Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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The only way you're going to get private drug R&D without patents is if you get rid of the FDA - nobody is going to do a $500M clinical trial for a drug that costs 10 cents/pill.
Very little drug research occurs for compounds that are only marginally better than other compounds that are currently available generically. You do find research on compounds that are only marginally better than other branded compounds - and this is a good thing. Choice leads to negotiated prices, availability of alternate options for those with allergies, etc.
The only way that a patent-free system would work is if all drug R&D is government-funded. Right now abut the only stuff that is publicly funded is non-applied - such as finding possible drug mechanisms, etc. While this is very critical to drug discovery, it amounts to a small portion of the total costs. The big cost is clinical trials, since those involve lots of doctors, who don't do anything for peanuts.
In any case, the solution is simple if you want public medicine. Just leave patents alone - have the NIH develop some drugs and patent them - then license them for anybody to produce. We can then see how expensive this is and if it makes sense to continue with this. If it doesn't work, we can go back to the status quo. If it does work, we can continue with it.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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Uh, that wouldn't work without copyright, unless purchasers paid without listening to the song first (like a commissioned work of art). Otherwise when you play your tune to a prospective buyer they just need to smuggle in a tape recorder and have their own band perform it the following week without giving you a dime. Even if you strip-searched them they need only remember the tune and lyrics and they could probably put it back together reasonably well with the right talent. Compared to the cost of a record deal that would be VERY cheap...
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 1
Uh, you do realize that it takes 5 years just to do the safety trials on a drug to get it on the market, right? If the patent lifetime were 5 years nobody would bother. Why make what will end up being a generic medication when you can just make aspirin pills for the same marginal profit and far less sunk costs?
Obviously patents need to be reasonable, but unless you make a distinction between the haves and the have-nots you can't sell anything. If you consider profit from health care immoral then you're going to have to tax people a great sum to provide for it, and then you're going to have to make public policy as to which diseases will and won't get R&D'd and to what levels. With private funding the consumers get to decide.
Which isn't to say that public medicine couldn't work, but it wouldn't be nearly as cheap as a lot of people think, and it would have a whole new set of issues...
Compatibility with Microsoft Office is not 100% and OpenOffice.org is a slow piece of shit even at the best of times.
What does this have to do with linux? The same problem would exist on windows if you wanted to run Openoffice. And OpenOffice is no more incompatible with MS Office than MS Office is with OpenOffice. And it isn't like MS Office comes with windows in the first place - if you're comparing extra add-ons maybe the comparison should be StarOffice, or something more expensive than free? And I've run into my share of Word bugs at work - they aren't common but you can run into them when you put tables into headers/footers, and otherwise have complex documents.
The Java plugin is a pain in the hole to set up on Linux compared to Windows
Have you set up the official java plugin on windows? Or are you using the old built-in MS VM that they're not even allowed to update any more (at least I think that was the conclusion of the matter - I forget how all the lawsuits turned out). In any case, Java is 3rd-party software even on windows, and how well it works is limited by the fact that Sun doesn't let it get bundled with distros.
and the Flash plugin (yes, lots of people, myself included, like Flash movies) is absolutely terrible on Linux.
Again, this is 3rd-party software. This would be no different from me complaining about how lousy konqueror or tuxracer support is on windows.
Can't say I've observed your KDE issues - it tends to be pretty responsive in my experience as long as you don't overdo the eye-candy relative to hardware. While technically not linux I'd say that the desktop environment in general is fair game for criticism.
Don't get me wrong - linux has its issues. However, many of the issues amount to it being different from windows. Any system is going to have a learning curve.
In theory 64bit should be good for 17 179 869 184 GB. Granted, on AMD64 the process can only address 1 TB of RAM, and I think 256TB of virtual memory. However, that is a result of chip design and not arch, per se - so that can be raised without breaking compatibility at the software level.
I believe linux supports the full range, or close to it.
Sorry - wasn't my intention to pick on you in particular - it just seemed like there were quite a few posts in this general thread along the lines of "who needs transactions anyway."
Obviously if they aren't needed they just add overhead...
Well, that just leads to things like the reputation that import cars used to have for being impossible to find parts for. It used to be true, and so the foreign manufacturers went out of their way to make parts available, and now nobody worries about it.
Would you buy a car that nobody was willing to service?
I develop a database-heavy webapp and a quick grep through the query logs show that about 96% of UPDATE queries include a WHERE clause that specifies a primary key value, and thus by definition only change one row.
