That was going to be my 2c too, although the problem is the lossy compression, not compression per se. I'd figure some stuff he's looking for - human-inaudible patterns - would be just the things lossy compressors introduce to get their jobs done. Sounds a quick way to wreck a science career, to me.
Only a couple hundred degrees, actually; and the lack of air means you get no convective cooling. On the other hand, if you could manage some kind of a half-shell casing that kept your hot stuff shaded from the sun but exposed to space in the right wavelengths while shielding from trash and hard radiation, you should get enough radiative heat loss - it's fourth power of temperature, after all - to make do:)
The reason that it is not right, or legal for a company to say you can't review them if you are a customer is that it could infringe on your free speech.
I'm not a lawyer either. But as I grasp your 1st amendment, it is at most a protection from limitations on expression being imposed by your governments. It has nothing to say about contractual limitations on expression between private entities. How many times have you seen non-disclosure agreeements successfully nullified on constitutional bases, for instance?
It's true (I think) that a contract involving illegal activities (eg murder) aren't binding; but it's not at all clear to me that there is anything illegal about this particular contract, or at least this particular clause.
It would appear that all of the permissions listed
are of a technical nature
The Adobe needs serious rephrasing. "No printing is permitted" could be argued into a legal prohibition; "Printing is disabled" and "Read-Aloud is not available" would make the situation clear.
My God, when will people learn to say what they mean.
Bandwidth is an issue too. I once tried Netscape across a phone line, and after about five minutes negotiating this and that, the little animated N graphic left no room for anything else to happen.
About all I can think would help is to use applications that don't animate pixmaps, and maybe tacking a compressor into the stream (even though X uses commands, they can be pretty verbose commands that a compressor may be able to pack down a bit more, especially if an X-aware compressor were made),
'nough doubt has been cast on the core of this argument... but hasn't there also been a lot of strutting in the Linux community about it really not being Unix? Something about it being a complete write from scratch, with nothing lifted directly? Unlike, say the BSD family... methinks M$'d have more than a bit of a case, assuming there was anything about which to make a case:p
The group noted that NAT can be eliminated simply
by putting more addresses into circulation.
Ick! not quite. NAT also lets users squeeze several machines through one IPaddr from stingy ISPs. ISPs would have to be giving away multiple IP addresses to users before NAT disappears. It's possible the huge IPv6 space will trigger the giveaway, but I don't see it as a given.
Oh well, I wanted to wait for at least 1.5.1 anyway to get the bugs shaken down. 1.4.0 nipped me with bizarre crashes, so I don't leap onto new branches like I useta.
I just hope this time they included my one-line quirk table patch for my CD drive! grrr
Does "America" mean "The United States of America" now?
To Canadians it does. We get a bit miffy when we go to Europe and you call us Americans. You may be technically correct, but I think most persons in the Americas think of American as "citizen of the Democratic Republic of America", ie the allegedly United States thereof.
PCs dominate the world today because the spec was opened up
Partly... but more because it bore a name that carried big weight in the business sector, which had more money "laying around" for trying expensive new toys, introducing them at work to people who otherwise would never have considered a computer, etc.
And don't forget that IBM didn't open the entire machine; the BIOS had to be reverse engineered; and very carefully, to avoid legal hassles.
I say it's already happened, for all practical purposes, but not over the desktops (pbbbt!). It's in the debates over "which Linux should I get", and "will this binary package work on my Linux", or "damn! why doesn't this work on my Linux", and "Should I use the Red Hat Package system, or the Degain?" and a few others I've come across among my friends in the Linux world... I know you've lost many newcomers by all this confusion, I've watched it happen.
I try to get them to try NetBSD, which has one (series of) kernel, one core SW install distribution, one package system (which beats Red Hat's all to hell, but could take a couple of lessons from Debian's if what I've read is accurate), runs on almost anything, is supposed to be able to run Linux binaries (I've never tried), and other Good Things (TM). It's far less overwhelming/daunting for a newbie than the Linux menagerie. I think that the one major technical point holding it back is the install; it's not pretty from any angle...
