First we blast it with asteroids to raise the mass and warm it up. Then we drop water comets, to start a greenhouse effect. Finally, we wrap it around with one sodding big orbiting elecromagnet, and jumpstart the magnetic field. Then we can get down to the funky business of oxygen farming, soil improvement etc. It's all totally trivial.
You know what galls me about Trek? For all that it was ground-breaking in race mixing at a time when that wasn't ever done on screen, since then it only ever got more racist. More precisely, speciesist. Every species has one personality, one government, one religion, one language. Each of them represent some fixed quality, for example, Ferengi greed, Vulcan logic, Cardassian brutality. Even humans are stereotyped as Starfleet functionaries or generic colonists from a bland, humanity-spanning culture. Where a character has any individuality, it's unusual enough to drive plot.
It's as if the socialists who write it can't easily bring themselves to consider people outside of their species collective. Like there's something broken in their heads.
Compare Serenity, where people can be good, bad or indifferent - or even Star Wars, where species mix it in together on the basis of shared individual goals, and where a shared planetary culture creates different individuals. A lot of SW characters are from Tatooine, but they aren't all "Tattooine-ians".
Being an interested layman, I don't want to read junk science anymore than you, a scientist, want the public to be dog-ignorant. Slashdot is Slashdot, it's arse for trustworthy info, but often interesting for comments. Rather than trying to reform the incorrigible, why not get together with a few other like minded scientists and start publishing your own competitor Slashdot-style blog of "genuinely interesting but real and undistorted science news"? I'm sure there's plenty of it out there to be told.
Debian never pulled it, instead, you goofed in using dist-upgrade without using your head. Just recently in testing a lot of KDE was being held back because it was waiting on the new QT compiled with the new C++ ABI. So when that new QT finally got released, a few programs were marked as upgradeable, and a whole slew of them were marked for deletion (because the most recent versions were still compiled with the old QT). At this point, a sensible admin would have realized that until the other packages catch up, they should switch to regular upgrade and give dist-upgrade a miss. But no, you, the dunce, wiped half your KDE, and now you're blaming it on a buggy release. PEBKAC. Learn to use the tools before you come crying that you smashed your thumb.
A major possible fault of subject-is-buyer studies is the possibility of bias by selective publication. Do ten thousand completely fair studies, publish the favourable results and bury the rest. Or, a similar procedure but preemptive, focus the study's remit upon a known strength which is in fact surrounded and dwarfed by (un-studied) weaknesses.
In this the researcher may not actually be methodologically at fault at all. How did you protect your study from this kind of externally induced bias?
This article strikes me as having the same sort of human-centric hubris as the folks who think aliens have some urgent need to abduct hicks from the American backwoods. Why on earth (or off it) would they bother hacking our primitive, barely connected, slow-as-treacle, uninteresting computers?
If are any worthwhile long-range hacks to be made upon the unsuspecting people of earth, they're memetic.
Contrast it to a few years back, when a major complaint against MS was the lack of obscure internationalized variants. From what I hear, this was pushing adoption of OSS in the third world.
I can understand the business case both ways. "We can't afford to allocate resources for a few thousand native speakers, the market's too small" versus "we've lost momentum over there, and we run the risk of losing monopoly if the global office-app market diversifies enough to force a public standard". OASIS Open Document probably lit a fire under option 2, so they've pulled out the stops looking for a workflow that can internationalize an app on the cheap and without a support nightmare.
What is this canvas element and what's it's purpose? It looks to me like a bitmap-based competitor to SVG or something, but built into HTML. Can anyone tell me what it's meant to be used for?
That attitude strikes me as bogus. Microsoft was the underdog because, and only because, they weren't the overdog. Even back then they were no nicer. It's just that folks would have thrown a street party for Satan himself, if he rode into town with IBM's head on a pike.
I believe that companies, like people, rarely change their personality. Rather, their changing role can give them wider opportunities to express it, for good or ill.
Therefore, Google will not become evil merely because of success.
It's interesting, not because it's difficult or wholly new, but because they gave it the conceptual spin that might lead to real-world applications.
Scientists knew stuff would heat in an electric current, and hot stuff would glow in a vacuum without burning, long before Edison figuired how to commercialize the light bulb.
...you're doing the multiculturalism thing all wrong!
What you're supposed to say is that "marrying your sister" is a cultural practise of excellent pedigree, and shouldn't be judged by narrow "western", ahem, I mean "urban" standards. Then you should suggest that Southern drawl is in fact a seperate language, start a "Southern-English dictionary", and get the bible translated into simplistic sentences (with Jesus replaced by Elvis, as being "culturally relevant"). And then, start some large lobbying groups in DC (manned entirely by damyankees except for a token Southern frontman) which advocate "rural quotas", and always seem to support the Democrats.
