In the interview where Bruce Schneier lists the various hardware and software requirements for AES, that it both work in very small 8bit low RAM environments along with higher end equipment; that it stream well for desktop video on demand; that it parallelize well across many devices; that it fit in specialized embedded cryptographic hardware in few gates, etc etc etc... I ask:
Why do we need one algorithm for all these functions? Beyond political constraints of the AES selection process, wouldn't it make more sense to choose two, or possibly several, candidates each suited for different purposes?
This is great, I support the use of CO-OPs for this kind of community sharing (I've been involved with my current food CO-OP for almost a decade), but because the phone companies have mopopolies on providing local loop and digital services it's really only viable where you can string your own wire.
So, I can't imagine a CO-OP like this being viable if the have to go through the local CO in order to get to each member's demark, but for community condominiums and large apartment buildings this kind of technique is a wonderful idea for lowering cost across the board to all members. The point I'm making is that once you start reselling something (even if you're doing it non-profit) that the phone company can do with it's own equipment you are at a serious disadvantage.
One other possibility: the CO-OP could get a high speed connection in a neighborhood and then resell it via wireless... but that could turn into a regulatory nightmare.
Finally: If cablemodem companies are serious about providing "local loop" service (even if it's a completely different technology from traditional switched phone networks) then shouldn't they be regulated under the same tarrifs as the standard phone companies? Such an argument could bring demark standardization between the two carriers and foster better competition... and even lower prices -- for individuals and CO-OPs.
Actually, it was more meant for the proprietary libc's that came with the Un*x systems that GNU was bootstrapped on. When the Motif issue came about, people kind of looked the other way (RMS included), but it was an uncomfortable situation. Emacs (the quintessential RMS work) has never used Motif, even though the crufty widgets it used in lieu aren't great to work with (Xawe, I think).
Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I distictly remember RMS stating the this exception was OK for use with Motif. And I'm certain that emacs is #ifdef'd for use with Motif, because I've built straight emacs linked against Motif before. There's a./configure switch to build for Motif right in the distribution. Now, even if all of this is right I'm sure Motif gives RMS the willies -- never mind the obnoxiousness of having to program with it.
[time taken to check] Yup... I'm right about Motif support, here's configure output from the latest emacs-20.4:
scuzzlebutt%./configure --help Usage: configure [options] [host] Options: [defaults in brackets after descriptions] Configuration: --cache-file=FILE cache test results in FILE
[snip for brevity]
--with-hesiod support Hesiod to get the POP server host --with-x-toolkit=KIT use an X toolkit (KIT = yes/lucid/athena/motif/no) --with-x use the X Window System scuzzlebutt%
The thing is, Motif was never a very viable development tool for free software developers. You have to statically link, people on non-proprietary Unicen usually don't have the development libraries, etc. So, people could look the other way because there was never any real danger of it starting a trend.
Qt is viable. That it is Open Source isn't terribly meaningful, because the GPL doesn't mention Open Source in any way -- and it shouldn't, because the Open Source Definition is hardly a legally robust document.
So, are you suggesting that RMS and his lawyers are going to draw a line in the sand and test the GPL in court here??? This seems not only dangerous but also an action with little gain. QT may not meet complete "Free Software" requirements as far as RMS and other total GPL proponents are concerned, but if the FSF decides to fight this issue out they better be ready to deal with compilation on proprietary UNIXen as well.
I think the most important point to make is that the enforcement of all of these licenses must be consistent across the board. If RMS, Linus, the GIMP developers, whoever, start playing games like "Well, you can derive from my source, but (s)he can't," just like how Sun's SCSL is structured, then we've denegrated the GPL and Free Software for all. It seems to me that if RMS includes support for Motif right in the latest emacs itself then GPL proponents really don't have a leg to stand on when claiming that QT and other GPL'd source can't be linked together; at least not if they want their argument to stay consistent.
Actually, IIRC, the clause refers not to "routinely shipped libraries" but instead to "essential system libraries"...to me, the distinction is vital.
There is absolutely nothing "essential" about QT for Linux...I can rm that tree, and my system will reboot just fine. You can't however simply remove the Windows\System directory, and expect anything to work properly.
While accurate, you miss the context of why that original clause was amended to the GPL. RMS wanted to make certain that software authors could write GPL'd Motif software, which at the time was (and some could arguably write still is for commercial vendors) the most popular GUI widget library available for UNIX and it's clones. RMS didn't want to prevent Free Software authors from writing useful code, so he carved out a niche for Motif and told everyone to go ahead a write free Motif code.
Now I ask you, since Motif is completely closed source while QT meets most "Open Source" guidelines by at least Eric Raymond's perspective, how is this clause usable with Motif and yet unavailable for QT? Or better put, how is a closed source Motif allowed to use the "Essential system libraries" clause while an "Open Source" QT can't, when they perform exactly the same system level services?
Beats me. RMS, can you chime in here???
OpenBSD and NetBSD merge...
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IMHO the best thing for the BSD community is if the OpenBSD guys and the NetBSD guys could get together. Unfortunately, the inability to do that is the very reason they are apart.
I'll address just this point, never mind the rest *cough*.
Two reasons why this won't happen:
OpenBSD codes and ships from Canada where laws against exporting cryptograpy are almost non-existent. This means that one of the primary reaons OpenBSD split off from the NetBSD group, that being to create a distribution with a security focus, could not be done here in the United States. I'll note that many of the core NetBSD contributors are based here in Boston (though, obviously not all)
I don't think Theo wants too. Good 'nuff for me.
Re:OpenBSD audits all its code...
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OpenBSD's security is wonderful, but correct me if i'm wrong, it's no *remote* root exploits?
I doubt anyone would be insane enough to make that claim with sincerity. OpenBSD does a good job by starting most daemons as normal users and then chroot() jailing the process, providing high quality blowfish cryptography support for passwords (try and run crack on that!), and just being careful with their code. They've done an extensive code audit looking for lack of bounds checking ala buffer overruns and other obvious exploits... strncpy() instead of strcpy() type fixes.
But this DOESN'T mean OpenBSD is completely and totally secure, nor does it mean it's been completely cleaned of remote root exploits. Never mind removing all Denial of Service exploits, or well hidden and unpredictable race conditions.
Such are the statements of fools...:-)
BSD differences are small, but at times critical
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.There are some serious differences between the different flavors of BSD, but for general purpose use one would almost never notice them.
OpenBSD ships with heavy cryptography in the distribution, allowing one to choose Blowfish generated passwords instead of MD5 for example. They're allowed to do this because they code, integrate the distribution, and ship from Canada, where Draconian laws on exporting Open Source cryptography are non-existent. Taking advantage of this the OpenBSD project is also striving to update ssh-1.2.12, the last completely free version of ssh, to remove well known security problems, which will be known as OpenSSH.
The other two projects, NetBSD and FreeBSD each have separate slants, though neither offers direct strong cryptography in their distributions because both ship from within the United States. FreeBSD is tailored for use with x86 and now Alpha CPUs, while NetBSD is tailored for wide portability. This is why the NetBSD project states "Of course it runs NetBSD."
I've only slightly used FreeBSD, and many years back. However, my NAT box connected to a cablemodem runs OpenBSD, and I have several old Sun workstations which run NetBSD... I have to say I'm very pleased with both of these Operating Systems and would strongly recommend them to anyone with need of an OS for some specific purpose (like NAT service on a firewall, or to run old oddball hardware like my Sun3s, old VAXes, and the like). And they're very strong distributions with heavy development cycles... just recently the NetBSD project integrated in UVM, a completely new memory manager with distinct advantages from the stock VM described in the BSD Design and implementation Red Book.
