The summary above is highly misleading, possibly because of the bad headline the NYT editor put on the story. The judge didn't rule on the merits at all. All he did is issue a preliminary injunctiion, which forces the drug company to maintain the status quo for the duration of the trial. The judge didn't "block an attempt by the drug company" he just deferred the attempt until the case is over. If New York wins its case, the judge will actually block the attempt by entering a permanent injunction.
In other words: this ruling only reflects a judgement that, until we know who wins, it's better to force the company to keep the drug on the market, which is obvious to everyone. It doesn't reflect a judgement on whether the drug company may legally withdraw the drug.
So when did these august Congresscritters aquire expertise in installation security? I have no opinion on whether a moats would be a good or bad idea, but surely the Congressmen have no idea either.
Now that Google has every reason to crush Firefox, what is Mozilla's market share going to be in 2019?
I agree that the Google being both a competitor and (until now) a sponsor is the major consideration here, not the quality of search results. The question is whether Google really are more motivated to support Mozilla when they are getting revenue from browser searches than when they aren't. Quite possibly the Mozilla Foundation concluded that Google would compete with them in any case.
It will be hard for anyone here to assess this move. Having not used Yahoo! search for a long time, I have no idea about the quality of their search results. It is even less clear whether the typical Mozilla user will care about any possible differences, or the extent to which Mozilla users might change browsers because of this
If I had to guess, I'd say that very few people choose their brower based on the default search engine, and therefore very few will change browers because of this. If the userbase is really fixed then Mozilla should try to maximize their revenue by letting Yahoo! and Google bid for the rights.
Coal is both extremely polluting and costs lives to dig out of the ground. Phasing it out is a great idea.
On the other hand, unless fusion arrives before 2050 (not very likely), fission is a much better idea than "rewneables" like wind and solar which are very expensive and (with wind) environmentally damaging..
I you really let me sit between you and the source of the download, I can mess with your download of the public key, and therefore replace signatures.
In other words, OS updates cannot be attacked this way (presumably OS vendor's the public key is included in the installation). But if you patch my download from www.example.com, you can also patch my download when I get the public key used by www.example.com to sign downloads.
Digital signatures is exactly the technology that solves this problem. If you download binaries from the internet (especially if you have need to use Tor to get them!), check the signatures!
Now, it may be possible to also dynamically patch the signatures when these are downloaded -- but that requires much greater control since signatures can be obtained separately, and since Tor can mitigate the problem by routing different downloads through different exit notes.
Moving binary blob into user space while keeping the kernel driver free would be an excellent move. I'm of course assuming that this "open source" driver will actually be free software like the current X.org driver.
Of course, if the experimental vaccine is effective, then we should be keeping people from dying and we don't need a control group. But this is an unwarranted assumption: we don't know yet if the exerimental vaccine is effective -- this is what we are trying to determine, and we won't have the answer until after the experiment.
You say "we already know the death rate of ebola through empirical observation", but the death rate depends on many variables. For example, health-care workers probably have better habits than the average person, but they are exposed to Ebola more than the average person. Suppose after the vaccine we see a lower death rate. Are we sure this is due to the vaccine? Perhaps the workers who got the vaccine were from volunteers from Sweden, and Swedish people are more resistant to Ebola? The point of randomized trials is exactly to account for any known and unknown effects of this type by randomly choosing who gets the treatment and who doesn't among a reasonably uniform population. This way the people who get and don't get the treatment differ statistically only in the experimentally tested property, and we can have some confidence any observed effects are due to the treatment.
The goal is not to make untraceable weapons – that's merely a side effect. The goal is to make the weapon yourself as opposed to buying it from a large manufacturer.
Cotton is an extremely water-intensive crop. Until quite recently it was pushed on developing economies as an "export crop" for industrialized agriculture, replacing local food prodcution. This has generally been a disaster. For water-poor countries, growing cotton for export amounts to exporting expensive water to water-rich countires.
Diverting water for agriculture simply makes no sense. It is cheaper and more efficient to import the end product.
ZMapp is not a mass-produced medication. It is an experimental treatment. Calling it "scarce" gives entirely the wrong impression -- it is amazing that it is available for clinical use at all.
It's certainly worth it to produce ZMapp in significant quantities -- people would rather take an untested drug than try to survive Ebola -- but there is no "scarcity" here. Perhaps if many people wish to try it we'll have a better idea if it actually works.
Yes, the math doesn't know gender, but the mathematicians who evaluate each other (say for promotion or for prizes) do know. Yes, the situation today is very different from the past, but biases do exist. For a strongly worded view point on this try Izabella Laba.
These $20M are good for SpaceX, but why are they good to the taxpayers of Texas? This feels like the "incentives" provided to sports teams where somehow the projected benefits to other local businesses never materialize.
Why should users care? How many "users" are aware of IP addresses, or view them as anything but a string of meaningless digits? The "complexity" of IPv6 falls entirely on sysadmins and on those who implement IPv6 stacks, that is on experts.
