Save Money
Use the ISS to drop a few bombs every time it passes over Afghanistan (or Kosovo, or wherever happens to be a problem). Save $200million in B52 fuel.
How about: Fit the B-52 fleet and (AWACS fleet for that matter) with modern fuel efficient engines, save $X billion on fuel and channel the savings into Science research and space flight.
And/OR:
Resurrect the shuttle program, build a the new shuttle, scrap the old shuttles and save $X billon because the cost per Kg of freight has gone down by a factor of 10. Use the saved money on Science research and space flight.
I used to wonder about how some conservative Americans reconcile their ideas of Morality, Democracy and Freedom of Expression with the fact that the USA is the largest Manufacturer of Pornography in the Known Universe.
The answer seems to be they don't! They only seem to want Freedom of expresson for "the right kind of people". The problem with this philosophy is that either you have Complete freedom of experssion for all and that includes pornographers, people who make lewd songs, Religious nutters, Politically uncomfortable people, Enviromentalists..... (the list goes on) or you gag the ones who's politial, moral and other views are not palatable to you.
If you fix it so that all Americans are free to express their views in what ever format they prefer, in theory. But in practice some Americans who's views you like are more free to express them selves than others you can not call America a true Democracy anymore.
Unfortunately for the consevatives of this world, and fortunately for the rest of us, it takes real and unrestriced freedom of expression to qualify for that most exhulted title Democracy.
Of course these people are free to do what they want on their radiostation. But god for bid they try to ram it down the throat of the rest of the free world.
Re:Finally, Finally, an evil Cyberspy!
on
Real Cyber-Spying
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· Score: 1
How? Boeing had an 80% market share last time they whined about Airbus to the US Govt.
Finally, Finally, an evil Cyberspy!
on
Real Cyber-Spying
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Well, building the largest cyber/electronic comunications spying apparatus on the planet finally payed off for the US. I was beginning to think they would never to use it for something other than helping Boeing trounce Airbus on an airliner-sale. But now they actually cought a real Spy! Too bad that the first great cyberspace master-spy turned out to have all the intelligence of a carpet mite.
I should not have to take precautions to prevent corporations from manipulating my publications in what is highly probably an illegal way. This is not about smart tags so much as showing them how far they can go. If M$ gets away with this they will take it furhter, insert not just line-links but texted-links and then small banners. That is what they allways do start small and see how far they can take it. They are hoping that if they do it slowly enaugh no one will notice. I can not defend my self against pirates an plagiarist but I can and will defend my self against corporations who use their methods to earn money of my creations without paying me royalties.
1. Worm smart tags into webpages to "Enhance the Internet experience with useful links"
2. Expand the concept to Advertising.
3. Spend alot of time wondering why people are pissed about ad links being introduced into their Web pages without their consent.
Knowing Microsoft that is the roadmap.
The way I see it the act of publication occures at the moment my page is downloaded of my server. If some one modifies the content of my page after that even if it is only in, say, 30% of all browsers, after the moment of publication he is modifying my publication without my consent.
What comes next? Will bookdealers be allowed to plaster books with commercials bofore selling them in complete disregard of the publlishers or the authors wishes?
Even if they include an option to switch this off I do not care. My stuff is my stuff and I want people to see it in their browser the way I intended them to not the way M$ thinks i did. I pay good money to an internet Hosting service to host my page, that includes freedom from the obligation to post advertising links or any other links on my pages. This is a very underhanded way to get around that and it SUX ASS! I am not asking for much, just the right to get my documents form my server to the consumer without someone re-editing my documents and inserting junk links to pages over who's content I have no control.
The point is that if I write a book I do not want the publisher to plaster it with advertisements unless the publisher has obtained my express written permission to do so . By analogy I do not want the web pages I create to be re-edited to inclute useless M$ generated junk. I want my webpages to be viewed just the way I intended them to. No more no less.
YAAFINSO = Yet Another Annoying Feature I Need to Switch Off
Anyone willing to bet against me when I say that this will rival JavaScript powered, OnClose event triggered, Pop-Up-Window explosions for being the most annoying thing on the Internet???
C'mon now...technology was MEANT to be disposable.
I agree completely but there is still no reason why we should not make shure that the materials which our technology is made of are as close to 100% recyclable as possible. Which is precisely what this move towards forcing manufacturers to recycle their products is all about. It seems to be the only way to get them to help to solve the problem of mountains of waste piling up in 1'st world countries.
Technology can be disposable and still completely recyclable at the same time.
.....Europe is planning to force manufacturers to recycle their products at the end of the product's lifespan.