Hell, they all make for excellent alternatives to Linux as well... though I personally prefer Linux on my desktop workstation, after having my previous IP-MASQ Linux system, also connected to the cablemodem, cracked using a well known named buffer overflow (yes it was my fault) I'm now convinced I don't want a Linux box sitting out on the open net. I feel much safer with OpenBSD for many reasons... not just because they include the cryptography but because they code audit, they by default run critical daemons without root privileges in chroot() jails, and the authors take great pains to distribute their system by default with the fewest services started as possible, unlike most Linux distributions.
And one last thing, not meant to inflame Linux Proponents since I gleefully run both systems in my house, the documentation in all the BSD distributions seems far superior to Linux DOCS. Linux may have more HOWTO's, and other informal documentation, but when it comes to finding canonical documentation, like in man5 for/etc for example, the BSD's seem much better organized. The man system is but one small example, for primary documentation (just read Design and Implementation of the BSD Operating System for a great example of amazing kernel documentation) I've simply found nothing better among free software.
_I_ am not calling anything anything, other than calling you on crack - show me these 'patches' that Red Hat ships.
OK, I'd like to thank users "tap" and "mmclure" for pointing out the obvious; that installing the kernel-2.2.12-20.src.rpm will generate our list of patches for you:
[root@marquez SOURCES]# ls -l | wc -l 65 [root@marquez SOURCES]#
Am I still a liar? Do these patches live in never-never land? Does this whole thread really deserve to be moderated down by several points to a 1 simply because some moderators didn't agree with its position? Isn't the point of moderation to promote factually correct and valuable discourse?
A public apology for calling me a liar would be nice, Blue.
So, since Alan Cox works for Redhat it's OK for Redhat to ship modified kernel source, but not OK for Pacific HI-TEC?
No, since Alan Cox is one of the three core contributors to the linux kernel, since he regularly supplies updates, and since he is the person who puts together the kernel that Red Hat ships, it is ok for them to ship whatever the hell they want to - it IS the linux kernel. That would make a great piece of Red Hat Trivia - name all of AC's changes to the kernel shipped by Red Hat that Linus later nixed. I'm sure there are at least 1 or 2.
You insinuated that they were shipping extensions, modifications, or additions to the kernel that are not part of the 'stock' linux kernel, and that is false. Their CONFIGURATION of said kernel is quite different from what Linus or Alan choose to post, ie, the default configuration, but I know you're much too smart to be confusing configuration with code - at least, I've had enough respect for your posts in the past to hope so.
I'm insinuating nothing of the sort, I'm stating it outright. All you have to do is run a make config on the RH6.1 2.2.12-20 kernel which is supplied with the distribution against a make config from a stock 2.2.12 which has been blessed by Linus and diff the comparing.config's. There are many additional patches which don't ship with the Linus blessed kernel supplied in the Redhat distribution kernel. Last I heard, Alan Cox is not Linus Torvalds, and his ac branch kernel series is not distributed as a "proper" Linux kernel. This is not a value judgment against Redhat, or Alan Cox, it is simply the truth. When you make the claim that Alan Cox, among other well known kernel developers, have more or better special rights over the kernel source than everyone else you are underminding the very meaning of the GPL! This is nothing with which to dilly-dally about... Free Software has a special meaning... if what you say were true legally the GPL would be meaningless as a Free Software document.
You can't call the GPL'd patches included with either Redhat or TurboLinux inapropriate because that complies with the GPL.And you can't call the proprietary kernel modules inapropriate (even though Redhat doesn't ship proprietary kernel modules with it's distribution) because Linus has made quite clear that he accepts the legality of proprietary binary kernel modules.
_I_ am not calling anything anything, other than calling you on crack - show me these 'patches' that Red Hat ships. The TL patches are really that, patches that apply against a base stable or devel release of the kernel. This is an extension of the existing kernel. Red Hat supplies, to my knowledge, no such patches. They supply a kernel, a stock linux kernel, usually a branch of the stable release. There are no PVM extensions, there are no scalability extensions. I think you might be confusing the fact that they, by default, enable almost every single driver available to be built as a module, with them including extra code. They supply those modules because they are needed at install time to interface with the customer's hardware.
Now who's baiting flames? Like I said, as long as it meets the guidelines of GPL licensing, it's perfectly legal! Free Software isn't about whether you like it that I can include my own GPL'd code in your distribution, it's about FREEDOM to modify your and my code as I see fit! Pacific Hi-Tec isn't even skirting the laws here, unlike Corel with their previous beta Corel Linux program, they are releasing a set of GPL'd patches and some proprietary kernel modules... all actions of which Linus has made perfectly clear in the past he supports.
See above for how it's different, and you're baiting flames by making completely false claims. A lie, to me, is always flame bait.
I didn't lie in the first post, and I still don't see a single person who has pointed out even a factual error! I'm perfectly happy to be corrected with factual mistakes, but to call me a liar simply because I wrote a seemingly unpopular truth really stretches your point. And I note that since moderators have chosen to moderate this down to the cruft, nobody cares anyway. Still, Damn rude on your part.
Please don't moderate total falsehoods like this up - this is flamebait. Alan Cox, the actual primary code architect of the Linux Kernel, is a Red Hat employee. While RH does often ship a 'tweener' kernel, or one that is in some state of AC's patches, there is nothing at all non-standard about it.
So, since Alan Cox works for Redhat it's OK for Redhat to ship modified kernel source, but not OK for Pacific HI-TEC?
This is Free Software, as long as the patches comply with the licensing terms of the Linux kernel the distributers of TurboLinux have every right to ship a modified GPL kernel source, just as they have every right to ship a distribution which contains proprietary closed source drivers bundled as binary modules.
You can't call the GPL'd patches included with either Redhat or TurboLinux innapropriate because that complies with the GPL. And you can't call the proprietary kernel modules innapropriate (even though Redhat doesn't ship proprietary kernel modules with it's distribution) becuase Linus has made quite clear that he accepts the legality of priprietary binary kernel modules.
So, how is this different from Redhat, or any other distribution vendor? And how am I baiting flames with my statements?
I would be concerned about the customization if it prevented me from compiling my own kernel and using that instead.
And how are you prevented from compiling and booting a standard "blessed" linux kernel on Pacific Linux? You may lose the clustering capabilities, but that's no different from compiling a non RAID enabled kernel on a system which depending on the RAID capabilities which were included as non-blessed patches in previous Redhat releases.
Redhat kernels (at least, the ones I tried..) are not identical to the standard ones, and so the standard kernel patches can't be applied. This is a nuisance, but only to Redhat users who have to download a huge rpm instead of a few 100K patch file : it doesn't hurt anybody else.
The only other problem I've had is that Redhat initscripts require build-specific System.map and module-info files. The stock release doesn't create those, so you have to bodge around it. Maybe this is documented properly somewhere now - if so, I haven't found it yet. Again, a pain only to Redhat users.
My point exactly... just compare a.depend made from a make config on a pristine kernel to one made with a Redhat supplied kernel to view the differences. This is not a value judgement against Redhat for including non-standard kernel patches with their product, they have every right to do so. Just as Turbo Linux has every right to modify the kernel and include non-blessed patches with their product, as long as they don't break the terms of the GPL. This is a non-issue, as so many others have stated.
Maybe these guys can explain to me how the inclusion of Pacific TurboLinux's unblessed kernel patches to support clustering is any different from the non-standard kernel that ships with Redhat.
Now they must follow GPL licensing restrictions, but this doesn't legally prevent them from selling a tailored distribution which contains a mix of GPL patches and proprietary closed source driver modules... and it's not any more forked than the heavily patched kernel source that ships with Redhat Linux.
Not another effort to equate RMS with the rise of free software!
