Re:No Post is Too Late: Send the Iraqis to Allah
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You forget, Al Jazeera is trying to report on the truth of the conflict, not to further US war aims.
If this is the case, then why didn't they post pictures of the 5000 children who died monthly under Hussein's regime? Or the thousands of others tortured or killed by his regime for any number of "offenses". Do you know why Iraq has no international representation worth mentioning in the Olymipcs or other sporting events? Because Hussein's son, who runs Iraq's athletic organization, tortures athletes that lose. No Iraqi wants to become an athlete now. The stories are endless.
Al Jazeera is all too ready to inflame the Islamic world with anti-American propaganda, while omitting much, if not all, of the other side of the story. If you call that "the truth", then you're either naive or have the same twisted agenda as they do. If they actually gave the truth to their viewers, they'd lose their ratings overnight. They know what their viewers want, and they feed it to them with little concern for the truth.
All you have do to is turn on your GPS and see if your current location is correct (assuming you already know where you are). I've been turning mine on every morning to see if the military's up to something. Works like always, so far. As soon as it doesn't, I'm sure it will be painfully obvious.
I am ready for 64 bit. I have been ready for a long time. And I want it now. Not for my desktop, though. I'm not sure why 64 bit would be really helpful there. I'm still using an ancient PIII as a workstation, and it's more than I
need for Linux to run happily.
No, I need 64 bit for a server application that requires more than 4GB VM addressibility (or with Linux, more like 2 GB, which is about all you really get for user space apps w/o some major hacking). Until now, you had to buy expensive Sparc hardware and run Solaris, or the like. No cheap, open consumer hardware (i.e. PC) was available until now. But now that it's available, I can get what I need w/o having to pay disgustingly expensive prices for computers that aren't even as fast as a PC at 1/4 the cost.
Am I the only one to notice how messed up that article from The Standard is? Some paragraphs were repeatedly repeated (i.e. more than twice). Don't they have editors or something? And it wasn't even directly relevant to this particular patent issue. It was more of a commentary on software patents in general. Perhaps that part got edited out in favor of repeating so much of the text.:)
...is if Rick Berman goes away, and they replace him with someone like J. Michael Straczynski. Star Trek Enterprise has no originality, no stories, no decent recurring arc, no acting, and no suspense. In other words it almost doesn't even exist.
I liken Berman to Saddam. He knows his days are numbered, and for the sake of that which he controls he should simply give up. But he doesn't, apparently for utterly selfish reasons. Give it up, Rick. You don't know science fiction, you don't have any talent for creativity. Either hand over the reins to someone with actual ability, or close up shop. Either is preferable to the farce called Enterprise.
It's about determining *which* ad to put on a web page based on bidders for that space. If a web page doesn't use a bidding system like Amazon's, they won't be infringing on this patent simply by placing ads on a web page. I really love/. articles about patents - they're always so content-free, or at least factual-content-free.
I also wonder about defects in general. If OLED's will be better then 99.99% defect free LCD's(which would be pretty good if we weren't talking about millions of pixels).
I saw a 15" OLED screen made by Samsung at CES, and it was beautiful. I will not buy another screen until I can get an OLED one for a decent price. Utterly amazing. But only if the manufacturing process is near-perfect. The 15" screen had
at least two bad pixels, and it only takes one to ruin the screen. Though they were only a few out of a million or two, it was very distracting.
...the problem with the blue LED fading over a few years of use? That would be a showstopper for me, unless these units are so cheap that I can buy a new one every 6-12 months without feeling the pain.
What is the effect if IBM released SCO code into linux?
Guess you didn't grok my point. It doesn't matter what the effect is. All that matters is if IBM contractually agreed not to. It's principle and ethics that are the subject of my posting. It is not okay for a company, say IBM, to agree to keep another company's code secret, subsequently release it to the world, and then get off because the code wasn't sufficiently unique, in their judgement, to justify maintaining that secrecy. See the point?
Frankly, I do agree that it seems like SCO is out of control, and is probably in the wrong. But that's not the point. I want whoever is lying to fry, because I hate lying corporations. One or the other company (or both) is trying to rip off the other, which seems to be the staple of American capitalism these days.
I haven't yet read all 300+ comments here, but so far I haven't seen *any* supporting SCO. Do any of you really know what's going on here? It is quite possible that IBM did rip them off. If SCO shared proprietary code with IBM under contractual restrictions, and IBM went ahead and violated those restrictions by putting that code in other products, then IBM is in the wrong. It doesn't even matter if the code is covered by patents or not, all that matters is what the two companies agreed to on paper.
