Just because you pur "Democrat" next to your name doesn't make you less corruptable.
Heh; of course not. But you have some bodacious standards to live up to, if you're to compete with the recent crop of Republicans.
I recall around 13 years ago, reading a report that listed all the presidential appointeed who had been jailed for felonies. It seems that Ronald Reagan had not only had more appointees jailed; he'd had more jailed than all previous administrations combined. I was duly impressed.
I wonder if this list is still around somewhere? Probably on some blog...
Of course, Bush I tried to outdo him, but his effort was cut short by being defeated for a second term. Clinton wasn't even a contender; by this standard, he was one of the country's most honest politicians (hard as may be to believe).
Maybe Bush II can top Reagan's record. He has a good start, and three more years to score. And remember that most of the Reagan administration's convictions came in the last couple of years, and the years after he left office. So it'll probably be around 2012 or 2015 before we really know whether the current Team Dubya was officially the most corrupt in history, or has taken second place to Team Ronald.
I've never seen a blog that is a 'journal', pretty much all of them are editorials.
Sure you have; one is called "slashdot.org".;-)
Now, granted, there is sometimes a wee bit of editorializing in the articles here, but that's normally a minor aside. The main point here is to journalize (i.e., post in rough time order) events of interest to us geeks.
This, of course, makes it a blog. And as with many blogs, readers can add comments, which is where you get the real editorializing (sometimes interrupted by actual facts).
Actually, if you look at any significant portion of the several million blogs that now exist, you'll find that this isn't all that unusual. It's fairly common for the primary "articles" to be brief, factual reports of events of interest to the blogger. Sometimes they follow this with editorializing, sometimes not. But the format isn't at all unusual. If you haven't seen it, you might try looking at more than a few blogs. Try blogsearch.google.com to locate a lot of them. Right now, the phrase "journalist shield law" gets 958 matches. There's some interesting stuff there.
To put this into perspective, however, the term "kitten" gets 152,555 matches from blogsearch.google.com, and "cute kitten" gets 24,758 matches. So I guess we know what's really important in the blogosphere.
[W]hat mainstream media source has done anything earth shattering since watergate?
Jon Stewart.;-)
Of course, he'd just continue to insist that he's not a journalist, he's a commedian. (And he would probably add that the Comedy Channel isn't exactly a "mainstream" news outlet).
But around the time of the 2004 US elections, some of us we did notice the reports that his viewers were the best-informed of people who got their "news" from television. Not that that's anything to especially proud of, I suppose, considering that you can easily match the news in any hour of evening news with 10 minutes at news.google.com. Except maybe for your local crime and/or cute child/pet story.
There's long been a saying that freedom of the press applies only to those with the money to own and operate a press.
One interesting about the Internet is that you no longer have to be rich to "publish". Anyone can now act as a journalist without first having the price of entry (or being hired by someone with the price of entry) to the tradition printed press or radio or television. Those kept out the riff-raff by requiring printing or broadcast equipment that most of us couldn't afford.
This bill is really just an attempt to maintain this tradition of press freedom belonging only to the wealthy and to corporations.
So it's not really abridging any freedoms that most of us ever had. It's merely reacting to the internet giving this freedom to the masses, which was never the case in the past.
'Are bloggers journalists or some of the commercial businesses that you here would probably not consider real journalists?'
How the hell do you parse that? And I wonder about the native language of whoever wrote that sentence. Anyway, I can see several possible parsings, none of which are really "native" English, and which have rather different meanings.
Maybe it needs a few commas, semicolons, parens, or something.
(For example why would we not consider them real journalists here, but consider them real journalists somewhere else? And is it the commercial business who are the real journalists, or are the bloggers considered commercial businesses? Lots of good questions buried in there;-)
If you like helping people who dont have brains, you yourself may not have a brain.
Heh. I have a lot of these green, growing things out in my yard and garden. None of them has a brain. I sorta enjoy helping them grow. Does this mean I don't have a brain?
Of course, I don't do that for a living. Some of my ancestors did, and (at least here in the US), it's no way to make a living any more.
source applications, and come up with some changes you could implement (or even ask the class to implement). Showing them that with OSS they have the power (and right) to go in and change everything...
Strictly speaking, OSS gives you the power to change things, but not the right. That's where you need Free Software.
After all, Microsoft has their version of Open Source, in which you sign an NDA and can read the source, but you have no right to do anything else such as make changes.
Of course, freedom to change software doesn't mean much unless you have the source. That's why some people prefer to use the acronym FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). That way, you have both the power and the right to change it if you wish.
A class on OSS is a business, legal or philosophy class, not a programming class.
Perhaps. But I've seen firsthand how difficult the task can be when the "student" has never done any programming. Remember that OSS stands for "Open Source Software". How do you explain that phrase to someone who has no concept of what "source code" is?
I've tried this on occastion, typically with managers. But I've found it impossible to explain to them why I need this mysterious, incomprehensible stuff called "source code". Why can't I just examine the program itself? (Well, yes; given the right tools, I could. Given a lot of time...)
One of the main reasons for OSS is that if you (or your people) can't get at the source code, a program could contain anything at all, and you'd never know until it was too late. There could be spyware or some sort of time bomb hidden in there. The code could be quietly linking your machine into a network of zombies for running other people's code. There could be a routine working for a competitor, silently and subtly sabotaging your operations. Without the source code, and people who can read it, you're just volunteering to be a victim of whatever the software supplier wants (or has been paid) to foist on you.
Such considerations are not what most people would call "philosophy", of course, and you don't get much business or legal attention to this topic. But it's one of the primary things you need to get across. It's why OSS has been making inroads into Microsoft's turf in so many governments lately.
But how do you explain this to people who don't understand the phrase "source code"? About all you can do is take an authority-figure stance, and tell them that they have to accept it whether or not they understand.
This isn't likely to be very persuasive with most business or legal people. Or philosophers, for that matter.
So work on finding a way to explain "source code" to non-programmers. Good luck.
