My definition of terrorism is groups that kill solely out of hatred of other human beings.
That's not even close to any dictionary definition of "terrorism". Rather, it has names like "mass murder" and "genocide", which are different kinds of evil.
Most definitions of "terrorism" are variants on the original (French) definition: Attacking civilian noncombatants in order to put pressure on their government.
Of course, most governments carefully tweak the definition so that it doesn't apply when their own people do it.
For instance, one of the most clear-cut examples of (state-sponsored) terrorism in recent years went by the name "shock and awe". That was a clear statement that the perpetrators' intent was to instill terror in the population, in order to have an effect on the government. You might remember who it was that used that slogan. This point may have been missed by American media, but it did have a strong effect on the victims of the shock-and-awe campaign: It pushed many of them into the newly-formed resistance that has been so much in the news lately.
In any case, using your own idiosyncratic definition of words is not a good thing if you're trying to communicate. But I suppose it's good if you're trying to confuse the discussion.
Companies are afraid of what their employees might say over a phone,...
But I wonder: Of these companies that are trying to block Skype for security reasons, how many are also blocking outside phone calls? I've never seen a company do that.
I suspect that it's the old "There's a computer involved; we must throw out everything we know and relearn everything from scratch." I hope nobody tells them that their cell phones contain a computer. If they find out, they'll have to block cell phone access, too.
People should NEVER, EVER, EVER, have to prove their innocence! That is not the way laws are supposed to work! Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be how the law works, even for people who work for comporations!
The thing is, MS can either - pay up - pull out of Europe
Actually, there's a third option, the one that they used to get the US Justice Dept to cave and settle for a slap on Microsoft's wrist back in 2001. This amount of money gives them a strong incentive to spend a lesser amount to bribe the right politicians.
Remember that in the 2000 US election, Microsoft suddenly became one of the largest campaign contributors, to both major parties, but primarily to Republicans. Then, after the Bush crowd took power, the Justice Dept's lawsuit was settled on terms very advantageous to Microsoft. Sheer coincidence, of course.;-)
For much less than a billion dollars, they could also make "contributions" to enough campaign coffers in Europe to ensure that they never have to actually pay the amount of this fine. A billion dollars can buy you a lot of politicians.
Europe is somewhat more picky about corporate contributions, and has actually fined companies for bribery. But if you think there aren't ways of hiding it, you're pretty naive. And a billion dollars is a good motivator, even to Microsoft.
It's not hard to find examples where doctors have been wrong about the safety of treatments in the past, so we know they are not infallible. The Bible on the other hand...
One of the main reason that doctors and others in the scientific branch of medicine have more credibility is that so many of them are open and factual about their limits and failures. Granted, a lot of practicing doctors do pretend to be gods, but the medical field as a whole is fairly open about their failures.
Religious people, OTOH, tend to be perfect and never admit that their belief system can fail.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to understand why you should trust one of these groups more than the other.
Of course, we also have some factual history: For thousands of years, the religious folks claimed that their god/prophet/saint/whoever could heal diseases, but all those diseases were still with us and killing us. Nearly every generation had a plague that wiped them out in huge numbers. Then the scientists came along, and in a mere few centuries, some diseases have been eradicated, others will be as soon as a few religious strongholds are treated, and others have been greatly reduced. No religious healers have even accomplished anything like that.
Scientific medicine's open reporting and discussion of results (good and bad) have a lot to do with this. In particular, honesty about failures, with followup studies, have led to a great many successes.
This has always seemed like a good idea to me. Similarly the suggestion that people with racist ideologies should be denied the medical results of research done by members of the groups that they don't like. It could be a bit difficult to actually implement these in any formal manner, though. How do you get people to talk honestly about their moral/social ideas when they know that their medical treatment may depend on their answers?
Examined scientifically, human life begins when you travel down the birth canal, pop-out, grab your first breath and become conscious for the first time.
Actually, a better characterization of the scientific answer to the question of when "life" begins is that it doesn't. Many school texts even go into the research in the 18th and 19th centuries, in which flasks of sterile nutrients were watched closely, and nothing living ever appeared. After much research, scientists concluded that, however life may have arisen from non-living matter in the past, it apparently no longer does so on our Earth. Rather, life only appears as the offspring of earlier life. At no point in the process does life appear from non-living material.
In the human case, a scientist would simply observe that our ova and sperm are living, metabolizing, and "human" according to any sensible definition of life. Granted, without the obvious fusion taking place, they won't live for long, but that's also true on a somewhat larger scale for an adult human.
Thus "When does human life begin?" isn't a scientific question at all, it's a religious and legal question. Theologians and lawyers can and do define "human life" in ways that there is a starting point such as conception, "quickening", day 40, birth, or whenever. These may well be meaningful and useful definitions for religious or legal purposes. But scientifically, none of these are the start of life, since the precursor was also alive and was human (as can be verified now with a DNA test).
So if you want to determine when a human life begins, you shouldn't ask scientists. If they think about it, they'll probably just tell you "It doesn't; there's no point in the cycle where the earlier stage wasn't alive and human but the next stage is. Spontaneous generation was tested and rejected several centuries ago."
(There's also an old Jewish joke to the effect that a human life begins when the fetus gets its law or medical degree.;-)
Some time last year, I saw the same claim made for Windows Vista.
Of course, since then, they've cut back on major new features. So maybe now it isn't the most complex thing that humans have ever built.
But there are many ways to define complexity. Someone at MS (or one of their detractors) is probably right now working on a definition that will restore the claim.
hat, am I supposed to just turn off security (i.e. switch to WEP) to get online with Linux?
Heh. As part of getting a Mac Powerbook (now two; my wife loves hers and hates her old Windows box;-), I got an Airport. It works pretty well with the Macs, aside from the occasional 15-20 minute periods where one or the other will see no signal and nothing seems to diagnose the problem. But that's not my topic.
