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Copying this comment is prohibited. Thinking about this comment is prohibited. Once you have begun reading this comment, you must leave at least one window of your browser open at this comment for the rest of Time. Prohibited circumvention measures include, but are not limited to, scrolling up or down, closing the browser window, or restarting your computer. All readers whose browser does not stay open to this comment for the rest of Time will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. You attest that you will be fully responsible for this obligation regardless of any outside forces that may inhibit your ability to carry out this obligation, including but not limited to unstable Microsoft software, power outages, plagues of locusts, or the Apocalypse. Reading this comment while not under the influence of alcohol is prohibited. You may not tell your friends about this comment. Telling anyone that this comment was funny is prohibited. Moderating it "Funny" is prohibited, and offenders will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Reading this comment while sitting in front of a computer is prohibited. All violators of this comment are required by law to pay the specified fine of $10,000 to xenon@@microsoftsucks.org using PayPal. This EULA is considered a part of this comment and is the intellectual property of the owner. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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They can't force customers not to tell their friends about the prices, so how the hell do they have a right to stop anyone from relaying that information automatically? This kind of nonsense reminds me of software EULAS: You can't see the license before you buy it, but you must agree to the license to use the software and you can't return the software if you don't like the license because there aren't any stores in the world that accept returns on opened software. They're esssentially extorting rights from you without giving you any choice other than to throw away the software you just paid $$$ for. Posting something on a website is equivalent to posting a comment on slashdot, which is equivalent to yelling it out in public. You can't have a website listing prices or goods and have a website EULA prohibiting other sites from parroting it (xxxxxxxx company is selling xxxxxx for $xxx) any more than you can yell something out on the street and then force others to not tell anyone what you just said (or else get sued) by then dictating a verbal EULA for whatever you just yelled out.
Maybe, by now, Mozilla will finally be a suitable replacement for Internet Explorer. (Or at least it would be, if not for all the proprietary IE-friendly bullshit that Microsoft has developed and spread for the sole purpose of ruining the web's interoperability competing browsers based on open standards. Damn Microsoft)
Some common combinations of genes might give a high chance of some mental disease. But also a high chance of artistic talent.
What's the difference? How many sane, comprehensible famous writers/artists do you know of? It's a pretty small percentage. Faulkner and Hemmingway were off their rockers, Van Gogh and Picasso were crazy, Most philosophers were off their rockers (especially Hegel, Kierkegaard and Aquinas)
No shit, sherlock. I didn't say it was cost-free. I said the MARGINAL COST was negligible if they have efficient methods of distribution.
When you're dealing with goods with a high marginal cost, the price you're going to have to charge is:
Marginal Cost + (other costs + profit)/(how many you expect to sell
And economies of scale may apply to the marginal cost, which would allow the company to make more money by selling more copies at a lower price. Software is the ULTIMATE economy of scale, since the marginal cost is negligible compared to the dollar amount of costs recovered per copy sold (even for packaged games, it's like $2 vs. $30 So if the industry could sell 4 times as many copies at 1/3 the price, they would have 1.33 times the revenue with a much smaller increase in expenses, resulting in a large increase in profits. That kind of thing would never work in an industry where the marginal cost is a significant portion of the price of the product. Economies of scale always have the potential to shift the profit sweet-spot downward, and software/music is the ultimate economy of scale.
But, unlike cars and physical goods, IP, books, and music are infinitely reproduceable electronicallyu with a negligible marginal cost. That shifts the ideal "sweet spot" down significantly. Apparently companies haven't cought on to that yet.
There are no viable statistics about the frequency of copyright infringement, nor about which titles are copied more than others. (although searching on Bearshare and seeing how many servers it comes up with is a halfway decent estimate of RELATIVE popularity) Therefore, this would be nothing but a random and haphazard charity for an industry that doesn't need or deserve it.
