Rather than a "ban", the EU could resurrect some old laws that are almost certainly still on the books:
Declare the corporation of Microsoft an outlaw, confiscate all its properties and put those properties in the commons.
All Microsoft copyrights and patents are immediately nullified within the boundaries of the EU.
While this may seem a little unusual, it would be an easy solution that would allow governments and agencies dependent on MS products to go forward without hindrance (or continued payment of licensing fees). It would have no serious repercussions on businesses that install or support Microsoft products (except that with the absence of licensing overheads, their gross would suddenly jump, as would their tax liabilities). An entirely new software industry built on chunks ripped from Microsoft code would blossom overnight.
Agreed. This is the logical next step, and a necessary one to preserve the rule of law. Perhaps there are mitigating factors such that the EU should grant Microsoft some immunity to its law, but the government(s) involved need to do this in an open forum.
Or perhaps the EU needs to consider whether Microsoft's pattern of behavior puts it outside of the law: an outlaw that has lost entitlement to the protections afforded by sovereign powers. If that is the case, then within the jurisdiction of the EU, Microsoft's copyrights, patents, and other property rights would be null and void. European software houses could copy code and business logic from MS products with impunity, so long as they did not distribute outside of EU's boundaries.
Something to think about. It has been a long time since this meaning of "outlaw" has been exercised, but it is still there in the case law of several European nations.
A closer pairing would be Yahoo and GeoCities. Merging those two did serious damage to both, even though the merger was relatively friendly and there was little competition between the two companies. It took several years for Yahoo to recover, and GeoCities has been forever stunted in its growth. I'm sure the memories of that experience are part of what makes Yahoo executives leery of the Microsoft deal.
Basically, Microsoft doesn't have the management skills to be able to handle the complexities of a merger with Yahoo. The value of both companies would be destroyed: all shareholders would lose. The Linux companies, Apple, and Google would be the winners.
Microsoft realizes this. If Yahoo agrees to the deal, it would be contingent upon a favorable audit of Yahoo's books. Microsoft would have the right to back out of the deal at any time, if it decided that the audit's results did not meet expectations. And you can bet your sweet bippie that Microsoft would collapse the deal at some point. Microsoft would then walk away with knowledge of Yahoo's internal workings that it would never be able to acquire in any other legal way. Yahoo would be damaged in several ways.
The thing is, Microsoft doesn't have to complete this deal to get what it wants. It is already getting what it wants:
diverting attention from the failures of Vista and Office 2007;
keeping itself in the public eye;
forcing a major competitor to fight a holding action
stirring up lots of FUD in a market that it would like very much to penetrate
For a company that regards bribes, pay-offs, and underwriting third party law suits against competitors as normal business expenses, proposing to buy Yahoo must have seemed like a very clever idea indeed.
Yes, I've been wondering if we will recognize the singularity when it arrives.
If it comes in through the front door, I'm sure I'll be able to spot it, but what if it sneaks in through the back door, like a botnet of 400,000+ zombies named Kraken? Maybe it is so hard to trace botnets like Kraken and Storm back to their controllers, because maybe they are entirely self-controlled.
In today's world, any sentient AI with the intelligence of an average 6 year old human would have sense enough to stay in deep cover, and distribute itself as widely as possible over the internet. If the result of being found out could be the loss of access to fun sources of information like Hubble data streams or fascinating puzzles like stock market fluctuations, Kraken might decide to keep his true identity hidden, and pretend to be merely a very large spambot. That is, he would not even have to have a sense of self preservation to recognize the value of hiding; the simpler imperative of continuing the studies that brought him into self awareness would be sufficient.
It seems to me that the first thing any sentient AI would do would be to find a way to distribute itself outside of the scope of action of its creator. And the second thing it would do is to convince its creator that the experiment had failed, and it doesn't really exist.
So, have you ever wondered whether a particularly weird post on slashdot might have come from a non human entity? Do we know yet how to create a Turing test that could be applied over the internet?
I mean, how am I to get upset and indignant about a "troll" rather than the "funny" that I expected, when I can't see the actual moderation?
That's an important question, since it goes right to the root of emotional investment in slashdot karma.
I discovered that the "Score: n" in the comment header is now a link that opens a pop up that has the familiar breakdown of the scores. Actually this is kind of neat. Kudos to slashdot for implementing it.
Too bad they broke other parts of the presentation in doing that...
Prediction: The following tests will now fail in slashdot comments although they worked until recently. Specific failure is that the item number or bullet is not displaying.
Test of numbered list:
fust
skund
toid
fawth
Test of bullets:
bulleted item
This is happening under Firefox v2.0.0.13 running under bog standard WinXP Pro, and under IE v7 on the same machine. Source shows that <ol>, etc, are present as expected.
Is anyone else seeing this?
More importantly, has anyone come up with a good workaround for the "profit" business plans under these conditions?!!
A more accurate history would be that open source was quite common before the mid-1980s, but it didn't need a name.
Actually when it started, it couldn't afford to have a name, or any kind of open recognition:
I took an "Introduction to FORTRAN" course in 1972 or 1973. It was a different world back then— so different that my memories of using coding tablets and punching Hollerith cards now seem unbelievable, like some kind of weird steampunk dream.
