The problem is clear. Everytime someone patents something, millions of people are banned from the invention if the inventor wants. He just want's to sell it for the optimun mononoly price (that is what a patent grants). So all the benefit goes to monopolistic patenter.
In this case it just gets worst, because what's basically beign patented is the underling "programming language" (for lack of a better word) the DNA uses and the actual data that is encoded.
What if an alien race came and claimed they patented DNA and forced to pay whatever royalties or inmediately terminate our grant to use the technology (to live).
This issue we are talking about are not Mickey Mouse movies or a technique to write to CD with more reliability or to produce scented beer. We are talking about what makes us human and "how we work".
I understand granting monopolies on this will help people try to reap the rewards from such a grant, turning knowing how humans are done into a profit & loss equation.
Also, we are talking about something that ALREADY has been invented (DNA and how it works) and the methods to extract usefull data from it though a 'kind of' reverse engineering are not inventions. It's like einstein patenting E=mc^2... it was already here before einstein noticed, and yes, his discovery transformed earth, and no, we didn't need patents to have people willing to o the research.
I mean, patent stuff and inventions, not methods or things whos logic belongs to nature / phisics itself.
God, I won't acept any other patent regarding my DNA as well as my relatives DNA (going back to Adan and Eva or whatever you call them). If anyone has a patent on this issue, and certainly doesn't need us to recognize it is god (be it aliens or a more stylized one like in religion).
How can any asshole claim to have a patent restricting me what I can do with my DNA and how to process is? This is just intelectual violence. We should find a different way to reward these scientists when and if their contributions to society are proven to be worthy.
I'm kind of stating to get bored about raping of the humans by other humans. You can't fit everything under the free market schema with hacks like patent law or copyright. It can help in certain cases, but generalized like this, they turn into a pie divider of societies gains through time which happens to be unacceptable (to me).
The fact that none of God's pantheon of creatures have managed to completely subvert nature and consume the planet
In fact, they managed, that's the key of evolution and why many species have lasted till today and why hundred million other have not.
It may well be true that after the grey goo era end, humans will not have survived whereas probably some other creature or bacteria would have survived. Several million years later, I can be some stupid cochroachs or rats leader will fully embrace their own extinction, leaving place for another kind of creature to screw themselves.
In short, we are not discussing if they can completely erradicate life on earth on a permanent basis, we are only caring that they must obsolete US, driving us to extinction. That's something I'd be very worried about.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 2
Simple argument. Suppose you get so advanced technologically, that you end up with two simple implementations of that technology and mostly everyone in a garage and little money could reproduce: A red button that aniquilates the entire universe (or maybe all the people of certain color or religion), and another one, the green one, that cures all ills and all scarcity of the good we need?
What would you base your decision to promote or ban the technology BEFORE it is developed, if you know that would be the outcome (green/red buttons)?
For: people are good, they will never do the bad thing and if the do, well, that's just what must happen, advances can't be stoped.
Against: we are better of with some scarcity and not putting the end of the universe as an individual choice. Any single human could devastate everything everywhere, no matter what the rest thinks.
This of nuclear power: the against would say the fact that it is inmenselly benefical does not compensate the risk, that is, ending the human race existance on earth. Ok, granted we haven't seen a disaster yet, but the fate of earth lies in the fingers of 10 or 20 people arround earth, sa Bush, France, Rusia. If their leader ever wanted to end life on earth, it's at their reach for sure. IS THAT GOOD?... I dunno. But imagine that scenario where EVERYONE has that power, not just 9 guys. We'd be dead in seconds for sure.
Nuclear research now is associated with weapons, though it has million other uses. It doesn't matter if the research is open or not, what matters are the possible implementations that the research allows.
If it allows or eases nanotech weapons it will be a mess. Granted, it probably will be much simpler than scifi a la Diamond Age or Rise of Endymion in the beggining, but i think it can be worst in the future.
I mean, can there be a technology that simply can't be stopped unless you are actually stoping peopl from accesing the technology at all? Nanotech is the worst evemy of the human race for sure, though it could be a great ally, the benefit should be net positive.