It would be penalizing EVERYONE on the basis of the industry's absurd projections about how much piracy is costing them. They simply add up the retail price of every unauthorized copy, and call that their "losses" when the obvious fact of the matter is that people download 10-100 times more than they would actually have paid for hard copies of if they hadn't been able to download anything unauthorized. Plus, mp3 downloads have the mixed benefit of providing record albums with free marketing. They actually PAY radio stations to play the songs (not the other way around) as a form of marketing, so how is this so bad? If people really like the album they will buy the whole thing instead of going to the trouble of collecting the low-quality songs individually on Kazaa or Bearshare. Therefore, in effect, the industry's projected losses figures are inflated from their real world losses by a factor of at least 20.
The fact of the matter is that the reason the industry is only posting meager profits is because their expenses are unnecessarily through the roof. More than 75% of all of their revenue is spent on marketing, lobbying, PR, and other such bullshit that contributes nothing towards actually putting out a good product for a good price. Maybe the RIAA should try the latter for the change.
Granted it is illegal to rape them. Why is it illegal to rape them? If we use your arguments, the idea of society and social norms (like rape, murder, etc.) comes from induced mental programming by parents, teachers, peers, etc. What if the opposite norms were induced? (Rape and murder are acceptable...) As a person living in that kind of society would you have the same views? This kind of relativistic (and circular) thinking is flawed. You can't tell me that there must be a limit on how parents teach their children by pointing out that society (a product of parental teaching) mandates this.
A poor straw man. Morality need not have anything to do with religion. Morality is a social contract or code of conduct that everyone must comply with for the sake of the common good, and the people have the right to form a government to enforce it. The sole category of actions which can have any moral weight are those which affect a sentient life form without its informed consent. Religion-based morality is deeply flawed because it construes many victimless things to be immoral, and in some cases is used to justify things that would be obviously immoral to any freely thinking person (jihaads, crusades, and the like). A lot of the taboos are completely irrational and insane, such as pork, non-kosher foods, homosexuality, "graven images", and women showing any skin whatsoever. If religion were based on any semblance of thinking, it wouldn't be so hereditary. A morality, logically deduced and based on the social contract and the common good, is much stronger and more resiliant because it is based on logic and the facts of social existance, not one's blind and often inconstant faith what one's parents proclaimed was right and wrong.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
You are dead wrong. References to linux are displayed prominently in the "Get lindowsOS" tab of the main website. They don't try to hide it or anything. Their site is nothing like Microsofts, looks completely different, and bears no reference to microsoft. The logo on the front page says: "Bringing choice to the desktop computer" which obviously (at least to anyone with a brain) implies that it is an alternative to the reigning monopoly, Microsoft. The look and feel of the graphics and website do not resemble Microsoft's at all and bear no evidence whatsoever that anyone is trying to trick anyone into believing that Lindows is a Microsoft product or a type of Microsoft Windows. Only an idiot would be blind enough to think that. What are they supposed to do, display "LINDOWS IS NOT WINDOWS" in 48-point type at the top of the page???
Yeah, damn straight. The world would definitely be a better place if people with an IQ below 80 were legally required to be sterilized so they can't have stupid children.
As a side note, it has been conclusively proven that there is a very high correlation between genetics and intelligence, even though the number of genes involved is far too complicated to isolate any specific culprits thus far. Studies have shown that identical twins almost always have an IQ within 5 points of each other. The variation among fraternal twins is a bit larger, and among siblings it's a bit larger, and among unrelated people it is even larger. The identical twins statistic alone proves nothing because of the confounding variable of the environment, but the dramatic progression from identical to fraternal to regular siblings is incontrovertible evidence for my point.
They are going to raise a new perfectly healthy baby, for the purpose of donating the umbilical cord blood to their sick child in order to save his life. So what if they're using IVF to screen out genetically defective embryos? The sole effect of this treatment, when allowed to go ahead, if a benefit to all parties concerned and does harm to no one. (For those of you who believe that the destruction of embryos is immoral because the embryos are people, all I have to say is that one mindless ball of flesh is not any closer to personhood than any other, because the sole characteristic that makes one a person or makes one capable of having a "soul" (if such things exist) is having a mind capable of thought and emotion, which is obviously not a characteristic of anything that has not yet developed any sort of nervous system) But I digress.