Yes, but how many of those 1-record-updates were triggered by a single "transaction". If I write a loop which updates records one-at-a-time then you'll get a million 1-record-updates, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't benefit from being enclosed in a transaction.
Also - atomicity is about more that DB writes. What happens if you query the same record 5 times in generating a report/webpage/whatever. If you enclose the SELECTs in a transaction they are guaranteed to return the same result. If you don't then they could be inconsistent. All a transaction does is make DB IO seem instantaneous, even if it wasn't. With a transaction, you can do a SELECT that returns 25 GB of data over a DSL line, and the last record returned was in the state it was the command was issued.
Now, I still think that allowing transactions to be disabled for the sake of performance is fine, as it gives control to the developer. However, I'd only trust a developer to make that determination if they were well versed in DB concepts - far too many folks have a transactions-are-overrated philosophy without understanding why they are often important.
Ironically back when electrical grids were starting to take off there was a big fight over AC vs DC, with one marketing approach being to associate the opposing side with the electric chair. I think that somebody wanted to coin the phrase "getting westinghoused" for being electrocuted.
Honestly, I don't think there are any practical alternatives to Citrix right now. Remote desktop might work - technically, but you lose seamless integration, and you'll need to set up printers on the remote profile. It might be more likely to work, actually, if you just treat the local workstation like a thin client and just have people set up the remote desktop as if it were their workstation.
Printing in citrix is less than perfect, but in recent versions it seems to work reasonably well. I'm not aware of anything else out there which will share your local printers/drives/COM-ports/etc.
You can also run citrix clients on linux (I've tinkered a little with the new HP linux thin clients - they generally work pretty well).
Don't get me wrong - I'd love there to be a FOSS alternative. I use NX at home, and that is almost as good as Citrix for WAN performance (emphasis on almost - it isn't always spectacular). However, at best this is a replacement for remote desktop - not for Citrix.
cal, vi, cron, curl/wget and a httpd give a competent user sync, sharing, group and web access.
Sounds to me like your problem is; you can't be bothered learing how to use a computer.
And a hack saw provides all the functionality of a band saw.
Need to get from New York to Paris? Ocean liner works just fine. It also has much higher baggage limits than those new-fangled jets.
And who needs gcc? Last time I checked the Athlon/Pentium opcode tables were published standards. Compilers are just for people too stupid to figure out how to follow the instruction pointer...
What, you just come in one day and your day's calendar is automatically populated by luser managers who decide they want you to attend a bunch of worthless meetings?
Yeah, the same luser managers who decide on what groupware package to standardize on...
Seriously though, it isn't just luser managers. You need to sit down for 30 minutes to talk to 3 customers about your latest problem/issue/prototype/requirements/whatever. You could call them on the phone and leave voicemails asking for 3 suggested times to meet from each of them, and play phone-tag for 3 days. You could use a more limited free/busy publishing app and view their calendars and start searching for a time to meet. Or, you could use exchange and tell outlook to find the next time you and the three customers are free, and while it is at it could it check the conference rooms at the same time.
In my experience the only folks who end up in meetings all day long are the managers. And really, the only meetings that tend to be wastes are standing meetings - if you are calling a meeting to deal with a particular issue then it often tends to be productive (unless you're one of those folks who calls meetings any time a trivial decision needs to be made).
When I find a useless meeting on my calendar the next day, I just call the organizer on the phone and see if it can't be dealt with in 5 minutes. If the issue is serious then the meeting is probably worth attending.
True, in some sense it would be like what would happen to linux if it took off commercially.
Next thing you know, software settings would be stored in/usr/bin/softwarexyz.ini, except for a few settings in/var/softwarexyz/abc.ini, and a few binary files scattered around the system. Before you know it, you have a pile of garbage instead of an organized filesystem, and good luck backing up your config files without backing up the entire system. The only thing saving you from user config files outside of/home is the fact that nobody runs as root by default - if the software was developed on linspire then your personal settings would go under/var/app/username.
The only reason that linux stays clean right now is because most software is installed by a distro-maintained package - not by software vendor-maintained package. If Microsoft made the installers for every application in existence they'd probably be half-decent about registry conformance.
The registry isn't completely horrible on a fundamental level, but I still prefer small text files. When combined with a package manager they're easier to prune on an uninstall, and if the system needs repair they are a lot easier to edit.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx1.mail.yahoo.com. yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx2.mail.yahoo.com. yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx3.mail.yahoo.com. yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 5 mx4.mail.yahoo.com.
mx1-3 will be contacted first by a legitimate sender (in any order). Each might be a round-robin DNS, in which case each would only be attempted once at whatever IP each returns first. Then mx4 will be tried (if 1-3 fail). If somebody hits mx4 before 1-3 that would be a sign of a bad mail relay.
