"I personally never thought that there was any conflict between evolutionary explanations of change in the natural world and Roman Catholic Christianity."
From "Evolutionary Biology at Regis, a Jesuit Catholic School" at http://academic.regis.edu/mghedott/evolut.htm.
I think this would be great. Most of the comments here have missed the point, I think.
Many of the comments I read have some common themes:
1) You suck as a parent. Spend some time with your kid on the internet, instead of abdicating your parental responsibilities to a giant corporation. It's called being a parent, you loser.
2) This isn't reasonable. This requires too much human effort. This isn't the way Google works.
3) There isn't a common understanding of what should be in the fence and what should be out of the fence. Everyone's morals are different. And movie ratings suck, too.
Some things to think about:
1) An important aspect of being a parent is giving your children progressive levels of responsibility and risk. That's why you teach them to swim in a swimming pool, not a class 5 rapid. Movie ratings aren't perfect, but at least it gives you some idea what to expect. For kids between 9 and 12, a movie rating of PG is not a bad first cut what might be appropriate. So, an internet safe zone would be a great way for kids to have some exposure to internet searches without getting the full firehose.
2) Yeah, the implementation details have some challenges. Too bad Google doesn't have a way to use automation to filter out masses of material as inappropriate. Oh wait, they do. Context, content, nuance, meaning, matching. That stuff is the BOMB these days. It's not like back in the day when computers were stupid.
3) Yeah, a common understanding might be a bit challenging on the boundary cases. But within some wide parameters, say language, off the top of my head, there are some fairly common understandings of whether something belongs in the kids' side or on the adults' side.
I think there is a definite market here. Just like there's a market in child safety seats, kid-sized bikes, Chucky Cheese, playgrounds, swimming pools, and all the myriad other ways parents will spend money to provide filtered environments for their kids.
While we're at it, a kid filter for Wikipedia would be great. You just never know what's going to pop up in a Wikipedia search.
In fact, I think I'll go write up a business plan. Heck, large amounts of venture capital has been thrown at far stupider ideas.
. . . CSS makes me excited every time I learn new things about it, and I'm not that hardcore of a geek...
And we can play with this stuff in Mozilla. Oh happy day.:)
Uhhh, if CSS makes you excited then, yeah, you're a geek. If it makes you excited over and over, then that makes you a hardcore geek. If you are unsure, use the "random unknown female test". Walk up to some random unknown female and say, "CSS makes me excited every time I learn new things about it. Does that make me a geek?". If she says, "Oh, I saw CSS on TV last night! That's so cool!", then you aren't a geek. Otherwise you are. Welcome to the brotherhood.;)
What boggles the mind is how little this really benefits the corporations.
We're talking about more money than you probably think.
According to Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion, only 2% of copyrighted works between 55 and 75 years old retain commercial value, but that that 2% is conservatively estimated to bring in $400 million a year in revenues to the copyright holders.
Certifications aren't the only answer. Certs do help, but there's a lot more you can do.
Beat your resume to death. It should be completely error-free. No spelling errors. No capitalization errors. No formatting errors. Examine it with a critical eye for presentation. Be truthful, but any skill that you genuinely have is in there. Get the buzzwords in. If your resume shows that you're older than 40 or 45, then consider removing those references.
Give your resume to many recruiters. It won't necessarily get you a job, but at least you'll have some else with some vested interest in getting you employed.
You need some claim to fame besides general NT administration. NT administrators are more plentiful than stray cats and dogs. (No we need a spay and release program?) If you do NT, then you need something else. Scripting. Programming. Networks. Linux. Databases. Citrix. Something.
Get a day job. 2001 and 2002 saw a great winnowing of the IT ranks, particularly in the Windows infrastructure area. You may need to face that it is going to be a long time before you're back in IT.
Get a degree. Even a two-year degree.
For experience, try volunteering. Find a non-profit that needs IT done. Work for them for free. Don't try to milk it for employment, just spend, say, 8 hours a week fixing their computer problems. There are many benefits, not the least of which is that you can legitimately claim it as experience on your resume.
Join user groups.
Build stuff at home. Buy surplus equipment. Install stuff. Buy a router simulator. Don't tell people in an interview that you have a network at home. Talk about it in terms of a "lab environment", or a "small network". If they want details, then tell them it's a home lab.
