Context is what matters. Sure, I could correctly call an entirely artificial cherry-flavored candy "organic" because it is made out of carbon-based compounds and so is "organic" in one sense of the word, but that is not the sense which people generally interpret the word "organic" in relation to food, so this usage would be somewhat misleading.
Similarly, calling a piece of proprietory software which is downloadable without charge "free" is correct English but again not how people generally interpret "free" in relation to Linux software, so the usage is again somewhat misleading.
"Open Source" is yet another concept altogether (it is a philosophy of software engineering aimed at helping the developer through obtaining bug fixes from users, and really doesn't relate to the freedom of use at all; although in practice Open Source projects tend to be free software, the two terms aren't equivilent)
Out of interest, what is a microarray? I have visions in my head of a char array[NULL]; for some reason, but i know it can't be that:)
Good one! But seriously, microarrays (or gene chips as they are sometimes called), allow the researcher to see what genes are active at any given time. To use a computer analogy, using microarrays is like using a debugger to see what is going on when the program is actually run. It's really cool technology, but it still is fairly rare because of the cost.
When I was an undergraduate in the late '80s I remember the big fuss when our university received its first PCR machine when PCR was viewed as a high-tech futuristic technique, much as microarrays are seen today. And now look at PCR -- amateurs can do it at home! I wonder if ten years from now microarrays will be cheap enough for amateurs to play with.
Raising the minimum wage to a livable level and giving US mothers the same rights as mothers in other first world nations? Not exactly radical there. Going after Microsoft and other companies? I seem to remember that it was the Republican Teddy Roosevelt who went after Standard Oil, and the Republican Richard Nixon who went after IBM. So again hardly radical actions if conservative Republicans could do them decades ago.
Well, Clinton and Gore seem like typical Southern Democrats -- really Republicans in disguise, and about as pro-business as you can get. Except for a failed attempt at introducing National Health (which would only bring US up to par with the rest of the developed world -- hardly radical), really the Clinton-Gore administration has done nothing a moderate Republican adminstration wouldn't have done -- including overlooking human rights when business interests say so.
While it is true that nobody really knows the "One True Way" on any philosophical issue, it seems infinitely more productive to choose a position and stick with it, than to adjust one's position to avoid offense. What can compromises achieve other than a mediocre solution pleasing nobody? As George Bernard Shaw said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
That has always struck me as the most ironic of positions -- the people arguing for improved trade relations with the only Communist power left in the world worth considering are the arch-capitalists out for a buck who don't give a damn about human rights. The people arguing that China violates human rights and shouldn't be accepted by the world community until they clean up their act are for the most part liberal people who also question the motives behind capitalism.
Re:Red Star Is To Commies As Swastika Is To Nazis
on
Mozilla M16 Released
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· Score: 2
The comparsion makes no sense. Nazism was a system dedicated to hate and murder, while Communism was a system noble in intent that has merely been used from time to time to justify hate and murder. Thus Communism belongs with other systems such as Christianity, Islam, and the British and American empires. Should the crucifix, cresent, Union Jack, and Stars and Stripes also be dispensed with in your world?
Since you seem to be an anti-Communist, you ought to be pleased that Mozilla's use of Communist icongraphy is used in a rather mocking way (much as crucifixes are used by some heavy metal bands). I doubt any actual Communists are pleased by seeing their symbols used in this way.
Well, places that require a clearance generally produce products designed to kill people rather than help them, so I'm not so sure "cool" is the proper adjective...
Creative writing courses. Take one. It'll open up your eyes if you think novelists are generally rich. Almost every decent creative writing course at a university is taught by a professional writer -- sometimes quite famous ones. Do you think they would put up with that crap if they didn't have to pay their bills that way?
Actually, that might not be a bad business model for writers. The simple fact is there is hardly any money to be made by novelists. Most authors do it more or less as a hobby and have a day job as well. An author typically only recieves pennies for each copy of a novel sold.
The weathly writers such as Stephen King and Tom Clancy (and to some extent, William Gibson) made the vast majority of their money through a different application of IP -- selling the movie rights to the novels. Having the novels free but retaining the movie rights would probably work just as well if not better than the current system
Mercury also directly relates to cryptography 300 years ago because of John Wilkins' 1694 book on the subject "Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger".
It's important to remember that the viewpoint of characters in a novel is *not* always the viewpoint of the author. If you've read Zodiac, do you think Stephenson's a left-wing eco-terrorist as well as a right-wing dittohead?
