There was a recent PBS show on GMOs (I forget if it was Nova, or Viewpoint, whatever).
In general GMOs is a big can of worms that has potentially unknowable disastrous side effects if we don't keep it under the strictest of control. For instance, the new corn is great, but now it kills of a rare type of butterfly. Or how about that case where a farmer's GMO corn somehow crossbreed with a neighboring farmer's corn, and now the biotech company wants the second farmer to pay for the corn he is using. Also, farmers are off pesticides, but guess what? The same people who were selling them pesticides are now selling them corn which cannot reproduce, so they are again still beholding to that company, and will have to rebuy ("relicense"?) the right to grow that type of corn every year. How do we keep GMOs from interacting with other pure organisms? How can we know every possible outcome, for something nature has never encountered? We can't. Once the cat's out of the bag you can't put it back in.
On the other side though, and a side I can sympathize with, are poorer nations who *need* food. They *need* GMOs so they don't starve and die. Now that I understand (set aside a separate whole rant on globalization). So, as usual we have to strike a balance here. So those who really need GMOs can get them, and those who just think they're the latest greatest thing aren't using them recklessly (um, is anybody as annoyed as me about the whole "antibacterial" this and "antibacterial" that (can anybody say "resistence")? I can't even come up with a funny quip, because I'm sure the product already exists!).
Um, isn't this a Good Thing? I mean, now freelancers have *more* control over their own work. Why would one suggest that this would "marginalize freelance writers in favor of staff flacks"? Those freelance writers will divert their content to more freelance/independent-friendly publishers/outlets. It's sort of like saying "Giving artists more control might leave the big record labels with only retreaded pre-fabricated pop bands, that's *awful*!" GOOD. It will mean people turn away from the conventional media sources to alternative ones that better reward artists/authors.
Is the art "computer-generated" as in a computer program generated it, or "computer-generated" as in it was a tool a real human used to create the art (through Photoshop, whatever).
In the latter case, I would think that it could still be considered "art proper". The former case though might be a little tricky - there is nothing the computer is trying to "get accross", no emotion it's trying to convey. That doesn't stop humans from appreciating it, but if one includes some sort of impetus of the artist in the definition of art, then perhaps that fails.
"Pfizer marketed the heck out of it to give it the prominent place in the market it has now."
"But if initial intellectual property is not patented, corporations will not aggressively push the products into the marketplace."
This begs the question of whether marketability should really be the end goal of research. As you say yourself, prozac might not be as ubiquitously used if it were not marketed and "aggressively pushed". But you fail to answer whether this is a GOOD thing or not. Would an equivalent product have taken prozac's place? Your argument is that if prozac hadn't have been patented Pfizer wouldn't have been able to accumulate should a large amount of marketing money to market it. This says NOTHING about the quality of the product. Your assumption seems to be that producing products should be the end goal.
"But if initial intellectual property is not patented, corporations will not aggressively push the products into the marketplace."
So what? Prove this is a bad thing. Prove that doing the reverse is a good thing. You're not saying anything.
Or, if your speed decreases from, say 50 mph, to 0 mph within 1 second, (and perhaps the same happened to another car very close to you) perhaps they can automatically dispatch an ambulance or something.
And it took me a few parses to figure out what CmdrTaco meant by "CSS Description Library" in the title. I can't wait to get this software so I can *describe* all my DVDs. Yay!
My purely speculative guess is that there should even be speed up in non-natively compiled code (code *you* write), because the entire core API can be natively compiled, as opposed to being in Java itself (as Sun's is). This would mean you wouldn't break WORA, but once you flip the native toggle on the GCJ runtime, you should see vast improvements in speed.
I about a month I will be making a big PR move: I will be having my birthday! Everybody is invited to send me presents. It's great, I don't even have to DO anything! 8)
I hope it's not overshadowed by the United States "Fourth-Of-July" PR event though...
Let's face it, most tutorial languages are picked for being high level, and having a fairly shallow learning curve. When I started learning programming, Pascal was used, which was fine in the days of purely procedural programming. Now that OO is more or less the defacto way of thinking about things (NOT to say that we should only be programming in OO languages), it makes sense to go with Java. Java was designed from the very very beginning with the explicit goal of making it harder to make mistakes - errors are caught up-front as much as possible.