Perhaps this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but the PCI-SIG Board of Directors is chaired by Tony Pierce of . . . Microsoft! According to this CNet story he is (or was) technical evangelist for Microsoft's Hardware Strategy Group. Good strategy.
At the same time, Wipro has embraced quality. In six years, it has trained 7,000 employees in Six Sigma and completed 1,000 quality projects. Six years ago, Fast Company pro?led a team at Lockheed-Martin that wrote nearly perfect code ( "They Write the Right Stuff," Dec : Jan 1997 ). The team's claim to fame: It was one of only four out?ts in the world to achieve Level 5 certi?cation from the Software Engineering Institute. Wipro has Level 5 certi?cation in three different categories. It's eye-glazing stuff, but an amazing achievement.
It's pretty scary to consider competing with the likes of this. It will be "interesting" to see how the US technology industry responds to these sorts of challenges. Interesting as in the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times". Will we respond by honing our competitive advantages? Will it spur us to upgrade our school system? Or maybe reduce Johnny's and Sally's weekly Disney ration down to only 20 hours a week and send them to do some extra homework? Or maybe spur legislative initiatives to curb outsourcing? (Trade sanctions! That's it! That's the ticket!) Will we cut off foreign aid? (Do we give India any foreign aid? I don't know. Seems like we give just about everyone foreign aid.) Or will we just sit here watching the latest pr0n, music video, reality TV until one day we realize that the economic imbalance that we currently enjoy no longer exists and that all we've gotten for it is entertainment and electronic gizmos we don't even understand any more.
Perhaps our children or grandchildren will be proud to work in the factories that will spring up fifty years from now because suddenly we're the cheap, unskilled labor.
The TCPA organization does not make its membership publicly available. Why is that? How was that decision made? Was there a vote? Did AMI participate in that decision? If so, how did AMI vote? What are the benefits to AMI in being a member of the TCPA? Can you give us a list of members?
For those of you consider this is no big deal, consider the following.
Let's say the Microsoft Watch is a big success. Go ahead and laugh. They've got the bucks to seed these sorts of things into the marketplace for years. Eventually something will stick. If not the Watch then the MS Clock or the MS Hairdryer or the MS Refrigerator, or something.
Now, let's say you, as a geek, have reprogrammed the thing so that it runs FreeWatch, the oss embedded watch OS that does all the cool stuff you want it to.
The next version of the MS Watch is Trusted. It only runs approved software. It only runs approved services. And if it doesn't recognize the os and the software, it just doesn't run. Of course, approved means approved by Microsoft, or by the Watch Software Consortium. And they'll be happy to add FreeWatch, for $500 million and a 25% cut of the profits.
If you don't think that's the way it will work, think again, very carefully. It isn't Trusted to Microsoft until it's utterly predictable. It will only run MS-approved software. It will only display MS colors. Once it's utterly predictable, then support costs go down, service fees go up, and 3. Profit!
Now, extend that to the PC platform. Microsoft's stated goal is for computers to be as predictible as kitchen appliances. That means they run exactly the way it runs. Support costs go down, service fees go up. Paladium, TCPA, DMCA, DRM, it's all the same. It is to give you absolutely reliable computing. To end hacking, cracking, viruses, tinkering, end-user encryption, and everything else most geeks hold near and dear. And incidently, to put the hands of the electronics and entertainment industries into your wallet, forever.
If you think this is unlikely, as yourself, why is the membership list of the TCPA secret?
Maybe you still don't agree with me. Maybe I'm wrong. I really hope so. But perhaps it's worth keeping an eye on things.
Rah, rah, open source. Nagios sounds great. Mr. Galstad sounds like a great guy.
But how does he support himself?
Or more generally, how do actual developers make a living on open source?
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like there are only a handful of ways to make money doing oss:
Be so awesomely famous that someone's willing to pay you to sit around and do your thing, a la Larry Wall
Have some sort of employment situation that allows you to spend time on an oss project
Have a big pile of previously acquired money
Live off someone else, like the 'rents or the spouse
Have a day job
Sell consulting
Run a web site and get make revenue off the ads
Live off of donations
For obvious reasons, #1 and #3 don't scale well to the general oss development community, #2 and #4 are cushy deals (I suppose) if you can get 'em, and #6, #7, and #8 seem dubious in all but a few cases.
