Yesterday (Wednesday) Polish government backed off and decided it will no longer try to oppose/delay the patent proceedings. This comes after recent heavy corporate lobbing by the likes of Microsoft and Siemens. (I used to like Siemens.)
As I understand it, aby hope now lies in the EU Parliament.
Details (in Polish) here: http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,53 600,252 6374.html
You're jesting, but for many this is an entrenched misconception. Warming on a global scale WILL mean very cold weather in many places. When the polar cap melts, you suddently have a lot of very cold whater in the mix.
Here in Poland we're having one of the warmest winters I remember (I'm 35). Daytime temperature has only droppped below 0C yesterday for the first time since November. It's been pretty unbelievable so far. Meanwhile, it's snowed today in Algeria - the first time in 50 years. Such anomalies are small on the global scale, but not so small to the people affected.
It may be normal, but it should be completely unacceptable. Here's why. It's not about "giving free stuff to rich people". It's not about elitism. It's about trust and free market.
If you trust someone for advice on geeky stuff, and that someone then turns around and starts pushing things because they got them for free with the expectation that they will eulogize about them in print, **and** they don't reveal this, then you are duped and none the wiser.
Free market needsa trust. Reliable information. That's one reason we have laws about truth in advertizing. That's why advertizing content is usually (and should always be) clearly demarcated.
One other thing. Now when you read a column by a geeky person you trust, you'll have to think if they maybe have a vested interest. These kinds of misguided initiatives breed distrust and paranoia, just because you'll never know.
"if these were always ethically sound, the corporation could NOT do evil."
What often happens is hat CEOs are prevented from maing ethically sound decisions by corporate laws. The CEO cannot take actions that would hit the shareholders' bottom line. Hence, all decisions made must be motivated by profit - even if the CEO doesn't like that.
In 1916 Henry Ford wanted to lower the price of the cars. Quote from Ford: "I do not believe that we should make such awful profits on our cars. A reasonable profit is right, but not too much." When he tried to cancel the payment of dividends to lower the pricetag, two shareholders - the Dodge brothers - took him to court and won.
I wish the movie gave more such instances. Maybe the book does, I've ordered it.
" I know next to nothing about most of the issues they raise about big bad corporations."
If you ever walk by a theater and a documentary movie called "The Corporation" is showing, go see it. (Would have to be an off-main-street movie house though.) Or find the movie on P2P, or wait for the DVD. Or try the book by the same guy (Joel Bakan) and the same title.
Bakan presents a very sober analysis, but the gist is: imagine a human being who (a) is motivated solely by pursuit of profit, (b) violates the rules of law and of ethics to further said pursuit, (c) is incapable of admitting guilt when caught, (d) acts without regard to the social environment - he adds a few other points but you get the picture. Such people exist - they're sociopaths. Bakan draws a list of behaviors considered psychopathic (in the strict psychiatric sense) and shows how corporations follow the list to a T. And of course the law gives corporations personhood, but you can't put a corporation in jail or in a psychiatric ward. His main point is that the individuals who run huge corporations may by and large be nice people with sweet families and cute dogs, but the very nature of the corporation - the laws that make them - result in a consistent pattern of psychpathic behavior.
I haven't read either Phrack or 2600 in a couple of years, so I can only take your word for it when you say it's all political leftist content now. But maybe there's a kind of conceptual continuity there, you know? Computer hacking was significantly fueled by interest in complex systems that had enormous potential but were just out of reach in pre-PC days. Today everyone and his dog have a PC, RFCs are free for all to read and learn from, and there's enough open code to last a lifetime of study for those so inclined.
So what complex, intriguing and powerful system is left that keeps the "rich folks only" tag and could conceivably be put to, well, other uses? What system is obscure and guards its inner workings? What huge complex system is left to hack? There's only one that really counts.
Phrack published the infamous E911 paper and shit hit the fan big time for some people. This was important, because it got lots of cool people interested in civil rights in a new way. If an equivalent event were to happen these days, I don't think it will be about a technical manual.
You know, when you start with XML, you read docs that give you those cute little examples like Doee ></person>, so it's human readable and sexy. Then in real life you deal with multi-meg documents filled with stuff like this (pasted from a file I'm working on right now, a few strings munged since it's all sooper-seekret stuff):
Nor should you! Four of the atmosphere sensors on the lander were indeed made in a lab in Poland. That's four out of four thousand or so I guess, but we'll make sure to get a mention every time!