Deploy under the roll and it pulls the paper out and up. One quick jerk and perfect paper every time:D
Some years back, an incident at home convinced me otherwise. I'd just replaced a roll of toilet paper, and used the "under" method. When I came back an hour or two later, I saw a large pile of toilet paper on the floor, with a very happy kitten in the middle looking up at me with a "Look what I did!" expression on her face.
In installed a new roll, using the "over" method, and aside from a few claw marks, had no further problems. I've used that method since.
Actually, we now have birds rather than cats, due to allergies. We once installed a TP roll using the "under" method, thinking it was safe from birds. Then one day I watched as a cockatiel flew up, grabbed the dangling end of the paper, and proceeded to happily unroll a large pile of it. I reversed the roll, and let her rip up the pile she'd made. Many parrots consider tissue paper one of the best toys there is.
I've seen a number of other articles on this topic. They typically list a number of factual errors in various print encyclopedias. Sometimes these errors go back decades, and have never been corrected.
Producing an accurate encyclopedis is a daunting task. Wikipedia has the advantage of having, in effect, thousands of editors.
Of course, those others could well compare their text with wikipedia's, look for discrepencies, and fix their own errors. But with a mere dozen or so editors, it is indeed a daunting task.
In addition, it looks like wikipedia is now the leader in terms of sheer number of articles. How many of those contain factual errors doesn't seem to be known...
Larry [Sanger] made the argument that even though he has a PhD in philosophy his articles could be corrected by a six year old.
While this may be true, it's based on a lack of understanding of how wikipedia works. This is more a description of how, say, an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup works. In that case, Larry's article and the six-year-old's would be equally preserved for prosperity in the archives.
With wikipedia, though, what usually happens is that a number of other [semi-]knowledgeable people see the editing, investigate, and revert the article to what (in their opinion) is the more factual and/or knowledgeable. It's not everyone posting equally; it's a community effort to produce the best (for some value of "best") article on the topic. Larry stands a good chance of winning such a pseudo-dispute even without typing anything other than his original article.
Personally, I think that if your beliefs can't stand up to the curiosity of a six year old then that says something in and of itself.
Yeah, but it's not obvious just what it says.;-)
And also note that wikipedia effectively struggles against people posting their "beliefs". There is strong social pressure to go for factual articles. When beliefs are included, they are typically clearly labelled as such.
An interesting and amusing case: Usenet has historically had a problem with unmoderated biological newsgroups. They get invaded by the religious folks, who respond to any mention of evolution by flooding the thread with their theories, making further serious technical discussion impossible. So the newsgroups go moderated, and in some cases have very limited distribution. This is the only defense that you have in such contentious topics.
But ask wikipedia about "evolution" and "intelligent design". You'll find some very thoughtful and useful introductions to both of the topics. The Evolution page is full of the basic history of the biological topic (with a link to a page dealing with other meanings of the term). The Intelligent_design page is also a basic history of the concept, with lots of links to related topics. There is the expected emphasis on the dispute surrounding the term, with summaries of the attitudes of the various parties, all in a very factual fashion. Both pages seem to have been stable for some time, which probably won't surprise anyone who reads them. It's a good example of wikipedia's emphasis on a neutral viewpoint, plus sticking to just the facts.
So far, Sanger's worries seem to be a bit overblown. But this is in part because a lot of wikipedia users agree with him, and are constantly on the lookout for the sort of problem he's talking about. The wikipedia community is often fast to act against such abuses.
Sometimes, as with evolution, the action is to separate the knowledgeable contributors from their attackers, and give each their own articles.
To see some more cases that should be relevant in a forum where Godwin's Law is frequently invoked, try looking up "Naziism" on wikipedia. Read through the articles on the topic, and then try finding better information anywhere else. In particular, how many people here have ever read anything about Nazi ideological theory? Do you know what the Thule Gesellschaft or the Germanenorden were? You'll find them in wikipedia. And, with a bit of reading, you too can start responding to accusations of Naziism with erudite comments bringing in obscure historical facts and events.
I think if Wikipedia had "certified" users who could somehow prove they had acceptable degrees in certain areas and whose changes could not be undone by regular users in articles pertaining to those areas, it would do a lot.
Actually there are a number of other online encyclopedia projects (even including some of the traditional printed encyclopedias) that are doing this. They all have different approaches and policies. This makes for an interesting experiment, and gives us an opportunity to compare the effectiveness of the different approaches.
So I'd suggest that wikipedia should remain totally open. Making it like one of the others would destroy the usefulness of the experiment.
It's already to the point that you can look up the same topic in several online encyclopedias, and compare their coverage of a growing list of topics. But so far, the evidence that you see isn't conclusively in favor of any single approach.
In the topic for which I know a lot, I'd say that wikipedia is very often (though not always) the winner so far. I've more and more finding myself looking in google, then wikipedia, and then in the other sites. Actually, I've been noticing that wikipedia often turns up in the first 10 matches on google, and when I see that, I usually go right to the wikipedia article.
But I'd also say we should give them all a few more years before forming any firm judgements. They're all in their infancy, really. So let's let the experiment run for a while longer, checking occasionally to see who's doing the better job on what topics.
Yeah; that's one of the reasons that scientists are so interested in Titan. Its atmosphere isn't anywhere near chemical equilibrium. It's about 6% methane, with traces of many small hydrocarbons.
Of course, there are geological processes that produce such compounds, and Titan is almost certainly geologically active. But this atmosphere has a lot of the properties that we'd expect if there were a biosphere, however primitive and sketchy.
So the nature of Titan's atmosphere, with all the organic compounds floating around, is "interesting". Any biochemistry there would be rather different from ours, sinceur chemical processes wouldn't work well at 94K. But there are organic reactions that do work at such termperatures, and there are carbon-chain molecules in Titan's atmosphere.
We had an article on the topic here a few days back.