Java has:
1) strict typing
2) dynamic linking
3) built-in memory management
4) a consistent implementation and rich libraries from a single vendor (for better or for worse)
5) works *identically* on many platforms ("identically" is the key here...we don't need to be spending half our time teaching build environments for various systems)
For all these reasons, it makes sense to use Java as a beginning language. The basic programming concepts are all there (yes, even resource management). The problem with C and C++ is that it is very easy to obscure larger concepts with intimate technical details, the learning curve is steep. I remember when I was learning Pascal, it was as if the class hit a brick wall when pointers were introduced. Imagine if learning pointers and intimate machine-dependent ("words"??) memory management was the prerequisite to larger programming concepts such as conditional statements, iteration, recursion, etc. The whole learning process would be stymied.
And I used to be one of the oh-so-cool C++ programmers who thought that Java was just a kindergarten-level "fad", and scoffed at it when it was used to teach programming in CS courses. Now enterprise Java programming is my day job, and I can attest to the fact that it is NOT a fad, is very powerful, and is used to do some really serious, and really cool stuff. I'm sure assembly programmers said "C?? You don't even need to know what REGISTERS are to use that!!".
"So what if he wants to drill the oil out of the ANWR? What is it going to do sitting in the ground? Will it solve the Energy Crisis in California? Will it keep gas prices down here in the US. No, it won't."
Because, you know, the environment is obviously something we should exploit for immediate gratuitous desires (hey, mother earth's next door, I think we should go rape her - we'll just explain that we "didn't really want to pay money for a hooker" and she'll understand). Hell, we could get a whole 130 DAYS out ANWAR. Let's just disregard that the problem is not with oil supply, but with *refining* capacity. But we wouldn't want to build more refineries, that would bring down the profit margin!
Wow, you must have studied to be an asshole. I wonder if you are really like that in real life.
"All you greenies want your cake and eat it too. You want electricity and big SUV's and all of that, but you don't want to pay for it and you don't want to accept that there is a price to pay for it."
Who does? Who are you talking to? I'm sure you'd just as soon criticize people who use bicycles and public transport and buy locally grown food as cuh-razy green tree-hugging commie nuts. I don't know who you are talking about, but there are no "greenies" I know of that "want electricity and big SUV's and all of that"...in fact, that conspicuous consumption is EXACTLY what they despise. Yet when they do something about it, they are all of a sudden crazy loony greens. I think perhaps you are talking about Bobos (who, yes, have co-opted much of the environmental movement - hey, soccar moms, buy your "RealSimple" magazine subscription now!).
"Either you want us to live in the dark ages (LITERALLY) or you're willing to accept a few mooses and ducks and shit like that dead. You might live in a fantasy world where you can have it both ways, but the REAL world is a lot different."
And you might live in a totally black and white fantasy world where any progress MUST come at a cost to the environment, where no compromises are possible, and where you can peacefully go about your life conscience-free conveniently convinced that there's nothing you can do about it anyway...but the REAL world is a lot different.
Some companies have discovered the distributed computing trend and jumped on the bandwagon to get free computing power. If you want to support non-profit, open, public research, instead of closed, for-profit efforts, here are a few projects:
Seti At Home (yeah, we all knew that)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Protein Folding At Home
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/
Genome At Home
http://genomeathome.stanford.edu/
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones I run.
"Actually, this is the equivalent of having *many* (transmitting) radar stations and a *single* receiving station. The bet is that *one* of the transmitters will be in the right place to reflect signals to your receiver."
Wouldn't the solution then be to just *randomly* deflect the signal? I realize that may ruin the whole point of being "stealthy"...they'd know *something* was in their range of reception, but not know exactly where. Perhaps that's what normal "jamming" is anyway...
"What we need is a system that can store musical (and other cultural) recommendations for 150 million of our closest friends."