As an example, nuclear research has been positive up to 22/11/2002. If there is at any time a nuclear war or detonation, no matter how much it helped, we'd have been better with it than with it.
Mh, maybe they will make us give up our freedom, so that they can get OUR pron:) Imagine, all the FBI, CIA, whatever servers set up with keywords "lez, chloe,..." with -20 priotity...
Bush: "all your pron belongs to us, for GREAT JUSTICE"!
If you don't agree, then why are you stating the exact same he said? That it has an upfront cost to intalling drivers in the first pass, requiring more knoledge. And that cloning is really easy (good thing).
There will be a sept 11 for communications. That day, a bastion of the IT industry will be just destroyed (not infected, but deleted, formated). That will be a simple and effective way to push Microsoft's any everyone else trying not to profit from this market, but to control our communications and daily lives.
After that day, Palladium (or something similar) will be mandated, encription will be banned (goverment provided encription will be the only legal encription, with the due unlock key in their hands). P2P will be banned.
Or does anybody still think they will care what a bunch of "anarchists" have to say about the freedom to trade porn movs or mp3?
So it is VERY important that people patch their systems. If they don't, they dumping fuel on what will benefit "cyberterrorists" and "anti privacy, pro control" organizations. It is indeed crucial, the fate of the information era depends on taking care about security BEFORE anything important has happened. For as when something important has happened, you will have no freedom so as to enjoy the "added _security_"....
All true statements:) Anyway, the outcome has been pretty positive considering the 3D cards of today have more power than a $250.000 station of 5 years ago.
And what about having to patch the Windows version every week? Add that cost on top of the initial $30.000. Everyone can administer the Linux network as long as they get paid. Or Microsoft support comes for free? Will MS send someone every week to update the security problem, to check every machine to see they have not been altered or hacked?
A Linux system can do fine with a very part time talented admin. A Windows system on the other hand requires 1 or 2 monkey full time telling the authorities they need faster machines and all kind of unnecesary programs.
Yeah, politics is how about summing net votes. If you say something to get a minority to vote you, and that bother other people, you're just lowering your votes:)
Many politicians don't know to play that game, it's very demanding and need a lot of intuition. Some parties don't have an option, they need to piss of a vast mayority securing the votes of a minority. It's better than nothing at all.
I'd be inclined to say people don't know Windows is NOT free, a PC is not Windows and that something called free software exists and looks like Windows if you want to.
More over, the ones that know something else exist could not think of even one reson why would they want to try free software, unless it is explained to them. Moving to Linux has a cost. It's slower, you need to relearn a lot of stuff (and that is a pain, because if we needed to relearn everything several times, we wouldn't be able to acomplish anything at all. Imagine if coutries swtiched units and bases every 5 years...)....
So yes, you need to provide advocacy examples, even in slashdot...
Great, no all we need are the actual packages...Linuxpackages has some, but i often have to recompile everything myself. That's not a problem, except when the package is hard to compile or has lots of dependencies (Evolution, Mozilla-Galeon, Gnome, etc).
Slackware is a pain to blindly upgrade, but it never prevents you from having the greatest latest. If you know how Slackware is lay out, you can keep it clean and dependencies problem to a minimum. You just need to be very carefull.
Slack makes my laptop worth because i can have a very decent signal to noise (no unneeded dependencies). But sometimes I only wish Slack could have a better package system than intallpkg. A versioned database of what was added/remove in time would be great. I mean, a more powerfull verion of apt get, and more packages.
We I want to be cheap, I find that I can just use.rpms. I just use mc to extract the files to a directory and repackage it in the correct directories and modify the necesary scripts. I there where more packages for Slackware:( (linuxpackages.com has only some key packages, most of them on an scratch an itch basis)
I have 1 server that originally had VA's Red Hat preinstalled. After a while, it started crashing once every 15 days or so, running out of swap. It was a mess to administer remotely. Also, the fact that mostly every business uses RedHat makes it much more vulnerable.