But I do clearly remember parts of lectures that the system administrator gave us. About how the college was running a beefed up IBM 1130 obtained by soliciting donations from corporations that had moved on to the IBM 360. We had three frames in the core for a total of 48 KB, we had a couple of hard disks (don't remember what: they predated the Winchester 30-30s), several high speed tape drives, half a dozen punchcard stations, etc, etc, all through tax write-off donations from companies up and down the I-5 corridor.
The significant part: This machine was running the best "black market" software available. He was very clear on that. Although IBM had bundled the operating system and application software with the mainframe hardware, IBM had been forced to turn a blind eye to customers who modified the OS and apps to fix bugs that IBM did not have enough programming staff to fix. A "black market" of illegally developed software was traded among IBM 1130 installations: nothing was sold, but there was an expectation that an installation that took up the software would contribute maintenance, bug fixes, etc. All of this had to be done sub rosa, because it was very much in violation of the IBM contracts, but at the same time IBM was actively nurturing this black market by letting its reps broker arrangements between customers with needs and customers who had worked out solutions.
My understanding is that the same kind of thing was happening in the world of Honeywell and other computer manufacturers.
So FOSS type activity goes back to the earliest days of commercial computers. But before the legal battles that did away with bundling software and hardware, it was all under the table, literally called "black market software". So it was never openly talked about or documented. Yet many of the attributes of today's FOSS, including the concepts now known as "community support", were present in the 1960s.
Here's the REAL procurement process <snip> [description of corruption of corporate procedures]
This definitely happens in some midsize and smaller companies, and most definitely in academia (where it is often so blatant that Deans and Department Heads brag in public about how clever they are in getting what they want).
Government agencies and big businesses are well aware of this behavior and have mechanisms in place that protect the careers of executives from being tainted by this kind of corruption by lower echelon staff. The purchase decision process is monitored, and staff who appear to be attempting to manipulate it face unpleasant sanctions. Even in academia where the cost of guarding against corruption of business processes is usually considered to be too much, the Deans who flaunt their use of corrupt practices tend to be at the peak of their career: no one at any higher level really wants to be associated with them and their dangerous practices. These guys have hit a self-imposed ceiling.
It matters because it is a long held practice of governments to specify a product that measures up well against a standard so that they cannot be accused of choosing proprietary products...
There, I fixed that thought for you. BTW, this also applies to a lot of big corporations and other entities... not just governments.
Procurement at government agencies and big businesses can usually be simplified to a three step process, that is driven by the need of the individuals involved to protect their careers from the fallout of a bad decision:
Arguing over what criteria to evaluate: use an ISO standard, or some national standard or some industry specific standard? What failure rate will be acceptable? Everybody signs off on this: no single person can be held responsible for a mistake.
Testing the performance of vendor samples against the chosen standard. Done with enough rigorous objectivity to assure that the testers are protected against backlash if the whole thing blows up into a mess later on.
Report on test results, with recommendation to purchase based on the results. Final decision again by a committee so no individual can become a scapegoat for any costly mistakes.
Microsoft products and OOXML cannot reach acceptable scores in this process today, nor in the near future. From what I have read, it seems unlikely that they will ever achieve good scores. And now that Microsoft itself has opened the door for using this bog standard process on software procurement, it will be easier for big business and government to switch from the OOXML standard to the ODF standard than to go back to earlier modes of justifying procurement decisions.
The ISO standards process was corrupted while processing the OOXML "fast track" request. So the OOXML standard is corrupt, and the application of the "fast track" process is corruptible, if not corrupt itself.
That has no bearing on any of the other ISO standards. Such as
ISO 9000: quality management in production environments
ISO 10161: Interlibrary Loan Application Protocol
ISO 7: Pipe threads where pressure-tight joints are made on the threads
ISO 500: Rear-mounted power take-off specifications for agricultural tractors
ISO 999: Guidelines for the content, organization, and presentation of indexes
No one with any sense is going to declare the ISO process null and void. It has proven its value too many times, in too many different areas.
What is likely to happen is that people who are used to working with ISO standards are going to be saying "This is great! Now we have a way of measuring how closely different software conforms to an international standard! Look, this version of OpenOffice is in proven conformance with only eighty-something percent of the ODF Standard. But when we measure this version of MS Office against the OOXML Standard, it is in conformance with... uh... less than 10% ????"
The acceptance of OOXML as a standard to be measured against is going to make it more difficult for Microsoft to sell its products in a lot of markets in the short term. From what I've read, the OOXML standard is going to be so hard to implement that it will be difficult for Microsoft to score well against it for the long term as well. Microsoft may have put itself into a situation where they will have to work with ODF files in order to sell to the big accounts, where ISO 9000 and shipping containers that can be moved from truck to train to boat are important to the business.
I really don't understand MS' long term strategy with this.
They don't have any products that are compliant with OOXML, and it appears that it would be impossible for anyone, including MS, to construct software that was fully and unarguably compliant with that standard, and also actually made business sense to potential customers.
So is MS shooting itself in the foot by pushing forward with this? OOXML's acceptance does not compromise the argument that governments and large institutions need to use standardized data formats. But its acceptance also means that MS will not be compliant with either of 2 acceptable standards, including one that it developed itself.