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
Why would we want to do something like this? I just don't get it. I don't want to be sold the "perfect" cool. I don't want to be sold ANY cool. Leave me alone. We need to stop creating and selling cool. Cool is irrational. Cool is a gimmick. Cool is a vicious cycle of making people feel inadequate so they buy your meaningless shit. I don't *want* a database of 6 billion people to tell me that yes, Limp Bizkit is indeed the coolest shit in the world, go out and buy it so you can feel good about yourselves because papa Media Industry loves you now (until of course you revert to being lame in a few months). What is Jamie smoking? "This vicious dehumanizing system is not EFFICIENT enough! Let's fix it Geeks!"
"What's to say that a bunch of poor people can't all buy stock and vote as a block?"
The idea that people shouldn't have to buy power with money. That's why we have governments - to equally represent all people. Poor people would much rather be *feeding* and *clothing* themselves than fighting off mega corporations.
I don't believe you had to purchase the service at all. If you look in the forums I think you will see this happening to many people who have no subscription AT ALL ('unsubbed'). The ONLY thing they have done is make the "test call" to set their clocks on the unit because there is no way to do that manually. Sure you could blame them for buying a piece of equipment that only allows you to set the clock by making a call to the company...but that's really a stretch. That's almost entrapment. How should I know that just making a test call is going to result in *software being downloaded and installed* on my machine? Consumer's shouldn't have to be always on edge wondering if every little feature of something can potentially be used to scam them in the future.
"Batteries...sure, use any type you like. (BUT THEY'LL BLOW UP CAUSING YOU TO HAVE TO BUY A NEW UNIT HAHAHAHAHAHAHA)"
Also remember that Machiavelli was more or less a toady to the very prince he was instructing in methods of attaining and keeping power. What would you do? Proclaim the benefits of democracy, free love, and tai chi? The Prince is at least a look at the ugly underbelly of politics for which we should design systems to keep in check.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a recent PBS show on GMOs (I forget if it was Nova, or Viewpoint, whatever).
In general GMOs is a big can of worms that has potentially unknowable disastrous side effects if we don't keep it under the strictest of control. For instance, the new corn is great, but now it kills of a rare type of butterfly. Or how about that case where a farmer's GMO corn somehow crossbreed with a neighboring farmer's corn, and now the biotech company wants the second farmer to pay for the corn he is using. Also, farmers are off pesticides, but guess what? The same people who were selling them pesticides are now selling them corn which cannot reproduce, so they are again still beholding to that company, and will have to rebuy ("relicense"?) the right to grow that type of corn every year. How do we keep GMOs from interacting with other pure organisms? How can we know every possible outcome, for something nature has never encountered? We can't. Once the cat's out of the bag you can't put it back in.
On the other side though, and a side I can sympathize with, are poorer nations who *need* food. They *need* GMOs so they don't starve and die. Now that I understand (set aside a separate whole rant on globalization). So, as usual we have to strike a balance here. So those who really need GMOs can get them, and those who just think they're the latest greatest thing aren't using them recklessly (um, is anybody as annoyed as me about the whole "antibacterial" this and "antibacterial" that (can anybody say "resistence")? I can't even come up with a funny quip, because I'm sure the product already exists!).
Um, isn't this a Good Thing? I mean, now freelancers have *more* control over their own work. Why would one suggest that this would "marginalize freelance writers in favor of staff flacks"? Those freelance writers will divert their content to more freelance/independent-friendly publishers/outlets. It's sort of like saying "Giving artists more control might leave the big record labels with only retreaded pre-fabricated pop bands, that's *awful*!" GOOD. It will mean people turn away from the conventional media sources to alternative ones that better reward artists/authors.
Is the art "computer-generated" as in a computer program generated it, or "computer-generated" as in it was a tool a real human used to create the art (through Photoshop, whatever).
In the latter case, I would think that it could still be considered "art proper". The former case though might be a little tricky - there is nothing the computer is trying to "get accross", no emotion it's trying to convey. That doesn't stop humans from appreciating it, but if one includes some sort of impetus of the artist in the definition of art, then perhaps that fails.
"Pfizer marketed the heck out of it to give it the prominent place in the market it has now."
"But if initial intellectual property is not patented, corporations will not aggressively push the products into the marketplace."