That leaves #5. How the heck does anyone have enough time to have a day job, some sort of social/family life, and also run anything but the smallest of oss projects? The only thing that I can think of is that the social/family life has to go (if it was ever there in the first place), although I suppose giving up slashdot and other computer games might be a start . . . .
Sure it's fair, as long as the consumer can choose to buy a brand other than Ford. It's only when there's no competition that tactics like this don't play out in the marketplace.
In fact, Gillette is generally credited with inventing loss-leader sales. He invented the safety razor using disposible blades, and in order to sell the blades he literally gave away razors. Once the market was developed he sold the razors, although continuing at a reduced price.
Gillette was also a pioneer in lock-in. Once the patent expired on the disposible razorblade, the only way to keep competitors from selling blades was to continually change the interconnection between the handle and the blade, a practice which continues in the modern razor business.
Gillette also was one of the first pioneers of the now time-honored technique of achieving marketing dominance by selling to the U.S military. He got a contract to supply the entire U.S. Army with Gillette razors in WWI, thereby cementing the sales after the war.
So, it's an old, old game. I guess the difficulty is in determining what sorts of lock-in are ok, and what aren't. Is razorblade lockin ok, but car dealership lockin not ok? I'm not sure exactly what the difference is.
. . . modern man was genetically engineered by aliens . . ..
In related news, Reuters reports that a group of forward-thinking and well-respected scientists and theologians who also acknowledge that life on earth was created by extra-terrestrials are expecting the impending birth of the first cloned human, see the Reuters article:
Sect Says First Cloned Baby Due in Weeks
For those of you too lazy to move your index finger, the entire article follows:
Sect Says First Cloned Baby Due in Weeks
Fri December 20, 2002 10:32 AM ET
MONTREAL (Reuters) - A Canadian cult that believes in free love and that life on earth was created by extra terrestrials said it could deliver the world's first cloned baby on Christmas day.
But the announcement by the Quebec-based Raelians sect was greeted on Thursday with anger and skepticism from experts in the field.
"I am personally disgusted," said Arthur Leader, chief of reproductive medicine at the Ottawa Hospital. "It shows disrespect for human embryos and it demeans our humanity," he said.
Brigitte Boisselier, a bishop in the sect, said their company, Clonaid, cloned a human embryo last March and a baby girl is expected to be delivered within the next two weeks and possibly on Christmas Day.
"We are well advanced and the first baby is due for the end of this year. We think it will be a healthy baby," Boisselier told Reuters.
She said 10 human embryos were cloned last spring, with five miscarrying. The four other cloned babies are expected next year.
Boisselier, 45, is a biochemist associated with the Raelians, a cult that believes life on earth was genetically created by visiting extra-terrestrials.
I'd comment on the whole free-love/aliens thing, but that would probably be too far off-topic.
Citizen, smitizen. Besides, how do we know you aren't a US citizen? And even if you aren't, whats the problem, you got something to hide? You know, we Americans get really sick and tired of all this whining and complaining by all you foreigners. Our divine mission is to keep the whole world safe for commerce, err, I mean, capitalism, err, I mean democracy, err, I mean, ummm, human rights. Yeah, that's it, human rights. And civil liberty! Of course, a certain amount of minor inconvenience might be necessary.
Re:Last line is a beaut...
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Actually, genetic engineering by aliens might explain a lot about the collective phenomenon known as "wives", as any married man could probably attest.
To be fair, my wife would probably argue that husbands are proof that genetic engineering could not possibly have taken place, because the male of the species could not possibly be the result of intelligent engineering.
ET Isn't the Only Unusual Phenomenon Going On Here
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A Google search for "Denise M. Clark" yields 10 pages of hits, most being book reviews of various types.
I guess that doesn't necessarily invalidate the book review, but it does show that this isn't a review from a slashdotter to the slashdot community, which is what I thought the slashdot book reviews were. Maybe I was wrong, I dunno.
But they can make it so massively complex that it is very difficult to implement interoperability with foreign tools, but that it is somehow much easier to implement with MS-centric tools.
The registry in Windows NT/2000/XP is sort of like that. It makes a lot more sense from a Microsoft-centric viewpoint than it does from a non-Microsoft-centric viewpoint. Now that it's been around so long, there are lots of ways to get at registry data (for instance, using Perl modules), but when the registry was new the only way to do it was through the Microsoft API, but until many people went through the pain of encapsulating the MS API, the pain of accessing the registry from a non-MS-centric toolset was high.