I for one hope that whoever is truly at fault gets nailed, be it IBM or SCO. I believe that agreements should be honored. That's something that corporate America cares little about, especially if a buck can be made by ignoring an agreement. If IBM truly blew off a legitimate agreement, then they should fry. If IBM really believes SCO has no rightful claim to the intellectual property in question, then they should not have signed an agreement with SCO. It could well be that SCO is lying/embellishing/hallucinating, but maybe they're not.
On an aside, back in the 80's and early 90's, I worked on a port of SCO Unix to a proprietary platform. What people have been saying here about SCO's "quality" is true. Their OS was crap. I can't count how many bugs in the kernel we had to fix. We even had to completely rearchitect whole subsystems. When we were done with it, it was fairly passable, but it took man years. The most appalling thing about their code was the third party SMP implementation they bought from some other company. It was truly horrendous. I believe it did improve over the years as the product matured, but obviously not enough to keep them alive.
I actually bought a copy of this. It was very hard. I had to make several calls and go through a huge rigamarole to get the copy and get it activated. Bleh. And it's a really old copy of the kernel that's missing key features. It's designed to be robust, so I guess they're slow to adopt newer kernels. Kinda sux, cause I need some of the fixes found in the newer kernels.
In any case, my impression is that they want you to call rather than buy through the web site so that a human salesperson can dog you eternally to buy more copies. That's what they've done to me. Those sales guys kinda have a desperate edge to their voices.
This is precisely why monopolies must be regulated. They are the ones who entirely control broadband over phonelines, and hence have a stranglehold on it. They have the right to be crybabies if they want, but the government shouldn't allow that to interfere with services that depend on their monopoly control.
Where I used to work there was a poster on the wall with two insects. One was just a plain old insect, and it was labeled "BUG". The otherwise identical second insect had on a nice suit and tie and a pair of sunglasses, and was labeled "FEATURE". It seems Bill Gates is trying to convince us that Windows comes preinstalled with a large walk-in closet full of Armani suits.
The error rate must be a lot lower for the generation-to-generation replication of this material than it is for replication of other cells within your body within your lifetime. But "a lot lower" != 0.
Well, okay, if you want to be nitpicky about it, you may be correct. But clearly, whatever errors occur in the creation of the mother's eggs is somehow compensated for, or after N generations all eggs produced by all mothers would suffer from replicative senescence. Not being an expert on this, I can't say exactly how this is managed, but clearly it is or we'd be extinct. That's not to say that mutations caused by replication are necessarily "fixed" in the process (that's actually an important part of evolution), but the DNA's ability to replicate is maintained across generations by a process I am not privy to. I don't actually know if anyone knows how it works. Regardless, whatever process takes place does not take place in the mother's own cells or there would be no replicative senescence, a process we know to exist. Which is why cloning an adult is so problematic.
The testicles' DNA must age, and clearly they are capable of producing "young" DNA for sperm anyway...I'm just claiming that you don't know enough to say cloning is impossible.
I never said it's impossible. It's just not possible to take DNA that is frought with replication errors and expect to create a clone that doesn't have those. Read up on replicative senescence and then come back and see if you still disagree. How "old" testicles produce sperm with "new" DNA is unknown to me. Perhaps it has something to do with telomerase repair. This is actually a hot area of research, because there is good reason to believe that somehow applying telomerase to repair aging DNA may extend an organism's lifespan. It could also have implications for using "old" DNA for truly successful cloning. But certainly, without repairing "old" DNA before using it to create a clone, something nobody yet knows how to do, you're going to get an imperfect copy of the original organism as of the time of its birth; an imperfect copy that, while still young, will suffer from whatever age-related effects one might expect from replicative senescence.
Ok, so as long as you're not doing any speculating, then how does regular reproduction work? Re-read everything you just wrote and imagine you're talking about normal sexual reproduction. From that point of view, it's simply 100% incorrect.
First of all, the mother's egg contains half of a child's DNA. The eggs are present in the mother's ovary at the time of her birth, and do not replicate. That genetic information isn't subject to replication error and hence doesn't "age". In other words, a female baby is born with all of the eggs she'll ever have, and they already contain the genetic material they need to create a baby.
As for the father's sperm, I have no idea how the DNA in sperm is not "aged" like the father's own DNA.
