Yo folks, haven't you heard of the Boston Tea Party? Colonists protested unjust taxation on Tea imports by breaking into a tea shipment and throwing it into the ocean. Perhaps it's time to repeat this bit of history...
The tea party in question wouldn't happen today, because corporations hold our nations' economies hostage. They don't serve the public, we serve the corporate agenda. In the 16th century, this wasn't the case, and the main force of the East India company was its monopoly by fiat. Today, corporations have power of their own which is only supplemented by government power (as in this case).
The astute reader will note that this can only get worse as corporate profit becomes more global - able to easily jump from country to country, corporations may play one off against the other in a bidding war for economical benefit. You and I will be the losers in the game, then as now.
What do to about it? I don't know. I suspect it's inevitable, given the headlock corporations have on our governments and, through the mass media, the prejudices of a large slice of our populations (I say "prejudices", because the opinions I am describing are formed based on inadequately balanced information). I know *I* feel disenfranchised.
I know I've been looking for a mail app with just these features that runs on Windows (and hopefully Linux too). I'm a competent Linux and Windows user, and I have no trouble using PGP on Windows with my Mozilla mailer. On Linux, it takes me significant time to copy and paste together an encrypted - or even just signed - message.
I don't think that there's a good reason to think that making PGP easier to apply to email would make it less secure:
Taking the PGP model as an example, we could simply bind a hotkey to the copy-EncryptClipBoard-paste operation.
Alternately, we could modify our mailers to include "encrypt" and "sign" buttons right next to the "send" button.
The problem with authentication could be solved by an icon displaying the level of trust the user may place in the key - highest if the user has typed it in manually and has explicitly indicated trust, lower for implicit trust, and very low for automatically found keys
There are already public key databases (which the NAI PGP client hooks into, I might add) which could be queried to decrypt or check signatures (see above re: trust levels) automatically. Making this transparent would significantly aid the spread of PGP use.
As you can probably tell, I feel kind of strongly about this - I even convinced my mother to use the PGP suite (although it turned out that the old version I gave her crashes her Win2k machine). I'd seriously consider working on the project, but I know I couldn't do it alone, and there are limited numbers of free choices for Windows (which I think it's crucial to get this working on). This is something I'd love to see integrated into the Mozilla mailer, but I don't want to suggest it while they're bug-hunting for 1.0!
I'd love to hear advice as to how I can help this to happen, or find it already sitting around.
Never mind their bad marketing; lots of companies do that and still succeed. NAI consistently damaged their product - it's like anti-marketing.
At one point, (about Summer 2000) NAI was still selling a decent product for about $70. It was a suite that contained a PGP encryptor/decryptor, a keyring application, and an IPSEC implementation. Everything you need, right?
So NAI split up the bundle, and upped the price on BOTH the parts so it would cost the user about $200 to get the functionality of the old version. I could understand selling the VPN seperately from the keychain, but only if both fragments cost less.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think this was some scam to play onto Ashcroft's nice list. I merely think that there's at least one suit near the top of NAI who isn't that interested; funding cuts, perhaps inadequate time spent considering marketing, you could see how this might go.
In the end, I suspect I hope in vain that NAI will give away the codebase when they stop support. They'll probably say something about "protecting shareholder value" by hanging onto the IP forever "in case" they could sell the increasingly outdated software for more than it's worth.
I'm not talking about photos that they sell - I'm talking about their photo developing shop. My friend once took a roll of film down to be developed which featured some shots of his girlfriend at the beach wearing a bikini swimsuit; she's well-endowed, and the suit was not, so there was quite a bit of skin showing according to my friend.
When he went to pick them up, some of the photos were missing. He asked about them and was told that it was their policy not to print pornography! He asked for the negatives, and they told him that they had been destroyed.
This was not explained to him by the attendant, nor was it displayed on signs in the store. Even so, he hadn't thought of them as pornographic. Meanwhile, he handed the roll over and shots (not replacable, in general) were destroyed. They even tried to charge him full price for what was left.
