Let a private business go through all the work and expense of developing a drug, and then simply procure it because of "public good."
Patents are a state intervention in the marketplace. When they don't serve the public interest, they ought to be revoked.
Anyway, a great deal of medically research is already publicly funded; big pharma just rakes the profits.
How the heck did the not fail to make it to the keyboard when I typed that? Of course I'm not comparing JMS to Shakespeare, that's not fair to anyone. (I don't even think it's fair to compare Shakespeare-the-actual-writer with Shakespeare-the-annoited-culture-hero, but that's another topic...)
Unfortunately, there's little concern for "suspense", which the vast majority of the TV viewing public prefers.
"Suspense" is a cheap device for hack horror flicks. Once you've seen what's going to happen, the suspense is over.
What makes, say, Hamlet a great work (and I'm comparing JMS to Shakespeare) is not the "suspense" of whether Hamlet's going to kill himeself or the king. We know the ending, yet we return over and over again.
The "real world" of "objective reality" is consenus-based, and that consensus has been known to change. Any statement about the "objective" universe more detailed than "the universe is doing what the universe is doing" is an approximation, a statement about our model(s) of the universe.
Consult your local Zen master for further enlightenment. Or your pineal gland, whatever.
The broadcast is open only those those who tune it in. Don't like Stern? Don't listen. It's not like he's standing on your front step shouting cuss words, you have to explictly choose to listen.
A reverend Donald Wildman in Mississippi heard something on the radio that he didn't like... Well reverend, did anyone ever tell you that there are two knobs on the radio? Two knobs on the radio! Course, I'm sure the reverend isn't too comfortable with anything that has two knobs on it... Well hey, reverend, there are two knobs on the radio! One of the turns the radio off, the other changes the station! Imagine that, reverend! You can actually change the station! It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was founded on! Look it up in the library, reverend, if you have any of them left when you've finished burning all the books! -- George Carlin
If you can't show daily measurement of the maturity of the code, how can anybody make a decision about schedules, resources, or when to ship? It'll all be just wild ass guesswork, and you'll suffer as a result.
You can have all sort of measurements, but the question of whether they are accurate or meaningful is another question...
Where do you draw the line? Shouldn't you also avoid tables for the benefit of those still using NCSA Mosaic? What about the small but significant CERN Linemode demographic?
I don't have any Mosaic hits in my logs. I do have Netscape 4 and IE 4 hits - not a lot, but some. If you want the maximum audience for your content, that suggests where to draw the line.
Now that modern, standards-compliant browsers like Firefox exist and are freely available, it's more than about time to knock Netscape 4.7 on the head and tell those still using it to upgrade or be left behind.
Firefox requires a 233Mhz Pentium, and recommends a 500MHz box with 128 MB. Believe it or not, there are still people out there with computers that don't meet the required, much less recommended, spec.
For mypersonalwebsites, it's all content, and there's no reason to leave anyone behind for the sake of eye candy.
For the site that pays the bills, our members are antique dealers, and (at least according to the boss) as a whole they are a significantly non-tech-savvy bunch, so suggesting any sort of upgrade is right out. (Maybe antique dealers like using "antique" software and hardware, I dunno.) I pitch it to the lowest common denominator.
I keep Javascript to a minimum and don't use the newest features.
Plus, you don't have to coerce your users into downloading and installing a multi-meg JVM.
Yeah, that's the number one reason ehy Java applets suck.
But with fancy Javascript you might have to coerce them into installing a whole new browser with a reasonably modern version of Javascript. I have hits on my website from people running Netscape 4.73 (on Windows 98), after all...
But how does the vendor knows that you didnt sent him:
encrypt(Kbankfoo, sign(Kself, "Authorize $2 to [vendor] from account 000001 at bank foo"))
Cryptographic cut-and-choose protocols.
Bascially, you send 100 sealed (encrypted), but unsigned, money orders to the vendor. The vendor picks 99 of them, and says "Open these". You do (you provide the decryption keys), he sees that they're all for $200, so he has a pretty good assurance that the 100th is also for $200. You sign the 100th.