This also means that if Linux is to compete for the desktop it will have to have the same features regardless of Stallmans desires. This is one thing on which Linus is absolutely right. The usage of DRM by pigopolists is a current fad which is only a minor fraction of its actual use. The real use of DRM is to enforce a security policy on data across an enterprise.
Easy solution to this - pass a law that states that anybody who buys or rents hardware is required to be given a human-readable list of all keys stored in that hardware, and a human-readable list of any keys mathematically associated with them (ie corresponding private keys). A list of all parties with copies of these keys must also be disclosed. Said hardware is also required to support user replacement of keys in case the buyer doesn't like somebody on the aforementioned list of copy-holders.
When ABC Co buys laptops they would use these keys to enforce their security policies, and they would not distribute the keys to regular employees (unless the employees buy their laptops).
You'll never see this happen, since the main reason DRM is being pushed is for copyright protection, and this relies on people not possessing the keys to the hardware they own.
If DRM were implemented in this manner, I'd be the first to sign up for it. Imagine - hardware-based crypto and OS security impossible to bypass with a boot CD (unless it is an owner-authorized boot CD). No running of binaries not approved by the system owner! It would be great. The problem is that the vendors consider themselves the system owners.
Since you seem to be following along fairly well I figured I'd toss you a link to the Carnot Cycle, which is the traditional mathematical treatment of a heat engine and the interplay of heat, temperature, entropy, etc.
It's been a little while since my physical chemistry classes, but the wikipedia explanation wasn't too bad for complexity as such things go.
There are a lot of concepts like internal energy, enthalpy, entropy, heat, temperature, etc which are often understood casually, but which have careful mathematical definitions. Once you understand the definitions you can work out the concrete relationships among them, and how things like engines work.
As others have explained, the bottom line is that an engine is powered by the flow of heat, and limited by how quickly you can bring heat in and get rid of it.
There has been talk of efficiency, but that comes down to a measure of what amount of the heat can even be used at all. For example, if you have a huge dam with a 1" drop in height, you can do as much work as hover dam, but you waste a LOT more water. In the same way a boiling water reactor (temp diff of 100C - 20C) isn't as efficient as a pressurized water reactor (maybe 150C-20C), and a liquid-metal reactor (maybe 500C-20C?) gets a lot more work done with the same amount of fuel consumed. This is also why an electrical care is theoretically a lot more efficient than a fossil-fuel car, even if the electric company burns fossil fuels. They can burn the fuel at a higher temperature, which means more energy is captured from the same amount of fuel burned. There is no getting around this fact of thermodynamics (2nd/3rd laws of thermo) - as explained on the link I gave you.
One thing the utopians who push similar ideas never seem to talk about (at least not in the interviews I've heard) is how they'll handle their prisoners and other undesirables. Basically their only plan is to put them ashore, but they can only do that with the cooperation of another nation. Let's see, they offer other countries the opportunity to shed their richest and most productive citizens (and the taxes they pay), and in exchange they can take back the criminals and other rejects who don't work out.
If a child is born on the ship, what country do they become citizens of? If the ship, then the ship cannot discharge them morrally (just as the US cannot just deport US-born criminals and put them on deserted islands). If some other country, then the ship is just a regular ship and subject to the laws of the nation whose flag it flies - no escape.
There is no question that nations can be run a lot better than they are, but when folks make economic arguments along the line that all essential government services can be purchased for $100/yr/citizen they are usually leaving out the justice system and national defence, and those are pretty essential unless you want your luxury liner to be known as Pirate's Paradise the first time somebody pulls up in a speedboat with an AK47...
Couldn't agree more. I have very strong feelings regarding the importance of marriage, and I have beliefs regarding what marriage is and is not.
However, I don't think the word marriage should appear at all in the laws of the US. States should not certify who can and cannot marry people. Taxes should be collected either on an individual basis or on the basis of mailing address, or some other systematic method. If two people want to enter into a contract allowing for communal ownership of property, etc, then that is fine, and it should be mediated as any other contract dispute when things go sour. It should not be the place of government to determine who can and cannot get married or divorced, or what an equitable division of property is (except to the degree that it mediates pre-arranged contracts).