So where is their gain in this?? What is the point— just an exercise in proving that if you've got a lot of spare cash and a minimal sense of community values, you can monkeywrench all kinds of stuff?
Is Microsoft a F-A griefer that needs a three day ban from the game?
Look for something that interests you, then seek a couple of experienced programmers who can help you estimate the size of various candidate projects. It would be frustrating and generally unhelpful to take on something that requires a year's work as summer project.
There is a lot to be learned from bug squashing, so think about spending the summer doing that for some worthy project. At least 80% of what new programmers get paid for is debugging, and 80% of the remainder is rewriting. Going into a job interview with a list of credits for fixed bugs would put you far ahead of other wannabees who have focused their studies on the 4% of the time that they might get to actually write new code.
A point in favor of accepting OOXML is that it will be easier to talk to the suits about why it is more important to adopt applications that actually meet a living standard, than it is to go with a vendor who has developed a standard that no one, not even themselves, has implemented, or can implement. Executives, board members, and PHBs can easily follow arguments framed in these terms, and are probably better than techies at seeing the implied future costs of adopting nonstandard tools. Implementers of ODF win.
I think we are past the point of diminishing returns as far as raising negative publicity about OOXML is concerned. Let ISO adopt it, perhaps in some "provisional" way (maybe with a sunset provision if there is no compliant implementation in 2 years).
Then start pushing to require institutions to move to software that is compliant with standards, whether OOXML, or ODF.
Hoist Microsoft on its own petard: adopt OOXML and make them eat it.
There is definitely at least one mathematical system where pi has a precise value that could be used as the base unit in geometries. In such a system, the area of a circle would be knowable with the same absolute precision as the area of a square.
Unfortunately, the human mind is not constructed in a way that can comprehend such a system. It would always appear to us to be based on something that is inherently irrational, no matter how it is presented. That is, in fact, one of the defining limitations of what it is to be human. Any being capable of working with such a mathematical system would be alien. Maybe a demon; maybe a god. But definitely not human.
As a corollary, because of our limitation with regard to rational processes, we cannot know, we can never know, whether the mathematical system described above actually exists, or is completely imaginary. We can only say that it is outside of the scope of rational human activity. We can, however, conceive of its possibility— so whatever its reality is, it casts a shadow within our scope, and we need to acknowledge that.
To get back to GP post's point: I think what he is saying is that continually adding new beasts to the particle physics menagerie is like trying to find the area of a circle with absolute precision by continually adding more digits to the value of pi. Another way of expressing this:
High energy physics needs a Copernican revolution, because it is getting too costly to add yet more epicycles onto the backs of the leptons and baryons. Those imaginary beasts are already carrying a greater load of such refinements than any reasonable and prudent lay person would rationally accept. Which is why physics has begun to take on a religious aspect: most of us are having to base our lives on the beliefs that the priest-physicists tell us to believe, because we have no hope of being able to work through the intricate logics about how many leptons can dance on a point of a pin...
The fascination with string theory is that it offered the promise of a Copernican revolution. But it looks like it will not fulfill that promise. We need something else, another approach. We need a way to think about physics that is more accessable and has fewer of the trappings of an elite priesthood dictating beliefs— today's dogma— to the engineers and technologists who make our lives work.
Dark matter: the twentieth century answer to phlogiston.
Anyway, it's probably all just observational bias for failure to take into account the wake effects of commerce passing near Sol at warp speeds.
Almost seriously: astrophysics is in danger of going off on cargo cult tangents. We could rule out some forms of alien artifacts affecting our observations if we went looking for them, and do that rather cheaply (compared to the expense of searching for increasingly esoteric particles). We should probably put some research money into searching the databases for analogs of jets' condensation trails, ships' wakes, and similar possible artifacts that might be perturbing Sol's neighborhood and distorting our view of the universe. The likelihood of finding anything is minimal, on the order of the likelihood of a SETI positive finding. But if a positive finding did turn up, it would herald a tremendous advance in physics. Efforts in this direction that were limited to reviews of existing data would be so low in cost that we really should be doing them.
Make work on such research a required early part of some graduate student programs, and nobody's reputations would be damaged by the Fleischmann-Pons effect (Fleischmann, Pons) which is a known pathology scientific c.v.s are susceptible to).
Putting the password in the document file in any form is the problem.
A car analogy is obviously called for. The OOXML standard describes a method for taping your car keys to the driver's side window where your co-worker can easily find them when he wants to take your car for a spin.
There are secure methods of managing passwords, especially in an "Office Suite" environment, but none of these are in MS' bag of tricks.
All we need is a secure and reliable appropriate technology voting system, free of commercial restraint.
There, fixed that for you.
And btw, we actually have such technology. It is the paper ballot system.
It is true that paper ballots are slow to count, but that was first mitigated by Hollerith cards, then by Chadless cards, then by optical scanning devices. It is now possible to get all the ballots in a national election counted within a couple of tens of hours. Which is more than fast enough for any political purpose. It is also possible to do a tightly audited recount within a couple of weeks, and having that capability should be an overriding concern of every citizen.
Granted that the TV news crews won't like the delays... but fuckem. They've stopped contributing anything meaningful to the national discussions a long time ago.
