for some mental disordes may also be the genes for high intelligence.
I have a short SF story that took place in a genetically-engineered future where occasionally, some families are given hyper-intelligence, at the risk of psychological instability, due to the greater good of society. You have to admit -- past a certain point, there isn't a strong correlation between a high IQ and happiness. Nor is there a strong correlation between an obsessive work habit and happiness (there is probably an inverse relationship though). Face it -- the people who do make the world what it is aren't probably as happy as they could be.
There are some disorders that we could eliminate with little or no loss and a lot of benefits. But we don't need genocide for that -- the same nanotech that can kill someone for possessing the gene could probably repair the gene without too much difficulty.
Proper typesetting is done by professional typesetting software like Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress, or even PageMaker or FrameMaker.
I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that TeX or one of its derivatives is the route if you have any mathmatical formula more complicated then a + b = c.
Seriously, why do I care about this at all?
The alternative seems to be no driver, and the kernel becomes a useless lump of code. We cant demand that companies that produce hardware support anything they don't want too, be happy they at least give us closed drivers... 5 years ago they didnt even do that, unless it was for a Microsoft kernel.
Some of us would rather support open drivers than closed drivers. When I buy hardware, I try to buy hardware with open drivers. Why? Because it directly affects me.
Case in point: Lets say I buy a Promise SX4000 RAID5 card. It has "linux drivers". However, by linux drivers, it means that it has precompiled drivers that only work for certain kernels. Congratulations, my upgrade path is restricted.
Now lets say I buy a RAID5 card with open drivers. My upgrade path is no longer restricted.
Unless I missed it, the article fails to mention anything about Office 2003's Sharepoint portal.
[ Description snipped. ]
There's a feeling you can get during nethack (or any other good roguelike) when you're at a deep enough level and you see a new type of monster for the first time.
That feeling is "This is probably very, very bad. Run away! Run away!"
Your description of Sharepoint gives me the same feeling.
I have one version of office. I paid it. It is 97. And it cannot open recent word documents. So saying M$ as no migration cost is PURE BULLSHIT.
Go visit the evil empire and download the free converter for Office '97 to open up Office 2k3 files.
In addition, you might want to check out the other free downloads available for Office '97.
For those of us who haven't purchased MS Office yet occasionally need to read MS Office documents, there is always the free MS Office document viewers if Open Office.org doesn't do the trick.
Kids are some of the sneakiest people alive. (This is not open for debate. We were all kids once.)
This is open for debate. Just because you were a sneaky kid doesn't mean that I was.
When I was a teen, there were always those adults who were hell-raisers when they were my age. They'd look at me with a 'knowing' eye and tell me that I couldn't fool them, they were a kid once.
I didn't like it then, and now, that I'm an adult, I still don't like it.
I didn't drink, smoke, or do drugs as a teen. I didn't lie to my parents or steal. I had good grades, and obeyed the law.
Stereotypes are bad, no matter who they are applied to.
"Students learn to repeat the program's motto: ''If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it."
That is so incredibly wrong I don't even know where to start.
Don't forget: "...students are asked to write an essay 'to get the word out that downloading copyrighted entertainment is illegal and unethical,'"
Its so easy to find an example of copyrighted music free for download that isn't illegal.
If they had this program when I went to school, I'd probably have been suspended for subversion.
Yes APT is great. It's easy to use and requires less effort than the FreeBSD upgrade process but it's too bad Debian stable is so hopelessly out of date.
Three words: "End of Life"
If we are looking at updates, the last extended support release of FreeBSD was 4.8, which was released in April, 2003.
Its end-of-life is March, 2005.
Debian Potato was released August, 2000 and end-of-lifed in June, 2003.
Debian Woody was released in July 2002, and, assuming that tradition holds, will be supported til at least May 2005. [ Debian seems to keep security updates going for one year after the date of the next release. ]
Its rather nice not to change software in 3 years or so. ["Change" as in "new software version" -- debian does security patches, but they are backported to the version that ships with the release to minimize breakage. ]
Ne'ermind that binary upgrades are damn nice.
[ Don't feel bad -- OpenBSD has a lifespan of 1 year on its stuff, and no binary updates, which *really* annoys me -- otherwise its a fine OS which I like to use. ]
Aren't they the people who crucify Santa Claus every Easter?
[ Its a joke, laugh. Or cry. Since it will probably be just as accurate as the rest of the comments in this thread. ]