RMS is largely responsible for the current rise of Free Software. Period. Without him Linus and the BSD folks wouldn't have had the tools necessary to write the Linux kernel, and rewrite out all that AT&T code in BSD. Face it, without the compiler and userspace tools written by the FSF and RMS I suspect that the BSD movement might have died under the weight of AT&T's lawsuit.
IMNSHO, the GPL is evil. It was deliberately designed to be incompatible with everything else and is a huge pain in the butt for many people. One world, one licence, one messiah, eh?
Say what you will about your distaste for the GPL, but without RMS's hard work across nearly a fallow decade lacking Free Software development in the '80s, this movement just wouldn't be viable. In a large measure, his hard work responsible for your access to Linux and BSD!
[...]it's about rebellion and communism and programmers making as little as street musicians[...]
Heh. I'd like to point out that one of my previous guitar teachers was/is a street musician who used to earn (he's since moved from the city) significant money performing in Harvard Square. I mean several hundred dollars a night on a hot weekend. He augmented this with cafe, local radio performances, touring, and teaching to earn a very high standard of living. Why? Because he is a damn good musician and performer. The point? I don't think Alan Cox, Linus Torvalds, RMS, or any of the other well known Free Software programmers are going hungry. In fact, I bet that at any time if they wanted to go on holiday they could scrounge up plenty of money to go play in Europe, The Bahamas, or anywhere else fun. This argument is meaningless.
BTW, how did this completely off-topic post get moderated to the top of this discussion? Not a single mention of "if I had to pay for Linux" or "if I couldn't get the source", just an apparently random tribute to a prominent figure in the world of free software.
This is your only valid argument. You know, I really should have tied a closing argument to the question at hand: "Where would Free Software be without Linux," but I thought my point was obvious. I met RMS promoting GNU long before Linux and 386BSD hit the scene... if Linux hadn't taken off because Linus had chosen some lame license, we would all be running GNU/HURD or BSD. Linus got a functional kernel in at the right time, and he chose an open development model that became popular among a large number of developers. But the BSD and HURD scene was moving along too... it was just a matter of time.
However, I didn't make that clear. And I'm not so sure I do deserve a score 5 on that post... honestly, I think Slashdot has been having some serious moderation problems lately because of the expansion of moderation to the general readership community. Too many poorly written, simplistic and politically correct posts have been moderated up to the very top while intelligent off-beat posts lie fallow. I think this is because everyone posts and moderates so quickly that anyone who spends the time to write and edit their post before committing winds up a good hundred messages below -- where no moderators travel. This is a serious problem... maybe the meta moderation system should allow meta moderators to not only value if a given post has been fairly moderated, but also if the total score to a post is reasonable as well. This way meta-moderators who looked at my score 5 and thought that maybe it was scored a bit too high could in some way resolve that problem. Either that or I saw someone suggest that maybe we should hold off on letting moderators score a post for the first 30 minutes or so... I like that idea too.
I first met RMS back in 1987, when a mutual friend from MIT who had recognized him and called out to say hello, introduced us in front of the Harvard Square T stop. Right up front, even back then, he was promoting his GNU Operating System as a free clone of UNIX with all the source available. I smiled, said "That's interesting" while on the inside I thought he was completely nuts.
I didn't realize that some pieces of his OS puzzle were already written and that a roadmap for the rest was well underway, but at the time I couldn't help but think that the whole idea was just plain stupid. I remember talking with my friend about the endevour afterward and basically pointing out that nobody much cared about UNIX as an Operating System, they bought hardware. People paid huge sums of money for high powered LISP machines from LMI and Symbolics -- not because they ran LISP (for the most part) but because with that hardware and a talented programmer one could do amazing things. At the time I figured the same was true for the emerging UNIX Workstation market, and that these machines would always be far too expensive for a free Operating System to matter at all. Who would throw away a vendor supplied OS and support just to run GNU? Idiotic.
Even though it was obvious given that superior hardware like the Macintosh was getting close to Workstation potential at almost PC prices, I just didn't see that the PC class computer would gain the CPU horsepower and instruction set necessary to run a UNIX class operating system -- even though low end UNIXen were already available for the PC. The idea that end users, not developers might want to run UNIX seemed more far fetched than a vegetarian pigging out in the Central Square MacDonalds (this is Cambridge, mind you).
So, several years later, around early '93 or so, I found myself with a 386sx running Windows -- and hating every minute of it. Upon bitching to my friend about the piece of crap that is Windows, and beating myself over the head for not taking the hit and buying a Macintosh (price gouging or no) my friend pointed out that a BSD clone for the x86 was available called 386BSD, and that some folks were working on another called FreeBSD. He also told me about another cheesy UNIX kernel clone called Linux, but steered me to BSD and offered to make me a set of install floppies.
"Oh, and by the way -- it runs Stallman's 'Idiotic' software," he pointed out.
Brainy MIT blowhards; always ready to point out that you missed the obvious. So, given his amazing net pipe and my funding a few boxes of floppies, I was able to install the software and check it out. And it was good but not terribly usable (mostly because I had a hard time configuring a serial port for a modem, and X wasn't usable) so I shelved the whole thing again until my friend again told me I was being an idiot and gave me an Yggdrasil CDrom in '94. That Worked! I had the thing installed with X running in an hour, and was able to figure out the serial port stuff within a day or so.
I haven't run Windows on my home computer since. Not that RMS cares about my opinion (he is a wacko -- but the good kind), still I thank him for all the effort against such adversity. I also thank him for not listening to the likes of me because there must have been an avalanche of people telling him his idea was stupid and pointless. It takes a certain kind of crazy to persevere through many years of careful building, stage by stage, to success while the whole world views your endevour as Quixotic folly. They, and I, were wrong -- he was right. Period.
Yet again, an article in which people talk about the wonderful (and terrible) things that nanotechnology has in store for us. These people don't seem to have any idea about the massive scale we're looking at here.
The dangers of Nanotechnology as both a weapon and the potential commercial misuse are staggering. Journalists are right to question the potential outcomes of this technology, just as they were right to question the justifications of molecular biology advances back in the late '70s. That journalists printed many mistaken ideas and displayed the ignorance of a layperson, compared to the knowledge of a scientist on the inside, doesn't disqualify them from printing valuable stories in order to inform the public.
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're still taking the very, very first few step. The equivalent of looking at Hero's engine and talking about spaceships.
I don't understand the reference to Hero... Sorry. But I think you would find K. Eric Drexler, and the folks at the Foresight Institute might disagree on your timetable. The point they make, and one which I agree, is that the critical threshold discovery for viable molecular manufacturing is Self Replication. Once we can build a robot which can replicate itself using ambient atoms, we can actually begin manufacturing materials on a large scale. You might argue that this manufacturing process is fraught with the perils of complexity for which we can't plan. And you might be right... but I suspect that this kind of manufacturing is highly parallelizeable, hence the success of biological organisms, and we're going to find that a few fairly simple rules will allow us to build very complex three dimensional systems just like biological organisms.
Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.
You've got to be kidding me. Nanotech represents the biggest (smallest) manufacturing shift ever. It's weapons potential make it a sure bet for NSF/DARPA funding for some time to come. And with funding on that scale, expect returns. How long did the government seed molecular biology research before it turned commercial? And before it turned commercial, how long was that research providing useful products to the military?
Remember, we still know very, very little about how our own cells are constructed. Trying to create a nanobot than can go in there and create new ones is a great idea, but it's not going to be here next week (or next year, or maybe not next century).
Nitpick: I hate it when people tell me to remember a point they're trying to present forcefully. As a reader, it's not my job to remember your stated position before it's even been written!:-) But that's not a fair complaint against your argument. We know a hell of a lot more about cell development and its molecular mechanisms today than thirty years ago. We actually know enough to create entirely new forms of bacteria. We have the general idea for how all the mechanisms work, even if some mysteries (such as protein folding) persist. This is after thirty years... and many technologies created researching molecular biology will be transferable over to molecular nanotechnology... we have a hell of a head start with this endevour compared to researchers in the sixties. I think you're a bit too skeptical here...