There is plenty of experimental evidence that bacteria could survive the processes involved in such transfer (asteroid/comet collisions with planets, capture of debris by other planets, then entry into atmosphere).
Actually, collisions are probably a minor portion of the Earthly source of bacteria on other planets.
Various astronomers have written about the Earth's "dust tail", similar to a comet's dust tail, but blown off from Earth's atmosphere by the solar wind. This tail is thin, and mostly molecular. But it is known to contain fine dust, up to and including particles the size of bacterial spores. There aren't many such spores in the outer atmosphere, but there are a few, and this is a much gentler way to escape the planet than being blown off in a collision strong enough to toss you into space.
Astronomers have dealt with this because the planet's dust tail is thick enough to interfere somewhat with some astronomical observations in some frequencies. So it's useful to know about it before you aim your telescope.
Anyway, chances are that our planet has been contaminating the outer planets, and the rest of the galaxy, with bacterial spores for 3 to 4 billion years. We don't really know how well they can survive in space. Probably well enough to reach the rest of the Solar System. Whether they'd actually survive the trip to other stars and their planets is pure conjecture.
But it's an interesting idea. Definitely good for occasional sci-fi use. And it's something that people interested in ultimate origins should consider. It's not easy to collect actual data on the topic, though.
Compression was not a necessary component of DOS 6.0...
No, but (as others have pointed out), it was the main advertising point for DOS 6.0. It was apparently the primary reason that people upgraded to 6.0. Also, the reason that a lot of people said they didn't intend to use the compression was that Microsoft themselves very quickly admitted that the compression code was faulty, and recommended that people not use it until they paid $9.95 for the patch.
Among salesmen, this is known as "bait and switch". It's generally considered sleazy and unethical by most people, even if the law is sufficiently demented to permit it.
There are probably a lot of (sleazy) salesmen and lawyers who really admire Microsoft for getting away with this.
And there are a few who will muse that it's the bad 95% of [salesmen|lawyers] who give the other 5% a bad name.
Anyway, I'm a bit apprehensive about the prospect of Ms Meirs judging a case that I'm involved with. They've tried hard to prevent us from knowing anything about her, but incidents like this do impart some information, however sketchy.
Yes, and it's legal and moral to defend rapists and corrupt politicians,...
Heh. This brings to mind an obvious parallel:
This fellow F makes dates with four women, A, B, C and D. On the date with A, he drugs her and rapes her. On the date with B, he drugs her and rapes her.
It happens that A and B meet the next day, compare notes, and realise there's a serial rapist at large. They tell friends about it, and the news gets around to C and D, who contact A and B.
The four women talk to a lawyer friend and decide that, although they don't have funds or evidence to charge him individually, by pooling their funds and knowledge, they have a good case.
In court, the defense lawyer argues that women C and D haven't been harmed by F, so they have no standing before the court. The judge listens, and agrees. He dismisses the case (but tells the women that they can sue F individually if they like). A and B again decide, with the advice of their lawyer, that they probably wouldn't win individually, and don't file charges.
Now, Meiers' supporters would argue that F's lawyer and the judge have acted properly in this case. It's essentially the same case, but with the more emotional aspect of rape instead of bad software.
I wonder how the typical person would react to a case like this? Not that we'd probably hear, of course, due to the aspect of shame surrounding a rape victim.
[S]he is required (yes REQUIRED) to do her best in the handling of the case, and since she won, I'd say she did a great job.
Where do people get the idea that lawyers are REQUIRED to "do their best"? This isn't true under American law, and I'd guess it's not true in any legal system.
Lawyers in the US have ethical standards, and they can be fined, jailed, and/or disbarred for violating them. Granted, this doesn't happen very often. (They're being judged by other lawyers, of course.;-) But that doesn't mean there are no ethical standards.
There have been any number of cases of lawyers collaborating with a client intimidating witnesses, suppressing evidence, submitting fake evidence, etc. The client sometimes expects and demands such behavior. And occasionally, people have collected that has led to the lawyer being prosecuted along with the client.
Go ask your favorite lawyer about it. They'll probably describe a few cases that they know of.
In this case, we do have the problem that Miers' actions were probably not in violation of any law or ethical standard. This is a problem with our laws, of course. But it's useful to know that her personal ethical standards don't preclude such actions.
However, not everybody who bought the product was using, or intended to use the compression features, so it was difficult to justify including all of them in the class.
What I infer from this is that if I've bought some software that turns out to have a serious defect, I'm expected to show that I've used all of the software's features, options, etc. Otherwise, I'm not really a user of the product, and I don't have a case.
As a long-time computer geek I'm quite aware that in many cases, I'm often not aware of all the "features" that I'm using. Thus, if I've noticed that some (but not all) email attachments that I get are compressed, base-64 encoded, quoted-printable encoded, etc. In most cases, I suspect that the sender didn't know that this was done. They just told their mail composer to add an attachment; they have no idea what this might entail. If you were to ask a typical email user how often they've used, say, quoted-printable encoding, most would tell you that they've never used it. They have, of course, but they've never heard of quoted-printable encoding, and have no idea that they're using it. When I hit the Submit button here, I don't know whether or how my text is encoded for transmission to/. (I could guess, and I know ways that I could test it, but I don't actually know right now.)
In general, software users can't reasonably be expected to know what features they're using, much less what features they'll use in the future. They just use software to get desired result, but don't (and can't) understand the inner workings of every piece of software, especially proprietary, binary-only software.
So the "logic" displayed here is simply an extreme case of judicial disregard for a company abusing its customers, by demanding that they know something that they don't and can't know. It's caveat emptor in the extreme.
But it does give me yet another excuse for avoiding buying Microsoft products. So thanks for explaining to me the "logic" they use to defraud people like me, with collaboration from the courts. I'll remember this "logic" when I'm considering future purchases.
(Not that I expect other companies to be any more honest with me, of course.;-)
Exactly. I'd love to have a small "laptop" like that that I can carry out into the wilds of New Hampshire, but which actually had functioning wireless access.
