Why should we own our DNA? If some pharmco makes a bundle of some discover from your DNA, what have they contributed? Major intellectual effort, money and time. What have you contributed? A slimey Q-tip. You get what you give. Royalties paid to people would be akin to a lottery, where your ticket is your DNA. Very few would profit in practice. Got something really valuable? Maybe you are naturally AIDS resistant, or cancer resistant. Hey, hold out for millions. You've got them over a barrel. NOW who is the profiteer? Maybe the IRS will now go after your parents for gift/estate taxes, because after all, you got the DNA from them.
You seem to see evil in people demanding money for works based on their unique genetic advantages. Good. The problem is that you instead say that this right should be turned over to pharmacutical companies. No way in hell.
Natural genetic code formed by billions of years of evolution is a public commons. It should be the property of all mankind. No company should be able to withhold the right of others to look at the DNA within themselves. The idea that a pharmacutical company should be able to patent tests on certain genes is ludicrous. It's the most obvious application of the Human Genome Project! Once you know what a gene does, testing to see if people have a problem created by that gene by looking for its presense is obvious, even to people who are not practioners versed in the art.
Natural genes that provide advantages to people are discoveries, not inventions. I don't have a problem with patenting unique created sequences, but patenting anything based on something discovered in nature is just a revolting abuse of the patent system. That's not innovation. That's not creativity. That's just taking something already existing and making sure that no one can use it without paying you for having noticed it.
If you want to see the evil that companies can do when they decide to enforce gene licenses, look no further than our favorite repeat offender, Monsanto.
Perhaps you should consider the recent Slashdot article about Monsanto suing a farmer in Canada who was growing crops based on Monsanto seeds that blew onto his property. Monsanto successfully proved that since they owned the patents to the genetically altered corn, they owned exclusive rights to the growth of the corn. Since he hadn't signed their extortionist contracts to grow the corn, he couldn't grow it, even though successive generations had been produced on his land. Futhermore, he couldn't grow crops based on seeds he had stored from the previous few years. Essentially, his business was destroyed because the Canadian courts ruled that since Monsanto owned the IP rights to the genes in the crops, they also own the rights to production of any derived works.
Now let's put those same rights of ownership of the genes that make you and me into the hands of a profiteering third party. What if your child gets a genetic enhancement that helps cure a disease? Can the company demand that your child pay a licensing fee for any children that they have? If you refuse, can they order any derivative works based on your child's genes destroyed or turned over to them?
Now, I think it's unlikely that anything this bad will ever happen with humans, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. Greed seems to be the primary motivating factor of society today.
The MPAA is composed of all the major American movie studios. Japanese companies and the American companies that distribute anime (such as ADV Films, AnimEigo, etc.) are not members of the MPAA as far as I can tell.
What is the MPAA and who are the members? The MPAA is the trade association for the motion picture industry. The members of the MPAA are: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, Inc. (The Walt Disney Co., Hollywood Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Miramax Films Corp.); Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, United Artists Pictures, Orion Pictures); Paramount Pictures Corporation; Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. (Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures); Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Universal Studios, Inc.; and Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P.
I don't see a single company that makes or distributes anime in there, unless you count Disney for "Princess Mononoke." If your real beef is with the DVD case, then buy your anime on VHS and be done with it. Don't go casting aspersions on the industry, though.
I'm the president of an anime club at my college, and the commercial companies have been very, very nice to us about letting us show anime to people in our local theatre. Normally, to do a public showing for a movie, you don't contact the studio. They'll blow you off and send you to the distribution houses, such as SWANK or Critereon. Instead, you those distributors $50-200 for a copy of the movie licensed for public showing. Most commercial anime companies, however, are nice enough to grant permission to show their stuff for free. They realize that without fans, they wouldn't have jobs and will treat people right. These guys are the good guys. They aren't in a position to stick it to their customers and will attempt to please them as much as possible.
Knowing they exist and having to deal with them are two different deals. You assume every Mac user uses Word.
Huh? When did I say that? I'm a long time Mac user, and I religiously avoid installing MS software on my home machine. I still use Appleworks (once Clarisworks) for the simple papers I have to write.
As for MacOS X being vunderable to virii, it has been out for over 8 months (Public Beta - 1.5 years if you count MacOS X Server) and not one virus has shown up. Since normal usage of X prevents root access, viruses are going to be difficult to write.
Oh, wow. 8 months. 8 months of Beta software used only by early adopters. Give it time.
Having used the Public Beta for quite a while, I disagree with your assertion about root access. Very many system tasks, including installing software for all users to use, involves clicking a little lock icon and giving the software the root password. A trojan posing as a system tool or an installer could very easily get root access from an unsuspecting Mac user. Worse, a virus could hijack a user executed process that provides hooks into root access via a similar method.
However, few viruses will need to play those kinds of tricks on the user. Root kits are an established problem in the UNIX world. Mac OS X brings a whole new installed base of unsophisticated UNIX admins running the same versions of the web server, FTP server, NFS server, etc. that come with Mac OS X. Just a click of a few button in the system panels, and you can publish a page to the web via your very own web server -- the same web server that is on every other Mac OS X machine. If an exploit is found against that version, it won't be long before a root kit could be made against every Mac OS X machine with their web server turned on. "Hello! You have root!"
Mac OS X will be a UNIX cracker's dream. Hundreds of thousands of UNIX machines will be on-line with admins who don't know a thing about security. Why should they? The Mac's strength has been keeping that kind of thing out of the user's hair. With an installed base greater than Red Hat and a far less technically sophisticated person, on average, administrating each system, Mac OS X is a much more desireable target than Linux. UNIX worm writers will easily be able to apply their skills to Mac OS X without having the learn the radically different Classic Mac OS or Carbon APIs. Plus they are much easier to remotely administrate/exploit than Classic Mac OS machines. Trust me. UNIX is as much a weakness for the Mac as it is a strength.
If MacOS X is so completely unimmune from viruses, lets see how many show up in the next year compared to Linux or Windows. I would rather use my computer to make money than fighting viruses. You waste your time, with the x86 -- I need a new pool boy...
