You are ignorant of what you are discussing. Firstly, nanotech is not a "5 trillion years from now" - we are talking revolutionary, frightening implications in mere decades. It pays to prepare now.
Secondly, your insinuation that open source operating systems "don't work" is patently false.
That's a good argument against affirmative action. I agree with the CEO in that case. However, that doesn't really speak against any other forms of social responsibility. It merely shows that affirmative action can be irresponsible and immoral. (Perhaps in some cases it can be responsible and moral, too, but not in this one.)
Then there's the natural tendency of the populatio to want to increase until it has passed the carrying capacity of the environment.
Counterexample: Japan. How do you explain that? Are they "unnatural"? The word "natural" is possibly the most slippery, contested and ambiguous word in the English language. If in doubt, try expressing your sentence without it - if you can't, that should set alarm bells ringing.
I suspect (but cannot prove) that you are a scientologist stooge. Anyone can see from this directory (with 204 links) that criticisms of scientology are not limited to emnating from fundamentalist Christians - far from it. And those criticisms can hardly be dismissed as "I don't like Scientology" or being applicable to any "religion" (Scientology is not a religion, it is a money-making cult)
Or maybe Altavista's just a crappy search engine. Actually...
From an Amnesty report: These are direct quotations, they are Amnesty's words, not my own.
The human rights picture in Turkey is bleak. Torture and ill-treatment have long been routine. The 1990s have seen the emergence of "disappearances" and extrajudicial executions. Turkey's citizens do not enjoy true freedom of expression. The security forces are the most powerful group in the country and they have treated human rights with contempt. Political violence has been a serious problem for almost three decades. Recent Turkish history has seen three military coups and, since the 1980s, armed conflict between the security forces and opposition groups based in the mountains of the southeast and the cities of west Turkey. Armed opposition groups have also abused human rights. The largest armed opposition group is the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK).
Successive governments have either denied that human rights violations occur, or justified them as the inevitable consequence of defending national security. The result is that no one in Turkey enjoys true personal security. Despite repeated promises of reform, Turkish citizens can still be arbitrarily detained. In custody, they will be unprotected against torture, still a standard method of interrogation. Since 1980 more than 400 people have reportedly been tortured to death in custody. "Disappearances" and political killings have claimed thousands of victims since 1991.
Even people fighting alongside the security forces are put at risk by the state's lawless methods. In January 1996 the government announced that the PKK had massacred 11 men near the remote village of Guclukonak. Seven of the victims were members of the local village guard force. Independent investigations suggested that the massacre was the work of the security forces. The international community has turned a blind eye to Turkey's human rights record. They have echoed the Turkish Government's claim that the threat to national security must be defeated at any cost to human rights. They have accepted official window-dressing as progress towards human rights protection. They have put the interests of trade and political allegiance before the security of Turkish citizens.
Strong data typing is for those who realise that there are things that are best left to the computer so we can get on with more interesting stuff, otherwise we'd all be coding in machine code today.
Well, it's not too hard to draw some conclusions from the article and the Intel piece it's presumably based upon.
ZDNet are clueless, but most of us knew that already. They refer to "releasing it to open source", which is a clunky phrase of ambiguous meaning. It could mean, releasing it to run on an open source platform like Linux, without actually being open source.
Most importantly, because it's cryptography, there will be restrictions on which countries you can export it to. But I don't see any difference between the inability to enforce that rule on licensees, whether it's open source or just free of charge. So I don't think that should be a problem.
"As an open source technology, CDSA can now be exported with greatly reduced restrictions**." (see point 2 for caveat). It may be that the only reason they're providing it as source code is to get around idiotic US export laws. That would be a very cynical claim though...
From Intel: "Companies can view the source code to verify for themselves that no backdoors or security holes exist in the software." This is pretty black-and-white. It's a step forward.
From Intel again: "Experience with open source technology such as Linux reveals that companies can often resolve problems by examining and modifying the working code, or by collaborating with open source developers on a fix." This strongly suggests that they will allow you to distribute your fixes - otherwise how could you collaborate? OTOH, it might turn out like the SCSL, where you can share code in theory, but only by posting it to a moderated, licensees-only site (this is what happens with Java platform source code).
It could also simply be that it includes inline assembly language with the special new optimized instructions, but only for critical sections. It's crazy to write a whole app in assembler these days (unless it's for an embedded system, but even then...), but it sometimes makes sense to do small parts in assembler.
