You really need to read this book. Read it critically, of course. But it opened my eyes to the fact that companies like Monsanto, BP, Dow Chemical, and so on, will never emit unvarnished truths-- there is too much of a financial incentive for them to spin things their way, even to the detriment of humanity. There's a story in the book about a Monsanto scientist who discovered that the gene they were inserting into GMO food was causing anaphylactic shock in some people. Working inside the company got him nowhere, so he spoke publicly about it, and Monsanto buried his career. I just can't trust information from a company like that.
You are mistaken about one important fact: science requires that there be one correct answer. The entire process depends on it. Science is the whittling away at that truth. Data that are gleaned through the creative use of statistics are not "scientifically backed up" if they are not true. Doing that is an obfuscation of the truth; it depends on the lay public not knowing how to interpret their methods.
If Monsanto wants to make information about their products known in a scientifically-rigorous way, they need to do it like everyone else: publish in a peer-reviewed journal. Until then, it is not science.
If you don't need to know the difference, then no. But there are plenty of people who have specific requirements, and I'm glad that Linux supports them. E.g., we pay to have our Linux machines use CVFS (StorNext) and associated daemons, because we require its features. A GPL'ed CVFS suite would be awesome, but I can understand why Quantum wouldn't want to do it.
The Justice Department is so fucked up. Does anyone really think that mandating portions of code will really solve antitrust issues? Sure, like the rest of Windows products, via convenient features, the code steers you toward eventual lock-in. But that wasn't really the issue-- after all, Apple, Sun, IBM, and most software development houses in the 90's all used this same strategy. The issue was that Microsoft was threatening their own customers, OEMs and integrators, if they did not play by Microsoft's rules. THAT was the problem.
Now what we will have is an operating system that was created in some fictitious anti-trust-free-zone, burdened by additional government "oversight" whose cost will be passed along to both taxpayers and Microsoft's customers, because Microsoft still plays like a bully, and the original issues brought up in the antitrust trial were NOT RESOLVED. When Microsoft is forced to play by the same rules as everyone else, that's when customers will finally be able to objectively decide whether they want to go the convenient, locked-in route or the some other way.
But wait-- you're only talking about the final appeal, which Fox New Corp won. What about the earlier trial, in which the jury found that Fox "acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs' news reporting on BGH" and subsequently awarded the plaintiffs (the reporters in question) $425,000. The fact that the case was overturned on appeal, by a technicality, does not change the fact that Fox News Corp's actions were unbecoming (i.e., unethical) of a real journalistic organization. The facts you are looking for can be found in the court documents, which are public record.
Interconnecting all of those cores is a real engineering challenge. The basic problem is covered in elementary discrete mathematics books. These guys are most definitely still pushing the envelope.
Oh, well, then you're also familiar with the litany of "conveniences" the MBTA lovingly provides for us on a daily basis. Like holding the train at Kenmore for screaming hordes of drunk Red Sox fans, making it a total crapshoot as to whether or not I can make my connecting commuter train from North Station. Recently, I've resorted to bringing a pair of running shoes and shorts and just hauling ass across the city, on foot.
The only reasonable thing to do, if you're worried about your communications being monitored, is to assume that they are being monitored. Relying on the fact that your phone is not tapped is just a bad idea, and this is why all security nowadays happens at the endpoints.
Yeah, actually, when I went to download Firebug the other day, the FF3 version was the one on the main page, before FF3 was even out! You have to hunt now to find the old one.
Firebug 1.2 requires Firefox 3. Firefox 2 users should install the older 1.05 version of Firebug.
Yeah, I didn't really want to mention that since it's an awesome idea really just for technical users. BTW, I shared your non-enthusiasm for JavaScript until recently, when I discovered that the modern language, ECMAScript, is a lot more mature than the JS I played with nearly a decade ago. And now that I have some formal mathematics training, I can appreciate some of the more... er, esoteric... features of JavaScript, like its scoping rules. Not that it's my language of choice, but I understand why a designer would get that fuzzy feeling when using it for the GUI engine *and* the layout engine.