Around here, you can get wifi, which is always-on but only works within range of an AP, which are few and far between outside the city. The blackberry that I got at work has wireless data access (GPRS) nearly everywhere, but the salesman's claim that it can be used as a wireless modem turned out to be false. Once they got the contract, ATT showed no interest in helping us make it actually work. Then Cingular bought them out, and their only interest is in persuading us to upgrade to a new model (which they say will work as a wireless modem but they don't actually demo).
But the description sounds like this MIT gadget will actually be a functioning wi-fi/cell-phone portable that works nearly everywhere. The commercial vendors can't or won't do this, but if MIT can, a lot of us will do whatever we can to get our hands on one.
Besides, it looks like a really fun toy.
And it'd be fun to try writing software for those 3rd-world kiddies. I think I'll start polishing up my UniCode skills right away...
[S]elling them to a larger audience would bring production costs down and make the whole program more likely to actually work.
Perhaps this is a symptom of a real desire to deliver the machines to kids in poor parts of the world.
There's a long history of people using the above reasoning, and finding that the commercial guys become the "tail that wags the dog". Featuritis sets in ('cause you've gotta have a hard disk and a serial port and...); before you know, you have a nice commercial product that you can't deliver for under $1000. Here in the US, we have seen a number of help-the-poor educational products that end up mostly benefitting middle-class students, with paperwork that blocks access by the actual poor.
Decreeing that they're serious that it's not for sale could be a management technique to make the team concentrate on really delivering what was promised, and not something "better" for wealthier customers.
Of course, once the machine's specs are out, you can bet we'll see commercial knockoffs. Plan on seeing those specs published openly, with a very cheap license to any commercial manufacturer. But you and I will have to buy them from a vendor, not from the MIT project or their suppliers.
Myself, I'd love a portable with true wireless capability; meaning that it works more than a few meters from the nearest Starbucks.;-)
But in at least a limited way, once a fertilized ovum undergoes it's first cell division (not at fertilization, as it hasn't become a new entity yet), it has become a new human in every sense that a fetus or a toddler is.
Of course, that doesn't mean that it has implanted yet. The ovum may still fail to implant in the uterine lining and will be expelled naturally. Is that the moment that the child becomes like a human being?
And, of course, in a strictly biological sense, an unfertilized ovum or sperm is a living, breathing (respiring, actually), independent living creature, busy doing their part in the life cycle. And they are certainly "human" lives; if not, what species are they? All their DNA is human. The haploid phase of the human reproductive cycle is rather reduced, but it exists and is a part of our life cycle.
Part of the fun of all this hairsplitting about "when life begins" is that it was answered quite well by scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their answer was simple: All the evidence pointed to the conclusion that life doesn't begin; it only continues from previous life. Whether the life is human, mouse, plant, or bacteria, it doesn't arise spontaneously from non-living material. Life is always continuous from one or more previous living things, and at no time are the organisms not alive.
It does seem likely that at some time in the remote geological past, life did arise from non-living chemicals by some process. But so far, there's little real science on that subject. Lots of interesting conjecture, of course, but not much more.
It is, of course, possible, even likely, that the precursors of life are forming on Earth right now. They'll never become life, though, because bacteria or plants will gobble them up before they get organized enough to qualify as "life".
The whole "when life begins" debate is purely theological. And it's based on the counterfactual presupposition that our lives have starting points. This has been conclusively shown wrong by a lot of researchers.
And moral or legal conclusions based on falsehoods are always wrong, too.
Not that I expect our moral or legal guardians to understand any of this.
Hell, you could say a single sperm is a biologically viable entity that, given a suitable place to go (an egg), can gestate into a human. That doesn't mean every sperm is sacred.
Ah, but it does, to us Monty Python fans.
Everyone sing along:
Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate....
So the policy document says that 'consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.' Does this cancel the clause in the ISP's TOS that says I can't run my own server(s)? In particular, do they have to stop blocking ports? Incoming as well as outgoing?
Or does it just mean that they can still charge me four times the usual rate to run my own server? That's what they do now, of course; it's usually called "business class" service. In that case, this part of the policy doc is meaningless.
Actually, we recently got speakeasy service here, complete with a promise to never block any ports, so it's not an issue at this moment. But the FCC's recent policy changes also imply that Verizon may soon be locking out independents like speakeasy, and force us to get to the internet either via the phone line that they own or the single cable company (Comcast, even worse than Verizon). It'd be nice to know that we can continue to get a real internet link, not just a browser/email connection.
- Be transparent to the government. The government MUST have a way to verify if no malicious code, country-hostile elements, backdoors or other such insecurities exist. Without source - impossible.
There is serious debate about whether this story is apocryphal, and of course only insiders at the CIA know for sure. But the story is very widely circulated outside the US, and is one of the canonical examples used to illustrate why one should never trust a computer whose software is controlled by a large American corporation.
It's easy enough to learn about this story. Just do as I did, and google for "Russian pipeline explosion computer software". That link was the first of 79,500. It's a well-known story.
If Microsoft really wants to fight this, they'll probably have to find a way to convince politicians that this story never happened. And that nothing like it has ever happened. And that nobody is even thinking about it. The latter is difficult when there are thousands of descriptions on the Net.
The sensible approach for anyone in a position to decide on software would be to assume that such stories are highly likely to be true, and to take steps to ensure that you can't be bitten this way. If you're a government or a successful business, you do have enemies, after all.
Without access to the source, you're totally at the mercy of the vendor and anyone who can bribe their programmers. And just to be sure, you probably want to recompile it all yourself. (And read Ken Thompson's famous ACM lecture.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you pur "Democrat" next to your name doesn't make you less corruptable.
...
Heh; of course not. But you have some bodacious standards to live up to, if you're to compete with the recent crop of Republicans.
I recall around 13 years ago, reading a report that listed all the presidential appointeed who had been jailed for felonies. It seems that Ronald Reagan had not only had more appointees jailed; he'd had more jailed than all previous administrations combined. I was duly impressed.