So maybe the XML format will be like that. If you're Linux-centric, for instance, the threshold of pain for accessing Word XML docs will be fairly high, but if you're Microsoft-centric, with all of their tools, code-snippets, documents, etc., then it won't be nearly as painful.
This way MS gets to claim interoperability, make Word data easily accessible to MS-centric solutions, but put a damper on non-MS-centric solutions.
The question is, when Microsoft says they are using XML as a document format, are they doing it because they believe in the principles underlying it, or solely for the cynical "this is what is selling now" aspect?
There's another possibility. Perhaps they're doing it so that the documents are interoperable, but the interoperable they care about is with other Microsoft products. I could easily see that the goal is interoperability with IIS, Sharepoint, Exchange, as well as the new stuff that's scheduled to come out next year. It's a lot like using the IE engine as a display mechanism within the OS -- it's a pretty good solution as long as you're only building stuff with MS components, it's when you want a choice then it's a problem.
What you are looking for is an opinion-free measurement of the skill differential between Microsoft correction efforts on the one hand and discovery efforts on the other. I don't think you'll ever be able to determine on a purely factual basis, untainted by bias, whether such a method. No doubt, statistics and logical arguments can be marshalled to support one side or the other. I suppose one could establish criteria for a "clue index", and measure each flaw based on those criteria, but even then it seems like the selection and application of the criteria would be highly subjective.
Another interesting but no doubt unattainable measurement would be the per-flaw cost-of-corrective-action vs. cost-of-discovery. In other words, how much did it cost to find the flaw, and then how much did it cost to fix it?
Perhaps some enterprising graduate student in some sort of hybrid sociology/business/computer science it putting together such a study right now.
It's also a sort of interesting thought exercise to imagine that Microsoft has a "bureaucratic-coeffecient-of-friction" of zero, in other words, all issues come down to a matter of cost. Then the question becomes, how does Microsoft balance the value of correcting security (or other flaws) vs. the fiduciary responsibility to provide maximum return on shareholder investment. In other words, what amount of money does Microsoft spend on code fixes now, in order to maximize the profitability of the code base in the long run, and how does the ROI of money spent on code fixes compare to the money spent on new code base development, marketing, acquisition, and/or lobbying? My own completely unsubstantiated opinion is this is exactly how the issue of security is evaluated at Microsoft, and that they spend a good bit of money to develop and evaluate models forecasting exactly this sort of thing.
Finally, I have to wonder whether such code flaws are truly "mistakes". If you consider the amount and severity of flaws to be directly related to the amount of money applied to the code base (personally, I imagine them using a shovel), then flaws aren't truly mistakes, they're decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Or will anyone able to pay for it be able to obtain it?
That would be my bet.
"I personally never thought that there was any conflict between evolutionary explanations of change in the natural world and Roman Catholic Christianity." From "Evolutionary Biology at Regis, a Jesuit Catholic School" at http://academic.regis.edu/mghedott/evolut.htm.
Here in DC they should start by fixing the meters.
Many of the comments I read have some common themes:
1) You suck as a parent. Spend some time with your kid on the internet, instead of abdicating your parental responsibilities to a giant corporation. It's called being a parent, you loser.
2) This isn't reasonable. This requires too much human effort. This isn't the way Google works.
3) There isn't a common understanding of what should be in the fence and what should be out of the fence. Everyone's morals are different. And movie ratings suck, too.
Some things to think about:
1) An important aspect of being a parent is giving your children progressive levels of responsibility and risk. That's why you teach them to swim in a swimming pool, not a class 5 rapid. Movie ratings aren't perfect, but at least it gives you some idea what to expect. For kids between 9 and 12, a movie rating of PG is not a bad first cut what might be appropriate. So, an internet safe zone would be a great way for kids to have some exposure to internet searches without getting the full firehose.
2) Yeah, the implementation details have some challenges. Too bad Google doesn't have a way to use automation to filter out masses of material as inappropriate. Oh wait, they do. Context, content, nuance, meaning, matching. That stuff is the BOMB these days. It's not like back in the day when computers were stupid.
3) Yeah, a common understanding might be a bit challenging on the boundary cases. But within some wide parameters, say language, off the top of my head, there are some fairly common understandings of whether something belongs in the kids' side or on the adults' side.