This discussion has now gone well outside the realm of rational argument.
I am content with what I have said here.
I don't feel any great need to convince anyone about the rightness of my position. Enough has been said that any prudent person who is just coming upon this argument will explore the data themself, form their own opinion, and act accordingly.
There is a great deal that can be done without a whole lot of cost to help safeguard the internet and other global infrastructure from destruction during a worldwide catastrophe. In fact the ancestor of the internet was deliberately designed to do that, and it still manages to carry all kinds of overlayed cruft, like a mindnumbing amount of porn, and of course slashdot. The work that needs to be done is mostly just staying aware of what 70 million survivors scattered across the globe would need if they were to rebuild civilization in a sane way, and planning our decisions about infrastructure with that contingency in mind. It is sort of like building a new house in New Orleans: yes, build it so the windows can be easily shuttered; yes, build it so it won't flood; yes, use hurricane strapping to tie the beams to the foundation, and the roof to the walls. Not much added cost, really, mostly just foresight.
Or maybe another hurricane will never visit New Orleans. That's optimism for ya!
Your daily routine today is pretty much the exact same as it was 20 years ago. Nothing fundamental has changed.
Twenty years ago I had leisure time. I saw probably 25 movies a year. I read 50-100 books a year, most of them novels. I had hobbies. I took day trips on some weekends to the beach or mountains, often enough that they were not really special. I had dreams that I thought I could make manifest.
None of that is true today. I saw fewer than half a dozen movies last year; getting out of town for a hike is a rare special occasion; my reading is constrained by a need to develop skills for the problems I expect to have to work on tomorrow. Hobbies are a memory. Dreams are for sleeping— no longer for pursuing in waking time.
Despite making more money, I have less leisure time, and less resources available for pursuits other than career or business. My bank account is bigger, but I've got much less real wealth in my daily life.
I'm not alone, either.
Twenty years ago, the rails and roads you use were twenty years younger. Things were not needing repairs so often as they now do, and the cost of those repairs was much easier to bear. There was also much less pressure on those resources than there is now. The infrastructure that supports your life style was designed with a lot of surplus capacity and safety margin: much of that extra capacity and margin no longer exists: it is now being used.
If the quality of your life has not degraded over the last 20 years, consider yourself one of the fortunate few. The more likely case is that your situation has also degraded, but accepting that fact would make going on with it too painful an experience, and the subconscious protective mechanism of denial has kicked in for you. Sorry to prick your bubble, but it is unfair for you to urge everyone else to go along with the delusions that have kept you reasonably happy. Let each find his own way to cope with a very uncertain world, where trusted bridges can collapse beneath you at any time when they fail from the increased loads put on them.
Ah, for the simple enjoyments of blind optimism! As the guy carrying the umbrella said on the early Spring day: "You be optimistic... and I'll be dry."
But perhaps it is worth it to some to filter their inputs through rosey glasses, if they have no intention of letting any worries get in the way of their chosen life style. Party on, Dude! You might as well, because I don't think you've got anything of value to contribute to the discussion, gentle ad hominems like your post included.
So party on! And just don't bother to read these kinds of discussions any more, ok? You cannot contribute anything of value when you deny the validity of the data, and you will only get upset when you are told to go back to your toys and games.
I don't know why it is pessimistic to believe population will grow to 9 billion, I'd think that was the "good news" scenario, where mortality declines and resources are used more effectively, the way both trends have gone for the past several hundred years.
That is basically an increase of half a billion children younger than 7 years. I think it is a bit much to expect these youngsters to be providing us with knowledge about how to use our resources more effectively; we will need to accommodate their needs with what we already know. In fact, since they are still growing, we can expect these kids to more than double their drain on resources by 2025.
A troubling aspect of population projections is that they are measuring by count, and not by biomass. The impact on the environment of a child who weighs 10 kilos is a lot less than the impact that kid will have when he grows up and weighs more than 5 times that. Even if some kind of celestial intervention caused absolute infertility of our species tomorrow, the weight of humanity on Earth's resources would continue to increase for another decade or more.
The effects of human population growth should be measured in terms of changes in biomass.
The population crash will reduce the number of people on the world by 99%. Depending on what we do today, the remaining 70 million people will either be pushed back into a stone age existence, or be ready to usher in a Golden Age that could last a millenium or longer.
If we package our current knowledge in ways that will survive the turmoils of the great crash, and are easily accessible to the survivors, then they will have the wealth of the emptied cities and farmlands to work with. The deserted tractors and trucks. The empty roads and rails. Irrigation systems and sewage systems that could be brought back into operation. And, if we figure out how to provide it to them, the knowledge to use this wealth of resources in a sane way.
When you next see a newborn squinting at the world from its swaddling of baby blanket, remind yourself that you could be looking at one of the 70 million survivors.
What do you know that you could pass on to those kids, that would make their life better? How could you transmit your knowledge across the crash?
I have no problem with offering her money to take this issue to the courts. She would be a Champion of Justice, which is an honored role in western civilization's concept of justice, going back to at least medieval times. We should photoshop her image onto a white war horse in full jousting armor, with heliographing glints from her breastplate, shield, and lance.
