I had a similar situation during the winter when I was the admin for a computer lab at the U of Wisconsin back in the 1970s. The building was hooked into the universiy's central air and heating system, but during winter they shut down the air conditioning system. You don't need that during a Wisconsin winter, right? But the computer lab was full of equipment that overheated the room. We couldn't get permission to install a small air conditioner in the window (because it's winter in Wisconsin, you know;-). So what we did was leave the window open a bit. It took some experimenting to determine the correct opening for a given outside temperature, but we were geeks and we could do the experiment. We did have to put up a sign to warn the cleaning people not to close the window at night, but they sometimes did anyway, and then we'd have to restart equipment in the morning because temp sensors had tripped and shut them down.
This wasn't all that unusual, though. It's a big research campus, and it's normal to see strange things hanging out of partly-open windows. The grounds and security folks long ago learned to ignore the "helpful" calls from people who spotted such strange things and thought they should be reported. A slightly open window on a cold winter night didn't faze them. The main problems were always with the cleaning crews, mostly minimum-wage workers who didn't read too well (even when English was their native language).
I've seen people try to use MS Exchange in place of a mail server.
A year to two back, I read a cute piece of parody that was about some hackers discovering that Microsoft's premium virus-delivery package, Exchange, could also be used to deliver email. I wonder where I read that?
Larry Niven's short story "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?" was based on a similar concept. The idea was that this planet is part of a breeding experiment, and periodically the experimenters look around for the "best" humans (by whatever criteria), transport small sets of them to other earthlike planets, and them wipe out the rest of the human population to prepare the planet for re-seeding. The title was one of the questions used to test people for acceptability. It's a fun story; you should read it if you can find it.
Since 90% of DNA is useless junk (warning: figure pulled out of ass, but it's a big number I believe)...
The percentage isn't too important (and varies for different species), but there's growing evidence that the "junk DNA" isn't necessarily useless. The phrase really just means DNA that doesn't seem to code for any proteins via any mechanism that we know. But this doesn't mean that it has no function. A few instances of "noncoding" DNA functioning as a regulator of nearby genes have been found, for example.
An interesting thing came out of the recent sequencing of the DNA of the domestic chicken. It seems that the researchers found a "junk" sequence of around 20,000 base pairs that are identical with a section of human DNA. The common ancestor was around 200 million years ago, and if this DNA weren't useful, random mutations and crossover events would have long since wiped it out. For such a long sequence to be preserved for 200 million years, it has to have a useful function in both species, and will probably be found in most other birds and mammals. Either that, or it's a retrovirus that has colonized both species' genomes. We have no idea what it is, but future research will probably explain it.
Anyway, researchers are starting to suspect that not all of that "junk DNA" is useless. But we're a long way from understanding it all.
This sounds a lot like the the concept of "ice-9", the high-temperature water crystal that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about in his famous novel Cat's Cradle. Physicists have suggested an explanation why it can't exist, and the explanation would seem to apply as well to this concept of "kill-everything" DNA, too.
In the case of ice-9, the argument is that the Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years or so, and for at least 4 billion years has been mostly covered with a kilometers-deep ocean. There are trillions and trillions of water molecules in the ocean, mostly at a temperature above 375K and bouncing around against each other in all possible patterns. If there were a possible ice crystal that's stable above the ocean's mean temperature, the random bouncing and quantum fluxuations over 4 billion years would have produced a small crystal at some time, and the oceans would have frozen solid at that point. This hasn't happened, so we have to conclude that no such high-temperature crystalline water form can exist.
A similar argument could easily be made against the idea of something (DNA, prion, virus, whatever) that kills all living things. The sheer magnitude of DNA and proteins on the planet, plus all the recombination (due to radiation, quantum fluxuations, whatever) that is known to happen, would have long ago produced such a particle, we'd all be extinct, and the Earth would be barren.
Of course, something a bit less virulent, that only kills its host, is quite likely. You have lots of things inside you that, if they break, you die. But that's not too dangerous to anyone around you, unless you're the one driving the car.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
People share the cheap stuff and hoard the expensive stuff, if they have any expensive stuff at all.
Yep; this is the natural behavior of most humans. That's why it took us so long to drag ourselves out of the stone age. And the reason that science and mathematics have had such a spectacular success over the past couple centuries at improving the human condition is that they developed an ethic of sharing information. If you're a scientist or mathematician, you only get "paid" (i.e., honor and credit) for what you share with the community; you don't profit from information that you hide. The effect of this is that people can build on each others' discoveries, and what you know isn't lost when you die, as happened repeatedly in previous centuries.
We're seeing strong pressure in the computer industry to abandon our sci/math roots and go with privatization of information, in the form of "intellectual property". Wikipedia has turned into a major force against this, but it's really just finding a new way to continue the centuries-old scientific method of sharing what you know with anyone who's interested and building on others' knowledge.
It's interesting to see people reacting to wikipedia as if it's something new. On the scale of the entire history of the human species, it is new, but it's just a computerized version of what made science and mathematics so successful. It's interesting that nobody in the computer biz seems to understand this. It'll also be interesting to see whether we decide to go with shared or privatized information.
For our own good, and the good of our grandchildren, we can hope that the privatizers lose this one.
Your arguments are the same arguments that I head on why IBM should remain in the lead back in the 80s.... [H]aving a single monopolistic company who expands by taking over partners will lead to lower jobs, not more. IBM did this, so has MS. Once MS loses its monopoly, the marketplace will be free and we will quickly see a very large number of software companies and jobs, similar to what was in the 90s.
An analysis that I've seen that's worth considering is: The computer industry has always had two "markets", the business/consumer market where people don't understand computers, and the tech/scientific market where people do understand computers. These two markets have always been separate, with very little crossover. The business/consumer market has always been a monopoly, because people just buy "computers" and refuse to even learn enough to understand that there are more than one kind of computer. The tech/scientific market has always been competitive, with many kinds of hardware, OS, etc., and a lot of competition.