It's up to the package maintainer for your distro to do that. There's just no way the Firefox people can write instructions that would apply to even all Linux distros out there-- at least, not without being either hopelessly vague or too verbose for practical use. That's like asking trees how to build a house.
This is a serious piece of work, under active development. The fact that they were able to add more features, plus stability, plus better memory management, plus better security handling (like seriously addressing XSS), PLUS address many of those only-a-problem-for-technical-twits issues that are out there says to me that the Firefox development team really has their shit together. This is an application that I have open all day, every day, and for me, it works great.
(of course, I'm currently posting using Safari, so YMMV)
Your post made me think of something-- the Earth is really BIG! But I'm a nerd, so I had to prove it to myself.
The surface area of the Earth, not counting water, is 510,072,000 km^2, according to Wikipedia. So, that's roughly 5.1 x 10^14 m^2. Again, according to Wikipedia, there are currently 6.67 x 10^9 people on Earth. That translates to about 7.65 x 10^4 m^2 for each person! In terms that Americans can understand, that's roughly 14 football fields (or to choose a landmark close to me, a little bit larger than Fenway Park). When you consider the fact that metro areas often have millions of residents, you realize that we're pretty lumped together, distribution-wise.
Wow, that reminds me of when some days there would only be a small handful of stories on Slashdot. Now that I actually like my job, there's far more than I can read in one day.
Brilliant. I was fortunate enough to have a similar math teacher in high school, and it was his showing me how fun and useful math could be that made me stick through all of the subsequently awful high school and college-level teachers-- I knew that there was something good there, just waiting for me to discover it. I'm glad you're doing this!
This is so true. The other day, my girlfriend's mother was grilling me on my asthma-- she was convinced that if I just "adjusted my attitude", my asthma would go away. I decided that it would be too rude to mention that maybe her cancer would have gone away, too, if she had had the right attitude-- this is despite the fact that modern medicine successfully treated her for cancer. Rational argument does not work with her, because, quite simply, she does not accept that systematic inquiry can lead to the answers.
I suspect that the two main considerations holding back device manufacturers from using formats other than FAT variants are:
1) Is it easy for the device to work in Windows?
2) Is the format unencumbered?
Technical considerations are probably generally not on their minds, at least not yet. I think the fact that both existing implementations you link to are GPL-licensed is a nail in the coffin for them-- there's no chance that Microsoft would ever consider stuffing the code into their default Windows install, and it seems that hardware manufacturers in particular are extremely slow coming around to the idea of Free Software. Were they BSD-licensed, however, it might be easier for these folks to adopt the code. Even Microsoft, at the head of the pack when it comes to NIH syndrome, regularly reuses BSD code.
Also, a very important point about Lincoln-- he filled his Cabinet with his opponents! This served many useful functions, most important in my mind being a constant supply of differing viewpoints (the Wiki article suggests that it was to prevent them from aligning against him). These were definitely not yes men.
So you'd be OK with it if they were hairy, fat, and losing teeth? Kinky!
I think the fact that we are, in general, attracted to such hairless, cosmetically-altered people shows that this has quite a bit to do with our natural sexual instincts. Maybe not all of it (there's a fair amount of variance between cultures for instance), but a lot of it, yes.
I'd personally be suspect of anyone who doesn't like porn, because you're talking about somebody with a powerful enough prejudice to find issue with millions of years of sexual reproduction.
Slashdot Mirror
You really need to read this book. Read it critically, of course. But it opened my eyes to the fact that companies like Monsanto, BP, Dow Chemical, and so on, will never emit unvarnished truths-- there is too much of a financial incentive for them to spin things their way, even to the detriment of humanity. There's a story in the book about a Monsanto scientist who discovered that the gene they were inserting into GMO food was causing anaphylactic shock in some people. Working inside the company got him nowhere, so he spoke publicly about it, and Monsanto buried his career. I just can't trust information from a company like that.