That is a good Idea but it will be a hard sell. The big problem with recycling computers is not so much the electronics as the huge amounts of Plastic. Take a look at you PC's monitor for example:
Glass tube, recyclable.
Whole lot of metal and electronics, recyclable.
Chemicals in the glass tube, problem
The plastic casing, huge problem.
What can be done about the plastic? Plastic is not completely recyclabe like metals for example and it is not Biodegradable like wood. It is hard to melt down and use again for new monitor/PC casings. It can not just be burned. It does not break down/decay if you dump it in a landfill and even if you recycle it to make, say, garden furniture of it you are still stuck with getting rid of a huge amount of plastic some time.
The problem here is that unless engineers start trying to calculate the disposability/recyclebility of ALL of the materials that an object is made of into their design we will drown in a flood of our own unbiodegradable, unrecyclable waste. This will involve not allways going the easyest cheapest most comfortable way and that will not be popular with the public because it will mean higher prices.
Here in Germany there has been much debate over an ecological tax on fossile fuels. The car owners lobby and the conservatives want it abolished. Their reasoning is that the money earned on this tax will not be spent on enviromental issues. But if that is the case why are they not arguing that the money should be better spent? The answer is simple they are prepared to own a car, they are prepared to cause wear and tear on the motor-ways that causes clowds of tar particles the rest of us has to inhale and they are prepared to spew pollutants into the atmosphere but they are not prepared to pay the price of repairing the motorways and cleaning up the pollution they cause.
It is only natural that the price of a product includes design costs, material costs, manufacturing costs, packaging costs, transport costs, marketing costs, so why should it not include disposal/recycling costs? True, we are allready paying taxes to dispose of waste but this disposal, at least in the case of plastic is just carting it off into a landfill where we can not see it. If producing a completely recyclable and/or bio-degradable product is not one of the holy grails of design work then it should be.
Is there any really secure form of communication? Even encryption software can be modified to have a back door. And even if there is no back door, of what use is encryption if somebody hacked your M$ Winsh*t PC and installed a keyboard sniffer that records what you write in your emails and secure files before it gets encrypted? If you want your operations to be secure do not communicate at all do everything yourself.
Even if it is still possible to bug my conversations with a directional mike in a black van at least it is alot harder for them to bug me. A van skulking around behind me in traffic with a big mike is alot hard to miss. Also I can sweep/check the phone for cockroackes installed on the production line myself.
The point is this thing will make life harder for the NSA/KGB/Chinese Intelligence sevice/Microsoft/Vice squad/the neughbourhood pervert or anyone else who gets off on bugging my conversations. Seatbelts are not a 100% guarantee that I will no get hurt in a car crash so should I regard them as useless and not use them? I use them anyway because they may not be 100% perfect but they do reduce the risk of damage. The same goes for this gizmo it may not be foolproof, but if I had a need to conduct secure conversations It would at the very least give me a small kick to know that the life and work of evesdropping pervets just go a whole lot harder.
Yeah! More millonares in space! I can see it now! Michael Jackson desperately chasing his nose around the ISS trying to catch it before it gets sucked into an airvent and ejected into space. What a dignified moment in the history of Space exploration. And come to think of it, hair burns alot faster in an oxygen rich enviroment don't it?
People have been producing Genetically modified crops that produce substances like Insulin, Penecillin and such chemicals for thousands of years?? That is news to me. There is a HUGE differnce between crossbreeding naturally occuring plants and artificially modifying plants by inserting human genetic code into their DNA.
I did not say they are a danger to plants I said that they outcompete or agressively displace a number of less agressive specialist species pushing them to the brink of extinction. This is deteremental to some plants who are quite common in rainforests but can only be pollenated efficiently by a limited number of specialist bees but can not be pollenated by killer bees because, for example the plants anatomy does not allow it. The Ecosystems in Rainforests are extremely specialized and it is not uncommon for certain species of plants be unable to reproduce in the absence of highly specialized animals. In Australia for example there are species of plants who's seeds can not germinate until they have been through the intestinal tract of a certain bird. Remove the birds and see what happens to the forest. No amount of GM can solve that problem. Once a species is gone it is GONE!
The only problem is that the African honeybees don't form very large hives and don't seem to build up large stores of honey. It's an obvious adaptation to a warmer climate and much shorter winters, but makes them less-than-optimal for honey production.
The Killer bees are a hybrid of African and European bees that is at least as, if not even more agressive than either European of African bees and is a quite prolific honey producer. Being a hybrid they also form large hives like European bees and can easily kill a human being. Even biologists who deal with them regularly have respect for their agressiveness and ability to inflict multiple stings. I do not see why this should be such a boon to the economy if Scientists are worried about the spread of this speicies.
