Umm, the fact that the bear is dead was not at issue. We were discussing whether or not it would have been scientifically useful to have tagged and studied the bear while it was still living. Purely an academic discussion, I assure you, with absolutely no misunderstanding of the contents of the article.
Nowhere in the article does it say anyone wanted to study the carcass. They've crossbred polar and grizzly bears in captivity before, I'm sure they have all the data they want from those experiments.
You've got it exactly backwards. Sure, no one is interested in studying the carcass, because they've done all they need on captive hybrids. But I bet there are plenty of scientists who would love to get the chance to radio-tag a live one and follow it around in the wild for a while. Does it behave like a grizzly or a polar bear? Does it get along with others of either type of bear? And many more questions.
A dead bear tells no tales that haven't already been heard. A living bear would be intensely interesting to the scientific community.
I have to wonder, how much were they willing to spend on Linux consultants (which, in fact, do exist-- http://www.novell.com/http://www.enterux.com/http://www.redhat.com/services/consulting/ --just to name a few big ones)? It seems like there is a reluctance to spend any money on Linux. Heck, it's free software, right? Too many companies seem to look to Linux as a way to reduce costs by not spending money for the software or expertise to make it run. Too few seem to look at the longer term savings brought about by increased flexibility and better control.
Maybe if they spent the same amount on Linux consultants to show them how to get what they wanted (and maybe to help them figure out what they needed) as they spent on MS cosultants, their experience would have been a little different.
Last I heard, there was a (debatably) good reason why manufacturers don't just release all the necessary information for anyone to write a driver for their cards (or more usefully, chipsets). Aside from the typical BS about trade secrets (people reverse engineer and figure the stuff out anyway), there is the issue of publishing specs for software-controlled radios. My understanding is that the FCC frowns upon the idea of any developer anywhere being able to manipulate the radio chips to do things not considered appropriate by the FCC.
Seems to me there is a simple solution to this (which means no politicians would ever go for it, of course).
Create a tax pool and use some tax percentage that is a reasonable average. Businesses would simply report how much of their taxed revenue went to each state, then each state would get a payment based on the revenue derived from shipments to that state. Perhaps purchase data could be kept as granular as the county being shipped to, and then states could divy up the money appropriately.
So, for example, a flat 7% could be charged on all goods ordered via mail, phone, or internet and shipped. If California accounted for 20% by revenue of all orders, then CA would get 20% of "the pot". Then CA could divide the money however it wished. Maybe they could apportion it based on per-county purchase amount, or they could just rebate income taxes to counties based on each county's contribution, or whatever.
There will be some states (namely those currenty without sales tax) that will find this a great boon, and those that won't like it so much (namely those with sales tax rate higher than whatever flat rate is chosen). And yes, it means that the money won't get distributed precisely as it would if the purchases we actually made locally, but I suspect it would be close enough to matter little in reality.
Overall, this would be far simpler to administer and probably no more prone to abuse than any other system that might be dreamed up.
At least for businesses, filter out the HTML from emails. I have Thunderbird set to show me my emails in plain text only, so I'm never fooled by the URL in the link text versus the actual URL trick. For example, I just got an Ebay phishing email that when viewed as HTML appeared to have a link to
www.paypal.com/...
But when viewed as text, it was clear the link was really to
www.paypal.com.us-cgi-bin-web-scr-cmd.com/...
This one simple trick seems to be pretty reliable in spotting phishing scams.
In addition to writing to Congress, write to the largest advertisers. TV broadcasters derive most of their revenue from advertising. If advertisers realize that there is significant resistance among viewers to these laws, then maybe they'll put a little pressure on the broadcasters.
I have a feeling that will have more of an affect than yelling at Representatives who have obviously already been paid for. The only thing that will sway their opinion is if a clear majority of their constituents speak out in opposition, which is extremely unlikely to happen, no matter how popular slashdot is.
Google already has a program in place to evaluate open source projects and provide a stipend. Give the money to Google with the restriction that it fund core Linux-related projects and developers. I bet we could even trust them not to fund mostly projects that would benefit them directly. I think we could even expect them to donate the administrative costs, leaving 100% of the funds for distribution.
Speaking of which, Thunderbird's IMAP support, while pretty, has one idiotic fault: there's no built-in way to purge deleted email messages. If you do manual purges with the purge button extension, you can't use the "move to deleted items folder" mode.
The "move to deleted items folder" doesn't actually remove the deleted messages from the inbox, just flags them as deleted. This sucks if your IMAP system is ever accessed from anywhere else (which is the whole freaking point of IMAP) because when you log in, you find that all the junk-email and deleted items are still sitting flagged right in your inbox.
This is a serious pisser.
