[While I am not into HIV virus research, I am a Ph.D. level structural biologist and feel qualified to answer this.] Won't work, unfortunately. Remember that a virus is an inanimate object composed of self-assembling parts. You can shake them apart all you want, they'll just reassemble. Unless you find a way to permanently damage the individual protein and nucleic acid subunits. However, I'm guessing the collateral damage to human tissue would be very high.
Quoting original poster: "Now, given a choice between paying annually for a new revision of MS Office, and paying a competent Unix/Linux IT guy to administer a bunch of Linux desktops, I'd vote for the latter. I'm thinking I'd get more for my tax dollar."
Cost of software is an issue, and certainly an important one.
More important, however, is accessibility and usability of government records. If important data and memos about an issue of today are locked up in a proprietary format which almost certainly won't be completely readable by the then current version of Office software in 2020 and beyond, then this is a real loss for all concerned! Moreover, citizens shouldn't have to own and use a particular piece of commercial software to be able to read documents which their own government produces. That's just plain wrong if there are simple and straightforward alternatives.
Exactly! What the author completely disregards is that there are many scientific fields which are based on measurements, not just on statistics. The old 'hard science' vs. 'weak science' thing, although weak science is fairly derogatory.
Anyway, in physics, and all the scientific endeavors based on physical measurements, results are hard to get compeletely wrong if you are careful. There are still rotten eggs, but by and large, what you can measure clearly doesn't easily lead to wrong results. Wrong conclusions perhaps, but that's a whole 'nother story.
I'd venture that physically based scientific observations, once published after peer review, are more than 70% correct even if one factors in conclusions and not just raw results.
I've yet to see an IM transcript that isn't completely inane. In my mind, the I in IM stands for "I don't know where the content is". But like I said, I'm not policing it much, my kids simply aren't into wasting time.
Did my parents ban phone use? No, but I didn't grow up in the US. Living in the US now and hearing and seeing people using their phones, I do put time limits on phone calls, too, for everyone in the family. And my kids don't complain. Go figure.
We have a similar, public setup and similar limits, and we enforce them regularly. Works really well, and we don't need filterware and other such BS.
In addition, I have disabled AOL messenger that came with our Mac and placed a general ban on IMing. Not that I police it much, but it deters enough. As a result, my kids have not yet developed the atrocious vocabulary and spelling you typically see on IM.
My 16 year old girl has admin privileges on the family Mac, because I know I can trust her not to mess up the system. Giving such a privilege eases tensions that might otherwise occur between parents and teenager. My 17 amd 14 year old boys are not capable of keeping the family computer working (at least I don't think so), and hence they are not sysadmins.
My 14 year old has his own laptop and is heavily into C++ and OpenGL. He has root access on his system, but there's no internet connection. I spend a lot of time with him discussing and troubleshooting code and other issues, and he thinks I am a really cool dad because of that.
It's a give and take. Impose limits, but also give some wiggle room.
Yes, really. Scientific applications to be precise.
I admin, support and teach scientific applications on supercomputers, clusters and workstations. All the heavy duty stuff originates in Unix. Some of it has been ported to Windows, granted, but 95+% of what matters to my users and to me is still Unix only.
My current desktop is a Linux box. My last one was an SGI, my next one will be a Mac. Windows need not apply.
- Christoph
One good computer application - learning to type
on
The Flickering Mind
·
· Score: 1
There is one really compelling application of computers in grade and middle schools: The various typing tutor programs. Back in my day (boy am I old!) we had electric typewriters, and learning to type was as mindnumbing as can be. With computer programs it is still mindnumbing to a degree, but it has been made more compelling, AND the tutor programs adjust to your skills and revisit problem spots right away. It still takes perseverance and lots of repetition, but it isn't nearly as dreary as it used to be.
Other than that, I fully agree with the gist of the reviewer's description of the book.
Americans tend to associate colored currency with Monopoly money, and currencies that don't hold their value against the US Dollar...