Given that this situation has persisted for around a half century, with no real signs of changing, the reasonable prediction is that the business/consumer sector will remain a monopoly. Microsoft may fade for some reason, as IBM did in the 1980s due to their inability to make a sellable desktop computer. But this will just lead to the rise of another single supplier that will monopolize that sector and lock out all competitors.
OTOH, the tech/scientific sector will probably remain the arena of competition and innovation that it has always been. The companies that sell in that sector will make occasional sales to non-techies, mostly to organizations with people in power who listen to their technical experts. But such organizations are rare, and will continue to be rare, so such inroads will remain rare and fragile, subject to changes in management that put people back in power who are resistant to technical expertise.
An open market in the computer business would be interesting to see, but I wouldn't bet on it ever developing. You first have to overcome the desire of most purchasers to learn as little as possible about their computers, and there's little sign of this changing anywhere.
Plus, there's also big movement in Europe. And Europe is the part of the world that CAN pay. They are choosing to switch because of Microsoft's monopoly. They want free choice and INTEROPERABILITY.
True, but there's another issue that's quietly getting attention: Microsoft's potential control over government's computers.
There was a funny example of the problem in the recent discussion here of Vista's DRM. When people mentioned MS's ability to disable your software remotely, one reply was that they've had this ability since XT. Really! This is a huge sword hanging over anyone that needs reliability and control of their own computer systems and data.
This is a really good issue for OSS supporters, and it should be used as a "talking point" at any opportunity. Do you really want a giant American corporation with such power over your computer's software? Such questions can really get the attention of government administrators.
Hmmm... I don't remember ever thinking that encyclopedias were any sort of gospel. They were just a good place to find a brief, over-simplified summary of something. If you wanted more than minimal information, you had to look for a book that actually gave more than a few paragraphs to the topic. And, of course, an encyclopedia was expensive, so nobody had more than one, and the articles were usually rather old. That's ok for things that happened decades ago, but not for anything recent.
And they never had anything about math. And they were pretty useless for astronomy. You'll find useful references to both of these in wikipedia. In particular, if you want to find the basic data about astronomical objects, wikipedia is a good place to start.
Do people really care that little about this article, or is this place that dead?
Well, I can't speak for the others, but what I see is the usual mess of assertions, most of which can't possibly be true simultaneously. My reaction is to juust say I'll wait until some other guinea pigs get enough experience with Vista that they can say how it really works.
Of course, even then, I expect that when someone reports what happened to them, there will be a lot of replies telling them that they're a total idiot because they didn't so such-and-such, which turns out to be undocumented or won't work for most people no matter how much they wish it to work.
And then my conclusion will be that Vista's DRM is simply too complex like an idiot like me and the other 90% of the users, so I'll go look at something else. I think that's the basic reason the iPod has done so well. There are lots of cute gadgets out there. But when you watch someone else play with them and quickly decide that you aren't making sense of the UI, so maybe you should look at something else and try to find something that makes sense.
In my case, I'm an amateur musician (like lots of computer geeks), and I want something that lets me do what I want with my own stuff. That's difficult enough on a Mac, and I've found it impossible on MS-based stuff. I'm actually a lot happier with the linux-based stuff that I've used, because it's complicated but I can read manuals, so I can get it to do what I want. YMMV, of course, and most people become illiterate as soon as they touch anything called a "computer", so maybe for them the Mac is best (or the best of a bad lot).
And MS should know that I'm rather wary of buying something that will decide that my own stuff is inviolation of their DRM (which I just know I'll never understand;-). So at least now, I acknowledge a strong bias against anything from them. Why would I pay good money for a system that decides that I don't have the right to use my own creations? And calling me an idiot because I don't understand simply tells me that you're probably right, and an idiot like me shouldn't waste my money.
But I suppose such a longwinded semi-explanation won't get me very far here, so I understand why we don't see much of a discussion here. Maybe tomorrow?
I'd think the best way to fix this would be to simply allow citizens to view whatever content they want without restrictions.
You misread the story. Wikipedia isn't blocking reading; they're blocking anonymous edits. People in Qatar can read wikipedia without any blocking. (At least none from wikipedia.) They just can't edit wikipedia content without first identifying themselves.
Remember the story a while back when wikipedia blocked edits coming from the US Congress's address?;-)
Just because Wikipedia isn't 100% accurate at all times doesn't mean that it's useless as a source of information, especially very basic information.
Yup; wikipedia is very much like a traditional dead-tree encyclopedia. Not surprising, since that was the basic model from the start. And the acknowledged limitation to "basic" information is why so many wikipedia pages have that list of references and links at the bottom.
Similarly, a few years ago while in Finland, I visited a site on the west coast called Mustasaari (Black Island). in the early 1600s, it was a thriving seaport. Now it's an archaeological site and museum, 10 km from the water.
That part of the world has been rising at about 1 meter per century. This means that, historically, ports have had to migrate "downhill" as the sea level fell. Sometimes, as in Mustasaari, the changing shore line left them with no usable port, so the town died out. In other places, good ports appeared and a new town developed.
The Scandinavians like to joke about how much they like global warming. It not only warms up their cold climate, improving farming and summer weather, but it also makes the shoreline more stable, so they won't have to move the port downhill as often.
Maybe they'll be able to recolonize Greenland soon, too. I have heard suggestions of building a huge dike along the low "pass" on the western edge, to keep out sea water. Then the melting glaciers will form a huge fresh-water lake in the interior. Funny thing is that they tell this as a sort of joke, but it's actually feasible. Whether it's worth doing is another question. Greenland is owned by Denmark, so they'd be the main ones to decide on such a mega-engineering project.