And I imagine 2000 years ago some barbarian was whining about how burning the Great Library of Aliexandria was a good idea. All that original thinking assembled in one place!?! SHOCKING? I also bet his descendants emigrated to the US and voted Republican.
Not quite they were produced by crossbreeding two kinds of bees, african ones (i know) which produce alot of honey but are agressive and European ones (I think, the second species may have been an American one) which are more docile. The result was an even more agressive species than either of the originals. Selective breeding is simply a very primitive form of Genetic manipulation. The best example of that are the innumerable races of dogs we humans have produced.
I see that we agree on this. I find it reprehensable to screw around with the building blocks of life as we know it with less seriousness and consideration that goes into the composition of a Penthouse readers letter.
The most direct analogy I can come up with is somebody making money by hacking up his own house for fire wood and selling it off. The problem is that this is impossible to stop. Drugs are tested for years for toxic and carcinogenic side effects. But it seems that one is free to modify a life form in a potentially dangerous and damaging way without any serious attempt at considering the cosequenses. Kind of brings to mind the old saying "You need a liscense for a dog, but they will let any ars*hole be a father!" or in this case a Geneticist. One possible scenario as I see it is this:
1) We genetically modify Potatos, a stapel food crop, to produce an insectecidic chemeical to increase crops and there by also profits.
2) Because the corporate lobbyists have done a good job at greasing up politicians, we do not test the new potato.
3) The new GM potato goes into large scale production for 10 years.
4) After overcoming corporate coverups it is revealed by Scientists that the Insecticide in the GM potatos causes brain cancer in humans over long periods of consumption. But because long term studies are not cost effective in corporate opinion they were not done.
5) We are stuck with huge crops of a stapel food that is un-edable and worse still the genetic modification is one that makes it easyer for the GM potatoes to reproduce in the wild since they are all but immune to insect attacks making them all but impossible to irradicate.
6) Botanists make the discovery that the Insecticide gene has prolifreated into other domestic and wild potato plant species.
Now imagine the same being done to rice, wheat, barley, and other stapel crops. I have seen many scientific horror scenario's but this one is one of the few that really has me worried. Now that people with the mental competence of Microsoft developers are allowed to screw around with the genes of plants. How long before we will start to see people with the words; "Encoded by Microsoft!" and a M$ logo genitically ingrained into their skin? And more importantly what do we do when these people have a massive system faliure in the middle of a conversation? Will Microsoft Genetics INC equip its GM humans with a Reset button?
What worries me about these GM crops is Genetic contamination. Today corporations are working on things like tobacco plants and Tomatoes with genes, in some cases even human genes added to produce medicine.
What worries me is:
What seems to be a complete lack control over what these corporations do. The US tobacco firms even genetically modified their tobacco to contain twice the normal amount of Nicotine and succeeded in marketing the resulting crop behind the back of the US Govt.
What will happen if these plants who in some cases will contain substances harmful to animals and humans begin to interbreed with wild plants and find their way into foodcrops. I see it as a problem if it was discovered that edable tomatoes had inadvertantly been crossed with say, insulin producing tomatoes.
The effect of genemodifying crops goes way beyond health issues for humans and copy and patent rights. It also has implications in the area of Genetic Contamination of wild plants and animals and nobody seems to care . The Killer Bee issue has allready shown what can happen when an artificially created species escapes into the enviroment. These bees have more of less exterminated large highly specialized bee species in the Rainforests of south and central America. This is a partickularly serious concern since the loss of these native bees may cause the extinction of numerous species of trees an other plants that rely exclusively on their specialized bees for pollenation. Shure the effectss will not be apparent for a few decades so using G.W. Bush logic we will not have to worry about them. Long term thinking BAD!!! Short term thinking and greed GOOOOOD!!! But "Hear no evil see no evil" will not make these issues go away. These genetic problems will still emerge and later Generations, stuck with genetically contaminated foodcrops and wild geene-pools, will curse us for ignoring them.
Large scale genetic modification of Plants and animals is dangerous and we have no way of knowing what problems an uncontrolled genetic goldrush will cause in nature. Genetic modifications of any kind should be striclty controlled by the state and not by corporoations. Genetic contamination and the escape of genetically modified plants and animals into wild populations is impossible to reverse.
So if I read this right they are forcing professional people to use their own AOL, Moron proof Email client because that is the only way to get anyone with more intelligence than your average Amoeba to use it??
Seems to me that AOL should solve their problem by writing and marketing better and more powerful apps.
