Re:South Effrica
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
You're the racist, for assuming all South Africans are white.
Er, excuse the OT post, but the original poster didn't say "white" anywhere, simply that they were racist, which I agree with. The black south africans (who are the vast majority) are even more racist - they hate anyone not of their tribe, not just colour - most black deaths (allegedly) are caused by other blacks, with zulus fighting sothos etc.
I'm Irish, so I'd a slightly easier time of it with the blacks once they knew where I was from, but there was always a suspicion before they heard the accent.
On the other hand, contrast the Zimbabwe of five years ago, while they were still in the throes of a happy independence. The whites were relaxed and comfortable, the blacks were relaxed and comfortable, there was little or no repression on either side, and one could engage in an equal conversation with no pretexts on either side, and this is in a major city with co-existing races, not in the rural areas where you could imagine little inter-communication as a reason.
Rant over. Again, apologies for the OT post. To try bringing it on-topic again, perhaps it's significant that a hackfest dealing with a major factor in combatting racism - genetics/bioinformatics - is held in one of the most notorious centres of racism globally... I like that:-)
5. Denial. The vendor denies the flaw really exists, setting his best PR guys on the job.
6. Demonstration. The Reporter creates exploit code to prove to the vendor that not only does it exist, but it is serious and should be fixed.
7. Vendor hires a DMCA lawyer to sue the pants off the reporter for exploiting vendor's product 8. Government incarcerates random employee of reporter's organisation who just happens to be in the country at the time. 9. Vendor retracts suit. 10. Government continues to incarcerate random employee, sticking tongue out at the rest of the world in the process.
OK, I've made an attempt to read the document critically. It reminded me of some of its more obvious failings though:
Not all "vendors" can be bound by the obligations of either fixing a "flaw" or explaining why the flaw can't be fixed
In open source projects, the documentation on "flaws" is often included in the TODO file, which counteracts a large amount of what this document is trying to acheive
We still have the open sore of the DMCA to worry about, regarding the release of information that could be used to exploit or reverse engineer communications or data, e.g. Alan Cox's public refusal to document some of the kernel security stuff
I have to admit that it's a good general solution for presentation to and ratification by the Microsofts of this world - companies for whom marketing departments have more control over release dates than systems engineering or test departments...
...but these are the very companies that are LEAST likely to pay attention to the words of the technological minority, in favour of placating the fickle majority. Anyone else see a problem here??
basically they're saying "pretty please tell us about your patent that might ruin our scheme so we can have enough time to prepare to defeat your patent."
Fortunately the W3C have (up to now) been relatively open and ethical about their products. I say relatively, because certain other protocols, languages etc. have been hidden beneath a wash of legalese and DMCA-isms both recently and in the past.
The fact of this whole patent drive seems to be getting up the nose of/.ers simply because they are advocating patents. This could be a good thing (remember: not all software patents are bad), or it could be a sign of their fall to the dark side. If so, it'd be a pity - they've been a stalwart of the open-standards community for some time now.
Automatically putting W3C patents in the public domain kinda defeats the purpose.
Most patents are created or applied for in order to make the applicant some money in licensing fees, or as part of a larger effort in leading up to another fee.
The "prior art" clauses would indicate that if one wanted to place an invention in the public domain, one would simply post about it in a public forum, like what Mr Torvalds did many years ago. No-one could patent Linux now, becuase it's in the public domain.
A third possibility is closer to Linus' trademark idea, i.e. he owns the trademark, but will only legally enforce that fact if he disagrees with someone's {ab}use of it. In patent-land, I could do the same with my invention, put it in the public domain and let others use it freely, as long as they conform to some license agreement such as the GPL.
That opens a whole other can of worms, but we're starting to see some convergence here, where licenses to use a technology (software or otherwise) are freely doled out under certain conditions. I'm surprised the FSF hasn't come up with something like this before.
The energy relation of *any* anti measure which might hit an asteroid versus the asteroid is the same as a bullet hitting the
chassis of a truck
That would be the case if you were using a simple p = mv type calculation, in which case the change in momentum of the joined bodies (bullet and truck) is a simple sum (assuming the bullet stops at the front of the truck:-) of the forward momentum of the bullet, say 700m/s * 0.1kg and the backward momentum - towards us - of the truck, say 50m/s * 4000kg. No contest, truck wins every time.