I wonder if this list is still around somewhere? Probably on some blog
Of course, Bush I tried to outdo him, but his effort was cut short by being defeated for a second term. Clinton wasn't even a contender; by this standard, he was one of the country's most honest politicians (hard as may be to believe).
Maybe Bush II can top Reagan's record. He has a good start, and three more years to score. And remember that most of the Reagan administration's convictions came in the last couple of years, and the years after he left office. So it'll probably be around 2012 or 2015 before we really know whether the current Team Dubya was officially the most corrupt in history, or has taken second place to Team Ronald.
Why does this seem like a sports competition?
I've never seen a blog that is a 'journal', pretty much all of them are editorials.
;-)
Sure you have; one is called "slashdot.org".
Now, granted, there is sometimes a wee bit of editorializing in the articles here, but that's normally a minor aside. The main point here is to journalize (i.e., post in rough time order) events of interest to us geeks.
This, of course, makes it a blog. And as with many blogs, readers can add comments, which is where you get the real editorializing (sometimes interrupted by actual facts).
Actually, if you look at any significant portion of the several million blogs that now exist, you'll find that this isn't all that unusual. It's fairly common for the primary "articles" to be brief, factual reports of events of interest to the blogger. Sometimes they follow this with editorializing, sometimes not. But the format isn't at all unusual. If you haven't seen it, you might try looking at more than a few blogs. Try blogsearch.google.com to locate a lot of them. Right now, the phrase "journalist shield law" gets 958 matches. There's some interesting stuff there.
To put this into perspective, however, the term "kitten" gets 152,555 matches from blogsearch.google.com, and "cute kitten" gets 24,758 matches. So I guess we know what's really important in the blogosphere.
[W]hat mainstream media source has done anything earth shattering since watergate?
;-)
Jon Stewart.
Of course, he'd just continue to insist that he's not a journalist, he's a commedian. (And he would probably add that the Comedy Channel isn't exactly a "mainstream" news outlet).
But around the time of the 2004 US elections, some of us we did notice the reports that his viewers were the best-informed of people who got their "news" from television. Not that that's anything to especially proud of, I suppose, considering that you can easily match the news in any hour of evening news with 10 minutes at news.google.com. Except maybe for your local crime and/or cute child/pet story.
There's long been a saying that freedom of the press applies only to those with the money to own and operate a press.
One interesting about the Internet is that you no longer have to be rich to "publish". Anyone can now act as a journalist without first having the price of entry (or being hired by someone with the price of entry) to the tradition printed press or radio or television. Those kept out the riff-raff by requiring printing or broadcast equipment that most of us couldn't afford.
This bill is really just an attempt to maintain this tradition of press freedom belonging only to the wealthy and to corporations.
So it's not really abridging any freedoms that most of us ever had. It's merely reacting to the internet giving this freedom to the masses, which was never the case in the past.
'Are bloggers journalists or some of the commercial businesses that you here would probably not consider real journalists?'
;-)
How the hell do you parse that? And I wonder about the native language of whoever wrote that sentence. Anyway, I can see several possible parsings, none of which are really "native" English, and which have rather different meanings.
Maybe it needs a few commas, semicolons, parens, or something.
(For example why would we not consider them real journalists here, but consider them real journalists somewhere else? And is it the commercial business who are the real journalists, or are the bloggers considered commercial businesses? Lots of good questions buried in there
If you like helping people who dont have brains, you yourself may not have a brain.
Heh. I have a lot of these green, growing things out in my yard and garden. None of them has a brain. I sorta enjoy helping them grow. Does this mean I don't have a brain?
Of course, I don't do that for a living. Some of my ancestors did, and (at least here in the US), it's no way to make a living any more.
source applications, and come up with some changes you could implement (or even ask the class to implement). Showing them that with OSS they have the power (and right) to go in and change everything ...
... ;-)
Strictly speaking, OSS gives you the power to change things, but not the right. That's where you need Free Software.
After all, Microsoft has their version of Open Source, in which you sign an NDA and can read the source, but you have no right to do anything else such as make changes.
Of course, freedom to change software doesn't mean much unless you have the source. That's why some people prefer to use the acronym FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). That way, you have both the power and the right to change it if you wish.
(Yeah, I know; picky, picky
A class on OSS is a business, legal or philosophy class, not a programming class.
...)
Perhaps. But I've seen firsthand how difficult the task can be when the "student" has never done any programming. Remember that OSS stands for "Open Source Software". How do you explain that phrase to someone who has no concept of what "source code" is?
I've tried this on occastion, typically with managers. But I've found it impossible to explain to them why I need this mysterious, incomprehensible stuff called "source code". Why can't I just examine the program itself? (Well, yes; given the right tools, I could. Given a lot of time
One of the main reasons for OSS is that if you (or your people) can't get at the source code, a program could contain anything at all, and you'd never know until it was too late. There could be spyware or some sort of time bomb hidden in there. The code could be quietly linking your machine into a network of zombies for running other people's code. There could be a routine working for a competitor, silently and subtly sabotaging your operations. Without the source code, and people who can read it, you're just volunteering to be a victim of whatever the software supplier wants (or has been paid) to foist on you.
Such considerations are not what most people would call "philosophy", of course, and you don't get much business or legal attention to this topic. But it's one of the primary things you need to get across. It's why OSS has been making inroads into Microsoft's turf in so many governments lately.
But how do you explain this to people who don't understand the phrase "source code"? About all you can do is take an authority-figure stance, and tell them that they have to accept it whether or not they understand.
This isn't likely to be very persuasive with most business or legal people. Or philosophers, for that matter.
So work on finding a way to explain "source code" to non-programmers. Good luck.
Deploy under the roll and it pulls the paper out and up. One quick jerk and perfect paper every time :D
Some years back, an incident at home convinced me otherwise. I'd just replaced a roll of toilet paper, and used the "under" method. When I came back an hour or two later, I saw a large pile of toilet paper on the floor, with a very happy kitten in the middle looking up at me with a "Look what I did!" expression on her face.