This begs the question of whether marketability should really be the end goal of research. As you say yourself, prozac might not be as ubiquitously used if it were not marketed and "aggressively pushed". But you fail to answer whether this is a GOOD thing or not. Would an equivalent product have taken prozac's place? Your argument is that if prozac hadn't have been patented Pfizer wouldn't have been able to accumulate should a large amount of marketing money to market it. This says NOTHING about the quality of the product. Your assumption seems to be that producing products should be the end goal.
"But if initial intellectual property is not patented, corporations will not aggressively push the products into the marketplace."
So what? Prove this is a bad thing. Prove that doing the reverse is a good thing. You're not saying anything.
Or, if your speed decreases from, say 50 mph, to 0 mph within 1 second, (and perhaps the same happened to another car very close to you) perhaps they can automatically dispatch an ambulance or something.
And it took me a few parses to figure out what CmdrTaco meant by "CSS Description Library" in the title. I can't wait to get this software so I can *describe* all my DVDs. Yay!
wow, analogous to the Committee on Presidential Debates...
(puts down his drum)
um, what is "Joe Cartoon" anyway? What's the typo?
My purely speculative guess is that there should even be speed up in non-natively compiled code (code *you* write), because the entire core API can be natively compiled, as opposed to being in Java itself (as Sun's is). This would mean you wouldn't break WORA, but once you flip the native toggle on the GCJ runtime, you should see vast improvements in speed.
Slashdot didn't give P3P such a warm reception the first time around.
I about a month I will be making a big PR move: I will be having my birthday! Everybody is invited to send me presents. It's great, I don't even have to DO anything! 8)
I hope it's not overshadowed by the United States "Fourth-Of-July" PR event though...
Let's face it, most tutorial languages are picked for being high level, and having a fairly shallow learning curve. When I started learning programming, Pascal was used, which was fine in the days of purely procedural programming. Now that OO is more or less the defacto way of thinking about things (NOT to say that we should only be programming in OO languages), it makes sense to go with Java. Java was designed from the very very beginning with the explicit goal of making it harder to make mistakes - errors are caught up-front as much as possible.
Java has:
1) strict typing
2) dynamic linking
3) built-in memory management
4) a consistent implementation and rich libraries from a single vendor (for better or for worse)
5) works *identically* on many platforms ("identically" is the key here...we don't need to be spending half our time teaching build environments for various systems)
For all these reasons, it makes sense to use Java as a beginning language. The basic programming concepts are all there (yes, even resource management). The problem with C and C++ is that it is very easy to obscure larger concepts with intimate technical details, the learning curve is steep. I remember when I was learning Pascal, it was as if the class hit a brick wall when pointers were introduced. Imagine if learning pointers and intimate machine-dependent ("words"??) memory management was the prerequisite to larger programming concepts such as conditional statements, iteration, recursion, etc. The whole learning process would be stymied.
And I used to be one of the oh-so-cool C++ programmers who thought that Java was just a kindergarten-level "fad", and scoffed at it when it was used to teach programming in CS courses. Now enterprise Java programming is my day job, and I can attest to the fact that it is NOT a fad, is very powerful, and is used to do some really serious, and really cool stuff. I'm sure assembly programmers said "C?? You don't even need to know what REGISTERS are to use that!!".
"So what if he wants to drill the oil out of the ANWR? What is it going to do sitting in the ground? Will it solve the Energy Crisis in California? Will it keep gas prices down here in the US. No, it won't."
Because, you know, the environment is obviously something we should exploit for immediate gratuitous desires (hey, mother earth's next door, I think we should go rape her - we'll just explain that we "didn't really want to pay money for a hooker" and she'll understand). Hell, we could get a whole 130 DAYS out ANWAR. Let's just disregard that the problem is not with oil supply, but with *refining* capacity. But we wouldn't want to build more refineries, that would bring down the profit margin!
Wow, you must have studied to be an asshole. I wonder if you are really like that in real life.
"All you greenies want your cake and eat it too. You want electricity and big SUV's and all of that, but you don't want to pay for it and you don't want to accept that there is a price to pay for it."