You know, if you'd bothered paying attention, it should've been obvious that I'm a Mac user myself. I'm also somewhat experienced with UNIX, and I think I know a little about the problems that it brings along with its strengths to the Macintosh. The last thing Mac users need is advocates who are insulting to people they think aren't Mac users and who spout dogma that is just plain wrong.
You know that there have been Mac viruses before. There's about 40-50 or so non-Word macro viruses. The reason you don't see as many of them is that the Mac hasn't been as friendly to casual programmers as DOS and Windows have been, and the market penetration is lower. Thus, there are less people messing around with non-professional programming on the Mac who would get the virus-writing urge. It's lack of market penetration has also made it less desireable of a target.
There is no inherent safety to the Classic Mac OS that prevents viruses at all. In fact, the use of shared global memory resources, non-existant memory protection, and nearly non-existant file protection makes it very unsafe. It's just secured by obscurity.
Mac OS X will have all the same strengths and weaknesses of a UNIX system. Unfortunately, the UNIX layer makes basic worm and virus writing easier since the APIs are better known by more people. It won't be long until the first Mac OS X viruses begin propogating. I don't think we'll ever reach the level of DOS/Windows in its heyday, but don't kid yourself into thinking that the Mac is, has been, or ever will be completely immune from rouge code on the system.
Re:Virii, OS acceptance, and making fun
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No OS is impervious to worms, virii, trojans, etc.... Quit using it as a reason to "make the switch to linux" in your anti-microsoft banter; you're not fooling anyone.
Yeah, but that's the equivalent of saying no nation is free of diseases. There are some places in the world you'd rather be (America, Europe, Japan, etc.) than others (Somalia, Haiti, Ghana). Better hospitals and better sanitation would be good reasons to prefer the more powerful industrialized nations. If anyone's been claiming that Linux (and UNIX in general) is invulnerable, then they really need to ask themselves why there even is an effort to make systems like OpenBSD. However, saying that one outbreak of a worm makes Linux on the same level as Windows in terms of security is like claiming that the LA riots made America equivalent to Palestine in terms of social stability.
Yes, there are Linux worms. Yes, there are Linux root-kits, designed to exploit well-known bugs in programs distributed with certain Linux distributions. Does that mean that Linux is anywhere near as vulnerable as Windows? I don't think so. Security is still a reason to switch from Windows to Linux, and a knowledgeable person who actually cares about security can put together a nearly bulletproof box with a little effort.
Could you say the same for Windows? Maybe, but it's a lot harder and takes away a lot more functionality to do so because there are fewer alternative solutions to replace the builtin solutions. (No IIS, no "Windows Networking", no Outlook, no IE, etc.)
I like the keyboard myself -- I have one sitting in front of me in my cubicle. However, I would not recommend it for his purposes. Pressing the keys on that keyboard takes a bit more force than that of the Dell QuietKey that I'm typing this on, and even this keyboard might be a bit more than what he's looking for.
They do sound, look, and feel good to me, but my favorite keyboards are still the old IBM PS/2 keyboards. You know the ones.. the ones that felt like they had bed springs under the keys? I loved the feel of them even though the noise they made meant that you couldn't use them at night when other people in the house might be sleeping.
If you think about work you get stressed. If you think about food you create saliva. If you think about water you start needing to pee. But what if you aren't thinking?
The first amendment only restrains the actions of government and public institution, such as a public school. Private entities are not beholden to the first amendment at all. They can make any censoring action they see fit unless other laws take precedence, such as equal-opportunity employment laws.
For example, this was helpful in the case "Cyber Promotions vs. AOL." (I think I have the plaintiff's name right.) Cyber Promotions was a well-known spam organization that AOL blocked e-mails from. Cyber Promotions argued that since AOL was acting as a postmaster that they should have to respect the first amendment. (There is a preexisting case that establishes that if a private institution is the only one offering a government service in a town that they must be treated as a public entity, such as in the case of "company towns.") The court rejected this argument and upheld that AOL was not acting as a government entity. Thus, AOL was free to filter their networks as they saw fit.
Private schools can get away with this because they don't receive public funding. I wonder, though, if Bush's school voucher program goes through if they can still enjoy this status.
Re:Invention without Ethics
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Paper Phones
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I hope you're right. I hope something good will come of all this. On the other hand, I don't think this will lead to any change in the total cost of the service. Even if the cost of the cell phone goes down, it'll probably cost just as much to use the service as it does now for a regular phone.
While this may make cheaper laptops one day available, current paper/ink & plastic circuitry technology doesn't perform anywhere near as well as regular methods. I think the days of a printed paper x86-class-of-complexity chip is a little ways off. By that time, who knows how much traditional technologies will cost? Heck, by then, Moore's Law may have stalled and price may be the only means of competition left.
It's a good thought, and I hope you're right. It's just the carelessness of the inventor that got me so angry. I certainly don't think she'll be instrumental in seeing these positive applications. Maybe something good can be built on the foundation she laid for herself.
Re:Total waste volume
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Sorry. That does suck losing a phone like that. However, from the experience of my friends and family (I'm the only guy I know who doesn't have a cell phone) I'd say that the average cell phone user would produce less waste with a normal cell phone than with the disposables.
It also doesn't change the fact that it is an idea created by a woman who apparently doesn't give a damn about the consequences of her actions to other. She was driving with a cell phone, was willing to throw it out the window if it didn't cost to much, and has shrugged off complaints about the idea by essentially saying that that is how society works so she might as well take advantage of it.
* The preservation of 2000 y.o. statues in Afganistan,
Oh, you mean the great statues of Buddha?
Re:Total waste volume
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Why are you throwing away the regular cell phone every 2 years? They last for much longer than that.
I'm pretty sure that the paper ones will generate far more trash. They, by default, only last 60 minutes. I don't know if they are rechargeable or if they have a replaceable battery, but it doesn't look like it does from the picture. They suggest that you'll be able to push a button to get more time, but I somehow doubt that the battery will be good enough for 3 months.
3 months isn't the intent of the design. It's intended, really, to be used for the 60 minutes and tossed away. For some people, that might be 3 months, but from what I've observed of most cell phone users, I suspect it will be far less time than that -- maybe a week or so.