I don't have any such problem, although I do use Thunderbird both at work and at home. To the best of my understanding, the messages that you "delete" are marked as such at the IMAP server, so they don't show up in your inbox from another machine.
I also thought that folders got expunged when there is more than some amount of deleted messages in them, but I could be wrong on that. I haven't used Pine for quite some time, but if I recall correctly, it showed messages as deleted if I had deleted them in Thunderbird (actually, Mozilla at the time).
I ran Ballmer's speach through the Google "marketspeak" translator and it came out something like this (paraphrasing):
"Consumers are willing to pay $700 or more for a home PC. Microsoft believes that it is in our best interest if $100 of that goes to the hardware manufacturers so that $600 is available for the consumer to give to Microsoft. This will allow for Microsoft to continue to 'innovate'."
I think the translator is incomplete, that last sentence seems untranslated to me.
This doesn't help the environment. It increases the use of batteries. Add some more acid to the compost heap.
Reminds me of an article I read a while back about the proliferation of "e-bikes" in China and how ironic it was that China was being so much more environmentally aware than us stupid Americans.
I couldn't help but think that those e-bikes were most likely replacing "regular" bikes as opposed to getting people out of their cars. So instead of reducing emissions, they were adding a bunch of lead-acid batteries that need to be charged and that would eventually go to landfills.
Of course in the poster's case, he probably would be getting out of a car, so he would be making an improvement, just not as much as if he did all the pedalling himslef. Hmmm, what affect would all the extra CO2 from the heavy breathing have?
Any why should a corporation pay any taxes.... The corporation just acts as a "pass-thru" entity.
One case I can see where a "corporation" should pay taxes (notwithstanding the arguments from IgnoramousMaximus) is when that corporation's income is being spent on something that does not generate any other tax revenue, such as off-shored workers.
Someone else suggested that corps should pay taxes on these otherwise written-off expenses, and I agree. Tax that money at a rate that would be equivalent to the average tax rate that would have been paid by US-based employees earning that income. It might help to level the global playing field a little (but I'm not an economist, and even if I was, I'd probably not fully understand all the issues involved here).
It's reasonable that he was emotionally worked up writing this reply, but the stuttery nature (so many paragraphs of only two sentences!) made it particularly hard to read. It felt incoherent and rushed, like new insults were going straight from brain to keyboard with no later revision.
It wasn't intended as an "article" for general consumption, it was a response directly to AdTI critiquing the book excerpt that was sent to him. So, each paragraph is essentially a response to some element of the book. It seems incoherent and rushed because it does not include (most of) the context. If you had just read the excerpt, then I am sure ESR's comments would make much more sense. Think of it as having heard one side of a phone conversation.
Please. Modern "First World" nations have a birth rate of less than 2 per woman. This implies depopulation.
Exactly. The whole notion of ever exponetially increasing population is hogwash. Once developing nations become "developed" nations, the birthrate drops to break-even or below (with countries like the US growing in population primarily due to immigration).
And as industrialized nations mature, there is a natural tendency towards reduced toxic/greenhouse emmisions. I think this is mostly due to pressure from citizens that no longer have to worry about such things as "will my child be one of the 40% who die before age five?" or "will I die from some simple disease that industrialized nations have vaccines for?". They have the time, money, and improved standard of living to care about the mercury emmisions from factories.
> Have you ever seen how much a tiger has to bust > his ass to get a meal? If s/he becomes fat, no > more meals and its slim city for El Tigre.
Not to mention the fact that the tigers that were prone to getting fat would not have survived evolution. We superior humans, on the other hand, can medically treat seriously obese people (and those with various other inherited conditions), allowing those genes to continue to propogate.
I am not advocating genetic cleansing by any means, just pointing out that many undesirable genetic traits are with us for good.
Of course closed source, proprietary systems are better. When was the last time you heard of a proprietary system having security problems or backdoors? I know I wouldn't want thousands of programmers looking at the code controlling the flight of any plane I was on, since I am sure that not a single one of them would publicize the fact that there were obvious security holes or backdoors in the code. Hackers are all evil, every single one of them (and by hackers, of course I mean programmers who would dare touch open source.)
From what I have read on newscientist in the past (mostly links from/. stories), they tend to be very short on real science and very long on politics and fear mongering. If they were really strong on science, I think they would have been a little more sceptical about the assumption that all of the radiation from the phones on the train would add, "much like light from different lamps would increase the overall illumination in a room."
The radiation is just as likely to subtract, which would mean that the more cell phones on around you, the better off you would be!
> Since these things are loud, it would sort of be
> the the equivalent of suddenly being in side a
> noisy train station. There has been concern
> expressed about possible damage
What a load of crap. Now I know not to bother with "newscientist".
