3) Start a shelf company or work though an umbrella company to limit your liability. Do part time contracting/consulting though your one man shelf company. Research the rest of the time. Examples of contracting work:
teaching
design
management
...
Your reseach can be used to increase the prestige and profile of your consulting work. If your research produces any applicable results the company can also be used as a commercialisation vehicle.
Sure vandalism would have to be addressed, but I will make two points:
Random vandalism is unlikely to make it through the build process.
Crucial programs, such 'login' and 'gcc' would no doubt be *very* carefully monitored for vandalism
and backdoors. As I read somewhere recently (can't remember where) the crucial thing is to provide the
tools to make it very easy for contributors to monitor each other's contributions. Eg.
providing watch lists and providing only relevant information in them. One would have to think very carefully
about accepting anonymous edits. Maybe the wiki would maintain a 'web of trust' to rank contributions, though this could also lead to a false sense of security and vunerability to 'sleeper agents'?
It is not the role of journalists or newspapers in Singapore to champion issues, or campaign for or against the Government. (...) If a columnist presents himself as a non-political observer, while exploiting his access to the mass media to undermine the government's standing with the electorate, then he is no longer a constructive critic, but a partisan player in politics.
It is scary how closely the Singaporean government's words mirror those of the Australian government when it was justifying withdrawing funding for charities that it deemed to be politically active. In out brave new globalised world it seems that totalitarianism is going global as well.
The fatal flaw with the UN way of "one vote one country" is that it blows "one vote one person" out of the water. Why should the vote of a person in the Vatican count for the votes of 1,409,843 people in China? What about doign things the Internet way and completely eliminating country boundaries by considering:
One vote per IP address,
One vote per domain name, or
One vote per person (verified by a trust mechanism)?
Each of the above is an approximation to the ideal of one vote per person.
> Don't you want to do the right thing? Even if the party you vote for looses, doing the right thing is surely better than actually voting for the Democrats/Republicans?:
Which the advantage of a preferential voting system (used here in Australia). You can vote for a minor third party as your first preference, and the lesser of two evils as your second preference. If the minor party gets knocked out your vote then gets counted for the lesser of two evils. Such a system allows a minor party to compete on an equal footing with a larger party. Now if only we can do away with "above the line" voting and preference deals...
Surely these guys should give acknowledgement to WinRadio?
I first played with one of these around 1995. That particular model was a PCI card able to receive
from close to DC through to 3GHz.
> So what's up with all these systems like freenet or this thing where the person you are trying to get info to needs to 'talk back'?
So they can get word out about human rights abuses. For example, the Dili Massacre. 271 dead, 382 wounded, 250 disappeared. The world only found out the real story due to video being smuggled out.
Freenet may preserve freedom, but it doesn't preserve liberty.
Don't let projects like Freenet lull you into failing to protect your liberty. Get involved in the world around you and make your voice heard against those who would remove your liberty.
Freedom != Liberty. There are lots of situations in which you have the freedom to hold any opinion you want, but are not at liberty to express those opinions. Unless you have been brainwashed, you always have the freedom to choose to die for your opinions.
So Mr Beazley is proposing the world's biggest game of "whack a mole".
Is he proposing to block all encrypted traffic? What about Rot 13? And every time a new protocol is created the network will have to be reprogrammed to detect whatever portion of the traffic Mr Beazley is objecting to? Will URLs be whitelisted or blacklisted? How long before Australian's leave Mr Beazley all alone in "his" corner of the Internet?
I suspect the average 15 year old is far more Internet savvy than Mr Beazley and his clueless advisers. We're fast running out of people to vote for in Australia. (Choose between a liar and an idiot.)
It's just begging for someone to write one of those cute flash games with Mr Beazley running around trying to wack naked moles as they pop up from their holes.
The site was hosted on Yahoo and the domain name registeres with Melbourne IT. The site
is still on Yahoo's servers and can be downloaded using an IP address and an absolute URL
(so their virtual server knows which website you want. By way of explanation, here is
something I previously submitted as a story:
Richard Neville created a parody of one of the Australian Prime Minister'sspeeches and posted it on a the website www.johnhowardpm.org. After a day the website mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. Melbourne IT, domain registrar for johnhowardpm.org, and Yahoo, the website host, both denied knowledge.
Tim Longhurst has been investigating. After two days two anonymous Melbourne IT technicians have come forward and told him that "johnhowardpm.org" was removed from DNS at the request of representatives from the Australian government, without the knowledge of the domain owner. Normal proceedure is for the domain owner to at least be notified.