The automotive manufacturers are arguably helping reduce the accident counts by making the various contributory technologies less distractive, such as by building in hands-free calling.
Well, maybe, but several of the studies of the effect of phones while driving (including that big one at Harvard that got so much publicity last year) said that hands-free phones were just as dangerous as hand-held phones. It seems that it's the act of using the phone that's dangerous, not holding it in your hand.
This has been downplayed or outright ignored, possibly because if people believe that hands-free phones are safer, they'll pay for the extra gadgetry. The push for hand-free phones is thus a marketing campaign that has nothing to do with safety.
Just a Guess.. but maybe there is.. uh... green land under Greenlands ice caps?
Heh. Actually, we've known for a few decades that most of the interior is below sea level. Greenland is a big, backwards "C", with a ring of mountains around the edges and lower land inside. But when the ice melts, the land will slowly start rising, as has happened in Scandinavia, and there might be some dry land there in a couple thousand years.
And you should look up the history of the name "Greenland". It's a good example of what can be done with a dishonest marketing campaign. The Vikings that fell for it and settled there ended up all dying some time later, leaving behind only a few interesting archaeological sites. The smarter ones settled further south, despite the name "Iceland", so their descendants are still alive today.
This study will be interesting because it will give us details of the terrain under the ice. What we have now is the general contours showing that Greenland is a large bowl.
Warming of the earth in the recent past is a fact. "Global Warming," or human initiated carbon emission based climate change, is up for debate contrary to conventional wisdom.
Actually, you're about 50 years behind the research. Global warming has been documented for over a century, and 50 years ago there was a lot of scientific debate over the causes. But two significant things have happened over the past several decades: The warming has accelerated rapidly, and scientific evidence has accumulated to the point that there's no longer scientific debate over the basic explanation (though there are still lots of fine details that will make for many dissertations).
The warming up to 50 years ago was probably mostly due to natural cycles, though human input had a small effect. The warming of the past few decades is not due to natural cycles; it is almost entirely due to human input. (Some models say that we cause around 110% of the warming; the planet should be cooling slightly now.;-)
When I was a kid in the Seattle area back in the 50s, something I read repeatedly was that the general area (from northern California to mid British Columbia) had been cooling slightly for some decades, and local glaciers had grown longer. This was considered interesting because it was well known that most of the world was getting warmer. Nobody knew why that small area and a few others had been cooling. But around 1970, the cooling stopped, the glaciers started retreating, and the area joined the rest of the world's warming trend.
People who think this is something new to scientists simply haven't been paying attention. We do have much better data for the past 30 or 40 years, but there's enough data from previous centuries to make the story fairly clear. A lot of scientific work has been done examining the data and building theoretical models to explain the data. It's now difficult for scientists to go along with the desires of politicians to ignore the growing problem that's mostly of our own making. The "debate" now in scientific circles is over the fine details of what's happening to the planet.
I know of some companies who are still on Win2K. Eventually, they'll upgrade but on their timeline, not MS.
I recently worked for a big company that was finally biting the bullet and converting all their W95 machines to W98. I figure they'll start considering Vista in 2015 or so.
Somehow I doubt that this is an isolated case. Most business people understand that if you have something that's doing the job, you don't replace it with something unfamiliar.
Urban tits consistently experimented with between one and five note calls, while those in forests close to the cities stuck to more normal combinations of two, three and four note tunes, the research found.
My first thought was that someone should explain to this writer that two, three and four are all between one and five.
Talk about a straw man.... Lawlessness should never be tolerated. Or will you let someone kill one of your family members,...
Actually, it's the escalation of the comment to killing that's the "straw man". The parent's point was that "lawlessness" includes not just murder and other awful crimes, but also such things as littering. A blanket statement that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated" isn't just saying that murderers shoult be punished to the extreme; it's also suggesting that litterers should receive an extreme punishment. And this is the crux of the problem.
For example, like 80-90% of American men (depending on which survey you've read), I currently have a small "Swiss Army" pocketknife in my pocket. In most of the US, this is illegal, since it's a "concealed weapon". I carry it because, well, I use it several times per day. It's light, it's no effort to carry, and it's useful. I've never used it to harm a person (not even myself;-), and I don't think it should be illegal. But it is, and I carry it nonetheless. Should I receive an extreme punishment for my publicly-admitted lawless behavior?
And this isn't at all a facetious or extreme example. A curious PR campaign that appeared here (Massachusetts) last year was about the installation of metal detectors in the doors of courthouses around the state. Since this was done, they have reported over 10,000 confiscated weapons per year from people entering the courthouses. This has been bandied about a lot to "educate" people to the lawlessness of the low-life parts of our population who end up in the courthouses.
But a few months ago, I heard an interest radio interview. The radio guy was talking to a few law-enforcement people about the problem, and started probing to find out just what sort of weapons all these people were trying to sneak into the courthouses. The law guys obviously didn't want to give the details, but the radio guy finally got it out of them: Almost all the "weapons" were pocket knives, "of the Swiss Army type".
So yes, the law-enforcement people in this supposedly liberal state are making a big fuss over people carrying 10,000 weapons per year into the courthouses, and they're talking about small pocketknives. They mean people like me, and they do consider my pocketknife a "weapon". When you say that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated", in this state you're not just talking about murderers. You are also saying that I'm a lawless criminal and my small pocketknife is a criminal weapon that should not be tolerated.
This is really what the UK cameras are all about, too, when it comes down to it. Yes, we like the idea of murderers, robbers and rapists being caught and punished. But we're not too comfortable with the idea that, if we whip out a Swiss Army knife to slice open one of those damned "clamshell" packages, we risk arrest and fines or imprisonment for carrying a concealed weapon.