I suspect that our only hopy will be developing AI powerful enough to do all the hard work for us... (and that's another really big job)
Wow... now developing real AI is a seriously tough job which requires major new scientific discoveries before we can even begin thinking about a timetable. Nanotech almost just an engineering problem at this point... I don't think we'll need any form of self aware machine in order to resolve the parallelizeable problems of complex 3D manufacturing that Nanotech implies. And honestly, given the strategic nature of this technology, we're going to see nanotech advances a hell of a lot faster than you're predicting.
But I hope not... Humanity is less ready for Nanotechnology than discovering Atomic Bomb. And we still haven't figured a way out of that mess yet.
I've got an even better idea. Why don't they hire some damn developers and get the thing out the door? I would willingly pay for a decent browser for Linux and I bet tons of other people would too...
First of all, hiring more new developers in an ad-hoc attempt to add more bodies to the project, would probably slow development down, not speed it up. This is a large complex project which requires that it's developers be knowedgable about its internal specifics; that is something one cannot buy off the street either from contractors or new employees. Secondly, Microsoft has already proven one cannot sell browsers as they now own our "air supply"... IOW: as long as MS gives away Explorer, there's little money to be had in selling a competing browser -- I certainly don't see Opera gaining significant market share other than in the embedded market.
[snipped previous posters "how to help" comment]
You know I already have a job, I don't need to do free QA for one of the largest companies in the world. I don't know why anyone else would either.
Mozilla is "Free Software" for real. If you're unwilling to even minimally help support free software by simply running a nightly or even a Milestone build, and reporting your success or failure back, then you have nothing to complain about regarding the project pace. I've been pretty damn impressed with the quality of the Mozilla builds under Linux and fully expect a quality beta browser in the next couple of months.
Of course, you could just be trolling for flames...
Um, did you miss the POINT of Jurassic Park? Given the choice...[...]
You also sound a big like Kahn from the original Star Trek episode [...]
let me just say that anyone who thinks AI lifeforms (if they ever do exist) will not have some hard-wire kill switch like Data then you are completely nuts.
Joe, This is not a flame, but I think debating US technology policy based on confused and oversimplified opinion presented in television and film really misses the point. "Jurassic Park", "Star Trek", and "The Matrix" do not provide a basis for learned discourse on this matter. It's not "Cell","Nature", or even some unknown doctoral thesis on bioethics, nor do I think we should consider them as such. Hell, I don't even think they were good fiction.
This is serious stuff, the benefits of which could save my father's (and countless others') life. I completely support the research and use of biotechnology for medical gain, given that I have a vested interest in the survival of a loved family member.
I personally support this fellow's perspective, but there's an angle that he didn't mention, which is addiction. Marijuana is damned addictive stuff, all in the psychological sense like getting addicted to food or compulsively handwashing. Claiming that it's not addictive is a crock, that's a technicality- _people_ are addictive, _people_ develop habits, and pot is about the most insidious thing you'll ever run into because it doesn't fsck you up physically (insert Cheech and Chong cough here, assume deadly pallor), it's not a hazard to society (okay, everybody who's _hit_ something like a bush or tree when driving in a car stoned, raise your hand), and it becomes your best friend (I've seen heroin junkies have a harder time giving up pot than their heroin!)
Wrong. This is not my "perspective," as you so eloquently state, but referenced opinion based on studies reported in the medical literature. Marijuana is NOT addictive. Period!
Physical addiction is generally a manifestation of a neurological dependence on some arbitrary substance, such as nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, narcotics, or barbiturates. When an individual "becomes addicted," it's because the drug mimiced a particular brain chemical such as a neuro-transmitter or neuro-inhibitor. By mimic, I mean that the drug winds up binding to a particular receptor normally used by neuro-transmitter or neuro-inhibitor. When this happens one runs the risk of allowing that part of the brain which manufactures said chemical to atrophy; meaning that afterward it will produce less of that particular chemical because the receptors have become satiated by an external source. If an individual in this condition suddenly stops taking the drug which is binding to those receptor sites, after the portion of his/her brain which manufactures that particular chemical has atrophied, then the person winds up experiencing drug withdrawals.This is physical dependence. Since different drugs mimic different neuro-chemicals the effects and symptoms of withdrawal are specific to each drug. However, marijuana does not produce this condition in people, or any other mammal. Period.
The Canadian "Le Dain Commission Interm Report," commissioned on the recommendation of Minister of National Health and Welfare and appointed as a "Commission of Inquiry" into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, presented it's report to the Canadian government in 1970. Here is a summary of what it has to say on the potential for physical dependence of marijuana, as obtained from the "Consumers Union Report: Licit & Illicit Drugs", Pg 460:
Physical dependence on marijuana, the report adds, has not been demonstrated; "it would appear that there are normally no adverse physiological effects or withdrawal symptoms occurring with abstinence from the drug, even in regular users." Reports to the contrary from the East are suspect. "Since hashish is smoked with large quantities of tobacco and other drugs in many Eastern countries, these mixtures could be responsible for the minor symptoms reported."
Now, you may want a quote on psychological dependence as well:
Marijuana, it is true. may in some cases produce psychological dependence -- but "psychological dependence may be said to exist with respect to anything which is part of one's preferred way of life. In our society, this kind of dependency occurs regularly with respect to such things as television, music, books, religion, sex, money, favorite foods, certain drugs, hobbies, sports or games and, often, other persons. Some degree of psychological dependence is, in this sense, a general and normal psychological condition"[Emphases Mine]
I happen to like spinach more than just about any other green leafy vegetable. By your logic, does this mean that I'm "addicted" to spinach? How about coffee? If I don't get my morning coffee, I get one hell of a headache! Not so if I miss a day of spinach. According to this, if I were a heavy marijuana user and suddenly stopped smoking pot, I should expect as many withdrawl symptoms as if I had just stopped eating spinach. Maybe less -- as I just might experience extreme constipation from giving up spinach (it's good roughage).
You can't _get_ a more insidious drug. It doesn't _need_ to lead to anything to screw you up completely, especially if you lose the volition to do anything _but_ smoke pot and end up struggling to come up with the money to _get_ the pot. You'll lie, manipulate, and con anybody, your own mother, your best friend, to get it. I smoked it for years, years ago when I was growing up. Me and my best friend had a little routine we'd go through- we'd go in on a bag, and then one of us would divide and the other pick. This is my best friend and he couldn't trust me to be fair- he knew I couldn't- and of course I couldn't trust him either! How many of you have to do this? One divides and the other picks? Is that a really _mellow_ spiritual approach?
This is mostly just unsubstantiated person opinion. IOW: CRAP! As for how you used to split bags of dope, well that sounds like a perfectly sane Machiavellian approach to your relationships. People fuck each other over for sex, money, status, and just about anything else desirable, including pot. So, your point is?
In fact, the only animal safety studies on Marijuana use ever completed killed vervet monkeys by asphyxiation from carbon dioxide poisoning, not from a drug overdose; showing that THC, while showing high efficacy, is one of the safest drugs known to man.
My mistake. I should have caught that before hitting submit. Those monkeys were killed from Carbon Monoxide poisoning, not Carbon Dioxide. D'uh.
I think your point was more along the lines of: Marijuana is the second-most used recreational drug, yet it causes fewer ER admissions than any other recreational drug. Which is an impressive fact; it means that on a per-use basis, there is virtually no risk.