In installed a new roll, using the "over" method, and aside from a few claw marks, had no further problems. I've used that method since.
Actually, we now have birds rather than cats, due to allergies. We once installed a TP roll using the "under" method, thinking it was safe from birds. Then one day I watched as a cockatiel flew up, grabbed the dangling end of the paper, and proceeded to happily unroll a large pile of it. I reversed the roll, and let her rip up the pile she'd made. Many parrots consider tissue paper one of the best toys there is.
Whether it's as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica. No, it's not.
;-)
...
Actually, take a look at wikipedia's article on the subject.
I've seen a number of other articles on this topic. They typically list a number of factual errors in various print encyclopedias. Sometimes these errors go back decades, and have never been corrected.
Producing an accurate encyclopedis is a daunting task. Wikipedia has the advantage of having, in effect, thousands of editors.
Of course, those others could well compare their text with wikipedia's, look for discrepencies, and fix their own errors. But with a mere dozen or so editors, it is indeed a daunting task.
In addition, it looks like wikipedia is now the leader in terms of sheer number of articles. How many of those contain factual errors doesn't seem to be known
Larry [Sanger] made the argument that even though he has a PhD in philosophy his articles could be corrected by a six year old.
;-)
While this may be true, it's based on a lack of understanding of how wikipedia works. This is more a description of how, say, an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup works. In that case, Larry's article and the six-year-old's would be equally preserved for prosperity in the archives.
With wikipedia, though, what usually happens is that a number of other [semi-]knowledgeable people see the editing, investigate, and revert the article to what (in their opinion) is the more factual and/or knowledgeable. It's not everyone posting equally; it's a community effort to produce the best (for some value of "best") article on the topic. Larry stands a good chance of winning such a pseudo-dispute even without typing anything other than his original article.
Personally, I think that if your beliefs can't stand up to the curiosity of a six year old then that says something in and of itself.
Yeah, but it's not obvious just what it says.
And also note that wikipedia effectively struggles against people posting their "beliefs". There is strong social pressure to go for factual articles. When beliefs are included, they are typically clearly labelled as such.
An interesting and amusing case: Usenet has historically had a problem with unmoderated biological newsgroups. They get invaded by the religious folks, who respond to any mention of evolution by flooding the thread with their theories, making further serious technical discussion impossible. So the newsgroups go moderated, and in some cases have very limited distribution. This is the only defense that you have in such contentious topics.
But ask wikipedia about "evolution" and "intelligent design". You'll find some very thoughtful and useful introductions to both of the topics. The Evolution page is full of the basic history of the biological topic (with a link to a page dealing with other meanings of the term). The Intelligent_design page is also a basic history of the concept, with lots of links to related topics. There is the expected emphasis on the dispute surrounding the term, with summaries of the attitudes of the various parties, all in a very factual fashion. Both pages seem to have been stable for some time, which probably won't surprise anyone who reads them. It's a good example of wikipedia's emphasis on a neutral viewpoint, plus sticking to just the facts.
So far, Sanger's worries seem to be a bit overblown. But this is in part because a lot of wikipedia users agree with him, and are constantly on the lookout for the sort of problem he's talking about. The wikipedia community is often fast to act against such abuses.
Sometimes, as with evolution, the action is to separate the knowledgeable contributors from their attackers, and give each their own articles.
To see some more cases that should be relevant in a forum where Godwin's Law is frequently invoked, try looking up "Naziism" on wikipedia. Read through the articles on the topic, and then try finding better information anywhere else. In particular, how many people here have ever read anything about Nazi ideological theory? Do you know what the Thule Gesellschaft or the Germanenorden were? You'll find them in wikipedia. And, with a bit of reading, you too can start responding to accusations of Naziism with erudite comments bringing in obscure historical facts and events.
I think if Wikipedia had "certified" users who could somehow prove they had acceptable degrees in certain areas and whose changes could not be undone by regular users in articles pertaining to those areas, it would do a lot.
Actually there are a number of other online encyclopedia projects (even including some of the traditional printed encyclopedias) that are doing this. They all have different approaches and policies. This makes for an interesting experiment, and gives us an opportunity to compare the effectiveness of the different approaches.
So I'd suggest that wikipedia should remain totally open. Making it like one of the others would destroy the usefulness of the experiment.
It's already to the point that you can look up the same topic in several online encyclopedias, and compare their coverage of a growing list of topics. But so far, the evidence that you see isn't conclusively in favor of any single approach.
In the topic for which I know a lot, I'd say that wikipedia is very often (though not always) the winner so far. I've more and more finding myself looking in google, then wikipedia, and then in the other sites. Actually, I've been noticing that wikipedia often turns up in the first 10 matches on google, and when I see that, I usually go right to the wikipedia article.
But I'd also say we should give them all a few more years before forming any firm judgements. They're all in their infancy, really. So let's let the experiment run for a while longer, checking occasionally to see who's doing the better job on what topics.
Damnit. I just received my SuSE 9.3 Professional DVD from Novell last week and it's already outdated.
That's ok; right now my bittorent is telling me "Time Remaining: 193 hour(s) 37 min(s) 56 sec(s)", and the estimate is slowly growing.
I think I'll kill it and wait a couple of weeks until it settles down. Then it'll only take an hour or so.
Not the first time for this behavior, either.
Yeah; that's one of the reasons that scientists are so interested in Titan. Its atmosphere isn't anywhere near chemical equilibrium. It's about 6% methane, with traces of many small hydrocarbons.
Of course, there are geological processes that produce such compounds, and Titan is almost certainly geologically active. But this atmosphere has a lot of the properties that we'd expect if there were a biosphere, however primitive and sketchy.
So the nature of Titan's atmosphere, with all the organic compounds floating around, is "interesting". Any biochemistry there would be rather different from ours, sinceur chemical processes wouldn't work well at 94K. But there are organic reactions that do work at such termperatures, and there are carbon-chain molecules in Titan's atmosphere.
