Encryption here is just a mean, they don't care if the ISP sees WHAT they're sharing, they only care that the ISP recognizes that they ARE sharing (and throttling their connection accordingly).
I find the argument agains the tracker taking care of it quite silly. The guy from uTorrent says that the ISP would simpy find or modify the packet saying that obfuscation is wanted.
I would guess the ISP would just throttle all encrypted traffic going to random ports before it starts identfiying specific packets. They're as justified to limit it to BT as they are to do it with all unrecognized traffic.
BT is costing them a large amount of money so they start to throttle it. That means that they're not going to sit idly and not respond if it becomes obfuscated/encrypted.
I don't think it's an arms race that BT can win at all. If the ISP wants to limit the amount of bandwidth you're using, they will limit it, one way or another. For example, the ISP might throttle everything after a threshold per month is exceeded.
That's the main point that Bram is making, and I find it difficult to disagree with him.
The network admins at my university wouldn't touch an argument like that with a 10-foot pole.
If I download a linux ISO to install on my research machine, I just performed an academic activity. I need a machine that works well to do my research.
Same for a sociology grad student trying to see trends in files shared on P2P networks. He'd be using it for research purposes and they don't have any reason to look into it.
Unless it's clearly illegal, they'll stay away from blocking it.
What they're doing instead is to use packet shaping to give priority to non-P2P activities during the day. They've still got to pay for bandwith and don't want P2P to interfere with other things. I think it's the best solution in the this context.
I'm not sure how they do it in residences. They might have additional rules there.
I'm in Canada, so the legal context is slightly different, and I know from experience that we have a horde of lawyers ready to jump on anyone who tries to interfere in university matters.
You're a bit behind in the news. The US doesn't have choice about the Most Favored Nation for China.
They're in the WTO, and the WTO says that every member has to pay the same custom fees as the "Most Favored Nation", give or take a couple of exception (notes that the US's fees are almost always judged illegal by the WTO and others when contested).
The US'd have to leave the WTO to do anything about that now.
Actually, the reason for Blue Gene is the following:
The life science division of IBM was looking at doing protein folding, and calculations showed that you'd need a 1 Teraflop computer running for a year to fold an average protein (about the same as doing it in the web lab).
So they're building it now and Blue Gene/L is the first version of that computer.
I've been working in various university labs in the last couple years (as an undergrad and now starting my Master's), and competent sysadmins are prized people there. Especially when you don't have any sysadmin at all (let alone a competent one). I've seen this especially in biology-related lab.
Successful profs will have pretty large amounts of money under their disposal, and a part of that goes on computers. But profs don't necessarily know anything about computers, and networks there have a tendency to grow by evolving rather than being organized.
Unfortunately, lots of them don't realize the value of a good sysadmin. They're afraid of spending the money there and don't realize how much of a difference it can make.
Of course, if you have an interest in biology and are not bad at programming/algorithms, a job with a bio-informatics component can be a blast (I'm biassed there, that's what I'm going into).
Even an ability to analyze the packages that exist out there and helping them decide what is relevant/useful for them. Then you can look at the algorithms used and see the pros/cons in each.
Of course, the pay is probably not that high there, and other people have posted a bit more about the work environment and such, but if you want to make a difference, that's one pretty good place.
And if you want to try science and stay in the corporate world, there are a bunch of scientific companies out there too, like pharmaceutical companies, that have big IT staffs there.
It would be unfortunate if in their zeal to go and hack any computer they think has copyright material they end up on an Canadian or European computer there.
They'd probably have a few nice lawsuits on their hands there after all.
And even trying to limit their searches to the US would most likely end up working imperfectly. I don't think that there's anyone who figured out a fool-proof way of mapping IP addresses to specific country.
One little thing to think about:
About half (maybe just 1/3) of all pregnancies actually end up aborting naturally. Those have more than 4-5 cells. People don't go and cry about those because they don't know there was a pregnancy. Period arrives a few days later, embryo gets lost with the flow.
I have some problems considering alive and deserving all the protection you'd give to an adult for example since so many don't survive. Maybe you could say those are worth every effort to save them, but it remains a very natural process.