Well, let's be honest, Matt. You're selling Escape Velocity Override for $25 US. That's $40 Canadian, which almost buys me a copy of The Longest Journey (certainly does if you count shipping and taxes) down at my local EB. On the other hand, EV:O is old enough to be a bargain-basement title, and you're still charging your customers through the nose for it. I note that EV:O is copyright 1993-8 Ambrosia Software; I can go to a retail store and buy boxed games published in 1998 (Such as Tribes 1) for $10-15 US ($15-25 CDN). I wouldn't claim that EV:O represents as much work as System Shock 2 or Tribes 1, nor as much fun. Hell, your "latest game" is cheaper!
Now, I don't own a Mac, but I've played EV:O on my friend's machine. Good game. Worth paying for. Not worth paying $40 CDN for, and If I did own a mac I wouldn't be buying it. Further, I wouldn't be buying anything else from you. Ambrosia clearly has an inflated opinion of its products, or alternately it doesn't believe in depreciation. I'm constantly amazed that while hardware depreciates, many software vendors and retailers seem to think that software doesn't. You seem to be no exception.
Now, before you throw me in the "cheapskate shareware dude" bin, consider that I *only* pay for shareware almost exclusively. I can't afford some software I use to learn and tinker with, and I pirate it. I pay for software that I use a lot, or I find an alternative. I always, always register shareware that is worth the asking price (or I don't use it). Shareware is one of the only places I can find small, tight applications and games that do what I want and not more. It's unfortunate that some authors don't realize that it's not worth the money they're asking.
I'm afraid that I have little respect for your complaints about piracy for these reasons. However, please give my regards to your family and I do hope that you all have enough to eat.
No kidding - I read "minicomputer" and thought "Shuttle makes THOSE?" Imagine my surprise when I saw something that would easily fit onto my desk, without cleaning! Well, without cleaning *much*...
I like the idea of NetBeans, a free and Open Source (Mozilla-esque license) Java-based Java IDE. Uh, looks like the site isn't responding, so here's the Google cache. I like its UI design, too. However, my experience with it has been that it's really really slow. I suspect misconfiguration on my part, since I haven't heard more general revulsion towards it. 30 seconds to build "Hello, World!" would cause revulsion, I figure. Still, having an IDE that runs on all platforms is nice.
On Windows, I've used Oracle JDeveloper, which is Free(beer) software and can be downloaded from the Oracle Tech Network site if you register. I've mainly used the older version (3.1) for doing JSP work, but it contains some native code and is thus faster. I think Jdeveloper was based on Borland Jbuilder, but I'm not familiar with the new version.
You are aware, are you not, that our Prime Minister is adamantly in favour of new, sweeping legislation that severely limit our civil liberties? That proposed Canadian anti-"terrorism" legislation defines "terrorist" as anyone employing civil disobedience in order to influence the government?
Yes, Canada has big problems too. I'm trying to figure out what I can do about it that will actually have an effect. I'm really concerned that all this anti-terrorism stuff will be applied to reduce our ability to disagree with the government, provoking terrorist actions. After all, terrorism is what people do when they feel they have no options left.
...overclocked dual athlon VIA motherboards... without a cooling fan
Dear Lord! I hope not - have you any idea [tomshardware.com] what that can do to the CPU? (Yes, that really is molten solder and I think *copper* on the die) We're talking Over Three Hundred degrees Celsius (580 F).
Hey, here's a thought. Why not dispense with this whole "teach them a lesson" thing. Any time a country does something out of line, just invade them (as now) and crush the government (as now) but add the country to the USA? That way, they'll never piss off America again. Sweet! As a side benefit, we'd be bringing the light of Democracy and Capitalism to the poor, dark world. Everyone is better off when they have self-determination - if they're Americans. Other people should support their betters.
This is a constant debate in the School of CS at my university - should schools be doing more practical training? My univeristy provides students with theoretical knowledge, and leaves practical education to the individual. Assignments are "implement this, using these language restrictions", just as in many other programs; learning the language(s) specified is up to the student. Group design work is encouraged, and group coding is discouraged. I agree with this policy - nothing is more frustrating than finally seeing the fruits of your labours, and not getting the credit for it (in a curved classroom, cheaters are stealing marks).
For comparison to other policies, the rule of thumb is that when one leaves a meeting with other students, one takes no notes.