Australian Internet users can no longer read www.johnhowardpm.org. Yahoo's DNS server (yns1.yahoo.com) still resolves johnhowardpm.org and the pages still exist on Yahoo's server (premium7.geo.vip.re4.yahoo.com = 216.39.58.74). They may be retrieved by sending a http GET request using telnet, or by setting one's HTTP proxy to 216.39.58.74 and typing "http://www.johnhowardpm.org/" into a browser address bar.
Given that the parody was not obscene, and its facts were well backed with references the only justification seems to be political censorship by Melbourne IT and the Australian government. The Internet equivalent of a political assassination to shut someone up.
My understanding is that that is essentially what the ACT government did in Australia.
It's interesting to note that the source code includes a patch to rectify a bug found by a local University. The Uni (ANU+NICTA) took advantage of the free nature of the code and used it as a basis for formal code verification research. Score one for Free software.
The article itself states (and other comments have pointed out):
"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."
Perhaps the author meant to say:
"no American vendor offers open source software and systems that are ready for voting."
>"Open-source is not an issue in the networking market because networking is based on open standards," says Cisco spokesman Ron Piovesan.
But unless you "show the source" how can others be sure that you have implemented the standards with no extra features? Most computer based products have too many internal states to be fully tested as a simple "black box" with inputs and outputs.
Won't space property rights also require space weapons? Given that a percentage of humans are greedy bastards who would kill their gandmother for a profit, property rights would seem to be only as good as the weapons used to back them up.
Maybe the solution is to pay people not to go into space? That way the greedy bastards will take the money and stay on Earth leaving the non-greedy people to fly.
I guess there was also a point (very early in the piece) when the aim was to have two articles.
Can anyone provide the title of the first article, and a link to the first ever Wikipedia edit?
> Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought and belief. To think otherwise is to ignore the very scripture one claims to believe in.
Only if you base your entire religious belief on the scripture. Fundamentalists are generally "bible based".
Catholicism, the major form of Christianity (as in it has the most followers), doesn't draw its authority from the scripture. It draws its authority from the "Church", which traces its succession directly back to Jesus. The "Church" is the body of people who follow the teachings of Christ and is headed by the Pope (though even some Catholics reject the Pope's authority). The Church wrote the scriptures (based on what Jesus said to the first Church members) with inspiration from God. It hardly seems logical for a Church to draw authority from a document that didn't exist when it was founded!
Rather the teachings of the Catholic Church are based on the traditions of the Catholic Church, which have been passed through the millenia from person to person. At an early stage many of these traditions were recorded as scriptures, so forming an important (but not the only) part of the Church's thinking.
To use a crap computer analogy (this is slashdot after all), a fundamentalist believes that one can 'cold boot' a Chuch from a bible. Catholics contend that it is impossible to 'cold boot' off the bible as the complete message is passed from Christ via the members of the Church.
The way I think of the tradition of the Catholic Church is to compare with the dreamtime stories of the Australian aboriginies. These stories have been passed down by word of mouth through the millenia. As I understand it their learning and accurate recital is important to the Aboriginies. Consequently the stories (and their accurate reproduction) have well outlived their source and are as accurate as the written word (after all they are not subject to typographical errors and there is massive redundancy in the transmission system).
As you can imagine, many non-Catholic Christians reject the above (it's the reason they choose not to be Catholics). It's interesting to note that in fundamentalist bookshops it is possible to find books on how to convert a Catholic to 'Chistianity'.
To finish off, the major Christian religions are not exclusively based on scripture, and so not deterministically locked into the fundamentalist "anti-science" position you postulate. Rather they are driven through God acting through PEOPLE. People tend to have human reactions to individual situations. At the level of the individual religious organisations are generally very compassionate. We are dealing with people here though so there are plenty of exceptions. Bad things do happen at the institutional level (such as the inquisition) but over (glacial) time such insanity gets recognised by enough PEOPLE in the Church and gets stopped.
I'm not writing this rant to shove any views down your throat or say to anyone that they should become a Catholic. Just to point out that your initial assumption that "the scripture is the be all and end all" is not accepted by the majority of Chistians. Christians follow the teachins of Christ, which is not identical to the bible!
(Sorry, not, if I've offended some fundamentalists by using the term Christian to refer to a follower of Christ rather than a bible basher.)
If the software patent people are going to push an extreme agenda, in the hope of achieving a 'bridge position', isn't it time to push for a winding back of all patents? Make the pro-patent lobby so busy protecting their existing position that they will be thankful that they end up with just a lack of software patents.