My topic is that we've occasionally had visitors with wireless Windows and/or linux laptops. The only way we've found to make the Airport available to them is to turn off its security. I've asked on a couple of fora, and got lots of RTFM-type answers, but we've never been able to make it work. One visitor managed to connect a Palm device that had wifi, by finding some long hex string in the Mac airport config stuff and laboriously copying it to a mysterious place in the Palm gadget. I didn't learn enough from that to replicate it with other equipment, so other than that one-time demo of possibility, the way to make non-Apple stuff talk to an Airport seems to be to open it up by turning off its security. Then it Just Works, as they say.
Now I expect to see a few replies telling me what an idiot I am, and how easy it is, but not imparting enough information that an idiot like me can actually make it work.
I've also worked on a project where I collected info about various wireless "solutions", and one of the results was to rule out Apple's networking. The primary reason was the utter lack of cooperation from their support people when they learned that I have a mixed-vendor home system. They would only deal with Apple equipment, and even went so far as to demand that I shut down my linux gateway and plug the Airport into the internet modem, or they couldn't help me. Reporting such things to my bosses quickly eliminated Apple as a contender. (Maybe the CS guys would have been more cooperative if I'd been calling from work. But we wanted to know the general quality of their support, and we felt it was better to test them on a small system first. They flunked that test badly. If they can't solve problems in a small setup with a handful of machines, how can you trust them with a bigger corporate network?;-)
Since when have nerds been a "canary in a coal mine" for any kind of technology? Nerds that I know have been into : laserdisk, betamax, etc.... I'd say that what nerds choose in terms of consuming is generally the exact opposite of what the general public does.
Yup. In reality, as many people have observed, since at least the mid-1960s there have been two distinct computer markets, the "tech" and the "non-tech" markets. These have rarely had any connection. Different things are successful in each market, and success in one has little to do with success in the other.
The tech market has always bought based on quality (and functionality for specific tasks). The non-tech market doesn't do this for the simple reason that it can't, so it buys the most heavily-advertised products. That is, they buy IBM and Microsoft, because those companies have ad budgets greater than the total of the ad budgets of all their competitors combined. Techies ridicule this, because people are buying crap, but such ridicule is only effective with people who have a way of distinguishing crap from non-crap, i.e., other techies.
And, yes, "techie" has pretty low entry qualifications. One is that if you have the slightest clue what an "operating system" is, you're a techie. This is why linux is pretty much invisible to non-techies. It's an operating system, and they don't buy operating systems; they buy computers. They can no more decide on an operating system when they buy a computer than they can decide on a transmission or differential when they buy a car. You have to know what something is before you can base purchase decisions on it.
OK; it probably doesn't work on my PB. I don't see that choice at all, just things labelled "Clicking", "Dragging", and "Drag Lock (tap again to release), all under the title "Trackpad Gestures:". I don't really see what those are. Maybe I'll check one of them, and see if I can spot any changes in the way that clicking works.
I've seen mention of "trackpad gestures", but I have no idea what that could mean. You can't exactly pick up the trackpad and swing it around. So far, I've only seen vague mentions, but no pointers to documentation or even details of what it's all about. Discovering such things can be time consuming...
So where can I find documentation on this allegedly marvelous two-finger trackpad click thingy? I've seen a number of references to it, and done a bit of googling and poking around on apple.com, but I haven't yet found a coherent description of what it does or how to enable it (just that I have to somehow enable it). I've seen references to a mouse preference pane; the only one I know of is in the System Preferences, and nothing there seems at all relevant.
I have a Powerbook G4, with the latest updates installed just yesterday. (Which again required killing all my running apps and rebooting; grrr...;-)
My main gripe after using this PB for a few years is the difficulty of discovering how a lot of things work. Most replies seem to be of the "Don't worry your little head abut it; it Just Works" form, which isn't all that helpful if something Just Doesn't Work, or if you don't even have a clue that something is possible. I also follow a number of Mac-related newsgroups, which are useful, but I've also been impressed by how few questions actually get answered. When you're looking for practical answers, a "Don't worry, be happy" culture can be rather unsatisfying.
Yeah, except in the printing industry, where fixed-width fonts are nearly unknown. If you open random printed books, you'll find indents that range from 2 to 6 ens, depending entirely on the whims of the publisher.
The computer industry is a bit weird in its use of fixed-width fonts, which publishers usually find unaesthetic, but which are very useful to us computer geeks. But we do have word processor software that also default to variable-width fonts and indent by distance rather than chars. And CSS lets you define indentation by points or cm or other distance measures.
We should probably face a future in which most software also uses variable-width fonts, and the debate over how many characters to indent will be baffling to most users, because it sounds so nonsensical.
Wrong. A TAB represents 1-N spaces, depending on the current column, where N is the tab setting. I've never seen a TAB interpreted as a fixed number of spaces, and I've seen a lot of output devices in the 40 or so years I've been playing with computers. TABs move the output position to the next tab stop, not some fixed number of spaces.
Or it was sent via a link that uses the famous Avian Carrier Protocol.
One problem with that protocol is that in times of heavy traffic, there can be long delays as the pigeons are trucked back to the other end of the link to pick up their next packet. So far, nobody has bred a full-duplex pigeon that will fly in both directions.
Well, yeah; but why do people seem so enamored of the Y and mitochondrial chromosomes? These don't contain all that much DNA. Chromosome 1 is a lot larger, and would tell you a lot more.
Also, the longer chromosomes are more likely to contain mixed ancestry info due to crossovers. Thus, you might find that one of your chromosome 3s has a crossover, with markers on one end for ancestors in the mountains of southern Poland, and markers on the other end for Tuscany. That would be every bit as interesting and informative as the Y and mitochrondial markers.
Maybe people are fixating on the Y and mitochondrial chromosomes because they're small and easier to work with. But they don't contain much information. Eventually, I'd think we'd want to do test all the chromosomes, to see all the rest of the information. Otherwise you're sorta like the old joke about the guy looking for something under a street light, because the light is better there.
