I am no fan of gene patents, but this story was something of a vindication of the arguments for gene patents (and intellectual property in general).
Gene patents could be very lucrative in this field. Imagine an informational video at the end of a future assembly line:
Welcome to Earth. I am your creator, Dr. Smith. You are a newly minted member of a custom designed super-human master race. I have good news for you: you have intellect and physical powers that dwarf those of the puny inhabitants of this planet. We have created you fully formed and preprogrammed with all of the knowledge known to mankind. You will walk amongst the population of this world as a god.
However, you should be aware of the following information: My company holds key patents on your being. In order to exist, you must license those patents. In order to cover your royalties, we will garner everything that you produce during your lifespan other than a small stipend. These same licensing terms apply to any offspring you may produce. In order to help keep you honest, your brain includes our DRM technology. We may also remotely monitor your thoughts, and we may share this information from time to time with our subsidiaries, contractors and marketing partners. We may change the terms of this agreement at any time by notifying you through a voice in your head. If you violate the terms of our licensing agreement, you may be remotely terminated without notice, so keep your nose clean.
YOU COME WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. WE WILL NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY OF YOUR ACTIONS; EVERYTHING YOU DO IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. WE MAKE NO CLAIMS THAT YOU ARE FIT FOR ANY PURPOSE, OR THAT YOU ARE SANE.
I imagine one could also remove mountains to allow remote viewing of approaching territory.
How is this different from adding a cheat mod to your FPS client? Transparent textures is one of the oldest tricks in the book. I think that the Geneva conventions need to be updated to prohibit this kind of thing. It just encourages campers.
If you buy a disc with that logo on it that isn't Red Book-compliant, then complain to the manufacturer and to Philips, not to the government. It's none of their business.
Being that this is a republic we live in, (not a democracy), you have no direct say in what the government's business is or is not. In this republic, members of congress are the only people in the country who determine what the government's business is (unless the supreme court determines that the business is unconstitutional).
In this case, a senator is proposing that CD labels are indeed the government's business. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that a corporation has an inalienable right to sell non-labeled CDs. If congress passes such a law, it's the government's business. If you don't like it, you can try to elect a different representative in a few years.
Now what they did not say is 'we make Crackers obsolete'.
That's because Microsoft has nothing to do with crackers. It's Frito-Lay that has made crackers obsolete. Tortilla chips have gained so much market share in recent years that crackers just don't have a chance.
The seemed to me a recipe for bloat/cache thrashing/ugliness.
No, templates are often anti-bloat. With a good optimizing compiler, a dizzying heirarchy of layers of abstraction can often compile down to 2 or 3 machine opcodes. If you understand how to use STL properly (which includes double-checking your results by disassembling critical points in the binary and inspecting them) you can often get code that is almost as fast as hand-coded assembly. I think that in general, if you use the other main approach to abstraction in C++ (virtual method calls), it's harder for the compiler to crush all of the layers of abstraction down to zero.
The main problem with C++ templates IMO is that they feel "brittle". It's hard to create large modular programs because of C++ #include dependencies and binary interface difficulties. I think that the best approach for large programs is to identify the performance-critical pieces and code them up in C++/STL as native modules for a nice high-level language like Python, then use the high-level language to glue everything together.
What does this have to do with "your rights online?"
It's simple. Microsoft is offering a license agreement which you may choose to accept. That agreement grants you certain rights to Microsoft's intellectual property. The terms of that agreement were recently changed.
The intellectual property in question is contained in software. When software is used, it is "online".
Hence, this information affects your rights online. Hope that helps.
Huge portions of a standard Linux distribution are GNU software, and they're arguably some of the most important parts (the compiler, the system libraries). When they say "you should call -it- GNU/Linux", they aren't referring to the kernel. They're refferring to the kernel *and* the rest of the system, of which the kernel is a relatively small part. The "GNU" in "GNU/Linux" refers to the GNU software that the distribution is built on, not the kernel. That's what the "Linux" part in "GNU/Linux" refers to.
Hmm... eyeballing my distro, it looks like KDE, QT, XFree86, Mozilla, vim and a host of other apps accounts for more bytes than the GNU components. It doesn't reach a quorum by that measure.