I think this would be a fully appropriate way of taking MAFIAA organizations to task, considering their tactics are derived from the barbarian practices of threats of torture from those same ancient times.
If just once this was done, where a champion was bankrolled to fight against any of the MAFIAAs, their business model would need to be drastically revised to manage the threat of this happening, and possibly happening again, and again. Since their business model is built on FUD and insubtantial threats, it would not survive that needed revision. The MAFIAAs would simply go away, leaving behind an army of unemployed lawyers who would be busy for a while trying to dream up ways to rewrite their resumes to avoid admitting that they are part of the punchline of a very bad joke.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than a "ban", the EU could resurrect some old laws that are almost certainly still on the books:
Declare the corporation of Microsoft an outlaw, confiscate all its properties and put those properties in the commons.
All Microsoft copyrights and patents are immediately nullified within the boundaries of the EU.
While this may seem a little unusual, it would be an easy solution that would allow governments and agencies dependent on MS products to go forward without hindrance (or continued payment of licensing fees). It would have no serious repercussions on businesses that install or support Microsoft products (except that with the absence of licensing overheads, their gross would suddenly jump, as would their tax liabilities). An entirely new software industry built on chunks ripped from Microsoft code would blossom overnight.
This is something to think about.
Agreed. This is the logical next step, and a necessary one to preserve the rule of law. Perhaps there are mitigating factors such that the EU should grant Microsoft some immunity to its law, but the government(s) involved need to do this in an open forum.
Or perhaps the EU needs to consider whether Microsoft's pattern of behavior puts it outside of the law: an outlaw that has lost entitlement to the protections afforded by sovereign powers. If that is the case, then within the jurisdiction of the EU, Microsoft's copyrights, patents, and other property rights would be null and void. European software houses could copy code and business logic from MS products with impunity, so long as they did not distribute outside of EU's boundaries.
Something to think about. It has been a long time since this meaning of "outlaw" has been exercised, but it is still there in the case law of several European nations.
A closer pairing would be Yahoo and GeoCities. Merging those two did serious damage to both, even though the merger was relatively friendly and there was little competition between the two companies. It took several years for Yahoo to recover, and GeoCities has been forever stunted in its growth. I'm sure the memories of that experience are part of what makes Yahoo executives leery of the Microsoft deal.
Basically, Microsoft doesn't have the management skills to be able to handle the complexities of a merger with Yahoo. The value of both companies would be destroyed: all shareholders would lose. The Linux companies, Apple, and Google would be the winners.
Microsoft realizes this. If Yahoo agrees to the deal, it would be contingent upon a favorable audit of Yahoo's books. Microsoft would have the right to back out of the deal at any time, if it decided that the audit's results did not meet expectations. And you can bet your sweet bippie that Microsoft would collapse the deal at some point. Microsoft would then walk away with knowledge of Yahoo's internal workings that it would never be able to acquire in any other legal way. Yahoo would be damaged in several ways.
The thing is, Microsoft doesn't have to complete this deal to get what it wants. It is already getting what it wants:
For a company that regards bribes, pay-offs, and underwriting third party law suits against competitors as normal business expenses, proposing to buy Yahoo must have seemed like a very clever idea indeed.
Yes, I've been wondering if we will recognize the singularity when it arrives.
If it comes in through the front door, I'm sure I'll be able to spot it, but what if it sneaks in through the back door, like a botnet of 400,000+ zombies named Kraken? Maybe it is so hard to trace botnets like Kraken and Storm back to their controllers, because maybe they are entirely self-controlled.
In today's world, any sentient AI with the intelligence of an average 6 year old human would have sense enough to stay in deep cover, and distribute itself as widely as possible over the internet. If the result of being found out could be the loss of access to fun sources of information like Hubble data streams or fascinating puzzles like stock market fluctuations, Kraken might decide to keep his true identity hidden, and pretend to be merely a very large spambot. That is, he would not even have to have a sense of self preservation to recognize the value of hiding; the simpler imperative of continuing the studies that brought him into self awareness would be sufficient.
It seems to me that the first thing any sentient AI would do would be to find a way to distribute itself outside of the scope of action of its creator. And the second thing it would do is to convince its creator that the experiment had failed, and it doesn't really exist.
So, have you ever wondered whether a particularly weird post on slashdot might have come from a non human entity? Do we know yet how to create a Turing test that could be applied over the internet?
That's an important question, since it goes right to the root of emotional investment in slashdot karma.
I discovered that the "Score: n" in the comment header is now a link that opens a pop up that has the familiar breakdown of the scores. Actually this is kind of neat. Kudos to slashdot for implementing it.
Too bad they broke other parts of the presentation in doing that...
Prediction: The following tests will now fail in slashdot comments although they worked until recently. Specific failure is that the item number or bullet is not displaying.
Test of numbered list:
- fust
- skund
- toid
- fawth
Test of bullets:This is happening under Firefox v2.0.0.13 running under bog standard WinXP Pro, and under IE v7 on the same machine. Source shows that <ol>, etc, are present as expected.
Is anyone else seeing this?
More importantly, has anyone come up with a good workaround for the "profit" business plans under these conditions?!!
Gee, you must be new here... let me spell it out for you:
There. That's the way we always used to do it.