(And the small 1-inch blade on my knife is a good tool for that sort of awful packaging. It's the safest portable tool I know to attack them with. I do wish it were legal, but until the law changes, I'll probably continue to be a concealed-weapon-carrying criminal, as will most American men and around half the women.;-)
The same sort of leakage can occur with a blog, on an ordinary personal page, or via a much-forwarded email message.
Actually, it's quite a lot worse than that. It's quite easy for things on your computer that you consider "hidden" to become public knowledge.
For example, I've had many discussions with people over ways to hide things online, so that you can access them if you know the URL, but the URL can't be found by any method other than guessing. The best-know is hiding stuff behind an index.html file, but there are other methods.
A problem with this is illustrated by recent discussions of leakage via the google toolbar. This is a useful tool, and lots of people use it. But there have been many reports from people doing web testing (and thus watching the server logs) of an interesting phenomenon: If you have the google toolbar installed, and use your browser to access a "hidden" web page on your server, you will sometimes see a visit by Googlebot to that URL soon after, often within a minute or so. And soon after that, a google search will find things in your "hidden" page. Google "google toolbar googlebot" for more information.
What's going on is that the google toolbar is running as part of your browser, and it has access to the browser's data. This includes the URLs of all the pages you visit.
I mentioned this case first because it's not a Microsoft product, and I didn't want to distract people by starting off with MS bashing. But, of course, MS is notorious for leaks like this, and they're generally not accidents or bugs. When the very first MS internet capabilities came out, engineers quickly reported seeing unexpected modem activity when "nothing was accessing the Net". Investigations showed that the activity was due to listings of the contents of the disk being transmitted to a.microsoft.com address. Similar behavior is known within pretty much every release of MS's systems. If you're running Microsoft software, you should assume that anything on your computer is accessible to Microsoft any time you're connected to the Net. Not understanding this is simply naive.
In a similar vein, there was the fuss a couple of years back, when msn.com was caught extracting things (mostly images) from customers' "private" data (mostly email) and using them in advertising. The first reaction was for msn.com to point out that the TOS stated that any data on their servers was their property, to do with as they wish. They quickly realized that this was a major PR blunder, and publicly backed off. But again, if you think they aren't doing such things now, you're just naive. You should expect that any ISP will behave this way if they think they can get away with it.
We also had a lot of discussions here of the Sony CD rootkit. Who would have thought that just "playing" a CD would install spyware in your computer? Well, we now know, and some of us are a bit less naive.
Open-source software is much less likely to contain spyware, but it's not guaranteed. The mozilla-suite browsers are open-source, but have you actually dug through the code? If not, you could easily be victimized by any new release, or by any plugin that you install. Granted, there are lots of people on the lookout for spyware in the most-used open-source software, but they might not have spotted the more subtle problems. And the google toolbar shows how easy it can be to trick users into opening their system up to outside access. MS isn't nearly the only culprit here. (They're just the most brazen and unapologetic.;-)
The important point is that we should stop listening to GW and his ilk when it comes to this subject.
Actually, that's exactly wrong. We should be listening to (and watching) them, analyzing their words and actions, and we writing about what's wrong. If we ignore them, they won't go away; they'll continue their ongoing efforts to make maximum short-term profit while slowly degrading our world. The only way we can successfully fight such things is through knowledge and understanding, not by ignorance.
Remember the old adage "Know your enemy". And, we might add, publicise your enemy's behavior.
Well, if it's like the earlier models, it's selling with pre-installed linux in Asia, but in the US you'll be able to buy it only with MS Windows installed, and you won't be able to find the drivers for the proprietary components that don't work with any of the online linux distros.
One of my questions would be whether it can handle languages like Mandarin and Arabic. Most computers sold in the US don't have software that do such things sanely, since everyone knows that Americans only understand English. Maybe what I should do is take a flight to Hong Kong and buy one there...
Is this saying that if they can prove you had a shared folder and that folder contained copyrighted works, then you are guilty of copyright infringement?... That kind of scares me...
As well it should. The obvious parallel that occurs to me: I have a lot of copyrighted works sitting on bookcases in my living room. Right at this moment, both our front and back doors are unlocked. (It's late Saturday morning here, and we've been going in and out of the house.)
If the prosecution's claim here is valid, then I'm also guilty of copyright infringement. After all, anyone could walk in off the street and take one of those copyrighted works off my shelf. They wouldn't even have to steal the book. There's a copier over in a corner, so they could copy a few pages, walk out with them, and I'd never know. Until someone sues me for "distribution", and uses my unlocked door as evidence of intent.
Now, obviously a computer directory full of files is physically different than a bookcase full of books with a copier in the corner. An unlocked door and a shared folder are physically different. But as far as the "intellectual contents", these two cases seem quite similar.
What's the legal difference here? Are there any lawyers here that can explain? Or am I taking a severe risk by not hiding my bookcases behind locked doors at all times?
Court documents say that Schuster ran a Google search over CWWIS' network using the following search terms: "how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ," "interference over wifi 2.4 Ghz," "wireless networks 2.4 interference," and "make device interfere wireless network." [TFA]
Hmmm... A few months ago, I did a number of google searches with very similar terms. I was trying to find out how to diagnose and defend against some wireless interference. Not that I learned all that much. I suspect that you need some rather special equipment to locate the source of interference, but I don't know what that equipment might be.
Anyway, I wonder if I could be a suspect now because of those searches?