The only place things get tricky is child custody. Children are generally not able to stand up and defend their own rights, and consequently there is some legitimate purpose in government doing so on their behalf (at least until they reach some defined level of maturity). When four people jointly adopt a child, and then over the next 10 years 8 people enter the relationship, and 9 people leave (including the original 4), then things could get confusing. Probably the best method would be to default to biological parentage as the basis of custody unless other arrangements are made in advance, in which case one primary parent must be designated willing to assume final responsibility for custody. (I'm sure somebody else can come up with a better idea - you can see how messy this can get.)
When the state of marriage conveys no legal benefits or penalties, and confers no rights or responsibilities for individuals or employers or anybody else, then you won't see huge legal battles over who is allowed to marry. And then we conservatives/liberals/whatever can go ahead and express our beliefs without restriction...
DVD-Audio -> don't know what the problem here is. I would love to get DVD-A in my car. CD+ quality with hours of content? I would love that.
Simple. CD-Audio = 40 minutes of music for $25. DVD-Audio = 5 hours of music for $175? Who would pay for that?
The recording industry probably only uses half of the space available on CDs currently - the last thing they want is 25 years of hits on a single disk.
If DVD-Audio took off it would be 40 minutes of 5.1 surround music for $40. And that is why it won't take off...
1. Make e-file a web-based service with an open API that tax software vendors can target. Do not require that the e-submissions come through an intermediary.
2. Make an online web-based tax submission form. No need to duplicate turbotax or anything like that - just create a set of forms that users can fill out just like they would by pencil.
This year I prepared my taxes using TuroboTax, and printed and mailed them. Why? Simple - I wasn't eligible for a rebate and didn't care to spend $15 to file what would otherwise cost me 37 cents. It isn't my problem that it costs the IRS more - if they cared they could do #1 above and I'd have filed electronically.
17 years is a minimum, not a maximum for medical patents. You can get extensions for a variety of reasons & the big pharma companies often do.
Yes and no. Medical patents in the US expire at 17 years, period. However, the US FDA under certain circumstances will delay approval of competing products even after the patent expires, which effectively maintains patent protection even if the patent itself is no longer valid.
These extensions are usually on the order of six months, and are obtained by doing orphan drug studies or pediatric studies of a product. The idea is that these studies are very expensive, and the manufacturer is in the best position to perform them. However, there isn't much money in selling Lipitor to 12 year olds, so the studies wouldn't normally get done. By performing the studies (if requested by the FDA) the company can sell Lipitor to adults for an extra six months, and that is VERY BIG money.
When you hear about generic drugs being held off for years on end, that isn't a matter of patent extensions / government protection. Instead, this is typically a result of loopholes and legal maneuvers, which most people think should be banned outright (even some pharma companies take this stance). The six month limited extension is a quid-pro-quo for the public (adults pay more for six months, less kids die forever), but the legal maneuvers are only about lining pockets and don't benefit anybody but the stockholders.
Well, yes and no. Which is better for the US economy:
1. Spend US tax dollars to employ US Contractors to build bridges in France.
2. Spend US tax dollars to employ US Contractors to build bridges in California.
Really, the biggest benefit of #1 to the US economy is in the form of getting money out of rich taxpayers and into the hands of employees who are more likely to spend it.
I have a feeling that this will turn into a general debian vs gentoo style debate, and we all have our preferences.
The big benefits of precompiling are that you don't need to support 1500 different sets of libraries in your development environments, and that the package will generally work right with minimum fuss.
The big benefits of source-based distros are the ability to tailor packages to each install (ie the ability to compile certain features in or out), to choose optimizations on each package (do you want -Os, -O2, -03, or are you really daring -> -ffast-math?).
There are some things that cut both ways - often a given package can be compiled using one or more different dependencies and if you want this flexibility then source-based might work better. On the other hand, it also means that if you have 500 different users of your distor you have 495 different configurations and bugs that are hard to reproduce.
As for me - I like source-based. However, if I had to build a linux email/browser box for a relative I'd probably use Debian stale...er...stable. The right tool for the right job.
ugh - darn konqueror ctrl-key links! submitted prematurely.
to continue - basic manufacturing safety regulation on medical devices / drugs/etc. Basically just what is needed to maintain a good standard for patient safety where patients can't figure it out on their own (we shouldn't have to rely on provider death rates to figure out who is a reasonably good doctor, and lawsuits to keep drugs safe).
In general, though, I advocate a minimalist approach until it is shown to not work.
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The only way you're going to get private drug R&D without patents is if you get rid of the FDA - nobody is going to do a $500M clinical trial for a drug that costs 10 cents/pill.