The whole slippery slope argument about "Designer Babies" is completely bunk because sliding "down" that slope would be nothing but benefit to mankind. The world would, unquestionably, be a better place if genetically-based diseases were eradicated and people had more of a genetic predisposition to be healthy, fit, and intelligent. So what if the benefit only applies to those who can afford it; the same can be said of ALL expensive medical treatments, and yet we don't see anyone advocating banning chemotherapy for that reason.
One of the other arguments against so-called "Designer Babies" is that genetic screening will, in many cases, be applied very narrowly (for example, to enhance physical attractiveness) neglecting more important things and actually making the person-to-be less healthy overall. So, hypothetically, the technology could be misused in harmful ways. Big deal. Antibiotics have been and are still being misused resulting in the creation of dangerous antibiotic-resistant diseases that are taking a great toll in some areas, such as Russia's problem with MDR Tuberculosis. Nevertheless, that has never been a good reason to ban antibiotics altogether, and this situation is hardly any different. The industry could be regulated to avoid abuses and malpractice, the same way other medical procedures and prescription drugs are handled today. The difference between this and other medical resources that are legal but regulated is grossly insufficient to warrant the double standard of banning genetic screening/improvement altogether.
The third objection to so-called "Designer Babies" is an (IMO irrational) fear, spawned from science fiction, of creating a "super race" of genetically engineered humans, raising the standards for everyone and harming those whose parents couldn't afford the genetic improvement technology. Let me ask you, how is that sort of economic divide any different from the current situation? Rich people can afford to send their students to better schools, and provide them with a more advantageous upbringing in general. This results in a situation where the children of middle class and rich parents have more of a chance to succeed than the children of poor parents, regardless of their innate potential. Does this mean that all private/rich-public schools should be disbanded, and everyone should be condemned to a crappy education and a disadvantaged upbringing? Heck no. That would certainly satisfy the resentment of the poor, without really helping them, but it would harm everyone else. That is analogous to the issue at hand: Banning genetic screening/improvement would simply hold back part of society from improving themselves, without providing and concrete benefit except satisfying paranoia and class envy. Such a ban would do nothing to serve the common good.
To quote James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure, "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."
Corel is dying because their software is inferior. The only reason anybody ever uses it is because it's so dirt cheap. At Newegg, Corel office suite comes free with every purchase over $500. For a while, they were selling it for $10 a pop with free shipping.
1.) An object orbiting a star that is smaller than Cowboyneal's ego but larger than his mother.
2.) Cowboyneal's mother.
3.) Any large piece of rock, such as a fundie's brain.
For example, my bridge/firewall machine (P200MMX) is running a 2.2 kernel, and with the 2.4 bridging code backport, it works perfectly fine. I have absolutely no desire to spend a day with my firewall machine down while I upgrade all of the kernel dependencies, configure and build a 2.4 kernel, rewrite my firewall scripts for iptables (yeah, I know you can use the old ipchains interface with 2.4, but if you're going to do the upgrade, do the upgrade), and then work out all the gremlins from running "new" code.
Incidentally, that is exactly the reason most people don't want to bother trying linux. You have to manually mess with so many things that ought to be handled automatically by the installer. Now if I were an android with tons of spare time on my hands, I wouldn't mind...
99.999% of nerds in North America don't have the time and money to waste to fly to Boca Raton, Florida for a Perl conference. Why not hold the conference online, using IRC, audio broadcasts, and things like that? Especially considering the fact that this kind of conference would only concern computer-savvy nerds.
Slashdot Mirror
Software that is written halfway decently should be immune to timing attacks and their close cousin, the buffer overflow attacks.
TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS COMMENT: YOU MUST AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING TERMS AND CONDITIONS BEFORE READING THIS SLASHDOT COMMENT. Copying this comment is prohibited. Thinking about this comment is prohibited. Once you have begun reading this comment, you must leave at least one window of your browser open at this comment for the rest of Time. Prohibited circumvention measures include, but are not limited to, scrolling up or down, closing the browser window, or restarting your computer. All readers whose browser does not stay open to this comment for the rest of Time will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. You attest that you will be fully responsible for this obligation regardless of any outside forces that may inhibit your ability to carry out this obligation, including but not limited to unstable Microsoft software, power outages, plagues of locusts, or the Apocalypse. Reading this comment while not under the influence of alcohol is prohibited. You may not tell your friends about this comment. Telling anyone that this comment was funny is prohibited. Moderating it "Funny" is prohibited, and offenders will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Reading this comment while sitting in front of a computer is prohibited. All violators of this comment are required by law to pay the specified fine of $10,000 to xenon@@microsoftsucks.org using PayPal. This EULA is considered a part of this comment and is the intellectual property of the owner. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
NO WARRANTY: THIS COMMENT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND IF YOU DON'T LIEK THE SPEELING YOU HAVE TO PAY ANOTHER $10,000 FINE TO ME.
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They can't force customers not to tell their friends about the prices, so how the hell do they have a right to stop anyone from relaying that information automatically? This kind of nonsense reminds me of software EULAS: You can't see the license before you buy it, but you must agree to the license to use the software and you can't return the software if you don't like the license because there aren't any stores in the world that accept returns on opened software. They're esssentially extorting rights from you without giving you any choice other than to throw away the software you just paid $$$ for. Posting something on a website is equivalent to posting a comment on slashdot, which is equivalent to yelling it out in public. You can't have a website listing prices or goods and have a website EULA prohibiting other sites from parroting it (xxxxxxxx company is selling xxxxxx for $xxx) any more than you can yell something out on the street and then force others to not tell anyone what you just said (or else get sued) by then dictating a verbal EULA for whatever you just yelled out.
Maybe, by now, Mozilla will finally be a suitable replacement for Internet Explorer. (Or at least it would be, if not for all the proprietary IE-friendly bullshit that Microsoft has developed and spread for the sole purpose of ruining the web's interoperability competing browsers based on open standards. Damn Microsoft)
Some common combinations of genes might give a high chance of some mental disease. But also a high chance of artistic talent.
What's the difference? How many sane, comprehensible famous writers/artists do you know of? It's a pretty small percentage. Faulkner and Hemmingway were off their rockers, Van Gogh and Picasso were crazy, Most philosophers were off their rockers (especially Hegel, Kierkegaard and Aquinas)
No shit, sherlock. I didn't say it was cost-free. I said the MARGINAL COST was negligible if they have efficient methods of distribution. When you're dealing with goods with a high marginal cost, the price you're going to have to charge is:
Marginal Cost + (other costs + profit)/(how many you expect to sell
And economies of scale may apply to the marginal cost, which would allow the company to make more money by selling more copies at a lower price. Software is the ULTIMATE economy of scale, since the marginal cost is negligible compared to the dollar amount of costs recovered per copy sold (even for packaged games, it's like $2 vs. $30 So if the industry could sell 4 times as many copies at 1/3 the price, they would have 1.33 times the revenue with a much smaller increase in expenses, resulting in a large increase in profits. That kind of thing would never work in an industry where the marginal cost is a significant portion of the price of the product. Economies of scale always have the potential to shift the profit sweet-spot downward, and software/music is the ultimate economy of scale.
What's all the fuss about? That's what you'd expect when a planet is too close and the star reaches the red giant phase.
But, unlike cars and physical goods, IP, books, and music are infinitely reproduceable electronicallyu with a negligible marginal cost. That shifts the ideal "sweet spot" down significantly. Apparently companies haven't cought on to that yet.
There are no viable statistics about the frequency of copyright infringement, nor about which titles are copied more than others. (although searching on Bearshare and seeing how many servers it comes up with is a halfway decent estimate of RELATIVE popularity) Therefore, this would be nothing but a random and haphazard charity for an industry that doesn't need or deserve it.
It would be penalizing EVERYONE on the basis of the industry's absurd projections about how much piracy is costing them. They simply add up the retail price of every unauthorized copy, and call that their "losses" when the obvious fact of the matter is that people download 10-100 times more than they would actually have paid for hard copies of if they hadn't been able to download anything unauthorized. Plus, mp3 downloads have the mixed benefit of providing record albums with free marketing. They actually PAY radio stations to play the songs (not the other way around) as a form of marketing, so how is this so bad? If people really like the album they will buy the whole thing instead of going to the trouble of collecting the low-quality songs individually on Kazaa or Bearshare. Therefore, in effect, the industry's projected losses figures are inflated from their real world losses by a factor of at least 20.