So, how does a student develop practical, real-world experience working with others on large projects and demonstrating language fluency? Easy. That student works on Free Software projects.
Large project. Check. Bigger than any school project.
Real-world. Check. Software may be in use all over the real world, on thousands of machines.
Working with others. Check, potentially thousands.
Language fluency. Check.
It's all there, plus you get to make software that you can use yourself, rather than something that has no other purpose than to demonstrate your knowledge.
72dBA is as loud as the *inside* of a car with the motor running, or as loud as a car that is 20 metres (60 some-odd feet) away. It's quieter than an unamplified singer. Your neighbours could probably hear it, but their neighbours couldn't.
This device seems to be designed for infrequent use - like a backup or portable power source. 1200 watts handles *my* home server closet pretty well, and 1500 hours sure beats the lead-acid array I have now. What did you want to use it for, anyhow?
If you wanted to power your house with it, you should consider the units built by an affiliated company (whose name I forget, but it might be Ballard Generation Systems) that builds a cell that can power a neighbourhood which fits in a standard container - the size of the trailer for a big rig - and has similar noise output to this cell. I don't know how much it costs, but as I said it powers a *neighbourhood*.
Yeah, that'd be a typo all right. Thanks for catching it.
Second, you might read a bit more about breast cancer and probabilities. The BRCA genes much increase your chances of getting breast cancer. That's it. Like crossing in the middle of the street increases your chances of being hit by
a car. But you can still cross the street and reasonably expect to live.
I'm aware of how probability works. I think suggesting otherwise as you do here is silly; not only is it not central to my argument, but I don't think I suggested otherwise.
Whether you've got the genes of not, you can take preventative measures to avoid breast cancer.
That's great advice. Still, cancer detection, prevention, and treatment involves a lot more than just changing your diet.
The $100 billion/yr cancer industry benefits from your ignorance and fears.
Heh. Yeah, I'm afraid. Watch me quake. I was afraid when my mother was first diagnosed, and later when she went for surgery. I'm not really afraid anymore since she's doing pretty well seeing as how she's alive and the metastatis seems to have been caught.
Still, up here in Canada there isn't anything resembling the "medical industry" that there is in the USA - frankly I thought that's what I was arguing against.
I like to think of it as my mother, father, and people like them who benefit from my concerns. As to my ignorance, Sara-san, you'll have to complain to Simon Fraser University's faculty - they're the ones who taught me my physiology before I started CS. _________
Hey, if you can patent the software for silicon, why can't you patent the software for cells?:-(
Prior art. You may have found the software for the cell, but you sure as shootin' didn't write it. What are you going to patent, "Method for creating life"? I think most companies patent "Process for identifying [PHENOTYPE] using genetic code analysis" (a phenotype is the result you get from a gene, like red hair - kinda like the difference between the binary and the output).
You may have been joking, but a lot of people really do feel like this, and it's a serious problem. The British Columbia Cancer agency just stopped providing testing for Breast Cancer susceptibility genes to all BC families because "the BC
Cancer Agency, through the Ministry of Health Planning, received legal
notice from representatives of Myriad Genetics/MDS asserting patent rights
for sequencing of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes". They priced the patent such that the BCCA can not afford to pay for it.
My mother may carry these genes, and if she does, then I probably do and any children I may have might as well. Generations of my family could go through surgical amputation, toxic chemical treatments, and even risk death, if these genes are present in our DNA and if it manifests.
So please, don't give me the argument that people are entitled to make money. They're actually not, because withholding this information is morally repugnant. How much does a mature, capable human life cost?
I've often heard the argument that monetary compensation is offered to spur the investment of time and effort into scientific endeavour, and that if we were to stop this from happening then scientific progress would stagnate due to lack of interest. Right, okay - well, according to this study that I just found if your mother lives to be 65, she has a 1% chance of dying of breast cancer within ten years. Hey CmdrTaco, how many people visit this site in a week? Let's say it's a million, and let's say none of you share a mother. One thousand of you will have a mother die of cancer if she lives to 65. Pretend you're one of those thousand unlucky people. How much of your time would you, personally give to see that that didn't happen? If your mother had cancer and you were not locked into your career (say you were in University, not 45 and in middle management) would you consider choosing a career related to cancer diagnosis or treatment? I sure am. And if you believe I care if I don't get a dime from it, you're wrong. I'm not required to do it, but I will work on it even if I have to work another job for my money.