And since when can Star office read M$ office documents properly?? Whenever I try to do that it F***S the document up completely. The scary part is that my employer may just start doing alot of work in close cooperation with Sun. And this article seems to indicate that I will be hug drawn and quartered for using Koffice instead of Star Office??
So Astoroth and Baphomet have finally ganged up on Lucifer !
This will be interesting in deed! Especially the Slashdot comments. The anti evil corporation fanatics will have an interesting time figuring out who is the bad guy in this fight.
Now that NASA is considering billing the Russians and that Tito dude for wasting astronauts time and endangering the ISS, I wonder if the Russians will respond in kind??
One thing is for shure. If the furniture designer had been a Russian we would be in the middle of a regular shitstorm of NASA critiscism.
Actually Adolf used to be a communist, I have seen a photo of him at a Bolshevik meeting wearing a red armband. Why people call the nazis right wing is beyond me. That description does not quite fit they borrowed from extreme right and left and hated the social demorcrats, liberals and other center parties. Nazism is a strange political hybrid that does not quite fit anywhere in the traditional spectrum.
That name sounds about right. Get back to me when you have become man enaugh to sign your user-name to your insults and I might take your infantile comments a little seriously.
No. The primary aim of censorship is not to prevent adults from obtaining information, but to prevent children from accessing inappropriate materials. Many people who support censorship believe that it is a crime to expose children to violence and pornography. Perhaps you think children should have unhindered access to these materials?
So you are pissed because you can't plant your kid in front of a PC or a TV and skip all that Raising and building the little guys/girls character bit?
I live in a country where we see the same violent movies as in the US we have acess to the same internetpornography. I will freely admit to having been exposed to pornography at 13 and I can not say it made me a pervert it mostly just made me interested in women. I have been exposed to Hollywood gore movies and I have yet to take a submachinegun into a supermarket and kill 30 people. And it is not like I could not get my hands on a gun, I own one. I was tought by my parents to have respect for guns and to solve my problems with other methods than violence. I am not a decent human being today because I was sheilded from pornography and violent movies as a child. I am abele to deal with these things because I was tought Right From Wrong by my parents. It is their upbringing that made me able to live around Porn, Gore movies and guns without turning into a drooling pervert chainsaw killer. If you want to raise a child you are going to have to accept the fact that there are big bad things in the world and your child will be better off if you teach it how to deal with them rather than sheilding your child from reality.
Sheilding your child from reality will only leave it more vulnerable to things it has not been tought to deal with. Your child is going to be influenced more by what your teach it than by what it sees on TV and the Internet. And it is what YOU teach it, your upbringing that will decide how well it deals with what it sees.
This is not meant to be an insult, but legal texts like the one you quoted make my brain hurt for some reason.
:)
Also, I do not know what IANAL means but if you hit the [Space] button in the right location you get:
I ANAL
I think somebody, somewhere should have thought about their abbreviaton a little harder.
END CRAP
Along a more serious note I do not see how their patent can give them the right to patent the act of setting up a CD information data base. They can patent methods, algorithms, hardware and so on to implement such a data base. But the concept of a CD information data base is unpatentable. As long as some competitor does not use their patented methods, algorithms, hardware and so on to implement his CD data base there is squat they can do to stop him other than playing dirty pool.
Also if they develop a protocol under GPL they can not sue someone else for using it unless that organization violates the terms of the GPL liscense.
As for the trade mark infringement, that wold seem to work like this.
1) Develop a protocol and releas it under GPL for every one to use.
2) Watch with pleasure as your protocol is widely accepted because it is free.
3) Register the name of your protocol as a trademark.
4) Use trademark infringement law suits to terrorize anyone who gets uppedy and starts to threaten your market share.
Allmost Microsoftish. First register as a trademark the name of a free protocol and then sue people for using its name in documentation and for writing competative interface software that uses this protocol.
They are being sued for:
"...breach of contract, patent infringement, trademark infringement and other violations of Federal law"
Breach of contract? Maybe, if they were daft enaugh to sign a contract that required them to use no other database than CDDB to get access to CDDB in the first place then yes they are in breach of contract if they switch whilst still bound to the contract with Gracenote.
Tademark enfringement? How does FreeDB infringe upon Gracenotes CDDB? Is FreeDB also a trademark of Gracenote's? Im lost on this one. Explain it to me I'm just a little brain struggling to understand.
Patent infringement? Little brain still not understand!! Big guru explain please!!! If I set up a data base of say DVD's that does much the same as CDDB and FreeDB do for CD's, lets call it DVDDB. A database of actors, directors, filmcrew, plot, Maltin rating and so on of all sorts of movies. Gracenote can sue me out of buisness because they have patented the act of setting up a database of digital entertainment media?