We had an article on the topic here a few days back.
There is plenty of experimental evidence that bacteria could survive the processes involved in such transfer (asteroid/comet collisions with planets, capture of debris by other planets, then entry into atmosphere).
Actually, collisions are probably a minor portion of the Earthly source of bacteria on other planets.
Various astronomers have written about the Earth's "dust tail", similar to a comet's dust tail, but blown off from Earth's atmosphere by the solar wind. This tail is thin, and mostly molecular. But it is known to contain fine dust, up to and including particles the size of bacterial spores. There aren't many such spores in the outer atmosphere, but there are a few, and this is a much gentler way to escape the planet than being blown off in a collision strong enough to toss you into space.
Astronomers have dealt with this because the planet's dust tail is thick enough to interfere somewhat with some astronomical observations in some frequencies. So it's useful to know about it before you aim your telescope.
Anyway, chances are that our planet has been contaminating the outer planets, and the rest of the galaxy, with bacterial spores for 3 to 4 billion years. We don't really know how well they can survive in space. Probably well enough to reach the rest of the Solar System. Whether they'd actually survive the trip to other stars and their planets is pure conjecture.
But it's an interesting idea. Definitely good for occasional sci-fi use. And it's something that people interested in ultimate origins should consider. It's not easy to collect actual data on the topic, though.
Compression was not a necessary component of DOS 6.0 ...
No, but (as others have pointed out), it was the main advertising point for DOS 6.0. It was apparently the primary reason that people upgraded to 6.0. Also, the reason that a lot of people said they didn't intend to use the compression was that Microsoft themselves very quickly admitted that the compression code was faulty, and recommended that people not use it until they paid $9.95 for the patch.
Among salesmen, this is known as "bait and switch". It's generally considered sleazy and unethical by most people, even if the law is sufficiently demented to permit it.
There are probably a lot of (sleazy) salesmen and lawyers who really admire Microsoft for getting away with this.
And there are a few who will muse that it's the bad 95% of [salesmen|lawyers] who give the other 5% a bad name.
Anyway, I'm a bit apprehensive about the prospect of Ms Meirs judging a case that I'm involved with. They've tried hard to prevent us from knowing anything about her, but incidents like this do impart some information, however sketchy.
Yes, and it's legal and moral to defend rapists and corrupt politicians, ...
Heh. This brings to mind an obvious parallel:
This fellow F makes dates with four women, A, B, C and D. On the date with A, he drugs her and rapes her. On the date with B, he drugs her and rapes her.
It happens that A and B meet the next day, compare notes, and realise there's a serial rapist at large. They tell friends about it, and the news gets around to C and D, who contact A and B.
The four women talk to a lawyer friend and decide that, although they don't have funds or evidence to charge him individually, by pooling their funds and knowledge, they have a good case.
In court, the defense lawyer argues that women C and D haven't been harmed by F, so they have no standing before the court. The judge listens, and agrees. He dismisses the case (but tells the women that they can sue F individually if they like). A and B again decide, with the advice of their lawyer, that they probably wouldn't win individually, and don't file charges.
Now, Meiers' supporters would argue that F's lawyer and the judge have acted properly in this case. It's essentially the same case, but with the more emotional aspect of rape instead of bad software.
I wonder how the typical person would react to a case like this? Not that we'd probably hear, of course, due to the aspect of shame surrounding a rape victim.
[S]he is required (yes REQUIRED) to do her best in the handling of the case, and since she won, I'd say she did a great job.
Where do people get the idea that lawyers are REQUIRED to "do their best"? This isn't true under American law, and I'd guess it's not true in any legal system.
Lawyers in the US have ethical standards, and they can be fined, jailed, and/or disbarred for violating them. Granted, this doesn't happen very often. (They're being judged by other lawyers, of course.;-) But that doesn't mean there are no ethical standards.
There have been any number of cases of lawyers collaborating with a client intimidating witnesses, suppressing evidence, submitting fake evidence, etc. The client sometimes expects and demands such behavior. And occasionally, people have collected that has led to the lawyer being prosecuted along with the client.
Go ask your favorite lawyer about it. They'll probably describe a few cases that they know of.
In this case, we do have the problem that Miers' actions were probably not in violation of any law or ethical standard. This is a problem with our laws, of course. But it's useful to know that her personal ethical standards don't preclude such actions.
Yeah; it's about what I expect ...
/. (I could guess, and I know ways that I could test it, but I don't actually know right now.)
;-)
However, not everybody who bought the product was using, or intended to use the compression features, so it was difficult to justify including all of them in the class.
What I infer from this is that if I've bought some software that turns out to have a serious defect, I'm expected to show that I've used all of the software's features, options, etc. Otherwise, I'm not really a user of the product, and I don't have a case.
As a long-time computer geek I'm quite aware that in many cases, I'm often not aware of all the "features" that I'm using. Thus, if I've noticed that some (but not all) email attachments that I get are compressed, base-64 encoded, quoted-printable encoded, etc. In most cases, I suspect that the sender didn't know that this was done. They just told their mail composer to add an attachment; they have no idea what this might entail. If you were to ask a typical email user how often they've used, say, quoted-printable encoding, most would tell you that they've never used it. They have, of course, but they've never heard of quoted-printable encoding, and have no idea that they're using it. When I hit the Submit button here, I don't know whether or how my text is encoded for transmission to
In general, software users can't reasonably be expected to know what features they're using, much less what features they'll use in the future. They just use software to get desired result, but don't (and can't) understand the inner workings of every piece of software, especially proprietary, binary-only software.
So the "logic" displayed here is simply an extreme case of judicial disregard for a company abusing its customers, by demanding that they know something that they don't and can't know. It's caveat emptor in the extreme.