In my case, I have an interesting ancestor who's not in my maternal or paternal line. She's my father's father's mother, who wouldn't have passed me either a Y chromosome or any mitochondria. But she's my only known non-European ancestor, which is interesting in itself, and I know of a minor medical condition (a beneficial one) that almost certainly came from her.
It doesn't seem sensible to me to ignore most of your ancestry, and look only at the paternal and maternal lines. And if you're trying to trace migrations, I'd think you'd want information about all of each person's ancestors. They all came from somewhere.
The problem is now that thousands of people who read the summary without even thinking about it will now be running around telling all their friend "everyone's got a common ancestor who lived in 500BC".
Maybe, but the rest of the 6 billion or so humans won't think about it, because they won't ever hear about it.;-)
Similarly, a while ago (the 70s IIRC), some demographers calculated that there was about a 50% possibility that there was a modern European who wasn't a descendent of Charlemagne. Now, that fellow did get around, and was known to have left behind offspring all over the map. But it's also a case vaguely like what the article is describing. Of course, it only applies to Europe, which is pretty well mixed, and only goes back about 1200 years.
Others have calculated that all modern Europeans are probably descendants of every Roman citizen who produced descendants. This gives another sort of estimate of the mixing time for that population.
Of course, it doesn't say much about remote, isolated populations. There may not be very many Native Americans, Polynesians or Aussie Aborigines who are descendants of Charlemagne. There's a lot of non-randomness about how humans interbreed, so assuming uniform mixing of populations won't necessarily give you results close to reality.
I have always expected that there would be a movement where a man and woman get married and pick a new family name.
I know a number of couples who have done this. Actually, in each case they combined their original names in some clever way to make a combinatin that they liked.
I've heard a number of lawyers explain that in all US states except Louisianna, the laws about names go back to English Common Law, where the rule was that you can use any name you like, as long as it isn't fraudulent. You can't pick a famous name and pretend to be that person, and you can't change your name to escape debts or prosecution. But if your name change (as in a marriage) is published in the official records, that constitutes public notice and you can't be charged with fraud after the change is officially published. They usually say this to explain why there's no legal problem with a woman keeping her original name after marriage. But I've also heard this used to explain why a couple that makes up a new family name and writes it on their marriage registration is fully within their rights, regardless of what ideas others may have on such things. And, historically speaking, neither practice is especially new or unusual in the English-speaking parts of the world.
Funny story: One such couple is two women who recently married here in Massachusetts, where it has been legal for a few years (and so far it hasn't destroyed any mixed-sex marriages that anyone knows of, even if a lot of men think they're both very attractive women;-). They recently renewed their passports, and sent in requests for a name change to their new combined last name. One was accepted (because they are legally married), one was rejected (because US federal law doesn't recognize same-sex marriage). Two different bureaucrats, two different decisions in exactly the same case.
Of course, having a different name on your passport and other ids isn't at all unusual. Newly-married women routinely find themselves in this situation, and it doesn't seriously interfere with travelling. This couple mostly think it's funny. "Guess what those idiots in the passport office just did."
What I'm looking forward to is the fun of watching US law adapt to the slowly-growing Muslim population. I can see a couple going off to Morrocco or Indonesia on vacation and coming home with a new wife in the family. I wouldn't be surprised if this has happened already, but they kept it quiet and didn't try to get official papers changed. But it's just a matter of time, and it'll be fun to follow the outrage and consternation from the bigot crowd, while the lawyers calmly ask what laws have been broken...
There's an easy solution. Assume that Mrs. Smith marries Mr. Jones. They take the family name Jones-Smith. Their daughters, upon marrying, drop "Jones" (the father's name). Their sons, upon marrying, drop "Smith" (the mother's name). So if Ms. Jones-Smith marries Mr. Jefferson-Clark, they couple takes the name Jefferson-Smith. A person would then share a name with their father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc, as well as their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc.
You've described the essence of the traditional naming scheme in Iberia (Spain, Portugal). There's inconsistency about whether the paternal name comes first or last. The upper classes often preserve more than just two names, and sometimes tack on "de" and a place name. Most people just use two family names, though, which probably saves them a lot of writing over a lifetime.
Of course, in most of Europe, family names often only go back a century or two, before which people had just a given name that could be augmented by a profession or place of origin or a descriptive term. Or just "'s son", which is often specific enough in a typical village. In Iceland, they still don't use family names, just patronymics.
I know a number of people from Scandinavia who have a specific last name because their parents or grandparents bought a farm, and they adopted the farm's name (whose origin is often lost to history).
A similar thing was done by the UK's royal family. They adopted the family name Windsor in 1917 to dissociate themselves from their German ancestors. They were at war with Germany, and wanted to sound English. Windsor was, of course, the name of one of their castles. A quick google for "Windsor royal family name" gets nearly 3 million hits, so you can easily read lots of takes on this particular family name.
My favorite name from my family tree is Cameron, which is a simplified spelling of a Scots Gaelic phrase meaning "broken nose". It seems there was this particularly belligerent fellow who was a clan leader, and a lot of his relatives decided to adopt that insult as their name, as a way of thumbing their noses at the taunters.
9. What tests do you perform? We will be performing ONE OF two tests for each public participant.
Males: Y-DNA test. This test helps us to identify deep ancestral geographic origins on the direct paternal line.
Females: Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This tests the mtDNA of females to help identify the ancestral migratory origins of your direct maternal line.
So they will ignore all of the autosomes, and test only the tiny Y chromosome for males. Their results will only tell you about your purely paternal line (if you're male) or your purely maternal line (if you're female).
My parents didn't talk about the family tree much, but I already know a lot more than what this study would tell me. Thus, being male, they won't tell me anything about either of my grandmothers, who both spoke French (from Quebec and France).
I wonder if I'm the only one who finds this a major disappointment. They could be extracting a lot more information from the DNA of the participants by looking for markers in the other 99% of their DNA.
People, nowadays, have such a paranoid lynch mob mentality, it is getting scary.