You're sort of signing through the envelope, so the metaphor breaks down (I guess you can imagine a piece of carbon paper in there)...actually what's involved are, IIRC, "blinded" crytographic signatures. See Schneider's Applied Cryptography for the gory details.
Technofetishism mixed with Cartesian dualism resulting in some idea that we're going to "leave our bodies behind" and emerge into a more perfect world of "pure mind" is sloppy thinking, not open mindedness.
It's sad that you think the physical world is something "mere" that we should attempt to "get beyond".
Rockie nWood, caveman unfrozen from the depths of the Ice mountain 8 years ago. He attended law school ever since and successfully got in flow with our society.
Come back when there's one which has survived constant wind, rain and earthquakes for at least 1000 years
Considering that the technique isn't that old, you'll have to wait. But constant wind, rain, and earthquakes for 1000 years? Dude, which circle of hell do you live in?:-)
Straw bale houses are usually finished with stucco, which has been a popular exterior for a long long time.
Will fall over upon application of very little lateral force -- no matter how strong you say it is... Dissolves in the rain.
How much lateral force does a typical home get exposed to? These
straw bale houses have survived for over 60 years, and some from the 1800s are still standing in Nebraska. They're strong enough, and obviously they don't dissolve in the rain.
Ever logged into your machine and authenticated against a server, LDAP. Ever done a directory lookup on someone using Outlook at work? LDAP. Use happy fancy Cisco VoIP phones?
Not since using workstation labs in grad school (which would have been NIS in one lab and Kerberos in another); no; and no.
As a Unix geek, most places I've worked there were a handful of boxes to which you might log in, and it was not desired to replicate or centralize logins, you were supposed to have access only to certain machines. Whatever PC or workstation I had on my desk was mine, authentication (if any) was local. And as I said, in the only case I can recall where it was centralized, LDAP wasn't used (in fact it didn't even exist yet).
Never used Outlook (shudder); used Bloated Notes for a while when at IBM, but I can't imagine it would have used anything as standards-compliant as LDAP:-)
And I've never been in the same room with a VoIP phone. (VoIP is another thing which seems to me to be "much ado about nothing".)
So I'm wondering if there's a sizable population in the Linux community like me, to whom LDAP is something they don't use or really care much about, and that's why the support is (according to the original querent) so bad...
LDAP is Linux's ultimate ability that permiates everything Linux can do and makes the many peices of Linux whole.
Pre-emptively, let me say: this is not a troll. Maybe a stupid question, but an honest one.
I've been spending entirely too much time in front of computers since the early 1980s. I have never been in any environment where LDAP - or indeed, and "directory service" - or the lack of it had any impact on my life at all.
I've worked in some large companies - IBM, TRW - that may have had some LDAP something running somewhere, but I can't recall any time that I directly or indirectly used it.
So, somebody tell me: wtf is the big deal? What am I missing that is "critical to Linux's survival" but has never impacted my life one whit?
The questions of what is a legitimate government service is a matter of debate.
Sure. I'm all for smaller government...though let's say that as a libertarian socialist the parts I want to shrink are probably radically different from the parts you want to shrink. (How about we start by revoking the government's power to issue corporate charters, patents, copyrights, land deeds except owner-occupied residences...)
But when you can tell me why making more money means I should pay a higher Percentage of that money then I'll agree that a flat tax is stupid. A flat tax is fair. An adjusted tax is not
What's "fair" is also a matter of debate. Is it "fair" that there are homeless people in a nation where there are billionaires?
If you advocate a flat tax, you've already got a system where the more you make, the more money you pay in taxes; the only question is the shape of the curve. Why is t=C*I fundamentally more fair than t=C*I^2 or t=C*e^I?
A progressive income tax balances regressivity of sales and (less so) property taxes, enough that total percent of income as taxes ends up pretty flat (or used to, before the current frenzy of tax cuts for the extremely wealthy.)
Is is fair that those with higher income pay more tax? The wealthy certainly enjoy more benefit from the state's creation and enforcement of artificial property rights than do the poor. Also progressive taxes act as a governor those actions of the state that tend to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few.