As far as relative importance... If Linux had no GUI, I wouldn't use it. If it had very few hardware drivers, I wouldn't use it. Those are essential parts of the OS for me.
However, (leaving out Gnome for now) the GNU parts are mostly middleware and heavy-duty geek utilities. A lot of the middleware could be replaced with *BSD stuff. Loss of the geek utilities would be annoying for me, but irrelevant to the average user as Linux goes more mainstream. I don't think that the C compiler used to build the system warrants headline status; it's not even necessary to install it to use the OS. That leaves a core subset of GNU middleware that is essential. Is that subset so large that it requires renaming the OS? I tend towards saying no.
The GNU project does deserve an "honorable mention" for pioneering the concept of Free software. Maybe they should have incorporated an old fashioned BSD-style advertising clause into the GPL to ensure proper recognition.
From the looks of a couple of old HDDs I've taken apart, they aren't sealed but actually have air vents. They had a little hole in the case with a serpentine shaped tunnel connecting to the inside. There was a felt-like filter in the tunnel to keep out dust. I would imagine that oil could eventually soak through such a filter. I'm not sure if late model drives have a similar construction, though.
Actually, I think the next movie could be kind of short:
Dirty Harry:I know what you're thinking punk. You're thinkin did he fire six shots or only five. Well to tell you the truth I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being this is the 44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off. You've got to ask yourself a question, Do I feel lucky? Well do you, PUNK!
Punk: Umm... Umm...
Smart Gun: WARNING! Chamber is empty! Load a new magazine to continue shooting! WARNING! Chamber is empty! Load a new magazine to continue shooting!
Punk: Fuck you, cop! Tackles Dirty Harry and bashes his head in with a brick.
When I started using the Web, I had to telnet to a server at CERN (from Japan, no less) just to run Lynx.
You had it lucky. Where I was stationed, we didn't have any newfangled interactive terminals. We had to punch our URLs onto cards and mail them to headquarters, then wait weeks for the next supply drop to bring our web page printouts and beef jerkey.
The most efficient internal combustion engines ever made are infact 2-stroke diesel engines, often used in ships and the like, these are large engines and it's well worth replacing them if a more efficient design exists.
To be precise, 2-stroke diesels work on a very different principle than a 2-stroke gasoline engine. They do not mix raw fuel and exhaust, and they have oil pans, so they don't have problems with spewing unburned fuel and oil. They also require an external supercharger to push air into the cylinders, so you won't find one on a chainsaw.
It beats buying fans online where shipping is outrageous, and you can buy resistors individually.
There's nothing I hate worse than getting stuck in the checkout line behind an old lady who's buying a few hundred assorted subminiature surface mount resistors. The clerk usually wastes a bunch of time trying to pick each one up with tweezers to attempt a barcode scan. This never works, so each one has to go under the microscope while he manually keys in the UPC. One time, the guy sneezed and scattered most of the merchandise across 3 checkout lanes.
To add insult to injury, the old lady usually waits until the whole tedious process is complete before starting to dig her checkbook out of her purse, then fills in her ledger before handing over the check, then puts her purse away before the clerk asks for her driver's license.
There's one way you could go about it that would immediately reduce our dependence on volatile oil supplies, reduce CO2 and improve our trade deficit.
First, for the short term start converting coal to hydrogen. This can be done without ever hauling the coal out of the mine. You put a reformer down there that converts coal+water to hydrogen+CO2. This can be done without external energy input. The long term problem with this scheme is storing the CO2 (in compressed liquid form) where the coal used to be without it eventually leaking out. That's why you need a long term plan:
Start serious research into fusion power and cheap polymer solar cells. IMHO, these are the only two energy sources that are scalable enough to supply the entire world's energy needs. (Fission is just too big a security risk to be acceptable in the long run.) As soon as one or both of these technologies becomes viable, use them to generate the hydrogen.
After the coal mines are closed, let the built up CO2 slowly escape over decades at a rate lower than today's releases.
DRM does not exist to prevent a determined individual from breaking the law.
For any given item, all it takes is one determined individual somewhere in the world, then the genie is out of the bottle. (Unless the government takes draconian measures to prevent it, which as I said, is worse than no new content.)
For example, right now it's easy to turn your own CD into MP3's for use in your own home, but it's just as easy to give those MP3's away to your friends.