Very little drug research occurs for compounds that are only marginally better than other compounds that are currently available generically. You do find research on compounds that are only marginally better than other branded compounds - and this is a good thing. Choice leads to negotiated prices, availability of alternate options for those with allergies, etc.
The only way that a patent-free system would work is if all drug R&D is government-funded. Right now abut the only stuff that is publicly funded is non-applied - such as finding possible drug mechanisms, etc. While this is very critical to drug discovery, it amounts to a small portion of the total costs. The big cost is clinical trials, since those involve lots of doctors, who don't do anything for peanuts.
In any case, the solution is simple if you want public medicine. Just leave patents alone - have the NIH develop some drugs and patent them - then license them for anybody to produce. We can then see how expensive this is and if it makes sense to continue with this. If it doesn't work, we can go back to the status quo. If it does work, we can continue with it.
Uh, that wouldn't work without copyright, unless purchasers paid without listening to the song first (like a commissioned work of art). Otherwise when you play your tune to a prospective buyer they just need to smuggle in a tape recorder and have their own band perform it the following week without giving you a dime. Even if you strip-searched them they need only remember the tune and lyrics and they could probably put it back together reasonably well with the right talent. Compared to the cost of a record deal that would be VERY cheap...
Uh, you do realize that it takes 5 years just to do the safety trials on a drug to get it on the market, right? If the patent lifetime were 5 years nobody would bother. Why make what will end up being a generic medication when you can just make aspirin pills for the same marginal profit and far less sunk costs?
Obviously patents need to be reasonable, but unless you make a distinction between the haves and the have-nots you can't sell anything. If you consider profit from health care immoral then you're going to have to tax people a great sum to provide for it, and then you're going to have to make public policy as to which diseases will and won't get R&D'd and to what levels. With private funding the consumers get to decide.
Which isn't to say that public medicine couldn't work, but it wouldn't be nearly as cheap as a lot of people think, and it would have a whole new set of issues...
Compatibility with Microsoft Office is not 100% and OpenOffice.org is a slow piece of shit even at the best of times.
What does this have to do with linux? The same problem would exist on windows if you wanted to run Openoffice. And OpenOffice is no more incompatible with MS Office than MS Office is with OpenOffice. And it isn't like MS Office comes with windows in the first place - if you're comparing extra add-ons maybe the comparison should be StarOffice, or something more expensive than free? And I've run into my share of Word bugs at work - they aren't common but you can run into them when you put tables into headers/footers, and otherwise have complex documents.
The Java plugin is a pain in the hole to set up on Linux compared to Windows
Have you set up the official java plugin on windows? Or are you using the old built-in MS VM that they're not even allowed to update any more (at least I think that was the conclusion of the matter - I forget how all the lawsuits turned out). In any case, Java is 3rd-party software even on windows, and how well it works is limited by the fact that Sun doesn't let it get bundled with distros.
and the Flash plugin (yes, lots of people, myself included, like Flash movies) is absolutely terrible on Linux.
Again, this is 3rd-party software. This would be no different from me complaining about how lousy konqueror or tuxracer support is on windows.
Can't say I've observed your KDE issues - it tends to be pretty responsive in my experience as long as you don't overdo the eye-candy relative to hardware. While technically not linux I'd say that the desktop environment in general is fair game for criticism.
Don't get me wrong - linux has its issues. However, many of the issues amount to it being different from windows. Any system is going to have a learning curve.
Is it really that low?
In theory 64bit should be good for 17 179 869 184 GB. Granted, on AMD64 the process can only address 1 TB of RAM, and I think 256TB of virtual memory. However, that is a result of chip design and not arch, per se - so that can be raised without breaking compatibility at the software level.
I believe linux supports the full range, or close to it.
Sorry - wasn't my intention to pick on you in particular - it just seemed like there were quite a few posts in this general thread along the lines of "who needs transactions anyway."
Obviously if they aren't needed they just add overhead...
Well, that just leads to things like the reputation that import cars used to have for being impossible to find parts for. It used to be true, and so the foreign manufacturers went out of their way to make parts available, and now nobody worries about it.
Would you buy a car that nobody was willing to service?
I develop a database-heavy webapp and a quick grep through the query logs show that about 96% of UPDATE queries include a WHERE clause that specifies a primary key value, and thus by definition only change one row.
Yes, but how many of those 1-record-updates were triggered by a single "transaction". If I write a loop which updates records one-at-a-time then you'll get a million 1-record-updates, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't benefit from being enclosed in a transaction.