The fact of the matter is that the reason the industry is only posting meager profits is because their expenses are unnecessarily through the roof. More than 75% of all of their revenue is spent on marketing, lobbying, PR, and other such bullshit that contributes nothing towards actually putting out a good product for a good price. Maybe the RIAA should try the latter for the change.
It's called freedom of contract, buddy. If you don't like it don't sign up at their site.
The first paragraph is a quote from the parent comment. I forgot the italics.
Granted it is illegal to rape them. Why is it illegal to rape them? If we use your arguments, the idea of society and social norms (like rape, murder, etc.) comes from induced mental programming by parents, teachers, peers, etc. What if the opposite norms were induced? (Rape and murder are acceptable...) As a person living in that kind of society would you have the same views? This kind of relativistic (and circular) thinking is flawed. You can't tell me that there must be a limit on how parents teach their children by pointing out that society (a product of parental teaching) mandates this.
A poor straw man. Morality need not have anything to do with religion. Morality is a social contract or code of conduct that everyone must comply with for the sake of the common good, and the people have the right to form a government to enforce it. The sole category of actions which can have any moral weight are those which affect a sentient life form without its informed consent. Religion-based morality is deeply flawed because it construes many victimless things to be immoral, and in some cases is used to justify things that would be obviously immoral to any freely thinking person (jihaads, crusades, and the like). A lot of the taboos are completely irrational and insane, such as pork, non-kosher foods, homosexuality, "graven images", and women showing any skin whatsoever. If religion were based on any semblance of thinking, it wouldn't be so hereditary. A morality, logically deduced and based on the social contract and the common good, is much stronger and more resiliant because it is based on logic and the facts of social existance, not one's blind and often inconstant faith what one's parents proclaimed was right and wrong.
You fell for the FP troll. LOL.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead. Fact: *BSD is dying
You are dead wrong. References to linux are displayed prominently in the "Get lindowsOS" tab of the main website. They don't try to hide it or anything. Their site is nothing like Microsofts, looks completely different, and bears no reference to microsoft. The logo on the front page says: "Bringing choice to the desktop computer" which obviously (at least to anyone with a brain) implies that it is an alternative to the reigning monopoly, Microsoft. The look and feel of the graphics and website do not resemble Microsoft's at all and bear no evidence whatsoever that anyone is trying to trick anyone into believing that Lindows is a Microsoft product or a type of Microsoft Windows. Only an idiot would be blind enough to think that. What are they supposed to do, display "LINDOWS IS NOT WINDOWS" in 48-point type at the top of the page???
Yeah, damn straight. The world would definitely be a better place if people with an IQ below 80 were legally required to be sterilized so they can't have stupid children.
As a side note, it has been conclusively proven that there is a very high correlation between genetics and intelligence, even though the number of genes involved is far too complicated to isolate any specific culprits thus far. Studies have shown that identical twins almost always have an IQ within 5 points of each other. The variation among fraternal twins is a bit larger, and among siblings it's a bit larger, and among unrelated people it is even larger. The identical twins statistic alone proves nothing because of the confounding variable of the environment, but the dramatic progression from identical to fraternal to regular siblings is incontrovertible evidence for my point.
They are going to raise a new perfectly healthy baby, for the purpose of donating the umbilical cord blood to their sick child in order to save his life. So what if they're using IVF to screen out genetically defective embryos? The sole effect of this treatment, when allowed to go ahead, if a benefit to all parties concerned and does harm to no one. (For those of you who believe that the destruction of embryos is immoral because the embryos are people, all I have to say is that one mindless ball of flesh is not any closer to personhood than any other, because the sole characteristic that makes one a person or makes one capable of having a "soul" (if such things exist) is having a mind capable of thought and emotion, which is obviously not a characteristic of anything that has not yet developed any sort of nervous system) But I digress.