I was under the impression that I can only patent a method to implement a DVD/CD Database. That patent does not not give me the right to sue anyone who also sets up a database unless that person uses the same method to do it as I have patented. And does it without permission. If that was the case whoever was the first to invent a can opener should have the market cornered because everybody else who invented a can opener was infringing on his patent. You can only patent a method to open cans not the act of opening a can.
Did little brain misunderstand?? Please be kind. Do not hurt little brains feelings I am emotionally sensiteve.
Slashdot Mirror
Save Money
Use the ISS to drop a few bombs every time it passes over Afghanistan (or Kosovo, or wherever happens to be a problem). Save $200million in B52 fuel.
How about: Fit the B-52 fleet and (AWACS fleet for that matter) with modern fuel efficient engines, save $X billion on fuel and channel the savings into Science research and space flight.
And/OR:
Resurrect the shuttle program, build a the new shuttle, scrap the old shuttles and save $X billon because the cost per Kg of freight has gone down by a factor of 10. Use the saved money on Science research and space flight.
I used to wonder about how some conservative Americans reconcile their ideas of Morality, Democracy and Freedom of Expression with the fact that the USA is the largest Manufacturer of Pornography in the Known Universe.
The answer seems to be they don't! They only seem to want Freedom of expresson for "the right kind of people". The problem with this philosophy is that either you have Complete freedom of experssion for all and that includes pornographers, people who make lewd songs, Religious nutters, Politically uncomfortable people, Enviromentalists..... (the list goes on) or you gag the ones who's politial, moral and other views are not palatable to you.
If you fix it so that all Americans are free to express their views in what ever format they prefer, in theory. But in practice some Americans who's views you like are more free to express them selves than others you can not call America a true Democracy anymore.
Unfortunately for the consevatives of this world, and fortunately for the rest of us, it takes real and unrestriced freedom of expression to qualify for that most exhulted title Democracy.
Of course these people are free to do what they want on their radiostation. But god for bid they try to ram it down the throat of the rest of the free world.
How? Boeing had an 80% market share last time they whined about Airbus to the US Govt.
Well, building the largest cyber/electronic comunications spying apparatus on the planet finally payed off for the US. I was beginning to think they would never to use it for something other than helping Boeing trounce Airbus on an airliner-sale. But now they actually cought a real Spy! Too bad that the first great cyberspace master-spy turned out to have all the intelligence of a carpet mite.
I should not have to take precautions to prevent corporations from manipulating my publications in what is highly probably an illegal way. This is not about smart tags so much as showing them how far they can go. If M$ gets away with this they will take it furhter, insert not just line-links but texted-links and then small banners. That is what they allways do start small and see how far they can take it. They are hoping that if they do it slowly enaugh no one will notice. I can not defend my self against pirates an plagiarist but I can and will defend my self against corporations who use their methods to earn money of my creations without paying me royalties.
1. Worm smart tags into webpages to "Enhance the Internet experience with useful links"
2. Expand the concept to Advertising.
3. Spend alot of time wondering why people are pissed about ad links being introduced into their Web pages without their consent.
Knowing Microsoft that is the roadmap.
The way I see it the act of publication occures at the moment my page is downloaded of my server. If some one modifies the content of my page after that even if it is only in, say, 30% of all browsers, after the moment of publication he is modifying my publication without my consent.
What comes next? Will bookdealers be allowed to plaster books with commercials bofore selling them in complete disregard of the publlishers or the authors wishes?
Even if they include an option to switch this off I do not care. My stuff is my stuff and I want people to see it in their browser the way I intended them to not the way M$ thinks i did. I pay good money to an internet Hosting service to host my page, that includes freedom from the obligation to post advertising links or any other links on my pages. This is a very underhanded way to get around that and it SUX ASS! I am not asking for much, just the right to get my documents form my server to the consumer without someone re-editing my documents and inserting junk links to pages over who's content I have no control.
Anonymous Coward =Microsoft Certified Solution Developer ??
The point is that if I write a book I do not want the publisher to plaster it with advertisements unless the publisher has obtained my express written permission to do so . By analogy I do not want the web pages I create to be re-edited to inclute useless M$ generated junk. I want my webpages to be viewed just the way I intended them to. No more no less.
YAAFINSO = Yet Another Annoying Feature I Need to Switch Off
Anyone willing to bet against me when I say that this will rival JavaScript powered, OnClose event triggered, Pop-Up-Window explosions for being the most annoying thing on the Internet???
C'mon now...technology was MEANT to be disposable.