When they become entirely ink on paper, maybe they'll be recycleable, but I somehow doubt it. That's not the intention. Remember, this is the invention of a woman who would've thrown her cell phone out the window and forgotten about it if it wasn't so expensive. When the average person hears about these things, they're excited by the idea of being able to use and dispose of it so easily. The ramifications of this don't really dent that enthusiasm. The average person, which this woman is in many ways, doesn't really understand nor care about the impact of garbage on the future.
I'm sure this will generate far more garbage, and I don't really think that it will be less damaging in the long run. Maybe I'm just cynical. I prefer to call it experienced.
A religion attempts to fulfill the spiritual needs of an individual. There is no concern beyond their spiritual welfare and the desire to help them to become a better person. This may mean accepting Jesus, becoming Enlightened, or whatever. While there may be fund-raising involved, it is usually intended stricly for the upkeep of religious structues and spiritual leaders or for the benefit of other people, such as for food for the homeless.
A "religion," or cult, mimics this behavior in an attempt to squeeze money, sexual favors, or adoration out of an individual. In such an organization there is frequently a leader or group of leaders who experience material gain at the expense of their followers. Followers are usually pressured into decisions that benefit the core of the cult at the expense of the common members, such as Scientology's alleged pressuring of its core office staff to avoid pregnancy and get abortions or the Branch Davidians' marriage of all women (including underage girls) to David Koresh.
While Religions are not immune to power-grabbing by selfish members, cults are often focused around this. Scientology has a nasty reputation for strong-arm tactics and its leaders have made somewhat worrisome statements in public before about enemies of the church needing to be "dealt with." Twice they've tried to defend in court their right to name enemies for constant harrasment under Freedom of Religion.
I realize that if you don't see religion as a positive thing, the distinction may be lost on you, but there is a significant difference between, say, Shinto or Islam and Scientology. A church shouldn't be run like a business, much less like a crime family. I don't know how much of the rumors are true, but the public actions that the church has taken are good indicators that they could be.
Invention without Ethics
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Yeah. I love that rationale too. She didn't care about the other drivers around her, just that her phone was too expensive. If it wasn't, she would've just simply chucked it out the window. Littering at the least, reckless endangerment at the worst. It's bad enough to have to deal with smokers tossing their damn cigarettes out the window. Now I should have to deal with cell phones too?
Oh, and you want a paper laptop too for the same reason. I'm not going to even start on that.
Then there's her other great quote:
"I can't change what society is. We are a disposable society. Life is what it is," she said. "I didn't wake up one day and say, 'What can I do to help destroy the planet?' "
I guess she's taking the phrase "if you aren't a part of the solution, you're part of the problem" just a little too far. If there's a problem in society that she recognizes, then she shouldn't be trying to make it worse. Of course, she's the type who would've thrown a normal phone out the window if it wouldn't have hurt her bottom line.
People like this make me sick. Invention without concern for the side-effects is just unethical. She acknowledges that she might be contributing to one of the crasser aspects of American society and then shrugs it off. I'm sure she just cares about the fact that Joe-on-the-Street will make her filthy rich. Who cares what it leads to as long as she gets rich.
Man, I don't need to read stuff like this. It gets me too angry. I hate being reminded what a selfish fucking world we live in.
They mention in the article that farmers have 3 solutions against this pest. The first two involve pesticides, sprayed on or produced by the cotton itself. The last option is to put out irridiated moths that are sterile. Unfortunately, these irradiated moths are damaged by the process and do not mate well. To be effective you have to release 60X the number of normal moths.
Instead, this is just a refinement of the "terminator seed" idea. Each year, you have to buy only 5X the number who wish to wipe out since the existing moths have absolutely no way of telling the difference. (In theory anyway, that's why they're testing it first.) The next year, you have far less moths to worry about. Farmers already do this with the irradiated moths. This is just a much more effective way of doing things.
Personally, I prefer this -- by far -- over Monsanto's Bt cotton. We still aren't sure whether prolonged exposure to Bt is harmful to people or not, and I don't have to wear the side effects of that little experiment. If this idea takes off, we may be able to reduce or nearly eliminate the need for pesticides. If we systematically eliminate/reduce the numbers of pests affecting crops in a biological fashion, we can reduce the need for chemical treatments.
I hope it goes well. In the same light, I also like the mosquito-vaccine idea. If we can release mosquitoes that block/treat malaria in regions infested with in, we might be able to do a lot of good for third-world nations.
What exactly are you babbling about? The man's problem is that people are taking stuff he wrote and giving his, Harlan Ellison's, stuff away for free.
This is not about people creating their own content and giving it away by choice. This is about people taking the source of what little revenue a SF writer gets and mass publishing it via the Internet without paying the author a single dime.
He's right to take a stand like this. My favorite SF author, Roger Zelazny, died of cancer while working his tail off. He was well-known and a Hugo award winner several times over yet he still wasn't making enough money just off writing to rest on his heels and relax for awhile and focus on recovery. Writers, especially the really good ones it seems, are generally not wealthy. In fact, usually they're struggling to get by.
This is not about jealousy over better writers releasing stuff for free. This is a fight for survival against people who don't think they should have to pay for the work that writers like Ellison do to provide the money for their food and housing. If you're upset that he should demand payment for services rendered, then don't buy his stuff. Go ahead. Be a leech. I'm sure that none of your other favorite authors that are still alive would approve, though. Do you think Asimov wrote the massive numbers of nonfiction articles he did just for kicks? Harlan just has the rabid tenacity and guts to take a stand against it.
Some of my favorite games are for the Gameboy. I'm suprised to see how well some of my cartridges (particularly the RPGs with battery saves) have held up over the years. I mean, my "Final Fantasy Legend" cart is still kicking after 10+ years!
I even bought a Game Boy Pocket last year when I temporarily succumbed to the Pokemon demons. Geez, talk about video game crack! I don't think I've logged more hours (100+) in a single session of any game before. That game is designed to prey upon the weaknesses of obsessive-compulsives.
Polys are not everything. Gameplay is what brings people back.
Well, this is deliberately bad. If the author had used descriptive variable names with more than one letter, used whitespace, and taken other steps to make it readable, I'm sure it wouldn't be so bad.