Start again next month and maybe you'll get lucky. As opposed to having lost the full 9 months of pregnancy and things like that.
Actually, there are a way that you could find a nice solution for that problem:
The GPL still allow you to license the work to someone else. License to the university however they want it, license to others with the GPL.
I'm sure you should be able put a notice on it that it's released through the GPL and that the University is granted additional rights to the work.
I'm not going into the technicalities of the GPL if it would allow it without that notice, I'm sure people with more knowledge than me will be posting that. But if you want to play it safe, just release it like that.
Well, probably because a SQL/NT can be reasonably secure if you have someone who knows that they're doing. Yeah it means that there are a bunch of patches, but if you're on top of your things, it's not that bad.
Those guys would've made that mistake with any implementations I'm guessing. This is a blatant and gaping security hole that can be easily fixed.
Yo can't really know in advance that the competition going to be that stupid. At least not the first time around.
Look at it people, it's not as if MS was going to make sure that no MP3 are going to be able to play on the Windows XP.
All they're doing is give a low-quality MP3 encoder with it (as compared to none), and have it be able to encode in their own proprietary format with high quality.
The current encoders might not work all that well right now with it, but they'll be updated so that they can run with it pretty quickly I think.
Lazy people who just want to use what is built-in might want to start using the Windows Audio format, but there's not much preventing you from keeping your MP3 around.
Sure MS wants to push against MP3s, but so far they haven't planned anything drastic with it like banning them from their new OS. Yes, they're using their clout to encourage people not to use it and they'll be pretty successful I think, but people will still have a choice.
Movies could easily be put in France just at the same time as in the US. More films are dubbed in French by the time they come out in the US. They come out in Canada at the same time as in the US (maybe a few days late sometimes), and the French version is available here in Quebec at the same time as the English version.
And the films are dubbed in France almost all the time, because France won't import a film that isn't dubbed locally and filmmakers don't want to have to pay twice for that dubbing. So the same reels could be sent over there if they wanted to.
It's a purely economical reason why the films are not shown at the same time. And it kinds of make sense to the French to say: Well if you're not going to send us the reels to show in theatres, you're not going to make money out of your DVDs too with the people who would buy them instead of seeing it in theatre.
Rather hypocritical IMHO, but that's how international commerce works.
If you read the article, I'm finding that Science acted pretty well on that manner. The sequences are available. If you need to download more than 1 megabase at the same time, you're doing some uncommon research there.
The limits put there are a bit unfortunate, but still reasonable. You can still search, you can verify all the data that came from their papers, you can replicate the experiments. You might have problems designing new experiments from it if you need a very large sequence (which would be unusual in most cases), but then you can try to get an agreement with them.
And what Science did a good thing, because Celera didn't have it available before, and they can check the integrity of the database if there is any doubt about that. It's probably one of the best compromise available for everyone in that situation, IMHO.
Well, trying to get a TLD out of it under their own control is very ambitious, but if I read their project right, it could be worth a TLD to do it (or it might not).
If they can manage to get enough sites under their TLD, that means thta they can offer a lot of information to a lot of subjects. Reliable information on a subject as important as your health and those of your loved ones, how important is that?
How many go to the library to consult medical dictionnaries when they have a health problems? Most importantly, how many people in the general population, in the global population?
To give them an easy way to get the information would be a big bonus. And existing sites could probably get their sites there rather quickly (if they can get the approval done in a reasonable manner). That gives a seal of approval and trust for people who might not know a lot about the subject.
This kind of things would be inconvenient to put under a subdomain name I would think. It is more combersome, and more difficult to reach the whole population as easily like that. BTW, if that is ever done, it would be under a.org, not a.com. We're talking about the WHO here after all, not a pharmaceutical company.
Of course there are all the alternative medecine sites, but they don't want to remove those, only put the "right sites" on the spotlight. Comparatively it could harm those sites if they can't get in there, but in this I'd side with the WHO. You don't really want to be using hemeopathy to treat your cancer. I'm fine with people using it, but I would sure never recommend it to anyone like that. Not when I don't know the active principles and how it works and study thereof.
