Combine this with some sort of in-place bicycle or exercise machine and now we can finally fit exercise and conservation into our lives. After all, compressions is a pretty damn simple and pollution free (the mechanism of compression itself) technology.
The issue is larger than this. Sure we can ensure accessibility by simply not using certain types of media. That nicely solved the problem, but probably isn't a step in the right direction. The majority of humans (i.e. those not disabled or "differently"-abled in some manner) will be demanding and creating new types of user interfaces to all sorts of things. It goes further than "stop creating all these confusing new fangled graphical interfaces".
...most open source projects have CYA verbage in the licenses saying something like "THIS IS UNSUPPORTED, AS IS, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, BLAH BLAH BLAH"...
"The best online ventures are the ones which provide end users access to information they didn't have anymore.
Slashdot, for example."
WTF are you talking about? Community sites like Slashdot are going down like sinking ships. Where have you been? The only think that is keeping Slashdot up is its huge popularity, and it's parent company, whose *own* future is in question. You call that a "best online venture"? I'm sorry, but EBay and porn is a "best online venture". Not subscription-free community sites.
...for one, stop reading and posting silly questions to Slashdot, and just subscribe to any one of the mailing lists of the many open source projects around. Pick something that sounds interesting. Or find a pyschologist if you don't know what is interesting to you. Sheesh.
Governments can and will censor (no matter what the medium), and one always has to be vigilant. Let's not pat ourselves on the back and get complacent just yet.
What exactly is your point? Are you denying the possibility that flies which aren't fully sterilized may pass on defective DNA to the next generation? Do you think they actually counted each sperm cell to make sure they were all sterile?
You are also a fool, because YOU misinterpreted what the article said. Quote:
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement
the tsetse fly, which carries the parasite that causes sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in animals, was killing three million livestock animals every year.
"The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate," said John Kabayo, regional coordinator for the Pan African Tsetse and Trypanosomosis Eradication Campaign (PATTEC), inaugurated by the Organization of African Unity.
"It's no accident that the concentration of much of the world's most acute poverty is in regions of sub-Saharan Africa infested with it," he said.
When you look at the context (you *did* read the article, right), they are talking about the current effects of the tsetse fly in general, not the potential effects of the mutated one.
"One of the main reasons sub-Saharan Africa is so poor is because of problems like the tsetse fly."
Another one of the main reasons that the third world is poor in general is because it is the cheap unskilled labor ghetto of the global capitalist economy. Sure certain places are pretty inhospitable to live in...nevertheless people have been living there quite peacably in harmony with their environment until the last century or so, which saw imperial colonization, and vast (mostly forced) changes in lifestyle. I bet you also subscribe to some absolutist view of "progress".
"If science and technology can succeed in hauling these countries into the 21st century"
Dude, the third world is *IN* the 21st century. It's only in the last century that the third world existed. Previous to that, we were *all* the third world. It's just that some nations came up with a self-righteous ideology that revolves around exploiting others, and shifting responsibility down the chain to somewhere far away, to people you don't have to deal with or feel guilty about. Come on Africa, get on the gravy train! Displace all your problems *elsewhere*! By the way, we'll gladly sell you all the drugs and genetically modified organisms you need. He'll, we'll even retrain you in the "modern" way of life, since you guys *obviously* don't know what the fuck you are doing. Sheesh, these Africans!
"The suggestion that the tsetse fly, HIV, etc are helping to deal with population problems in Africa is abhorrent!"
People lived entirely fine in locations that we are now having "population" problems in. You don't see any correlation between the move to industrialization, the centralization of population, the expansion into previously untouched areas, and all these "problems" the third world keeps having?
Yes, the tsetse fly, and the various horrible epidemics in Africa are a shame, and need to be rectified, and I don't mean to minimize them. But these problems will never be solved by absolutist views on lifestyle and "progress"...we will *always* end up pitching the next "modern" thing to the third world which will never be able to catch up.
"We need to help solve these problems and make Africa wealthy."
1) release sterile males 2) lots of females get fooled 3) population drops 4) females who mated with sterile males can't reproduce, and are selected against (duh) 5) females who mated with NON-sterile males are selected FOR 6) NON-sterile male population therefore rises 7) in absence of steady stream of sterile males, population skyrockets again
Do I have this wrong? This just seems like a very temporary solution. The only hope is to perhaps reduce the population so drastically that it is logistically impossible for the remaining non-sterile males to increase the population much. It seems the only way to really "solve" the problem, would be to somehow introduce a defect which has a high probability of killing flies before reproductive age (and that's disregarding the whole issue of whether we should be selectively extincting "pesky" species).
A post here mentioned the satisfaction of a non-profit job, where people really seemed to "care". I've been loosely following the whole indymedia phenomenon, and I figure that that would be one of the most interesting types of situations to work in. You know - showing up The Man (tm), giving people a voice, revealing the truth, hacking together ad-hoc information networks from donated/scrounged hardware. You know, actually doing "Stuff that Matters".
