Hindsight may be 20/20, but this is a lesson the American aristocracy can't seem to learn - realpolitik is a great way to create trouble down the road.* I fear Dubya and his grand viziers are going down this road again to take care of problems left by previous administrations, although one current Administration member was directly involved in creating the current problem.
It is hypocrises such as this that cast great doubt upon the current intentions of the US government, and why so many people distrust the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days.
* More frightening is that a few powerful American industrialists and entrepeneurs sympathized with Hitler - Hearst and Ford among them. That goes beyond realpolitik, which I don't think had been coined at that point; powerful people made money off Hitler's aggression and slaughter of Jews, Romani, communists, homosexuals, etc., and still benefit from it today.
Does the Trading With the Enemy Act still apply? That could be used on them - you know, like it was against Dubya's grandpa Prescott in 1942 to stop him from helping fund the Nazis.
How the heck do you reach second line support? There are a couple times I wish I could just call someone and ask "Is my modem showing up, or is there a service outage in my area" and get a straight answer from someone who knows what it means when I say "I don't have a supported e-mail client."
Hell, I can't even get hired for first-line support!
Well, I was terribly, terribly underwhelmed by Shockwave pt. II. It brought Archer back way too quickly and easily, sent Enterprise on her merry way with no consequences, and I got the implication that whatever Archer and Daniels threw together was the "last" bit of time-travel technology available in the timeline Archer went through. Of course, now that Archer's back on the ship, one could say that he's in yet another timeline where the secret leader and Daniels exist again, but even that comes across as a hokey plot device.
Unless the writers did some serious preplanning for this overall plot arc, or they're very careful reintroducing the 25th and 29th-century characters (I screwed that up in the other reply, I realize that) things will simply get less internally logical and less watchable over time. The episode after Minefield was watchable and interesting (and suffered from a common problem to all Treks, the really quick wrap-up), but I had no interest in watching something about Archer's sexual frustration. Shockwave II turned me off watching the next couple of episodes, so I missed the first meeting with the Romulans.
It's pretty hard to piss me off when it comes to sci-fi (hell, I still sometimes catch Voyager when I have little else to do, along with Forever Knight!), but Shockwave II led me to believe B+B really haven't learned how to write long-term plot effects. I laughed when I heard about how they thought about the conclusion of Shockwave - shock of shocks - before going on break for the summer. It's been a fairly consistent problem with Trek season-ending cliffhangers, though some have been much better than others (Best of Both Worlds comes to mind). Shockwave II was easily the worst.
And to think, I didn't have much problem with the first season, and thought Shockwave I was a great setup.
Mind telling me when the reset button was used in Shockwave II?
Archer's back on the ship, Enterprise is merrily on her way, and the entire 31st Century storyline seems to have been wiped out due to internal logic, although I fully expect some convoluted use of treknobabble and badly-conceived plot devices to restore it soon enough.
Now, if Archer had been stuck in the 31st Century and actually had to take a few episodes to figure out what was going on, and Enterprise had been forced to limp along without Archer, or someone was offed, or Enterprise was sent home, or something significant, I could have been impressed.
Instead, we were right back, plotwise, to where we started, minus 3000 colonists we will never hear from again unless TPTB have a real good surprise up their sleeves.
I managed to sit through the first season of Enterprise, hoping B+B would get away from the mistakes that made Voyager troublesome.
As of Shockwave Part II, I can see they haven't learned a damn thing. Of all the things they should have learned, why oh why do they still resort to the reset button? It will practically take an episode full of treknobabble and a big honking deus ex machina to salvage anything interesting out of the "temporal cold war" storyline, now that it seems to have been completely wiped out with no good resolution. At this point, it would be better if the whole thing were simply forgotten, but I'm willing to bet B+B will rely on some poorly-written badly-conceived treknobabble device to get that storyline started again, much as a poorly-written badly-conceived treknobabble device was used to reset-button Archer back into the 22nd Century and make everything happy ever after.