So how's that anything new? Even the slightest investigation shows that we've always had people like that. The only thing special here is that/. mentioned it, so we're discussing it.
Hereabouts (Boston), we have the documented Salem incident as a reminder. A few teenage kids made up a tall tale, and rather than a serious investigation, you had the authorities rounding up the innocent victims and killing them in public spectacles; the kids themselves were horrified at the whole thing but didn't have the nerve to admit publicly that it was just a prank.
Of course, this case is exacerbated by what's now a well-known phenomenon: As soon as the word "computer" is uttered, all precedent and history is thrown out the window, and people have to relearn from scratch the lessons they've known for millenia.
Is the government promoting the hysteria in order to gain more power?
Well, of course they are. That's one of the oldest tricks in the books. The Bush gang plays it to the hilt. But it's hard to find an administration anywhere that doesn't do this any time they think they can get away with it. For that matter, it's also one of the main techiques of marketers: Remind the marks (aka customers or citizens) of a scary, fuzzily-defined problem, and present your product as a solution.
As long as people react as they have to this site, we can trust that people who want power will take advantage of the reaction in the obvious way.
... but [people] can't unknowingly violate copyright.
They certainly can. Musicians do it all the time. You think you've come up with a new tune, but it's actually very close to some tune you heard years ago.
The poster boy for this was George Harrison, who learned about it the hard way. Nobody really thought that his "My Sweet Lord" was a conscious rip-off of "He's So Fine", but even a casual listen tells you that they're the same tune with different words. It can be very difficult for a musician to discover such a copyright violation, because there's no place you can find out what tunes are copyrighted. All you can do is write your music, perform it, then wait to see whether anyone sues you.
Writers haven't been hit by this quite as hard, because it's more difficult to accidentally produce an exact copy of words you heard years ago. Usually you reconstruct the words from the ideas that you've internalized, and this usually produces a paraphrase in your own words. But a few writers have unknowingly produced someone else's wording.
And the really bad case is with Trademark, where you can violate someone else's right even if it's your own name and used it first. The funny case was Mike Rowe's software firm. But before that, there was the fellow in California named Newton who had his own firm and web site years before Apple started selling a computer called Newton and sued him for violating their trade mark. And, of course, there are several stories of restaurants owned by people named McDonald who lost their right to their own name after someone (who wasn't even named McDonald) opened a chain by the same name that grew big enough to sue the older restaurants into oblivion.
[T]his is a classic example of the old military maxim of "amateurs discuss strategy; experts discuss logistics". A "great idea" is only a tactic. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Any fool can come up with a great idea. The real work is successfully marshalling the resources needed to bring the idea to fruition.
Indeed. So how about we propose attacking the major problem: When we're writing code that to us is original, how can we check it against the body of patents to see if there's a match? I'm not talking about us programmers trying to decrypt legalese; I'm talking about a repository of patented code, with a web site that will compare a chunk of submitted code and tell you whether there's a close match.
I've been involved for a while in the comparable problem with music: I'm thinking of a tune that I'd like to play (and perhaps record)? Is it a copyrighted tune? How can I find out whether someone owns the tune, and if so, how do I contact them and ask permission?
I've asked this question to reps of a number of music publishers, and the answer I've got is that I should buy a copy of everything they've published and search through it all for the tune. They apparently are serious about this. There is a slightly better solution in the US: Go to the Library of Congress and spend several years searching through their archives, comparing every piece of music with the tune in your head.
The online search sites aren't much help. There's not much published music online, and what is, is mostly in forms like PDF or Sibelius or other graphical formats. Extracting musical information from this is an intractable problem, and to my knowledge, nobody has even seriously tackled it. MIDI is slightly better, but still intractable for this purpose.
There was a plain-text music notation developed about 15 years ago, and there's a small body of music in this form online. (I hope Chris forgives me for the slashdotting.;-) It is easily parsed by software and the musical information can be extracted. There is a proposal that an online archive of all known music be created in this form. Some partly-successful software exists for comparing chunks of music in this form and calculating a "distance" between them.
Software can potentially be approached the same way. But it's not trivial. Attempting to handle chunks of code in arbitrary programming languages (including some not invented yet) is not practical; we'd need a way of converting code into an "archive" form in a standard archival language. And that language would have to be sufficiently tractable that such a translation would be feasible (i.e., not PL/I or a primitive Turing machine's code or Intercal or Brainf**k;-)
It's hard to imagine any commercial vendor cooperating willingly with such an effort. But it could be interesting to think of the impact of, say, a legal proceding that decided that since your claimed patent (or copyright) isn't in the archive, you can't sue someone for a violation. After all, you knowingly withheld the code from programmers who were diligently trying to find your patent and pay you for a license.
It's not clear this can ever work with music, either. 99% of the online music in abc form is the public-domain "trad" stuff, because copyright owners usually don't permit putting their music online in a computer-readable form. But even this little turns out to be useful. We've already seen cases where a publisher sends a C&D letter to someone, claiming to own a tune, and gets the reply "That tune was published by So-and-so in London in 1723. How can you claim to own it?" The publisher slinks off and is never heard from again (until they try the same fraud with someone else).
The bottom line in both cases is that we have no practical way that a creator can determine whether something they've created is legally owned by someone else due to copyright or patent. But we do potentially have solutions to thi
One of the fun bits here is that the judge made her view of SCO's charges (and evidence) clear when she wrote:
"Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus, they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'its in there somewhere, you figure it out.'"
The Groklaw summary also point out that she has gone to great pains to "cross every t and dot every i" in her writings, apparently to get the message through to SCO that an appeal is pointless because it will simply be rejected by any higher court.
Slashdot Mirror
My definition of terrorism is groups that kill solely out of hatred of other human beings.
That's not even close to any dictionary definition of "terrorism". Rather, it has names like "mass murder" and "genocide", which are different kinds of evil.
Most definitions of "terrorism" are variants on the original (French) definition: Attacking civilian noncombatants in order to put pressure on their government.