I'm certainly not an expert in that area, but I don't have to know *why* it's that way; I only need to know that it is, which I do happen to know. But the fact remains, the father's and mother's gametes both contain "young" genetic material. When they fuse, the zygote has a full complement of "young" genetic material for a brand new baby.
Clearly there's more to genetics than you know.
You're not one of those Raelian nutcakes who claim they've solved the problem of cloning a baby from old DNA, are you?
There's more to genetics than anybody knows. I have a degree in biology, but don't claim to be an expert. I have taken advanced courses in developmental biology and various areas of genetics, so I think I grasp the general issues here fairly well. My beliefs are based on the research of the more credible scientists, though it's certainly not unknown for scientists to err. However, I think it's unlikely that anyone will ever disprove that DNA from an older person/animal is unsuitable for cloning.
What speculation?
on
Goodbye, Dolly
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· Score: 1, Insightful
While one should be cautious about drawing conclusions from a single data point, its interesting to speculate.
No speculation required. As you age, your DNA deteriorates, no questions asked. If you take that aged DNA and put it into an embryo, when it develops you'll have an organism with a young body and an old roadmap for building it. It's going to exhibit any number of symptoms of old age.
It's agreed by anyone with any credibility on the subject that you would have to grab the DNA of a newborn infant to have any chance of creating a clone that's not going to be screwed up this way.
Many companies don't know about the law, and most employees certainly don't. As soon as my company discovered the law, they worked to be compliant ASAP. But it was a surprise to us. I have no doubt that there are lots more out there that have no clue, and will continue to live in blissful ignorance.
There is no such thing as unbreakable encryption, period, unless you use a one time pad. If the key is smaller than the data, even if it's a million bits as in this case, it is still breakable.
And even one time pads are attackable, if the method of random key generation is imperfect.
Of course, a little thought on the subject would probably lead to the conclusion that the searches must be being sent to different lookup engines since the same result going to the same DB will always return the same amount.
Unless you hit the same search engine and its index has been updated between searches.
I don't suppose the road sensors will be able to tell you about accidents, when lanes are blocked, how long it will be to clear accidents, whether there are chemical or debris spills on the roadway, and so on?
Slashdot Mirror
You forget, Al Jazeera is trying to report on the truth of the conflict, not to further US war aims.
If this is the case, then why didn't they post pictures of the 5000 children who died monthly under Hussein's regime? Or the thousands of others tortured or killed by his regime for any number of "offenses". Do you know why Iraq has no international representation worth mentioning in the Olymipcs or other sporting events? Because Hussein's son, who runs Iraq's athletic organization, tortures athletes that lose. No Iraqi wants to become an athlete now. The stories are endless.
Al Jazeera is all too ready to inflame the Islamic world with anti-American propaganda, while omitting much, if not all, of the other side of the story. If you call that "the truth", then you're either naive or have the same twisted agenda as they do. If they actually gave the truth to their viewers, they'd lose their ratings overnight. They know what their viewers want, and they feed it to them with little concern for the truth.
All you have do to is turn on your GPS and see if your current location is correct (assuming you already know where you are). I've been turning mine on every morning to see if the military's up to something. Works like always, so far. As soon as it doesn't, I'm sure it will be painfully obvious.
I am ready for 64 bit. I have been ready for a long time. And I want it now. Not for my desktop, though. I'm not sure why 64 bit would be really helpful there. I'm still using an ancient PIII as a workstation, and it's more than I need for Linux to run happily.
No, I need 64 bit for a server application that requires more than 4GB VM addressibility (or with Linux, more like 2 GB, which is about all you really get for user space apps w/o some major hacking). Until now, you had to buy expensive Sparc hardware and run Solaris, or the like. No cheap, open consumer hardware (i.e. PC) was available until now. But now that it's available, I can get what I need w/o having to pay disgustingly expensive prices for computers that aren't even as fast as a PC at 1/4 the cost.
Oh yes, I'm ready for 64 bit.
Am I the only one to notice how messed up that article from The Standard is? Some paragraphs were repeatedly repeated (i.e. more than twice). Don't they have editors or something? And it wasn't even directly relevant to this particular patent issue. It was more of a commentary on software patents in general. Perhaps that part got edited out in favor of repeating so much of the text. :)
...is if Rick Berman goes away, and they replace him with someone like J. Michael Straczynski. Star Trek Enterprise has no originality, no stories, no decent recurring arc, no acting, and no suspense. In other words it almost doesn't even exist.