Also - atomicity is about more that DB writes. What happens if you query the same record 5 times in generating a report/webpage/whatever. If you enclose the SELECTs in a transaction they are guaranteed to return the same result. If you don't then they could be inconsistent. All a transaction does is make DB IO seem instantaneous, even if it wasn't. With a transaction, you can do a SELECT that returns 25 GB of data over a DSL line, and the last record returned was in the state it was the command was issued.
Now, I still think that allowing transactions to be disabled for the sake of performance is fine, as it gives control to the developer. However, I'd only trust a developer to make that determination if they were well versed in DB concepts - far too many folks have a transactions-are-overrated philosophy without understanding why they are often important.
Mod parent up.
Ironically back when electrical grids were starting to take off there was a big fight over AC vs DC, with one marketing approach being to associate the opposing side with the electric chair. I think that somebody wanted to coin the phrase "getting westinghoused" for being electrocuted.
Can't say I remember the details though...
Honestly, I don't think there are any practical alternatives to Citrix right now. Remote desktop might work - technically, but you lose seamless integration, and you'll need to set up printers on the remote profile. It might be more likely to work, actually, if you just treat the local workstation like a thin client and just have people set up the remote desktop as if it were their workstation.
Printing in citrix is less than perfect, but in recent versions it seems to work reasonably well. I'm not aware of anything else out there which will share your local printers/drives/COM-ports/etc.
You can also run citrix clients on linux (I've tinkered a little with the new HP linux thin clients - they generally work pretty well).
Don't get me wrong - I'd love there to be a FOSS alternative. I use NX at home, and that is almost as good as Citrix for WAN performance (emphasis on almost - it isn't always spectacular). However, at best this is a replacement for remote desktop - not for Citrix.
cal, vi, cron, curl/wget and a httpd give a competent user sync, sharing, group and web access.
Sounds to me like your problem is; you can't be bothered learing how to use a computer.
And a hack saw provides all the functionality of a band saw.
Need to get from New York to Paris? Ocean liner works just fine. It also has much higher baggage limits than those new-fangled jets.
And who needs gcc? Last time I checked the Athlon/Pentium opcode tables were published standards. Compilers are just for people too stupid to figure out how to follow the instruction pointer...
What, you just come in one day and your day's calendar is automatically populated by luser managers who decide they want you to attend a bunch of worthless meetings?
Yeah, the same luser managers who decide on what groupware package to standardize on...
Seriously though, it isn't just luser managers. You need to sit down for 30 minutes to talk to 3 customers about your latest problem/issue/prototype/requirements/whatever. You could call them on the phone and leave voicemails asking for 3 suggested times to meet from each of them, and play phone-tag for 3 days. You could use a more limited free/busy publishing app and view their calendars and start searching for a time to meet. Or, you could use exchange and tell outlook to find the next time you and the three customers are free, and while it is at it could it check the conference rooms at the same time.
In my experience the only folks who end up in meetings all day long are the managers. And really, the only meetings that tend to be wastes are standing meetings - if you are calling a meeting to deal with a particular issue then it often tends to be productive (unless you're one of those folks who calls meetings any time a trivial decision needs to be made).
When I find a useless meeting on my calendar the next day, I just call the organizer on the phone and see if it can't be dealt with in 5 minutes. If the issue is serious then the meeting is probably worth attending.
True, in some sense it would be like what would happen to linux if it took off commercially.
/usr/bin/softwarexyz.ini, except for a few settings in /var/softwarexyz/abc.ini, and a few binary files scattered around the system. Before you know it, you have a pile of garbage instead of an organized filesystem, and good luck backing up your config files without backing up the entire system. The only thing saving you from user config files outside of /home is the fact that nobody runs as root by default - if the software was developed on linspire then your personal settings would go under /var/app/username.
Next thing you know, software settings would be stored in
The only reason that linux stays clean right now is because most software is installed by a distro-maintained package - not by software vendor-maintained package. If Microsoft made the installers for every application in existence they'd probably be half-decent about registry conformance.
The registry isn't completely horrible on a fundamental level, but I still prefer small text files. When combined with a package manager they're easier to prune on an uninstall, and if the system needs repair they are a lot easier to edit.
MX order has nothing to do with round-robin DNS.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx1.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx2.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx3.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 5 mx4.mail.yahoo.com.
mx1-3 will be contacted first by a legitimate sender (in any order). Each might be a round-robin DNS, in which case each would only be attempted once at whatever IP each returns first. Then mx4 will be tried (if 1-3 fail). If somebody hits mx4 before 1-3 that would be a sign of a bad mail relay.