I have noticed in the past that if you ask questions about security, you're usually treated as if you were a potential security risk, not as someone trying to improve your own security.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a similar situation during the winter when I was the admin for a computer lab at the U of Wisconsin back in the 1970s. The building was hooked into the universiy's central air and heating system, but during winter they shut down the air conditioning system. You don't need that during a Wisconsin winter, right? But the computer lab was full of equipment that overheated the room. We couldn't get permission to install a small air conditioner in the window (because it's winter in Wisconsin, you know ;-). So what we did was leave the window open a bit. It took some experimenting to determine the correct opening for a given outside temperature, but we were geeks and we could do the experiment. We did have to put up a sign to warn the cleaning people not to close the window at night, but they sometimes did anyway, and then we'd have to restart equipment in the morning because temp sensors had tripped and shut them down.
This wasn't all that unusual, though. It's a big research campus, and it's normal to see strange things hanging out of partly-open windows. The grounds and security folks long ago learned to ignore the "helpful" calls from people who spotted such strange things and thought they should be reported. A slightly open window on a cold winter night didn't faze them. The main problems were always with the cleaning crews, mostly minimum-wage workers who didn't read too well (even when English was their native language).
I've seen people try to use MS Exchange in place of a mail server.
A year to two back, I read a cute piece of parody that was about some hackers discovering that Microsoft's premium virus-delivery package, Exchange, could also be used to deliver email. I wonder where I read that?
Larry Niven's short story "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?" was based on a similar concept. The idea was that this planet is part of a breeding experiment, and periodically the experimenters look around for the "best" humans (by whatever criteria), transport small sets of them to other earthlike planets, and them wipe out the rest of the human population to prepare the planet for re-seeding. The title was one of the questions used to test people for acceptability. It's a fun story; you should read it if you can find it.
Since 90% of DNA is useless junk (warning: figure pulled out of ass, but it's a big number I believe) ...
The percentage isn't too important (and varies for different species), but there's growing evidence that the "junk DNA" isn't necessarily useless. The phrase really just means DNA that doesn't seem to code for any proteins via any mechanism that we know. But this doesn't mean that it has no function. A few instances of "noncoding" DNA functioning as a regulator of nearby genes have been found, for example.
An interesting thing came out of the recent sequencing of the DNA of the domestic chicken. It seems that the researchers found a "junk" sequence of around 20,000 base pairs that are identical with a section of human DNA. The common ancestor was around 200 million years ago, and if this DNA weren't useful, random mutations and crossover events would have long since wiped it out. For such a long sequence to be preserved for 200 million years, it has to have a useful function in both species, and will probably be found in most other birds and mammals. Either that, or it's a retrovirus that has colonized both species' genomes. We have no idea what it is, but future research will probably explain it.
Anyway, researchers are starting to suspect that not all of that "junk DNA" is useless. But we're a long way from understanding it all.
This sounds a lot like the the concept of "ice-9", the high-temperature water crystal that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about in his famous novel Cat's Cradle. Physicists have suggested an explanation why it can't exist, and the explanation would seem to apply as well to this concept of "kill-everything" DNA, too.
In the case of ice-9, the argument is that the Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years or so, and for at least 4 billion years has been mostly covered with a kilometers-deep ocean. There are trillions and trillions of water molecules in the ocean, mostly at a temperature above 375K and bouncing around against each other in all possible patterns. If there were a possible ice crystal that's stable above the ocean's mean temperature, the random bouncing and quantum fluxuations over 4 billion years would have produced a small crystal at some time, and the oceans would have frozen solid at that point. This hasn't happened, so we have to conclude that no such high-temperature crystalline water form can exist.
A similar argument could easily be made against the idea of something (DNA, prion, virus, whatever) that kills all living things. The sheer magnitude of DNA and proteins on the planet, plus all the recombination (due to radiation, quantum fluxuations, whatever) that is known to happen, would have long ago produced such a particle, we'd all be extinct, and the Earth would be barren.
Of course, something a bit less virulent, that only kills its host, is quite likely. You have lots of things inside you that, if they break, you die. But that's not too dangerous to anyone around you, unless you're the one driving the car.
People share the cheap stuff and hoard the expensive stuff, if they have any expensive stuff at all.
Yep; this is the natural behavior of most humans. That's why it took us so long to drag ourselves out of the stone age. And the reason that science and mathematics have had such a spectacular success over the past couple centuries at improving the human condition is that they developed an ethic of sharing information. If you're a scientist or mathematician, you only get "paid" (i.e., honor and credit) for what you share with the community; you don't profit from information that you hide. The effect of this is that people can build on each others' discoveries, and what you know isn't lost when you die, as happened repeatedly in previous centuries.
We're seeing strong pressure in the computer industry to abandon our sci/math roots and go with privatization of information, in the form of "intellectual property". Wikipedia has turned into a major force against this, but it's really just finding a new way to continue the centuries-old scientific method of sharing what you know with anyone who's interested and building on others' knowledge.
It's interesting to see people reacting to wikipedia as if it's something new. On the scale of the entire history of the human species, it is new, but it's just a computerized version of what made science and mathematics so successful. It's interesting that nobody in the computer biz seems to understand this. It'll also be interesting to see whether we decide to go with shared or privatized information.
For our own good, and the good of our grandchildren, we can hope that the privatizers lose this one.
Your arguments are the same arguments that I head on why IBM should remain in the lead back in the 80s. ... [H]aving a single monopolistic company who expands by taking over partners will lead to lower jobs, not more. IBM did this, so has MS. Once MS loses its monopoly, the marketplace will be free and we will quickly see a very large number of software companies and jobs, similar to what was in the 90s.
An analysis that I've seen that's worth considering is: The computer industry has always had two "markets", the business/consumer market where people don't understand computers, and the tech/scientific market where people do understand computers. These two markets have always been separate, with very little crossover. The business/consumer market has always been a monopoly, because people just buy "computers" and refuse to even learn enough to understand that there are more than one kind of computer. The tech/scientific market has always been competitive, with many kinds of hardware, OS, etc., and a lot of competition.