I liken Berman to Saddam. He knows his days are numbered, and for the sake of that which he controls he should simply give up. But he doesn't, apparently for utterly selfish reasons. Give it up, Rick. You don't know science fiction, you don't have any talent for creativity. Either hand over the reins to someone with actual ability, or close up shop. Either is preferable to the farce called Enterprise.
It's about determining *which* ad to put on a web page based on bidders for that space. If a web page doesn't use a bidding system like Amazon's, they won't be infringing on this patent simply by placing ads on a web page. I really love /. articles about patents - they're always so content-free, or at least factual-content-free.
I also wonder about defects in general. If OLED's will be better then 99.99% defect free LCD's(which would be pretty good if we weren't talking about millions of pixels).
I saw a 15" OLED screen made by Samsung at CES, and it was beautiful. I will not buy another screen until I can get an OLED one for a decent price. Utterly amazing. But only if the manufacturing process is near-perfect. The 15" screen had at least two bad pixels, and it only takes one to ruin the screen. Though they were only a few out of a million or two, it was very distracting.
...the problem with the blue LED fading over a few years of use? That would be a showstopper for me, unless these units are so cheap that I can buy a new one every 6-12 months without feeling the pain.
What is the effect if IBM released SCO code into linux?
Guess you didn't grok my point. It doesn't matter what the effect is. All that matters is if IBM contractually agreed not to. It's principle and ethics that are the subject of my posting. It is not okay for a company, say IBM, to agree to keep another company's code secret, subsequently release it to the world, and then get off because the code wasn't sufficiently unique, in their judgement, to justify maintaining that secrecy. See the point?
Frankly, I do agree that it seems like SCO is out of control, and is probably in the wrong. But that's not the point. I want whoever is lying to fry, because I hate lying corporations. One or the other company (or both) is trying to rip off the other, which seems to be the staple of American capitalism these days.
I haven't yet read all 300+ comments here, but so far I haven't seen *any* supporting SCO. Do any of you really know what's going on here? It is quite possible that IBM did rip them off. If SCO shared proprietary code with IBM under contractual restrictions, and IBM went ahead and violated those restrictions by putting that code in other products, then IBM is in the wrong. It doesn't even matter if the code is covered by patents or not, all that matters is what the two companies agreed to on paper.
I for one hope that whoever is truly at fault gets nailed, be it IBM or SCO. I believe that agreements should be honored. That's something that corporate America cares little about, especially if a buck can be made by ignoring an agreement. If IBM truly blew off a legitimate agreement, then they should fry. If IBM really believes SCO has no rightful claim to the intellectual property in question, then they should not have signed an agreement with SCO. It could well be that SCO is lying/embellishing/hallucinating, but maybe they're not.
On an aside, back in the 80's and early 90's, I worked on a port of SCO Unix to a proprietary platform. What people have been saying here about SCO's "quality" is true. Their OS was crap. I can't count how many bugs in the kernel we had to fix. We even had to completely rearchitect whole subsystems. When we were done with it, it was fairly passable, but it took man years. The most appalling thing about their code was the third party SMP implementation they bought from some other company. It was truly horrendous. I believe it did improve over the years as the product matured, but obviously not enough to keep them alive.
I actually bought a copy of this. It was very hard. I had to make several calls and go through a huge rigamarole to get the copy and get it activated. Bleh. And it's a really old copy of the kernel that's missing key features. It's designed to be robust, so I guess they're slow to adopt newer kernels. Kinda sux, cause I need some of the fixes found in the newer kernels.
In any case, my impression is that they want you to call rather than buy through the web site so that a human salesperson can dog you eternally to buy more copies. That's what they've done to me. Those sales guys kinda have a desperate edge to their voices.
This is precisely why monopolies must be regulated. They are the ones who entirely control broadband over phonelines, and hence have a stranglehold on it. They have the right to be crybabies if they want, but the government shouldn't allow that to interfere with services that depend on their monopoly control.
Where I used to work there was a poster on the wall with two insects. One was just a plain old insect, and it was labeled "BUG". The otherwise identical second insect had on a nice suit and tie and a pair of sunglasses, and was labeled "FEATURE". It seems Bill Gates is trying to convince us that Windows comes preinstalled with a large walk-in closet full of Armani suits.
The error rate must be a lot lower for the generation-to-generation replication of this material than it is for replication of other cells within your body within your lifetime. But "a lot lower" != 0.