Well, lately - like over the past two years - it's been rather the other way round. Most good currencies (which incidentally come in all sorts of funky colors) have gained dramatically against the US$.;-)
"You gonna do that with an RFID-enabled credit card? Anything that brute force will also erase the magnetic stripe and ruin the card."
So what? They'll just have to punch in the numbers by hand, gotta keep up that eye/hand coordinations you know...
I have to agree. In a previous life I spent significant amounts of time near or even under large magnets (15 T and up), and all my cards were always scrambled. Didn't create a whole lot of problems. It just prevented me from using ATMs and other non-attended gear. It was a really minor issue for me back then, and I doubt it would be worse today.
Besides, magnetic stripes can easily be reprogrammed on the existing card. Then you'd have a fully functional card minus the RFID tag. Don't know which banks still do this instead of issuing a new card, though.
The reason none of these providers is international (yet) is that music royalties are organized and paid in even more byzantine ways than recording contracts. Each country pretty much has their own agency/organization/whatever, and some have more than one (the US has three to my knowledge). Cutting through all that red tape (this is commercial, not government, for a change) is very, very hard. Read up about some of this stuff at Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge.
Wrong! My calls to Switzerland and Germany cost me 4.5 cts/min, 5.3 cts/min if all fees are factored in. That's cheaper than instate long distance, and equal to what I pay for national long distance.
In fact, it's so cheap that my wife and I have entirely stopped watching the clock while we phone overseas. Our free time is much more of a limiting factor.
BTW, I know SETI paved the way for this technology,...
SETI might be the best known of the early distributed computing efforts, but it was by no means the first. The DES challenges run by distributed.net came before SETI, as did the RC-48 and part of the RC-56 challenge. Distributed.net's technology was superior to SETI's in many ways back then, too. There were also many other, lesser known efforts underway, such as the Mersenne prime search.
I think crude distributed computing efforts have a long history on the internet, going back way further than even those projects I mentioned above. But I wasn't part of any of those, so I can't comment. Maybe others have some insight?
I don't mean to put down SETI in any way, just want to set the record straight.
I will go so far as to say that I think one form of copyright simply should NOT exist. That is "performance rights".
There's a common misconception around here. The performance rights don't stop me from performing a given song. In fact, performances are covered by compulsory licensing, meaning I cannot be denied the right to perform the song. However, someone connected with a paid performance, usually the venue, does pay royalties to ASCAP and BMI for the priviledge. Free performances do not owe a dime to copyright holders or administrators.
Since regular restaurants and other such venues don't pay royalties to BMI and ASCAP, their employees cannot legally sing 'Happy Birthday' to customers. That's all there is to it. It is still silly for such an old song, but really not a major deal. And if copyrights wouldn't last forever, it wouldn't be an issue at all.
... there'a a goodly amount of beautiful music that can't be performed live. "Eleanor Rigby" is getting tired, but how about "A Day in the Life"?
I saw that very tune performed live last year, along with the rest of the Sgt. Pepper's album. Everything, down to the last note, including "Within You, Without You". See http://www.rockola.com/beatles.html Granted, it's hard, but not impossible.
As to Eleanor Rigby, Paul McCartney had this one in his first set on the Trippin' The Life Fantastic tour in the early 90s. Preserved on the double CD of the same name.
Nature's change wasn't just motivated by employers taking away right from authors. There was and is a growing dissent from various corners of the political spectrum and of the scientific establishment that signing over to a (private) publisher copyright of a manuscript that resulted from publicly funded work is fundamentally wrong. If you read the fine print of some of those contracts, after a paper is published a scientist can often not legally use an illustration from that paper in a presentation without written consent from the publisher. Of course, most of us never bothered and got away with it, but increasignly less so.
Another facet of this is the growing prevalence of ties from academic institutions to commercial entities. Most of these agreements stipulate some form of IP transfer to the commercial side. The government research funding agencies have had an increasingly hard time to allow such wholesale transfer of publicly funded research results to the private sector. Many public grants now stipulate that private cosponsors cannot stop or influence the publication of research, other than maybe hold it up for a short time to review it for possible exploitation down the line (say, through patents).