This also means that if Linux is to compete for the desktop it will have to have the same features regardless of Stallmans desires. This is one thing on which Linus is absolutely right. The usage of DRM by pigopolists is a current fad which is only a minor fraction of its actual use. The real use of DRM is to enforce a security policy on data across an enterprise.
Easy solution to this - pass a law that states that anybody who buys or rents hardware is required to be given a human-readable list of all keys stored in that hardware, and a human-readable list of any keys mathematically associated with them (ie corresponding private keys). A list of all parties with copies of these keys must also be disclosed. Said hardware is also required to support user replacement of keys in case the buyer doesn't like somebody on the aforementioned list of copy-holders.
When ABC Co buys laptops they would use these keys to enforce their security policies, and they would not distribute the keys to regular employees (unless the employees buy their laptops).
You'll never see this happen, since the main reason DRM is being pushed is for copyright protection, and this relies on people not possessing the keys to the hardware they own.
If DRM were implemented in this manner, I'd be the first to sign up for it. Imagine - hardware-based crypto and OS security impossible to bypass with a boot CD (unless it is an owner-authorized boot CD). No running of binaries not approved by the system owner! It would be great. The problem is that the vendors consider themselves the system owners.
Since you seem to be following along fairly well I figured I'd toss you a link to the Carnot Cycle, which is the traditional mathematical treatment of a heat engine and the interplay of heat, temperature, entropy, etc.
It's been a little while since my physical chemistry classes, but the wikipedia explanation wasn't too bad for complexity as such things go.
There are a lot of concepts like internal energy, enthalpy, entropy, heat, temperature, etc which are often understood casually, but which have careful mathematical definitions. Once you understand the definitions you can work out the concrete relationships among them, and how things like engines work.
As others have explained, the bottom line is that an engine is powered by the flow of heat, and limited by how quickly you can bring heat in and get rid of it.
There has been talk of efficiency, but that comes down to a measure of what amount of the heat can even be used at all. For example, if you have a huge dam with a 1" drop in height, you can do as much work as hover dam, but you waste a LOT more water. In the same way a boiling water reactor (temp diff of 100C - 20C) isn't as efficient as a pressurized water reactor (maybe 150C-20C), and a liquid-metal reactor (maybe 500C-20C?) gets a lot more work done with the same amount of fuel consumed. This is also why an electrical care is theoretically a lot more efficient than a fossil-fuel car, even if the electric company burns fossil fuels. They can burn the fuel at a higher temperature, which means more energy is captured from the same amount of fuel burned. There is no getting around this fact of thermodynamics (2nd/3rd laws of thermo) - as explained on the link I gave you.
One thing the utopians who push similar ideas never seem to talk about (at least not in the interviews I've heard) is how they'll handle their prisoners and other undesirables. Basically their only plan is to put them ashore, but they can only do that with the cooperation of another nation. Let's see, they offer other countries the opportunity to shed their richest and most productive citizens (and the taxes they pay), and in exchange they can take back the criminals and other rejects who don't work out.
If a child is born on the ship, what country do they become citizens of? If the ship, then the ship cannot discharge them morrally (just as the US cannot just deport US-born criminals and put them on deserted islands). If some other country, then the ship is just a regular ship and subject to the laws of the nation whose flag it flies - no escape.
There is no question that nations can be run a lot better than they are, but when folks make economic arguments along the line that all essential government services can be purchased for $100/yr/citizen they are usually leaving out the justice system and national defence, and those are pretty essential unless you want your luxury liner to be known as Pirate's Paradise the first time somebody pulls up in a speedboat with an AK47...
Couldn't agree more. I have very strong feelings regarding the importance of marriage, and I have beliefs regarding what marriage is and is not.
However, I don't think the word marriage should appear at all in the laws of the US. States should not certify who can and cannot marry people. Taxes should be collected either on an individual basis or on the basis of mailing address, or some other systematic method. If two people want to enter into a contract allowing for communal ownership of property, etc, then that is fine, and it should be mediated as any other contract dispute when things go sour. It should not be the place of government to determine who can and cannot get married or divorced, or what an equitable division of property is (except to the degree that it mediates pre-arranged contracts).
The only place things get tricky is child custody. Children are generally not able to stand up and defend their own rights, and consequently there is some legitimate purpose in government doing so on their behalf (at least until they reach some defined level of maturity). When four people jointly adopt a child, and then over the next 10 years 8 people enter the relationship, and 9 people leave (including the original 4), then things could get confusing. Probably the best method would be to default to biological parentage as the basis of custody unless other arrangements are made in advance, in which case one primary parent must be designated willing to assume final responsibility for custody. (I'm sure somebody else can come up with a better idea - you can see how messy this can get.)