Damn, you're right. Now I'm pulling all my books on the subject, searching the web, and doing deja.com searches to find my reference on this in order to clean that statement up. Haven't found it yet, but here's an interesting quote along the same lines:
Marihuana: a signal of misunderstanding: First report of the national commission of Marihuana and Drug Abuse, pg. 83-84, published and handed over to the President and congress in 1972:
" Lethality
The commission's National Survey revealed that 48% of adults believe that some people have died from marihuana use. A careful search of the literature and testimony of the nation's health officials has not revealed a single human fatality un the United States proven to have resulted solely from ingestion of marihuana. Experiments with the drug in monkeys demonstrated that the dose required for overdose death was enourmous and for all practical purposes unachievable by humans smoking marihuana. This is in marked contrast to other substances in common use, most notably alchohol and barbituate sleeping pills.
Of comparative note, 89% of all adults in the same Surbvey believe that some people have died from using alcohol. This indicates that public opinion regarding alcohol and its potential letality is more accurate than it is for marihuana. At the same time, factual knowledge regarding the inherent danger in using a substance, for example alcohol, seemingly does not deter many persons from using it irresposibly."[emphases mine]
This report, handed to President Nixon and the '72 congress, was the first in a long line of publicaly funded studies on marijuana use and public health policy which recommended decriminalizing the drug immediately. Needless to say, Nixon took one look at it's findings and tossed the report in the trash -- showing that politicians have no regard for any science that doesn't back up their pre-conceived notions.
Nice post, however I have one criticism: "As the second most popular recreational drug in America, it causes fewer emergency room visits than all other drugs combined." This is not impressive. I am not positive, but I believe it safe to assume the same could be said for any other drug, as in: "PCP causes fewer emergency room visits than all other drugs combined".
It's relevant in that the recreational use of marijuana is second to only alcohol in popularity, while causing fewer hospitalizations than all other drug use combined -- including alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and PCP. This means that a very large population of users generate fewer hospitalizations than from the use of all other drugs combined. While PCP users presumably represent a very small number of the drug using population, they certainly generate more hospitalizations annually (by definition).
Originally Jethro's comment came in at a two, and has been moderated down. However, even though Jethro posted non-factual statements, it's turned into the most interesting comment thread among all the posts in this discussion forum (my opinion). So, moderators, please up this comment, and please go down and read some of the Anonymous Coward posts... at least one of them I noticed is very good.
Slashdot Mirror
In the interview where Bruce Schneier lists the various hardware and software requirements for AES, that it both work in very small 8bit low RAM environments along with higher end equipment; that it stream well for desktop video on demand; that it parallelize well across many devices; that it fit in specialized embedded cryptographic hardware in few gates, etc etc etc... I ask:
Why do we need one algorithm for all these functions? Beyond political constraints of the AES selection process, wouldn't it make more sense to choose two, or possibly several, candidates each suited for different purposes?
Can anyone answer this rationally? Thanks....
This is great, I support the use of CO-OPs for this kind of community sharing (I've been involved with my current food CO-OP for almost a decade), but because the phone companies have mopopolies on providing local loop and digital services it's really only viable where you can string your own wire.
So, I can't imagine a CO-OP like this being viable if the have to go through the local CO in order to get to each member's demark, but for community condominiums and large apartment buildings this kind of technique is a wonderful idea for lowering cost across the board to all members. The point I'm making is that once you start reselling something (even if you're doing it non-profit) that the phone company can do with it's own equipment you are at a serious disadvantage.
One other possibility: the CO-OP could get a high speed connection in a neighborhood and then resell it via wireless... but that could turn into a regulatory nightmare.
Finally: If cablemodem companies are serious about providing "local loop" service (even if it's a completely different technology from traditional switched phone networks) then shouldn't they be regulated under the same tarrifs as the standard phone companies? Such an argument could bring demark standardization between the two carriers and foster better competition... and even lower prices -- for individuals and CO-OPs.
Actually, it was more meant for the proprietary libc's that came with the Un*x systems that GNU was bootstrapped on. When the Motif issue came about, people kind of looked the other way (RMS included), but it was an uncomfortable situation. Emacs (the quintessential RMS work) has never used Motif, even though the crufty widgets it used in lieu aren't great to work with (Xawe, I think).
Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I distictly remember RMS stating the this exception was OK for use with Motif. And I'm certain that emacs is #ifdef'd for use with Motif, because I've built straight emacs linked against Motif before. There's a
[time taken to check] Yup... I'm right about Motif support, here's configure output from the latest emacs-20.4: [snip for brevity] The thing is, Motif was never a very viable development tool for free software developers. You have to statically link, people on non-proprietary Unicen usually don't have the development libraries, etc. So, people could look the other way because there was never any real danger of it starting a trend.
Qt is viable. That it is Open Source isn't terribly meaningful, because the GPL doesn't mention Open Source in any way -- and it shouldn't, because the Open Source Definition is hardly a legally robust document.
So, are you suggesting that RMS and his lawyers are going to draw a line in the sand and test the GPL in court here??? This seems not only dangerous but also an action with little gain. QT may not meet complete "Free Software" requirements as far as RMS and other total GPL proponents are concerned, but if the FSF decides to fight this issue out they better be ready to deal with compilation on proprietary UNIXen as well.
I think the most important point to make is that the enforcement of all of these licenses must be consistent across the board. If RMS, Linus, the GIMP developers, whoever, start playing games like "Well, you can derive from my source, but (s)he can't," just like how Sun's SCSL is structured, then we've denegrated the GPL and Free Software for all. It seems to me that if RMS includes support for Motif right in the latest emacs itself then GPL proponents really don't have a leg to stand on when claiming that QT and other GPL'd source can't be linked together; at least not if they want their argument to stay consistent.
Actually, IIRC, the clause refers not to "routinely shipped libraries" but instead to "essential system libraries"...to me, the distinction is vital.
There is absolutely nothing "essential" about QT for Linux...I can rm that tree, and my system will reboot just fine. You can't however simply remove the Windows\System directory, and expect anything to work properly.
While accurate, you miss the context of why that original clause was amended to the GPL. RMS wanted to make certain that software authors could write GPL'd Motif software, which at the time was (and some could arguably write still is for commercial vendors) the most popular GUI widget library available for UNIX and it's clones. RMS didn't want to prevent Free Software authors from writing useful code, so he carved out a niche for Motif and told everyone to go ahead a write free Motif code.
Now I ask you, since Motif is completely closed source while QT meets most "Open Source" guidelines by at least Eric Raymond's perspective, how is this clause usable with Motif and yet unavailable for QT? Or better put, how is a closed source Motif allowed to use the "Essential system libraries" clause while an "Open Source" QT can't, when they perform exactly the same system level services?
Beats me. RMS, can you chime in here???
I'll address just this point, never mind the rest *cough*.
Two reasons why this won't happen:
OpenBSD's security is wonderful, but correct me if i'm wrong, it's no *remote* root exploits?
:-)
I doubt anyone would be insane enough to make that claim with sincerity. OpenBSD does a good job by starting most daemons as normal users and then chroot() jailing the process, providing high quality blowfish cryptography support for passwords (try and run crack on that!), and just being careful with their code. They've done an extensive code audit looking for lack of bounds checking ala buffer overruns and other obvious exploits... strncpy() instead of strcpy() type fixes.
But this DOESN'T mean OpenBSD is completely and totally secure, nor does it mean it's been completely cleaned of remote root exploits. Never mind removing all Denial of Service exploits, or well hidden and unpredictable race conditions.
Such are the statements of fools...
.There are some serious differences between the different flavors of BSD, but for general purpose use one would almost never notice them.
/etc for example, the BSD's seem much better organized. The man system is but one small example, for primary documentation (just read Design and Implementation of the BSD Operating System for a great example of amazing kernel documentation) I've simply found nothing better among free software.