Anyway, does anybody have any other reports from the non-profit trenches, or from indymedia itself. Is life sustainable, or do you just do it as a hobby/volunteerism?
"The average Chinese citizen does not want your revolution. They want orderly, nonviolent change."
Yeah, but how does that gloriously reaffirm the righteousness of the USA and give us high moral ground as the pioneers of freedom? Really, citizen, I'm beginning to question your unflagging patriotism. Are you a terrorist?
A system in which dissenting views are allowed (limited) exposure -- only to be swamped out by flag-waving and soundbytes -- gives people the illusion that they are living in an open society and participating in an open debate. But as long as vast swathes of history and unpopular facts are not widely known, critics will seem as though they are coming from left field and will be generally ignored, if not hated. Ironically, this small amount of openness serves to "immunize" the populace from taking opposing views seriously.
No XML is not suited for this. XML is not a panacea. XML is for representing large amounts of structured data whose primary purpose is to be interpreted and transformed, and frequently eventually presented to some user. The semantic, syntactic, and performance overhead of XML is WAY too great.
Instead we just need a simple text-only configuration file format which has support for a hierarchy of values (this gets you pretty much what XML would give you). It would also be nice if the format was position-independent, so it could be streamable. A proposal was posted somewhere, but now I cannot find the link. The format could be as simple as:
"If you were to buy a new watch, and you are the geek type, which one would you buy?"
I'd buy a decent $20 watch, and donate the other $100-200 to some worthy charity. If donating to mundane run of the mill "feed-the-starving-cure-the-sick" charities is too pedestrian for you, you could always donate to the EFF.
The conspicuous consumption of the geek crowd is amazing.
Re:Cox on governments adopting open source softwar
on
Alan Cox Interview
·
· Score: 2
"is that government unlawfully competing with private enterprise?"
Law and the free market are the ultimate monopolistic social programs of Government (after all, it's not like there are privatized courts). So how would this be "unlawful"? Unjust is another question. But since government defines law, I doubt it would be "unlawful".
Wow seems like a huge waste of time and complexity. This stuff is just crying for broadband streaming (or hell, even local "streaming" which I suppose is what the new digital format is all about).
By the way, do you get to splice pornographic images into cartoons? <quagmire>Ooooh yeah!</quagmire>
Slashdot Mirror
Combine this with some sort of in-place bicycle or exercise machine and now we can finally fit exercise and conservation into our lives. After all, compressions is a pretty damn simple and pollution free (the mechanism of compression itself) technology.
The issue is larger than this. Sure we can ensure accessibility by simply not using certain types of media. That nicely solved the problem, but probably isn't a step in the right direction. The majority of humans (i.e. those not disabled or "differently"-abled in some manner) will be demanding and creating new types of user interfaces to all sorts of things. It goes further than "stop creating all these confusing new fangled graphical interfaces".
Wow, a really helpful post on slashdot, thanks! :)
You can hack in your contextual message passing (e.g. for authentication and sessioning).
/ do cs/index.html
Try this:
Implicit contextual info in 1.2-RMI calls
http://www-und.ida.liu.se/~ricob684/java/ctxrmi
"Dump those $15 battery chargers, get a good one"
Any suggestions?
Sort of gives a whole new meaning to "one-click interface".
...for small values of 1962...
...most open source projects have CYA verbage in the licenses saying something like "THIS IS UNSUPPORTED, AS IS, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, BLAH BLAH BLAH"...
"The best online ventures are the ones which provide end users access to information they didn't have anymore.
Slashdot, for example."
WTF are you talking about? Community sites like Slashdot are going down like sinking ships. Where have you been? The only think that is keeping Slashdot up is its huge popularity, and it's parent company, whose *own* future is in question. You call that a "best online venture"? I'm sorry, but EBay and porn is a "best online venture". Not subscription-free community sites.
...for one, stop reading and posting silly questions to Slashdot, and just subscribe to any one of the mailing lists of the many open source projects around. Pick something that sounds interesting. Or find a pyschologist if you don't know what is interesting to you. Sheesh.
Governments can and will censor (no matter what the medium), and one always has to be vigilant. Let's not pat ourselves on the back and get complacent just yet.
...as the elected North American at-large representative.
(reposted from here because original poster, rs79, apparently did not have enough karma to bump this up to being visible)
Please mod parent up moderators.
"And to say that it lives in corporate back pockets indicates that you don't know much about WIPO."
Well, ok, to be fair, governments live in corporate back pockets also.
What exactly is your point? Are you denying the possibility that flies which aren't fully sterilized may pass on defective DNA to the next generation? Do you think they actually counted each sperm cell to make sure they were all sterile?
When you look at the context (you *did* read the article, right), they are talking about the current effects of the tsetse fly in general, not the potential effects of the mutated one.