Of course, most governments carefully tweak the definition so that it doesn't apply when their own people do it.
For instance, one of the most clear-cut examples of (state-sponsored) terrorism in recent years went by the name "shock and awe". That was a clear statement that the perpetrators' intent was to instill terror in the population, in order to have an effect on the government. You might remember who it was that used that slogan. This point may have been missed by American media, but it did have a strong effect on the victims of the shock-and-awe campaign: It pushed many of them into the newly-formed resistance that has been so much in the news lately.
In any case, using your own idiosyncratic definition of words is not a good thing if you're trying to communicate. But I suppose it's good if you're trying to confuse the discussion.
Companies are afraid of what their employees might say over a phone, ...
But I wonder: Of these companies that are trying to block Skype for security reasons, how many are also blocking outside phone calls? I've never seen a company do that.
I suspect that it's the old "There's a computer involved; we must throw out everything we know and relearn everything from scratch." I hope nobody tells them that their cell phones contain a computer. If they find out, they'll have to block cell phone access, too.
People should NEVER, EVER, EVER, have to prove their innocence! That is not the way laws are supposed to work! Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be how the law works, even for people who work for comporations!
You must be new to this planet.
The thing is, MS can either
;-)
- pay up
- pull out of Europe
Actually, there's a third option, the one that they used to get the US Justice Dept to cave and settle for a slap on Microsoft's wrist back in 2001. This amount of money gives them a strong incentive to spend a lesser amount to bribe the right politicians.
Remember that in the 2000 US election, Microsoft suddenly became one of the largest campaign contributors, to both major parties, but primarily to Republicans. Then, after the Bush crowd took power, the Justice Dept's lawsuit was settled on terms very advantageous to Microsoft. Sheer coincidence, of course.
For much less than a billion dollars, they could also make "contributions" to enough campaign coffers in Europe to ensure that they never have to actually pay the amount of this fine. A billion dollars can buy you a lot of politicians.
Europe is somewhat more picky about corporate contributions, and has actually fined companies for bribery. But if you think there aren't ways of hiding it, you're pretty naive. And a billion dollars is a good motivator, even to Microsoft.
It's not hard to find examples where doctors have been wrong about the safety of treatments in the past, so we know they are not infallible. The Bible on the other hand...
One of the main reason that doctors and others in the scientific branch of medicine have more credibility is that so many of them are open and factual about their limits and failures. Granted, a lot of practicing doctors do pretend to be gods, but the medical field as a whole is fairly open about their failures.
Religious people, OTOH, tend to be perfect and never admit that their belief system can fail.
It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to understand why you should trust one of these groups more than the other.
Of course, we also have some factual history: For thousands of years, the religious folks claimed that their god/prophet/saint/whoever could heal diseases, but all those diseases were still with us and killing us. Nearly every generation had a plague that wiped them out in huge numbers. Then the scientists came along, and in a mere few centuries, some diseases have been eradicated, others will be as soon as a few religious strongholds are treated, and others have been greatly reduced. No religious healers have even accomplished anything like that.
Scientific medicine's open reporting and discussion of results (good and bad) have a lot to do with this. In particular, honesty about failures, with followup studies, have led to a great many successes.
Is the [stem-cell issue] going to be a problem for the religious types who fret about these things?
Only until their own mortality comes into question.
There was a widely-copied Dooonesbury strip on this topic a while back.
This has always seemed like a good idea to me. Similarly the suggestion that people with racist ideologies should be denied the medical results of research done by members of the groups that they don't like. It could be a bit difficult to actually implement these in any formal manner, though. How do you get people to talk honestly about their moral/social ideas when they know that their medical treatment may depend on their answers?
Examined scientifically, human life begins when you travel down the birth canal, pop-out, grab your first breath and become conscious for the first time.
;-)
Actually, a better characterization of the scientific answer to the question of when "life" begins is that it doesn't. Many school texts even go into the research in the 18th and 19th centuries, in which flasks of sterile nutrients were watched closely, and nothing living ever appeared. After much research, scientists concluded that, however life may have arisen from non-living matter in the past, it apparently no longer does so on our Earth. Rather, life only appears as the offspring of earlier life. At no point in the process does life appear from non-living material.
In the human case, a scientist would simply observe that our ova and sperm are living, metabolizing, and "human" according to any sensible definition of life. Granted, without the obvious fusion taking place, they won't live for long, but that's also true on a somewhat larger scale for an adult human.
Thus "When does human life begin?" isn't a scientific question at all, it's a religious and legal question. Theologians and lawyers can and do define "human life" in ways that there is a starting point such as conception, "quickening", day 40, birth, or whenever. These may well be meaningful and useful definitions for religious or legal purposes. But scientifically, none of these are the start of life, since the precursor was also alive and was human (as can be verified now with a DNA test).
So if you want to determine when a human life begins, you shouldn't ask scientists. If they think about it, they'll probably just tell you "It doesn't; there's no point in the cycle where the earlier stage wasn't alive and human but the next stage is. Spontaneous generation was tested and rejected several centuries ago."
(There's also an old Jewish joke to the effect that a human life begins when the fetus gets its law or medical degree.
Some time last year, I saw the same claim made for Windows Vista.
Of course, since then, they've cut back on major new features. So maybe now it isn't the most complex thing that humans have ever built.
But there are many ways to define complexity. Someone at MS (or one of their detractors) is probably right now working on a definition that will restore the claim.
hat, am I supposed to just turn off security (i.e. switch to WEP) to get online with Linux?
;-), I got an Airport. It works pretty well with the Macs, aside from the occasional 15-20 minute periods where one or the other will see no signal and nothing seems to diagnose the problem. But that's not my topic.