It's possible some users will have a home network on the 192.168.x.x IPv4 range connected via a NAT to the IPv6 internet, but this choice will be made for them by the people who write NAT software: home users universally use first-come-first-served DHCP to assign addresses on their home network so they never see even the local IP addresses.
I like to remotely SSH to my home computer, so I note the IP address assigned to my NAT by the ISP, but a typical user can't pull that off. I also like to have fixed IP addresses inside the home network so I can reliably use SSH between the machines. You might be diong the same. But the average user can't and doesn't feel the need to.
Mozilla capitulating on the tag has serious implications for web standards. By including patent-encumbered code in the browser they take the rug from under those in the www foundation that argue for free web standards.
Yes, some websites wanted to use H.264 for video encoding, but Mozilla shouldn't have abetted them.
Post-prohibition most states regimented the alcholic beverage distribution chain into a three-tier system: producers, distributors, and retailers. As you can see this is even worse than with cars. For example, vinyards often cannot sell directly to the public, and they can't sell directly to pubs or wine stores. The middlemen must be paid...
For wide adoption there needs to be a full market around electric vehicles: opportunities to build charging stations, sell home charging equipment and so on. Gas stations are possible since practically all cars use the same fuel, but also because they have very similar intake openings so that the pump can stop by itself.
Tesla by itself is too small to set standards, so this is good news. It also shows how disclaim in patents helps: the benefit from a greater and more active market exceeds the payoffs from discouraging competition.
Taxpayers should not be paying for someone's pet cause...
Proper action would be to mandate the government to use the best software for the task at hand... Let the technical merits decide.
I'm sorry, but while technical merits should be paramount, they are not the only consideration. Public contracting is not an exact science, and it is entirely appropriate to have non-technical considerations tip the scales in close cases. So while Free Software should not be mandatory, legislating a preference for it makes perfect sense.
Furthermore, there are considerations beyond the needs of a specific project and tender. Free Software has an externality: when the government (as a customer) requests modifications and improvements (and pays for them to be created), everyone benefits. For example, when my university has Blackboard Inc fix a bug (or improve the software) only Blackboard captures the value (when they sell their software to the next customre). If we were using Moodle, every other Moodle user would automatically benefit. Had we opted for Moodle, we'd also benefit from fixes made by other universities.
Yes, these elliptic curves address defined over a finite field, but there's no known connection between the discrete log problem for the field and for the elliptic curve.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary above is highly misleading, possibly because of the bad headline the NYT editor put on the story. The judge didn't rule on the merits at all. All he did is issue a preliminary injunctiion, which forces the drug company to maintain the status quo for the duration of the trial. The judge didn't "block an attempt by the drug company" he just deferred the attempt until the case is over. If New York wins its case, the judge will actually block the attempt by entering a permanent injunction.
In other words: this ruling only reflects a judgement that, until we know who wins, it's better to force the company to keep the drug on the market, which is obvious to everyone. It doesn't reflect a judgement on whether the drug company may legally withdraw the drug.
So when did these august Congresscritters aquire expertise in installation security? I have no opinion on whether a moats would be a good or bad idea, but surely the Congressmen have no idea either.
You're right, but probably Microsoft wasn't interested in paying them while Yahoo! was.
I agree that the Google being both a competitor and (until now) a sponsor is the major consideration here, not the quality of search results. The question is whether Google really are more motivated to support Mozilla when they are getting revenue from browser searches than when they aren't. Quite possibly the Mozilla Foundation concluded that Google would compete with them in any case.
It will be hard for anyone here to assess this move. Having not used Yahoo! search for a long time, I have no idea about the quality of their search results. It is even less clear whether the typical Mozilla user will care about any possible differences, or the extent to which Mozilla users might change browsers because of this
If I had to guess, I'd say that very few people choose their brower based on the default search engine, and therefore very few will change browers because of this. If the userbase is really fixed then Mozilla should try to maximize their revenue by letting Yahoo! and Google bid for the rights.
Coal is both extremely polluting and costs lives to dig out of the ground. Phasing it out is a great idea.
On the other hand, unless fusion arrives before 2050 (not very likely), fission is a much better idea than "rewneables" like wind and solar which are very expensive and (with wind) environmentally damaging..
I you really let me sit between you and the source of the download, I can mess with your download of the public key, and therefore replace signatures.
In other words, OS updates cannot be attacked this way (presumably OS vendor's the public key is included in the installation). But if you patch my download from www.example.com, you can also patch my download when I get the public key used by www.example.com to sign downloads.
Digital signatures is exactly the technology that solves this problem. If you download binaries from the internet (especially if you have need to use Tor to get them!), check the signatures!
Now, it may be possible to also dynamically patch the signatures when these are downloaded -- but that requires much greater control since signatures can be obtained separately, and since Tor can mitigate the problem by routing different downloads through different exit notes.
Moving binary blob into user space while keeping the kernel driver free would be an excellent move. I'm of course assuming that this "open source" driver will actually be free software like the current X.org driver.