(IMHO, though, there is no valid use for the ternary operator '?:' other than making code hard to read.)
Being a government body, then, they are beholden to the same Constitutional limits of any other government body. You see, you actually did need to read the article to notice that all of the examples where you actually have no recourse are private institutions.
Well, if you're willing to try out Mozilla, they've added hidden preferences in release 0.8 that will let you turn that off. They say that there will be a UI for it soon. The description can be found here.
Trust me. It works great. I've been using Mozilla as my regular browser since 0.7 came out, and it's come a long way since the M## builds.
Um, no. "Evolution" means that the genetic makeup of a population changes over time. This is a fact as much as gravity is a fact.
That's adaptation. Darwinian evolution was a theory that attempted to explain the source of different species as being based on natural selection of random variations. The key here is that adaptation must be inherited and must lead to new species.
So far, we've seen inherited adapation, but we have not seen any fundamentally new species occur. At the scale of simple asexual creatures, it is difficult to define whether or not a variation is a new species of not. However, in sexually reproducing creatures, you can define the species line as whether or not two creatures can breed a non-sterile child. For example, lions and tigers can breed, but the child will be sterile.
We have seen extreme variation within a single species, such as the domesticated dog. However, all breeds of dog can be cross-bred. (Some crosses will have extreme difficulty surviving in the womb due to size differences, but they are not impossible.) We have not, however, seen evidence of new, incompatible species being created. Domestic and wild turkeys can still breed. This is what we have not observed, the creation of a new species.
Well, I should've guessed I'd get a lot of replies, but I didn't know that I was so wrong about the things which had been eating at me lately.
Things I got wrong:
1) Linus gives permission to use system calls without violating the GPL. Thank God. It really irritated me that if I wanted to use a feature of the kernel directly that I couldn't take my choice of licenses. (I prefer a public-domain like license, such as the BSD license.)
2) There are GPL-compatible licenses. I did not know this. I thought that if you linked to GPL'ed code it had to be GPL'ed. In fact, I wrote up a response in another article about the GPL 3.0 where I asked a bunch of questions about this. The responses I got back indicated that you probably did have to GPL your code if you so much as touched someone else's GPLed code. Never once did someone bring up GPL-compatible licenses. I didn't know such things existed.
However, I still think that RMS's message is nothing more than a troll intended to get people to try to pressure Apple into doing things his way.
As for the control thing, aren't you supposed to give ownership of a GPL'ed project over the FSF generally? (Primarily, according to them, so that they can handle any legal disputes.)
This is known as punctuated equilibrium. The idea is that unless some major environmental change happens, speciation never occurs. This wonderful theory makes evolution impossible to disprove, much like most religious beliefs.
We can't observe speciation occuring? That just means that we aren't in a critical point in evolution. Until we observe speciation it is unproven. It's funny how religion is criticized for being a belief in something unproven, unobserved, and defiantly undisprovable and evolution is not.
The very fact that we share proteins and cellular structures in common with bacteria dictates that we must share genes in common with them. We've long known, for example, that mouse biochemistry is very similar to our own. Logically, we must share a great majority of genes with them. That the tools used to make similar structures are similar in no way denies divine creation of these things.
We have long known that we would share much in common with other creatures. I don't think any scientific creationist has ever denied this. Why should God use more complex tools to create life when so much of it is reusable? Perhaps as a software developer, I see the inherent need for reuse of code whenever possible that others might not. All this shows is that evolution would have had to do less work to get to the point that complex life has gotten to. It is in no way the smoking gun that proves the theory.
Let us remember what so many in the scientific establishment attempt to deny: evolution is nothing but a theory. It is a good one, and it is the only one that makes sense if you posit the lack of existance of a creating force. However the fanatical willingness to overlook flaws in the model is just as much a matter of religious (atheist) dogma as some of the twisted logic of some of its opponents.
The problem comes when one puts their faith in the belief that there is no God. Rather than accept the possibility that they are wrong and respect the beliefs of others, dedicated evolutionists will attempt to push their doctrine as fact, much as this author has done.
In truth, these people will hold their doctrine of evolution to less standards of proof than they would hold a religious man's beliefs. Though as religious man is treated a fool for believing in a being that he has never observed, evolution, which has never been observed, is not treated as rigorously. In fact, when confronted with gaps in the fossil records, evolutionists countered with the puncuated equilibrium theory. This theory holds that the reason for the gaps is that evolution suddenly happens across all species for a short period of time and then stops for millions of years. Brilliant! Now, if we cannot observe evolution it is not disproven because it may never happen in our lifetimes, or, indeed, in the lifetime of all of human civilization.
This gleeful "slam dunk" article that revels in taunting an evolutionist philosophical rivals is one of the worst examples of athiest zealotry that I've seen. In his rush to say, "I told you so," the author misses the simple fact that a divine creator could've used common tools in the creation of life just as easily as random luck. This is no proof, and this antagonistic little chestbeating is not worthy to be called news. Until we can see evolution definitively happen in a higher life form, we cannot accept the theory of evolution as proven no matter what other incidental evidence encourages support of the theory.
(Incidentally, I'm a theistic evolutionist. I believe very strongly that evolution is true, but that it was guided by a divine plan. However, as someone who does not assume that there is no God, I have no turned a blind eye to flaws in evolutionist doctine. I believe that they will be plugged one day, but I am not willing to outright dismiss the idea that evolution is the only possibility.)
The Free Software Foundation will only accept one license -- the one that gives them control, the GPL. It does not matter what anyone else attempt to do, unless you give all software over to their dogmatic cause, then you are the enemy. I don't think Apple should pay them a bit of attention. The FSF's dogma has always been "My way or the highway."
The fact that I can't make a direct system call (and bypassing the LGPL'ed glibc) in Linux without GPL'ing my software is nauseating. The fact that I can't use the GNU regular expression library without GPLing my software is even more frustrating. What is the point of a library you can't use because of licensing issues? How is that free?