Some of you may wonder what I do that helps - I'm making my career in the area of human information access; intelligent searching, visualization, etc. In part, this is why I am extremely interested in the consolidation of information and its liberation from the greedy. If successful, I predict it will be the largest boost to research since well before the Internet, and probably for years to come.
/. is a focus for a lot of people who are interested in Open Source and Free Software. Most are interested in a way to get their work done, or a way to learn about software, or just a stable platform. Some want to make $$$ fast! Here, however, we have an application which Free software is uniquely suited to:
It can evolve and change as this initative grows.
It is without cost and without proprietary encumberance.
It is stable and has unparalleled technical support.
It is already built mainly by people who have at least as good moral as buiness sense.
Here we have an opportunity to provide an example of what can be done with the Free Software movement. It cannot be ignored as a serious foray into an enterprise-scale environment, and if the initiative succeeds it will be used by at least half of the scientific community. Proprietary software makers will be forced to be compatible with us for a change.
More importantly, here we have the opportunity to catalyse scientific advancement. Try this: think of your friends, family, and coworkers and imagine that work you did help save that person's life, or made that person happier, or enable that other person to help you somehow. Heck, you can even think of the children - it actually works this time!
I urge you to head on over to http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ and read up on it. If you can, offer your help, and mean it. If you can't help, tell your friends. It's worth it. _________
even if you let it in front of your home for some weeks
Grammatically, there's nothing wrong with that sentence. What Taco needs is a good proofreader.
Yeah, except for the missing verb after "it". What Taco needs is a good editor.
Actually, there's no missing verb after "it". Let can be used as a transitive verb (this is how you're trying to use it), or an intransitive verb, which is how Taco used it. See the definition at dictionary.com for proof.
I think this is pretty final proof that people bitching about grammar usually do it as an end unto itself rather than because it actually annoys them. However, I sure was confused about this guy renting out his machine in front of his house.
Last semester, I did a directed study about applying approximate machine reasoning to human information access, specifically to searching hypertexts of metadata. One of the ideas I looked at was an article about a search engine called FuzzyBase (pdf) which was developed by three people including my professor, who works in the SFU Communication Networks Laboratory. FuzzyBase did just what you suggest - it used an interactive user session to disambiguate user queries. There are several interesting technologies which use this sort of thing to obtain unambiguous search keys, and most involve the usage of semantic ontologies. If you want to get started looking at this stuff, have a look at some of the articles on this page, especially the online links at the end of the page. There are already search engines that do this to some degree.
Of course I do; I study at Simon Fraser University. SFU is a great source of interesting and useful technologies, however our government is not yet bad enough to actually implement such policies.
Note that I said, "useful" - this does not imply it's useful to everyone.
Uh, what do you mean, "inevitably get to play by government rules"? In case you didn't notice, it's the USAnian government that thought up the clipper chip, the V-chip, the DMCA, and the UCITA. Canada doesn't have that stuff.
In fact, if the infrastructure is owned by the people (that is, citizens of the country, via the government) then it'll be a lot less suceptible to pushing around by the megacorps. What ISP do you know that won't roll over if AOL/T-W comes knocking? Oh yeah - AOL. They just start in a pre-rolled-over state.
This is really simple, and it doesn't stem from the place you think it does.
Whenever someone asks Google to see a message, Google must redistribute the message. In order to do this legally, they must have license to redistribute it, copy it, etc. The easiest way to do this is to put it in their TOS that this license is implicitly granted. It absolutely boggles me how people expect others to honour their copyright on original works one day, then turn around and demand that they break copyright later.
A friend of mine is the lead developer over at Ludidoc.com, a Washington-based Application Service provider that handles the documentation needs of the likes of JPL and Boeing. They're responsive to complaints (they're a small company, so duh) and their application is quick and cleverly made. It's written almost entirely in Perl and VB, running off of Debian Linux, if I'm not mistaken, although their brochure page is on NT/IIS. Get this: The Perl quite often generates JavaScript that runs on the client side - for a long while - then uploads back to the server at the end. Highly cool!