All told, Nature's step is very commendable and is a great first step in a direction opposite from current trends.
Whether that was a mistake or not is another question. I too bought studio monitors for my home system, in my case Carvin SRS 6.5. The very present mids (i.e. flat frequency response) took some getting used to (all of 20 minutes, actually) but I'll never go back. Ever. Of course, my stereo also doubles as a mini PA for band rehearsals and I know the monitors will even allow for small house gigs (with hi-fi quality sound!). Now I wonder why people even buy something that's not a studio monitor if they are going to shell out $300+ for new speakers.
There's a difference between absolute illiteracy and functional illiteracy. You are referring to absolute illiteracy which is indeed very low (as it should be). However, there are many people who are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and understanding text of moderate complexity, and they find it hard to impossible to write text that is longish, to the point and reasonably error free.
I know a good number of those, including my inlaws, even though my social circle is mostly well educated. And all these functionally illiterate people are very decent folks.
Interesting comment. This ties right in with the observation in the study that internet use correlates with newspaper reading, TV use, and other sources of information and/or entertainment.
And likewise, the study says that cell phone and PDA use also correlates with internet use.
I think what we're seeing is the start of a new trend where some people decide to drastically limit the time and money they spend for being flooded with (dis)/(non)information.
Maybe there is life beyond ubiquitous connectivity?
Well, RedHat's advantage over your distro is that they employ knowledgeable programmers and engineers with an impressive track record, and we all know that. Whereas we don't know anything about the people behind your distro. That's an tangible asset that is relatively independant of the brand (other than the fact that talented employees may rather flock to a known brand).
In other words, there are two kinds of brand: Those which add nothing to the product at all, and those who have a lot of tangible and intangible assets and advantages behind them. Heinz ketchup is a good example of the former because there are many ketchup brands that taste better and/or are cheaper. Apple is an example of the latter because Apple computers are undeniably different from regular PCs, inside and outside.
Let's face it, for one legally you don't get any privacy from your parents until you're of age.
And really, no generation has ever had as much privacy as the current teenagers. Who of you kids shares a room with a sibling? Who shares a bathroom with more than one other person?
Not to mention the countless electronic communications gadgets and applications that are generally yours only and might even be password protected.Give me a break!
Try bunking with a younger brother, sharing a single bathroom with 5 others in the family, sharing a single landline phone in a very public space of your home for a few weeks, and then check back with us and tell us your impression of how private your regular life is, parents checkig up on homework notwithstanding.
This, by the way, is how most of our planet's population lives. Just not where most/. readers grow up. Quit whining already!
You are absolutely right, but I wouldn't steer towards deterring undesirable behavior, but rather towards encouraging good habits and discussing choices and their expected result (without getting overly moralistic).
What about the case when two or more people independently come up with the same idea? Who gets attribution?
Both, I presume. Just like in bibliographies. Since attribution is only indirectly about money, there is much less fighting over it.
The truly paranoid could still patent or copyright or whatever their idea to make it clear that they were there first. In the end, attribution is basically a moral obligation.
But what's more important is the fact that attribution is inalienable. Your idea is always yours. You can't give it away in the sense that someone else can claim that it was theirs. They may try, but that doesn't make it the truth.
However, you can give away or sell the compensation aspect, and that's where all the mess about IP is.
I think a intellectual output calls for two protections which are to be VERY differently managed. All too often the two are wrongly lumped into one or at least muddled.
One is attribution: Your idea is yours, and anybody quoting or using it should attribute it to you whenever possible. I think this is an inalienable right and cannot be argued away. The GPL, for example, is very clear on this.
Second is compensation: Your idea MAY be yours to profit from it. Society MAY decide to let you use the idea for profit and help defend yourself from imposters. This is NOT an inalienable right, but merely a social bargain and will change over time to reflect market and societal environment.
I think Alan Greenspan in his speech correctly goes back to the underpinnings of the second protection and asks whether our current system of IP protections benefits or hurts the economy.
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[While I am not into HIV virus research, I am a Ph.D. level structural biologist and feel qualified to answer this.]