"One of the main reasons sub-Saharan Africa is so poor is because of problems like the tsetse fly."
Another one of the main reasons that the third world is poor in general is because it is the cheap unskilled labor ghetto of the global capitalist economy. Sure certain places are pretty inhospitable to live in...nevertheless people have been living there quite peacably in harmony with their environment until the last century or so, which saw imperial colonization, and vast (mostly forced) changes in lifestyle. I bet you also subscribe to some absolutist view of "progress".
"If science and technology can succeed in hauling these countries into the 21st century"
Dude, the third world is *IN* the 21st century. It's only in the last century that the third world existed. Previous to that, we were *all* the third world. It's just that some nations came up with a self-righteous ideology that revolves around exploiting others, and shifting responsibility down the chain to somewhere far away, to people you don't have to deal with or feel guilty about. Come on Africa, get on the gravy train! Displace all your problems *elsewhere*! By the way, we'll gladly sell you all the drugs and genetically modified organisms you need. He'll, we'll even retrain you in the "modern" way of life, since you guys *obviously* don't know what the fuck you are doing. Sheesh, these Africans!
"The suggestion that the tsetse fly, HIV, etc are helping to deal with population problems in Africa is abhorrent!"
People lived entirely fine in locations that we are now having "population" problems in. You don't see any correlation between the move to industrialization, the centralization of population, the expansion into previously untouched areas, and all these "problems" the third world keeps having?
Yes, the tsetse fly, and the various horrible epidemics in Africa are a shame, and need to be rectified, and I don't mean to minimize them. But these problems will never be solved by absolutist views on lifestyle and "progress"...we will *always* end up pitching the next "modern" thing to the third world which will never be able to catch up.
"We need to help solve these problems and make Africa wealthy."
And hence the vicious cycle...
1) release sterile males
2) lots of females get fooled
3) population drops
4) females who mated with sterile males can't reproduce, and are selected against (duh)
5) females who mated with NON-sterile males are selected FOR
6) NON-sterile male population therefore rises
7) in absence of steady stream of sterile males, population skyrockets again
Do I have this wrong? This just seems like a very temporary solution. The only hope is to perhaps reduce the population so drastically that it is logistically impossible for the remaining non-sterile males to increase the population much. It seems the only way to really "solve" the problem, would be to somehow introduce a defect which has a high probability of killing flies before reproductive age (and that's disregarding the whole issue of whether we should be selectively extincting "pesky" species).
A post here mentioned the satisfaction of a non-profit job, where people really seemed to "care". I've been loosely following the whole indymedia phenomenon, and I figure that that would be one of the most interesting types of situations to work in. You know - showing up The Man (tm), giving people a voice, revealing the truth, hacking together ad-hoc information networks from donated/scrounged hardware. You know, actually doing "Stuff that Matters".
Anyway, does anybody have any other reports from the non-profit trenches, or from indymedia itself. Is life sustainable, or do you just do it as a hobby/volunteerism?
"The average Chinese citizen does not want your revolution. They want orderly, nonviolent change."
Yeah, but how does that gloriously reaffirm the righteousness of the USA and give us high moral ground as the pioneers of freedom? Really, citizen, I'm beginning to question your unflagging patriotism. Are you a terrorist?
Good thing we live in the good old US of A.
(sorry, it was too easy)
No XML is not suited for this. XML is not a panacea. XML is for representing large amounts of structured data whose primary purpose is to be interpreted and transformed, and frequently eventually presented to some user. The semantic, syntactic, and performance overhead of XML is WAY too great.
Instead we just need a simple text-only configuration file format which has support for a hierarchy of values (this gets you pretty much what XML would give you). It would also be nice if the format was position-independent, so it could be streamable. A proposal was posted somewhere, but now I cannot find the link. The format could be as simple as:
toplevelkey=value
[tab]branchname1
[tab]branch-key1=value
[tab]branch-key2=value
[tab][tab]branchname2
[tab][tab]branch-key3=value
you get the idea. Please don't throw XML into the mix, it will not simplify things.
"If you were to buy a new watch, and you are the geek type, which one would you buy?"
I'd buy a decent $20 watch, and donate the other $100-200 to some worthy charity. If donating to mundane run of the mill "feed-the-starving-cure-the-sick" charities is too pedestrian for you, you could always donate to the EFF.
The conspicuous consumption of the geek crowd is amazing.
"is that government unlawfully competing with private enterprise?"
Law and the free market are the ultimate monopolistic social programs of Government (after all, it's not like there are privatized courts). So how would this be "unlawful"? Unjust is another question. But since government defines law, I doubt it would be "unlawful".
Wow seems like a huge waste of time and complexity. This stuff is just crying for broadband streaming (or hell, even local "streaming" which I suppose is what the new digital format is all about).
By the way, do you get to splice pornographic images into cartoons? <quagmire>Ooooh yeah!</quagmire>