You know, if online papers I liked had a DONATE button, I might send a few dollars there way now and again... nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com come to mind. It amazes me that they don't!
If you can deliver the vaccine to a very broad spectrum of a population and let the individual decide if they want the vaccine, then you'll have large numbers of both cases - vaccinated and unvaccinated
The problem with letting the individual decide is, as the article mentioned, cohort effects. Correlation != causation, etc... for example, a study might find that people who drink green have less heart attacks. But what if (for example) this is because people who drink green tea tend, on average, to be wealthier than those who don't?
Anytime you separate a sample population based on self-selection, you introduce the possibility that the real cause of difference might be something unrelated and unseen. The only valid medical protocol for establishing scientific efficacy is a double-blind real/placebo study.
An interesting point, seriously. As I parse that (not being a lawyer, myself), yes... one can't include necessary drivers, but instead require the end-user to set up the linking themselves (the common sun jdbc api, etc)..
But, the additional injustice I referred to (more to the mysql end-user than the developer, necessarily (well, except for the concievable, lesser appeal of the developers product, as it wouldn't interoperate with the end-user unless they forked out for a commercial mysql license regime))
...r.e. the anecdote I recollected, was in fact unnecessary? That the insert-mysql-jdcbs-driver-script just had to allow the configuration for linking with mysql drivers, but did not in fact require an avowal that the end-user required a commercial license themselves to be able to link the driver.
Again, I'm not a lawyer. But, as far as mysql ab seems to put it, it's a murky ground.
We never did the calculations. What was without a doubt an unfortunate cost, though, was using mysql in the first place. I'd always laughed off all that 'viral' gpl talk as nonsense. Then it sort of bit us in the rear..
All in all, it took less than 2 days to migrate everything, with a few bugs popping up here and there over the next week.
Even if it -would- have cost less, that sort of a bait-and-switch move isn't the sort of thing that engenders one to trust a business going forward.
Well in our case, it was mostly in house. I'm thinking more of the case of the anecdote I recounted, the fellow selling software that utilized an sql backstore. As I understand it, he was was in no way selling or distributing mysql to his clients, they were already using it.
As I see it, the situation would be no different than needing to pay, say, microsoft for the privledge of distributing software that runs on their platform. It just seems inverted to try to force developers to pay a toll to be able to provide software that runs on other peoples systems.
On the other hand, I suppose it could also be the clients who suddenly realize that their 'free' mysql isn't free anymore, for they have to have a commercial license for it to be able to talk to other peoples software.
This reminds me of our experience with mysql.. they changed the license of their drivers (the jdbc driver, in this instance) to GPL from LGPL a while ago, and also affirmed a legal position (at least in their marketing materials) that using the now GPL library would require any application dynamically linking/loading it to also be GPL, with the exception of being able to buy licenses to a separate non-GPL'd commercial instantiation of the library. (They also conveniently hired the guy who had been maintaining the previously freely useable LGPL version).
In theory, of course, someone else could re-invent the wheel and create another fully LGPL JDBC driver for mysql.. (I was ever-so-mildly tempted to do start work on that myself, out of spite and irritation, but didn't have the time).
Needless to say, after talking to the lawyer we had to switch our entire infrastructure over to postgresql. On the bright side, I found that I rather preferred postgres as a more comprehensive and functional sql anyway. (No more having to do manual tricks for multi-merges, etc). Still, it seemed like very bad faith to switch the license like that right out from under people who had already been using it, all in the hopes of further monetizing mysql. (Yes, the earlier license applied to the old versions of the driver... which happened not to work properly with newer versions of mysql).
I once talked to someone else else who makes a a bit of money on the side selling some piece of booking software. Unfortunately for him, almost half his clients were deploying his software in mysql shops. His software was a drop-in.war archive that was trivial to install (just copy it into tomcat/webapps or whatever (well, and run the database creation script to set up the tables for it) and it was good to go. After the license change he was unable to distribute a fully packaged pre-working.war file with the necessary drivers for client databases. (Oracle was propriatary, but free to distribute).. he had to write a specialized install script that the customer could use to unpack the.war, install the mysql jdbc driver, and repackage it, where the script required the client to affirm that they were using a legally licensed non-GPL version of the jdbc driver from mysql to be able to install/link it. This took the liability off of him...The liability for having the temerity to want to talk with a basic software infrastructure service (such as a sql server), without GPL'ing his little niche app.