You are mistaken about one important fact: science requires that there be one correct answer. The entire process depends on it. Science is the whittling away at that truth. Data that are gleaned through the creative use of statistics are not "scientifically backed up" if they are not true. Doing that is an obfuscation of the truth; it depends on the lay public not knowing how to interpret their methods.
If Monsanto wants to make information about their products known in a scientifically-rigorous way, they need to do it like everyone else: publish in a peer-reviewed journal. Until then, it is not science.
Note to mods: "Funny", not "Insightful".
If you don't need to know the difference, then no. But there are plenty of people who have specific requirements, and I'm glad that Linux supports them. E.g., we pay to have our Linux machines use CVFS (StorNext) and associated daemons, because we require its features. A GPL'ed CVFS suite would be awesome, but I can understand why Quantum wouldn't want to do it.
The Justice Department is so fucked up. Does anyone really think that mandating portions of code will really solve antitrust issues? Sure, like the rest of Windows products, via convenient features, the code steers you toward eventual lock-in. But that wasn't really the issue-- after all, Apple, Sun, IBM, and most software development houses in the 90's all used this same strategy. The issue was that Microsoft was threatening their own customers, OEMs and integrators, if they did not play by Microsoft's rules. THAT was the problem.
Now what we will have is an operating system that was created in some fictitious anti-trust-free-zone, burdened by additional government "oversight" whose cost will be passed along to both taxpayers and Microsoft's customers, because Microsoft still plays like a bully, and the original issues brought up in the antitrust trial were NOT RESOLVED. When Microsoft is forced to play by the same rules as everyone else, that's when customers will finally be able to objectively decide whether they want to go the convenient, locked-in route or the some other way.
But wait-- you're only talking about the final appeal, which Fox New Corp won. What about the earlier trial, in which the jury found that Fox "acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs' news reporting on BGH" and subsequently awarded the plaintiffs (the reporters in question) $425,000. The fact that the case was overturned on appeal, by a technicality, does not change the fact that Fox News Corp's actions were unbecoming (i.e., unethical) of a real journalistic organization. The facts you are looking for can be found in the court documents, which are public record.
Ford Prefect: "Imagine you've got this bath. And it's ebony. And it's conical."
Interconnecting all of those cores is a real engineering challenge. The basic problem is covered in elementary discrete mathematics books. These guys are most definitely still pushing the envelope.
Oh, well, then you're also familiar with the litany of "conveniences" the MBTA lovingly provides for us on a daily basis. Like holding the train at Kenmore for screaming hordes of drunk Red Sox fans, making it a total crapshoot as to whether or not I can make my connecting commuter train from North Station. Recently, I've resorted to bringing a pair of running shoes and shorts and just hauling ass across the city, on foot.
The only reasonable thing to do, if you're worried about your communications being monitored, is to assume that they are being monitored. Relying on the fact that your phone is not tapped is just a bad idea, and this is why all security nowadays happens at the endpoints.
Yeah, I didn't really want to mention that since it's an awesome idea really just for technical users. BTW, I shared your non-enthusiasm for JavaScript until recently, when I discovered that the modern language, ECMAScript, is a lot more mature than the JS I played with nearly a decade ago. And now that I have some formal mathematics training, I can appreciate some of the more... er, esoteric... features of JavaScript, like its scoping rules. Not that it's my language of choice, but I understand why a designer would get that fuzzy feeling when using it for the GUI engine *and* the layout engine.
It's up to the package maintainer for your distro to do that. There's just no way the Firefox people can write instructions that would apply to even all Linux distros out there-- at least, not without being either hopelessly vague or too verbose for practical use. That's like asking trees how to build a house.