It depends how much fear is removed. Consequences themselves are conceptual fear, the abstract avoidance of an unwanted outcome. Erase all fear, and judgement between outcomes is bounded by present whim. You might decide you want to follow orders. You might decide that orders are boring, and go sight-seeing. You might get curious what your entrails look like, and disembowel yourself (or someone else). Basically you'd be unpredictable, uncivilized and ruthlessly selfish.
The inability to sensate any fear is quite a different thing from the trained skill of putting it aside in emergencies.
"Hey check this out, I'm not in the least afraid anymore. Hmm, I wonder what it feels like to plough an airplane into the ground on full afterburner. Whee, fast! Hello mr cornfield. Ooh, a scarecrow. My, that ground sure is big."
1. Force patent holders to reveal themselves when standards are being created. 2. Force all standards to be patent-free. 3. Entice the state of the art to track patent-free standards and starve patent-wielding companies.
"Should be that if you don't enforce your patent within a reasonable time frame, you lose the right to do so."
Agreed, or as an alternative automatic limitation: if a patent is included in an official international standard with either the consent of the patent-holder, or the justifiable ignorance of the standardizers (they did due dilligence, but it was a "submarine patent"), then the patent is invalidated. Meaning in other words, that if standardization was contemplated, patent holders would be forced to crawl out of the woodwork then and there, or be stripped of the patent.
Submarine patents in standards are so obviously bad, that this fix might be more saleable to politicians than the generic "must enforce", which would turn existing patent jurisprudence on its head.
Branding can be "protected" without official recognition of trademarks. Basically, copying a brand mark is fraud if a person doing so is trying to present their business as one company when in reality it's another. Customers could validly sue.
I suspect that even with no monopolistic IP, brand marks would be sacrosanct and socially enforced. If I made a computer and tried to sell it as "IBM", people would laugh and call me a liar. However, product trademarks might not be - they could quickly become new generic nouns, like hoover or kleenex. Lego, for example, would become a generic name and spec for interlocking bricks from various competing brands.
Distance learning (formal or not) has the potential to make a difference.
Heck, can you imagine the sheer impact of merely having casual, immediate access to canned versions of Wikipedia? (Updated periodically via the aforementioned mesh networking.)
It's good enough to completely replace textbooks in a rural school and turn out students with a genuine old-fashined "liberal education" - covering everything from biological taxonomy to the history of drama.
Unfortunately at the moment the UK is a very centralized government. The local officials have trivial or negligible powers. They are ordered from central government what to do, they only have discretion in how. The police are technically local, but de-facto centralized and entirely unelected. Judges are unelected. In fact, there are only 3 elected layers of government, and usually only 2 apply: parliament, councils (almost powerless) and city mayors (only in London at the moment). Because of our "first past the post" voting system, the central elections are entirely too blunt an instrument to register details of voter preferences. So in reality, democracy isn't going to dig the UK out of this hole. Probably the best solution would be to vote in the Conservatives and hope that their localist policies stretch far enough to help.
I suspect his comments are directed at groups who, instead of accepting that they've missed the window, decide to game the rules by submitting unfinished code in order to co-opt the bugfix window to complete the project. As though "/*TODO: write this*/" was a valid bug. That's an attempt to play Linus for a fool, and he's quite right to stomp on it.
If you must provide root, how about using a system like SELinux that provides "mandatory access control" that root can't override? Then you can lock the kiddies out of messing with anything that could wreck the machine, while leaving them free rein in everything else.
Might it not be easier to eg: launch the "tractor" (small rocket, big motor) and hook up to the "trailer" (some small rocky asteroid) once already out there? Then shunt that tame asteroid (whose metaphoric role changes to that of a "carrot") in order to attract the rogue "donkey" into a safer orbit.
Ignoring for a moment, the ideological points, lets consider a frequently raised practical point: the idea that an API would either get out of sync with the kernel, or be a drag on innovation.
I agree that when the Linux kernel was young and untried, standardizing a binary API was bound to become a millstone in a short period of time, as the kernel internals were in a constant state of churn and iterative improvement. Nowadays though, surely, the kernel has been "shaken down" enough that it could afford to commit to binary APIs that are stable at least throughout each minor version number?
Returning to ideology, I can see how a stable binary API would be useful even to open source hardware. How much easier is it, to say "drop this file under/lib/modules/binary/" than "you need to recompile and reinstall the whole kernel with this patch"?. For obscure hardware which will never be in the official kernel, it would be nice to have the ability to easily use it with any linux distro. No need for a slew of precompiled RPMs, DEBs, and a user-unfriendly source tarball, just one driver binary and you're ready to roll.
In itself, that says nothing, either pro or anti, about the availability of driver source.
Slashdot Mirror
First we blast it with asteroids to raise the mass and warm it up. Then we drop water comets, to start a greenhouse effect. Finally, we wrap it around with one sodding big orbiting elecromagnet, and jumpstart the magnetic field. Then we can get down to the funky business of oxygen farming, soil improvement etc. It's all totally trivial.