I'm all for the GPL. I love it! I've used it myself in a few things I've developed. I love all the good it's brought, etc, the idea of openness, a publishing and peer-reviewed manner of developing code, all that.
But I still find it very obnoxious to make a piece of library glue GPL. That's exactly what the LGPL is there for. Logically, it's not a derivative work of mysql if you use it for processing sql transactions (making no modifications or redistributions of it of any kind) any more than a file you create in the gimp is a derivative work of the gimp.
That's working now, is it? I'll have to try it again, last time I looked, it wasn't. Also, if we're talking high end processors, we aren't talking about this particular device.
Honestly, nvidia's vdpau is the only way to go now for playing hi-def content (like that produced by the HDPVR1212)on anything other than a super high end box. (Seriously, even my quad core2 clocked at 3.2Ghz can't handle high bitrate x264 hi-def), although I've heard there's an experimental ffmpeg branch that can decode across multiple cores.
Note: I -do- buy non-drm mp3s from amazon, etc. The last three albums I've bought have been online, and in a free non-drm format. Before that was available, guess what..I used bittorrent. But, if I know I want some data, and want to support it, I'm happy to pay for it. It's not like I'm some unethical bastard.. I believe that the often large amount of work that goes into producing art certainly does deserve to be rewarded.
But, if I'm a bloody PAYING CUSTOMER, than don't try to cripple or hassle me when DRM and rootkits. Otherwise, I'm inclined to look elsewhere. I mean, seriously! Where is the rational motive in making the legit payed product inferior to the cracked version?!?
..actually, although I'll likely never buy from then again given their recent patent trolling, I must say that sandisk makes some quality memory. I once accidentally put a 2gb sandisk mini-'cruzer' through not just a wash cycle, but also in the dryer on high heat.. And it didn't even remain in the pocket it had been left in, but instead slipped out and was banging against the dryer drum the whole time (I heard the noise, and at the time merely thought I had left some loose change in one of my pockets, so didn't bother to stop it)..
..and, long story short, it still worked perfectly!
All he did was run a tor exit node, and observe the outgoing traffic, a known possibility when using tor. Not only is there the disclaimer "This is experimental software. Do not rely on it for strong anonymity" evertime you run tor, but this vector of potential attack is so bloody obvious that anyone not aware of would be a bloody idiot not to use additional encryption for accessing sensitive information on the other end, and rely on tor only for obfuscation of the fact that the route originates from them.
The rep said they didn't support linux, I politely told her it was surely a hardware issue as the machine wouldn't even post. She said I could send it in for repair/replacement, and they would just wipe the drive to test it and I could re-install linux when I got it back. I told her this was inconvinient as I had work on the drive, and so she agreed to let me send it in without the hard drive for repair (I assumed they would temporarily put one in themselves for testing, etc), and then ship me the repair/replacement without a hard drive so I could put back in my original one.
In my experience, Acer support was excellent, and I had my laptop back in short order.
# 2007-02-26: OpenBSD team communicates that the issue is specific to OpenBSD. OpenBSD no longer uses the term "vulnerability" when referring to bugs that lead to a remote denial of service attack, as opposed to bugs that lead to remote control of vulnerable systems to avoid oversimplifying ("pablumfication") the use of the term.
# 2007-02-26: Core email sent to OpenBSD team explaining that Core considers a remote denial of service a security issue and therefore does use the term "vulnerability" to refer to it and that although remote code execution could not be proved in this specific case, the possibility should not be discarded. Core requests details about the bug and if possible an analysis of why the OpenBSD team may or may not consider the bug exploitable for remote code execution.
# 2007-02-28: OpenBSD team indicates that the bug results in corruption of mbuf chains and that only IPv6 code uses that mbuf code, there is no user data in the mbuf header fields that become corrupted and it would be surprising to be able to run arbitrary code using a bug so deep in the mbuf code. The bug simply leads to corruption of the mbuf chain.