So a friend prepared a small slackware replicating all the custom setups we had and remotelly installed the server. After the (human assisted) reboot LILO was told to now boot the Slackware partition. That was march 2001. We don't know if we still have the reboot problem because we never had any reson to reboot it.
Securitywise it was a pleasure. We didn't have the OpenSSH problem because it came with SSH (ssh.com), Bind didn't have any problem, and we only had the ports we needed open where as the red hat version shipped had all kind of open ports all arround for no reason. Everything was on the wrong place (cron files in ridicule places)
At home, I have a laptop which also uses Slack, my life couldn't be easier
Give someone a fish, they get a meal. Teach them to fish, and they'll feed themselves.
Not so true, teach them how to think, and to be hard workers, and that nothing comes for free, and that plain will is no match actually willing what works and working hard in that direction, and only THEN they'll feed themselves. In any other case, you are only enslaving them.
Lending is no better also, because they are not mature enough to truly understand they have to give that money back in the future (their children actually) and also because even if they do know it, they just have no option, they seriously need the money _now_ no matter what happens in the future. I mean, if you are starving, wouldn't you agree on _whatever_ to get that meal?
The comment may seem out of line, but i think it's somewhat on line. We are discussing the Simputer. Come on, they need education, not more debt. It's much better for them to learn to READ than to actually have to work hard for 12 months (without spending any of that income) to have the simputer (average income in these countries if far below 200 u$s a year for the illiterate population).
Want to help the third world? Educate them and forbid the educated ones from emigrating.
Unlimited directory metadata, as my naive first sight interpretation. I think it will be very usefull for Databases, security (finegrained security of directories, like telling extactly how, what and in what situation certain user has rights in the directory), amongh many other possible uses.
Your right about the Rendition. The problems with it where "too late". The Voodoo I came almost at the same time as the Verite I and it wasn't 5 FPS, it was a lot more. The quality of the verite was ineed much vetter than the Voodoo, but the Voodoo quality was much more than expected. I remember thinking we'd NEVER ever be able to play 640x480 games at fool screen. And there was Quake and Mechwarrior at 40 FPS and 640x480.
I had a friend with a Verite and LOVED it. But the Voodoo had Glide and the miniGL, and Id discovered they didn't want to write one driver tunned for each card. The specifically regreted about writing the Verite driver because from then on everyone would expect them to write a driver for each card and they wheren't going to do that.
I think the real reson the Voodoo catched on is because it was a pleasure to use Glide, it was more powerfull (speed) and it really had the budget to fucos on getting the card supported. They where constantly helping developers to write the Glide versions. Rendition probably didn't have that much resources.
Use OTP for the emails (say you share a 100GB HD with keys with your fellows). When the goverment comes and ask for the unencripted messages you could just tell _whatever_ you like:)
Impractical, but should be really funny. And if we can do this so could Saddam. There's no possible way to know the message. Thee know this, but spying on people has a lot other advantages to US. Imagine, spying on what everyone that is not a terrorist (99,999%), all the information you can gather for whatever. That is power.
In fact, it's very easy to rob a car, and the ones blamed are the thiefs, not Ford. Also, that's why you have insurance, I don't see Ford putting a lot of efforts in anti-theft technology.
With computers, it's a little different. You can't get insurance and the equivalent of "robbing a million cars in a day" is easy as writing a good worm. So Microsoft has to be more carefull, we are trusting our data and business to them, and they should show more caring for the customers.
We demand security, LESS features, ADDED security. At some point, people asked features, now they ask security. The ones asking for more features should know of that trade-off. They do not often link features with code harder to secure.
Well, they could delete everything that's not already opened. Like deltree. I'd preffer a format to a deltree + overwriting all bits with junk or zeroes.
With a format, and asuming you are using FAT, your data is intaact, you just need to chain the data togheter again (expensive + time consuming, but if the data is valuable, you have an option).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is clear. Everytime someone patents something, millions of people are banned from the invention if the inventor wants. He just want's to sell it for the optimun mononoly price (that is what a patent grants). So all the benefit goes to monopolistic patenter.
... it was already here before einstein noticed, and yes, his discovery transformed earth, and no, we didn't need patents to have people willing to o the research.