Isn't one of the Curie Institute's arguments that a mutation has been found that can't be investigated, because Myriad claims control over the gene and its mutations? It seems pretty obvious to me that this gene is being investigated by other institutions - or would be, if Myriad weren't sending out cease-and-desists.
Besides that, at least two other organizations are assignees on (what seem to be) the applicable patents - the University of Utah Research Fund and the USA via the Dept. of Health. Is that taxpayer money I smell attached to this patent?
This, however, seems to be clearly a patent on a gene, according to the claims section. It appears to be related to the patent linked originally.
It's a bit hard to tell what patents are related in what way, aside from the references section. Either way, it reads like Myriad's patenting general testing procedures, results, and genes, trying to gain a monopoly on breast cancer research.
It's worth noting the "Assignees" on both patents. If I understand correctly, "assignees" are the entities that actually own the patent, usually the organizations the inventors work for and have likely signed contracts with automatically assigning all products of their work:
Assignee: Myriad Genetics, Inc. (Salt Lake City, UT); University of Utah Research Foundation (Salt Lake City, UT); The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health (Washington, DC)
So it appears Myriad isn't the only owner of the patent, but perhaps the University of Utah has transferred their control to Myriad, and is it possible for the USA to hold patents, since it also gives them out through another body?
It does *not* patent the gene. The way to evaluate what it "patents" is to read the claims section of the patent.
Claim 2:
The method of claim 1 wherein the wild-type BRCA1 gene has the sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:1.
Claims 30-36:
30. The method of claim 20 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
31. The method of claim 21 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
32. The method of claim 22 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
33. The method of claim 23 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
34. The method of claim 24 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:l.
35. The method of claim 25 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
36. The method of claim 26 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
At the end of the patent, several genetic code sequences are listed, including a lot of information for SEQ ID NO:1. I don't know if these code inclusions are common to biotech patents when the gene itself isn't patented, perhaps for information purposes, but the claims section seems to declare control over one entire sequence, and the possible results of testing for certain sequences along with the general method of testing itself. In short, if you don't have those nucleotide deletions, the patent may not apply to you.
Taking a quick read over the beginning, it does seem to outline a method for finding the gene, but it also clearly outlines a series of missing nucleotide sequences, of which the ways to detect them are outlined in previous claims.
It's rather specific about steps in places, but in others it simply seems to claim patent over testing processes that might be done in many labs; I have no way of knowing.
I suppose it would be up to the company to say whether they actually claim control over the genetic sequences - in which case, they've expropriated control over part of the genetic code of millions of people without their knowledge or consent, which I find absolutely abhorrent.
What blows me away about the defenders of this patent is that they seem to believe a company should be able to recoup their costs in any way possible, including expropriating ownership of a person's genetic code without his/her knowledge or consent. Myriad effectively owns a pair of genes (and genes covered under 98 other patents) found in millions of people for the next couple of decades. You can't offer your own breast cancer genes for testing and research, because under a broken patent law, you don't own them. This is the entire reason this testing has to be stopped; Myriad apparently has the legal right to tell people whether they can even look for these genes or not. You don't control the right to use them and provide them to others as you see fit, so no dice giving your tissue for a university for cancer research.
To reiterate: it's not as if Myriad simply patented the testing itself. It patented a gene that is clearly not a unique configuration of matter (found in part of patent law as a way for companies to patent things like molecules), since it's obviously found in millions of people - otherwise, it would be useless as part of a test. They have claimed ownership over a part of millions of people; it may "only" be a gene or two, but this company is using their authority over it to block any kind of testing or research using it. Talk about stifling innovation... it's arguable that this company has effectively stolen a person's ownership over their own genes.
If a government claimed ownership of part of your genetic code and said you couldn't get a certain test without ponying up big money to Big Brother, I bet the people saying "but the company has to recoup their costs" would go into conniptions about a government cash-grab and Big Brother, rightfully.