# 2007-03-05: Core develops proof of concept code that demonstrates remote code execution in the kernel context by exploiting the mbuf overflow.
It's not a big deal that it only solves a particular NP-complete problem.. because if you can solve and one NP-complete problem, you can solve ALL of them.
From the wikipedia article
a deterministic, polynomial-time solution to any NP-complete problem would also be a solution to every other problem in NP
Anyone who took computer science at a decent school and remembers any of it would remember the whole issue of whether P=NP or not. One of great unsolved problems in mathematics, and the fundamental promise of quantum computers vs. classical ones.
And the little tidbit that NP-c problems are cross equivalent.. that if you could solve any ONE of them, you could use that method, translating all others into a formalism that could be solved by the original solution.
This is a VERY big thing if it's actually working. Still only 16 bits, but jeesh.
Still, I'm not sure what the 'adiabatic' nature means. From perusing the article (which was over my head, to be sure) it sounds like they've achieved some sort of partially locked quantum state that's allowed to evolve slowly, not instantaniously. Sort of a quantum anealing, if you will? They are perhaps wiggling the system on a sort of clock while quantum information exchange can happen in parts between certain but not all parts of the system?
In which case, it's still pretty neat, but I don't know about scaling.. It may still take quite some (unrealistic) time to solve problems of larger size with more bits
Although this might not be terribly usefull for computation, if atomic scale digital logic flow control can be perfected, it might be possible to use it for something far cooler than drexlers nanotechnological assemblers... something more akin to star trek 'replicators' (albeit at near absolute zero)... digitally controlled control of the position of single atoms could revolutionize manufacturing... wouldn't it be funny if the only way we ever manage to achieve the manufacturing precision to make a nanotech assembler would be via a technology that completely obsoletes it!
The earth will be
engulfed (or superheated) by the sun when it eventually expands into a red giant. Billions of years of evolution will all have been for nothing in the end, unless a technologically advanced civilization is able to colonize space with bits of protected ecosystem. Humanity (intelligent life) is the high-point amongst the achievements of evolution, and it will be necessary if any life from earth is to perservere.
%25 of worlds energy, %5 of population. Awesome! Energy use is strongly equated to wealth, you know. And who's to say we don't use the energy here more efficently in many cases (of course, towards our own selfish ends, (damn freedom!.. my neighbor buying a jetski when he could be subsidizing space elevator research! (which whould be preferable to giving money to the poor))..
Argh. I'm ranting. Too tired for this right now... but, I suppose I should sum up by saying that, although there are many critiques I could make of modern american society.. it's consumption and enjoyment of a large share of earth's wealth (assuming a zero-sum game without innovation) is a pretty awesome thing to me. Go america! Just don't expect it to last with the recent hi-tech modernization of many other competitors in the world. May the best, and most technologically sucessfull and productive culture win!
My wallet, it's around hear somewhere..probably hiding out with my keys. It's not like I ever misplace anything! Goodbye data? Still, I suppose if it's just an offline known-transient copy, than it needn't matter so much.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, if online papers I liked had a DONATE button, I might send a few dollars there way now and again... nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com come to mind. It amazes me that they don't!
The problem with letting the individual decide is, as the article mentioned, cohort effects. Correlation != causation, etc... for example, a study might find that people who drink green have less heart attacks. But what if (for example) this is because people who drink green tea tend, on average, to be wealthier than those who don't?
Anytime you separate a sample population based on self-selection, you introduce the possibility that the real cause of difference might be something unrelated and unseen. The only valid medical protocol for establishing scientific efficacy is a double-blind real/placebo study.
Anyone who -distributes- that driver with the application, no?
An interesting point, seriously. As I parse that (not being a lawyer, myself), yes... one can't include necessary drivers, but instead require the end-user to set up the linking themselves (the common sun jdbc api, etc)..
...r.e. the anecdote I recollected, was in fact unnecessary? That the insert-mysql-jdcbs-driver-script just had to allow the configuration for linking with mysql drivers, but did not in fact require an avowal that the end-user required a commercial license themselves to be able to link the driver.