I've been using CVS for a while, but it really doesn't cut it for the kind of document management that they can do. Throw them an email and see what falls out.
If you want your own special little Open Source chat network, buy your own damn servers and pay for your own damn bandwidth
That's what Jabber does - they have their own servers (Jabber servers) and the server guys pay for their own bandwidth. The AOL servers are only used to talk to... AOL Clients!
AOL can do whatever they like with their servers, it's true. No amount of crying on 'our' part that "we have no choice, we can't get entire relationship networks to change" will do anything about that. However, it's not fair for AOL to say that the users on their system can't talk to users of other systems (Jabber, for example). Note that they can still do it, but it's not the Right Thing. I know full well that this means nothing to AOL, but I'm pretty sure it means a lot to most of the readers here. Who knows, it may be not only morally correct, but legally correct too.
I think arguing about this is not really the way to deal with the issue, though. Let's look at this from a different perspective (bear with me):
If AIM's management keeps playing tricks, then we can't link AIM to other systems (Jabber is a way to do this, even if GAIM isn't). Let's say other messenger services don't pull these tricks, so they get tied together. Now these messenger services have an incentive to use them instead of AIM - the effective increase in the reachable user base. If this is big enough, then people will join up because they will want to talk to their friends. Eventually, people will leave AIM because more of their friends use the other system.
There are other benefits to this, too; once you can change IM clients without losing all your contacts, you can use the one that annoys you the least and/or provides you with your most desired features, even just picking from "approved" clients! Suddenly, there is competition within the linked IM market (as opposed to the isolate IM market, like AIM will be in) based on something other than user base size (ie, how many of your buddies use it). There will be market pressure to keep ads and other cruft off the clients! Pressure for working features, and robustness, and maybe even decent dedicated proxies for firewalls! Currently, once you have a contact network set up on a system, the owners of that system have you in a headlock much like phone companies would if you could only phone people on that company. Since you can change phone companies (at least for long distance) there's fierce competition in that market. This isn't really any different.
Slashdot Mirror
The tea party in question wouldn't happen today, because corporations hold our nations' economies hostage. They don't serve the public, we serve the corporate agenda. In the 16th century, this wasn't the case, and the main force of the East India company was its monopoly by fiat. Today, corporations have power of their own which is only supplemented by government power (as in this case).
The astute reader will note that this can only get worse as corporate profit becomes more global - able to easily jump from country to country, corporations may play one off against the other in a bidding war for economical benefit. You and I will be the losers in the game, then as now.
What do to about it? I don't know. I suspect it's inevitable, given the headlock corporations have on our governments and, through the mass media, the prejudices of a large slice of our populations (I say "prejudices", because the opinions I am describing are formed based on inadequately balanced information). I know *I* feel disenfranchised.
I don't think that there's a good reason to think that making PGP easier to apply to email would make it less secure:
- Taking the PGP model as an example, we could simply bind a hotkey to the copy-EncryptClipBoard-paste operation.
- Alternately, we could modify our mailers to include "encrypt" and "sign" buttons right next to the "send" button.
- The problem with authentication could be solved by an icon displaying the level of trust the user may place in the key - highest if the user has typed it in manually and has explicitly indicated trust, lower for implicit trust, and very low for automatically found keys
- There are already public key databases (which the NAI PGP client hooks into, I might add) which could be queried to decrypt or check signatures (see above re: trust levels) automatically. Making this transparent would significantly aid the spread of PGP use.
As you can probably tell, I feel kind of strongly about this - I even convinced my mother to use the PGP suite (although it turned out that the old version I gave her crashes her Win2k machine). I'd seriously consider working on the project, but I know I couldn't do it alone, and there are limited numbers of free choices for Windows (which I think it's crucial to get this working on). This is something I'd love to see integrated into the Mozilla mailer, but I don't want to suggest it while they're bug-hunting for 1.0!I'd love to hear advice as to how I can help this to happen, or find it already sitting around.