I think there is a definite market here. Just like there's a market in child safety seats, kid-sized bikes, Chucky Cheese, playgrounds, swimming pools, and all the myriad other ways parents will spend money to provide filtered environments for their kids.
While we're at it, a kid filter for Wikipedia would be great. You just never know what's going to pop up in a Wikipedia search.
In fact, I think I'll go write up a business plan. Heck, large amounts of venture capital has been thrown at far stupider ideas.
And we can play with this stuff in Mozilla. Oh happy day. :)
Uhhh, if CSS makes you excited then, yeah, you're a geek. If it makes you excited over and over, then that makes you a hardcore geek. If you are unsure, use the "random unknown female test". Walk up to some random unknown female and say, "CSS makes me excited every time I learn new things about it. Does that make me a geek?". If she says, "Oh, I saw CSS on TV last night! That's so cool!", then you aren't a geek. Otherwise you are. Welcome to the brotherhood. ;)
. . . or they'd by EMPing us by the city block.
We're talking about more money than you probably think.
According to Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion, only 2% of copyrighted works between 55 and 75 years old retain commercial value, but that that 2% is conservatively estimated to bring in $400 million a year in revenues to the copyright holders.
That's billions over the next 20 years.
Beat your resume to death. It should be completely error-free. No spelling errors. No capitalization errors. No formatting errors. Examine it with a critical eye for presentation. Be truthful, but any skill that you genuinely have is in there. Get the buzzwords in. If your resume shows that you're older than 40 or 45, then consider removing those references.
Give your resume to many recruiters. It won't necessarily get you a job, but at least you'll have some else with some vested interest in getting you employed.
You need some claim to fame besides general NT administration. NT administrators are more plentiful than stray cats and dogs. (No we need a spay and release program?) If you do NT, then you need something else. Scripting. Programming. Networks. Linux. Databases. Citrix. Something.
Get a day job. 2001 and 2002 saw a great winnowing of the IT ranks, particularly in the Windows infrastructure area. You may need to face that it is going to be a long time before you're back in IT.
Get a degree. Even a two-year degree.
For experience, try volunteering. Find a non-profit that needs IT done. Work for them for free. Don't try to milk it for employment, just spend, say, 8 hours a week fixing their computer problems. There are many benefits, not the least of which is that you can legitimately claim it as experience on your resume.
Join user groups.
Build stuff at home. Buy surplus equipment. Install stuff. Buy a router simulator. Don't tell people in an interview that you have a network at home. Talk about it in terms of a "lab environment", or a "small network". If they want details, then tell them it's a home lab.
Good luck.
Perhaps this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but the PCI-SIG Board of Directors is chaired by Tony Pierce of . . . Microsoft! According to this CNet story he is (or was) technical evangelist for Microsoft's Hardware Strategy Group. Good strategy.
At the same time, Wipro has embraced quality. In six years, it has trained 7,000 employees in Six Sigma and completed 1,000 quality projects. Six years ago, Fast Company pro?led a team at Lockheed-Martin that wrote nearly perfect code ( "They Write the Right Stuff," Dec : Jan 1997 ). The team's claim to fame: It was one of only four out?ts in the world to achieve Level 5 certi?cation from the Software Engineering Institute. Wipro has Level 5 certi?cation in three different categories. It's eye-glazing stuff, but an amazing achievement.
It's pretty scary to consider competing with the likes of this. It will be "interesting" to see how the US technology industry responds to these sorts of challenges. Interesting as in the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times". Will we respond by honing our competitive advantages? Will it spur us to upgrade our school system? Or maybe reduce Johnny's and Sally's weekly Disney ration down to only 20 hours a week and send them to do some extra homework? Or maybe spur legislative initiatives to curb outsourcing? (Trade sanctions! That's it! That's the ticket!) Will we cut off foreign aid? (Do we give India any foreign aid? I don't know. Seems like we give just about everyone foreign aid.) Or will we just sit here watching the latest pr0n, music video, reality TV until one day we realize that the economic imbalance that we currently enjoy no longer exists and that all we've gotten for it is entertainment and electronic gizmos we don't even understand any more.
Perhaps our children or grandchildren will be proud to work in the factories that will spring up fifty years from now because suddenly we're the cheap, unskilled labor.