And if there's any organization who could and should put something like that off, I think it's the WHO, I hope they manage to get the project going (and hope they will even if they can't get their TLD).
There is one advantage of the.kids TLD in this situation. I for one wouldn't mind to have an aggressive filter system on that.
Say you only allow those domains for your kids. Then put an filter that'll remove any traces of sexual content or whatever. A 10 years old doesn't necessarily need to be able to get to site about abortion.
So if you put your site on.kids make sure you can go through whatever censorware people will want. If you want to target kids, make sure it is appropriate.
No, you won't see projections like that here. Mostly because there are no exit polls (are they illegal? I have no idea). That's what they use to predict the winners.
I'll point out that in all the Canadian elections I've seen (based on the CBC coverage in French), I have rarely seen them make wrong calls. Of course they wait to make sure before they do, unlike here it would seem.
2 reasons why they're not waiting:
1- You look better when you can predict the winner earlier.
2- They base themselves on the exit polls to say who will win.
If you look at the California polls, Gore wins in all categories (almost). So they declared him winner as soon as the polls closed. Of course, right now Bush has 54% of the vote with around 20% of the precinct opened.
On the first screens, you have a copyright notice with the year usually. I'm pretty sure Galaga and all those old games have them.
And copyrights last a long deal longer than patents also (I think it's something like 25 years about the death of the author for books).
If it was based on a patent, they'd lost because they didn't make any move to protect those patents earlier, if you don't want them enough to try to protect them, the courts ain't going to give them back to you years later when you finally wake up.
But here the companies didn't loose, they just decided to settle to get Hasbro off their back. If the lawsuit would cost you more than those game would give you in 10 years, I understand why they would want to settle as well. This doesn't mean that every Tetris clone is illegal, though it could encourage Hasbro to go against them in court of law as well now that they settle with those two.
Because a system have problem doesn't mean that you the system in inherently bad.
School system has LOTS of problems, I'll be the first to agree, but would parents do any better if they had to educate their children themselves? I doubt it a lot. Parents who do it now are pretty successful, but they're motivated to do it, most parents wouldn't put all that energy into it.
I've seen other kinds of school the traditional one. There are alternatives that are possible. I don't know how available it is in the US, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible.
If you have a better way to teaching kids together, by all means, go for and start your own school system. If it's good, it might replace the actual system at some point. Or become a teacher in education to try to change the way teachers are taught to handle a class. Or just send your kids (if any) to a school where you are more satisfied with the education to promote it.
There are lots of ways to try to change the system without first sending it crumbling to the ground.
Are you going to hold a mirror if Mattel sues your ass?
They've now got the right for the program, so everyone with distributing it is doing it illegally. They can also pretty easily chance their encryption scheme. In some time, there won't be a lot left of CPHack lying around.
In most of the interviews that Linus gives, he says that he's an engineer first of all. That if you really want an open source advocate, pick Stallman instead, he's more of an ideologist. Look at his motive and you'll see that he's very honest about it. He started Linux because it is a cool and interesting project. It still is, the same way he finds the job he does at Transmeta to be very interesting.
The way I understand it, he sees the open source movement as being a way to reach a mean, but not necessarily the mean by itself. It's an interesting idea, but that doesn't mean that other ideas aren't interesting.
If it means that Linus has some little selfishness in him by working for a close-sourced project that he likes, and doesn't focus his whole life on open source projects, does that make him bad. No, he has to eat like everyone else and he probably wants to try different things now and then. He never said he was like that, so please don't say he's not being honest and start questioning his motives because he works for Transmeta.
From their point of view there's no reasons to tell it, you avoid the panic and anyway, you're going to pay for whatever happens so the public doesn't loose anything by not knowing.
They stole corporate secrets and things like that, they didn't steal credit cart numbers, so this is more of an internal matter and all it does is make them seem incompetent, which I'm really not sure if it's true or not.
Companies have the right to have a little privacy too, maybe not much, but enough that they don't need to tell the public if it doesn't effect it (and Visa would need to loose a lot more than 10 millions of pounds before the customers see a difference).