OpenBSD ships with heavy cryptography in the distribution, allowing one to choose Blowfish generated passwords instead of MD5 for example. They're allowed to do this because they code, integrate the distribution, and ship from Canada, where Draconian laws on exporting Open Source cryptography are non-existent. Taking advantage of this the OpenBSD project is also striving to update ssh-1.2.12, the last completely free version of ssh, to remove well known security problems, which will be known as OpenSSH.
The other two projects, NetBSD and FreeBSD each have separate slants, though neither offers direct strong cryptography in their distributions because both ship from within the United States. FreeBSD is tailored for use with x86 and now Alpha CPUs, while NetBSD is tailored for wide portability. This is why the NetBSD project states "Of course it runs NetBSD."
I've only slightly used FreeBSD, and many years back. However, my NAT box connected to a cablemodem runs OpenBSD, and I have several old Sun workstations which run NetBSD... I have to say I'm very pleased with both of these Operating Systems and would strongly recommend them to anyone with need of an OS for some specific purpose (like NAT service on a firewall, or to run old oddball hardware like my Sun3s, old VAXes, and the like). And they're very strong distributions with heavy development cycles... just recently the NetBSD project integrated in UVM, a completely new memory manager with distinct advantages from the stock VM described in the BSD Design and implementation Red Book.
Hell, they all make for excellent alternatives to Linux as well... though I personally prefer Linux on my desktop workstation, after having my previous IP-MASQ Linux system, also connected to the cablemodem, cracked using a well known named buffer overflow (yes it was my fault) I'm now convinced I don't want a Linux box sitting out on the open net. I feel much safer with OpenBSD for many reasons... not just because they include the cryptography but because they code audit, they by default run critical daemons without root privileges in chroot() jails, and the authors take great pains to distribute their system by default with the fewest services started as possible, unlike most Linux distributions.
And one last thing, not meant to inflame Linux Proponents since I gleefully run both systems in my house, the documentation in all the BSD distributions seems far superior to Linux DOCS. Linux may have more HOWTO's, and other informal documentation, but when it comes to finding canonical documentation, like in man5 for
I've been very pleased with the results
OK, I'd like to thank users "tap" and "mmclure" for pointing out the obvious; that installing the kernel-2.2.12-20.src.rpm will generate our list of patches for you:
[snip for brevity]
Am I still a liar? Do these patches live in never-never land? Does this whole thread really deserve to be moderated down by several points to a 1 simply because some moderators didn't agree with its position? Isn't the point of moderation to promote factually correct and valuable discourse?
A public apology for calling me a liar would be nice, Blue.
No, since Alan Cox is one of the three core contributors to the linux kernel, since he regularly supplies updates, and since he is the person who puts together the kernel that Red Hat ships, it is ok for them to ship whatever the hell they want to - it IS the linux kernel. That would make a great piece of Red Hat Trivia - name all of AC's changes to the kernel shipped by Red Hat that Linus later nixed. I'm sure there are at least 1 or 2.
You insinuated that they were shipping extensions, modifications, or additions to the kernel that are not part of the 'stock' linux kernel, and that is false. Their CONFIGURATION of said kernel is quite different from what Linus or Alan choose to post, ie, the default configuration, but I know you're much too smart to be confusing configuration with code - at least, I've had enough respect for your posts in the past to hope so.
I'm insinuating nothing of the sort, I'm stating it outright. All you have to do is run a make config on the RH6.1 2.2.12-20 kernel which is supplied with the distribution against a make config from a stock 2.2.12 which has been blessed by Linus and diff the comparing
_I_ am not calling anything anything, other than calling you on crack - show me these 'patches' that Red Hat ships. The TL patches are really that, patches that apply against a base stable or devel release of the kernel. This is an extension of the existing kernel. Red Hat supplies, to my knowledge, no such patches. They supply a kernel, a stock linux kernel, usually a branch of the stable release. There are no PVM extensions, there are no scalability extensions. I think you might be confusing the fact that they, by default, enable almost every single driver available to be built as a module, with them including extra code. They supply those modules because they are needed at install time to interface with the customer's hardware.
Now who's baiting flames? Like I said, as long as it meets the guidelines of GPL licensing, it's perfectly legal! Free Software isn't about whether you like it that I can include my own GPL'd code in your distribution, it's about FREEDOM to modify your and my code as I see fit! Pacific Hi-Tec isn't even skirting the laws here, unlike Corel with their previous beta Corel Linux program, they are releasing a set of GPL'd patches and some proprietary kernel modules... all actions of which Linus has made perfectly clear in the past he supports.
See above for how it's different, and you're baiting flames by making completely false claims. A lie, to me, is always flame bait.
I didn't lie in the first post, and I still don't see a single person who has pointed out even a factual error! I'm perfectly happy to be corrected with factual mistakes, but to call me a liar simply because I wrote a seemingly unpopular truth really stretches your point. And I note that since moderators have chosen to moderate this down to the cruft, nobody cares anyway. Still, Damn rude on your part.
Cheers!
Please don't moderate total falsehoods like this up - this is flamebait. Alan Cox, the actual primary code architect of the Linux Kernel, is a Red Hat employee. While RH does often ship a 'tweener' kernel, or one that is in some state of AC's patches, there is nothing at all non-standard about it.
So, since Alan Cox works for Redhat it's OK for Redhat to ship modified kernel source, but not OK for Pacific HI-TEC?
This is Free Software, as long as the patches comply with the licensing terms of the Linux kernel the distributers of TurboLinux have every right to ship a modified GPL kernel source, just as they have every right to ship a distribution which contains proprietary closed source drivers bundled as binary modules.
You can't call the GPL'd patches included with either Redhat or TurboLinux innapropriate because that complies with the GPL. And you can't call the proprietary kernel modules innapropriate (even though Redhat doesn't ship proprietary kernel modules with it's distribution) becuase Linus has made quite clear that he accepts the legality of priprietary binary kernel modules.
So, how is this different from Redhat, or any other distribution vendor? And how am I baiting flames with my statements?
I would be concerned about the customization if it prevented me from compiling my own kernel and using that instead.
And how are you prevented from compiling and booting a standard "blessed" linux kernel on Pacific Linux? You may lose the clustering capabilities, but that's no different from compiling a non RAID enabled kernel on a system which depending on the RAID capabilities which were included as non-blessed patches in previous Redhat releases.
See top... my mistake.
Redhat kernels (at least, the ones I tried ..) are not identical to the standard ones, and so the standard kernel patches can't be applied. This is a nuisance, but only to Redhat users who have to download a huge rpm instead of a few 100K patch file : it doesn't hurt anybody else.
.depend made from a make config on a pristine kernel to one made with a Redhat supplied kernel to view the differences. This is not a value judgement against Redhat for including non-standard kernel patches with their product, they have every right to do so. Just as Turbo Linux has every right to modify the kernel and include non-blessed patches with their product, as long as they don't break the terms of the GPL. This is a non-issue, as so many others have stated.
The only other problem I've had is that Redhat initscripts require build-specific System.map and module-info files. The stock release doesn't create those, so you have to bodge around it. Maybe this is documented properly somewhere now - if so, I haven't found it yet. Again, a pain only to Redhat users.
My point exactly... just compare a
Maybe these guys can explain to me how the inclusion of Pacific TurboLinux's unblessed kernel patches to support clustering is any different from the non-standard kernel that ships with Redhat.
Now they must follow GPL licensing restrictions, but this doesn't legally prevent them from selling a tailored distribution which contains a mix of GPL patches and proprietary closed source driver modules... and it's not any more forked than the heavily patched kernel source that ships with Redhat Linux.
Man, the author writes up front that it's a (Score:-1, Troll). He obviously intended it to be slightly offensive because that's the point of HUMOR.