You can't compare these things. When we still thought that the earth was flat, we had absolutely no clue what was on the
other side. You can't use that to argue that now that we can fly all the way around it, we still can't be absolutely sure
about the shape of the earth, because me made false assumptions about it earlier.
I really think you miss the point. You focussed on one example I pulled out, and misused it. Yes, it's just possible that if Thalidomide were invented now, that booboo wouldn't happen. But some other booboo would have, in order to get the knowledge and procedures in place to save us from Thalidomide!
The point was, that humans of Western societies have always had a forge-ahead attitude, one of "we didn't know enough then but we know enough now" despite the fact we've always thought that way, and that a moment's rational thought would show that it's as false now as it was at any earlier time. The problem is not advancing technology, the problem is our attitude. Our thinking is far behind our knowledge, and our knowledge is now dangerous on the global scale.
Certainly I can compare those things... And you, yourself, became an example of why.
Hokay... I'm not a biologist or even particularly interested in biology; physics, maths, and CS were my bailiwicks. But I think I know enough about genetics and whatnot to form a valid opinion.
Humans tend to be arrogant and narrowminded. You pretty much have to be arrogant and narrowminded (of the kind produced by the excessively fine focus required for discovery in and advancement of specific fields) to be a scientist or an engineer, or a company president clawing for profits in an expensive, competitive
business. Such people are not motivated to explore all the little side effects of their accomplishments, they push ahead and leave some details for later. It's happened, historically, in virtually every human endeavour. Even in well-developed fields, little oversights creep in that cause major disasters (eg, the collapse of the walkways in that Kansas City hotel). Do you read Michael Crichton? A hallmark of his books that some tiny little thing goes wrong somewhere in a carefully engineered system, and it snowballs into major problems. Yes, strictly, it's fiction; but it's also the way the Real World works.
Some goals of GE (I mean the modern, high-tech kind; ol' fashioned cross- and in-breeding etc. seem to have natural limits which keep them safe "enough" from a global perspective... these limits being one reason for the "direct" manipulation methods in the first place) are, I will admit, probably benign in their long-term effects (such as this beta-carotene modification) but others are not; and I don't trust big business to objectively do the testing necessary to be even half-sure of global long-term effects. And government, historically, imposes requirements for testing on a reactive basis; something has to go wrong, usually several times and/or spectacularly, before standards are developed and enforced. (Americans, it seems, insist on it being this way - they want to keep Big Gov't out of Big Business. This is scary to us of the Rest of the World.)
And without global enforcement of strong regulations, which is essentially impossible, a company that wants to develop and release GE organisms can simply move to a lenient locale.
Remember Phthalidomide (sp?)? That was tested to the standards of its time, and deemed safe. So was DDT. Antibiotics were supposed to free us of bacterial infections; instead the bacteria have evolved to the point some nasty ones of them thrive on antibiotics (eg I think a streptococcus was found in England that ate Vancomycin, one of the strongest ABs we have).
(This evolution was not unforeseen; but those who spoke up were poohpooed as paranoid. And again, American mismanagement, with over-the-counter sales of ABs, accelerated the problem.)
So... (where am I? oh yeah...) Some of us who are fearful of GE are not fearful merely because it's a Something New or Something Mysterious. We are fearful because we know that time and time again humans have decided they know how to do a thing and then fallen flat on their faces, as it were. We have no reason to believe this habit has changed; in fact we have some reason to believe it's getting worse (examine the profit motives), and with more dangerous toys (eg Chernobyl).
We believe that humans have managed to survive, decently, for many thousand years already, and that there's absolutely no reason to rush into anything like GE. Note I don't say, "no reason to have GE ever ever Amen;" I just say that there's good reason to be Fucking Cautious! We're playing with some core machinery of Nature, and She has a way of turning on you with great decision and irony.
Forgive me if this read chunkily in places; I've always hated reading for proof my own output and almost never do so.
Re:Multiple causes, multiple effects
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
... However, because of the size of the problem, even a "minor fix" such as genetic engineering can save human lives on a
massive scale.