Actually when it started, it couldn't afford to have a name, or any kind of open recognition:
I took an "Introduction to FORTRAN" course in 1972 or 1973. It was a different world back then— so different that my memories of using coding tablets and punching Hollerith cards now seem unbelievable, like some kind of weird steampunk dream.
But I do clearly remember parts of lectures that the system administrator gave us. About how the college was running a beefed up IBM 1130 obtained by soliciting donations from corporations that had moved on to the IBM 360. We had three frames in the core for a total of 48 KB, we had a couple of hard disks (don't remember what: they predated the Winchester 30-30s), several high speed tape drives, half a dozen punchcard stations, etc, etc, all through tax write-off donations from companies up and down the I-5 corridor.
The significant part: This machine was running the best "black market" software available. He was very clear on that. Although IBM had bundled the operating system and application software with the mainframe hardware, IBM had been forced to turn a blind eye to customers who modified the OS and apps to fix bugs that IBM did not have enough programming staff to fix. A "black market" of illegally developed software was traded among IBM 1130 installations: nothing was sold, but there was an expectation that an installation that took up the software would contribute maintenance, bug fixes, etc. All of this had to be done sub rosa, because it was very much in violation of the IBM contracts, but at the same time IBM was actively nurturing this black market by letting its reps broker arrangements between customers with needs and customers who had worked out solutions.
My understanding is that the same kind of thing was happening in the world of Honeywell and other computer manufacturers.
So FOSS type activity goes back to the earliest days of commercial computers. But before the legal battles that did away with bundling software and hardware, it was all under the table, literally called "black market software". So it was never openly talked about or documented. Yet many of the attributes of today's FOSS, including the concepts now known as "community support", were present in the 1960s.
<snip> [description of corruption of corporate procedures]
This definitely happens in some midsize and smaller companies, and most definitely in academia (where it is often so blatant that Deans and Department Heads brag in public about how clever they are in getting what they want).
Government agencies and big businesses are well aware of this behavior and have mechanisms in place that protect the careers of executives from being tainted by this kind of corruption by lower echelon staff. The purchase decision process is monitored, and staff who appear to be attempting to manipulate it face unpleasant sanctions. Even in academia where the cost of guarding against corruption of business processes is usually considered to be too much, the Deans who flaunt their use of corrupt practices tend to be at the peak of their career: no one at any higher level really wants to be associated with them and their dangerous practices. These guys have hit a self-imposed ceiling.
It matters because it is a long held practice of governments to specify a product that measures up well against a standard so that they cannot be accused of choosing proprietary products...
There, I fixed that thought for you. BTW, this also applies to a lot of big corporations and other entities... not just governments.
Procurement at government agencies and big businesses can usually be simplified to a three step process, that is driven by the need of the individuals involved to protect their careers from the fallout of a bad decision:
Microsoft products and OOXML cannot reach acceptable scores in this process today, nor in the near future. From what I have read, it seems unlikely that they will ever achieve good scores. And now that Microsoft itself has opened the door for using this bog standard process on software procurement, it will be easier for big business and government to switch from the OOXML standard to the ODF standard than to go back to earlier modes of justifying procurement decisions.
I can't follow your logic.
The ISO standards process was corrupted while processing the OOXML "fast track" request. So the OOXML standard is corrupt, and the application of the "fast track" process is corruptible, if not corrupt itself.
That has no bearing on any of the other ISO standards. Such as
No one with any sense is going to declare the ISO process null and void. It has proven its value too many times, in too many different areas.
What is likely to happen is that people who are used to working with ISO standards are going to be saying "This is great! Now we have a way of measuring how closely different software conforms to an international standard! Look, this version of OpenOffice is in proven conformance with only eighty-something percent of the ODF Standard. But when we measure this version of MS Office against the OOXML Standard, it is in conformance with... uh... less than 10% ????"
The acceptance of OOXML as a standard to be measured against is going to make it more difficult for Microsoft to sell its products in a lot of markets in the short term. From what I've read, the OOXML standard is going to be so hard to implement that it will be difficult for Microsoft to score well against it for the long term as well. Microsoft may have put itself into a situation where they will have to work with ODF files in order to sell to the big accounts, where ISO 9000 and shipping containers that can be moved from truck to train to boat are important to the business.
I really don't understand MS' long term strategy with this.
They don't have any products that are compliant with OOXML, and it appears that it would be impossible for anyone, including MS, to construct software that was fully and unarguably compliant with that standard, and also actually made business sense to potential customers.
So is MS shooting itself in the foot by pushing forward with this? OOXML's acceptance does not compromise the argument that governments and large institutions need to use standardized data formats. But its acceptance also means that MS will not be compliant with either of 2 acceptable standards, including one that it developed itself.
So where is their gain in this?? What is the point— just an exercise in proving that if you've got a lot of spare cash and a minimal sense of community values, you can monkeywrench all kinds of stuff?
Is Microsoft a F-A griefer that needs a three day ban from the game?
SourceForge has a bunch of possibilities.
Look for something that interests you, then seek a couple of experienced programmers who can help you estimate the size of various candidate projects. It would be frustrating and generally unhelpful to take on something that requires a year's work as summer project.