In this case it just gets worst, because what's basically beign patented is the underling "programming language" (for lack of a better word) the DNA uses and the actual data that is encoded.
What if an alien race came and claimed they patented DNA and forced to pay whatever royalties or inmediately terminate our grant to use the technology (to live).
This issue we are talking about are not Mickey Mouse movies or a technique to write to CD with more reliability or to produce scented beer. We are talking about what makes us human and "how we work".
I understand granting monopolies on this will help people try to reap the rewards from such a grant, turning knowing how humans are done into a profit & loss equation.
Also, we are talking about something that ALREADY has been invented (DNA and how it works) and the methods to extract usefull data from it though a 'kind of' reverse engineering are not inventions. It's like einstein patenting E=mc^2
I mean, patent stuff and inventions, not methods or things whos logic belongs to nature / phisics itself.
God, I won't acept any other patent regarding my DNA as well as my relatives DNA (going back to Adan and Eva or whatever you call them). If anyone has a patent on this issue, and certainly doesn't need us to recognize it is god (be it aliens or a more stylized one like in religion).
How can any asshole claim to have a patent restricting me what I can do with my DNA and how to process is? This is just intelectual violence. We should find a different way to reward these scientists when and if their contributions to society are proven to be worthy.
I'm kind of stating to get bored about raping of the humans by other humans. You can't fit everything under the free market schema with hacks like patent law or copyright. It can help in certain cases, but generalized like this, they turn into a pie divider of societies gains through time which happens to be unacceptable (to me).
The fact that none of God's pantheon of creatures have managed to completely subvert nature and consume the planet
In fact, they managed, that's the key of evolution and why many species have lasted till today and why hundred million other have not.
It may well be true that after the grey goo era end, humans will not have survived whereas probably some other creature or bacteria would have survived. Several million years later, I can be some stupid cochroachs or rats leader will fully embrace their own extinction, leaving place for another kind of creature to screw themselves.
In short, we are not discussing if they can completely erradicate life on earth on a permanent basis, we are only caring that they must obsolete US, driving us to extinction. That's something I'd be very worried about.
Simple argument. Suppose you get so advanced technologically, that you end up with two simple implementations of that technology and mostly everyone in a garage and little money could reproduce: A red button that aniquilates the entire universe (or maybe all the people of certain color or religion), and another one, the green one, that cures all ills and all scarcity of the good we need?
... I dunno. But imagine that scenario where EVERYONE has that power, not just 9 guys. We'd be dead in seconds for sure.
What would you base your decision to promote or ban the technology BEFORE it is developed, if you know that would be the outcome (green/red buttons)?
For: people are good, they will never do the bad thing and if the do, well, that's just what must happen, advances can't be stoped.
Against: we are better of with some scarcity and not putting the end of the universe as an individual choice. Any single human could devastate everything everywhere, no matter what the rest thinks.
This of nuclear power: the against would say the fact that it is inmenselly benefical does not compensate the risk, that is, ending the human race existance on earth. Ok, granted we haven't seen a disaster yet, but the fate of earth lies in the fingers of 10 or 20 people arround earth, sa Bush, France, Rusia. If their leader ever wanted to end life on earth, it's at their reach for sure. IS THAT GOOD?
Nuclear research now is associated with weapons, though it has million other uses. It doesn't matter if the research is open or not, what matters are the possible implementations that the research allows.
If it allows or eases nanotech weapons it will be a mess. Granted, it probably will be much simpler than scifi a la Diamond Age or Rise of Endymion in the beggining, but i think it can be worst in the future.
I mean, can there be a technology that simply can't be stopped unless you are actually stoping peopl from accesing the technology at all? Nanotech is the worst evemy of the human race for sure, though it could be a great ally, the benefit should be net positive.
As an example, nuclear research has been positive up to 22/11/2002. If there is at any time a nuclear war or detonation, no matter how much it helped, we'd have been better with it than with it.