Let's see, Firefox:
- Can render many different doctypes: HTML 4.01 traditional, HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1, RSS, etc, etc, etc
- Includes a Javascript interpreter
- Has its own platform-independent GUI drawing code, and those widgets are designed to match the native widgets on each platform
- Supports UTF-8 and many, many other character encodings.
- Stores bookmark and preference data in a RDBMS (not a very capable one, admittedly, but still)
- Has a plugin framework
- Runs on virtually every OS that is still in use
- Is very friendly to web developers (e.g., supports neat stuff like Firebug)
- And a zillion other features.
This is a serious piece of work, under active development. The fact that they were able to add more features, plus stability, plus better memory management, plus better security handling (like seriously addressing XSS), PLUS address many of those only-a-problem-for-technical-twits issues that are out there says to me that the Firefox development team really has their shit together. This is an application that I have open all day, every day, and for me, it works great.(of course, I'm currently posting using Safari, so YMMV)
Your post made me think of something-- the Earth is really BIG! But I'm a nerd, so I had to prove it to myself.
The surface area of the Earth, not counting water, is 510,072,000 km^2, according to Wikipedia. So, that's roughly 5.1 x 10^14 m^2. Again, according to Wikipedia, there are currently 6.67 x 10^9 people on Earth. That translates to about 7.65 x 10^4 m^2 for each person! In terms that Americans can understand, that's roughly 14 football fields (or to choose a landmark close to me, a little bit larger than Fenway Park). When you consider the fact that metro areas often have millions of residents, you realize that we're pretty lumped together, distribution-wise.
Wow, that reminds me of when some days there would only be a small handful of stories on Slashdot. Now that I actually like my job, there's far more than I can read in one day.
Hey, I resent that. I live in the attic now.
Yeah-- I just hope Ginsberg can hang on long enough for a sane president to be elected to office.
Brilliant. I was fortunate enough to have a similar math teacher in high school, and it was his showing me how fun and useful math could be that made me stick through all of the subsequently awful high school and college-level teachers-- I knew that there was something good there, just waiting for me to discover it. I'm glad you're doing this!
This is so true. The other day, my girlfriend's mother was grilling me on my asthma-- she was convinced that if I just "adjusted my attitude", my asthma would go away. I decided that it would be too rude to mention that maybe her cancer would have gone away, too, if she had had the right attitude-- this is despite the fact that modern medicine successfully treated her for cancer. Rational argument does not work with her, because, quite simply, she does not accept that systematic inquiry can lead to the answers.
I'd just like to point out, for the record, that scientists and science teachers are usually two completely different creatures.
I suspect that the two main considerations holding back device manufacturers from using formats other than FAT variants are:
1) Is it easy for the device to work in Windows?
2) Is the format unencumbered?
Technical considerations are probably generally not on their minds, at least not yet. I think the fact that both existing implementations you link to are GPL-licensed is a nail in the coffin for them-- there's no chance that Microsoft would ever consider stuffing the code into their default Windows install, and it seems that hardware manufacturers in particular are extremely slow coming around to the idea of Free Software. Were they BSD-licensed, however, it might be easier for these folks to adopt the code. Even Microsoft, at the head of the pack when it comes to NIH syndrome, regularly reuses BSD code.
Also, a very important point about Lincoln-- he filled his Cabinet with his opponents! This served many useful functions, most important in my mind being a constant supply of differing viewpoints (the Wiki article suggests that it was to prevent them from aligning against him). These were definitely not yes men.
So you'd be OK with it if they were hairy, fat, and losing teeth? Kinky!
I think the fact that we are, in general, attracted to such hairless, cosmetically-altered people shows that this has quite a bit to do with our natural sexual instincts. Maybe not all of it (there's a fair amount of variance between cultures for instance), but a lot of it, yes.
I'd personally be suspect of anyone who doesn't like porn, because you're talking about somebody with a powerful enough prejudice to find issue with millions of years of sexual reproduction.