I'd much rather see an adjusted flat tax (adjust the bottom rung of people so it wouldn't be as regressive)...
A "flat tax" is still an income tax.
Sure would be cheaper that what I pay now...even with the tax cuts that did help some
You then go on to complain about the quality of government services.
We'd all like lower taxes. But you get what you pay for. (Sure, there's some stuff we can and should stop paying for - wars of agression, prosecuting and punishing consenual crimes, et cetera, and we could save a few bucks there. But you've got to cut the government spending before you cut the tax income, especially when you're deep in debt.)
The U.S. has very low tax rates compared to other industrialed nations.
Hell, I have to work almost half a year just to pay the damned taxes...
I'm getting tired of this right-wing carard. With a progressive income tax, if you worked only half the year, you'd be taxed less.
Any chance that methane isomers might be a way to check? Or does methane come only in one version?
It's been about 20 years since my last chemistry class, but I'm pretty sure methane is CH4, and that there's only one way to fit one carbon and four hydrogens together with covalent bonds.
Though open-source may be great, why should I be *forced* to GPL my game code, which has little to do with LibSDL development?
If your game truly has little to do with LibSDL, it is not a derivative work, and therefore doesn't have to be GPL'ed. I doubt you could sucessfully argue that a game isn't a derivative work of the rendering library it depends upon, though.
The question of whether linking a library into an application makes the result a derivative work is an open one. The FSF has it's opionion, but as they note, "[it] is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide."
But want to make a derivative work, the cost is making it GPL'ed.
The Constitution also says that blacks count as three-fifths of a person.
No, the Constitution says no such thing.
Article. I, Section 2: "...which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Does it explictly say "black persons"? No. And a free black man would have (or at least should have under that clause) been counted as a whole person. But those "all other Persons" was clearly intended, and was interpreted, to mean victims of slavery. (After you've accounted for free people, indentured servants, and natives, who else is left?)
It should be clear that in order to have a good society, it requires much more than 2.2% of that population to either be incarcerated or closely monitored and controlled by the government right?
That is what every other society in the world has done up to now, right?
Not sure if you're naive, sarcastic, or trolling, so let me point out that the US has, both per capita and in absolute numbers, the highest prision population on the planet. (At least according to official numbers. It's alleged by some that China and North Korea have imprisoned people that they don't officially admit to. OTOH, post-PATRIOT act, it seems we're starting to do that too...)
Our problem is definitely not that we're not locking enough people up. We're locking up far to many people, mostly for non-violent drug crimes.
Anyway...many people on probation or parole are on some sort of "home detention" and wear electronic devices (often an anklet) that must be within range of a base station. My brother, after a DUI conviction, had one of these for a while, and we were certainly glad it allowed him to get out of prison more quickly. The use of GPS seems in line with this precedent.
My only concern is that when it becomes easier for the state to bring and keep you "in the system", it's possible that more people will end up there. At least when it costs taxpayers more money to punish lawbreakers, there's some incentive to only make laws against acts that actually violate the rights of others. But at least so far this seems targeted at enforcing restraining orders; having spent a week or so in fear while the cops got around to tracking down a demented ex who was stalking my housemate, sounds good to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents are a state intervention in the marketplace. When they don't serve the public interest, they ought to be revoked. Anyway, a great deal of medically research is already publicly funded; big pharma just rakes the profits.
What an embarassing typo! Please change that to "and I'm not comparing JMS to Shakespeare" in my post. :-)
How the heck did the not fail to make it to the keyboard when I typed that? Of course I'm not comparing JMS to Shakespeare, that's not fair to anyone. (I don't even think it's fair to compare Shakespeare-the-actual-writer with Shakespeare-the-annoited-culture-hero, but that's another topic...)
"Suspense" is a cheap device for hack horror flicks. Once you've seen what's going to happen, the suspense is over.
What makes, say, Hamlet a great work (and I'm comparing JMS to Shakespeare) is not the "suspense" of whether Hamlet's going to kill himeself or the king. We know the ending, yet we return over and over again.
Depends on what you mean by "real world". The "real world" of experience is subjective, and statements about it can be simultaneously true, false, true and false, meaningless, true and meaningless, false and meaningless, and true and false and meaningless.