Go ahead, tell me all about the millions pharmaceuticals pour into research, and how they simply must be compensated... fine. Patent a test. Patent a device used to find the gene. Don't put people into a situation where they discover they don't have control over their own bodies anymore, can't offer their own tissue for testing and research because they don't have the right to something they were born with. Profit is not a right that overrides all other rights, and it doesn't justify, what is effectively, theft of property rights from millions of people to one entity so it can make money.
I'll have to be one of those "works great here" types.
PII-266. 224 MB RAM. 6.4 GB HD.
Runs fine.
Balsa starts up fast. Galeon starts up fast. Mozilla starts up fairly fast. The only thing really slow starting up is OpenOffice. Hell, I have less trouble running DivX videos on this than on my folks' Celery 500 with 256 MB RAM.
Got the httpd running. Got named running. Got sshd running. Nautilus sits in the background doing Kosh-knows-what.
Distro? Red Hat 7.3. May go to 8 or Mandrake 9 if I can get my hands on some CDs.
I couldn't imagine running WinXP on anything less than a 600 MHz box with at least 256 MB ram.
[x] Trashcan support [X] Easy to use Windowing system - KDE, Gnome (my computer-braindead girlfriend uses it without any problems) [X] Standard software install system - LSB, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse [X] Easy to use Windows filesharing - KDE, Samba [X] Easy support for video files and DVD - Xine is awesome, and it will even play QT5 files! [X] Desktop company support - Red Hat, The Kompany, etc.
As for trashcans... as a temporary stopgap, it's not difficult to set up an alias that will move a file to $HOME/.Trash instead of deleting it, but this isn't real undelete support.
I love being able to listen to my obnoxious hip hop music without having to worry about an office mate like I did at internships in the past.
In that case, see about getting a DVD player capable of playing DVD-A in that office of yours. I'm not a huge fan of rap (though I do enjoy The Coup and Public Enemy), but some tracks from the 5.1 mix of Missy Elliot's...so addictive are to fucking die for. I miss having easy access to a 5.1-capable studio with a giant LFE in the floor and a DVD-A/V player. Wonder if Reza ever finished that project...
However I often find myself wishing for speakers better than the stock, cheap PC speakers than came with my Dell. Surround sound would be way fucking cool.
Unless you're willing to put out for studio monitors and a decent surround receiver to run from your box, I've found Altec Lansings are pretty good. Those Cambridge Soundworks cubes are passable, but they desperately need a sub to go with them.
I'm a little out of touch due to life pulling me away from the usual tech drooling, but I'm getting back into all that crud now.
Of course, this all assumes having your own office. Cubicles or other shared spaces may not be as conducive for surround sound music listening as ones own office but I wouldn't just dismiss it out of hand as you have.
Well, cubicles and open-concept offices are exactly what came to mind when I thought of the whole "office of the near future" thing. Entertainment-wise, it would be cool, but I could see a company shelling out for some of those wraparound monitors before they spend the bucks on surround speaker sets.
Surely there *must* be some more new ideas floating round than that - for instance, what about better tools to manage the flood of email people now receive?
Patch the holes in Outlook that help e-mail worms propagate? We're talking about the same Microsoft, right?
1) That wraparound screen actually looks pretty cool and potentially useful. I find myself glancing back and forth slightly across my large screen, so something like this could help with limited screen real estate. Not everyone's comfortable with X-style multiple desktops. My one worry is that this monitor would be MS-only (insert quote about GM requiring GM wheels here...)
2) Surround sound being an important part of an office? If your office is a production studio, maybe - but if your office is a studio, chances are you know more about what you need than a bunch of marketing hacks from MS.
I kind of hope this was a joke that the article didn't quite make clear.
3) The lack of a focus on security - on the one hand, MS might not want to overhype something they've been horribly deficient with in the past. On the other hand, it sounds like even the visitors noticed a lack of focus on secure computing, and I'd be a bit concerned about a company that promotes style over substance as the "office of the near future".
