Not only that, but Bill never would have gotten his sweet deal with IBM if his mother hadn't been a friend of one of the IBM bigwigs. They were on the board of some charitable institution (I forget which one), and Bill's mom basically got Microsoft a consulting role with IBM in designing their PC. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Its true that Sun does some bad stuff (particularly the way they've handled java), but they do some good stuff too. For instance, they released StarOffice under the GPL, and they have devoted 40 programmers to work on Gnome. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Um, that version of Gnome requires a Windows-based X server. Just because its Windows doesn't mean that X is no longer necessary. As for those embedded systems, it wouldn't surprise me if they were running a scaled down version of X. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
I don't mean this as a troll, but it seems that BIND has more security vulnerabilities than any other piece of software. I know someone brings this up on every DNS related post, but I think more people should try djbdns, with which I have been very impressed since I started using it about six months ago. I have heard that BIND 9 is supposed to be an improvement, but with BIND's history of security problems I'm not sure if I would trust even this new improved version. I think it is better to go with software that has already demonstrated its good security, like djbdns has. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Good one. I guess Hammermill is also pretty upset about people sending email instead of writing letters on paper and sending them by snail mail. Who knows, perhaps we'll be seeing Hammermill demanding payment for every email in lieu of profits lost, just like the U.S. Postal Service:^)
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Actually, Chris Matthews is a Democrat. A lot of people seem to miss this, because he is fairly conservative for a Democrat, and has a deep dislike of Bill Clinton. I guess you could call him an old-school liberal ( he was an aide to Tip O'Neill many years ago), who is a bit upset over the direction his party has taken. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Who is forcing anyone not to pay? If you want to send in some money to fund overseas abortions, go right ahead. As a matter of fact, you can take that extra money you'll be getting back (if we actually get the tax cut Bush is promising) and send it to whatever cause you want. My, isn't freedom of choice a wonderful thing?
For the record, I'm not a pro-lifer, nor did I vote for Bush. I just found the logic in your post pretty twisted. Another point: just because most Americans think abortion should be legal doesn't mean that they think it is a good thing, or that they want to pay for someone else's abortions. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Xerox PARC, IIRC, had the first GUI and it was they who got ripped off. The Mouse as well I believe.
Just to nitpick another nitpick, the mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart. Some of the people who worked in his lab eventually moved on to PARC, taking the idea along with them. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
In a sense, isn't this how slashdot works? Basically, we read articles from other sites, then discuss their merits here. We are both the audience and the reviewers, and with moderation, we also "watch the watchmen." Now if only the moderation system worked better. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Telling the world you're going to release Super-Itanium-Linux.NET v 3.0 on October 1, 2000, while simultaneously planning to actually release on October 1, 2005 is not a bad thing.
Well, actually yes, it is a bad thing. It's called lying. I don't thing I'm alone in saying that dishonesty is bad. If you say your release will be on a specific date, you should try to release on that date. If the code is not ready, then its understandable to delay, but if you never even planned to release on that date, then all you are doing is hurting your credibility.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
If you want to handle a lot of data, you need to divide it up somehow, and hierarchical (directory-oriented) organization works great for that.
I agree that large amounts of data need to be divided in order to make them manageable, but I think that a hierarchical system actually works very poorly for this. Its not that people are too stupid to use them, its just that as more data is added to the system, deeper and deeper hierarchies are needed. At a point, the structure becomes so complex that it is almost as hard to find data in a hierarchy as it is in a flat system. Also, hierarchies divide data into rigid categories, while human understanding of data is very flexible. For instance, my computer has image files of various types and for various purposes scattered through the filesystem (/usr/share/pixmaps,/home/httpd/images,/mnt/win/My Documents/My Pictures, the list goes on and on). No matter how well-designed a hierarchy is, this type of complexity is inevitable, because there are always different ways of thinking about the same data. If I want to manage all of the images on my system, I have to either hunt through the filesystem manually, or use the find command, which essentially breaks down the hierarchy, and is also very slow.
A queryable database is a much more efficient and flexible means of organization. You can arrange data in an almost limitless number of combinations very quickly. I think that a virtual filesystem layer organized as a database with one or a very few tables would be a big advance. Of course, since I'm sure most people would not want to learn SQL to manage their data, a good GUI is needed. Work on this is under way, though. GNOME's Evolution mail application, for example is designed to manage mail as a database rather than a hierarchy, and people who receive huge amounts of mail should be welcoming this.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
I never read the sequels. "Ender's Game" caters to the "there will never be such a thing as Artificial Intelligence" crowd.