At one point, (about Summer 2000) NAI was still selling a decent product for about $70. It was a suite that contained a PGP encryptor/decryptor, a keyring application, and an IPSEC implementation. Everything you need, right?
So NAI split up the bundle, and upped the price on BOTH the parts so it would cost the user about $200 to get the functionality of the old version. I could understand selling the VPN seperately from the keychain, but only if both fragments cost less.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think this was some scam to play onto Ashcroft's nice list. I merely think that there's at least one suit near the top of NAI who isn't that interested; funding cuts, perhaps inadequate time spent considering marketing, you could see how this might go.
In the end, I suspect I hope in vain that NAI will give away the codebase when they stop support. They'll probably say something about "protecting shareholder value" by hanging onto the IP forever "in case" they could sell the increasingly outdated software for more than it's worth.
Vivendi is also the company who killed off Dynamix, incidentally, right after Tribes 2 shipped. Apparently they've got a great track record.
Hey, that's nothing. Wal-Mart censors photos.
I'm not talking about photos that they sell - I'm talking about their photo developing shop. My friend once took a roll of film down to be developed which featured some shots of his girlfriend at the beach wearing a bikini swimsuit; she's well-endowed, and the suit was not, so there was quite a bit of skin showing according to my friend.
When he went to pick them up, some of the photos were missing. He asked about them and was told that it was their policy not to print pornography! He asked for the negatives, and they told him that they had been destroyed.
This was not explained to him by the attendant, nor was it displayed on signs in the store. Even so, he hadn't thought of them as pornographic. Meanwhile, he handed the roll over and shots (not replacable, in general) were destroyed. They even tried to charge him full price for what was left.
Well, let's be honest, Matt. You're selling Escape Velocity Override for $25 US. That's $40 Canadian, which almost buys me a copy of The Longest Journey (certainly does if you count shipping and taxes) down at my local EB. On the other hand, EV:O is old enough to be a bargain-basement title, and you're still charging your customers through the nose for it. I note that EV:O is copyright 1993-8 Ambrosia Software; I can go to a retail store and buy boxed games published in 1998 (Such as Tribes 1) for $10-15 US ($15-25 CDN). I wouldn't claim that EV:O represents as much work as System Shock 2 or Tribes 1, nor as much fun. Hell, your "latest game" is cheaper!
Now, I don't own a Mac, but I've played EV:O on my friend's machine. Good game. Worth paying for. Not worth paying $40 CDN for, and If I did own a mac I wouldn't be buying it. Further, I wouldn't be buying anything else from you. Ambrosia clearly has an inflated opinion of its products, or alternately it doesn't believe in depreciation. I'm constantly amazed that while hardware depreciates, many software vendors and retailers seem to think that software doesn't. You seem to be no exception.
Now, before you throw me in the "cheapskate shareware dude" bin, consider that I *only* pay for shareware almost exclusively. I can't afford some software I use to learn and tinker with, and I pirate it. I pay for software that I use a lot, or I find an alternative. I always, always register shareware that is worth the asking price (or I don't use it). Shareware is one of the only places I can find small, tight applications and games that do what I want and not more. It's unfortunate that some authors don't realize that it's not worth the money they're asking.
I'm afraid that I have little respect for your complaints about piracy for these reasons. However, please give my regards to your family and I do hope that you all have enough to eat.
No kidding - I read "minicomputer" and thought "Shuttle makes THOSE?" Imagine my surprise when I saw something that would easily fit onto my desk, without cleaning! Well, without cleaning *much*...
Hey, Microsoft told me in the Windows 95 install script that "Everything you want to do, and more, is now possible". Why would I *ever* upgrade?
On Windows, I've used Oracle JDeveloper, which is Free(beer) software and can be downloaded from the Oracle Tech Network site if you register. I've mainly used the older version (3.1) for doing JSP work, but it contains some native code and is thus faster. I think Jdeveloper was based on Borland Jbuilder, but I'm not familiar with the new version.
Yes, Canada has big problems too. I'm trying to figure out what I can do about it that will actually have an effect. I'm really concerned that all this anti-terrorism stuff will be applied to reduce our ability to disagree with the government, provoking terrorist actions. After all, terrorism is what people do when they feel they have no options left.