The bits about Iran and Usama are pretty much dead-on, but is the Iraq bit accurate? I've seen pieces from time to time claiming the CIA at least quietly supported Saddam's rise to power in Iraq, but I thought the country's always been run by single strongmen since the British installed a Hashemite monarchy after World War I. It's well-known that the U.S. at least provided material and political support to Saddam's regime to fight Iran (while Ollie North and others sold weapons to Iran - if I were an Iranian or Iraqi and found this out, I'd be more than a little pissed at Washington), but did the CIA have any direct or indirect influence on Saddam's takeover of the Ba'ath Party?
Back to Iran... wasn't Khomeini initially supported by European and American powers? From what I've read, a socialist provisional government ran the country from 1978, when the Shah fell, until Khomeini's arrival in 1979; until then, he'd been in Paris, heading up an Islamic expatriate group. It almost seems as if the takeover of the U.S. Embassy was something Washington hadn't counted on from what they thought of as a potential ally to stop socialism, considering the one attempt to free the hostages was a failed rescue mission, when the same country later had no problem invading Grenada to reach some medical students/hostages.
What a mess. And to think, this type of manipulative, Pax Americana policy is rearing its ugly head again... farking authoritarians of all stripes suck.
And at that point, when said person has nothing much to live for anymore and certainly nothing to lose, Scientology HQ will go up in a big orange-red ball of ammonium nitrate and diesel oil.
Frankly, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. But with their present behavior, it's only a matter of time.
Don't even joke about this kind of stuff - Keith Henson was convicted in California of religious intolerance for someone else cracking a joke on alt.religion.scientology about passing by the headquarters of Golden Era Productions (a Scientology front company) with a "Tom Cruise Missile", and published the coordinates for the complex, along with the occasional protest of Scientology orgs. He was convicted, and bolted to Canada. Last I heard, he applied for refugee status.
Free trade involves killing subsidies and tariffs, something I imagine "anarchists that would like to see all borders fall and all imposed limits between various peoples disappear" supporting, not protesting.
FTAA does nothing to drop barriers to the flow of workers to find a better living conditions. It does drop barriers to the flow of capital. It does nothing to ensure that employees will get paid a wage they can live on, continue to have access to arable land to grow food instead of cash crops, or see any benefit from the arrival of foreign operations, but it does ensure companies can move their operations from country to country almost at will in order to maximize profits. The idea that third-world companies will be able to take advantage of North American markets assumes North American companies won't go to third-world countries and squash the local competition first, funnelling the big wins back to HQ. This is the big fear, and it has some basis in reality, as many large Western companies have taken advantage of a lack of strong labour traditions in numerous less-industrialized nations to pay criminally-low wages and maintain conditions that would cause American workers to riot.
Activists in South American nations, among other places, share fears that local economies won't be given a chance to benefit from supposedly free trade, or that the arrival of companies looking to take advantage of the lack of labour laws and tariffs will actually damage and drain societies that, in a fair trade, would benefit. It should be noted that FTAA, and the Bretton Woods organizations, practically demand the elimination of any subsidies and labour protection laws, things that even the U.S. doesn't do and likely wouldn't agree to. Generally, these deals and organizations are less about levelling the playing field than just making it easier for economic powers to increase their growth, as if making money is the most important thing on Earth.
But it's funny how all these rebranding efforts (equalitarian, humanitarian, social democracy, social responsibility, etc) started when the soviet union fell. It's just a wound licking effort by failed political systems to say that the political system, in fact, never existed.
If you think Indymedia is full of Marx-spewing Stalinoid USSR apologists, you seriously need to look harder.
-Plat, occasional Indymedia contributor and definitely not a Trot.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have hoped you also saw the result of NOT using force when it should have been...like keeping Hitler from rearming after WWI.
Of course, Hitler didn't do it alone. He had help. Lots of help.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but this is a lesson the American aristocracy can't seem to learn - realpolitik is a great way to create trouble down the road.* I fear Dubya and his grand viziers are going down this road again to take care of problems left by previous administrations, although one current Administration member was directly involved in creating the current problem.
It is hypocrises such as this that cast great doubt upon the current intentions of the US government, and why so many people distrust the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days.