Wish I could, they just devaluated here. us$ 400 get's you 600 meals here now. I'd feel bad :)
Mh, maybe they will make us give up our freedom, so that they can get OUR pron :) Imagine, all the FBI, CIA, whatever servers set up with keywords "lez, chloe, ..." with -20 priotity ...
Bush: "all your pron belongs to us, for GREAT JUSTICE"!
Gatos makes the 2D part, DRI the 3D part. What do you mean you don't need the Gatos drivers?
If you don't agree, then why are you stating the exact same he said? That it has an upfront cost to intalling drivers in the first pass, requiring more knoledge. And that cloning is really easy (good thing).
Now I can buy an ATI card. Good for them and for us.
There will be a sept 11 for communications. That day, a bastion of the IT industry will be just destroyed (not infected, but deleted, formated). That will be a simple and effective way to push Microsoft's any everyone else trying not to profit from this market, but to control our communications and daily lives.
After that day, Palladium (or something similar) will be mandated, encription will be banned (goverment provided encription will be the only legal encription, with the due unlock key in their hands). P2P will be banned.
Or does anybody still think they will care what a bunch of "anarchists" have to say about the freedom to trade porn movs or mp3?
So it is VERY important that people patch their systems. If they don't, they dumping fuel on what will benefit "cyberterrorists" and "anti privacy, pro control" organizations. It is indeed crucial, the fate of the information era depends on taking care about security BEFORE anything important has happened. For as when something important has happened, you will have no freedom so as to enjoy the "added _security_"....
All true statements :) Anyway, the outcome has been pretty positive considering the 3D cards of today have more power than a $250.000 station of 5 years ago.
And what about having to patch the Windows version every week? Add that cost on top of the initial $30.000. Everyone can administer the Linux network as long as they get paid. Or Microsoft support comes for free? Will MS send someone every week to update the security problem, to check every machine to see they have not been altered or hacked?
A Linux system can do fine with a very part time talented admin. A Windows system on the other hand requires 1 or 2 monkey full time telling the authorities they need faster machines and all kind of unnecesary programs.
Yeah, politics is how about summing net votes. If you say something to get a minority to vote you, and that bother other people, you're just lowering your votes :)
Many politicians don't know to play that game, it's very demanding and need a lot of intuition. Some parties don't have an option, they need to piss of a vast mayority securing the votes of a minority. It's better than nothing at all.
I'd be inclined to say people don't know Windows is NOT free, a PC is not Windows and that something called free software exists and looks like Windows if you want to.
More over, the ones that know something else exist could not think of even one reson why would they want to try free software, unless it is explained to them. Moving to Linux has a cost. It's slower, you need to relearn a lot of stuff (and that is a pain, because if we needed to relearn everything several times, we wouldn't be able to acomplish anything at all. Imagine if coutries swtiched units and bases every 5 years...)....
So yes, you need to provide advocacy examples, even in slashdot...
Great, no all we need are the actual packages...Linuxpackages has some, but i often have to recompile everything myself. That's not a problem, except when the package is hard to compile or has lots of dependencies (Evolution, Mozilla-Galeon, Gnome, etc).
Slackware is a pain to blindly upgrade, but it never prevents you from having the greatest latest. If you know how Slackware is lay out, you can keep it clean and dependencies problem to a minimum. You just need to be very carefull.
.rpms. I just use mc to extract the files to a directory and repackage it in the correct directories and modify the necesary scripts. I there where more packages for Slackware :( (linuxpackages.com has only some key packages, most of them on an scratch an itch basis)
Slack makes my laptop worth because i can have a very decent signal to noise (no unneeded dependencies). But sometimes I only wish Slack could have a better package system than intallpkg. A versioned database of what was added/remove in time would be great. I mean, a more powerfull verion of apt get, and more packages.
We I want to be cheap, I find that I can just use
I have 1 server that originally had VA's Red Hat preinstalled. After a while, it started crashing once every 15 days or so, running out of swap. It was a mess to administer remotely. Also, the fact that mostly every business uses RedHat makes it much more vulnerable.