I think you've seriously misinterpreted the book. I don't think Card is even remotely saying that there will never be AI. Instead, in the fictional future of Ender's childhood, AI is simply not advanced enough to do what you are thinking (the book is supposed to be set not very far in the future). In addition to that, if you had read any of the rest of the books, you would know that one of the main characters in the series actually is an AI.
Here's my take on Ender's Game. Ender was a genius, one of the most gifted human beings alive at the time, and through intense training became a formidable military strategist. It had nothing to do with intuition. The reason why he could not know he was actually involved in a real war was that he had studied the aliens so closely, and learned to identify with them so well, that he would have been overcome with guilt and would not have been able to wipe them out of existence. This really is the main theme running through the entire Ender series: if you can truly understand another being (alien or human), you cannot hate them, because you would see their motives, even the despicable ones, as being not too different from your own. This is what Ender comes to believe (and presumably Card believes as well), though whether it is true I'm not completely sure.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
You need to get a clue. Solo classical piano music is not "songs".
Not entirely true. Felix Mendelssohn wrote many "Songs without Words", which were all solo piano pieces. I understand that a few other composers continued this form, though I'm not very familiar with them.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Since it seems that the thing that most people want to block is pr0n, why not filter images rather than pages? I suppose the filter could have a list of innappropriate sites from which images cannot be loaded. Or if you wanted things stricter, a list of approved sites that are the only ones which can have images.
Or, I suppose, an easier solution would be to make all the school kids surf using lynx;-)
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
the entire universe couldn't support anything more complex than a dim glow if a physical constant was off by the slightest bit...
It's on this razor-thin edge that our existance is balanced...
I think you (and Martin Rees) are making some pretty huge assumptions with this line of thinking. For all we know, Rees's six numbers *have* to have the values they do. This is almost like being amazed that a circle's circumference divided by its diameter equals such a strange and wonderful number as pi. Never mind that it *has* to equal pi, unless you redefine what a circle is.
As far as I know, no one has ever tried to alter the universe in such a way as to change one of Rees's six numbers. Thinking you know what will happen in such a case is a little bit presumptuous. If I had to make a guess (and really, when dealing with this sort of thing all you can do is guess), I would say that changing the universe in such a fundamental way would render our models of physics useless. Kinda like trying to predict the behavior of subatomic particles using Newton's laws. Our models simply haven't been tested against the necessary data to say whether they would hold true.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
If this succeds, the CD you buy will be SDMI watermarked. This ISN'T just for downloadable music. They want to apply this ACROSS THE BOARD to all purchasable and listenable music.
Why should we be worried about watermarks on CDs or the radio? I thought the idea of watermarking was to be able to find the person who committed the original copyright infringement. Since music from CD stores and the radio can be acquired anonymously, what good would a watermark be to the RIAA?
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Never mind the extremely rude guy who commented earlier. To answer your question, the stock is not worth more than the company, but rather it is worth more than the company's annual earnings. This is generally the case. Most companies have a price to earnings ratio of at least 30 to 1. During the big internet stock boom which began about a year ago, some companies had p/e ratios of well over a 100 to 1. ---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
I don't think anything like this is feasible, for the simple reason that a healthy species *needs* genetic variation to survive. Imagine the inbreeding problems when an entire population is basically copies from one or a few individuals!
The issues you raised are pretty accurate, though there may be ways of getting around the problems. First of all, due to the founder effect, the gene pool of the newly resurrected species is unlikely to be identical to the original species. However, if they can find and clone enough different samples, they might be able to approximate it pretty well. This is similar to the way pollsters don't question every person in the country about the presidential election, but can still get fairly accurate results with a carefully chosen representative sample. How many different genetic samples would be necessary for this, I have no idea.
The second problem they would have to deal with is genetic drift, where even a population of several thousand can randomly lose genetic diversity. This is less of a problem than it appears, because even if the population loses a few genes, they can always clone some more animals that actually have them.
As far as inbreeding, the problems here usually arise from homozygosity of deleterious recessive genes. They could potentially lower the likelyhood of this being a problem by eliminating the deleterious recessives in the lab (probably much harder than it sounds). Beyond that, deleterious recessives tend to gradually fade away in populations where inbreeding is common, because they are far more likely to cause problems in a such a population, and thus have a much higher selection pressure going against them. For instance, in many human societies where marrying one's first cousin is common, deleterious recessives are much less common than in Western cultures, where marrying even second cousins is taboo.