I agree completely but there is still no reason why we should not make shure that the materials which our technology is made of are as close to 100% recyclable as possible. Which is precisely what this move towards forcing manufacturers to recycle their products is all about. It seems to be the only way to get them to help to solve the problem of mountains of waste piling up in 1'st world countries.
Technology can be disposable and still completely recyclable at the same time.
That is a good Idea but it will be a hard sell. The big problem with recycling computers is not so much the electronics as the huge amounts of Plastic. Take a look at you PC's monitor for example:
- Glass tube, recyclable.
- Whole lot of metal and electronics, recyclable.
- Chemicals in the glass tube, problem
- The plastic casing, huge problem.
What can be done about the plastic? Plastic is not completely recyclabe like metals for example and it is not Biodegradable like wood. It is hard to melt down and use again for new monitor/PC casings. It can not just be burned. It does not break down/decay if you dump it in a landfill and even if you recycle it to make, say, garden furniture of it you are still stuck with getting rid of a huge amount of plastic some time.The problem here is that unless engineers start trying to calculate the disposability/recyclebility of ALL of the materials that an object is made of into their design we will drown in a flood of our own unbiodegradable, unrecyclable waste. This will involve not allways going the easyest cheapest most comfortable way and that will not be popular with the public because it will mean higher prices.
Here in Germany there has been much debate over an ecological tax on fossile fuels. The car owners lobby and the conservatives want it abolished. Their reasoning is that the money earned on this tax will not be spent on enviromental issues. But if that is the case why are they not arguing that the money should be better spent? The answer is simple they are prepared to own a car, they are prepared to cause wear and tear on the motor-ways that causes clowds of tar particles the rest of us has to inhale and they are prepared to spew pollutants into the atmosphere but they are not prepared to pay the price of repairing the motorways and cleaning up the pollution they cause.
It is only natural that the price of a product includes design costs, material costs, manufacturing costs, packaging costs, transport costs, marketing costs, so why should it not include disposal/recycling costs? True, we are allready paying taxes to dispose of waste but this disposal, at least in the case of plastic is just carting it off into a landfill where we can not see it. If producing a completely recyclable and/or bio-degradable product is not one of the holy grails of design work then it should be.
Is there any really secure form of communication? Even encryption software can be modified to have a back door. And even if there is no back door, of what use is encryption if somebody hacked your M$ Winsh*t PC and installed a keyboard sniffer that records what you write in your emails and secure files before it gets encrypted? If you want your operations to be secure do not communicate at all do everything yourself.
Even if it is still possible to bug my conversations with a directional mike in a black van at least it is alot harder for them to bug me. A van skulking around behind me in traffic with a big mike is alot hard to miss. Also I can sweep/check the phone for cockroackes installed on the production line myself.
The point is this thing will make life harder for the NSA/KGB/Chinese Intelligence sevice/Microsoft/Vice squad/the neughbourhood pervert or anyone else who gets off on bugging my conversations. Seatbelts are not a 100% guarantee that I will no get hurt in a car crash so should I regard them as useless and not use them? I use them anyway because they may not be 100% perfect but they do reduce the risk of damage. The same goes for this gizmo it may not be foolproof, but if I had a need to conduct secure conversations It would at the very least give me a small kick to know that the life and work of evesdropping pervets just go a whole lot harder.
<sarcasm>
Yeah! More millonares in space! I can see it now! Michael Jackson desperately chasing his nose around the ISS trying to catch it before it gets sucked into an airvent and ejected into space. What a dignified moment in the history of Space exploration. And come to think of it, hair burns alot faster in an oxygen rich enviroment don't it?
</sarcasm>
People have been producing Genetically modified crops that produce substances like Insulin, Penecillin and such chemicals for thousands of years?? That is news to me. There is a HUGE differnce between crossbreeding naturally occuring plants and artificially modifying plants by inserting human genetic code into their DNA.
And they're not actually a danger to plants.
I did not say they are a danger to plants I said that they outcompete or agressively displace a number of less agressive specialist species pushing them to the brink of extinction. This is deteremental to some plants who are quite common in rainforests but can only be pollenated efficiently by a limited number of specialist bees but can not be pollenated by killer bees because, for example the plants anatomy does not allow it. The Ecosystems in Rainforests are extremely specialized and it is not uncommon for certain species of plants be unable to reproduce in the absence of highly specialized animals. In Australia for example there are species of plants who's seeds can not germinate until they have been through the intestinal tract of a certain bird. Remove the birds and see what happens to the forest. No amount of GM can solve that problem. Once a species is gone it is GONE!
The only problem is that the African honeybees don't form very large hives and don't seem to build up large stores of honey. It's an obvious adaptation to a warmer climate and much shorter winters, but makes them less-than-optimal for honey production.