Now I know where Roald Dahl got the idea for the Great Glass Elevator from. Does anyone else find the similarity between a mag-lev elevator and a rail gun just slightly disturbing?
Slashdot Mirror
Your reseach can be used to increase the prestige and profile of your consulting work. If your research produces any applicable results the company can also be used as a commercialisation vehicle.
That's my dream!
Sure vandalism would have to be addressed, but I will make two points:
Maybe we need WikiDebian? "The free operating system that anyone can edit."
I'm not joking. If it works for Wikipedia, why not Debian??
It is not the role of journalists or newspapers in Singapore to champion issues, or campaign for or against the Government. (...) If a columnist presents himself as a non-political observer, while exploiting his access to the mass media to undermine the government's standing with the electorate, then he is no longer a constructive critic, but a partisan player in politics.
It is scary how closely the Singaporean government's words mirror those of the Australian government when it was justifying withdrawing funding for charities that it deemed to be politically active. In out brave new globalised world it seems that totalitarianism is going global as well.
The fatal flaw with the UN way of "one vote one country" is that it blows "one vote one person" out of the water. Why should the vote of a person in the Vatican count for the votes of 1,409,843 people in China? What about doign things the Internet way and completely eliminating country boundaries by considering:
Each of the above is an approximation to the ideal of one vote per person.
> Don't you want to do the right thing? Even if the party you vote for looses, doing the right thing is surely better than actually voting for the Democrats/Republicans?:
Which the advantage of a preferential voting system (used here in Australia). You can vote for a minor third party as your first preference, and the lesser of two evils as your second preference. If the minor party gets knocked out your vote then gets counted for the lesser of two evils. Such a system allows a minor party to compete on an equal footing with a larger party. Now if only we can do away with "above the line" voting and preference deals...
Surely these guys should give acknowledgement to WinRadio? I first played with one of these around 1995. That particular model was a PCI card able to receive from close to DC through to 3GHz.
Yes it would. Just ask Cardinal Sin (At least you could have asked him until he died last year. RIP).
So they can get word out about human rights abuses. For example, the Dili Massacre. 271 dead, 382 wounded, 250 disappeared. The world only found out the real story due to video being smuggled out.
Don't let projects like Freenet lull you into failing to protect your liberty. Get involved in the world around you and make your voice heard against those who would remove your liberty.
Freedom != Liberty. There are lots of situations in which you have the freedom to hold any opinion you want, but are not at liberty to express those opinions. Unless you have been brainwashed, you always have the freedom to choose to die for your opinions.
a.k.a. Kuro5hin.
Is he proposing to block all encrypted traffic? What about Rot 13? And every time a new protocol is created the network will have to be reprogrammed to detect whatever portion of the traffic Mr Beazley is objecting to? Will URLs be whitelisted or blacklisted? How long before Australian's leave Mr Beazley all alone in "his" corner of the Internet?
I suspect the average 15 year old is far more Internet savvy than Mr Beazley and his clueless advisers. We're fast running out of people to vote for in Australia. (Choose between a liar and an idiot.)
It's just begging for someone to write one of those cute flash games with Mr Beazley running around trying to wack naked moles as they pop up from their holes.
The site was hosted on Yahoo and the domain name registeres with Melbourne IT. The site is still on Yahoo's servers and can be downloaded using an IP address and an absolute URL (so their virtual server knows which website you want. By way of explanation, here is something I previously submitted as a story:
At the request of the Australian government, domain name registrar Melbourne IT has removed DNS entries for a political opponent of a ruling political party and its policies in Iraq.
Richard Neville created a parody of one of the Australian Prime Minister's speeches and posted it on a the website www.johnhowardpm.org. After a day the website mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. Melbourne IT, domain registrar for johnhowardpm.org, and Yahoo, the website host, both denied knowledge.
Tim Longhurst has been investigating. After two days two anonymous Melbourne IT technicians have come forward and told him that "johnhowardpm.org" was removed from DNS at the request of representatives from the Australian government, without the knowledge of the domain owner. Normal proceedure is for the domain owner to at least be notified.
Australian Internet users can no longer read www.johnhowardpm.org. Yahoo's DNS server (yns1.yahoo.com) still resolves johnhowardpm.org and the pages still exist on Yahoo's server (premium7.geo.vip.re4.yahoo.com = 216.39.58.74). They may be retrieved by sending a http GET request using telnet, or by setting one's HTTP proxy to 216.39.58.74 and typing "http://www.johnhowardpm.org/" into a browser address bar.