The TCPA organization does not make its membership publicly available. Why is that? How was that decision made? Was there a vote? Did AMI participate in that decision? If so, how did AMI vote? What are the benefits to AMI in being a member of the TCPA? Can you give us a list of members?
DMCA, go to jail.
Let's say the Microsoft Watch is a big success. Go ahead and laugh. They've got the bucks to seed these sorts of things into the marketplace for years. Eventually something will stick. If not the Watch then the MS Clock or the MS Hairdryer or the MS Refrigerator, or something.
Now, let's say you, as a geek, have reprogrammed the thing so that it runs FreeWatch, the oss embedded watch OS that does all the cool stuff you want it to.
The next version of the MS Watch is Trusted. It only runs approved software. It only runs approved services. And if it doesn't recognize the os and the software, it just doesn't run. Of course, approved means approved by Microsoft, or by the Watch Software Consortium. And they'll be happy to add FreeWatch, for $500 million and a 25% cut of the profits.
If you don't think that's the way it will work, think again, very carefully. It isn't Trusted to Microsoft until it's utterly predictable. It will only run MS-approved software. It will only display MS colors. Once it's utterly predictable, then support costs go down, service fees go up, and 3. Profit!
Now, extend that to the PC platform. Microsoft's stated goal is for computers to be as predictible as kitchen appliances. That means they run exactly the way it runs. Support costs go down, service fees go up. Paladium, TCPA, DMCA, DRM, it's all the same. It is to give you absolutely reliable computing. To end hacking, cracking, viruses, tinkering, end-user encryption, and everything else most geeks hold near and dear. And incidently, to put the hands of the electronics and entertainment industries into your wallet, forever.
If you think this is unlikely, as yourself, why is the membership list of the TCPA secret?
Maybe you still don't agree with me. Maybe I'm wrong. I really hope so. But perhaps it's worth keeping an eye on things.
But how does he support himself?
Or more generally, how do actual developers make a living on open source?
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like there are only a handful of ways to make money doing oss:
- Be so awesomely famous that someone's willing to pay you to sit around and do your thing, a la Larry Wall
- Have some sort of employment situation that allows you to spend time on an oss project
- Have a big pile of previously acquired money
- Live off someone else, like the 'rents or the spouse
- Have a day job
- Sell consulting
- Run a web site and get make revenue off the ads
- Live off of donations
For obvious reasons, #1 and #3 don't scale well to the general oss development community, #2 and #4 are cushy deals (I suppose) if you can get 'em, and #6, #7, and #8 seem dubious in all but a few cases.That leaves #5. How the heck does anyone have enough time to have a day job, some sort of social/family life, and also run anything but the smallest of oss projects? The only thing that I can think of is that the social/family life has to go (if it was ever there in the first place), although I suppose giving up slashdot and other computer games might be a start . . . .
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Sure it's fair, as long as the consumer can choose to buy a brand other than Ford. It's only when there's no competition that tactics like this don't play out in the marketplace.
Gillette was also a pioneer in lock-in. Once the patent expired on the disposible razorblade, the only way to keep competitors from selling blades was to continually change the interconnection between the handle and the blade, a practice which continues in the modern razor business.
Gillette also was one of the first pioneers of the now time-honored technique of achieving marketing dominance by selling to the U.S military. He got a contract to supply the entire U.S. Army with Gillette razors in WWI, thereby cementing the sales after the war.
So, it's an old, old game. I guess the difficulty is in determining what sorts of lock-in are ok, and what aren't. Is razorblade lockin ok, but car dealership lockin not ok? I'm not sure exactly what the difference is.
Wow, double bonus. No more of this namby-pamby legislative crap.
Works for me.
In related news, Reuters reports that a group of forward-thinking and well-respected scientists and theologians who also acknowledge that life on earth was created by extra-terrestrials are expecting the impending birth of the first cloned human, see the Reuters article: Sect Says First Cloned Baby Due in Weeks
For those of you too lazy to move your index finger, the entire article follows:
Sect Says First Cloned Baby Due in Weeks
Fri December 20, 2002 10:32 AM ET
MONTREAL (Reuters) - A Canadian cult that believes in free love and that life on earth was created by extra terrestrials said it could deliver the world's first cloned baby on Christmas day.