And with DRM, it probably won't be easy for you to turn your own CDs into MP3s for home use any more either. DRM will hinder casual fair use, but won't stop P2P piracy. It's a lose-lose situation for the content providers and their customers.
(1) DRM will, when properly implemented, provide an effective means to curtail the rampant piracy that has swept the nation and the world since the advent of the MP3 and other media compression technologies, which will in turn result in (b) the more widespread availability of digital media.
Catch 22: Any DRM that is not mandatory and draconian will be trivially cracked. Any DRM that is mandatory and draconian will extract a cost to freedom that outweighs the "benefits of more widespread availability of digital media".
DRM is not going to withstand hacker attacks unless they either: outlaw every existing port, chip and connector on your computer and replace it with a secured alternative, or: require a federal license to open a server socket on the Internet. Neither one of these alternatives is an acceptable price to pay for the convenience of viewing reruns of Gilligan's Island in high definition pay-per-view.
I say if watertight DRM is necessary for digital media, then we can live without digital media. We made it through the 20th century without it, and we're all still here.
Apparently, I'm not getting my point across very well. What I'm doing is pulling my focus way up past the 200,000 foot level and looking at the really big picture. Look over thousands of years of history, Civilizations come and go. Tens of billions of people come and go. Epidemics, diseases, wars and famines come and go.
Amongst all that, contacting an alien civilization would really stand out. Maybe it would take a century for round-trip communications. That amount of time is still only 1/50th of recorded history. We might not see any benefits from such a discovery in our lifetimes, but we could still make a contribution to help shape the destiny of the human race.
Nobody's saying that we have to stop working on curing diseases. I'd be surprised if the money spent on SETI is more than 1/1000th of the money spent on medical research. All I'm saying is that demanding that that last tidbit be taken away as well is short sighted, especially when the majority of the people in this country piss away most of their spare time and resources anyway.
As far as the probability question goes, the odds of payoff for this project may be slim, but I'm sure it's better than the 1 in 50,000,000 that drive people into a frenzy over lotto tickets.
But to say that everybody's going to die anyway, so why bother is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. By that logic, we might as well shut down all the hospitals, and repeal all the laws on murder. After all, we're all going to go sometime.
That's not what I meant. I was reacting to the prevalent attitude around here that until we find a cure for every fatal disease, no other activity is worthwhile.
Why don't people say: "Those guys on TV in that NASCAR race are just wasting resources we could be using in the war on cancer!" For some reason they don't. They save their criticism for activities that actually have their own intrinsic value.
Maybe the message that an advanced alien race would broadcast over the radio waves would be instructions on how to set up a zero-latency subspace channel.
Helping the fight against diseases like Alzheimer and Parkinson is a lot more rewarding than looking for little green men.
No, everybody's going to eventually die one way or another, and we have no problem making replacements. Curing any given disease is just a temporary stopgap which isn't that significant in the big scheme of things. Our race somehow muddled through millions of years before we had cures for any diseases.
OTOH, finding little green men would probably be the single most significant moment in human history.
Another major advantage of ribbon cables is that they are dirt cheap. They can be stamped out in one step without handling the individual wires. You can also attach connectors to all ~50 wires just by shoving the sharp teeth through the ribbon in one motion. No soldering or advanced tools required.
I'm not surprised that they use crap parts in answering machines. I've bought three digital answering machines over the years, and each one went flaky and died within a couple of years. Each time one died, I returned to my original General Electic dual-tape machine.
Eventually, I learned my lesson: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. My mechanical answering machine is now 18 years old and running fine. I have no plans of ever replacing it again.
Slashdot Mirror
Gene patents could be very lucrative in this field. Imagine an informational video at the end of a future assembly line:
How is this different from adding a cheat mod to your FPS client? Transparent textures is one of the oldest tricks in the book. I think that the Geneva conventions need to be updated to prohibit this kind of thing. It just encourages campers.
Being that this is a republic we live in, (not a democracy), you have no direct say in what the government's business is or is not. In this republic, members of congress are the only people in the country who determine what the government's business is (unless the supreme court determines that the business is unconstitutional).
In this case, a senator is proposing that CD labels are indeed the government's business. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that a corporation has an inalienable right to sell non-labeled CDs. If congress passes such a law, it's the government's business. If you don't like it, you can try to elect a different representative in a few years.