Hmmm... I'm starting to ramble, so I'll end here by saying that resurrecting a species, given the right conditions is certainly possible, but it would be a mammoth undertaking (pun intended) far beyond something like merely cloning a sheep.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Microsoft has worked long and hard to create a GUI that is clean and usable. And they have done very good job too. There is no reason to do a major UI overhaull, so they stick with the old -- why is that a bad thing? Why should Microsoft force 200 million people to learn some new obscure user interface paradigm?
MS could do a number of small things to vastly improve their interface without forcing users to relearn everything. For instance, a few of their UI designers could actually look up
Fitt's Law and learn to apply it. MS has been using their current interface scheme for five years now, yet they remain willfully ignorant of things such as this.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Having laws designed to prevent their country being swamped by American 'culture' sounds like a good idea to me.
I wish we had some laws here in America to prevent us from being swamped by American culture.
:^)
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
Did you read the article? Wake up and smell the roses, pal. The corps and lawyers don't think they rule the 'Net, but they're taking steps to make sure that they will do. In the meantime, we're all sitting around on our collective fannies doing absolutely nothing about it.
What makes you think that passing a few laws gives them control? What you're talking about here is what I think is the main problem with the Suck article. The politician, lawyers, corporations, etc may think that they can control things, and we may whine a lot about them, but mostly what we do is completely ignore them. Call it civil disobedience, or simply being unafraid of getting caught, but a million college students are going to keep on trading mp3's and free software zealots will always mirror DeCSS, no matter how many lawsuits they file or ridiculous laws they pass. As Henry David Thoreau said, "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." Most of us are *NOT* fools, even if we tend to think a little to highly of our abilities from time to time;^)
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Sure, netscape crashes a lot, but in the two years that I have been using linux, I have never even seen netscape take down X, let alone the whole operating system. Any linux box that does this is not "perfectly fine" as you say. If linux did crash from running Microsoft's ported apps, then it indeed would be linux's fault. After all, if an app crashes, it's the app's fault, but if an app crashes and takes down the whole operating system with it, then there is a problem with the OS.
Of course, my statements above are invalid if an app requires a buggy kernel module to run, and I suppose a kernel module might be required for their win32 layer. Maybe that is their strategy;-)
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but Bill never would have gotten his sweet deal with IBM if his mother hadn't been a friend of one of the IBM bigwigs. They were on the board of some charitable institution (I forget which one), and Bill's mom basically got Microsoft a consulting role with IBM in designing their PC.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Its true that Sun does some bad stuff (particularly the way they've handled java), but they do some good stuff too. For instance, they released StarOffice under the GPL, and they have devoted 40 programmers to work on Gnome.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Um, that version of Gnome requires a Windows-based X server. Just because its Windows doesn't mean that X is no longer necessary. As for those embedded systems, it wouldn't surprise me if they were running a scaled down version of X.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
I don't mean this as a troll, but it seems that BIND has more security vulnerabilities than any other piece of software. I know someone brings this up on every DNS related post, but I think more people should try djbdns, with which I have been very impressed since I started using it about six months ago. I have heard that BIND 9 is supposed to be an improvement, but with BIND's history of security problems I'm not sure if I would trust even this new improved version. I think it is better to go with software that has already demonstrated its good security, like djbdns has.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Good one. I guess Hammermill is also pretty upset about people sending email instead of writing letters on paper and sending them by snail mail. Who knows, perhaps we'll be seeing Hammermill demanding payment for every email in lieu of profits lost, just like the U.S. Postal Service :^)
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Actually, Chris Matthews is a Democrat. A lot of people seem to miss this, because he is fairly conservative for a Democrat, and has a deep dislike of Bill Clinton. I guess you could call him an old-school liberal ( he was an aide to Tip O'Neill many years ago), who is a bit upset over the direction his party has taken.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Who is forcing anyone not to pay? If you want to send in some money to fund overseas abortions, go right ahead. As a matter of fact, you can take that extra money you'll be getting back (if we actually get the tax cut Bush is promising) and send it to whatever cause you want. My, isn't freedom of choice a wonderful thing?