But the announcement by the Quebec-based Raelians sect was greeted on Thursday with anger and skepticism from experts in the field.
"I am personally disgusted," said Arthur Leader, chief of reproductive medicine at the Ottawa Hospital. "It shows disrespect for human embryos and it demeans our humanity," he said.
Brigitte Boisselier, a bishop in the sect, said their company, Clonaid, cloned a human embryo last March and a baby girl is expected to be delivered within the next two weeks and possibly on Christmas Day.
"We are well advanced and the first baby is due for the end of this year. We think it will be a healthy baby," Boisselier told Reuters.
She said 10 human embryos were cloned last spring, with five miscarrying. The four other cloned babies are expected next year.
Boisselier, 45, is a biochemist associated with the Raelians, a cult that believes life on earth was genetically created by visiting extra-terrestrials.
I'd comment on the whole free-love/aliens thing, but that would probably be too far off-topic.
Of course, on the Internet, no one knows you're a octopus.
Citizen, smitizen. Besides, how do we know you aren't a US citizen? And even if you aren't, whats the problem, you got something to hide? You know, we Americans get really sick and tired of all this whining and complaining by all you foreigners. Our divine mission is to keep the whole world safe for commerce, err, I mean, capitalism, err, I mean democracy, err, I mean, ummm, human rights. Yeah, that's it, human rights. And civil liberty! Of course, a certain amount of minor inconvenience might be necessary.
To be fair, my wife would probably argue that husbands are proof that genetic engineering could not possibly have taken place, because the male of the species could not possibly be the result of intelligent engineering.
Even more interesting, a Google search for the phrase "The existence of extraterrestrials has long been a subject" gives 3 pages of hits.
I guess that doesn't necessarily invalidate the book review, but it does show that this isn't a review from a slashdotter to the slashdot community, which is what I thought the slashdot book reviews were. Maybe I was wrong, I dunno.
The registry in Windows NT/2000/XP is sort of like that. It makes a lot more sense from a Microsoft-centric viewpoint than it does from a non-Microsoft-centric viewpoint. Now that it's been around so long, there are lots of ways to get at registry data (for instance, using Perl modules), but when the registry was new the only way to do it was through the Microsoft API, but until many people went through the pain of encapsulating the MS API, the pain of accessing the registry from a non-MS-centric toolset was high.
So maybe the XML format will be like that. If you're Linux-centric, for instance, the threshold of pain for accessing Word XML docs will be fairly high, but if you're Microsoft-centric, with all of their tools, code-snippets, documents, etc., then it won't be nearly as painful.
This way MS gets to claim interoperability, make Word data easily accessible to MS-centric solutions, but put a damper on non-MS-centric solutions.
There's another possibility. Perhaps they're doing it so that the documents are interoperable, but the interoperable they care about is with other Microsoft products. I could easily see that the goal is interoperability with IIS, Sharepoint, Exchange, as well as the new stuff that's scheduled to come out next year. It's a lot like using the IE engine as a display mechanism within the OS -- it's a pretty good solution as long as you're only building stuff with MS components, it's when you want a choice then it's a problem.
Another interesting but no doubt unattainable measurement would be the per-flaw cost-of-corrective-action vs. cost-of-discovery. In other words, how much did it cost to find the flaw, and then how much did it cost to fix it?
Perhaps some enterprising graduate student in some sort of hybrid sociology/business/computer science it putting together such a study right now.
It's also a sort of interesting thought exercise to imagine that Microsoft has a "bureaucratic-coeffecient-of-friction" of zero, in other words, all issues come down to a matter of cost. Then the question becomes, how does Microsoft balance the value of correcting security (or other flaws) vs. the fiduciary responsibility to provide maximum return on shareholder investment. In other words, what amount of money does Microsoft spend on code fixes now, in order to maximize the profitability of the code base in the long run, and how does the ROI of money spent on code fixes compare to the money spent on new code base development, marketing, acquisition, and/or lobbying? My own completely unsubstantiated opinion is this is exactly how the issue of security is evaluated at Microsoft, and that they spend a good bit of money to develop and evaluate models forecasting exactly this sort of thing.
Finally, I have to wonder whether such code flaws are truly "mistakes". If you consider the amount and severity of flaws to be directly related to the amount of money applied to the code base (personally, I imagine them using a shovel), then flaws aren't truly mistakes, they're decisions.