Dear Lord! I hope not - have you any idea [tomshardware.com] what that can do to the CPU? (Yes, that really is molten solder and I think *copper* on the die) We're talking Over Three Hundred degrees Celsius (580 F).
Hey, here's a thought. Why not dispense with this whole "teach them a lesson" thing. Any time a country does something out of line, just invade them (as now) and crush the government (as now) but add the country to the USA? That way, they'll never piss off America again. Sweet! As a side benefit, we'd be bringing the light of Democracy and Capitalism to the poor, dark world. Everyone is better off when they have self-determination - if they're Americans. Other people should support their betters.
For comparison to other policies, the rule of thumb is that when one leaves a meeting with other students, one takes no notes.
So, how does a student develop practical, real-world experience working with others on large projects and demonstrating language fluency? Easy. That student works on Free Software projects.
- Large project. Check. Bigger than any school project.
- Real-world. Check. Software may be in use all over the real world, on thousands of machines.
- Working with others. Check, potentially thousands.
- Language fluency. Check.
It's all there, plus you get to make software that you can use yourself, rather than something that has no other purpose than to demonstrate your knowledge.This device seems to be designed for infrequent use - like a backup or portable power source. 1200 watts handles *my* home server closet pretty well, and 1500 hours sure beats the lead-acid array I have now. What did you want to use it for, anyhow?
If you wanted to power your house with it, you should consider the units built by an affiliated company (whose name I forget, but it might be Ballard Generation Systems) that builds a cell that can power a neighbourhood which fits in a standard container - the size of the trailer for a big rig - and has similar noise output to this cell. I don't know how much it costs, but as I said it powers a *neighbourhood*.
Still, up here in Canada there isn't anything resembling the "medical industry" that there is in the USA - frankly I thought that's what I was arguing against.
I like to think of it as my mother, father, and people like them who benefit from my concerns. As to my ignorance, Sara-san, you'll have to complain to Simon Fraser University's faculty - they're the ones who taught me my physiology before I started CS.
_________
You may have been joking, but a lot of people really do feel like this, and it's a serious problem. The British Columbia Cancer agency just stopped providing testing for Breast Cancer susceptibility genes to all BC families because "the BC Cancer Agency, through the Ministry of Health Planning, received legal notice from representatives of Myriad Genetics/MDS asserting patent rights for sequencing of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes". They priced the patent such that the BCCA can not afford to pay for it.
My mother may carry these genes, and if she does, then I probably do and any children I may have might as well. Generations of my family could go through surgical amputation, toxic chemical treatments, and even risk death, if these genes are present in our DNA and if it manifests.
So please, don't give me the argument that people are entitled to make money. They're actually not, because withholding this information is morally repugnant. How much does a mature, capable human life cost?
I've often heard the argument that monetary compensation is offered to spur the investment of time and effort into scientific endeavour, and that if we were to stop this from happening then scientific progress would stagnate due to lack of interest. Right, okay - well, according to this study that I just found if your mother lives to be 65, she has a 1% chance of dying of breast cancer within ten years. Hey CmdrTaco, how many people visit this site in a week? Let's say it's a million, and let's say none of you share a mother. One thousand of you will have a mother die of cancer if she lives to 65. Pretend you're one of those thousand unlucky people. How much of your time would you, personally give to see that that didn't happen? If your mother had cancer and you were not locked into your career (say you were in University, not 45 and in middle management) would you consider choosing a career related to cancer diagnosis or treatment? I sure am. And if you believe I care if I don't get a dime from it, you're wrong. I'm not required to do it, but I will work on it even if I have to work another job for my money.
Some of you may wonder what I do that helps - I'm making my career in the area of human information access; intelligent searching, visualization, etc. In part, this is why I am extremely interested in the consolidation of information and its liberation from the greedy. If successful, I predict it will be the largest boost to research since well before the Internet, and probably for years to come.
- It can evolve and change as this initative grows.
- It is without cost and without proprietary encumberance.
- It is stable and has unparalleled technical support.
- It is already built mainly by people who have at least as good moral as buiness sense.