Again, I'm not a lawyer. But, as far as mysql ab seems to put it, it's a murky ground.
But, the additional injustice I referred to (more to the mysql end-user than the developer, necessarily (well, except for the concievable, lesser appeal of the developers product, as it wouldn't interoperate with the end-user unless they forked out for a commercial mysql license regime))
Amen!
That's exactly what we did, obviously!
We never did the calculations. What was without a doubt an unfortunate cost, though, was using mysql in the first place. I'd always laughed off all that 'viral' gpl talk as nonsense. Then it sort of bit us in the rear..
All in all, it took less than 2 days to migrate everything, with a few bugs popping up here and there over the next week.
Even if it -would- have cost less, that sort of a bait-and-switch move isn't the sort of thing that engenders one to trust a business going forward.
Well in our case, it was mostly in house. I'm thinking more of the case of the anecdote I recounted, the fellow selling software that utilized an sql backstore. As I understand it, he was was in no way selling or distributing mysql to his clients, they were already using it.
As I see it, the situation would be no different than needing to pay, say, microsoft for the privledge of distributing software that runs on their platform. It just seems inverted to try to force developers to pay a toll to be able to provide software that runs on other peoples systems.
On the other hand, I suppose it could also be the clients who suddenly realize that their 'free' mysql isn't free anymore, for they have to have a commercial license for it to be able to talk to other peoples software.
The jdbc driver for mysql. Older versions were LGPL, but they -changed- it to GPL.
This reminds me of our experience with mysql.. they changed the license of their drivers (the jdbc driver, in this instance) to GPL from LGPL a while ago, and also affirmed a legal position (at least in their marketing materials) that using the now GPL library would require any application dynamically linking/loading it to also be GPL, with the exception of being able to buy licenses to a separate non-GPL'd commercial instantiation of the library. (They also conveniently hired the guy who had been maintaining the previously freely useable LGPL version).
.war archive that was trivial to install (just copy it into tomcat/webapps or whatever (well, and run the database creation script to set up the tables for it) and it was good to go. After the license change he was unable to distribute a fully packaged pre-working .war file with the necessary drivers for client databases. (Oracle was propriatary, but free to distribute).. he had to write a specialized install script that the customer could use to unpack the .war, install the mysql jdbc driver, and repackage it, where the script required the client to affirm that they were using a legally licensed non-GPL version of the jdbc driver from mysql to be able to install/link it. This took the liability off of him ...The liability for having the temerity to want to talk with a basic software infrastructure service (such as a sql server), without GPL'ing his little niche app.
In theory, of course, someone else could re-invent the wheel and create another fully LGPL JDBC driver for mysql.. (I was ever-so-mildly tempted to do start work on that myself, out of spite and irritation, but didn't have the time).
Needless to say, after talking to the lawyer we had to switch our entire infrastructure over to postgresql. On the bright side, I found that I rather preferred postgres as a more comprehensive and functional sql anyway. (No more having to do manual tricks for multi-merges, etc). Still, it seemed like very bad faith to switch the license like that right out from under people who had already been using it, all in the hopes of further monetizing mysql. (Yes, the earlier license applied to the old versions of the driver... which happened not to work properly with newer versions of mysql).
I once talked to someone else else who makes a a bit of money on the side selling some piece of booking software. Unfortunately for him, almost half his clients were deploying his software in mysql shops. His software was a drop-in
I'm all for the GPL. I love it! I've used it myself in a few things I've developed. I love all the good it's brought, etc, the idea of openness, a publishing and peer-reviewed manner of developing code, all that.
But I still find it very obnoxious to make a piece of library glue GPL. That's exactly what the LGPL is there for. Logically, it's not a derivative work of mysql if you use it for processing sql transactions (making no modifications or redistributions of it of any kind) any more than a file you create in the gimp is a derivative work of the gimp.
That's working now, is it? I'll have to try it again, last time I looked, it wasn't. Also, if we're talking high end processors, we aren't talking about this particular device.
Um, except for the fact that vdpau currently, I don't know ...WORKS?