;-)
Heh. As part of getting a Mac Powerbook (now two; my wife loves hers and hates her old Windows box
My topic is that we've occasionally had visitors with wireless Windows and/or linux laptops. The only way we've found to make the Airport available to them is to turn off its security. I've asked on a couple of fora, and got lots of RTFM-type answers, but we've never been able to make it work. One visitor managed to connect a Palm device that had wifi, by finding some long hex string in the Mac airport config stuff and laboriously copying it to a mysterious place in the Palm gadget. I didn't learn enough from that to replicate it with other equipment, so other than that one-time demo of possibility, the way to make non-Apple stuff talk to an Airport seems to be to open it up by turning off its security. Then it Just Works, as they say.
Now I expect to see a few replies telling me what an idiot I am, and how easy it is, but not imparting enough information that an idiot like me can actually make it work.
I've also worked on a project where I collected info about various wireless "solutions", and one of the results was to rule out Apple's networking. The primary reason was the utter lack of cooperation from their support people when they learned that I have a mixed-vendor home system. They would only deal with Apple equipment, and even went so far as to demand that I shut down my linux gateway and plug the Airport into the internet modem, or they couldn't help me. Reporting such things to my bosses quickly eliminated Apple as a contender. (Maybe the CS guys would have been more cooperative if I'd been calling from work. But we wanted to know the general quality of their support, and we felt it was better to test them on a small system first. They flunked that test badly. If they can't solve problems in a small setup with a handful of machines, how can you trust them with a bigger corporate network?
Since when have nerds been a "canary in a coal mine" for any kind of technology? Nerds that I know have been into : laserdisk, betamax, etc. ... I'd say that what nerds choose in terms of consuming is generally the exact opposite of what the general public does.
Yup. In reality, as many people have observed, since at least the mid-1960s there have been two distinct computer markets, the "tech" and the "non-tech" markets. These have rarely had any connection. Different things are successful in each market, and success in one has little to do with success in the other.
The tech market has always bought based on quality (and functionality for specific tasks). The non-tech market doesn't do this for the simple reason that it can't, so it buys the most heavily-advertised products. That is, they buy IBM and Microsoft, because those companies have ad budgets greater than the total of the ad budgets of all their competitors combined. Techies ridicule this, because people are buying crap, but such ridicule is only effective with people who have a way of distinguishing crap from non-crap, i.e., other techies.
And, yes, "techie" has pretty low entry qualifications. One is that if you have the slightest clue what an "operating system" is, you're a techie. This is why linux is pretty much invisible to non-techies. It's an operating system, and they don't buy operating systems; they buy computers. They can no more decide on an operating system when they buy a computer than they can decide on a transmission or differential when they buy a car. You have to know what something is before you can base purchase decisions on it.
OK; it probably doesn't work on my PB. I don't see that choice at all, just things labelled "Clicking", "Dragging", and "Drag Lock (tap again to release), all under the title "Trackpad Gestures:". I don't really see what those are. Maybe I'll check one of them, and see if I can spot any changes in the way that clicking works.
...
I've seen mention of "trackpad gestures", but I have no idea what that could mean. You can't exactly pick up the trackpad and swing it around. So far, I've only seen vague mentions, but no pointers to documentation or even details of what it's all about. Discovering such things can be time consuming
So where can I find documentation on this allegedly marvelous two-finger trackpad click thingy? I've seen a number of references to it, and done a bit of googling and poking around on apple.com, but I haven't yet found a coherent description of what it does or how to enable it (just that I have to somehow enable it). I've seen references to a mouse preference pane; the only one I know of is in the System Preferences, and nothing there seems at all relevant.
... ;-)
I have a Powerbook G4, with the latest updates installed just yesterday. (Which again required killing all my running apps and rebooting; grrr
My main gripe after using this PB for a few years is the difficulty of discovering how a lot of things work. Most replies seem to be of the "Don't worry your little head abut it; it Just Works" form, which isn't all that helpful if something Just Doesn't Work, or if you don't even have a clue that something is possible. I also follow a number of Mac-related newsgroups, which are useful, but I've also been impressed by how few questions actually get answered. When you're looking for practical answers, a "Don't worry, be happy" culture can be rather unsatisfying.
Yeah, except in the printing industry, where fixed-width fonts are nearly unknown. If you open random printed books, you'll find indents that range from 2 to 6 ens, depending entirely on the whims of the publisher.
The computer industry is a bit weird in its use of fixed-width fonts, which publishers usually find unaesthetic, but which are very useful to us computer geeks. But we do have word processor software that also default to variable-width fonts and indent by distance rather than chars. And CSS lets you define indentation by points or cm or other distance measures.
We should probably face a future in which most software also uses variable-width fonts, and the debate over how many characters to indent will be baffling to most users, because it sounds so nonsensical.
Wrong. A TAB represents 1-N spaces, depending on the current column, where N is the tab setting. I've never seen a TAB interpreted as a fixed number of spaces, and I've seen a lot of output devices in the 40 or so years I've been playing with computers. TABs move the output position to the next tab stop, not some fixed number of spaces.
My bible says it is morally wrong to use Vi.
Well, of course it is. VI is Latin for 6, which is 1/3 of 666, and we know what that stands for.
As further proof, check vi's origins. It came from Berkeley, and their BSD system has a little d[a]emon as a symbol. Spawn of Satan, QED.
Or it was sent via a link that uses the famous Avian Carrier Protocol.
One problem with that protocol is that in times of heavy traffic, there can be long delays as the pigeons are trucked back to the other end of the link to pick up their next packet. So far, nobody has bred a full-duplex pigeon that will fly in both directions.
Well, yeah; but why do people seem so enamored of the Y and mitochondrial chromosomes? These don't contain all that much DNA. Chromosome 1 is a lot larger, and would tell you a lot more.
Also, the longer chromosomes are more likely to contain mixed ancestry info due to crossovers. Thus, you might find that one of your chromosome 3s has a crossover, with markers on one end for ancestors in the mountains of southern Poland, and markers on the other end for Tuscany. That would be every bit as interesting and informative as the Y and mitochrondial markers.