Secondly, in regard to WWII Japan, I don't think you can find much that wasn't true in Cryptonomicon. Rape, murder, and slave labor were all par for the course in the Japanese Empire. If I were a member of that culture, I could only hope I'd have the strength to reject it. (More likely, I'd simply try to ignore the evil around me and go about my business like everyone else, though)
Whenever someone claims that a field is essentially complete, they are nearly always wrong. Consider what people believed in the year 1900: Physics was considered practically a completed science -- and that was right before the explosion of modern physics.
http://www.principality-sealand.net/en00.htm, is actually run by a group of people who sell fake Sealand passports. It is not a site endorsed by Prince Roy or Princess Joan
The following article from The Guardian explains the issue: Storm Warning
I will pay you $1 per year for the next hundred years, or I will pay you $5 right now.
And guess what? Any real-world company will take the $5 and run. Why? Because they are concerned about the next quarters' profit. Capitalism is a broken system. Just because Soviet Communism was even more broken doesn't change this fact.
So people are willing to pay infinite amounts of money to avoid infinitesimally small amounts of pollution? I don't think so. That means that every pollution has its price
Yeah, yeah. Heard that chestnut about a million times. The point is that there is no objective way of measuring that price.
Yes, I know this isn't obvious, but if it was obvious, there wouldn't be a Nobel prize for economics.
There is a Nobel prize in economics simply because a guy who invented dynamite decreed there to be one. He could have just as easily decreed there to be prize in phrenology.
Yes they can. They look at the price of one thing, and compare it to the price of another. AS LONG as everyone's property rights are recognized, and air and water pollution is paid for by those producing it, then all the social and environmental factors can be considered just by comparing prices.
Ever see "Dead Poets' Society"? Remember the scene where they were trying to find the best poem by quantifying "depth" and "beauty" and taking their product? That's exactly like trying to quantify pollution in dollars.
I played around with Pike for a while, and my gripe with it is that it is too C-like. At least what I want out of scripting language is a high-level environment like Perl or Python. Of course, horses for courses.
Slashdot Mirror
Context is what matters. Sure, I could correctly call an entirely artificial cherry-flavored candy "organic" because it is made out of carbon-based compounds and so is "organic" in one sense of the word, but that is not the sense which people generally interpret the word "organic" in relation to food, so this usage would be somewhat misleading.
Similarly, calling a piece of proprietory software which is downloadable without charge "free" is correct English but again not how people generally interpret "free" in relation to Linux software, so the usage is again somewhat misleading.
"Open Source" is yet another concept altogether (it is a philosophy of software engineering aimed at helping the developer through obtaining bug fixes from users, and really doesn't relate to the freedom of use at all; although in practice Open Source projects tend to be free software, the two terms aren't equivilent)
wonder if you could build an array spotter from lego mindstorms..)
:-)
That's exactly what I thought when I first saw an array spotter -- it's just a robotic pipet, after all. Of course accuracy might be a problem
Out of interest, what is a microarray? I have visions in my head of a char array[NULL]; for some reason, but i know it can't be that :)
Good one! But seriously, microarrays (or gene chips as they are sometimes called), allow the researcher to see what genes are active at any given time. To use a computer analogy, using microarrays is like using a debugger to see what is going on when the program is actually run. It's really cool technology, but it still is fairly rare because of the cost.
If you want more info on microarrays, see
http://www.gene-chips.com/
When I was an undergraduate in the late '80s I remember the big fuss when our university received its first PCR machine when PCR was viewed as a high-tech futuristic technique, much as microarrays are seen today. And now look at PCR -- amateurs can do it at home! I wonder if ten years from now microarrays will be cheap enough for amateurs to play with.
Raising the minimum wage to a livable level and giving US mothers the same rights as mothers in other first world nations? Not exactly radical there. Going after Microsoft and other companies? I seem to remember that it was the Republican Teddy Roosevelt who went after Standard Oil, and the Republican Richard Nixon who went after IBM. So again hardly radical actions if conservative Republicans could do them decades ago.
Well, Clinton and Gore seem like typical Southern Democrats -- really Republicans in disguise, and about as pro-business as you can get. Except for a failed attempt at introducing National Health (which would only bring US up to par with the rest of the developed world -- hardly radical), really the Clinton-Gore administration has done nothing a moderate Republican adminstration wouldn't have done -- including overlooking human rights when business interests say so.
While it is true that nobody really knows the "One True Way" on any philosophical issue, it seems infinitely more productive to choose a position and stick with it, than to adjust one's position to avoid offense. What can compromises achieve other than a mediocre solution pleasing nobody? As George Bernard Shaw said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
As if. Totalitarianism and capitalism get along just fine, as the history of the third world shows. Making a buck has nothing to do with free speech.