Given that this situation has persisted for around a half century, with no real signs of changing, the reasonable prediction is that the business/consumer sector will remain a monopoly. Microsoft may fade for some reason, as IBM did in the 1980s due to their inability to make a sellable desktop computer. But this will just lead to the rise of another single supplier that will monopolize that sector and lock out all competitors.
OTOH, the tech/scientific sector will probably remain the arena of competition and innovation that it has always been. The companies that sell in that sector will make occasional sales to non-techies, mostly to organizations with people in power who listen to their technical experts. But such organizations are rare, and will continue to be rare, so such inroads will remain rare and fragile, subject to changes in management that put people back in power who are resistant to technical expertise.
An open market in the computer business would be interesting to see, but I wouldn't bet on it ever developing. You first have to overcome the desire of most purchasers to learn as little as possible about their computers, and there's little sign of this changing anywhere.
Plus, there's also big movement in Europe. And Europe is the part of the world that CAN pay. They are choosing to switch because of Microsoft's monopoly. They want free choice and INTEROPERABILITY.
True, but there's another issue that's quietly getting attention: Microsoft's potential control over government's computers.
There was a funny example of the problem in the recent discussion here of Vista's DRM. When people mentioned MS's ability to disable your software remotely, one reply was that they've had this ability since XT. Really! This is a huge sword hanging over anyone that needs reliability and control of their own computer systems and data.
This is a really good issue for OSS supporters, and it should be used as a "talking point" at any opportunity. Do you really want a giant American corporation with such power over your computer's software? Such questions can really get the attention of government administrators.
Hmmm ... I don't remember ever thinking that encyclopedias were any sort of gospel. They were just a good place to find a brief, over-simplified summary of something. If you wanted more than minimal information, you had to look for a book that actually gave more than a few paragraphs to the topic. And, of course, an encyclopedia was expensive, so nobody had more than one, and the articles were usually rather old. That's ok for things that happened decades ago, but not for anything recent.
And they never had anything about math. And they were pretty useless for astronomy. You'll find useful references to both of these in wikipedia. In particular, if you want to find the basic data about astronomical objects, wikipedia is a good place to start.
Do people really care that little about this article, or is this place that dead?
;-). So at least now, I acknowledge a strong bias against anything from them. Why would I pay good money for a system that decides that I don't have the right to use my own creations? And calling me an idiot because I don't understand simply tells me that you're probably right, and an idiot like me shouldn't waste my money.
Well, I can't speak for the others, but what I see is the usual mess of assertions, most of which can't possibly be true simultaneously. My reaction is to juust say I'll wait until some other guinea pigs get enough experience with Vista that they can say how it really works.
Of course, even then, I expect that when someone reports what happened to them, there will be a lot of replies telling them that they're a total idiot because they didn't so such-and-such, which turns out to be undocumented or won't work for most people no matter how much they wish it to work.
And then my conclusion will be that Vista's DRM is simply too complex like an idiot like me and the other 90% of the users, so I'll go look at something else. I think that's the basic reason the iPod has done so well. There are lots of cute gadgets out there. But when you watch someone else play with them and quickly decide that you aren't making sense of the UI, so maybe you should look at something else and try to find something that makes sense.
In my case, I'm an amateur musician (like lots of computer geeks), and I want something that lets me do what I want with my own stuff. That's difficult enough on a Mac, and I've found it impossible on MS-based stuff. I'm actually a lot happier with the linux-based stuff that I've used, because it's complicated but I can read manuals, so I can get it to do what I want. YMMV, of course, and most people become illiterate as soon as they touch anything called a "computer", so maybe for them the Mac is best (or the best of a bad lot).
And MS should know that I'm rather wary of buying something that will decide that my own stuff is inviolation of their DRM (which I just know I'll never understand
But I suppose such a longwinded semi-explanation won't get me very far here, so I understand why we don't see much of a discussion here. Maybe tomorrow?
I'd think the best way to fix this would be to simply allow citizens to view whatever content they want without restrictions.
;-)
You misread the story. Wikipedia isn't blocking reading; they're blocking anonymous edits. People in Qatar can read wikipedia without any blocking. (At least none from wikipedia.) They just can't edit wikipedia content without first identifying themselves.
Remember the story a while back when wikipedia blocked edits coming from the US Congress's address?
Just because Wikipedia isn't 100% accurate at all times doesn't mean that it's useless as a source of information, especially very basic information.
Yup; wikipedia is very much like a traditional dead-tree encyclopedia. Not surprising, since that was the basic model from the start. And the acknowledged limitation to "basic" information is why so many wikipedia pages have that list of references and links at the bottom.
Similarly, a few years ago while in Finland, I visited a site on the west coast called Mustasaari (Black Island). in the early 1600s, it was a thriving seaport. Now it's an archaeological site and museum, 10 km from the water.
That part of the world has been rising at about 1 meter per century. This means that, historically, ports have had to migrate "downhill" as the sea level fell. Sometimes, as in Mustasaari, the changing shore line left them with no usable port, so the town died out. In other places, good ports appeared and a new town developed.
The Scandinavians like to joke about how much they like global warming. It not only warms up their cold climate, improving farming and summer weather, but it also makes the shoreline more stable, so they won't have to move the port downhill as often.
Maybe they'll be able to recolonize Greenland soon, too. I have heard suggestions of building a huge dike along the low "pass" on the western edge, to keep out sea water. Then the melting glaciers will form a huge fresh-water lake in the interior. Funny thing is that they tell this as a sort of joke, but it's actually feasible. Whether it's worth doing is another question. Greenland is owned by Denmark, so they'd be the main ones to decide on such a mega-engineering project.