I don't think that it's important. It's just an attempt to get the zealots stirred up in an attempt to force Apple to accept things on the FSF's terms. I say ignore them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should we own our DNA? If some pharmco makes a bundle of some discover from your DNA, what have they contributed? Major intellectual effort, money and time. What have you contributed? A slimey Q-tip. You get what you give. Royalties paid to people would be akin to a lottery, where your ticket is your DNA. Very few would profit in practice. Got something really valuable? Maybe you are naturally AIDS resistant, or cancer resistant. Hey, hold out for millions. You've got them over a barrel. NOW who is the profiteer? Maybe the IRS will now go after your parents for gift/estate taxes, because after all, you got the DNA from them.
You seem to see evil in people demanding money for works based on their unique genetic advantages. Good. The problem is that you instead say that this right should be turned over to pharmacutical companies. No way in hell.
Natural genetic code formed by billions of years of evolution is a public commons. It should be the property of all mankind. No company should be able to withhold the right of others to look at the DNA within themselves. The idea that a pharmacutical company should be able to patent tests on certain genes is ludicrous. It's the most obvious application of the Human Genome Project! Once you know what a gene does, testing to see if people have a problem created by that gene by looking for its presense is obvious, even to people who are not practioners versed in the art.
Natural genes that provide advantages to people are discoveries, not inventions. I don't have a problem with patenting unique created sequences, but patenting anything based on something discovered in nature is just a revolting abuse of the patent system. That's not innovation. That's not creativity. That's just taking something already existing and making sure that no one can use it without paying you for having noticed it.
If you want to see the evil that companies can do when they decide to enforce gene licenses, look no further than our favorite repeat offender, Monsanto.
Perhaps you should consider the recent Slashdot article about Monsanto suing a farmer in Canada who was growing crops based on Monsanto seeds that blew onto his property. Monsanto successfully proved that since they owned the patents to the genetically altered corn, they owned exclusive rights to the growth of the corn. Since he hadn't signed their extortionist contracts to grow the corn, he couldn't grow it, even though successive generations had been produced on his land. Futhermore, he couldn't grow crops based on seeds he had stored from the previous few years. Essentially, his business was destroyed because the Canadian courts ruled that since Monsanto owned the IP rights to the genes in the crops, they also own the rights to production of any derived works.
Now let's put those same rights of ownership of the genes that make you and me into the hands of a profiteering third party. What if your child gets a genetic enhancement that helps cure a disease? Can the company demand that your child pay a licensing fee for any children that they have? If you refuse, can they order any derivative works based on your child's genes destroyed or turned over to them?
Now, I think it's unlikely that anything this bad will ever happen with humans, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. Greed seems to be the primary motivating factor of society today.
The MPAA is composed of all the major American movie studios. Japanese companies and the American companies that distribute anime (such as ADV Films, AnimEigo, etc.) are not members of the MPAA as far as I can tell.
From http://www.mpaa.org/Press/DVD_FAQ.htm:
What is the MPAA and who are the members?
The MPAA is the trade association for the motion picture industry. The members of the MPAA are: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, Inc. (The Walt Disney Co., Hollywood Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Miramax Films Corp.); Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, United Artists Pictures, Orion Pictures); Paramount Pictures Corporation; Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. (Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures); Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Universal Studios, Inc.; and Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P.
I don't see a single company that makes or distributes anime in there, unless you count Disney for "Princess Mononoke." If your real beef is with the DVD case, then buy your anime on VHS and be done with it. Don't go casting aspersions on the industry, though.
I'm the president of an anime club at my college, and the commercial companies have been very, very nice to us about letting us show anime to people in our local theatre. Normally, to do a public showing for a movie, you don't contact the studio. They'll blow you off and send you to the distribution houses, such as SWANK or Critereon. Instead, you those distributors $50-200 for a copy of the movie licensed for public showing. Most commercial anime companies, however, are nice enough to grant permission to show their stuff for free. They realize that without fans, they wouldn't have jobs and will treat people right. These guys are the good guys. They aren't in a position to stick it to their customers and will attempt to please them as much as possible.
Knowing they exist and having to deal with them are two different deals. You assume every Mac user uses Word.
Huh? When did I say that? I'm a long time Mac user, and I religiously avoid installing MS software on my home machine. I still use Appleworks (once Clarisworks) for the simple papers I have to write.
As for MacOS X being vunderable to virii, it has been out for over 8 months (Public Beta - 1.5 years if you count MacOS X Server) and not one virus has shown up. Since normal usage of X prevents root access, viruses are going to be difficult to write.
Oh, wow. 8 months. 8 months of Beta software used only by early adopters. Give it time.
Having used the Public Beta for quite a while, I disagree with your assertion about root access. Very many system tasks, including installing software for all users to use, involves clicking a little lock icon and giving the software the root password. A trojan posing as a system tool or an installer could very easily get root access from an unsuspecting Mac user. Worse, a virus could hijack a user executed process that provides hooks into root access via a similar method.
However, few viruses will need to play those kinds of tricks on the user. Root kits are an established problem in the UNIX world. Mac OS X brings a whole new installed base of unsophisticated UNIX admins running the same versions of the web server, FTP server, NFS server, etc. that come with Mac OS X. Just a click of a few button in the system panels, and you can publish a page to the web via your very own web server -- the same web server that is on every other Mac OS X machine. If an exploit is found against that version, it won't be long before a root kit could be made against every Mac OS X machine with their web server turned on. "Hello! You have root!"
Mac OS X will be a UNIX cracker's dream. Hundreds of thousands of UNIX machines will be on-line with admins who don't know a thing about security. Why should they? The Mac's strength has been keeping that kind of thing out of the user's hair. With an installed base greater than Red Hat and a far less technically sophisticated person, on average, administrating each system, Mac OS X is a much more desireable target than Linux. UNIX worm writers will easily be able to apply their skills to Mac OS X without having the learn the radically different Classic Mac OS or Carbon APIs. Plus they are much easier to remotely administrate/exploit than Classic Mac OS machines. Trust me. UNIX is as much a weakness for the Mac as it is a strength.
If MacOS X is so completely unimmune from viruses, lets see how many show up in the next year compared to Linux or Windows. I would rather use my computer to make money than fighting viruses. You waste your time, with the x86 -- I need a new pool boy...