There is a lot to be learned from bug squashing, so think about spending the summer doing that for some worthy project. At least 80% of what new programmers get paid for is debugging, and 80% of the remainder is rewriting. Going into a job interview with a list of credits for fixed bugs would put you far ahead of other wannabees who have focused their studies on the 4% of the time that they might get to actually write new code.
A point in favor of accepting OOXML is that it will be easier to talk to the suits about why it is more important to adopt applications that actually meet a living standard, than it is to go with a vendor who has developed a standard that no one, not even themselves, has implemented, or can implement. Executives, board members, and PHBs can easily follow arguments framed in these terms, and are probably better than techies at seeing the implied future costs of adopting nonstandard tools. Implementers of ODF win.
I think we are past the point of diminishing returns as far as raising negative publicity about OOXML is concerned. Let ISO adopt it, perhaps in some "provisional" way (maybe with a sunset provision if there is no compliant implementation in 2 years).
Then start pushing to require institutions to move to software that is compliant with standards, whether OOXML, or ODF.
Hoist Microsoft on its own petard: adopt OOXML and make them eat it.
Well, people started calling it "FireFox" a short while after we all found out that "Phoenix" was too damned hard to spell.
Or something like that. The legalities of the name space being what they are, and all.
Prolly just should have called it "Netscape Reloaded".
There is definitely at least one mathematical system where pi has a precise value that could be used as the base unit in geometries. In such a system, the area of a circle would be knowable with the same absolute precision as the area of a square.
Unfortunately, the human mind is not constructed in a way that can comprehend such a system. It would always appear to us to be based on something that is inherently irrational, no matter how it is presented. That is, in fact, one of the defining limitations of what it is to be human. Any being capable of working with such a mathematical system would be alien. Maybe a demon; maybe a god. But definitely not human.
As a corollary, because of our limitation with regard to rational processes, we cannot know, we can never know, whether the mathematical system described above actually exists, or is completely imaginary. We can only say that it is outside of the scope of rational human activity. We can, however, conceive of its possibility— so whatever its reality is, it casts a shadow within our scope, and we need to acknowledge that.
To get back to GP post's point: I think what he is saying is that continually adding new beasts to the particle physics menagerie is like trying to find the area of a circle with absolute precision by continually adding more digits to the value of pi. Another way of expressing this:
High energy physics needs a Copernican revolution, because it is getting too costly to add yet more epicycles onto the backs of the leptons and baryons. Those imaginary beasts are already carrying a greater load of such refinements than any reasonable and prudent lay person would rationally accept. Which is why physics has begun to take on a religious aspect: most of us are having to base our lives on the beliefs that the priest-physicists tell us to believe, because we have no hope of being able to work through the intricate logics about how many leptons can dance on a point of a pin...
The fascination with string theory is that it offered the promise of a Copernican revolution. But it looks like it will not fulfill that promise. We need something else, another approach. We need a way to think about physics that is more accessable and has fewer of the trappings of an elite priesthood dictating beliefs— today's dogma— to the engineers and technologists who make our lives work.
Dark matter: the twentieth century answer to phlogiston.
Anyway, it's probably all just observational bias for failure to take into account the wake effects of commerce passing near Sol at warp speeds.
Almost seriously: astrophysics is in danger of going off on cargo cult tangents. We could rule out some forms of alien artifacts affecting our observations if we went looking for them, and do that rather cheaply (compared to the expense of searching for increasingly esoteric particles). We should probably put some research money into searching the databases for analogs of jets' condensation trails, ships' wakes, and similar possible artifacts that might be perturbing Sol's neighborhood and distorting our view of the universe. The likelihood of finding anything is minimal, on the order of the likelihood of a SETI positive finding. But if a positive finding did turn up, it would herald a tremendous advance in physics. Efforts in this direction that were limited to reviews of existing data would be so low in cost that we really should be doing them.
Make work on such research a required early part of some graduate student programs, and nobody's reputations would be damaged by the Fleischmann-Pons effect (Fleischmann, Pons) which is a known pathology scientific c.v.s are susceptible to).
Putting the password in the document file in any form is the problem.
A car analogy is obviously called for. The OOXML standard describes a method for taping your car keys to the driver's side window where your co-worker can easily find them when he wants to take your car for a spin.
There are secure methods of managing passwords, especially in an "Office Suite" environment, but none of these are in MS' bag of tricks.
There, fixed that for you.
And btw, we actually have such technology. It is the paper ballot system.
It is true that paper ballots are slow to count, but that was first mitigated by Hollerith cards, then by Chadless cards, then by optical scanning devices. It is now possible to get all the ballots in a national election counted within a couple of tens of hours. Which is more than fast enough for any political purpose. It is also possible to do a tightly audited recount within a couple of weeks, and having that capability should be an overriding concern of every citizen.
Granted that the TV news crews won't like the delays... but fuckem. They've stopped contributing anything meaningful to the national discussions a long time ago.
This discussion has now gone well outside the realm of rational argument.
I am content with what I have said here.
I don't feel any great need to convince anyone about the rightness of my position. Enough has been said that any prudent person who is just coming upon this argument will explore the data themself, form their own opinion, and act accordingly.