Won't work, unfortunately. Remember that a virus is an inanimate object composed of self-assembling parts. You can shake them apart all you want, they'll just reassemble. Unless you find a way to permanently damage the individual protein and nucleic acid subunits. However, I'm guessing the collateral damage to human tissue would be very high.
Quoting original poster: "Now, given a choice between paying annually for a new revision of MS Office, and paying a competent Unix/Linux IT guy to administer a bunch of Linux desktops, I'd vote for the latter. I'm thinking I'd get more for my tax dollar."
Cost of software is an issue, and certainly an important one.
More important, however, is accessibility and usability of government records. If important data and memos about an issue of today are locked up in a proprietary format which almost certainly won't be completely readable by the then current version of Office software in 2020 and beyond, then this is a real loss for all concerned! Moreover, citizens shouldn't have to own and use a particular piece of commercial software to be able to read documents which their own government produces. That's just plain wrong if there are simple and straightforward alternatives.
Exactly! What the author completely disregards is that there are many scientific fields which are based on measurements, not just on statistics. The old 'hard science' vs. 'weak science' thing, although weak science is fairly derogatory.
Anyway, in physics, and all the scientific endeavors based on physical measurements, results are hard to get compeletely wrong if you are careful. There are still rotten eggs, but by and large, what you can measure clearly doesn't easily lead to wrong results. Wrong conclusions perhaps, but that's a whole 'nother story.
I'd venture that physically based scientific observations, once published after peer review, are more than 70% correct even if one factors in conclusions and not just raw results.
I've yet to see an IM transcript that isn't completely inane. In my mind, the I in IM stands for "I don't know where the content is". But like I said, I'm not policing it much, my kids simply aren't into wasting time.
Did my parents ban phone use? No, but I didn't grow up in the US. Living in the US now and hearing and seeing people using their phones, I do put time limits on phone calls, too, for everyone in the family. And my kids don't complain. Go figure.
We have a similar, public setup and similar limits, and we enforce them regularly. Works really well, and we don't need filterware and other such BS.
In addition, I have disabled AOL messenger that came with our Mac and placed a general ban on IMing. Not that I police it much, but it deters enough. As a result, my kids have not yet developed the atrocious vocabulary and spelling you typically see on IM.
My 16 year old girl has admin privileges on the family Mac, because I know I can trust her not to mess up the system. Giving such a privilege eases tensions that might otherwise occur between parents and teenager. My 17 amd 14 year old boys are not capable of keeping the family computer working (at least I don't think so), and hence they are not sysadmins.
My 14 year old has his own laptop and is heavily into C++ and OpenGL. He has root access on his system, but there's no internet connection. I spend a lot of time with him discussing and troubleshooting code and other issues, and he thinks I am a really cool dad because of that.
It's a give and take. Impose limits, but also give some wiggle room.
Yes, really. Scientific applications to be precise.
I admin, support and teach scientific applications on supercomputers, clusters and workstations. All the heavy duty stuff originates in Unix. Some of it has been ported to Windows, granted, but 95+% of what matters to my users and to me is still Unix only.
My current desktop is a Linux box. My last one was an SGI, my next one will be a Mac. Windows need not apply.
- Christoph
There is one really compelling application of computers in grade and middle schools: The various typing tutor programs. Back in my day (boy am I old!) we had electric typewriters, and learning to type was as mindnumbing as can be. With computer programs it is still mindnumbing to a degree, but it has been made more compelling, AND the tutor programs adjust to your skills and revisit problem spots right away. It still takes perseverance and lots of repetition, but it isn't nearly as dreary as it used to be.
Other than that, I fully agree with the gist of the reviewer's description of the book.
- Christoph
Americans tend to associate colored currency with Monopoly money, and currencies that don't hold their value against the US Dollar...
;-)
Well, lately - like over the past two years - it's been rather the other way round. Most good currencies (which incidentally come in all sorts of funky colors) have gained dramatically against the US$.
- Christoph
"You gonna do that with an RFID-enabled credit card? Anything that brute force will also erase the magnetic stripe and ruin the card."