Ultrasound operates at frequencies in the megahertz and is nowhere near audible. Not even a bat can hear these frequencies. I used to work at an ultrasound company and I scanned my wife a dozen or more times when she was pregnant. More often than not, our daughter would be asleep in a position that would make it difficult to see her face. We certainly never had a problem with her getting "agitated".
Even if the baby does become agitated, it is more likely caused by the transducer being pushed into the mother's belly.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, the fact that the bear is dead was not at issue. We were discussing whether or not it would have been scientifically useful to have tagged and studied the bear while it was still living. Purely an academic discussion, I assure you, with absolutely no misunderstanding of the contents of the article.
Nowhere in the article does it say anyone wanted to study the carcass. They've crossbred polar and grizzly bears in captivity before, I'm sure they have all the data they want from those experiments.
You've got it exactly backwards. Sure, no one is interested in studying the carcass, because they've done all they need on captive hybrids. But I bet there are plenty of scientists who would love to get the chance to radio-tag a live one and follow it around in the wild for a while. Does it behave like a grizzly or a polar bear? Does it get along with others of either type of bear? And many more questions.
A dead bear tells no tales that haven't already been heard. A living bear would be intensely interesting to the scientific community.
Working with Microsoft consultants
I have to wonder, how much were they willing to spend on Linux consultants (which, in fact, do exist-- http://www.novell.com/ http://www.enterux.com/ http://www.redhat.com/services/consulting/ --just to name a few big ones)? It seems like there is a reluctance to spend any money on Linux. Heck, it's free software, right? Too many companies seem to look to Linux as a way to reduce costs by not spending money for the software or expertise to make it run. Too few seem to look at the longer term savings brought about by increased flexibility and better control.
Maybe if they spent the same amount on Linux consultants to show them how to get what they wanted (and maybe to help them figure out what they needed) as they spent on MS cosultants, their experience would have been a little different.
Last I heard, there was a (debatably) good reason why manufacturers don't just release all the necessary information for anyone to write a driver for their cards (or more usefully, chipsets). Aside from the typical BS about trade secrets (people reverse engineer and figure the stuff out anyway), there is the issue of publishing specs for software-controlled radios. My understanding is that the FCC frowns upon the idea of any developer anywhere being able to manipulate the radio chips to do things not considered appropriate by the FCC.
Seems to me there is a simple solution to this (which means no politicians would ever go for it, of course).
Create a tax pool and use some tax percentage that is a reasonable average. Businesses would simply report how much of their taxed revenue went to each state, then each state would get a payment based on the revenue derived from shipments to that state. Perhaps purchase data could be kept as granular as the county being shipped to, and then states could divy up the money appropriately.
So, for example, a flat 7% could be charged on all goods ordered via mail, phone, or internet and shipped. If California accounted for 20% by revenue of all orders, then CA would get 20% of "the pot". Then CA could divide the money however it wished. Maybe they could apportion it based on per-county purchase amount, or they could just rebate income taxes to counties based on each county's contribution, or whatever.
There will be some states (namely those currenty without sales tax) that will find this a great boon, and those that won't like it so much (namely those with sales tax rate higher than whatever flat rate is chosen). And yes, it means that the money won't get distributed precisely as it would if the purchases we actually made locally, but I suspect it would be close enough to matter little in reality.
Overall, this would be far simpler to administer and probably no more prone to abuse than any other system that might be dreamed up.
At least for businesses, filter out the HTML from emails. I have Thunderbird set to show me my emails in plain text only, so I'm never fooled by the URL in the link text versus the actual URL trick. For example, I just got an Ebay phishing email that when viewed as HTML appeared to have a link to
www.paypal.com/...
But when viewed as text, it was clear the link was really to
www.paypal.com.us-cgi-bin-web-scr-cmd.com/...
This one simple trick seems to be pretty reliable in spotting phishing scams.
In addition to writing to Congress, write to the largest advertisers.
TV broadcasters derive most of their revenue from advertising. If
advertisers realize that there is significant resistance among viewers
to these laws, then maybe they'll put a little pressure on the
broadcasters.
I have a feeling that will have more of an affect than yelling at
Representatives who have obviously already been paid for. The only
thing that will sway their opinion is if a clear majority of their
constituents speak out in opposition, which is extremely unlikely
to happen, no matter how popular slashdot is.
There needs to be a good name for this technique. I propose "Phishing for Phools".
-Don
Google already has a program in place to evaluate open source projects and provide a stipend. Give the money to Google with the restriction that it fund core Linux-related projects and developers. I bet we could even trust them not to fund mostly projects that would benefit them directly. I think we could even expect them to donate the administrative costs, leaving 100% of the funds for distribution.
Speaking of which, Thunderbird's IMAP support, while pretty, has one idiotic fault: there's no built-in way to purge deleted email messages. If you do manual purges with the purge button extension, you can't use the "move to deleted items folder" mode.