Honestly, nvidia's vdpau is the only way to go now for playing hi-def content (like that produced by the HDPVR1212)on anything other than a super high end box. (Seriously, even my quad core2 clocked at 3.2Ghz can't handle high bitrate x264 hi-def), although I've heard there's an experimental ffmpeg branch that can decode across multiple cores.
MOD PARENT UP.. Such rare insight is, well.... uh, rare. ..Ahem.
Note: I -do- buy non-drm mp3s from amazon, etc. The last three albums I've bought have been online, and in a free non-drm format. Before that was available, guess what ..I used bittorrent. But, if I know I want some data, and want to support it, I'm happy to pay for it. It's not like I'm some unethical bastard.. I believe that the often large amount of work that goes into producing art certainly does deserve to be rewarded.
But, if I'm a bloody PAYING CUSTOMER, than don't try to cripple or hassle me when DRM and rootkits. Otherwise, I'm inclined to look elsewhere. I mean, seriously! Where is the rational motive in making the legit payed product inferior to the cracked version?!?
..actually, although I'll likely never buy from then again given their recent patent trolling, I must say that sandisk makes some quality memory. I once accidentally put a 2gb sandisk mini-'cruzer' through not just a wash cycle, but also in the dryer on high heat.. And it didn't even remain in the pocket it had been left in, but instead slipped out and was banging against the dryer drum the whole time (I heard the noise, and at the time merely thought I had left some loose change in one of my pockets, so didn't bother to stop it)..
..and, long story short, it still worked perfectly!
All he did was run a tor exit node, and observe the outgoing traffic, a known possibility when using tor. Not only is there the disclaimer "This is experimental software. Do not rely on it for strong anonymity" evertime you run tor, but this vector of potential attack is so bloody obvious that anyone not aware of would be a bloody idiot not to use additional encryption for accessing sensitive information on the other end, and rely on tor only for obfuscation of the fact that the route originates from them.
The rep said they didn't support linux, I politely told her it was surely a hardware issue as the machine wouldn't even post. She said I could send it in for repair/replacement, and they would just wipe the drive to test it and I could re-install linux when I got it back. I told her this was inconvinient as I had work on the drive, and so she agreed to let me send it in without the hard drive for repair (I assumed they would temporarily put one in themselves for testing, etc), and then ship me the repair/replacement without a hard drive so I could put back in my original one.
In my experience, Acer support was excellent, and I had my laptop back in short order.
Although this might not be terribly usefull for computation, if atomic scale digital logic flow control can be perfected, it might be possible to use it for something far cooler than drexlers nanotechnological assemblers... something more akin to star trek 'replicators' (albeit at near absolute zero)... digitally controlled control of the position of single atoms could revolutionize manufacturing... wouldn't it be funny if the only way we ever manage to achieve the manufacturing precision to make a nanotech assembler would be via a technology that completely obsoletes it!
The earth will be engulfed (or superheated) by the sun when it eventually expands into a red giant. Billions of years of evolution will all have been for nothing in the end, unless a technologically advanced civilization is able to colonize space with bits of protected ecosystem. Humanity (intelligent life) is the high-point amongst the achievements of evolution, and it will be necessary if any life from earth is to perservere.
That wouldn't work, at least as far as preventing someone from knowing you have opened the mail.
%25 of worlds energy, %5 of population. Awesome! Energy use is strongly equated to wealth, you know. And who's to say we don't use the energy here more efficently in many cases (of course, towards our own selfish ends, (damn freedom!.. my neighbor buying a jetski when he could be subsidizing space elevator research! (which whould be preferable to giving money to the poor)).. Argh. I'm ranting. Too tired for this right now... but, I suppose I should sum up by saying that, although there are many critiques I could make of modern american society.. it's consumption and enjoyment of a large share of earth's wealth (assuming a zero-sum game without innovation) is a pretty awesome thing to me. Go america! Just don't expect it to last with the recent hi-tech modernization of many other competitors in the world. May the best, and most technologically sucessfull and productive culture win!
My wallet, it's around hear somewhere ..probably hiding out with my keys. It's not like I ever misplace anything! Goodbye data? Still, I suppose if it's just an offline known-transient copy, than it needn't matter so much.