You know, if you'd bothered paying attention, it should've been obvious that I'm a Mac user myself. I'm also somewhat experienced with UNIX, and I think I know a little about the problems that it brings along with its strengths to the Macintosh. The last thing Mac users need is advocates who are insulting to people they think aren't Mac users and who spout dogma that is just plain wrong.
You know that there have been Mac viruses before. There's about 40-50 or so non-Word macro viruses. The reason you don't see as many of them is that the Mac hasn't been as friendly to casual programmers as DOS and Windows have been, and the market penetration is lower. Thus, there are less people messing around with non-professional programming on the Mac who would get the virus-writing urge. It's lack of market penetration has also made it less desireable of a target.
There is no inherent safety to the Classic Mac OS that prevents viruses at all. In fact, the use of shared global memory resources, non-existant memory protection, and nearly non-existant file protection makes it very unsafe. It's just secured by obscurity.
Mac OS X will have all the same strengths and weaknesses of a UNIX system. Unfortunately, the UNIX layer makes basic worm and virus writing easier since the APIs are better known by more people. It won't be long until the first Mac OS X viruses begin propogating. I don't think we'll ever reach the level of DOS/Windows in its heyday, but don't kid yourself into thinking that the Mac is, has been, or ever will be completely immune from rouge code on the system.
No OS is impervious to worms, virii, trojans, etc. ... Quit using it as a reason to "make the switch to linux" in your anti-microsoft banter; you're not fooling anyone.
Yeah, but that's the equivalent of saying no nation is free of diseases. There are some places in the world you'd rather be (America, Europe, Japan, etc.) than others (Somalia, Haiti, Ghana). Better hospitals and better sanitation would be good reasons to prefer the more powerful industrialized nations. If anyone's been claiming that Linux (and UNIX in general) is invulnerable, then they really need to ask themselves why there even is an effort to make systems like OpenBSD. However, saying that one outbreak of a worm makes Linux on the same level as Windows in terms of security is like claiming that the LA riots made America equivalent to Palestine in terms of social stability.
Yes, there are Linux worms. Yes, there are Linux root-kits, designed to exploit well-known bugs in programs distributed with certain Linux distributions. Does that mean that Linux is anywhere near as vulnerable as Windows? I don't think so. Security is still a reason to switch from Windows to Linux, and a knowledgeable person who actually cares about security can put together a nearly bulletproof box with a little effort.
Could you say the same for Windows? Maybe, but it's a lot harder and takes away a lot more functionality to do so because there are fewer alternative solutions to replace the builtin solutions. (No IIS, no "Windows Networking", no Outlook, no IE, etc.)
I like the keyboard myself -- I have one sitting in front of me in my cubicle. However, I would not recommend it for his purposes. Pressing the keys on that keyboard takes a bit more force than that of the Dell QuietKey that I'm typing this on, and even this keyboard might be a bit more than what he's looking for.
They do sound, look, and feel good to me, but my favorite keyboards are still the old IBM PS/2 keyboards. You know the ones.. the ones that felt like they had bed springs under the keys? I loved the feel of them even though the noise they made meant that you couldn't use them at night when other people in the house might be sleeping.
If you think about work you get stressed. If you think about food you create saliva. If you think about water you start needing to pee. But what if you aren't thinking?
Then you're probably trolling on Slashdot.
The first amendment only restrains the actions of government and public institution, such as a public school. Private entities are not beholden to the first amendment at all. They can make any censoring action they see fit unless other laws take precedence, such as equal-opportunity employment laws.
For example, this was helpful in the case "Cyber Promotions vs. AOL." (I think I have the plaintiff's name right.) Cyber Promotions was a well-known spam organization that AOL blocked e-mails from. Cyber Promotions argued that since AOL was acting as a postmaster that they should have to respect the first amendment. (There is a preexisting case that establishes that if a private institution is the only one offering a government service in a town that they must be treated as a public entity, such as in the case of "company towns.") The court rejected this argument and upheld that AOL was not acting as a government entity. Thus, AOL was free to filter their networks as they saw fit.
Private schools can get away with this because they don't receive public funding. I wonder, though, if Bush's school voucher program goes through if they can still enjoy this status.
I hope you're right. I hope something good will come of all this. On the other hand, I don't think this will lead to any change in the total cost of the service. Even if the cost of the cell phone goes down, it'll probably cost just as much to use the service as it does now for a regular phone.
While this may make cheaper laptops one day available, current paper/ink & plastic circuitry technology doesn't perform anywhere near as well as regular methods. I think the days of a printed paper x86-class-of-complexity chip is a little ways off. By that time, who knows how much traditional technologies will cost? Heck, by then, Moore's Law may have stalled and price may be the only means of competition left.
It's a good thought, and I hope you're right. It's just the carelessness of the inventor that got me so angry. I certainly don't think she'll be instrumental in seeing these positive applications. Maybe something good can be built on the foundation she laid for herself.
Sorry. That does suck losing a phone like that. However, from the experience of my friends and family (I'm the only guy I know who doesn't have a cell phone) I'd say that the average cell phone user would produce less waste with a normal cell phone than with the disposables.
It also doesn't change the fact that it is an idea created by a woman who apparently doesn't give a damn about the consequences of her actions to other. She was driving with a cell phone, was willing to throw it out the window if it didn't cost to much, and has shrugged off complaints about the idea by essentially saying that that is how society works so she might as well take advantage of it.
That's an unethical inventor.
Oh, you mean the great statues of Buddha?
Why are you throwing away the regular cell phone every 2 years? They last for much longer than that.
I'm pretty sure that the paper ones will generate far more trash. They, by default, only last 60 minutes. I don't know if they are rechargeable or if they have a replaceable battery, but it doesn't look like it does from the picture. They suggest that you'll be able to push a button to get more time, but I somehow doubt that the battery will be good enough for 3 months.
3 months isn't the intent of the design. It's intended, really, to be used for the 60 minutes and tossed away. For some people, that might be 3 months, but from what I've observed of most cell phone users, I suspect it will be far less time than that -- maybe a week or so.