Of course, if the experimental vaccine is effective, then we should be keeping people from dying and we don't need a control group. But this is an unwarranted assumption: we don't know yet if the exerimental vaccine is effective -- this is what we are trying to determine, and we won't have the answer until after the experiment.
You say "we already know the death rate of ebola through empirical observation", but the death rate depends on many variables. For example, health-care workers probably have better habits than the average person, but they are exposed to Ebola more than the average person. Suppose after the vaccine we see a lower death rate. Are we sure this is due to the vaccine? Perhaps the workers who got the vaccine were from volunteers from Sweden, and Swedish people are more resistant to Ebola? The point of randomized trials is exactly to account for any known and unknown effects of this type by randomly choosing who gets the treatment and who doesn't among a reasonably uniform population. This way the people who get and don't get the treatment differ statistically only in the experimentally tested property, and we can have some confidence any observed effects are due to the treatment.
The goal is not to make untraceable weapons – that's merely a side effect. The goal is to make the weapon yourself as opposed to buying it from a large manufacturer.
Cotton is an extremely water-intensive crop. Until quite recently it was pushed on developing economies as an "export crop" for industrialized agriculture, replacing local food prodcution. This has generally been a disaster. For water-poor countries, growing cotton for export amounts to exporting expensive water to water-rich countires.
Diverting water for agriculture simply makes no sense. It is cheaper and more efficient to import the end product.
ZMapp is not a mass-produced medication. It is an experimental treatment. Calling it "scarce" gives entirely the wrong impression -- it is amazing that it is available for clinical use at all.
It's certainly worth it to produce ZMapp in significant quantities -- people would rather take an untested drug than try to survive Ebola -- but there is no "scarcity" here. Perhaps if many people wish to try it we'll have a better idea if it actually works.
The author is quite confused: email predates the web by decades. It predates the internet.
Yes, the math doesn't know gender, but the mathematicians who evaluate each other (say for promotion or for prizes) do know. Yes, the situation today is very different from the past, but biases do exist. For a strongly worded view point on this try Izabella Laba.
These $20M are good for SpaceX, but why are they good to the taxpayers of Texas? This feels like the "incentives" provided to sports teams where somehow the projected benefits to other local businesses never materialize.
Why should users care? How many "users" are aware of IP addresses, or view them as anything but a string of meaningless digits? The "complexity" of IPv6 falls entirely on sysadmins and on those who implement IPv6 stacks, that is on experts. It's possible some users will have a home network on the 192.168.x.x IPv4 range connected via a NAT to the IPv6 internet, but this choice will be made for them by the people who write NAT software: home users universally use first-come-first-served DHCP to assign addresses on their home network so they never see even the local IP addresses. I like to remotely SSH to my home computer, so I note the IP address assigned to my NAT by the ISP, but a typical user can't pull that off. I also like to have fixed IP addresses inside the home network so I can reliably use SSH between the machines. You might be diong the same. But the average user can't and doesn't feel the need to.
Mozilla capitulating on the tag has serious implications for web standards. By including patent-encumbered code in the browser they take the rug from under those in the www foundation that argue for free web standards. Yes, some websites wanted to use H.264 for video encoding, but Mozilla shouldn't have abetted them.
Post-prohibition most states regimented the alcholic beverage distribution chain into a three-tier system: producers, distributors, and retailers. As you can see this is even worse than with cars. For example, vinyards often cannot sell directly to the public, and they can't sell directly to pubs or wine stores. The middlemen must be paid ...
For wide adoption there needs to be a full market around electric vehicles: opportunities to build charging stations, sell home charging equipment and so on. Gas stations are possible since practically all cars use the same fuel, but also because they have very similar intake openings so that the pump can stop by itself.
Tesla by itself is too small to set standards, so this is good news. It also shows how disclaim in patents helps: the benefit from a greater and more active market exceeds the payoffs from discouraging competition.
This guy spent $150K of other people's money to make $10K for himself.
I'm sorry, but while technical merits should be paramount, they are not the only consideration. Public contracting is not an exact science, and it is entirely appropriate to have non-technical considerations tip the scales in close cases. So while Free Software should not be mandatory, legislating a preference for it makes perfect sense.
Furthermore, there are considerations beyond the needs of a specific project and tender. Free Software has an externality: when the government (as a customer) requests modifications and improvements (and pays for them to be created), everyone benefits. For example, when my university has Blackboard Inc fix a bug (or improve the software) only Blackboard captures the value (when they sell their software to the next customre). If we were using Moodle, every other Moodle user would automatically benefit. Had we opted for Moodle, we'd also benefit from fixes made by other universities.
Ctrl-S stops text from scrolling on my terminal. I don't see how auto save helps with that.
Yes, these elliptic curves address defined over a finite field, but there's no known connection between the discrete log problem for the field and for the elliptic curve.
The fields of rational, real, and complex numbers are certainly not finite.