1) So what am I going to do with the three thousand plus bookmarks I've collected over the years? There seems to be no import mechanism
2) If there is a way to import existing bookmarks, this has interesting security implications. A quick search through my Firefox bookmarks yielded two URLs with username/password included as CGI vars. No website does that for anything important (I hope), these are some forum and mailing list sites, for which I use a low-value password, but people who use the same password for everything they do online are going to be seriously screwed.
3) What's the gain of opening up my bookmarks file to the world? I mean, why should I care that so many other people bookmarked this or that page? How does it let me find interesting stuff easier than Google?
4) Social network through browser bookmarks... give me a break. If I view someone else's bookmarks or subscribe to their RSS feed, do we get marked as "friends"?
" if 53% of Americans were Christian fanatics this country would be a very, very different place"
I see where you're going, but this isn't necessarily true. Most regular people who think of themselves as Christian prefer others to do the hard Chrstian work for them. So they will, for example, vote for a guy who they think will curb abortion. That doesn't mean they live their lives turning the other cheek or teach their children to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Scratch that, didn't read grandparent!
Also a pun on "Gaiman", then.
I initially read it as "pat_i_ents have expiration", as in date. Same thing applies, really.
lobb_y_ing, is what I meant to say.
Yesterday (Wednesday) Polish government backed off and decided it will no longer try to oppose/delay the patent proceedings. This comes after recent heavy corporate lobbing by the likes of Microsoft and Siemens. (I used to like Siemens.)
3 600,252 6374.html
As I understand it, aby hope now lies in the EU Parliament.
Details (in Polish) here:
http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,5
You're jesting, but for many this is an entrenched misconception. Warming on a global scale WILL mean very cold weather in many places. When the polar cap melts, you suddently have a lot of very cold whater in the mix.
Here in Poland we're having one of the warmest winters I remember (I'm 35). Daytime temperature has only droppped below 0C yesterday for the first time since November. It's been pretty unbelievable so far. Meanwhile, it's snowed today in Algeria - the first time in 50 years. Such anomalies are small on the global scale, but not so small to the people affected.
It may be normal, but it should be completely unacceptable. Here's why. It's not about "giving free stuff to rich people". It's not about elitism. It's about trust and free market.
If you trust someone for advice on geeky stuff, and that someone then turns around and starts pushing things because they got them for free with the expectation that they will eulogize about them in print, **and** they don't reveal this, then you are duped and none the wiser.
Free market needsa trust. Reliable information. That's one reason we have laws about truth in advertizing. That's why advertizing content is usually (and should always be) clearly demarcated.
One other thing. Now when you read a column by a geeky person you trust, you'll have to think if they maybe have a vested interest. These kinds of misguided initiatives breed distrust and paranoia, just because you'll never know.
"A robot could commit war crimes, and it could easily be blamed on a 'technical fault', the manufacturers"
The manufacturers have the EULA.
And they had their lawyers spend as many man-hours on drafting it as they spent themselves on designing the product.
This isn't getting better, you know. Between an actual redneck and someone who isn't but has rednecks as role models, I'll take the former any time.
"if these were always ethically sound, the corporation could NOT do evil."
What often happens is hat CEOs are prevented from maing ethically sound decisions by corporate laws. The CEO cannot take actions that would hit the shareholders' bottom line. Hence, all decisions made must be motivated by profit - even if the CEO doesn't like that.
In 1916 Henry Ford wanted to lower the price of the cars. Quote from Ford: "I do not believe that we should make such awful profits on our cars. A reasonable profit is right, but not too much." When he tried to cancel the payment of dividends to lower the pricetag, two shareholders - the Dodge brothers - took him to court and won.
I wish the movie gave more such instances. Maybe the book does, I've ordered it.
" I know next to nothing about most of the issues they raise about big bad corporations."
If you ever walk by a theater and a documentary movie called "The Corporation" is showing, go see it. (Would have to be an off-main-street movie house though.) Or find the movie on P2P, or wait for the DVD. Or try the book by the same guy (Joel Bakan) and the same title.