When they become entirely ink on paper, maybe they'll be recycleable, but I somehow doubt it. That's not the intention. Remember, this is the invention of a woman who would've thrown her cell phone out the window and forgotten about it if it wasn't so expensive. When the average person hears about these things, they're excited by the idea of being able to use and dispose of it so easily. The ramifications of this don't really dent that enthusiasm. The average person, which this woman is in many ways, doesn't really understand nor care about the impact of garbage on the future.
I'm sure this will generate far more garbage, and I don't really think that it will be less damaging in the long run. Maybe I'm just cynical. I prefer to call it experienced.
A religion attempts to fulfill the spiritual needs of an individual. There is no concern beyond their spiritual welfare and the desire to help them to become a better person. This may mean accepting Jesus, becoming Enlightened, or whatever. While there may be fund-raising involved, it is usually intended stricly for the upkeep of religious structues and spiritual leaders or for the benefit of other people, such as for food for the homeless.
A "religion," or cult, mimics this behavior in an attempt to squeeze money, sexual favors, or adoration out of an individual. In such an organization there is frequently a leader or group of leaders who experience material gain at the expense of their followers. Followers are usually pressured into decisions that benefit the core of the cult at the expense of the common members, such as Scientology's alleged pressuring of its core office staff to avoid pregnancy and get abortions or the Branch Davidians' marriage of all women (including underage girls) to David Koresh.
While Religions are not immune to power-grabbing by selfish members, cults are often focused around this. Scientology has a nasty reputation for strong-arm tactics and its leaders have made somewhat worrisome statements in public before about enemies of the church needing to be "dealt with." Twice they've tried to defend in court their right to name enemies for constant harrasment under Freedom of Religion.
I realize that if you don't see religion as a positive thing, the distinction may be lost on you, but there is a significant difference between, say, Shinto or Islam and Scientology. A church shouldn't be run like a business, much less like a crime family. I don't know how much of the rumors are true, but the public actions that the church has taken are good indicators that they could be.
Yeah. I love that rationale too. She didn't care about the other drivers around her, just that her phone was too expensive. If it wasn't, she would've just simply chucked it out the window. Littering at the least, reckless endangerment at the worst. It's bad enough to have to deal with smokers tossing their damn cigarettes out the window. Now I should have to deal with cell phones too?
Oh, and you want a paper laptop too for the same reason. I'm not going to even start on that.
Then there's her other great quote:
"I can't change what society is. We are a disposable society. Life is what it is," she said. "I didn't wake up one day and say, 'What can I do to help destroy the planet?' "
I guess she's taking the phrase "if you aren't a part of the solution, you're part of the problem" just a little too far. If there's a problem in society that she recognizes, then she shouldn't be trying to make it worse. Of course, she's the type who would've thrown a normal phone out the window if it wouldn't have hurt her bottom line.
People like this make me sick. Invention without concern for the side-effects is just unethical. She acknowledges that she might be contributing to one of the crasser aspects of American society and then shrugs it off. I'm sure she just cares about the fact that Joe-on-the-Street will make her filthy rich. Who cares what it leads to as long as she gets rich.
Man, I don't need to read stuff like this. It gets me too angry. I hate being reminded what a selfish fucking world we live in.
They mention in the article that farmers have 3 solutions against this pest. The first two involve pesticides, sprayed on or produced by the cotton itself. The last option is to put out irridiated moths that are sterile. Unfortunately, these irradiated moths are damaged by the process and do not mate well. To be effective you have to release 60X the number of normal moths.
Instead, this is just a refinement of the "terminator seed" idea. Each year, you have to buy only 5X the number who wish to wipe out since the existing moths have absolutely no way of telling the difference. (In theory anyway, that's why they're testing it first.) The next year, you have far less moths to worry about. Farmers already do this with the irradiated moths. This is just a much more effective way of doing things.
Personally, I prefer this -- by far -- over Monsanto's Bt cotton. We still aren't sure whether prolonged exposure to Bt is harmful to people or not, and I don't have to wear the side effects of that little experiment. If this idea takes off, we may be able to reduce or nearly eliminate the need for pesticides. If we systematically eliminate/reduce the numbers of pests affecting crops in a biological fashion, we can reduce the need for chemical treatments.
I hope it goes well. In the same light, I also like the mosquito-vaccine idea. If we can release mosquitoes that block/treat malaria in regions infested with in, we might be able to do a lot of good for third-world nations.
What exactly are you babbling about? The man's problem is that people are taking stuff he wrote and giving his, Harlan Ellison's, stuff away for free.
This is not about people creating their own content and giving it away by choice. This is about people taking the source of what little revenue a SF writer gets and mass publishing it via the Internet without paying the author a single dime.
He's right to take a stand like this. My favorite SF author, Roger Zelazny, died of cancer while working his tail off. He was well-known and a Hugo award winner several times over yet he still wasn't making enough money just off writing to rest on his heels and relax for awhile and focus on recovery. Writers, especially the really good ones it seems, are generally not wealthy. In fact, usually they're struggling to get by.
This is not about jealousy over better writers releasing stuff for free. This is a fight for survival against people who don't think they should have to pay for the work that writers like Ellison do to provide the money for their food and housing. If you're upset that he should demand payment for services rendered, then don't buy his stuff. Go ahead. Be a leech. I'm sure that none of your other favorite authors that are still alive would approve, though. Do you think Asimov wrote the massive numbers of nonfiction articles he did just for kicks? Harlan just has the rabid tenacity and guts to take a stand against it.
Yeah, people who still care about gameplay.
Some of my favorite games are for the Gameboy. I'm suprised to see how well some of my cartridges (particularly the RPGs with battery saves) have held up over the years. I mean, my "Final Fantasy Legend" cart is still kicking after 10+ years!
I even bought a Game Boy Pocket last year when I temporarily succumbed to the Pokemon demons. Geez, talk about video game crack! I don't think I've logged more hours (100+) in a single session of any game before. That game is designed to prey upon the weaknesses of obsessive-compulsives.
Polys are not everything. Gameplay is what brings people back.
Well, this is deliberately bad. If the author had used descriptive variable names with more than one letter, used whitespace, and taken other steps to make it readable, I'm sure it wouldn't be so bad.