* More frightening is that a few powerful American industrialists and entrepeneurs sympathized with Hitler - Hearst and Ford among them. That goes beyond realpolitik, which I don't think had been coined at that point; powerful people made money off Hitler's aggression and slaughter of Jews, Romani, communists, homosexuals, etc., and still benefit from it today.
Does the Trading With the Enemy Act still apply? That could be used on them - you know, like it was against Dubya's grandpa Prescott in 1942 to stop him from helping fund the Nazis.
(And the axe of Godwin falls upon the thread...)
How the heck do you reach second line support? There are a couple times I wish I could just call someone and ask "Is my modem showing up, or is there a service outage in my area" and get a straight answer from someone who knows what it means when I say "I don't have a supported e-mail client."
Hell, I can't even get hired for first-line support!
Well, I was terribly, terribly underwhelmed by Shockwave pt. II. It brought Archer back way too quickly and easily, sent Enterprise on her merry way with no consequences, and I got the implication that whatever Archer and Daniels threw together was the "last" bit of time-travel technology available in the timeline Archer went through. Of course, now that Archer's back on the ship, one could say that he's in yet another timeline where the secret leader and Daniels exist again, but even that comes across as a hokey plot device.
Unless the writers did some serious preplanning for this overall plot arc, or they're very careful reintroducing the 25th and 29th-century characters (I screwed that up in the other reply, I realize that) things will simply get less internally logical and less watchable over time. The episode after Minefield was watchable and interesting (and suffered from a common problem to all Treks, the really quick wrap-up), but I had no interest in watching something about Archer's sexual frustration. Shockwave II turned me off watching the next couple of episodes, so I missed the first meeting with the Romulans.
It's pretty hard to piss me off when it comes to sci-fi (hell, I still sometimes catch Voyager when I have little else to do, along with Forever Knight!), but Shockwave II led me to believe B+B really haven't learned how to write long-term plot effects. I laughed when I heard about how they thought about the conclusion of Shockwave - shock of shocks - before going on break for the summer. It's been a fairly consistent problem with Trek season-ending cliffhangers, though some have been much better than others (Best of Both Worlds comes to mind). Shockwave II was easily the worst.
And to think, I didn't have much problem with the first season, and thought Shockwave I was a great setup.
Mind telling me when the reset button was used in Shockwave II?
Archer's back on the ship, Enterprise is merrily on her way, and the entire 31st Century storyline seems to have been wiped out due to internal logic, although I fully expect some convoluted use of treknobabble and badly-conceived plot devices to restore it soon enough.
Now, if Archer had been stuck in the 31st Century and actually had to take a few episodes to figure out what was going on, and Enterprise had been forced to limp along without Archer, or someone was offed, or Enterprise was sent home, or something significant, I could have been impressed.
Instead, we were right back, plotwise, to where we started, minus 3000 colonists we will never hear from again unless TPTB have a real good surprise up their sleeves.
Perhaps I was simply spoiled by Babylon 5.
I managed to sit through the first season of Enterprise, hoping B+B would get away from the mistakes that made Voyager troublesome.
As of Shockwave Part II, I can see they haven't learned a damn thing. Of all the things they should have learned, why oh why do they still resort to the reset button? It will practically take an episode full of treknobabble and a big honking deus ex machina to salvage anything interesting out of the "temporal cold war" storyline, now that it seems to have been completely wiped out with no good resolution. At this point, it would be better if the whole thing were simply forgotten, but I'm willing to bet B+B will rely on some poorly-written badly-conceived treknobabble device to get that storyline started again, much as a poorly-written badly-conceived treknobabble device was used to reset-button Archer back into the 22nd Century and make everything happy ever after.
Let me know if the show gets watchable, ok?
Technically, I'm sure they're right in the sense that someone owns it, but it's not as if the land is being used for anything.
Not by humans, anyway.
I think the cacti, brush, and local wildlife might have some use for it, though.
The University of Utah Research Fund and the Dept. of Health are both assignees on the patent along with Myriad.
Definitely appears some public money went into this patent.
Whee.