You know what galls me about Trek? For all that it was ground-breaking in race mixing at a time when that wasn't ever done on screen, since then it only ever got more racist. More precisely, speciesist. Every species has one personality, one government, one religion, one language. Each of them represent some fixed quality, for example, Ferengi greed, Vulcan logic, Cardassian brutality. Even humans are stereotyped as Starfleet functionaries or generic colonists from a bland, humanity-spanning culture. Where a character has any individuality, it's unusual enough to drive plot.
It's as if the socialists who write it can't easily bring themselves to consider people outside of their species collective. Like there's something broken in their heads.
Compare Serenity, where people can be good, bad or indifferent - or even Star Wars, where species mix it in together on the basis of shared individual goals, and where a shared planetary culture creates different individuals. A lot of SW characters are from Tatooine, but they aren't all "Tattooine-ians".
Being an interested layman, I don't want to read junk science anymore than you, a scientist, want the public to be dog-ignorant. Slashdot is Slashdot, it's arse for trustworthy info, but often interesting for comments. Rather than trying to reform the incorrigible, why not get together with a few other like minded scientists and start publishing your own competitor Slashdot-style blog of "genuinely interesting but real and undistorted science news"? I'm sure there's plenty of it out there to be told.
Debian never pulled it, instead, you goofed in using dist-upgrade without using your head. Just recently in testing a lot of KDE was being held back because it was waiting on the new QT compiled with the new C++ ABI. So when that new QT finally got released, a few programs were marked as upgradeable, and a whole slew of them were marked for deletion (because the most recent versions were still compiled with the old QT). At this point, a sensible admin would have realized that until the other packages catch up, they should switch to regular upgrade and give dist-upgrade a miss. But no, you, the dunce, wiped half your KDE, and now you're blaming it on a buggy release. PEBKAC. Learn to use the tools before you come crying that you smashed your thumb.
A major possible fault of subject-is-buyer studies is the possibility of bias by selective publication. Do ten thousand completely fair studies, publish the favourable results and bury the rest. Or, a similar procedure but preemptive, focus the study's remit upon a known strength which is in fact surrounded and dwarfed by (un-studied) weaknesses.
In this the researcher may not actually be methodologically at fault at all. How did you protect your study from this kind of externally induced bias?
This article strikes me as having the same sort of human-centric hubris as the folks who think aliens have some urgent need to abduct hicks from the American backwoods. Why on earth (or off it) would they bother hacking our primitive, barely connected, slow-as-treacle, uninteresting computers?
If are any worthwhile long-range hacks to be made upon the unsuspecting people of earth, they're memetic.
Contrast it to a few years back, when a major complaint against MS was the lack of obscure internationalized variants. From what I hear, this was pushing adoption of OSS in the third world.
I can understand the business case both ways. "We can't afford to allocate resources for a few thousand native speakers, the market's too small" versus "we've lost momentum over there, and we run the risk of losing monopoly if the global office-app market diversifies enough to force a public standard". OASIS Open Document probably lit a fire under option 2, so they've pulled out the stops looking for a workflow that can internationalize an app on the cheap and without a support nightmare.
What is this canvas element and what's it's purpose? It looks to me like a bitmap-based competitor to SVG or something, but built into HTML. Can anyone tell me what it's meant to be used for?
I hope the idiots who interrupted their schedule will compensate them for all the LOX they wasted.
That attitude strikes me as bogus. Microsoft was the underdog because, and only because, they weren't the overdog. Even back then they were no nicer. It's just that folks would have thrown a street party for Satan himself, if he rode into town with IBM's head on a pike.
I believe that companies, like people, rarely change their personality. Rather, their changing role can give them wider opportunities to express it, for good or ill.
Therefore, Google will not become evil merely because of success.
It's interesting, not because it's difficult or wholly new, but because they gave it the conceptual spin that might lead to real-world applications.
Scientists knew stuff would heat in an electric current, and hot stuff would glow in a vacuum without burning, long before Edison figuired how to commercialize the light bulb.
...you're doing the multiculturalism thing all wrong!
What you're supposed to say is that "marrying your sister" is a cultural practise of excellent pedigree, and shouldn't be judged by narrow "western", ahem, I mean "urban" standards. Then you should suggest that Southern drawl is in fact a seperate language, start a "Southern-English dictionary", and get the bible translated into simplistic sentences (with Jesus replaced by Elvis, as being "culturally relevant"). And then, start some large lobbying groups in DC (manned entirely by damyankees except for a token Southern frontman) which advocate "rural quotas", and always seem to support the Democrats.