So what? They'll just have to punch in the numbers by hand, gotta keep up that eye/hand coordinations you know...
I have to agree. In a previous life I spent significant amounts of time near or even under large magnets (15 T and up), and all my cards were always scrambled. Didn't create a whole lot of problems. It just prevented me from using ATMs and other non-attended gear. It was a really minor issue for me back then, and I doubt it would be worse today.
Besides, magnetic stripes can easily be reprogrammed on the existing card. Then you'd have a fully functional card minus the RFID tag. Don't know which banks still do this instead of issuing a new card, though.
- Christoph
The reason none of these providers is international (yet) is that music royalties are organized and paid in even more byzantine ways than recording contracts. Each country pretty much has their own agency/organization/whatever, and some have more than one (the US has three to my knowledge). Cutting through all that red tape (this is commercial, not government, for a change) is very, very hard. Read up about some of this stuff at Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge.
- Christoph
The Linpack benchmark uses floats, not reals. Double precision floats, to be exact.
Wrong! My calls to Switzerland and Germany cost me 4.5 cts/min, 5.3 cts/min if all fees are factored in. That's cheaper than instate long distance, and equal to what I pay for national long distance.
In fact, it's so cheap that my wife and I have entirely stopped watching the clock while we phone overseas. Our free time is much more of a limiting factor.
- Christoph
BTW, I know SETI paved the way for this technology, ...
SETI might be the best known of the early distributed computing efforts, but it was by no means the first. The DES challenges run by distributed.net came before SETI, as did the RC-48 and part of the RC-56 challenge. Distributed.net's technology was superior to SETI's in many ways back then, too. There were also many other, lesser known efforts underway, such as the Mersenne prime search.
I think crude distributed computing efforts have a long history on the internet, going back way further than even those projects I mentioned above. But I wasn't part of any of those, so I can't comment. Maybe others have some insight?
I don't mean to put down SETI in any way, just want to set the record straight.
I will go so far as to say that I think one form of copyright simply should NOT exist. That is "performance rights".
There's a common misconception around here. The performance rights don't stop me from performing a given song. In fact, performances are covered by compulsory licensing, meaning I cannot be denied the right to perform the song. However, someone connected with a paid performance, usually the venue, does pay royalties to ASCAP and BMI for the priviledge. Free performances do not owe a dime to copyright holders or administrators.
Since regular restaurants and other such venues don't pay royalties to BMI and ASCAP, their employees cannot legally sing 'Happy Birthday' to customers. That's all there is to it. It is still silly for such an old song, but really not a major deal. And if copyrights wouldn't last forever, it wouldn't be an issue at all.
... there'a a goodly amount of beautiful music that can't be performed live. "Eleanor Rigby" is getting tired, but how about "A Day in the Life"?
I saw that very tune performed live last year, along with the rest of the Sgt. Pepper's album. Everything, down to the last note, including "Within You, Without You". See http://www.rockola.com/beatles.html
Granted, it's hard, but not impossible.
As to Eleanor Rigby, Paul McCartney had this one in his first set on the Trippin' The Life Fantastic tour in the early 90s. Preserved on the double CD of the same name.
So, I don't know what you are talking about here.
Nature's change wasn't just motivated by employers taking away right from authors. There was and is a growing dissent from various corners of the political spectrum and of the scientific establishment that signing over to a (private) publisher copyright of a manuscript that resulted from publicly funded work is fundamentally wrong. If you read the fine print of some of those contracts, after a paper is published a scientist can often not legally use an illustration from that paper in a presentation without written consent from the publisher. Of course, most of us never bothered and got away with it, but increasignly less so.
Another facet of this is the growing prevalence of ties from academic institutions to commercial entities. Most of these agreements stipulate some form of IP transfer to the commercial side. The government research funding agencies have had an increasingly hard time to allow such wholesale transfer of publicly funded research results to the private sector. Many public grants now stipulate that private cosponsors cannot stop or influence the publication of research, other than maybe hold it up for a short time to review it for possible exploitation down the line (say, through patents).