You folks are WAY OVER-REACTING!
KDE is fine. Gnome is fine. Go on and continue your boring and bland lives where everything is politically correct.
Not another effort to equate RMS with the rise of free software!
RMS is largely responsible for the current rise of Free Software. Period. Without him Linus and the BSD folks wouldn't have had the tools necessary to write the Linux kernel, and rewrite out all that AT&T code in BSD. Face it, without the compiler and userspace tools written by the FSF and RMS I suspect that the BSD movement might have died under the weight of AT&T's lawsuit.
IMNSHO, the GPL is evil. It was deliberately designed to be incompatible with everything else and is a huge pain in the butt for many people. One world, one licence, one messiah, eh?
Say what you will about your distaste for the GPL, but without RMS's hard work across nearly a fallow decade lacking Free Software development in the '80s, this movement just wouldn't be viable. In a large measure, his hard work responsible for your access to Linux and BSD!
[...]it's about rebellion and communism and programmers making as little as street musicians[...]
Heh. I'd like to point out that one of my previous guitar teachers was/is a street musician who used to earn (he's since moved from the city) significant money performing in Harvard Square. I mean several hundred dollars a night on a hot weekend. He augmented this with cafe, local radio performances, touring, and teaching to earn a very high standard of living. Why? Because he is a damn good musician and performer. The point? I don't think Alan Cox, Linus Torvalds, RMS, or any of the other well known Free Software programmers are going hungry. In fact, I bet that at any time if they wanted to go on holiday they could scrounge up plenty of money to go play in Europe, The Bahamas, or anywhere else fun. This argument is meaningless.
BTW, how did this completely off-topic post get moderated to the top of this discussion? Not a single mention of "if I had to pay for Linux" or "if I couldn't get the source", just an apparently random tribute to a prominent figure in the world of free software.
This is your only valid argument. You know, I really should have tied a closing argument to the question at hand: "Where would Free Software be without Linux," but I thought my point was obvious. I met RMS promoting GNU long before Linux and 386BSD hit the scene... if Linux hadn't taken off because Linus had chosen some lame license, we would all be running GNU/HURD or BSD. Linus got a functional kernel in at the right time, and he chose an open development model that became popular among a large number of developers. But the BSD and HURD scene was moving along too... it was just a matter of time.
However, I didn't make that clear. And I'm not so sure I do deserve a score 5 on that post... honestly, I think Slashdot has been having some serious moderation problems lately because of the expansion of moderation to the general readership community. Too many poorly written, simplistic and politically correct posts have been moderated up to the very top while intelligent off-beat posts lie fallow. I think this is because everyone posts and moderates so quickly that anyone who spends the time to write and edit their post before committing winds up a good hundred messages below -- where no moderators travel. This is a serious problem... maybe the meta moderation system should allow meta moderators to not only value if a given post has been fairly moderated, but also if the total score to a post is reasonable as well. This way meta-moderators who looked at my score 5 and thought that maybe it was scored a bit too high could in some way resolve that problem. Either that or I saw someone suggest that maybe we should hold off on letting moderators score a post for the first 30 minutes or so... I like that idea too.
I first met RMS back in 1987, when a mutual friend from MIT who had recognized him and called out to say hello, introduced us in front of the Harvard Square T stop. Right up front, even back then, he was promoting his GNU Operating System as a free clone of UNIX with all the source available. I smiled, said "That's interesting" while on the inside I thought he was completely nuts.
I didn't realize that some pieces of his OS puzzle were already written and that a roadmap for the rest was well underway, but at the time I couldn't help but think that the whole idea was just plain stupid. I remember talking with my friend about the endevour afterward and basically pointing out that nobody much cared about UNIX as an Operating System, they bought hardware. People paid huge sums of money for high powered LISP machines from LMI and Symbolics -- not because they ran LISP (for the most part) but because with that hardware and a talented programmer one could do amazing things. At the time I figured the same was true for the emerging UNIX Workstation market, and that these machines would always be far too expensive for a free Operating System to matter at all. Who would throw away a vendor supplied OS and support just to run GNU? Idiotic.
Even though it was obvious given that superior hardware like the Macintosh was getting close to Workstation potential at almost PC prices, I just didn't see that the PC class computer would gain the CPU horsepower and instruction set necessary to run a UNIX class operating system -- even though low end UNIXen were already available for the PC. The idea that end users, not developers might want to run UNIX seemed more far fetched than a vegetarian pigging out in the Central Square MacDonalds (this is Cambridge, mind you).
So, several years later, around early '93 or so, I found myself with a 386sx running Windows -- and hating every minute of it. Upon bitching to my friend about the piece of crap that is Windows, and beating myself over the head for not taking the hit and buying a Macintosh (price gouging or no) my friend pointed out that a BSD clone for the x86 was available called 386BSD, and that some folks were working on another called FreeBSD. He also told me about another cheesy UNIX kernel clone called Linux, but steered me to BSD and offered to make me a set of install floppies.
"Oh, and by the way -- it runs Stallman's 'Idiotic' software," he pointed out.
Brainy MIT blowhards; always ready to point out that you missed the obvious. So, given his amazing net pipe and my funding a few boxes of floppies, I was able to install the software and check it out. And it was good but not terribly usable (mostly because I had a hard time configuring a serial port for a modem, and X wasn't usable) so I shelved the whole thing again until my friend again told me I was being an idiot and gave me an Yggdrasil CDrom in '94. That Worked! I had the thing installed with X running in an hour, and was able to figure out the serial port stuff within a day or so.
I haven't run Windows on my home computer since. Not that RMS cares about my opinion (he is a wacko -- but the good kind), still I thank him for all the effort against such adversity. I also thank him for not listening to the likes of me because there must have been an avalanche of people telling him his idea was stupid and pointless. It takes a certain kind of crazy to persevere through many years of careful building, stage by stage, to success while the whole world views your endevour as Quixotic folly. They, and I, were wrong -- he was right. Period.
Thank you RMS.
--Maynard
Yet again, an article in which people talk about the wonderful (and terrible) things that nanotechnology has in store for us. These people don't seem to have any idea about the massive scale we're looking at here.
:-) But that's not a fair complaint against your argument. We know a hell of a lot more about cell development and its molecular mechanisms today than thirty years ago. We actually know enough to create entirely new forms of bacteria. We have the general idea for how all the mechanisms work, even if some mysteries (such as protein folding) persist. This is after thirty years... and many technologies created researching molecular biology will be transferable over to molecular nanotechnology... we have a hell of a head start with this endevour compared to researchers in the sixties. I think you're a bit too skeptical here...
The dangers of Nanotechnology as both a weapon and the potential commercial misuse are staggering. Journalists are right to question the potential outcomes of this technology, just as they were right to question the justifications of molecular biology advances back in the late '70s. That journalists printed many mistaken ideas and displayed the ignorance of a layperson, compared to the knowledge of a scientist on the inside, doesn't disqualify them from printing valuable stories in order to inform the public.
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're still taking the very, very first few step. The equivalent of looking at Hero's engine and talking about spaceships.
I don't understand the reference to Hero... Sorry. But I think you would find K. Eric Drexler, and the folks at the Foresight Institute might disagree on your timetable. The point they make, and one which I agree, is that the critical threshold discovery for viable molecular manufacturing is Self Replication. Once we can build a robot which can replicate itself using ambient atoms, we can actually begin manufacturing materials on a large scale. You might argue that this manufacturing process is fraught with the perils of complexity for which we can't plan. And you might be right... but I suspect that this kind of manufacturing is highly parallelizeable, hence the success of biological organisms, and we're going to find that a few fairly simple rules will allow us to build very complex three dimensional systems just like biological organisms.
Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.