Well, okay, if you want to be nitpicky about it, you may be correct. But clearly, whatever errors occur in the creation of the mother's eggs is somehow compensated for, or after N generations all eggs produced by all mothers would suffer from replicative senescence. Not being an expert on this, I can't say exactly how this is managed, but clearly it is or we'd be extinct. That's not to say that mutations caused by replication are necessarily "fixed" in the process (that's actually an important part of evolution), but the DNA's ability to replicate is maintained across generations by a process I am not privy to. I don't actually know if anyone knows how it works. Regardless, whatever process takes place does not take place in the mother's own cells or there would be no replicative senescence, a process we know to exist. Which is why cloning an adult is so problematic.
The testicles' DNA must age, and clearly they are capable of producing "young" DNA for sperm anyway...I'm just claiming that you don't know enough to say cloning is impossible.
I never said it's impossible. It's just not possible to take DNA that is frought with replication errors and expect to create a clone that doesn't have those. Read up on replicative senescence and then come back and see if you still disagree. How "old" testicles produce sperm with "new" DNA is unknown to me. Perhaps it has something to do with telomerase repair. This is actually a hot area of research, because there is good reason to believe that somehow applying telomerase to repair aging DNA may extend an organism's lifespan. It could also have implications for using "old" DNA for truly successful cloning. But certainly, without repairing "old" DNA before using it to create a clone, something nobody yet knows how to do, you're going to get an imperfect copy of the original organism as of the time of its birth; an imperfect copy that, while still young, will suffer from whatever age-related effects one might expect from replicative senescence.
Ok, so as long as you're not doing any speculating, then how does regular reproduction work? Re-read everything you just wrote and imagine you're talking about normal sexual reproduction. From that point of view, it's simply 100% incorrect.
First of all, the mother's egg contains half of a child's DNA. The eggs are present in the mother's ovary at the time of her birth, and do not replicate. That genetic information isn't subject to replication error and hence doesn't "age". In other words, a female baby is born with all of the eggs she'll ever have, and they already contain the genetic material they need to create a baby.
As for the father's sperm, I have no idea how the DNA in sperm is not "aged" like the father's own DNA. I'm certainly not an expert in that area, but I don't have to know *why* it's that way; I only need to know that it is, which I do happen to know. But the fact remains, the father's and mother's gametes both contain "young" genetic material. When they fuse, the zygote has a full complement of "young" genetic material for a brand new baby.
Clearly there's more to genetics than you know.
You're not one of those Raelian nutcakes who claim they've solved the problem of cloning a baby from old DNA, are you?
There's more to genetics than anybody knows. I have a degree in biology, but don't claim to be an expert. I have taken advanced courses in developmental biology and various areas of genetics, so I think I grasp the general issues here fairly well. My beliefs are based on the research of the more credible scientists, though it's certainly not unknown for scientists to err. However, I think it's unlikely that anyone will ever disprove that DNA from an older person/animal is unsuitable for cloning.
While one should be cautious about drawing conclusions from a single data point, its interesting to speculate.
No speculation required. As you age, your DNA deteriorates, no questions asked. If you take that aged DNA and put it into an embryo, when it develops you'll have an organism with a young body and an old roadmap for building it. It's going to exhibit any number of symptoms of old age.
It's agreed by anyone with any credibility on the subject that you would have to grab the DNA of a newborn infant to have any chance of creating a clone that's not going to be screwed up this way.
Good point. Did they?
Did these people actually hack a satelite/feed?
How does one design a device for hacking a satellite feed without actually hacking the satellite feed?
Many companies don't know about the law, and most employees certainly don't. As soon as my company discovered the law, they worked to be compliant ASAP. But it was a surprise to us. I have no doubt that there are lots more out there that have no clue, and will continue to live in blissful ignorance.
There is no such thing as unbreakable encryption, period, unless you use a one time pad. If the key is smaller than the data, even if it's a million bits as in this case, it is still breakable. And even one time pads are attackable, if the method of random key generation is imperfect.
Of course, a little thought on the subject would probably lead to the conclusion that the searches must be being sent to different lookup engines since the same result going to the same DB will always return the same amount.
Unless you hit the same search engine and its index has been updated between searches.
I don't suppose the road sensors will be able to tell you about accidents, when lanes are blocked, how long it will be to clear accidents, whether there are chemical or debris spills on the roadway, and so on?
Okay, ruin my fun. So, I guess he writes stories about dark objects that were once geometric, but might or might not have been damaged and/or marked.
...ever noticed how his most popular books are all about smooth black geometric shapes floating through space?
;)