Now, you're COMPLETELY disregarding the warhead's part in this. The payload of such a missile defense system would increase its effect to more than just two things banging off each other. The same reason a 1kg bomb can make a stationary 1500kg car flip over. Now magnify that to nuclear levels. The bullet analogy just does not hold.
Unfortunately we still have the issue where that kind of force is destructive rather than motile; we're far more likely to fragment an asteroid than redirect it, so changing one big predictable problem into many smaller problems, unpredictably. It's obvious why this technology is so controversial, despite the small sample of advocacy I linked to earlier.
...when they are happy as pie
spending billions on missile defence or giant tents if you are from the UK
Hmm... that old chestnut. Missile defense was supposed to take care of asteroids AND missiles, as mentioned in this and
this article. Somewhere along the line, the populist (and governmental - often one and the same, but that's another article) opinion was that the system would point in more than out. That's where the problem lies.
They should not cease their work until either they choose (i.e. if the market decides they are complete vapourware after all....), or until they are forced to, if a suitably independent judgement decides they are in fact infringing on an extant trademark.
Now the prime issues are will they actually get a decent useable product to market, and can they get suitably independent justice. Their adversary is one of the largest patrons of the legal trade after all...
One thing that's rarely mentioned is the fact that many different cultures see different levels of "acceptability" in things - in Europe, levels of violence on TV are higher, and accepted. Levels of sex on network TV are higher and accepted in places like France, Sweden, Denmark. In Japan, underage sexuality is accepted and pervasive.
To paraphrase a quote I read recently: 20 years is all it takes for a liberal to become a conservative, with no change in his opinions. The judges were right. But there will always be something else to pick on.
The same thing has been going on for years in the fields of materials and chemistry anyway. And where do you think the major advances in biotech until recently have come from?
Medicine is the same. Only lately has the majority of new wonderdrugs come from industry - major research has come from hospitals and universitys for a long time, and the resulting technology has been licensed. Only this time it's software, "pure" information. There is no real difference, except perhaps in the duplicability of results: anyone can copy a program, but not everyone can copy the AIDS drugs.
Hang on: Education shouldn't hinge on funding! It's there to develop PEOPLE, not MONEY. When money gets involved, corruption follows. What education needs is decent management, with the right levels of integrity and the correct "philosophy", not just idealistic open-source types, but the same ideas that made Socrates and Plato the giants they were, the same goal of people development, teaching people to think.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, excuse the OT post, but the original poster didn't say "white" anywhere, simply that they were racist, which I agree with. The black south africans (who are the vast majority) are even more racist - they hate anyone not of their tribe, not just colour - most black deaths (allegedly) are caused by other blacks, with zulus fighting sothos etc.
I'm Irish, so I'd a slightly easier time of it with the blacks once they knew where I was from, but there was always a suspicion before they heard the accent.
On the other hand, contrast the Zimbabwe of five years ago, while they were still in the throes of a happy independence. The whites were relaxed and comfortable, the blacks were relaxed and comfortable, there was little or no repression on either side, and one could engage in an equal conversation with no pretexts on either side, and this is in a major city with co-existing races, not in the rural areas where you could imagine little inter-communication as a reason.
Rant over. Again, apologies for the OT post. To try bringing it on-topic again, perhaps it's significant that a hackfest dealing with a major factor in combatting racism - genetics/bioinformatics - is held in one of the most notorious centres of racism globally... I like that :-)
6. Demonstration. The Reporter creates exploit code to prove to the vendor that not only does it exist, but it is serious and should be fixed.
7. Vendor hires a DMCA lawyer to sue the pants off the reporter for exploiting vendor's product
8. Government incarcerates random employee of reporter's organisation who just happens to be in the country at the time.
9. Vendor retracts suit.
10. Government continues to incarcerate random employee, sticking tongue out at the rest of the world in the process.
I give up.
Here's one...