The Killer bees are a hybrid of African and European bees that is at least as, if not even more agressive than either European of African bees and is a quite prolific honey producer. Being a hybrid they also form large hives like European bees and can easily kill a human being. Even biologists who deal with them regularly have respect for their agressiveness and ability to inflict multiple stings. I do not see why this should be such a boon to the economy if Scientists are worried about the spread of this speicies.
And I imagine 2000 years ago some barbarian was whining about how burning the Great Library of Aliexandria was a good idea. All that original thinking assembled in one place!?! SHOCKING? I also bet his descendants emigrated to the US and voted Republican.
Not quite they were produced by crossbreeding two kinds of bees, african ones (i know) which produce alot of honey but are agressive and European ones (I think, the second species may have been an American one) which are more docile. The result was an even more agressive species than either of the originals. Selective breeding is simply a very primitive form of Genetic manipulation. The best example of that are the innumerable races of dogs we humans have produced.
The most direct analogy I can come up with is somebody making money by hacking up his own house for fire wood and selling it off. The problem is that this is impossible to stop. Drugs are tested for years for toxic and carcinogenic side effects. But it seems that one is free to modify a life form in a potentially dangerous and damaging way without any serious attempt at considering the cosequenses. Kind of brings to mind the old saying "You need a liscense for a dog, but they will let any ars*hole be a father!" or in this case a Geneticist. One possible scenario as I see it is this:
2) Because the corporate lobbyists have done a good job at greasing up politicians, we do not test the new potato.
3) The new GM potato goes into large scale production for 10 years.
4) After overcoming corporate coverups it is revealed by Scientists that the Insecticide in the GM potatos causes brain cancer in humans over long periods of consumption. But because long term studies are not cost effective in corporate opinion they were not done.
5) We are stuck with huge crops of a stapel food that is un-edable and worse still the genetic modification is one that makes it easyer for the GM potatoes to reproduce in the wild since they are all but immune to insect attacks making them all but impossible to irradicate.
6) Botanists make the discovery that the Insecticide gene has prolifreated into other domestic and wild potato plant species.
Now imagine the same being done to rice, wheat, barley, and other stapel crops. I have seen many scientific horror scenario's but this one is one of the few that really has me worried. Now that people with the mental competence of Microsoft developers are allowed to screw around with the genes of plants. How long before we will start to see people with the words; "Encoded by Microsoft!" and a M$ logo genitically ingrained into their skin? And more importantly what do we do when these people have a massive system faliure in the middle of a conversation? Will Microsoft Genetics INC equip its GM humans with a Reset button?
What worries me is:
The effect of genemodifying crops goes way beyond health issues for humans and copy and patent rights. It also has implications in the area of Genetic Contamination of wild plants and animals and nobody seems to care . The Killer Bee issue has allready shown what can happen when an artificially created species escapes into the enviroment. These bees have more of less exterminated large highly specialized bee species in the Rainforests of south and central America. This is a partickularly serious concern since the loss of these native bees may cause the extinction of numerous species of trees an other plants that rely exclusively on their specialized bees for pollenation. Shure the effectss will not be apparent for a few decades so using G.W. Bush logic we will not have to worry about them. Long term thinking BAD!!! Short term thinking and greed GOOOOOD!!! But "Hear no evil see no evil" will not make these issues go away. These genetic problems will still emerge and later Generations, stuck with genetically contaminated foodcrops and wild geene-pools, will curse us for ignoring them.
Large scale genetic modification of Plants and animals is dangerous and we have no way of knowing what problems an uncontrolled genetic goldrush will cause in nature. Genetic modifications of any kind should be striclty controlled by the state and not by corporoations. Genetic contamination and the escape of genetically modified plants and animals into wild populations is impossible to reverse.
So if I read this right they are forcing professional people to use their own AOL, Moron proof Email client because that is the only way to get anyone with more intelligence than your average Amoeba to use it??
Seems to me that AOL should solve their problem by writing and marketing better and more powerful apps.
And since when can Star office read M$ office documents properly?? Whenever I try to do that it F***S the document up completely. The scary part is that my employer may just start doing alot of work in close cooperation with Sun. And this article seems to indicate that I will be hug drawn and quartered for using Koffice instead of Star Office??
So Astoroth and Baphomet have finally ganged up on Lucifer !
This will be interesting in deed! Especially the Slashdot comments. The anti evil corporation fanatics will have an interesting time figuring out who is the bad guy in this fight.
Now that NASA is considering billing the Russians and that Tito dude for wasting astronauts time and endangering the ISS, I wonder if the Russians will respond in kind??