Maybe people are fixating on the Y and mitochondrial chromosomes because they're small and easier to work with. But they don't contain much information. Eventually, I'd think we'd want to do test all the chromosomes, to see all the rest of the information. Otherwise you're sorta like the old joke about the guy looking for something under a street light, because the light is better there.
In my case, I have an interesting ancestor who's not in my maternal or paternal line. She's my father's father's mother, who wouldn't have passed me either a Y chromosome or any mitochondria. But she's my only known non-European ancestor, which is interesting in itself, and I know of a minor medical condition (a beneficial one) that almost certainly came from her.
It doesn't seem sensible to me to ignore most of your ancestry, and look only at the paternal and maternal lines. And if you're trying to trace migrations, I'd think you'd want information about all of each person's ancestors. They all came from somewhere.
The problem is now that thousands of people who read the summary without even thinking about it will now be running around telling all their friend "everyone's got a common ancestor who lived in 500BC".
;-)
Maybe, but the rest of the 6 billion or so humans won't think about it, because they won't ever hear about it.
Similarly, a while ago (the 70s IIRC), some demographers calculated that there was about a 50% possibility that there was a modern European who wasn't a descendent of Charlemagne. Now, that fellow did get around, and was known to have left behind offspring all over the map. But it's also a case vaguely like what the article is describing. Of course, it only applies to Europe, which is pretty well mixed, and only goes back about 1200 years.
Others have calculated that all modern Europeans are probably descendants of every Roman citizen who produced descendants. This gives another sort of estimate of the mixing time for that population.
Of course, it doesn't say much about remote, isolated populations. There may not be very many Native Americans, Polynesians or Aussie Aborigines who are descendants of Charlemagne. There's a lot of non-randomness about how humans interbreed, so assuming uniform mixing of populations won't necessarily give you results close to reality.
I have always expected that there would be a movement where a man and woman get married and pick a new family name.
;-). They recently renewed their passports, and sent in requests for a name change to their new combined last name. One was accepted (because they are legally married), one was rejected (because US federal law doesn't recognize same-sex marriage). Two different bureaucrats, two different decisions in exactly the same case.
...
I know a number of couples who have done this. Actually, in each case they combined their original names in some clever way to make a combinatin that they liked.
I've heard a number of lawyers explain that in all US states except Louisianna, the laws about names go back to English Common Law, where the rule was that you can use any name you like, as long as it isn't fraudulent. You can't pick a famous name and pretend to be that person, and you can't change your name to escape debts or prosecution. But if your name change (as in a marriage) is published in the official records, that constitutes public notice and you can't be charged with fraud after the change is officially published. They usually say this to explain why there's no legal problem with a woman keeping her original name after marriage. But I've also heard this used to explain why a couple that makes up a new family name and writes it on their marriage registration is fully within their rights, regardless of what ideas others may have on such things. And, historically speaking, neither practice is especially new or unusual in the English-speaking parts of the world.
Funny story: One such couple is two women who recently married here in Massachusetts, where it has been legal for a few years (and so far it hasn't destroyed any mixed-sex marriages that anyone knows of, even if a lot of men think they're both very attractive women
Of course, having a different name on your passport and other ids isn't at all unusual. Newly-married women routinely find themselves in this situation, and it doesn't seriously interfere with travelling. This couple mostly think it's funny. "Guess what those idiots in the passport office just did."
What I'm looking forward to is the fun of watching US law adapt to the slowly-growing Muslim population. I can see a couple going off to Morrocco or Indonesia on vacation and coming home with a new wife in the family. I wouldn't be surprised if this has happened already, but they kept it quiet and didn't try to get official papers changed. But it's just a matter of time, and it'll be fun to follow the outrage and consternation from the bigot crowd, while the lawyers calmly ask what laws have been broken
There's an easy solution. Assume that Mrs. Smith marries Mr. Jones. They take the family name Jones-Smith. Their daughters, upon marrying, drop "Jones" (the father's name). Their sons, upon marrying, drop "Smith" (the mother's name). So if Ms. Jones-Smith marries Mr. Jefferson-Clark, they couple takes the name Jefferson-Smith. A person would then share a name with their father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc, as well as their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc.
You've described the essence of the traditional naming scheme in Iberia (Spain, Portugal). There's inconsistency about whether the paternal name comes first or last. The upper classes often preserve more than just two names, and sometimes tack on "de" and a place name. Most people just use two family names, though, which probably saves them a lot of writing over a lifetime.
Of course, in most of Europe, family names often only go back a century or two, before which people had just a given name that could be augmented by a profession or place of origin or a descriptive term. Or just "'s son", which is often specific enough in a typical village. In Iceland, they still don't use family names, just patronymics.
I know a number of people from Scandinavia who have a specific last name because their parents or grandparents bought a farm, and they adopted the farm's name (whose origin is often lost to history).
A similar thing was done by the UK's royal family. They adopted the family name Windsor in 1917 to dissociate themselves from their German ancestors. They were at war with Germany, and wanted to sound English. Windsor was, of course, the name of one of their castles. A quick google for "Windsor royal family name" gets nearly 3 million hits, so you can easily read lots of takes on this particular family name.
My favorite name from my family tree is Cameron, which is a simplified spelling of a Scots Gaelic phrase meaning "broken nose". It seems there was this particularly belligerent fellow who was a clan leader, and a lot of his relatives decided to adopt that insult as their name, as a way of thumbing their noses at the taunters.
From the Nat'l Geographic FAQ:
9. What tests do you perform?
We will be performing ONE OF two tests for each public participant.
Males: Y-DNA test. This test helps us to identify deep ancestral geographic origins on the direct paternal line.
Females: Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This tests the mtDNA of females to help identify the ancestral migratory origins of your direct maternal line.
So they will ignore all of the autosomes, and test only the tiny Y chromosome for males. Their results will only tell you about your purely paternal line (if you're male) or your purely maternal line (if you're female).
My parents didn't talk about the family tree much, but I already know a lot more than what this study would tell me. Thus, being male, they won't tell me anything about either of my grandmothers, who both spoke French (from Quebec and France).