The whole slippery slope argument about "Designer Babies" is completely bunk because sliding "down" that slope would be nothing but benefit to mankind. The world would, unquestionably, be a better place if genetically-based diseases were eradicated and people had more of a genetic predisposition to be healthy, fit, and intelligent. So what if the benefit only applies to those who can afford it; the same can be said of ALL expensive medical treatments, and yet we don't see anyone advocating banning chemotherapy for that reason.
One of the other arguments against so-called "Designer Babies" is that genetic screening will, in many cases, be applied very narrowly (for example, to enhance physical attractiveness) neglecting more important things and actually making the person-to-be less healthy overall. So, hypothetically, the technology could be misused in harmful ways. Big deal. Antibiotics have been and are still being misused resulting in the creation of dangerous antibiotic-resistant diseases that are taking a great toll in some areas, such as Russia's problem with MDR Tuberculosis. Nevertheless, that has never been a good reason to ban antibiotics altogether, and this situation is hardly any different. The industry could be regulated to avoid abuses and malpractice, the same way other medical procedures and prescription drugs are handled today. The difference between this and other medical resources that are legal but regulated is grossly insufficient to warrant the double standard of banning genetic screening/improvement altogether.
The third objection to so-called "Designer Babies" is an (IMO irrational) fear, spawned from science fiction, of creating a "super race" of genetically engineered humans, raising the standards for everyone and harming those whose parents couldn't afford the genetic improvement technology. Let me ask you, how is that sort of economic divide any different from the current situation? Rich people can afford to send their students to better schools, and provide them with a more advantageous upbringing in general. This results in a situation where the children of middle class and rich parents have more of a chance to succeed than the children of poor parents, regardless of their innate potential. Does this mean that all private/rich-public schools should be disbanded, and everyone should be condemned to a crappy education and a disadvantaged upbringing? Heck no. That would certainly satisfy the resentment of the poor, without really helping them, but it would harm everyone else. That is analogous to the issue at hand: Banning genetic screening/improvement would simply hold back part of society from improving themselves, without providing and concrete benefit except satisfying paranoia and class envy. Such a ban would do nothing to serve the common good.
To quote James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure, "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."
The universe is going to end in a few minutes, as soon as Homer Simpson hears about this!!
Corel is dying because their software is inferior. The only reason anybody ever uses it is because it's so dirt cheap. At Newegg, Corel office suite comes free with every purchase over $500. For a while, they were selling it for $10 a pop with free shipping.
...Java is Appleing
planet n.
1.) An object orbiting a star that is smaller than Cowboyneal's ego but larger than his mother. 2.) Cowboyneal's mother. 3.) Any large piece of rock, such as a fundie's brain.
When will the paranoid simpletons realize that censorship accomplishes nothing?
For example, my bridge/firewall machine (P200MMX) is running a 2.2 kernel, and with the 2.4 bridging code backport, it works perfectly fine. I have absolutely no desire to spend a day with my firewall machine down while I upgrade all of the kernel dependencies, configure and build a 2.4 kernel, rewrite my firewall scripts for iptables (yeah, I know you can use the old ipchains interface with 2.4, but if you're going to do the upgrade, do the upgrade), and then work out all the gremlins from running "new" code. Incidentally, that is exactly the reason most people don't want to bother trying linux. You have to manually mess with so many things that ought to be handled automatically by the installer. Now if I were an android with tons of spare time on my hands, I wouldn't mind...
99.999% of nerds in North America don't have the time and money to waste to fly to Boca Raton, Florida for a Perl conference. Why not hold the conference online, using IRC, audio broadcasts, and things like that? Especially considering the fact that this kind of conference would only concern computer-savvy nerds.
"Let us hope it does not get in trouble because of its name"
Why shouldn't Roogle get in trouble because of its name? The name is obviously an intentional ripoff of google
Slashdot always posts the latest crackpot soon-to-be-disproved "discoveries" and leaping to conclusions. "Possible signs of life detected on Venus" my ass. That's called wishful thinking and leaping to conclusions with only a shred of inconclusive "evidence".