Bakan presents a very sober analysis, but the gist is: imagine a human being who (a) is motivated solely by pursuit of profit, (b) violates the rules of law and of ethics to further said pursuit, (c) is incapable of admitting guilt when caught, (d) acts without regard to the social environment - he adds a few other points but you get the picture. Such people exist - they're sociopaths. Bakan draws a list of behaviors considered psychopathic (in the strict psychiatric sense) and shows how corporations follow the list to a T. And of course the law gives corporations personhood, but you can't put a corporation in jail or in a psychiatric ward. His main point is that the individuals who run huge corporations may by and large be nice people with sweet families and cute dogs, but the very nature of the corporation - the laws that make them - result in a consistent pattern of psychpathic behavior.
Uh, female sex appeal?
I haven't read either Phrack or 2600 in a couple of years, so I can only take your word for it when you say it's all political leftist content now. But maybe there's a kind of conceptual continuity there, you know? Computer hacking was significantly fueled by interest in complex systems that had enormous potential but were just out of reach in pre-PC days. Today everyone and his dog have a PC, RFCs are free for all to read and learn from, and there's enough open code to last a lifetime of study for those so inclined.
So what complex, intriguing and powerful system is left that keeps the "rich folks only" tag and could conceivably be put to, well, other uses? What system is obscure and guards its inner workings? What huge complex system is left to hack? There's only one that really counts.
Phrack published the infamous E911 paper and shit hit the fan big time for some people. This was important, because it got lots of cool people interested in civil rights in a new way. If an equivalent event were to happen these days, I don't think it will be about a technical manual.
You know, when you start with XML, you read docs that give you those cute little examples like Doee ></person>, so it's human readable and sexy. Then in real life you deal with multi-meg documents filled with stuff like this (pasted from a file I'm working on right now, a few strings munged since it's all sooper-seekret stuff):
t ; revisionNumber="12"></ut>e loperConceptualDocument xmlns="http://some.domain.com/someplace/1&quo t; xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink&quo t;></ut>
<Body><Raw><ut Class="procinstr" DisplayText="Instruction"><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?></ut>
<ut Type="start" Style="external" RightEdge="angle" DisplayText="topic"><topic id="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001&quo
<ut Type="start" Style="external" RightEdge="angle" DisplayText="developerConceptualDocument"><dev
Human-read me *this*.
I thank you, sir. Not only is this hilarious, but right on the mark. Wish I had mod points today.
Nor should you! Four of the atmosphere sensors on the lander were indeed made in a lab in Poland. That's four out of four thousand or so I guess, but we'll make sure to get a mention every time!
"...while sitting at the dentists office..."
Was it before or after the nurse applied anesthetics? (GD&R)
Oh, come on. The poster you're replying to didn't mean Ad-Aware, he meant "adware". As in, not-quite-spyware-but-annoying-nonetheless.
1) So what am I going to do with the three thousand plus bookmarks I've collected over the years? There seems to be no import mechanism
2) If there is a way to import existing bookmarks, this has interesting security implications. A quick search through my Firefox bookmarks yielded two URLs with username/password included as CGI vars. No website does that for anything important (I hope), these are some forum and mailing list sites, for which I use a low-value password, but people who use the same password for everything they do online are going to be seriously screwed.
3) What's the gain of opening up my bookmarks file to the world? I mean, why should I care that so many other people bookmarked this or that page? How does it let me find interesting stuff easier than Google?
4) Social network through browser bookmarks... give me a break. If I view someone else's bookmarks or subscribe to their RSS feed, do we get marked as "friends"?
Cube, the movie. Did you see it, unixpro? Because you're in it.
"Remember that human volunteers have a high chance at screwing up also"
Yes, but only by making honest mistakes. Not in a systematic and/or massive way.
" if 53% of Americans were Christian fanatics this country would be a very, very different place"
I see where you're going, but this isn't necessarily true. Most regular people who think of themselves as Christian prefer others to do the hard Chrstian work for them. So they will, for example, vote for a guy who they think will curb abortion. That doesn't mean they live their lives turning the other cheek or teach their children to do so.
Seriously, would Jesus run for President? Or deny clemency to a death-row inmate?
s/who's/whose
:)
I mean, think of the children! They're still learning English
Yesterday news of Firefox 1.0 release was on BBC front page for a couple of hours. The article is now here.
"It was hammered well before Slashdot got the story"
No wonder. BBC has Firefox 1.0 on front page under "Other top stories". Very cool.