(IMHO, though, there is no valid use for the ternary operator '?:' other than making code hard to read.)
Being a government body, then, they are beholden to the same Constitutional limits of any other government body. You see, you actually did need to read the article to notice that all of the examples where you actually have no recourse are private institutions.
Public funding is a two-edged sword.
Well, if you're willing to try out Mozilla, they've added hidden preferences in release 0.8 that will let you turn that off. They say that there will be a UI for it soon. The description can be found here.
Trust me. It works great. I've been using Mozilla as my regular browser since 0.7 came out, and it's come a long way since the M## builds.
Um, no. "Evolution" means that the genetic makeup of a population changes over time. This is a fact as much as gravity is a fact.
That's adaptation. Darwinian evolution was a theory that attempted to explain the source of different species as being based on natural selection of random variations. The key here is that adaptation must be inherited and must lead to new species.
So far, we've seen inherited adapation, but we have not seen any fundamentally new species occur. At the scale of simple asexual creatures, it is difficult to define whether or not a variation is a new species of not. However, in sexually reproducing creatures, you can define the species line as whether or not two creatures can breed a non-sterile child. For example, lions and tigers can breed, but the child will be sterile.
We have seen extreme variation within a single species, such as the domesticated dog. However, all breeds of dog can be cross-bred. (Some crosses will have extreme difficulty surviving in the womb due to size differences, but they are not impossible.) We have not, however, seen evidence of new, incompatible species being created. Domestic and wild turkeys can still breed. This is what we have not observed, the creation of a new species.
Well, I should've guessed I'd get a lot of replies, but I didn't know that I was so wrong about the things which had been eating at me lately.
Things I got wrong:
1) Linus gives permission to use system calls without violating the GPL. Thank God. It really irritated me that if I wanted to use a feature of the kernel directly that I couldn't take my choice of licenses. (I prefer a public-domain like license, such as the BSD license.)
2) There are GPL-compatible licenses. I did not know this. I thought that if you linked to GPL'ed code it had to be GPL'ed. In fact, I wrote up a response in another article about the GPL 3.0 where I asked a bunch of questions about this. The responses I got back indicated that you probably did have to GPL your code if you so much as touched someone else's GPLed code. Never once did someone bring up GPL-compatible licenses. I didn't know such things existed.
However, I still think that RMS's message is nothing more than a troll intended to get people to try to pressure Apple into doing things his way.
As for the control thing, aren't you supposed to give ownership of a GPL'ed project over the FSF generally? (Primarily, according to them, so that they can handle any legal disputes.)
This is known as punctuated equilibrium. The idea is that unless some major environmental change happens, speciation never occurs. This wonderful theory makes evolution impossible to disprove, much like most religious beliefs.
We can't observe speciation occuring? That just means that we aren't in a critical point in evolution. Until we observe speciation it is unproven. It's funny how religion is criticized for being a belief in something unproven, unobserved, and defiantly undisprovable and evolution is not.
Oh, but in many ways it is a religious belief.
The very fact that we share proteins and cellular structures in common with bacteria dictates that we must share genes in common with them. We've long known, for example, that mouse biochemistry is very similar to our own. Logically, we must share a great majority of genes with them. That the tools used to make similar structures are similar in no way denies divine creation of these things.
We have long known that we would share much in common with other creatures. I don't think any scientific creationist has ever denied this. Why should God use more complex tools to create life when so much of it is reusable? Perhaps as a software developer, I see the inherent need for reuse of code whenever possible that others might not. All this shows is that evolution would have had to do less work to get to the point that complex life has gotten to. It is in no way the smoking gun that proves the theory.
Let us remember what so many in the scientific establishment attempt to deny: evolution is nothing but a theory. It is a good one, and it is the only one that makes sense if you posit the lack of existance of a creating force. However the fanatical willingness to overlook flaws in the model is just as much a matter of religious (atheist) dogma as some of the twisted logic of some of its opponents.
The problem comes when one puts their faith in the belief that there is no God. Rather than accept the possibility that they are wrong and respect the beliefs of others, dedicated evolutionists will attempt to push their doctrine as fact, much as this author has done.
In truth, these people will hold their doctrine of evolution to less standards of proof than they would hold a religious man's beliefs. Though as religious man is treated a fool for believing in a being that he has never observed, evolution, which has never been observed, is not treated as rigorously. In fact, when confronted with gaps in the fossil records, evolutionists countered with the puncuated equilibrium theory. This theory holds that the reason for the gaps is that evolution suddenly happens across all species for a short period of time and then stops for millions of years. Brilliant! Now, if we cannot observe evolution it is not disproven because it may never happen in our lifetimes, or, indeed, in the lifetime of all of human civilization.
This gleeful "slam dunk" article that revels in taunting an evolutionist philosophical rivals is one of the worst examples of athiest zealotry that I've seen. In his rush to say, "I told you so," the author misses the simple fact that a divine creator could've used common tools in the creation of life just as easily as random luck. This is no proof, and this antagonistic little chestbeating is not worthy to be called news. Until we can see evolution definitively happen in a higher life form, we cannot accept the theory of evolution as proven no matter what other incidental evidence encourages support of the theory.
(Incidentally, I'm a theistic evolutionist. I believe very strongly that evolution is true, but that it was guided by a divine plan. However, as someone who does not assume that there is no God, I have no turned a blind eye to flaws in evolutionist doctine. I believe that they will be plugged one day, but I am not willing to outright dismiss the idea that evolution is the only possibility.)
The Free Software Foundation will only accept one license -- the one that gives them control, the GPL. It does not matter what anyone else attempt to do, unless you give all software over to their dogmatic cause, then you are the enemy. I don't think Apple should pay them a bit of attention. The FSF's dogma has always been "My way or the highway."
The fact that I can't make a direct system call (and bypassing the LGPL'ed glibc) in Linux without GPL'ing my software is nauseating. The fact that I can't use the GNU regular expression library without GPLing my software is even more frustrating. What is the point of a library you can't use because of licensing issues? How is that free?
I don't think that it's important. It's just an attempt to get the zealots stirred up in an attempt to force Apple to accept things on the FSF's terms. I say ignore them.