Isn't one of the Curie Institute's arguments that a mutation has been found that can't be investigated, because Myriad claims control over the gene and its mutations? It seems pretty obvious to me that this gene is being investigated by other institutions - or would be, if Myriad weren't sending out cease-and-desists.
Besides that, at least two other organizations are assignees on (what seem to be) the applicable patents - the University of Utah Research Fund and the USA via the Dept. of Health. Is that taxpayer money I smell attached to this patent?
The real stupid part is, there I don't have a space in my nick and you do.
WTF is this, some bizarre synchronicity?
It goes to the original link.
This, however, seems to be clearly a patent on a gene, according to the claims section. It appears to be related to the patent linked originally.
It's a bit hard to tell what patents are related in what way, aside from the references section. Either way, it reads like Myriad's patenting general testing procedures, results, and genes, trying to gain a monopoly on breast cancer research.
It's worth noting the "Assignees" on both patents. If I understand correctly, "assignees" are the entities that actually own the patent, usually the organizations the inventors work for and have likely signed contracts with automatically assigning all products of their work:
Assignee: Myriad Genetics, Inc. (Salt Lake City, UT); University of Utah Research Foundation (Salt Lake City, UT); The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health (Washington, DC)
So it appears Myriad isn't the only owner of the patent, but perhaps the University of Utah has transferred their control to Myriad, and is it possible for the USA to hold patents, since it also gives them out through another body?
...didn't you and I just go at this over on Fark less than 12 hours ago?
It does *not* patent the gene. The way to evaluate what it "patents" is to read the claims section of the patent.
Claim 2:
The method of claim 1 wherein the wild-type BRCA1 gene has the sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:1.
Claims 30-36:
30. The method of claim 20 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
31. The method of claim 21 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
32. The method of claim 22 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
33. The method of claim 23 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
34. The method of claim 24 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:l.
35. The method of claim 25 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
36. The method of claim 26 wherein said alteration consists of a deletion of 11 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 189-199 in SEQ ID NO:1.
At the end of the patent, several genetic code sequences are listed, including a lot of information for SEQ ID NO:1. I don't know if these code inclusions are common to biotech patents when the gene itself isn't patented, perhaps for information purposes, but the claims section seems to declare control over one entire sequence, and the possible results of testing for certain sequences along with the general method of testing itself. In short, if you don't have those nucleotide deletions, the patent may not apply to you.
The whole thing appears a little... screwy.
Taking a quick read over the beginning, it does seem to outline a method for finding the gene, but it also clearly outlines a series of missing nucleotide sequences, of which the ways to detect them are outlined in previous claims.
It's rather specific about steps in places, but in others it simply seems to claim patent over testing processes that might be done in many labs; I have no way of knowing.
I suppose it would be up to the company to say whether they actually claim control over the genetic sequences - in which case, they've expropriated control over part of the genetic code of millions of people without their knowledge or consent, which I find absolutely abhorrent.
What blows me away about the defenders of this patent is that they seem to believe a company should be able to recoup their costs in any way possible, including expropriating ownership of a person's genetic code without his/her knowledge or consent. Myriad effectively owns a pair of genes (and genes covered under 98 other patents) found in millions of people for the next couple of decades. You can't offer your own breast cancer genes for testing and research, because under a broken patent law, you don't own them. This is the entire reason this testing has to be stopped; Myriad apparently has the legal right to tell people whether they can even look for these genes or not. You don't control the right to use them and provide them to others as you see fit, so no dice giving your tissue for a university for cancer research.
To reiterate: it's not as if Myriad simply patented the testing itself. It patented a gene that is clearly not a unique configuration of matter (found in part of patent law as a way for companies to patent things like molecules), since it's obviously found in millions of people - otherwise, it would be useless as part of a test. They have claimed ownership over a part of millions of people; it may "only" be a gene or two, but this company is using their authority over it to block any kind of testing or research using it. Talk about stifling innovation... it's arguable that this company has effectively stolen a person's ownership over their own genes.