When the state of marriage conveys no legal benefits or penalties, and confers no rights or responsibilities for individuals or employers or anybody else, then you won't see huge legal battles over who is allowed to marry. And then we conservatives/liberals/whatever can go ahead and express our beliefs without restriction...
We'll never see this happen though...
DVD-Audio -> don't know what the problem here is. I would love to get DVD-A in my car. CD+ quality with hours of content? I would love that.
Simple. CD-Audio = 40 minutes of music for $25.
DVD-Audio = 5 hours of music for $175? Who would pay for that?
The recording industry probably only uses half of the space available on CDs currently - the last thing they want is 25 years of hits on a single disk.
If DVD-Audio took off it would be 40 minutes of 5.1 surround music for $40. And that is why it won't take off...
It is a matter of degree. Which would you rather be - a resident of New York City on 9/11, or a resident of Dresden when the allies bombed it?
Sure, terrorism is horrible and needs to be stopped. However, it pales in comparison to real conventional warfare.
Of course, dealing with the former and being prepared for the latter are by no means mutually exclusive...
Agreed, the IRS should take several steps:
1. Make e-file a web-based service with an open API that tax software vendors can target. Do not require that the e-submissions come through an intermediary.
2. Make an online web-based tax submission form. No need to duplicate turbotax or anything like that - just create a set of forms that users can fill out just like they would by pencil.
This year I prepared my taxes using TuroboTax, and printed and mailed them. Why? Simple - I wasn't eligible for a rebate and didn't care to spend $15 to file what would otherwise cost me 37 cents. It isn't my problem that it costs the IRS more - if they cared they could do #1 above and I'd have filed electronically.
17 years is a minimum, not a maximum for medical patents. You can get extensions for a variety of reasons & the big pharma companies often do.
Yes and no. Medical patents in the US expire at 17 years, period. However, the US FDA under certain circumstances will delay approval of competing products even after the patent expires, which effectively maintains patent protection even if the patent itself is no longer valid.
These extensions are usually on the order of six months, and are obtained by doing orphan drug studies or pediatric studies of a product. The idea is that these studies are very expensive, and the manufacturer is in the best position to perform them. However, there isn't much money in selling Lipitor to 12 year olds, so the studies wouldn't normally get done. By performing the studies (if requested by the FDA) the company can sell Lipitor to adults for an extra six months, and that is VERY BIG money.
When you hear about generic drugs being held off for years on end, that isn't a matter of patent extensions / government protection. Instead, this is typically a result of loopholes and legal maneuvers, which most people think should be banned outright (even some pharma companies take this stance). The six month limited extension is a quid-pro-quo for the public (adults pay more for six months, less kids die forever), but the legal maneuvers are only about lining pockets and don't benefit anybody but the stockholders.
Well, yes and no. Which is better for the US economy:
1. Spend US tax dollars to employ US Contractors to build bridges in France.
2. Spend US tax dollars to employ US Contractors to build bridges in California.
Really, the biggest benefit of #1 to the US economy is in the form of getting money out of rich taxpayers and into the hands of employees who are more likely to spend it.
I have a feeling that this will turn into a general debian vs gentoo style debate, and we all have our preferences.
The big benefits of precompiling are that you don't need to support 1500 different sets of libraries in your development environments, and that the package will generally work right with minimum fuss.
The big benefits of source-based distros are the ability to tailor packages to each install (ie the ability to compile certain features in or out), to choose optimizations on each package (do you want -Os, -O2, -03, or are you really daring -> -ffast-math?).
There are some things that cut both ways - often a given package can be compiled using one or more different dependencies and if you want this flexibility then source-based might work better. On the other hand, it also means that if you have 500 different users of your distor you have 495 different configurations and bugs that are hard to reproduce.
As for me - I like source-based. However, if I had to build a linux email/browser box for a relative I'd probably use Debian stale...er...stable. The right tool for the right job.
ugh - darn konqueror ctrl-key links! submitted prematurely.
/etc. Basically just what is needed to maintain a good standard for patient safety where patients can't figure it out on their own (we shouldn't have to rely on provider death rates to figure out who is a reasonably good doctor, and lawsuits to keep drugs safe).
to continue - basic manufacturing safety regulation on medical devices / drugs
In general, though, I advocate a minimalist approach until it is shown to not work.