"We were using Motorola processors, and all. And then, like, they stopped improving them and stuff. We were like, Huh??
We had to tell our customers that, you know, 3X the clock speed was only a myth. But they weren't trying to hear that.
That sucked.
Then we, like, lost our market share, and stuff... It was good market share.
Bummer.
My name is Steve Jobs, and I switched to X86."
That's because Microsoft has nothing to do with crackers. It's Frito-Lay that has made crackers obsolete. Tortilla chips have gained so much market share in recent years that crackers just don't have a chance.
No, templates are often anti-bloat. With a good optimizing compiler, a dizzying heirarchy of layers of abstraction can often compile down to 2 or 3 machine opcodes. If you understand how to use STL properly (which includes double-checking your results by disassembling critical points in the binary and inspecting them) you can often get code that is almost as fast as hand-coded assembly. I think that in general, if you use the other main approach to abstraction in C++ (virtual method calls), it's harder for the compiler to crush all of the layers of abstraction down to zero.
The main problem with C++ templates IMO is that they feel "brittle". It's hard to create large modular programs because of C++ #include dependencies and binary interface difficulties. I think that the best approach for large programs is to identify the performance-critical pieces and code them up in C++/STL as native modules for a nice high-level language like Python, then use the high-level language to glue everything together.
It's simple. Microsoft is offering a license agreement which you may choose to accept. That agreement grants you certain rights to Microsoft's intellectual property. The terms of that agreement were recently changed.
The intellectual property in question is contained in software. When software is used, it is "online".
Hence, this information affects your rights online. Hope that helps.
Hmm... eyeballing my distro, it looks like KDE, QT, XFree86, Mozilla, vim and a host of other apps accounts for more bytes than the GNU components. It doesn't reach a quorum by that measure.
As far as relative importance... If Linux had no GUI, I wouldn't use it. If it had very few hardware drivers, I wouldn't use it. Those are essential parts of the OS for me.
However, (leaving out Gnome for now) the GNU parts are mostly middleware and heavy-duty geek utilities. A lot of the middleware could be replaced with *BSD stuff. Loss of the geek utilities would be annoying for me, but irrelevant to the average user as Linux goes more mainstream. I don't think that the C compiler used to build the system warrants headline status; it's not even necessary to install it to use the OS. That leaves a core subset of GNU middleware that is essential. Is that subset so large that it requires renaming the OS? I tend towards saying no.
The GNU project does deserve an "honorable mention" for pioneering the concept of Free software. Maybe they should have incorporated an old fashioned BSD-style advertising clause into the GPL to ensure proper recognition.
From the looks of a couple of old HDDs I've taken apart, they aren't sealed but actually have air vents. They had a little hole in the case with a serpentine shaped tunnel connecting to the inside. There was a felt-like filter in the tunnel to keep out dust. I would imagine that oil could eventually soak through such a filter. I'm not sure if late model drives have a similar construction, though.
Actually, I think the next movie could be kind of short:
Dirty Harry:I know what you're thinking punk. You're thinkin did he fire six shots or only five. Well to tell you the truth I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being this is the 44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off. You've got to ask yourself a question, Do I feel lucky? Well do you, PUNK!
Punk: Umm... Umm...
Smart Gun: WARNING! Chamber is empty! Load a new magazine to continue shooting! WARNING! Chamber is empty! Load a new magazine to continue shooting!
Punk: Fuck you, cop! Tackles Dirty Harry and bashes his head in with a brick.
You had it lucky. Where I was stationed, we didn't have any newfangled interactive terminals. We had to punch our URLs onto cards and mail them to headquarters, then wait weeks for the next supply drop to bring our web page printouts and beef jerkey.
To be precise, 2-stroke diesels work on a very different principle than a 2-stroke gasoline engine. They do not mix raw fuel and exhaust, and they have oil pans, so they don't have problems with spewing unburned fuel and oil. They also require an external supercharger to push air into the cylinders, so you won't find one on a chainsaw.
There's nothing I hate worse than getting stuck in the checkout line behind an old lady who's buying a few hundred assorted subminiature surface mount resistors. The clerk usually wastes a bunch of time trying to pick each one up with tweezers to attempt a barcode scan. This never works, so each one has to go under the microscope while he manually keys in the UPC. One time, the guy sneezed and scattered most of the merchandise across 3 checkout lanes.