One thing is for shure. If the furniture designer had been a Russian we would be in the middle of a regular shitstorm of NASA critiscism.
Actually Adolf used to be a communist, I have seen a photo of him at a Bolshevik meeting wearing a red armband. Why people call the nazis right wing is beyond me. That description does not quite fit they borrowed from extreme right and left and hated the social demorcrats, liberals and other center parties. Nazism is a strange political hybrid that does not quite fit anywhere in the traditional spectrum.
Anonymous Coward??
That name sounds about right. Get back to me when you have become man enaugh to sign your user-name to your insults and I might take your infantile comments a little seriously.
No. The primary aim of censorship is not to prevent adults from obtaining information, but to prevent children from accessing inappropriate materials. Many people who support censorship believe that it is a crime to expose children to violence and pornography. Perhaps you think children should have unhindered access to these materials?
So you are pissed because you can't plant your kid in front of a PC or a TV and skip all that Raising and building the little guys/girls character bit?
I live in a country where we see the same violent movies as in the US we have acess to the same internetpornography. I will freely admit to having been exposed to pornography at 13 and I can not say it made me a pervert it mostly just made me interested in women. I have been exposed to Hollywood gore movies and I have yet to take a submachinegun into a supermarket and kill 30 people. And it is not like I could not get my hands on a gun, I own one. I was tought by my parents to have respect for guns and to solve my problems with other methods than violence. I am not a decent human being today because I was sheilded from pornography and violent movies as a child. I am abele to deal with these things because I was tought Right From Wrong by my parents. It is their upbringing that made me able to live around Porn, Gore movies and guns without turning into a drooling pervert chainsaw killer. If you want to raise a child you are going to have to accept the fact that there are big bad things in the world and your child will be better off if you teach it how to deal with them rather than sheilding your child from reality.
Sheilding your child from reality will only leave it more vulnerable to things it has not been tought to deal with. Your child is going to be influenced more by what your teach it than by what it sees on TV and the Internet. And it is what YOU teach it, your upbringing that will decide how well it deals with what it sees.
BEGIN CRAP
:)
This is not meant to be an insult, but legal texts like the one you quoted make my brain hurt for some reason.
Also, I do not know what IANAL means but if you hit the [Space] button in the right location you get:
I ANAL
I think somebody, somewhere should have thought about their abbreviaton a little harder.
END CRAP
Along a more serious note I do not see how their patent can give them the right to patent the act of setting up a CD information data base. They can patent methods, algorithms, hardware and so on to implement such a data base. But the concept of a CD information data base is unpatentable. As long as some competitor does not use their patented methods, algorithms, hardware and so on to implement his CD data base there is squat they can do to stop him other than playing dirty pool.
Also if they develop a protocol under GPL they can not sue someone else for using it unless that organization violates the terms of the GPL liscense.
As for the trade mark infringement, that wold seem to work like this.
1) Develop a protocol and releas it under GPL for every one to use.
2) Watch with pleasure as your protocol is widely accepted because it is free.
3) Register the name of your protocol as a trademark.
4) Use trademark infringement law suits to terrorize anyone who gets uppedy and starts to threaten your market share.
Allmost Microsoftish. First register as a trademark the name of a free protocol and then sue people for using its name in documentation and for writing competative interface software that uses this protocol.
I think they have missed the whole point of GPL.
They are being sued for:
"...breach of contract, patent infringement, trademark infringement and other violations of Federal law"
Breach of contract? Maybe, if they were daft enaugh to sign a contract that required them to use no other database than CDDB to get access to CDDB in the first place then yes they are in breach of contract if they switch whilst still bound to the contract with Gracenote.
Tademark enfringement? How does FreeDB infringe upon Gracenotes CDDB? Is FreeDB also a trademark of Gracenote's? Im lost on this one. Explain it to me I'm just a little brain struggling to understand.
Patent infringement? Little brain still not understand!! Big guru explain please!!! If I set up a data base of say DVD's that does much the same as CDDB and FreeDB do for CD's, lets call it DVDDB. A database of actors, directors, filmcrew, plot, Maltin rating and so on of all sorts of movies. Gracenote can sue me out of buisness because they have patented the act of setting up a database of digital entertainment media?
I was under the impression that I can only patent a method to implement a DVD/CD Database. That patent does not not give me the right to sue anyone who also sets up a database unless that person uses the same method to do it as I have patented. And does it without permission. If that was the case whoever was the first to invent a can opener should have the market cornered because everybody else who invented a can opener was infringing on his patent. You can only patent a method to open cans not the act of opening a can.
Did little brain misunderstand?? Please be kind. Do not hurt little brains feelings I am emotionally sensiteve.