That has always struck me as the most ironic of positions -- the people arguing for improved trade relations with the only Communist power left in the world worth considering are the arch-capitalists out for a buck who don't give a damn about human rights. The people arguing that China violates human rights and shouldn't be accepted by the world community until they clean up their act are for the most part liberal people who also question the motives behind capitalism.
The comparsion makes no sense. Nazism was a system dedicated to hate and murder, while Communism was a system noble in intent that has merely been used from time to time to justify hate and murder. Thus Communism belongs with other systems such as Christianity, Islam, and the British and American empires. Should the crucifix, cresent, Union Jack, and Stars and Stripes also be dispensed with in your world?
Since you seem to be an anti-Communist, you ought to be pleased that Mozilla's use of Communist icongraphy is used in a rather mocking way (much as crucifixes are used by some heavy metal bands). I doubt any actual Communists are pleased by seeing their symbols used in this way.
Well, places that require a clearance generally produce products designed to kill people rather than help them, so I'm not so sure "cool" is the proper adjective...
Well, Brahe did have a silver nose, so if you think about it, he really was a 16th century cyborg and not a mere unmodifed man.
Where do you come up with this bullshit?
Creative writing courses. Take one. It'll open up your eyes if you think novelists are generally rich. Almost every decent creative writing course at a university is taught by a professional writer -- sometimes quite famous ones. Do you think they would put up with that crap if they didn't have to pay their bills that way?
Actually, that might not be a bad business model for writers. The simple fact is there is hardly any money to be made by novelists. Most authors do it more or less as a hobby and have a day job as well. An author typically only recieves pennies for each copy of a novel sold.
The weathly writers such as Stephen King and Tom Clancy (and to some extent, William Gibson) made the vast majority of their money through a different application of IP -- selling the movie rights to the novels. Having the novels free but retaining the movie rights would probably work just as well if not better than the current system
Mercury also directly relates to cryptography 300 years ago because of John Wilkins' 1694 book on the subject "Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger".
It's important to remember that the viewpoint of characters in a novel is *not* always the viewpoint of the author. If you've read Zodiac, do you think Stephenson's a left-wing eco-terrorist as well as a right-wing dittohead?
Secondly, in regard to WWII Japan, I don't think you can find much that wasn't true in Cryptonomicon. Rape, murder, and slave labor were all par for the course in the Japanese Empire. If I were a member of that culture, I could only hope I'd have the strength to reject it. (More likely, I'd simply try to ignore the evil around me and go about my business like everyone else, though)
Start a company with Derek Smart of "Battlecruiser 3000" fame!
No, he isn't saying that we should be out there innovating -- he claims that innovations have no chance of success.
Whenever someone claims that a field is essentially complete, they are nearly always wrong. Consider what people believed in the year 1900: Physics was considered practically a completed science -- and that was right before the explosion of modern physics.
It isn't "their" diplomacy site at all -- you are quoting from a scam. Read this
Please note that the first address you give,
http://www.principality-sealand.net/en00.htm, is actually run by a group of people who sell fake Sealand passports. It is not a site endorsed by Prince Roy or Princess Joan
The following article from The Guardian explains the issue:
Storm Warning
I will pay you $1 per year for the next hundred years, or I will pay you $5 right now.
And guess what? Any real-world company will take the $5 and run. Why? Because they are concerned about the next quarters' profit. Capitalism is a broken system. Just because Soviet Communism was even more broken doesn't change this fact.
So people are willing to pay infinite amounts of money to avoid infinitesimally small amounts of pollution? I don't think so. That means that every pollution has its price
Yeah, yeah. Heard that chestnut about a million times. The point is that there is no objective way of measuring that price.
Yes, I know this isn't obvious, but if it was obvious, there wouldn't be a Nobel prize for economics.
There is a Nobel prize in economics simply because a guy who invented dynamite decreed there to be one. He could have just as easily decreed there to be prize in phrenology.
Yes they can. They look at the price of one thing, and compare it to the price of another. AS LONG as everyone's property rights are recognized, and air and water pollution is paid for by those producing it, then all the social and environmental factors can be considered just by comparing prices.
Ever see "Dead Poets' Society"? Remember the scene where they were trying to find the best poem by quantifying "depth" and "beauty" and taking their product? That's exactly like trying to quantify pollution in dollars.
I played around with Pike for a while, and my gripe with it is that it is too C-like. At least what I want out of scripting language is a high-level environment like Perl or Python. Of course, horses for courses.