The "real world" of "objective reality" is consenus-based, and that consensus has been known to change. Any statement about the "objective" universe more detailed than "the universe is doing what the universe is doing" is an approximation, a statement about our model(s) of the universe.
Consult your local Zen master for further enlightenment. Or your pineal gland, whatever.
The broadcast is open only those those who tune it in. Don't like Stern? Don't listen. It's not like he's standing on your front step shouting cuss words, you have to explictly choose to listen.
You can have all sort of measurements, but the question of whether they are accurate or meaningful is another question...
I don't have any Mosaic hits in my logs. I do have Netscape 4 and IE 4 hits - not a lot, but some. If you want the maximum audience for your content, that suggests where to draw the line.
Firefox requires a 233Mhz Pentium, and recommends a 500MHz box with 128 MB. Believe it or not, there are still people out there with computers that don't meet the required, much less recommended, spec.
For my personal websites, it's all content, and there's no reason to leave anyone behind for the sake of eye candy.
For the site that pays the bills, our members are antique dealers, and (at least according to the boss) as a whole they are a significantly non-tech-savvy bunch, so suggesting any sort of upgrade is right out. (Maybe antique dealers like using "antique" software and hardware, I dunno.) I pitch it to the lowest common denominator. I keep Javascript to a minimum and don't use the newest features.
Yeah, that's the number one reason ehy Java applets suck.
But with fancy Javascript you might have to coerce them into installing a whole new browser with a reasonably modern version of Javascript. I have hits on my website from people running Netscape 4.73 (on Windows 98), after all...
Cryptographic cut-and-choose protocols.
Bascially, you send 100 sealed (encrypted), but unsigned, money orders to the vendor. The vendor picks 99 of them, and says "Open these". You do (you provide the decryption keys), he sees that they're all for $200, so he has a pretty good assurance that the 100th is also for $200. You sign the 100th.
You're sort of signing through the envelope, so the metaphor breaks down (I guess you can imagine a piece of carbon paper in there)...actually what's involved are, IIRC, "blinded" crytographic signatures. See Schneider's Applied Cryptography for the gory details.
Technofetishism mixed with Cartesian dualism resulting in some idea that we're going to "leave our bodies behind" and emerge into a more perfect world of "pure mind" is sloppy thinking, not open mindedness.
It's sad that you think the physical world is something "mere" that we should attempt to "get beyond".
As opposed to, say, C++, where writing ugly code is somehow difficult? Riiiiight.
There is not, not will there ever be, a programming language in which it is difficult to write ugly code.
Nah, his name's Cirroc: the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.
Considering that the technique isn't that old, you'll have to wait. But constant wind, rain, and earthquakes for 1000 years? Dude, which circle of hell do you live in? :-)
Straw bale houses are usually finished with stucco, which has been a popular exterior for a long long time.
How much lateral force does a typical home get exposed to? These straw bale houses have survived for over 60 years, and some from the 1800s are still standing in Nebraska. They're strong enough, and obviously they don't dissolve in the rain.
WTF are you talking about?
Not since using workstation labs in grad school (which would have been NIS in one lab and Kerberos in another); no; and no.
As a Unix geek, most places I've worked there were a handful of boxes to which you might log in, and it was not desired to replicate or centralize logins, you were supposed to have access only to certain machines. Whatever PC or workstation I had on my desk was mine, authentication (if any) was local. And as I said, in the only case I can recall where it was centralized, LDAP wasn't used (in fact it didn't even exist yet).
Never used Outlook (shudder); used Bloated Notes for a while when at IBM, but I can't imagine it would have used anything as standards-compliant as LDAP :-)
And I've never been in the same room with a VoIP phone. (VoIP is another thing which seems to me to be "much ado about nothing".)
So I'm wondering if there's a sizable population in the Linux community like me, to whom LDAP is something they don't use or really care much about, and that's why the support is (according to the original querent) so bad...
Pre-emptively, let me say: this is not a troll. Maybe a stupid question, but an honest one.