So a friend prepared a small slackware replicating all the custom setups we had and remotelly installed the server. After the (human assisted) reboot LILO was told to now boot the Slackware partition. That was march 2001. We don't know if we still have the reboot problem because we never had any reson to reboot it.
Securitywise it was a pleasure. We didn't have the OpenSSH problem because it came with SSH (ssh.com), Bind didn't have any problem, and we only had the ports we needed open where as the red hat version shipped had all kind of open ports all arround for no reason. Everything was on the wrong place (cron files in ridicule places)
At home, I have a laptop which also uses Slack, my life couldn't be easier
Give someone a fish, they get a meal. Teach them to fish, and they'll feed themselves.
Not so true, teach them how to think, and to be hard workers, and that nothing comes for free, and that plain will is no match actually willing what works and working hard in that direction, and only THEN they'll feed themselves. In any other case, you are only enslaving them.
Lending is no better also, because they are not mature enough to truly understand they have to give that money back in the future (their children actually) and also because even if they do know it, they just have no option, they seriously need the money _now_ no matter what happens in the future. I mean, if you are starving, wouldn't you agree on _whatever_ to get that meal?
The comment may seem out of line, but i think it's somewhat on line. We are discussing the Simputer. Come on, they need education, not more debt. It's much better for them to learn to READ than to actually have to work hard for 12 months (without spending any of that income) to have the simputer (average income in these countries if far below 200 u$s a year for the illiterate population).
Want to help the third world? Educate them and forbid the educated ones from emigrating.
Without support from "Christian" fundamentalists, he could not have been elected.
And without support from the non "Christian" fundamentalists, he could not have been elected either.
They are still a minority. The thing is, Bush should have never been elected in the first place. He wasn't even the one with the most votes.
The Albatros can not only fly, but actually is the fastest bird on earth.
Unlimited directory metadata, as my naive first sight interpretation. I think it will be very usefull for Databases, security (finegrained security of directories, like telling extactly how, what and in what situation certain user has rights in the directory), amongh many other possible uses.
Your right about the Rendition. The problems with it where "too late". The Voodoo I came almost at the same time as the Verite I and it wasn't 5 FPS, it was a lot more. The quality of the verite was ineed much vetter than the Voodoo, but the Voodoo quality was much more than expected. I remember thinking we'd NEVER ever be able to play 640x480 games at fool screen. And there was Quake and Mechwarrior at 40 FPS and 640x480.
I had a friend with a Verite and LOVED it. But the Voodoo had Glide and the miniGL, and Id discovered they didn't want to write one driver tunned for each card. The specifically regreted about writing the Verite driver because from then on everyone would expect them to write a driver for each card and they wheren't going to do that.
I think the real reson the Voodoo catched on is because it was a pleasure to use Glide, it was more powerfull (speed) and it really had the budget to fucos on getting the card supported. They where constantly helping developers to write the Glide versions. Rendition probably didn't have that much resources.
Use OTP for the emails (say you share a 100GB HD with keys with your fellows). When the goverment comes and ask for the unencripted messages you could just tell _whatever_ you like :)
Impractical, but should be really funny. And if we can do this so could Saddam. There's no possible way to know the message. Thee know this, but spying on people has a lot other advantages to US. Imagine, spying on what everyone that is not a terrorist (99,999%), all the information you can gather for whatever. That is power.
In fact, it's very easy to rob a car, and the ones blamed are the thiefs, not Ford. Also, that's why you have insurance, I don't see Ford putting a lot of efforts in anti-theft technology.
With computers, it's a little different. You can't get insurance and the equivalent of "robbing a million cars in a day" is easy as writing a good worm. So Microsoft has to be more carefull, we are trusting our data and business to them, and they should show more caring for the customers.
We demand security, LESS features, ADDED security. At some point, people asked features, now they ask security. The ones asking for more features should know of that trade-off. They do not often link features with code harder to secure.
Well, they could delete everything that's not already opened. Like deltree. I'd preffer a format to a deltree + overwriting all bits with junk or zeroes.
With a format, and asuming you are using FAT, your data is intaact, you just need to chain the data togheter again (expensive + time consuming, but if the data is valuable, you have an option).