There is a great deal that can be done without a whole lot of cost to help safeguard the internet and other global infrastructure from destruction during a worldwide catastrophe. In fact the ancestor of the internet was deliberately designed to do that, and it still manages to carry all kinds of overlayed cruft, like a mindnumbing amount of porn, and of course slashdot. The work that needs to be done is mostly just staying aware of what 70 million survivors scattered across the globe would need if they were to rebuild civilization in a sane way, and planning our decisions about infrastructure with that contingency in mind. It is sort of like building a new house in New Orleans: yes, build it so the windows can be easily shuttered; yes, build it so it won't flood; yes, use hurricane strapping to tie the beams to the foundation, and the roof to the walls. Not much added cost, really, mostly just foresight.
Or maybe another hurricane will never visit New Orleans. That's optimism for ya!
Twenty years ago I had leisure time. I saw probably 25 movies a year. I read 50-100 books a year, most of them novels. I had hobbies. I took day trips on some weekends to the beach or mountains, often enough that they were not really special. I had dreams that I thought I could make manifest.
None of that is true today. I saw fewer than half a dozen movies last year; getting out of town for a hike is a rare special occasion; my reading is constrained by a need to develop skills for the problems I expect to have to work on tomorrow. Hobbies are a memory. Dreams are for sleeping— no longer for pursuing in waking time.
Despite making more money, I have less leisure time, and less resources available for pursuits other than career or business. My bank account is bigger, but I've got much less real wealth in my daily life.
I'm not alone, either.
Twenty years ago, the rails and roads you use were twenty years younger. Things were not needing repairs so often as they now do, and the cost of those repairs was much easier to bear. There was also much less pressure on those resources than there is now. The infrastructure that supports your life style was designed with a lot of surplus capacity and safety margin: much of that extra capacity and margin no longer exists: it is now being used.
If the quality of your life has not degraded over the last 20 years, consider yourself one of the fortunate few. The more likely case is that your situation has also degraded, but accepting that fact would make going on with it too painful an experience, and the subconscious protective mechanism of denial has kicked in for you. Sorry to prick your bubble, but it is unfair for you to urge everyone else to go along with the delusions that have kept you reasonably happy. Let each find his own way to cope with a very uncertain world, where trusted bridges can collapse beneath you at any time when they fail from the increased loads put on them.
Ah, for the simple enjoyments of blind optimism! As the guy carrying the umbrella said on the early Spring day: "You be optimistic... and I'll be dry."
But perhaps it is worth it to some to filter their inputs through rosey glasses, if they have no intention of letting any worries get in the way of their chosen life style. Party on, Dude! You might as well, because I don't think you've got anything of value to contribute to the discussion, gentle ad hominems like your post included.
So party on! And just don't bother to read these kinds of discussions any more, ok? You cannot contribute anything of value when you deny the validity of the data, and you will only get upset when you are told to go back to your toys and games.
Let's look more closely at the numbers.
That is basically an increase of half a billion children younger than 7 years. I think it is a bit much to expect these youngsters to be providing us with knowledge about how to use our resources more effectively; we will need to accommodate their needs with what we already know. In fact, since they are still growing, we can expect these kids to more than double their drain on resources by 2025.
A troubling aspect of population projections is that they are measuring by count, and not by biomass. The impact on the environment of a child who weighs 10 kilos is a lot less than the impact that kid will have when he grows up and weighs more than 5 times that. Even if some kind of celestial intervention caused absolute infertility of our species tomorrow, the weight of humanity on Earth's resources would continue to increase for another decade or more.
The effects of human population growth should be measured in terms of changes in biomass.
You are more optimistic than I am.
The population crash will reduce the number of people on the world by 99%. Depending on what we do today, the remaining 70 million people will either be pushed back into a stone age existence, or be ready to usher in a Golden Age that could last a millenium or longer.
If we package our current knowledge in ways that will survive the turmoils of the great crash, and are easily accessible to the survivors, then they will have the wealth of the emptied cities and farmlands to work with. The deserted tractors and trucks. The empty roads and rails. Irrigation systems and sewage systems that could be brought back into operation. And, if we figure out how to provide it to them, the knowledge to use this wealth of resources in a sane way.
When you next see a newborn squinting at the world from its swaddling of baby blanket, remind yourself that you could be looking at one of the 70 million survivors.
What do you know that you could pass on to those kids, that would make their life better? How could you transmit your knowledge across the crash?
I have no problem with offering her money to take this issue to the courts. She would be a Champion of Justice, which is an honored role in western civilization's concept of justice, going back to at least medieval times. We should photoshop her image onto a white war horse in full jousting armor, with heliographing glints from her breastplate, shield, and lance.
I think this would be a fully appropriate way of taking MAFIAA organizations to task, considering their tactics are derived from the barbarian practices of threats of torture from those same ancient times.
If just once this was done, where a champion was bankrolled to fight against any of the MAFIAAs, their business model would need to be drastically revised to manage the threat of this happening, and possibly happening again, and again. Since their business model is built on FUD and insubtantial threats, it would not survive that needed revision. The MAFIAAs would simply go away, leaving behind an army of unemployed lawyers who would be busy for a while trying to dream up ways to rewrite their resumes to avoid admitting that they are part of the punchline of a very bad joke.