Doesn't that presume the regimes causing the starvation will be willing or able to afford to use GE produce? (Yes, Dr. Whosis wants to give his fertile seeds away; but I can't see the shareholders of ADM being so magnaminous... nor can I see a gov't like China's being eager to make itself overtly grateful or reliant upon capitalists. The only way I see GE helping most starving mobs is if they do the GE themselves... and I bet if they could afford that in the first place, they wouldn't need it. And then they'd be embroiled in patent infringements suits... oh, time to stop rambling...)
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That was going to be my 2c too, although the problem is the lossy compression, not compression per se. I'd figure some stuff he's looking for - human-inaudible patterns - would be just the things lossy compressors introduce to get their jobs done. Sounds a quick way to wreck a science career, to me.
Or just send up some more of them. You'll have to do something like that anyway, they won't last forever.
Even if there were, how much participation would NASA have to have before they got veto powers?
Only a couple hundred degrees, actually; and the lack of air means you get no convective cooling. On the other hand, if you could manage some kind of a half-shell casing that kept your hot stuff shaded from the sun but exposed to space in the right wavelengths while shielding from trash and hard radiation, you should get enough radiative heat loss - it's fourth power of temperature, after all - to make do :)
Upgrade to NetBSD, of course.
Iridium satellites and Mars probes seem to have been stupid ideas too, how much loss would this be if it chokes? :)
My only technical worry is "what about debris and radiation?"
49. Hawai'i was never legally a united state of America.
Hmm... Newfoundland. Or maybe Iceland.
I'm not a lawyer either. But as I grasp your 1st amendment, it is at most a protection from limitations on expression being imposed by your governments. It has nothing to say about contractual limitations on expression between private entities. How many times have you seen non-disclosure agreeements successfully nullified on constitutional bases, for instance?
It's true (I think) that a contract involving illegal activities (eg murder) aren't binding; but it's not at all clear to me that there is anything illegal about this particular contract, or at least this particular clause.
The Adobe needs serious rephrasing. "No printing is permitted" could be argued into a legal prohibition; "Printing is disabled" and "Read-Aloud is not available" would make the situation clear.
My God, when will people learn to say what they mean.
especially if an X-aware compressor were made ... such as LBX :p
About all I can think would help is to use applications that don't animate pixmaps, and maybe tacking a compressor into the stream (even though X uses commands, they can be pretty verbose commands that a compressor may be able to pack down a bit more, especially if an X-aware compressor were made),
'nough doubt has been cast on the core of this argument... but hasn't there also been a lot of strutting in the Linux community about it really not being Unix? Something about it being a complete write from scratch, with nothing lifted directly? Unlike, say the BSD family... methinks M$'d have more than a bit of a case, assuming there was anything about which to make a case :p
smack D'oh! Pioneer has steadily orbited the Sun at a mean distance of 0.8 AU
133 million km isn't even 1 AU. They must've meant 133  Tm.
aw pshoo, I misspelled "Crichton".
Ick! not quite. NAT also lets users squeeze several machines through one IPaddr from stingy ISPs. ISPs would have to be giving away multiple IP addresses to users before NAT disappears. It's possible the huge IPv6 space will trigger the giveaway, but I don't see it as a given.
Oh well, I wanted to wait for at least 1.5.1 anyway to get the bugs shaken down. 1.4.0 nipped me with bizarre crashes, so I don't leap onto new branches like I useta.
I just hope this time they included my one-line quirk table patch for my CD drive! grrr
To Canadians it does. We get a bit miffy when we go to Europe and you call us Americans. You may be technically correct, but I think most persons in the Americas think of American as "citizen of the Democratic Republic of America", ie the allegedly United States thereof.
Partly... but more because it bore a name that carried big weight in the business sector, which had more money "laying around" for trying expensive new toys, introducing them at work to people who otherwise would never have considered a computer, etc.
And don't forget that IBM didn't open the entire machine; the BIOS had to be reverse engineered; and very carefully, to avoid legal hassles.
Yeah, that's what I said above, only a little better :) Someone mod this up.
I try to get them to try NetBSD, which has one (series of) kernel, one core SW install distribution, one package system (which beats Red Hat's all to hell, but could take a couple of lessons from Debian's if what I've read is accurate), runs on almost anything, is supposed to be able to run Linux binaries (I've never tried), and other Good Things (TM). It's far less overwhelming/daunting for a newbie than the Linux menagerie. I think that the one major technical point holding it back is the install; it's not pretty from any angle...