Here we have an opportunity to provide an example of what can be done with the Free Software movement. It cannot be ignored as a serious foray into an enterprise-scale environment, and if the initiative succeeds it will be used by at least half of the scientific community. Proprietary software makers will be forced to be compatible with us for a change.More importantly, here we have the opportunity to catalyse scientific advancement. Try this: think of your friends, family, and coworkers and imagine that work you did help save that person's life, or made that person happier, or enable that other person to help you somehow. Heck, you can even think of the children - it actually works this time!
I urge you to head on over to http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ and read up on it. If you can, offer your help, and mean it. If you can't help, tell your friends. It's worth it.
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I think this is pretty final proof that people bitching about grammar usually do it as an end unto itself rather than because it actually annoys them. However, I sure was confused about this guy renting out his machine in front of his house.
Hey! I thought Taylor series were supposed to be infinite.
Last semester, I did a directed study about applying approximate machine reasoning to human information access, specifically to searching hypertexts of metadata. One of the ideas I looked at was an article about a search engine called FuzzyBase (pdf) which was developed by three people including my professor, who works in the SFU Communication Networks Laboratory. FuzzyBase did just what you suggest - it used an interactive user session to disambiguate user queries. There are several interesting technologies which use this sort of thing to obtain unambiguous search keys, and most involve the usage of semantic ontologies. If you want to get started looking at this stuff, have a look at some of the articles on this page, especially the online links at the end of the page. There are already search engines that do this to some degree.
Note that I said, "useful" - this does not imply it's useful to everyone.
In fact, if the infrastructure is owned by the people (that is, citizens of the country, via the government) then it'll be a lot less suceptible to pushing around by the megacorps. What ISP do you know that won't roll over if AOL/T-W comes knocking? Oh yeah - AOL. They just start in a pre-rolled-over state.
I think this would be a good time to link to The Linux Security HOWTO: What to Do During and After a Breakin , as well as of course the Linux Security HOWTO itself . Don't just read it. Implement it.
Whenever someone asks Google to see a message, Google must redistribute the message . In order to do this legally, they must have license to redistribute it, copy it, etc. The easiest way to do this is to put it in their TOS that this license is implicitly granted. It absolutely boggles me how people expect others to honour their copyright on original works one day, then turn around and demand that they break copyright later.
I've been using CVS for a while, but it really doesn't cut it for the kind of document management that they can do. Throw them an email and see what falls out.
That's what Jabber does - they have their own servers (Jabber servers) and the server guys pay for their own bandwidth. The AOL servers are only used to talk to... AOL Clients!
AOL can do whatever they like with their servers, it's true. No amount of crying on 'our' part that "we have no choice, we can't get entire relationship networks to change" will do anything about that. However, it's not fair for AOL to say that the users on their system can't talk to users of other systems (Jabber, for example). Note that they can still do it, but it's not the Right Thing. I know full well that this means nothing to AOL, but I'm pretty sure it means a lot to most of the readers here. Who knows, it may be not only morally correct, but legally correct too.
I think arguing about this is not really the way to deal with the issue, though. Let's look at this from a different perspective (bear with me):
If AIM's management keeps playing tricks, then we can't link AIM to other systems (Jabber is a way to do this, even if GAIM isn't). Let's say other messenger services don't pull these tricks, so they get tied together. Now these messenger services have an incentive to use them instead of AIM - the effective increase in the reachable user base. If this is big enough, then people will join up because they will want to talk to their friends. Eventually, people will leave AIM because more of their friends use the other system.
There are other benefits to this, too; once you can change IM clients without losing all your contacts, you can use the one that annoys you the least and/or provides you with your most desired features, even just picking from "approved" clients! Suddenly, there is competition within the linked IM market (as opposed to the isolate IM market, like AIM will be in) based on something other than user base size (ie, how many of your buddies use it). There will be market pressure to keep ads and other cruft off the clients! Pressure for working features, and robustness, and maybe even decent dedicated proxies for firewalls! Currently, once you have a contact network set up on a system, the owners of that system have you in a headlock much like phone companies would if you could only phone people on that company. Since you can change phone companies (at least for long distance) there's fierce competition in that market. This isn't really any different.