But it does give me yet another excuse for avoiding buying Microsoft products. So thanks for explaining to me the "logic" they use to defraud people like me, with collaboration from the courts. I'll remember this "logic" when I'm considering future purchases.
(Not that I expect other companies to be any more honest with me, of course.
Exactly. I'd love to have a small "laptop" like that that I can carry out into the wilds of New Hampshire, but which actually had functioning wireless access.
...
Around here, you can get wifi, which is always-on but only works within range of an AP, which are few and far between outside the city. The blackberry that I got at work has wireless data access (GPRS) nearly everywhere, but the salesman's claim that it can be used as a wireless modem turned out to be false. Once they got the contract, ATT showed no interest in helping us make it actually work. Then Cingular bought them out, and their only interest is in persuading us to upgrade to a new model (which they say will work as a wireless modem but they don't actually demo).
But the description sounds like this MIT gadget will actually be a functioning wi-fi/cell-phone portable that works nearly everywhere. The commercial vendors can't or won't do this, but if MIT can, a lot of us will do whatever we can to get our hands on one.
Besides, it looks like a really fun toy.
And it'd be fun to try writing software for those 3rd-world kiddies. I think I'll start polishing up my UniCode skills right away
[S]elling them to a larger audience would bring production costs down and make the whole program more likely to actually work.
...); before you know, you have a nice commercial product that you can't deliver for under $1000. Here in the US, we have seen a number of help-the-poor educational products that end up mostly benefitting middle-class students, with paperwork that blocks access by the actual poor.
;-)
Perhaps this is a symptom of a real desire to deliver the machines to kids in poor parts of the world.
There's a long history of people using the above reasoning, and finding that the commercial guys become the "tail that wags the dog". Featuritis sets in ('cause you've gotta have a hard disk and a serial port and
Decreeing that they're serious that it's not for sale could be a management technique to make the team concentrate on really delivering what was promised, and not something "better" for wealthier customers.
Of course, once the machine's specs are out, you can bet we'll see commercial knockoffs. Plan on seeing those specs published openly, with a very cheap license to any commercial manufacturer. But you and I will have to buy them from a vendor, not from the MIT project or their suppliers.
Myself, I'd love a portable with true wireless capability; meaning that it works more than a few meters from the nearest Starbucks.
But in at least a limited way, once a fertilized ovum undergoes it's first cell division (not at fertilization, as it hasn't become a new entity yet), it has become a new human in every sense that a fetus or a toddler is.
Of course, that doesn't mean that it has implanted yet. The ovum may still fail to implant in the uterine lining and will be expelled naturally. Is that the moment that the child becomes like a human being?
And, of course, in a strictly biological sense, an unfertilized ovum or sperm is a living, breathing (respiring, actually), independent living creature, busy doing their part in the life cycle. And they are certainly "human" lives; if not, what species are they? All their DNA is human. The haploid phase of the human reproductive cycle is rather reduced, but it exists and is a part of our life cycle.
Part of the fun of all this hairsplitting about "when life begins" is that it was answered quite well by scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their answer was simple: All the evidence pointed to the conclusion that life doesn't begin; it only continues from previous life. Whether the life is human, mouse, plant, or bacteria, it doesn't arise spontaneously from non-living material. Life is always continuous from one or more previous living things, and at no time are the organisms not alive.
It does seem likely that at some time in the remote geological past, life did arise from non-living chemicals by some process. But so far, there's little real science on that subject. Lots of interesting conjecture, of course, but not much more.
It is, of course, possible, even likely, that the precursors of life are forming on Earth right now. They'll never become life, though, because bacteria or plants will gobble them up before they get organized enough to qualify as "life".
The whole "when life begins" debate is purely theological. And it's based on the counterfactual presupposition that our lives have starting points. This has been conclusively shown wrong by a lot of researchers.
And moral or legal conclusions based on falsehoods are always wrong, too.
Not that I expect our moral or legal guardians to understand any of this.
Hell, you could say a single sperm is a biologically viable entity that, given a suitable place to go (an egg), can gestate into a human. That doesn't mean every sperm is sacred.
...
Ah, but it does, to us Monty Python fans.
Everyone sing along:
Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
So the policy document says that 'consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.' Does this cancel the clause in the ISP's TOS that says I can't run my own server(s)? In particular, do they have to stop blocking ports? Incoming as well as outgoing?
Or does it just mean that they can still charge me four times the usual rate to run my own server? That's what they do now, of course; it's usually called "business class" service. In that case, this part of the policy doc is meaningless.
Actually, we recently got speakeasy service here, complete with a promise to never block any ports, so it's not an issue at this moment. But the FCC's recent policy changes also imply that Verizon may soon be locking out independents like speakeasy, and force us to get to the internet either via the phone line that they own or the single cable company (Comcast, even worse than Verizon). It'd be nice to know that we can continue to get a real internet link, not just a browser/email connection.
- Be transparent to the government. The government MUST have a way to verify if no malicious code, country-hostile elements, backdoors or other such insecurities exist. Without source - impossible.
;-)
It is widely believed that this has happened.
There is serious debate about whether this story is apocryphal, and of course only insiders at the CIA know for sure. But the story is very widely circulated outside the US, and is one of the canonical examples used to illustrate why one should never trust a computer whose software is controlled by a large American corporation.
It's easy enough to learn about this story. Just do as I did, and google for "Russian pipeline explosion computer software". That link was the first of 79,500. It's a well-known story.
If Microsoft really wants to fight this, they'll probably have to find a way to convince politicians that this story never happened. And that nothing like it has ever happened. And that nobody is even thinking about it. The latter is difficult when there are thousands of descriptions on the Net.
The sensible approach for anyone in a position to decide on software would be to assume that such stories are highly likely to be true, and to take steps to ensure that you can't be bitten this way. If you're a government or a successful business, you do have enemies, after all.
Without access to the source, you're totally at the mercy of the vendor and anyone who can bribe their programmers. And just to be sure, you probably want to recompile it all yourself. (And read Ken Thompson's famous ACM lecture.