I really think you miss the point. You focussed on one example I pulled out, and misused it. Yes, it's just possible that if Thalidomide were invented now, that booboo wouldn't happen. But some other booboo would have, in order to get the knowledge and procedures in place to save us from Thalidomide!
The point was, that humans of Western societies have always had a forge-ahead attitude, one of "we didn't know enough then but we know enough now" despite the fact we've always thought that way, and that a moment's rational thought would show that it's as false now as it was at any earlier time. The problem is not advancing technology, the problem is our attitude. Our thinking is far behind our knowledge, and our knowledge is now dangerous on the global scale.
Certainly I can compare those things... And you, yourself, became an example of why.
Humans tend to be arrogant and narrowminded. You pretty much have to be arrogant and narrowminded (of the kind produced by the excessively fine focus required for discovery in and advancement of specific fields) to be a scientist or an engineer, or a company president clawing for profits in an expensive, competitive business. Such people are not motivated to explore all the little side effects of their accomplishments, they push ahead and leave some details for later. It's happened, historically, in virtually every human endeavour. Even in well-developed fields, little oversights creep in that cause major disasters (eg, the collapse of the walkways in that Kansas City hotel). Do you read Michael Crichton? A hallmark of his books that some tiny little thing goes wrong somewhere in a carefully engineered system, and it snowballs into major problems. Yes, strictly, it's fiction; but it's also the way the Real World works.
Some goals of GE (I mean the modern, high-tech kind; ol' fashioned cross- and in-breeding etc. seem to have natural limits which keep them safe "enough" from a global perspective... these limits being one reason for the "direct" manipulation methods in the first place) are, I will admit, probably benign in their long-term effects (such as this beta-carotene modification) but others are not; and I don't trust big business to objectively do the testing necessary to be even half-sure of global long-term effects. And government, historically, imposes requirements for testing on a reactive basis; something has to go wrong, usually several times and/or spectacularly, before standards are developed and enforced. (Americans, it seems, insist on it being this way - they want to keep Big Gov't out of Big Business. This is scary to us of the Rest of the World.) And without global enforcement of strong regulations, which is essentially impossible, a company that wants to develop and release GE organisms can simply move to a lenient locale.
Remember Phthalidomide (sp?)? That was tested to the standards of its time, and deemed safe. So was DDT. Antibiotics were supposed to free us of bacterial infections; instead the bacteria have evolved to the point some nasty ones of them thrive on antibiotics (eg I think a streptococcus was found in England that ate Vancomycin, one of the strongest ABs we have). (This evolution was not unforeseen; but those who spoke up were poohpooed as paranoid. And again, American mismanagement, with over-the-counter sales of ABs, accelerated the problem.)
So... (where am I? oh yeah...) Some of us who are fearful of GE are not fearful merely because it's a Something New or Something Mysterious. We are fearful because we know that time and time again humans have decided they know how to do a thing and then fallen flat on their faces, as it were. We have no reason to believe this habit has changed; in fact we have some reason to believe it's getting worse (examine the profit motives), and with more dangerous toys (eg Chernobyl). We believe that humans have managed to survive, decently, for many thousand years already, and that there's absolutely no reason to rush into anything like GE. Note I don't say, "no reason to have GE ever ever Amen;" I just say that there's good reason to be Fucking Cautious! We're playing with some core machinery of Nature, and She has a way of turning on you with great decision and irony.
Forgive me if this read chunkily in places; I've always hated reading for proof my own output and almost never do so.
Doesn't that presume the regimes causing the starvation will be willing or able to afford to use GE produce? (Yes, Dr. Whosis wants to give his fertile seeds away; but I can't see the shareholders of ADM being so magnaminous... nor can I see a gov't like China's being eager to make itself overtly grateful or reliant upon capitalists. The only way I see GE helping most starving mobs is if they do the GE themselves... and I bet if they could afford that in the first place, they wouldn't need it. And then they'd be embroiled in patent infringements suits... oh, time to stop rambling...)