2 00 &mode=thread
4 21 2&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/22/172
and here's a followup
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/11/142
OK, I've made an attempt to read the document critically. It reminded me of some of its more obvious failings though:
I have to admit that it's a good general solution for presentation to and ratification by the Microsofts of this world - companies for whom marketing departments have more control over release dates than systems engineering or test departments...
...but these are the very companies that are LEAST likely to pay attention to the words of the technological minority, in favour of placating the fickle majority. Anyone else see a problem here??
Doesh it *hic* mesh up your *hic* documentsh like *hic* I do when I'm dhrinking methanol *hic* ?
basically they're saying "pretty please tell us about your patent that might ruin our scheme so we can have enough time to prepare to defeat your patent."
Fortunately the W3C have (up to now) been relatively open and ethical about their products. I say relatively, because certain other protocols, languages etc. have been hidden beneath a wash of legalese and DMCA-isms both recently and in the past.
The fact of this whole patent drive seems to be getting up the nose of /.ers simply because they are advocating patents. This could be a good thing (remember: not all software patents are bad), or it could be a sign of their fall to the dark side. If so, it'd be a pity - they've been a stalwart of the open-standards community for some time now.
Most patents are created or applied for in order to make the applicant some money in licensing fees, or as part of a larger effort in leading up to another fee.
The "prior art" clauses would indicate that if one wanted to place an invention in the public domain, one would simply post about it in a public forum, like what Mr Torvalds did many years ago. No-one could patent Linux now, becuase it's in the public domain.
A third possibility is closer to Linus' trademark idea, i.e. he owns the trademark, but will only legally enforce that fact if he disagrees with someone's {ab}use of it. In patent-land, I could do the same with my invention, put it in the public domain and let others use it freely, as long as they conform to some license agreement such as the GPL.
That opens a whole other can of worms, but we're starting to see some convergence here, where licenses to use a technology (software or otherwise) are freely doled out under certain conditions. I'm surprised the FSF hasn't come up with something like this before.
That would be the case if you were using a simple p = mv type calculation, in which case the change in momentum of the joined bodies (bullet and truck) is a simple sum (assuming the bullet stops at the front of the truck :-) of the forward momentum of the bullet, say 700m/s * 0.1kg and the backward momentum - towards us - of the truck, say 50m/s * 4000kg. No contest, truck wins every time.
Now, you're COMPLETELY disregarding the warhead's part in this. The payload of such a missile defense system would increase its effect to more than just two things banging off each other. The same reason a 1kg bomb can make a stationary 1500kg car flip over. Now magnify that to nuclear levels. The bullet analogy just does not hold.
Unfortunately we still have the issue where that kind of force is destructive rather than motile; we're far more likely to fragment an asteroid than redirect it, so changing one big predictable problem into many smaller problems, unpredictably. It's obvious why this technology is so controversial, despite the small sample of advocacy I linked to earlier.
Hmm... that old chestnut. Missile defense was supposed to take care of asteroids AND missiles, as mentioned in this and this article. Somewhere along the line, the populist (and governmental - often one and the same, but that's another article) opinion was that the system would point in more than out. That's where the problem lies.
Now big tents on the other hand...
They should not cease their work until either they choose (i.e. if the market decides they are complete vapourware after all....), or until they are forced to, if a suitably independent judgement decides they are in fact infringing on an extant trademark.
Now the prime issues are will they actually get a decent useable product to market, and can they get suitably independent justice. Their adversary is one of the largest patrons of the legal trade after all...
To paraphrase a quote I read recently:
20 years is all it takes for a liberal to become a conservative, with no change in his opinions.
The judges were right. But there will always be something else to pick on.
Medicine is the same. Only lately has the majority of new wonderdrugs come from industry - major research has come from hospitals and universitys for a long time, and the resulting technology has been licensed. Only this time it's software, "pure" information. There is no real difference, except perhaps in the duplicability of results: anyone can copy a program, but not everyone can copy the AIDS drugs.
Hang on: Education shouldn't hinge on funding! It's there to develop PEOPLE, not MONEY. When money gets involved, corruption follows. What education needs is decent management, with the right levels of integrity and the correct "philosophy", not just idealistic open-source types, but the same ideas that made Socrates and Plato the giants they were, the same goal of people development, teaching people to think.