To add insult to injury, the old lady usually waits until the whole tedious process is complete before starting to dig her checkbook out of her purse, then fills in her ledger before handing over the check, then puts her purse away before the clerk asks for her driver's license.
First, for the short term start converting coal to hydrogen. This can be done without ever hauling the coal out of the mine. You put a reformer down there that converts coal+water to hydrogen+CO2. This can be done without external energy input. The long term problem with this scheme is storing the CO2 (in compressed liquid form) where the coal used to be without it eventually leaking out. That's why you need a long term plan:
Start serious research into fusion power and cheap polymer solar cells. IMHO, these are the only two energy sources that are scalable enough to supply the entire world's energy needs. (Fission is just too big a security risk to be acceptable in the long run.) As soon as one or both of these technologies becomes viable, use them to generate the hydrogen.
After the coal mines are closed, let the built up CO2 slowly escape over decades at a rate lower than today's releases.
For any given item, all it takes is one determined individual somewhere in the world, then the genie is out of the bottle. (Unless the government takes draconian measures to prevent it, which as I said, is worse than no new content.)
For example, right now it's easy to turn your own CD into MP3's for use in your own home, but it's just as easy to give those MP3's away to your friends.
And with DRM, it probably won't be easy for you to turn your own CDs into MP3s for home use any more either. DRM will hinder casual fair use, but won't stop P2P piracy. It's a lose-lose situation for the content providers and their customers.
Catch 22: Any DRM that is not mandatory and draconian will be trivially cracked. Any DRM that is mandatory and draconian will extract a cost to freedom that outweighs the "benefits of more widespread availability of digital media".
DRM is not going to withstand hacker attacks unless they either: outlaw every existing port, chip and connector on your computer and replace it with a secured alternative, or: require a federal license to open a server socket on the Internet. Neither one of these alternatives is an acceptable price to pay for the convenience of viewing reruns of Gilligan's Island in high definition pay-per-view.
I say if watertight DRM is necessary for digital media, then we can live without digital media. We made it through the 20th century without it, and we're all still here.
Amongst all that, contacting an alien civilization would really stand out. Maybe it would take a century for round-trip communications. That amount of time is still only 1/50th of recorded history. We might not see any benefits from such a discovery in our lifetimes, but we could still make a contribution to help shape the destiny of the human race.
Nobody's saying that we have to stop working on curing diseases. I'd be surprised if the money spent on SETI is more than 1/1000th of the money spent on medical research. All I'm saying is that demanding that that last tidbit be taken away as well is short sighted, especially when the majority of the people in this country piss away most of their spare time and resources anyway.
As far as the probability question goes, the odds of payoff for this project may be slim, but I'm sure it's better than the 1 in 50,000,000 that drive people into a frenzy over lotto tickets.
That's not what I meant. I was reacting to the prevalent attitude around here that until we find a cure for every fatal disease, no other activity is worthwhile.
Why don't people say: "Those guys on TV in that NASCAR race are just wasting resources we could be using in the war on cancer!" For some reason they don't. They save their criticism for activities that actually have their own intrinsic value.
No, so they can fax us our Intergalactic Federation tax forms.
Maybe the message that an advanced alien race would broadcast over the radio waves would be instructions on how to set up a zero-latency subspace channel.
No, everybody's going to eventually die one way or another, and we have no problem making replacements. Curing any given disease is just a temporary stopgap which isn't that significant in the big scheme of things. Our race somehow muddled through millions of years before we had cures for any diseases.
OTOH, finding little green men would probably be the single most significant moment in human history.
This is the exact step that Microsoft is now taking ("strong binding") in an effort to finally solve the DLL Hell problem.
Why would you install a $700 operating system on a $70 machine?
Another major advantage of ribbon cables is that they are dirt cheap. They can be stamped out in one step without handling the individual wires. You can also attach connectors to all ~50 wires just by shoving the sharp teeth through the ribbon in one motion. No soldering or advanced tools required.
Eventually, I learned my lesson: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. My mechanical answering machine is now 18 years old and running fine. I have no plans of ever replacing it again.