Whether or not that's true, powdered milk can be lethal, and, because of poor water supplies and poor education, is a leading cause of death for babies and infants in poor countries. Moreover, lactose intolerance affects a large proportion of the world's population. See:
Dyson is a woman, she fails to meet the narrow standards demanded of women, therefore she cannot be treated as a human.
You're actually saying that the NYT are treating her as subhuman. Come on, that's ridiculous. I know some men are really like this, but the article doesn't support that claim. Describing what someone looks like, in the eye of a certain beholder, does not amount to treating them as subhuman.
By stark contrast, you pointedly ignore how Richard Stallman is treated. Oh, so it's just par for the course if Stallman is mocked for his looks, but if a women is mocked for her looks (and for God's sake, don't women mock each other for their looks often enough!!) - it's automatically evidence of misogyny? How blinkered and biased is that!
Much of what passes for feminism is obscurantist nonsense, in my experience. "Transcending patriarchical reason" and all that nonsense.
The trouble is, you get a rebound effect, where feminists go too far and take on the attributes of the oppressors (and even in some cases become the oppressors, ironically).
I'm sure they could get away with that, but it's like busting AOL for allowing their pipes to be used to kiddie porn. I mean, yeah, to the extent that they can prevent it, they should of course - but the technology to do it 100% accurately just doesn't exist. Think common carrier status.
The trouble is, although I basically agree with the idea of FreeNet, I haven't heard a really convincing argument for that. At the moment it still looks like it will be for privacy nuts, geeks and pornographers. (Okay, so there are a lot of geeks, and even more porn consumers, but still...)
Perhaps I'm just being shortsighted. I think most people on this thread are. If they even bothered to read the article and the FAQ.
It's very ironic that your username is Top Shelf. This wouldn't have anything to do with those infamous top shelf publications would it? The ones that people are so keen to buy, you know, anonymously?
There's actually one very good reason why FreeNet is needed, and that has nothing to do with trivial personal reasons. When molecular nanotechnology builds up steam, the big industries of this world (energy, monoagriculture, pharmaceuticals, etc.) are going to see it as an enormous threat to their oligopolies, because it threatens to bring about the decentralization of production (If I have a magic box which produces my basic needs, why should I do this shitty job in a telesales center?). They will try extremely hard to control MNT absolutely, with horrifying consequences if they succeed. They will use fearsome propaganda technologies, even mind control where they can get away with it, and free channels of information will be essential to fight back...
Sigh. Here we go again. I gotta stop feeding the trolls.
1.Well for starters I really don't know a whit of Java
Fair enough.
2. Using java makes the whole thing much less cross platform
Less than what? Evidence?
3. The size of the java compiler and "runtime environment" limits access. g++ can fit quite well on my small hd. Java could not.
Just how tiny is your HDD?? Data will present space problems, not code.
4. Concept of having information residing on a changing number of systems prevents total 100% access of that data.
Oh boo hoo. Sometimes data is inaccessible. Live with it.
5. Specialized clients are also a pain. Intelgration with standard protocols would be a nice thing. I can hardly see this getting popular unless popular browsers support it.
There are no standard protocols! This is not a standard idea! You're asking for the impossible!
They're doing the next best thing - all open source and thus open standards. People can patch Mozilla to use it. If it gets popular, browser support will be no impediment.
6. Evil powers that be might just try to take it. (I get daily CVS snapshots from their page just in case).
You're absolutely right about that. But I don't think anyone will be able to erase all copies of it.:-)
That's right, you can sell it, but you can't prevent others from doing so, as long as they abide by terms of the GPL. So in practice, you can only "sustainably" make money (and I'm not talking about environmentally sustainability!) from value add like proprietary add ons, or tech support, or training, because the Internet will undercut you with its effective $0 distribution cost.
Slashdot Mirror
This is silly. Physicists, and others, brainstorm all the time. It pays to bounce ideas off one another.
Secondly, your insinuation that open source operating systems "don't work" is patently false.
Counterexample: Japan. How do you explain that? Are they "unnatural"? The word "natural" is possibly the most slippery, contested and ambiguous word in the English language. If in doubt, try expressing your sentence without it - if you can't, that should set alarm bells ringing.
Or maybe Altavista's just a crappy search engine. Actually...