The automotive manufacturers are arguably helping reduce the accident counts by making the various contributory technologies less distractive, such as by building in hands-free calling.
Well, maybe, but several of the studies of the effect of phones while driving (including that big one at Harvard that got so much publicity last year) said that hands-free phones were just as dangerous as hand-held phones. It seems that it's the act of using the phone that's dangerous, not holding it in your hand.
This has been downplayed or outright ignored, possibly because if people believe that hands-free phones are safer, they'll pay for the extra gadgetry. The push for hand-free phones is thus a marketing campaign that has nothing to do with safety.
Just a Guess.. but maybe there is.. uh... green land under Greenlands ice caps?
Heh. Actually, we've known for a few decades that most of the interior is below sea level. Greenland is a big, backwards "C", with a ring of mountains around the edges and lower land inside. But when the ice melts, the land will slowly start rising, as has happened in Scandinavia, and there might be some dry land there in a couple thousand years.
And you should look up the history of the name "Greenland". It's a good example of what can be done with a dishonest marketing campaign. The Vikings that fell for it and settled there ended up all dying some time later, leaving behind only a few interesting archaeological sites. The smarter ones settled further south, despite the name "Iceland", so their descendants are still alive today.
This study will be interesting because it will give us details of the terrain under the ice. What we have now is the general contours showing that Greenland is a large bowl.
Warming of the earth in the recent past is a fact. "Global Warming," or human initiated carbon emission based climate change, is up for debate contrary to conventional wisdom.
;-)
Actually, you're about 50 years behind the research. Global warming has been documented for over a century, and 50 years ago there was a lot of scientific debate over the causes. But two significant things have happened over the past several decades: The warming has accelerated rapidly, and scientific evidence has accumulated to the point that there's no longer scientific debate over the basic explanation (though there are still lots of fine details that will make for many dissertations).
The warming up to 50 years ago was probably mostly due to natural cycles, though human input had a small effect. The warming of the past few decades is not due to natural cycles; it is almost entirely due to human input. (Some models say that we cause around 110% of the warming; the planet should be cooling slightly now.
When I was a kid in the Seattle area back in the 50s, something I read repeatedly was that the general area (from northern California to mid British Columbia) had been cooling slightly for some decades, and local glaciers had grown longer. This was considered interesting because it was well known that most of the world was getting warmer. Nobody knew why that small area and a few others had been cooling. But around 1970, the cooling stopped, the glaciers started retreating, and the area joined the rest of the world's warming trend.
People who think this is something new to scientists simply haven't been paying attention. We do have much better data for the past 30 or 40 years, but there's enough data from previous centuries to make the story fairly clear. A lot of scientific work has been done examining the data and building theoretical models to explain the data. It's now difficult for scientists to go along with the desires of politicians to ignore the growing problem that's mostly of our own making. The "debate" now in scientific circles is over the fine details of what's happening to the planet.
I know of some companies who are still on Win2K. Eventually, they'll upgrade but on their timeline, not MS.
I recently worked for a big company that was finally biting the bullet and converting all their W95 machines to W98. I figure they'll start considering Vista in 2015 or so.
Somehow I doubt that this is an isolated case. Most business people understand that if you have something that's doing the job, you don't replace it with something unfamiliar.
My favorite dumb sentence was:
Urban tits consistently experimented with between one and five note calls, while those in forests close to the cities stuck to more normal combinations of two, three and four note tunes, the research found.
My first thought was that someone should explain to this writer that two, three and four are all between one and five.
You know your hardware is going to work with Microsoft.
... That's not my experience, or the experience of a lot of other people that I know.
Hmmm
Nope, it isn't right to litter or ...
... Lawlessness should never be tolerated. Or will you let someone kill one of your family members, ...
;-), and I don't think it should be illegal. But it is, and I carry it nonetheless. Should I receive an extreme punishment for my publicly-admitted lawless behavior?
;-)
Talk about a straw man.
Actually, it's the escalation of the comment to killing that's the "straw man". The parent's point was that "lawlessness" includes not just murder and other awful crimes, but also such things as littering. A blanket statement that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated" isn't just saying that murderers shoult be punished to the extreme; it's also suggesting that litterers should receive an extreme punishment. And this is the crux of the problem.
For example, like 80-90% of American men (depending on which survey you've read), I currently have a small "Swiss Army" pocketknife in my pocket. In most of the US, this is illegal, since it's a "concealed weapon". I carry it because, well, I use it several times per day. It's light, it's no effort to carry, and it's useful. I've never used it to harm a person (not even myself
And this isn't at all a facetious or extreme example. A curious PR campaign that appeared here (Massachusetts) last year was about the installation of metal detectors in the doors of courthouses around the state. Since this was done, they have reported over 10,000 confiscated weapons per year from people entering the courthouses. This has been bandied about a lot to "educate" people to the lawlessness of the low-life parts of our population who end up in the courthouses.
But a few months ago, I heard an interest radio interview. The radio guy was talking to a few law-enforcement people about the problem, and started probing to find out just what sort of weapons all these people were trying to sneak into the courthouses. The law guys obviously didn't want to give the details, but the radio guy finally got it out of them: Almost all the "weapons" were pocket knives, "of the Swiss Army type".
So yes, the law-enforcement people in this supposedly liberal state are making a big fuss over people carrying 10,000 weapons per year into the courthouses, and they're talking about small pocketknives. They mean people like me, and they do consider my pocketknife a "weapon". When you say that "Lawlessness should never be tolerated", in this state you're not just talking about murderers. You are also saying that I'm a lawless criminal and my small pocketknife is a criminal weapon that should not be tolerated.
This is really what the UK cameras are all about, too, when it comes down to it. Yes, we like the idea of murderers, robbers and rapists being caught and punished. But we're not too comfortable with the idea that, if we whip out a Swiss Army knife to slice open one of those damned "clamshell" packages, we risk arrest and fines or imprisonment for carrying a concealed weapon.