If a government claimed ownership of part of your genetic code and said you couldn't get a certain test without ponying up big money to Big Brother, I bet the people saying "but the company has to recoup their costs" would go into conniptions about a government cash-grab and Big Brother, rightfully.
Go ahead, tell me all about the millions pharmaceuticals pour into research, and how they simply must be compensated... fine. Patent a test. Patent a device used to find the gene. Don't put people into a situation where they discover they don't have control over their own bodies anymore, can't offer their own tissue for testing and research because they don't have the right to something they were born with. Profit is not a right that overrides all other rights, and it doesn't justify, what is effectively, theft of property rights from millions of people to one entity so it can make money.
Can I have your G4, then?
It's in a dumpster - finders keepers, now.
So, go ahead, grab it - before I do.
I want those koosh balls, too, so keep your grubby paws off them.
I'll have to be one of those "works great here" types.
PII-266. 224 MB RAM. 6.4 GB HD.
Runs fine.
Balsa starts up fast. Galeon starts up fast. Mozilla starts up fairly fast. The only thing really slow starting up is OpenOffice. Hell, I have less trouble running DivX videos on this than on my folks' Celery 500 with 256 MB RAM.
Got the httpd running. Got named running. Got sshd running. Nautilus sits in the background doing Kosh-knows-what.
Distro? Red Hat 7.3. May go to 8 or Mandrake 9 if I can get my hands on some CDs.
I couldn't imagine running WinXP on anything less than a 600 MHz box with at least 256 MB ram.
But, that's just an anecdote...
[x] Trashcan support
[X] Easy to use Windowing system - KDE, Gnome (my computer-braindead girlfriend uses it without any problems)
[X] Standard software install system - LSB, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse
[X] Easy to use Windows filesharing - KDE, Samba
[X] Easy support for video files and DVD - Xine is awesome, and it will even play QT5 files!
[X] Desktop company support - Red Hat, The Kompany, etc.
As for trashcans... as a temporary stopgap, it's not difficult to set up an alias that will move a file to $HOME/.Trash instead of deleting it, but this isn't real undelete support.
I love being able to listen to my obnoxious hip hop music without having to worry about an office mate like I did at internships in the past.
...so addictive are to fucking die for. I miss having easy access to a 5.1-capable studio with a giant LFE in the floor and a DVD-A/V player. Wonder if Reza ever finished that project...
In that case, see about getting a DVD player capable of playing DVD-A in that office of yours. I'm not a huge fan of rap (though I do enjoy The Coup and Public Enemy), but some tracks from the 5.1 mix of Missy Elliot's
However I often find myself wishing for speakers better than the stock, cheap PC speakers than came with my Dell. Surround sound would be way fucking cool.
Unless you're willing to put out for studio monitors and a decent surround receiver to run from your box, I've found Altec Lansings are pretty good. Those Cambridge Soundworks cubes are passable, but they desperately need a sub to go with them.
I'm a little out of touch due to life pulling me away from the usual tech drooling, but I'm getting back into all that crud now.
Of course, this all assumes having your own office. Cubicles or other shared spaces may not be as conducive for surround sound music listening as ones own office but I wouldn't just dismiss it out of hand as you have.
Well, cubicles and open-concept offices are exactly what came to mind when I thought of the whole "office of the near future" thing. Entertainment-wise, it would be cool, but I could see a company shelling out for some of those wraparound monitors before they spend the bucks on surround speaker sets.
Surely there *must* be some more new ideas floating round than that - for instance, what about better tools to manage the flood of email people now receive?
Patch the holes in Outlook that help e-mail worms propagate? We're talking about the same Microsoft, right?
1) That wraparound screen actually looks pretty cool and potentially useful. I find myself glancing back and forth slightly across my large screen, so something like this could help with limited screen real estate. Not everyone's comfortable with X-style multiple desktops. My one worry is that this monitor would be MS-only (insert quote about GM requiring GM wheels here...)
2) Surround sound being an important part of an office? If your office is a production studio, maybe - but if your office is a studio, chances are you know more about what you need than a bunch of marketing hacks from MS.