The human rights picture in Turkey is bleak. Torture and ill-treatment have long been routine. The 1990s have seen the emergence of "disappearances" and extrajudicial executions. Turkey's citizens do not enjoy true freedom of expression. The security forces are the most powerful group in the country and they have treated human rights with contempt. Political violence has been a serious problem for almost three decades. Recent Turkish history has seen three military coups and, since the 1980s, armed conflict between the security forces and opposition groups based in the mountains of the southeast and the cities of west Turkey. Armed opposition groups have also abused human rights. The largest armed opposition group is the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK).
Successive governments have either denied that human rights violations occur, or justified them as the inevitable consequence of defending national security. The result is that no one in Turkey enjoys true personal security. Despite repeated promises of reform, Turkish citizens can still be arbitrarily detained. In custody, they will be unprotected against torture, still a standard method of interrogation. Since 1980 more than 400 people have reportedly been tortured to death in custody. "Disappearances" and political killings have claimed thousands of victims since 1991.
Even people fighting alongside the security forces are put at risk by the state's lawless methods. In January 1996 the government announced that the PKK had massacred 11 men near the remote village of Guclukonak. Seven of the victims were members of the local village guard force. Independent investigations suggested that the massacre was the work of the security forces. The international community has turned a blind eye to Turkey's human rights record. They have echoed the Turkish Government's claim that the threat to national security must be defeated at any cost to human rights. They have accepted official window-dressing as progress towards human rights protection. They have put the interests of trade and political allegiance before the security of Turkish citizens.
Whether or not that's true, powdered milk can be lethal, and, because of poor water supplies and poor education, is a leading cause of death for babies and infants in poor countries. Moreover, lactose intolerance affects a large proportion of the world's population. See:
http://www.gn.apc.org/babymilk/
and find out just how evil Nestle et al really are. Boycott Nestle!
http://directory.mozilla. org/Computers/Internet/WWW/Anonymous_Surfing/
Dyson is a woman, she fails to meet the narrow standards demanded of women, therefore she cannot be treated as a human.
You're actually saying that the NYT are treating her as subhuman. Come on, that's ridiculous. I know some men are really like this, but the article doesn't support that claim. Describing what someone looks like, in the eye of a certain beholder, does not amount to treating them as subhuman.
By stark contrast, you pointedly ignore how Richard Stallman is treated. Oh, so it's just par for the course if Stallman is mocked for his looks, but if a women is mocked for her looks (and for God's sake, don't women mock each other for their looks often enough!!) - it's automatically evidence of misogyny? How blinkered and biased is that!
Much of what passes for feminism is obscurantist nonsense, in my experience. "Transcending patriarchical reason" and all that nonsense.
The trouble is, you get a rebound effect, where feminists go too far and take on the attributes of the oppressors (and even in some cases become the oppressors, ironically).
And anyway, hip silicon valley types are always turning nouns into verbs these days. Like, to IPO.
Perhaps I'm just being shortsighted. I think most people on this thread are. If they even bothered to read the article and the FAQ.
There's actually one very good reason why FreeNet is needed, and that has nothing to do with trivial personal reasons. When molecular nanotechnology builds up steam, the big industries of this world (energy, monoagriculture, pharmaceuticals, etc.) are going to see it as an enormous threat to their oligopolies, because it threatens to bring about the decentralization of production (If I have a magic box which produces my basic needs, why should I do this shitty job in a telesales center?). They will try extremely hard to control MNT absolutely, with horrifying consequences if they succeed. They will use fearsome propaganda technologies, even mind control where they can get away with it, and free channels of information will be essential to fight back...
But anyway, that's getting offtopic.
1.Well for starters I really don't know a whit of Java
Fair enough.
2. Using java makes the whole thing much less cross platform
Less than what? Evidence?
3. The size of the java compiler and "runtime environment" limits access. g++ can fit quite well on my small hd. Java could not.
Just how tiny is your HDD?? Data will present space problems, not code.
4. Concept of having information residing on a changing number of systems prevents total 100% access of that data.
Oh boo hoo. Sometimes data is inaccessible. Live with it.
5. Specialized clients are also a pain. Intelgration with standard protocols would be a nice thing. I can hardly see this getting popular unless popular browsers support it.
There are no standard protocols! This is not a standard idea! You're asking for the impossible!
They're doing the next best thing - all open source and thus open standards. People can patch Mozilla to use it. If it gets popular, browser support will be no impediment.
6. Evil powers that be might just try to take it. (I get daily CVS snapshots from their page just in case).
You're absolutely right about that. But I don't think anyone will be able to erase all copies of it. :-)