Given that the parody was not obscene, and its facts were well backed with references the only justification seems to be political censorship by Melbourne IT and the Australian government. The Internet equivalent of a political assassination to shut someone up.
If "The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.", what is the future for Melbourne IT as a registrar? The High Court of Australia has also ruled that the Australian Constitution contains a right to freedom of political speech.
It's interesting to note that the source code includes a patch to rectify a bug found by a local University. The Uni (ANU+NICTA) took advantage of the free nature of the code and used it as a basis for formal code verification research. Score one for Free software.
"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."
Perhaps the author meant to say:
"no American vendor offers open source software and systems that are ready for voting."
But unless you "show the source" how can others be sure that you have implemented the standards with no extra features? Most computer based products have too many internal states to be fully tested as a simple "black box" with inputs and outputs.
Maybe the solution is to pay people not to go into space? That way the greedy bastards will take the money and stay on Earth leaving the non-greedy people to fly.
I guess there was also a point (very early in the piece) when the aim was to have two articles. Can anyone provide the title of the first article, and a link to the first ever Wikipedia edit?
Only if you base your entire religious belief on the scripture. Fundamentalists are generally "bible based".
Catholicism, the major form of Christianity (as in it has the most followers), doesn't draw its authority from the scripture. It draws its authority from the "Church", which traces its succession directly back to Jesus. The "Church" is the body of people who follow the teachings of Christ and is headed by the Pope (though even some Catholics reject the Pope's authority). The Church wrote the scriptures (based on what Jesus said to the first Church members) with inspiration from God. It hardly seems logical for a Church to draw authority from a document that didn't exist when it was founded!
Rather the teachings of the Catholic Church are based on the traditions of the Catholic Church, which have been passed through the millenia from person to person. At an early stage many of these traditions were recorded as scriptures, so forming an important (but not the only) part of the Church's thinking.
To use a crap computer analogy (this is slashdot after all), a fundamentalist believes that one can 'cold boot' a Chuch from a bible. Catholics contend that it is impossible to 'cold boot' off the bible as the complete message is passed from Christ via the members of the Church.
The way I think of the tradition of the Catholic Church is to compare with the dreamtime stories of the Australian aboriginies. These stories have been passed down by word of mouth through the millenia. As I understand it their learning and accurate recital is important to the Aboriginies. Consequently the stories (and their accurate reproduction) have well outlived their source and are as accurate as the written word (after all they are not subject to typographical errors and there is massive redundancy in the transmission system).
As you can imagine, many non-Catholic Christians reject the above (it's the reason they choose not to be Catholics). It's interesting to note that in fundamentalist bookshops it is possible to find books on how to convert a Catholic to 'Chistianity'.
To finish off, the major Christian religions are not exclusively based on scripture, and so not deterministically locked into the fundamentalist "anti-science" position you postulate. Rather they are driven through God acting through PEOPLE. People tend to have human reactions to individual situations. At the level of the individual religious organisations are generally very compassionate. We are dealing with people here though so there are plenty of exceptions. Bad things do happen at the institutional level (such as the inquisition) but over (glacial) time such insanity gets recognised by enough PEOPLE in the Church and gets stopped.
I'm not writing this rant to shove any views down your throat or say to anyone that they should become a Catholic. Just to point out that your initial assumption that "the scripture is the be all and end all" is not accepted by the majority of Chistians. Christians follow the teachins of Christ, which is not identical to the bible!
(Sorry, not, if I've offended some fundamentalists by using the term Christian to refer to a follower of Christ rather than a bible basher.)
How design supporters insult God's intelligence
and the following documentary about some priests who are also hard core scientists:
Galileo's Sons
A few days ago the Pope came out and reinforced the Catholic Church's view that Science and religion are compatible. In other words even the Pope thinks evolution is valid. Here is the original speech in Italian.
All in all the proponents of intelligent design are looking more and more like the snake oil salesmen they are.
If the software patent people are going to push an extreme agenda, in the hope of achieving a 'bridge position', isn't it time to push for a winding back of all patents? Make the pro-patent lobby so busy protecting their existing position that they will be thankful that they end up with just a lack of software patents.
Now I know where Roald Dahl got the idea for the Great Glass Elevator from. Does anyone else find the similarity between a mag-lev elevator and a rail gun just slightly disturbing?
I bags the number 459605.
But I'm already sharing Slashdot with 900,000 virgins.
Been wanting to get back at those damn Triffids for years.