(And the small 1-inch blade on my knife is a good tool for that sort of awful packaging. It's the safest portable tool I know to attack them with. I do wish it were legal, but until the law changes, I'll probably continue to be a concealed-weapon-carrying criminal, as will most American men and around half the women.
The same sort of leakage can occur with a blog, on an ordinary personal page, or via a much-forwarded email message.
.microsoft.com address. Similar behavior is known within pretty much every release of MS's systems. If you're running Microsoft software, you should assume that anything on your computer is accessible to Microsoft any time you're connected to the Net. Not understanding this is simply naive.
;-)
Actually, it's quite a lot worse than that. It's quite easy for things on your computer that you consider "hidden" to become public knowledge.
For example, I've had many discussions with people over ways to hide things online, so that you can access them if you know the URL, but the URL can't be found by any method other than guessing. The best-know is hiding stuff behind an index.html file, but there are other methods.
A problem with this is illustrated by recent discussions of leakage via the google toolbar. This is a useful tool, and lots of people use it. But there have been many reports from people doing web testing (and thus watching the server logs) of an interesting phenomenon: If you have the google toolbar installed, and use your browser to access a "hidden" web page on your server, you will sometimes see a visit by Googlebot to that URL soon after, often within a minute or so. And soon after that, a google search will find things in your "hidden" page. Google "google toolbar googlebot" for more information.
What's going on is that the google toolbar is running as part of your browser, and it has access to the browser's data. This includes the URLs of all the pages you visit.
I mentioned this case first because it's not a Microsoft product, and I didn't want to distract people by starting off with MS bashing. But, of course, MS is notorious for leaks like this, and they're generally not accidents or bugs. When the very first MS internet capabilities came out, engineers quickly reported seeing unexpected modem activity when "nothing was accessing the Net". Investigations showed that the activity was due to listings of the contents of the disk being transmitted to a
In a similar vein, there was the fuss a couple of years back, when msn.com was caught extracting things (mostly images) from customers' "private" data (mostly email) and using them in advertising. The first reaction was for msn.com to point out that the TOS stated that any data on their servers was their property, to do with as they wish. They quickly realized that this was a major PR blunder, and publicly backed off. But again, if you think they aren't doing such things now, you're just naive. You should expect that any ISP will behave this way if they think they can get away with it.
We also had a lot of discussions here of the Sony CD rootkit. Who would have thought that just "playing" a CD would install spyware in your computer? Well, we now know, and some of us are a bit less naive.
Open-source software is much less likely to contain spyware, but it's not guaranteed. The mozilla-suite browsers are open-source, but have you actually dug through the code? If not, you could easily be victimized by any new release, or by any plugin that you install. Granted, there are lots of people on the lookout for spyware in the most-used open-source software, but they might not have spotted the more subtle problems. And the google toolbar shows how easy it can be to trick users into opening their system up to outside access. MS isn't nearly the only culprit here. (They're just the most brazen and unapologetic.
The important point is that we should stop listening to GW and his ilk when it comes to this subject.
Actually, that's exactly wrong. We should be listening to (and watching) them, analyzing their words and actions, and we writing about what's wrong. If we ignore them, they won't go away; they'll continue their ongoing efforts to make maximum short-term profit while slowly degrading our world. The only way we can successfully fight such things is through knowledge and understanding, not by ignorance.
Remember the old adage "Know your enemy". And, we might add, publicise your enemy's behavior.
Run Linux or OpenBSD or my favourite, FreeBSD?
...
Well, if it's like the earlier models, it's selling with pre-installed linux in Asia, but in the US you'll be able to buy it only with MS Windows installed, and you won't be able to find the drivers for the proprietary components that don't work with any of the online linux distros.
One of my questions would be whether it can handle languages like Mandarin and Arabic. Most computers sold in the US don't have software that do such things sanely, since everyone knows that Americans only understand English. Maybe what I should do is take a flight to Hong Kong and buy one there
Is this saying that if they can prove you had a shared folder and that folder contained copyrighted works, then you are guilty of copyright infringement? ... ...
That kind of scares me
As well it should. The obvious parallel that occurs to me: I have a lot of copyrighted works sitting on bookcases in my living room. Right at this moment, both our front and back doors are unlocked. (It's late Saturday morning here, and we've been going in and out of the house.)
If the prosecution's claim here is valid, then I'm also guilty of copyright infringement. After all, anyone could walk in off the street and take one of those copyrighted works off my shelf. They wouldn't even have to steal the book. There's a copier over in a corner, so they could copy a few pages, walk out with them, and I'd never know. Until someone sues me for "distribution", and uses my unlocked door as evidence of intent.
Now, obviously a computer directory full of files is physically different than a bookcase full of books with a copier in the corner. An unlocked door and a shared folder are physically different. But as far as the "intellectual contents", these two cases seem quite similar.
What's the legal difference here? Are there any lawyers here that can explain? Or am I taking a severe risk by not hiding my bookcases behind locked doors at all times?
Court documents say that Schuster ran a Google search over CWWIS' network using the following search terms: "how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ," "interference over wifi 2.4 Ghz," "wireless networks 2.4 interference," and "make device interfere wireless network." [TFA]
... A few months ago, I did a number of google searches with very similar terms. I was trying to find out how to diagnose and defend against some wireless interference. Not that I learned all that much. I suspect that you need some rather special equipment to locate the source of interference, but I don't know what that equipment might be.
Hmmm
Anyway, I wonder if I could be a suspect now because of those searches?
I have noticed in the past that if you ask questions about security, you're usually treated as if you were a potential security risk, not as someone trying to improve your own security.