You've got to be kidding me. Nanotech represents the biggest (smallest) manufacturing shift ever. It's weapons potential make it a sure bet for NSF/DARPA funding for some time to come. And with funding on that scale, expect returns. How long did the government seed molecular biology research before it turned commercial? And before it turned commercial, how long was that research providing useful products to the military?
Remember, we still know very, very little about how our own cells are constructed. Trying to create a nanobot than can go in there and create new ones is a great idea, but it's not going to be here next week (or next year, or maybe not next century).
Nitpick: I hate it when people tell me to remember a point they're trying to present forcefully. As a reader, it's not my job to remember your stated position before it's even been written!
I suspect that our only hopy will be developing AI powerful enough to do all the hard work for us... (and that's another really big job)
Wow... now developing real AI is a seriously tough job which requires major new scientific discoveries before we can even begin thinking about a timetable. Nanotech almost just an engineering problem at this point... I don't think we'll need any form of self aware machine in order to resolve the parallelizeable problems of complex 3D manufacturing that Nanotech implies. And honestly, given the strategic nature of this technology, we're going to see nanotech advances a hell of a lot faster than you're predicting.
But I hope not... Humanity is less ready for Nanotechnology than discovering Atomic Bomb. And we still haven't figured a way out of that mess yet.
I've got an even better idea. Why don't they hire some damn developers and get the thing out the door? I would willingly pay for a decent browser for Linux and I bet tons of other people would too...
First of all, hiring more new developers in an ad-hoc attempt to add more bodies to the project, would probably slow development down, not speed it up. This is a large complex project which requires that it's developers be knowedgable about its internal specifics; that is something one cannot buy off the street either from contractors or new employees. Secondly, Microsoft has already proven one cannot sell browsers as they now own our "air supply"... IOW: as long as MS gives away Explorer, there's little money to be had in selling a competing browser -- I certainly don't see Opera gaining significant market share other than in the embedded market.
[snipped previous posters "how to help" comment]
You know I already have a job, I don't need to do free QA for one of the largest companies in the world. I don't know why anyone else would either.
Mozilla is "Free Software" for real. If you're unwilling to even minimally help support free software by simply running a nightly or even a Milestone build, and reporting your success or failure back, then you have nothing to complain about regarding the project pace. I've been pretty damn impressed with the quality of the Mozilla builds under Linux and fully expect a quality beta browser in the next couple of months.
Of course, you could just be trolling for flames...
Joe,
This is not a flame, but I think debating US technology policy based on confused and oversimplified opinion presented in television and film really misses the point. "Jurassic Park", "Star Trek", and "The Matrix" do not provide a basis for learned discourse on this matter. It's not "Cell", "Nature", or even some unknown doctoral thesis on bioethics, nor do I think we should consider them as such. Hell, I don't even think they were good fiction.
This is serious stuff, the benefits of which could save my father's (and countless others') life. I completely support the research and use of biotechnology for medical gain, given that I have a vested interest in the survival of a loved family member.
Wrong. This is not my "perspective," as you so eloquently state, but referenced opinion based on studies reported in the medical literature. Marijuana is NOT addictive. Period!
Physical addiction is generally a manifestation of a neurological dependence on some arbitrary substance, such as nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, narcotics, or barbiturates. When an individual "becomes addicted," it's because the drug mimiced a particular brain chemical such as a neuro-transmitter or neuro-inhibitor. By mimic, I mean that the drug winds up binding to a particular receptor normally used by neuro-transmitter or neuro-inhibitor. When this happens one runs the risk of allowing that part of the brain which manufactures said chemical to atrophy; meaning that afterward it will produce less of that particular chemical because the receptors have become satiated by an external source. If an individual in this condition suddenly stops taking the drug which is binding to those receptor sites, after the portion of his/her brain which manufactures that particular chemical has atrophied, then the person winds up experiencing drug withdrawals. This is physical dependence. Since different drugs mimic different neuro-chemicals the effects and symptoms of withdrawal are specific to each drug. However, marijuana does not produce this condition in people, or any other mammal. Period.
The Canadian "Le Dain Commission Interm Report," commissioned on the recommendation of Minister of National Health and Welfare and appointed as a "Commission of Inquiry" into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, presented it's report to the Canadian government in 1970. Here is a summary of what it has to say on the potential for physical dependence of marijuana, as obtained from the "Consumers Union Report: Licit & Illicit Drugs", Pg 460: Now, you may want a quote on psychological dependence as well:I happen to like spinach more than just about any other green leafy vegetable. By your logic, does this mean that I'm "addicted" to spinach? How about coffee? If I don't get my morning coffee, I get one hell of a headache! Not so if I miss a day of spinach. According to this, if I were a heavy marijuana user and suddenly stopped smoking pot, I should expect as many withdrawl symptoms as if I had just stopped eating spinach. Maybe less -- as I just might experience extreme constipation from giving up spinach (it's good roughage).
You can't _get_ a more insidious drug. It doesn't _need_ to lead to anything to screw you up completely, especially if you lose the volition to do anything _but_ smoke pot and end up struggling to come up with the money to _get_ the pot. You'll lie, manipulate, and con anybody, your own mother, your best friend, to get it. I smoked it for years, years ago when I was growing up. Me and my best friend had a little routine we'd go through- we'd go in on a bag, and then one of us would divide and the other pick. This is my best friend and he couldn't trust me to be fair- he knew I couldn't- and of course I couldn't trust him either! How many of you have to do this? One divides and the other picks? Is that a really _mellow_ spiritual approach?
This is mostly just unsubstantiated person opinion. IOW: CRAP! As for how you used to split bags of dope, well that sounds like a perfectly sane Machiavellian approach to your relationships. People fuck each other over for sex, money, status, and just about anything else desirable, including pot. So, your point is?
In fact, the only animal safety studies on Marijuana use ever completed killed vervet monkeys by asphyxiation from carbon dioxide poisoning, not from a drug overdose; showing that THC, while showing high efficacy, is one of the safest drugs known to man.
My mistake. I should have caught that before hitting submit. Those monkeys were killed from Carbon Monoxide poisoning, not Carbon Dioxide. D'uh.
Damn, you're right. Now I'm pulling all my books on the subject, searching the web, and doing deja.com searches to find my reference on this in order to clean that statement up. Haven't found it yet, but here's an interesting quote along the same lines:
Marihuana: a signal of misunderstanding: First report of the national commission of Marihuana and Drug Abuse, pg. 83-84, published and handed over to the President and congress in 1972:
This report, handed to President Nixon and the '72 congress, was the first in a long line of publicaly funded studies on marijuana use and public health policy which recommended decriminalizing the drug immediately. Needless to say, Nixon took one look at it's findings and tossed the report in the trash -- showing that politicians have no regard for any science that doesn't back up their pre-conceived notions.
Thanks for both of your replies, BTW.
Nice post, however I have one criticism: "As the second most popular recreational drug in America, it causes fewer emergency room visits than all other drugs combined." This is not impressive. I am not positive, but I believe it safe to assume the same could be said for any other drug, as in: "PCP causes fewer emergency room visits than all other drugs combined".
It's relevant in that the recreational use of marijuana is second to only alcohol in popularity, while causing fewer hospitalizations than all other drug use combined -- including alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and PCP. This means that a very large population of users generate fewer hospitalizations than from the use of all other drugs combined. While PCP users presumably represent a very small number of the drug using population, they certainly generate more hospitalizations annually (by definition).
Originally Jethro's comment came in at a two, and has been moderated down. However, even though Jethro posted non-factual statements, it's turned into the most interesting comment thread among all the posts in this discussion forum (my opinion). So, moderators, please up this comment, and please go down and read some of the Anonymous Coward posts... at least one of them I noticed is very good.