I've been spending entirely too much time in front of computers since the early 1980s. I have never been in any environment where LDAP - or indeed, and "directory service" - or the lack of it had any impact on my life at all.
I've worked in some large companies - IBM, TRW - that may have had some LDAP something running somewhere, but I can't recall any time that I directly or indirectly used it.
So, somebody tell me: wtf is the big deal? What am I missing that is "critical to Linux's survival" but has never impacted my life one whit?
If we ever work at the same place, I'll trade ya. :-) Can't stand being windowless, I get sleepy and depressed when deprived of sunlight.
Sure. I'm all for smaller government...though let's say that as a libertarian socialist the parts I want to shrink are probably radically different from the parts you want to shrink. (How about we start by revoking the government's power to issue corporate charters, patents, copyrights, land deeds except owner-occupied residences...)
What's "fair" is also a matter of debate. Is it "fair" that there are homeless people in a nation where there are billionaires?
If you advocate a flat tax, you've already got a system where the more you make, the more money you pay in taxes; the only question is the shape of the curve. Why is t=C*I fundamentally more fair than t=C*I^2 or t=C*e^I?
A progressive income tax balances regressivity of sales and (less so) property taxes, enough that total percent of income as taxes ends up pretty flat (or used to, before the current frenzy of tax cuts for the extremely wealthy.)
Is is fair that those with higher income pay more tax? The wealthy certainly enjoy more benefit from the state's creation and enforcement of artificial property rights than do the poor. Also progressive taxes act as a governor those actions of the state that tend to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few.
Yes, that's including all taxes. The total U.S. tax burdern as a percent of GDP ranks near the bottom of OECD nations.
A "flat tax" is still an income tax.
You then go on to complain about the quality of government services.
We'd all like lower taxes. But you get what you pay for. (Sure, there's some stuff we can and should stop paying for - wars of agression, prosecuting and punishing consenual crimes, et cetera, and we could save a few bucks there. But you've got to cut the government spending before you cut the tax income, especially when you're deep in debt.)
The U.S. has very low tax rates compared to other industrialed nations.
I'm getting tired of this right-wing carard. With a progressive income tax, if you worked only half the year, you'd be taxed less.
It's been about 20 years since my last chemistry class, but I'm pretty sure methane is CH4, and that there's only one way to fit one carbon and four hydrogens together with covalent bonds.
If your game truly has little to do with LibSDL, it is not a derivative work, and therefore doesn't have to be GPL'ed. I doubt you could sucessfully argue that a game isn't a derivative work of the rendering library it depends upon, though.
The question of whether linking a library into an application makes the result a derivative work is an open one. The FSF has it's opionion, but as they note, "[it] is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide."
But want to make a derivative work, the cost is making it GPL'ed.
Article. I, Section 2: "...which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Does it explictly say "black persons"? No. And a free black man would have (or at least should have under that clause) been counted as a whole person. But those "all other Persons" was clearly intended, and was interpreted, to mean victims of slavery. (After you've accounted for free people, indentured servants, and natives, who else is left?)
Not sure if you're naive, sarcastic, or trolling, so let me point out that the US has, both per capita and in absolute numbers, the highest prision population on the planet. (At least according to official numbers. It's alleged by some that China and North Korea have imprisoned people that they don't officially admit to. OTOH, post-PATRIOT act, it seems we're starting to do that too...)
Our problem is definitely not that we're not locking enough people up. We're locking up far to many people, mostly for non-violent drug crimes.
Anyway...many people on probation or parole are on some sort of "home detention" and wear electronic devices (often an anklet) that must be within range of a base station. My brother, after a DUI conviction, had one of these for a while, and we were certainly glad it allowed him to get out of prison more quickly. The use of GPS seems in line with this precedent.
My only concern is that when it becomes easier for the state to bring and keep you "in the system", it's possible that more people will end up there. At least when it costs taxpayers more money to punish lawbreakers, there's some incentive to only make laws against acts that actually violate the rights of others. But at least so far this seems targeted at enforcing restraining orders; having spent a week or so in fear while the cops got around to tracking down a demented ex who was stalking my housemate, sounds good to me.