For the record, I'm not a pro-lifer, nor did I vote for Bush. I just found the logic in your post pretty twisted. Another point: just because most Americans think abortion should be legal doesn't mean that they think it is a good thing, or that they want to pay for someone else's abortions.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
In a sense, isn't this how slashdot works? Basically, we read articles from other sites, then discuss their merits here. We are both the audience and the reviewers, and with moderation, we also "watch the watchmen." Now if only the moderation system worked better.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
I agree that large amounts of data need to be divided in order to make them manageable, but I think that a hierarchical system actually works very poorly for this. Its not that people are too stupid to use them, its just that as more data is added to the system, deeper and deeper hierarchies are needed. At a point, the structure becomes so complex that it is almost as hard to find data in a hierarchy as it is in a flat system. Also, hierarchies divide data into rigid categories, while human understanding of data is very flexible. For instance, my computer has image files of various types and for various purposes scattered through the filesystem (/usr/share/pixmaps, /home/httpd/images, /mnt/win/My Documents/My Pictures, the list goes on and on). No matter how well-designed a hierarchy is, this type of complexity is inevitable, because there are always different ways of thinking about the same data. If I want to manage all of the images on my system, I have to either hunt through the filesystem manually, or use the find command, which essentially breaks down the hierarchy, and is also very slow.
A queryable database is a much more efficient and flexible means of organization. You can arrange data in an almost limitless number of combinations very quickly. I think that a virtual filesystem layer organized as a database with one or a very few tables would be a big advance. Of course, since I'm sure most people would not want to learn SQL to manage their data, a good GUI is needed. Work on this is under way, though. GNOME's Evolution mail application, for example is designed to manage mail as a database rather than a hierarchy, and people who receive huge amounts of mail should be welcoming this.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Here's my take on Ender's Game. Ender was a genius, one of the most gifted human beings alive at the time, and through intense training became a formidable military strategist. It had nothing to do with intuition. The reason why he could not know he was actually involved in a real war was that he had studied the aliens so closely, and learned to identify with them so well, that he would have been overcome with guilt and would not have been able to wipe them out of existence. This really is the main theme running through the entire Ender series: if you can truly understand another being (alien or human), you cannot hate them, because you would see their motives, even the despicable ones, as being not too different from your own. This is what Ender comes to believe (and presumably Card believes as well), though whether it is true I'm not completely sure.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Since it seems that the thing that most people want to block is pr0n, why not filter images rather than pages? I suppose the filter could have a list of innappropriate sites from which images cannot be loaded. Or if you wanted things stricter, a list of approved sites that are the only ones which can have images.
;-)
Or, I suppose, an easier solution would be to make all the school kids surf using lynx
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
As far as I know, no one has ever tried to alter the universe in such a way as to change one of Rees's six numbers. Thinking you know what will happen in such a case is a little bit presumptuous. If I had to make a guess (and really, when dealing with this sort of thing all you can do is guess), I would say that changing the universe in such a fundamental way would render our models of physics useless. Kinda like trying to predict the behavior of subatomic particles using Newton's laws. Our models simply haven't been tested against the necessary data to say whether they would hold true.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
KEE - ar - EE - lee - oh - nay
(that is, if my memory of Italian pronunciation is at all accurate).
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Never mind the extremely rude guy who commented earlier. To answer your question, the stock is not worth more than the company, but rather it is worth more than the company's annual earnings. This is generally the case. Most companies have a price to earnings ratio of at least 30 to 1. During the big internet stock boom which began about a year ago, some companies had p/e ratios of well over a 100 to 1.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
The second problem they would have to deal with is genetic drift, where even a population of several thousand can randomly lose genetic diversity. This is less of a problem than it appears, because even if the population loses a few genes, they can always clone some more animals that actually have them.
As far as inbreeding, the problems here usually arise from homozygosity of deleterious recessive genes. They could potentially lower the likelyhood of this being a problem by eliminating the deleterious recessives in the lab (probably much harder than it sounds). Beyond that, deleterious recessives tend to gradually fade away in populations where inbreeding is common, because they are far more likely to cause problems in a such a population, and thus have a much higher selection pressure going against them. For instance, in many human societies where marrying one's first cousin is common, deleterious recessives are much less common than in Western cultures, where marrying even second cousins is taboo.
Hmmm... I'm starting to ramble, so I'll end here by saying that resurrecting a species, given the right conditions is certainly possible, but it would be a mammoth undertaking (pun intended) far beyond something like merely cloning a sheep.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
Sure, netscape crashes a lot, but in the two years that I have been using linux, I have never even seen netscape take down X, let alone the whole operating system. Any linux box that does this is not "perfectly fine" as you say. If linux did crash from running Microsoft's ported apps, then it indeed would be linux's fault. After all, if an app crashes, it's the app's fault, but if an app crashes and takes down the whole operating system with it, then there is a problem with the OS.
;-)
Of course, my statements above are invalid if an app requires a buggy kernel module to run, and I suppose a kernel module might be required for their win32 layer. Maybe that is their strategy
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"