I kind of hope this was a joke that the article didn't quite make clear.
3) The lack of a focus on security - on the one hand, MS might not want to overhype something they've been horribly deficient with in the past. On the other hand, it sounds like even the visitors noticed a lack of focus on secure computing, and I'd be a bit concerned about a company that promotes style over substance as the "office of the near future".
The bits about Iran and Usama are pretty much dead-on, but is the Iraq bit accurate? I've seen pieces from time to time claiming the CIA at least quietly supported Saddam's rise to power in Iraq, but I thought the country's always been run by single strongmen since the British installed a Hashemite monarchy after World War I. It's well-known that the U.S. at least provided material and political support to Saddam's regime to fight Iran (while Ollie North and others sold weapons to Iran - if I were an Iranian or Iraqi and found this out, I'd be more than a little pissed at Washington), but did the CIA have any direct or indirect influence on Saddam's takeover of the Ba'ath Party?
Back to Iran... wasn't Khomeini initially supported by European and American powers? From what I've read, a socialist provisional government ran the country from 1978, when the Shah fell, until Khomeini's arrival in 1979; until then, he'd been in Paris, heading up an Islamic expatriate group. It almost seems as if the takeover of the U.S. Embassy was something Washington hadn't counted on from what they thought of as a potential ally to stop socialism, considering the one attempt to free the hostages was a failed rescue mission, when the same country later had no problem invading Grenada to reach some medical students/hostages.
What a mess. And to think, this type of manipulative, Pax Americana policy is rearing its ugly head again... farking authoritarians of all stripes suck.
And at that point, when said person has nothing much to live for anymore and certainly nothing to lose, Scientology HQ will go up in a big orange-red ball of ammonium nitrate and diesel oil.
Frankly, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. But with their present behavior, it's only a matter of time.
Don't even joke about this kind of stuff - Keith Henson was convicted in California of religious intolerance for someone else cracking a joke on alt.religion.scientology about passing by the headquarters of Golden Era Productions (a Scientology front company) with a "Tom Cruise Missile", and published the coordinates for the complex, along with the occasional protest of Scientology orgs. He was convicted, and bolted to Canada. Last I heard, he applied for refugee status.
Free trade involves killing subsidies and tariffs, something I imagine "anarchists that would like to see all borders fall and all imposed limits between various peoples disappear" supporting, not protesting.
FTAA does nothing to drop barriers to the flow of workers to find a better living conditions. It does drop barriers to the flow of capital. It does nothing to ensure that employees will get paid a wage they can live on, continue to have access to arable land to grow food instead of cash crops, or see any benefit from the arrival of foreign operations, but it does ensure companies can move their operations from country to country almost at will in order to maximize profits. The idea that third-world companies will be able to take advantage of North American markets assumes North American companies won't go to third-world countries and squash the local competition first, funnelling the big wins back to HQ. This is the big fear, and it has some basis in reality, as many large Western companies have taken advantage of a lack of strong labour traditions in numerous less-industrialized nations to pay criminally-low wages and maintain conditions that would cause American workers to riot.
Activists in South American nations, among other places, share fears that local economies won't be given a chance to benefit from supposedly free trade, or that the arrival of companies looking to take advantage of the lack of labour laws and tariffs will actually damage and drain societies that, in a fair trade, would benefit. It should be noted that FTAA, and the Bretton Woods organizations, practically demand the elimination of any subsidies and labour protection laws, things that even the U.S. doesn't do and likely wouldn't agree to. Generally, these deals and organizations are less about levelling the playing field than just making it easier for economic powers to increase their growth, as if making money is the most important thing on Earth.
But it's funny how all these rebranding efforts (equalitarian, humanitarian, social democracy, social responsibility, etc) started when the soviet union fell. It's just a wound licking effort by failed political systems to say that the political system, in fact, never existed.
If you think Indymedia is full of Marx-spewing Stalinoid USSR apologists, you seriously need to look harder.
-Plat, occasional Indymedia contributor and definitely not a Trot.