The "move to deleted items folder" doesn't actually remove the deleted messages from the inbox, just flags them as deleted. This sucks if your IMAP system is ever accessed from anywhere else (which is the whole freaking point of IMAP) because when you log in, you find that all the junk-email and deleted items are still sitting flagged right in your inbox.
This is a serious pisser.
I don't have any such problem, although I do use Thunderbird both at work and at home. To the best of my understanding, the messages that you "delete" are marked as such at the IMAP server, so they don't show up in your inbox from another machine.
I also thought that folders got expunged when there is more than some amount of deleted messages in them, but I could be wrong on that. I haven't used Pine for quite some time, but if I recall correctly, it showed messages as deleted if I had deleted them in Thunderbird (actually, Mozilla at the time).
I ran Ballmer's speach through the Google "marketspeak" translator and it came out something like this (paraphrasing):
"Consumers are willing to pay $700 or more for a home PC. Microsoft believes that it is in our best interest if $100 of that goes to the hardware manufacturers so that $600 is available for the consumer to give to Microsoft. This will allow for Microsoft to continue to 'innovate'."
I think the translator is incomplete, that last sentence seems untranslated to me.
Why not just peddle the bike.
This doesn't help the environment. It increases the use of batteries. Add some more acid to the compost heap.
Reminds me of an article I read a while back about the proliferation of "e-bikes" in China and how ironic it was that China was being so much more environmentally aware than us stupid Americans.
I couldn't help but think that those e-bikes were most likely replacing "regular" bikes as opposed to getting people out of their cars. So instead of reducing emissions, they were adding a bunch of lead-acid batteries that need to be charged and that would eventually go to landfills.
Of course in the poster's case, he probably would be getting out of a car, so he would be making an improvement, just not as much as if he did all the pedalling himslef. Hmmm, what affect would all the extra CO2 from the heavy breathing have?
Any why should a corporation pay any taxes.
One case I can see where a "corporation" should pay taxes (notwithstanding the arguments from IgnoramousMaximus) is when that corporation's income is being spent on something that does not generate any other tax revenue, such as off-shored workers.
Someone else suggested that corps should pay taxes on these otherwise written-off expenses, and I agree. Tax that money at a rate that would be equivalent to the average tax rate that would have been paid by US-based employees earning that income. It might help to level the global playing field a little (but I'm not an economist, and even if I was, I'd probably not fully understand all the issues involved here).
Exactly. The whole notion of ever exponetially increasing population is hogwash. Once developing nations become "developed" nations, the birthrate drops to break-even or below (with countries like the US growing in population primarily due to immigration).
And as industrialized nations mature, there is a natural tendency towards reduced toxic/greenhouse emmisions. I think this is mostly due to pressure from citizens that no longer have to worry about such things as "will my child be one of the 40% who die before age five?" or "will I die from some simple disease that industrialized nations have vaccines for?". They have the time, money, and improved standard of living to care about the mercury emmisions from factories.
> Have you ever seen how much a tiger has to bust
> his ass to get a meal? If s/he becomes fat, no
> more meals and its slim city for El Tigre.
Not to mention the fact that the tigers that were prone to getting fat would not have survived evolution. We superior humans, on the other hand, can medically treat seriously obese people (and those with various other inherited conditions), allowing those genes to continue to propogate.
I am not advocating genetic cleansing by any means, just pointing out that many undesirable genetic traits are with us for good.
Of course closed source, proprietary systems are better. When was the last time you heard of a proprietary system having security problems or backdoors? I know I wouldn't want thousands of programmers looking at the code controlling the flight of any plane I was on, since I am sure that not a single one of them would publicize the fact that there were obvious security holes or backdoors in the code. Hackers are all evil, every single one of them (and by hackers, of course I mean programmers who would dare touch open source.)
From what I have read on newscientist in the past (mostly links from /. stories), they tend to be very short on real science and very long on politics and fear mongering. If they were really strong on science, I think they would have been a little more sceptical about the assumption that all of the radiation from the phones on the train would add, "much like light from different lamps would increase the overall illumination in a room."
The radiation is just as likely to subtract, which would mean that the more cell phones on around you, the better off you would be!
> Since these things are loud, it would sort of be
> the the equivalent of suddenly being in side a
> noisy train station. There has been concern
> expressed about possible damage
What a load of crap. Now I know not to bother with "newscientist".
Ultrasound operates at frequencies in the megahertz and is nowhere near audible. Not even a bat can hear these frequencies. I used to work at an ultrasound company and I scanned my wife a dozen or more times when she was pregnant. More often than not, our daughter would be asleep in a position that would make it difficult to see her face. We certainly never had a problem with her getting "agitated".
Even if the baby does become agitated, it is more likely caused by the transducer being pushed into the mother's belly.