Who does? Who are you talking to? I'm sure you'd just as soon criticize people who use bicycles and public transport and buy locally grown food as cuh-razy green tree-hugging commie nuts. I don't know who you are talking about, but there are no "greenies" I know of that "want electricity and big SUV's and all of that"...in fact, that conspicuous consumption is EXACTLY what they despise. Yet when they do something about it, they are all of a sudden crazy loony greens. I think perhaps you are talking about Bobos (who, yes, have co-opted much of the environmental movement - hey, soccar moms, buy your "RealSimple" magazine subscription now!).
"Either you want us to live in the dark ages (LITERALLY) or you're willing to accept a few mooses and ducks and shit like that dead. You might live in a fantasy world where you can have it both ways, but the REAL world is a lot different."
And you might live in a totally black and white fantasy world where any progress MUST come at a cost to the environment, where no compromises are possible, and where you can peacefully go about your life conscience-free conveniently convinced that there's nothing you can do about it anyway...but the REAL world is a lot different.
Some companies have discovered the distributed computing trend and jumped on the bandwagon to get free computing power. If you want to support non-profit, open, public research, instead of closed, for-profit efforts, here are a few projects:
Seti At Home (yeah, we all knew that)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Protein Folding At Home
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/
Genome At Home
http://genomeathome.stanford.edu/
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones I run.
"Actually, this is the equivalent of having *many* (transmitting) radar stations and a *single* receiving station. The bet is that *one* of the transmitters will be in the right place to reflect signals to your receiver."
Wouldn't the solution then be to just *randomly* deflect the signal? I realize that may ruin the whole point of being "stealthy"...they'd know *something* was in their range of reception, but not know exactly where. Perhaps that's what normal "jamming" is anyway...
(IANAAeornauticalEngineer...)
"They get sued over copying the artile and posting it on their web site."
*** Grey-Area Alert ***
What about photocopied news articles on bulletin boards? I think a lot of this falls under fair use.
OMG...this guys is for REAL? I thought it was all some quirky in-joke, like the Church of Subgenious.
Man, now *this* is scary....
"What we need is a system that can store musical (and other cultural) recommendations for 150 million of our closest friends."
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
Why would we want to do something like this? I just don't get it. I don't want to be sold the "perfect" cool. I don't want to be sold ANY cool. Leave me alone. We need to stop creating and selling cool. Cool is irrational. Cool is a gimmick. Cool is a vicious cycle of making people feel inadequate so they buy your meaningless shit. I don't *want* a database of 6 billion people to tell me that yes, Limp Bizkit is indeed the coolest shit in the world, go out and buy it so you can feel good about yourselves because papa Media Industry loves you now (until of course you revert to being lame in a few months). What is Jamie smoking? "This vicious dehumanizing system is not EFFICIENT enough! Let's fix it Geeks!"
"What's to say that a bunch of poor people can't all buy stock and vote as a block?"
The idea that people shouldn't have to buy power with money. That's why we have governments - to equally represent all people. Poor people would much rather be *feeding* and *clothing* themselves than fighting off mega corporations.
I don't believe you had to purchase the service at all. If you look in the forums I think you will see this happening to many people who have no subscription AT ALL ('unsubbed'). The ONLY thing they have done is make the "test call" to set their clocks on the unit because there is no way to do that manually. Sure you could blame them for buying a piece of equipment that only allows you to set the clock by making a call to the company...but that's really a stretch. That's almost entrapment. How should I know that just making a test call is going to result in *software being downloaded and installed* on my machine? Consumer's shouldn't have to be always on edge wondering if every little feature of something can potentially be used to scam them in the future.
"Batteries...sure, use any type you like. (BUT THEY'LL BLOW UP CAUSING YOU TO HAVE TO BUY A NEW UNIT HAHAHAHAHAHAHA)"
...i said..."meh"
AGH! s/didn't/did !
I DID give EFF $60. I'm a good boy. Ok.
"I have donating dollar for dollar to the EFF for every product I buy from the RIAA or MPAA member companies."
Me too. $0. Oh wait, I didn't give EFF $60. So I guess that's -$60. Woah, am I sticking it to "da man"!
Also remember that Machiavelli was more or less a toady to the very prince he was instructing in methods of attaining and keeping power. What would you do? Proclaim the benefits of democracy, free love, and tai chi? The Prince is at least a look at the ugly underbelly of politics for which we should design systems to keep in check.