All told, Nature's step is very commendable and is a great first step in a direction opposite from current trends.
Whether that was a mistake or not is another question. I too bought studio monitors for my home system, in my case Carvin SRS 6.5. The very present mids (i.e. flat frequency response) took some getting used to (all of 20 minutes, actually) but I'll never go back. Ever.
Of course, my stereo also doubles as a mini PA for band rehearsals and I know the monitors will even allow for small house gigs (with hi-fi quality sound!).
Now I wonder why people even buy something that's not a studio monitor if they are going to shell out $300+ for new speakers.
There's a difference between absolute illiteracy and functional illiteracy. You are referring to absolute illiteracy which is indeed very low (as it should be). However, there are many people who are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and understanding text of moderate complexity, and they find it hard to impossible to write text that is longish, to the point and reasonably error free.
I know a good number of those, including my inlaws, even though my social circle is mostly well educated. And all these functionally illiterate people are very decent folks.
Interesting comment. This ties right in with the observation in the study that internet use correlates with newspaper reading, TV use, and other sources of information and/or entertainment.
And likewise, the study says that cell phone and PDA use also correlates with internet use.
I think what we're seeing is the start of a new trend where some people decide to drastically limit the time and money they spend for being flooded with (dis)/(non)information.
Maybe there is life beyond ubiquitous connectivity?
- Christoph
Well, RedHat's advantage over your distro is that they employ knowledgeable programmers and engineers with an impressive track record, and we all know that. Whereas we don't know anything about the people behind your distro. That's an tangible asset that is relatively independant of the brand (other than the fact that talented employees may rather flock to a known brand).
In other words, there are two kinds of brand: Those which add nothing to the product at all, and those who have a lot of tangible and intangible assets and advantages behind them. Heinz ketchup is a good example of the former because there are many ketchup brands that taste better and/or are cheaper. Apple is an example of the latter because Apple computers are undeniably different from regular PCs, inside and outside.
Let's face it, for one legally you don't get any privacy from your parents until you're of age.
/. readers grow up. Quit whining already!
And really, no generation has ever had as much privacy as the current teenagers. Who of you kids shares a room with a sibling? Who shares a bathroom with more than one other person?
Not to mention the countless electronic communications gadgets and applications that are generally yours only and might even be password protected.Give me a break!
Try bunking with a younger brother, sharing a single bathroom with 5 others in the family, sharing a single landline phone in a very public space of your home for a few weeks, and then check back with us and tell us your impression of how private your regular life is, parents checkig up on homework notwithstanding.
This, by the way, is how most of our planet's population lives. Just not where most
You are absolutely right, but I wouldn't steer towards deterring undesirable behavior, but rather towards encouraging good habits and discussing choices and their expected result (without getting overly moralistic).
What about the case when two or more people independently come up with
the same idea? Who gets attribution?
Both, I presume. Just like in bibliographies. Since attribution is only indirectly about money, there is much less fighting over it.
The truly paranoid could still patent or copyright or whatever their idea to make it clear that they were there first. In the end, attribution is basically a moral obligation.
But what's more important is the fact that attribution is inalienable. Your idea is always yours. You can't give it away in the sense that someone else can claim that it was theirs. They may try, but that doesn't make it the truth.
However, you can give away or sell the compensation aspect, and that's where all the mess about IP is.
I think a intellectual output calls for two protections which are to be VERY differently managed. All too often the two are wrongly lumped into one or at least muddled.
One is attribution: Your idea is yours, and anybody quoting or using it should attribute it to you whenever possible. I think this is an inalienable right and cannot be argued away. The GPL, for example, is very clear on this.
Second is compensation: Your idea MAY be yours to profit from it. Society MAY decide to let you use the idea for profit and help defend yourself from imposters. This is NOT an inalienable right, but merely a social bargain and will change over time to reflect market and societal environment.
I think Alan Greenspan in his speech correctly goes back to the underpinnings of the second protection and asks whether our current system of IP protections benefits or hurts the economy.
Per Zoe Lofgren's own summary , yes, you pretty much got it right.