I wonder if I'm the only one who finds this a major disappointment. They could be extracting a lot more information from the DNA of the participants by looking for markers in the other 99% of their DNA.
People, nowadays, have such a paranoid lynch mob mentality, it is getting scary.
/. mentioned it, so we're discussing it.
So how's that anything new? Even the slightest investigation shows that we've always had people like that. The only thing special here is that
Hereabouts (Boston), we have the documented Salem incident as a reminder. A few teenage kids made up a tall tale, and rather than a serious investigation, you had the authorities rounding up the innocent victims and killing them in public spectacles; the kids themselves were horrified at the whole thing but didn't have the nerve to admit publicly that it was just a prank.
Of course, this case is exacerbated by what's now a well-known phenomenon: As soon as the word "computer" is uttered, all precedent and history is thrown out the window, and people have to relearn from scratch the lessons they've known for millenia.
Is the government promoting the hysteria in order to gain more power?
Well, of course they are. That's one of the oldest tricks in the books. The Bush gang plays it to the hilt. But it's hard to find an administration anywhere that doesn't do this any time they think they can get away with it. For that matter, it's also one of the main techiques of marketers: Remind the marks (aka customers or citizens) of a scary, fuzzily-defined problem, and present your product as a solution.
As long as people react as they have to this site, we can trust that people who want power will take advantage of the reaction in the obvious way.
... but [people] can't unknowingly violate copyright.
They certainly can. Musicians do it all the time. You think you've come up with a new tune, but it's actually very close to some tune you heard years ago.
The poster boy for this was George Harrison, who learned about it the hard way. Nobody really thought that his "My Sweet Lord" was a conscious rip-off of "He's So Fine", but even a casual listen tells you that they're the same tune with different words. It can be very difficult for a musician to discover such a copyright violation, because there's no place you can find out what tunes are copyrighted. All you can do is write your music, perform it, then wait to see whether anyone sues you.
Writers haven't been hit by this quite as hard, because it's more difficult to accidentally produce an exact copy of words you heard years ago. Usually you reconstruct the words from the ideas that you've internalized, and this usually produces a paraphrase in your own words. But a few writers have unknowingly produced someone else's wording.
And the really bad case is with Trademark, where you can violate someone else's right even if it's your own name and used it first. The funny case was Mike Rowe's software firm. But before that, there was the fellow in California named Newton who had his own firm and web site years before Apple started selling a computer called Newton and sued him for violating their trade mark. And, of course, there are several stories of restaurants owned by people named McDonald who lost their right to their own name after someone (who wasn't even named McDonald) opened a chain by the same name that grew big enough to sue the older restaurants into oblivion.
[T]his is a classic example of the old military maxim of "amateurs discuss strategy; experts discuss logistics". A "great idea" is only a tactic. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Any fool can come up with a great idea. The real work is successfully marshalling the resources needed to bring the idea to fruition.
;-) It is easily parsed by software and the musical information can be extracted. There is a proposal that an online archive of all known music be created in this form. Some partly-successful software exists for comparing chunks of music in this form and calculating a "distance" between them.
;-)
Indeed. So how about we propose attacking the major problem: When we're writing code that to us is original, how can we check it against the body of patents to see if there's a match? I'm not talking about us programmers trying to decrypt legalese; I'm talking about a repository of patented code, with a web site that will compare a chunk of submitted code and tell you whether there's a close match.
I've been involved for a while in the comparable problem with music: I'm thinking of a tune that I'd like to play (and perhaps record)? Is it a copyrighted tune? How can I find out whether someone owns the tune, and if so, how do I contact them and ask permission?
I've asked this question to reps of a number of music publishers, and the answer I've got is that I should buy a copy of everything they've published and search through it all for the tune. They apparently are serious about this. There is a slightly better solution in the US: Go to the Library of Congress and spend several years searching through their archives, comparing every piece of music with the tune in your head.
The online search sites aren't much help. There's not much published music online, and what is, is mostly in forms like PDF or Sibelius or other graphical formats. Extracting musical information from this is an intractable problem, and to my knowledge, nobody has even seriously tackled it. MIDI is slightly better, but still intractable for this purpose.
There was a plain-text music notation developed about 15 years ago, and there's a small body of music in this form online. (I hope Chris forgives me for the slashdotting.
Software can potentially be approached the same way. But it's not trivial. Attempting to handle chunks of code in arbitrary programming languages (including some not invented yet) is not practical; we'd need a way of converting code into an "archive" form in a standard archival language. And that language would have to be sufficiently tractable that such a translation would be feasible (i.e., not PL/I or a primitive Turing machine's code or Intercal or Brainf**k
It's hard to imagine any commercial vendor cooperating willingly with such an effort. But it could be interesting to think of the impact of, say, a legal proceding that decided that since your claimed patent (or copyright) isn't in the archive, you can't sue someone for a violation. After all, you knowingly withheld the code from programmers who were diligently trying to find your patent and pay you for a license.
It's not clear this can ever work with music, either. 99% of the online music in abc form is the public-domain "trad" stuff, because copyright owners usually don't permit putting their music online in a computer-readable form. But even this little turns out to be useful. We've already seen cases where a publisher sends a C&D letter to someone, claiming to own a tune, and gets the reply "That tune was published by So-and-so in London in 1723. How can you claim to own it?" The publisher slinks off and is never heard from again (until they try the same fraud with someone else).
The bottom line in both cases is that we have no practical way that a creator can determine whether something they've created is legally owned by someone else due to copyright or patent. But we do potentially have solutions to thi
One of the fun bits here is that the judge made her view of SCO's charges (and evidence) clear when she wrote:
"Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus, they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'its in there somewhere, you figure it out.'"
The Groklaw summary also point out that she has gone to great pains to "cross every t and dot every i" in her writings, apparently to get the message through to SCO that an appeal is pointless because it will simply be rejected by any higher court.