It depends how much fear is removed. Consequences themselves are conceptual fear, the abstract avoidance of an unwanted outcome. Erase all fear, and judgement between outcomes is bounded by present whim. You might decide you want to follow orders. You might decide that orders are boring, and go sight-seeing. You might get curious what your entrails look like, and disembowel yourself (or someone else). Basically you'd be unpredictable, uncivilized and ruthlessly selfish.
The inability to sensate any fear is quite a different thing from the trained skill of putting it aside in emergencies.
"Hey check this out, I'm not in the least afraid anymore. Hmm, I wonder what it feels like to plough an airplane into the ground on full afterburner. Whee, fast! Hello mr cornfield. Ooh, a scarecrow. My, that ground sure is big."
Fancy meeting you here :-)
;-)
And yes you should write the "Why Star Wars Sucks" essay. I'd be curious to read
[karma bonus switched off due to utter off-topicness]
The design intent of the algorithm is
1. Force patent holders to reveal themselves when standards are being created.
2. Force all standards to be patent-free.
3. Entice the state of the art to track patent-free standards and starve patent-wielding companies.
"Should be that if you don't enforce your patent within a reasonable time frame, you lose the right to do so."
Agreed, or as an alternative automatic limitation: if a patent is included in an official international standard with either the consent of the patent-holder, or the justifiable ignorance of the standardizers (they did due dilligence, but it was a "submarine patent"), then the patent is invalidated. Meaning in other words, that if standardization was contemplated, patent holders would be forced to crawl out of the woodwork then and there, or be stripped of the patent.
Submarine patents in standards are so obviously bad, that this fix might be more saleable to politicians than the generic "must enforce", which would turn existing patent jurisprudence on its head.
...offer bit-torrents.
Bandwidth limitation really isn't an excuse, nowadays.
Branding can be "protected" without official recognition of trademarks. Basically, copying a brand mark is fraud if a person doing so is trying to present their business as one company when in reality it's another. Customers could validly sue.
I suspect that even with no monopolistic IP, brand marks would be sacrosanct and socially enforced. If I made a computer and tried to sell it as "IBM", people would laugh and call me a liar. However, product trademarks might not be - they could quickly become new generic nouns, like hoover or kleenex. Lego, for example, would become a generic name and spec for interlocking bricks from various competing brands.
Heck, can you imagine the sheer impact of merely having casual, immediate access to canned versions of Wikipedia? (Updated periodically via the aforementioned mesh networking.)
It's good enough to completely replace textbooks in a rural school and turn out students with a genuine old-fashined "liberal education" - covering everything from biological taxonomy to the history of drama.
Unfortunately at the moment the UK is a very centralized government. The local officials have trivial or negligible powers. They are ordered from central government what to do, they only have discretion in how. The police are technically local, but de-facto centralized and entirely unelected. Judges are unelected. In fact, there are only 3 elected layers of government, and usually only 2 apply: parliament, councils (almost powerless) and city mayors (only in London at the moment). Because of our "first past the post" voting system, the central elections are entirely too blunt an instrument to register details of voter preferences. So in reality, democracy isn't going to dig the UK out of this hole. Probably the best solution would be to vote in the Conservatives and hope that their localist policies stretch far enough to help.
I suspect his comments are directed at groups who, instead of accepting that they've missed the window, decide to game the rules by submitting unfinished code in order to co-opt the bugfix window to complete the project. As though "/*TODO: write this*/" was a valid bug. That's an attempt to play Linus for a fool, and he's quite right to stomp on it.
If you must provide root, how about using a system like SELinux that provides "mandatory access control" that root can't override? Then you can lock the kiddies out of messing with anything that could wreck the machine, while leaving them free rein in everything else.
Might it not be easier to eg: launch the "tractor" (small rocket, big motor) and hook up to the "trailer" (some small rocky asteroid) once already out there? Then shunt that tame asteroid (whose metaphoric role changes to that of a "carrot") in order to attract the rogue "donkey" into a safer orbit.
Ignoring for a moment, the ideological points, lets consider a frequently raised practical point: the idea that an API would either get out of sync with the kernel, or be a drag on innovation.
/lib/modules/binary/" than "you need to recompile and reinstall the whole kernel with this patch"?. For obscure hardware which will never be in the official kernel, it would be nice to have the ability to easily use it with any linux distro. No need for a slew of precompiled RPMs, DEBs, and a user-unfriendly source tarball, just one driver binary and you're ready to roll.
I agree that when the Linux kernel was young and untried, standardizing a binary API was bound to become a millstone in a short period of time, as the kernel internals were in a constant state of churn and iterative improvement. Nowadays though, surely, the kernel has been "shaken down" enough that it could afford to commit to binary APIs that are stable at least throughout each minor version number?
Returning to ideology, I can see how a stable binary API would be useful even to open source hardware. How much easier is it, to say "drop this file under
In itself, that says nothing, either pro or anti, about the availability of driver source.