Calm down, this is just an article. It might be crap, but then everything is someone else's crap in some way.
This was probably moderated up because some people enjoy having more than one side of the story. That wasn't really a bad comment in itself even if it was wrong (and I'm not saying anything about that). Anyone who moderated this might now have your information and even that doesn't mean that it was wrong to moderate it. If that guy has that much Karma, only one +1 would send it to 3, not that much considering the comments that get 3 and 4.
Yeah, you're right. I meant he didn't got a lot of money, but I think he did actually got some. The Nobel prize was in 1993.
As for the patent, his name wasn't in the article and the process is a little too straightforward to be invalidated by technical arguments like that. It was new, it worked, it wasn't obvious, we knew for sure who invented it. There's not much space for invalidation there.
The process of the PCR (that's the right abbreviation) is a very patentable process. It's a mix of using bacterial enzymes (which was what the patent was about) and putting it into a thermocycler (it simply raises and drops the temperature over and over) with the segment of DNA and primers and an hour later you have billions of copies of sequence you're interested in.
The idea of putting it all together is rather simple when you thing about it, but it's still a stroke of genius. That patent still holds if I remember well (but no money went to the inventor though). At the begininng, you had to put a new enzyme mix at each cycle because the heat would destroy it. If I understand it well, the patent in question was about another mix that can survive the temperature, so you put it once and forget about it. So THAT patent was more of using something that already exist in nature (and not a new process).
Processes like that are and should be patentable because they are still brilliant inventions with a human mechanical side and they're the ones that helps the science go advance so fast these days.
There is also a slight problem of the practicality of having a distributed client. The problem here isn't really a matter of brute force.
You need to sequence the gene first. This is the long and costly part if I remember well.
The computing power is used mainly to see the similarities with other genes already discovered (in humans and in other species). Here you need more of a huge database holding all the information as you simply search for matches and near matches in the sequences.
I'm not sure it would be very useful to have a distributed client for this. And for myself, I'd rather wait a few more years and be sure that I can trust those results.
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to be confusing the 2 issues.
Encryption here is just a mean, they don't care if the ISP sees WHAT they're sharing, they only care that the ISP recognizes that they ARE sharing (and throttling their connection accordingly).
I find the argument agains the tracker taking care of it quite silly. The guy from uTorrent says that the ISP would simpy find or modify the packet saying that obfuscation is wanted.
I would guess the ISP would just throttle all encrypted traffic going to random ports before it starts identfiying specific packets. They're as justified to limit it to BT as they are to do it with all unrecognized traffic.
BT is costing them a large amount of money so they start to throttle it. That means that they're not going to sit idly and not respond if it becomes obfuscated/encrypted.
I don't think it's an arms race that BT can win at all. If the ISP wants to limit the amount of bandwidth you're using, they will limit it, one way or another. For example, the ISP might throttle everything after a threshold per month is exceeded.
That's the main point that Bram is making, and I find it difficult to disagree with him.
The network admins at my university wouldn't touch an argument like that with a 10-foot pole.
If I download a linux ISO to install on my research machine, I just performed an academic activity. I need a machine that works well to do my research.
Same for a sociology grad student trying to see trends in files shared on P2P networks. He'd be using it for research purposes and they don't have any reason to look into it.
Unless it's clearly illegal, they'll stay away from blocking it.
What they're doing instead is to use packet shaping to give priority to non-P2P activities during the day. They've still got to pay for bandwith and don't want P2P to interfere with other things. I think it's the best solution in the this context.
I'm not sure how they do it in residences. They might have additional rules there.
I'm in Canada, so the legal context is slightly different, and I know from experience that we have a horde of lawyers ready to jump on anyone who tries to interfere in university matters.
You're a bit behind in the news. The US doesn't have choice about the Most Favored Nation for China.
They're in the WTO, and the WTO says that every member has to pay the same custom fees as the "Most Favored Nation", give or take a couple of exception (notes that the US's fees are almost always judged illegal by the WTO and others when contested).
The US'd have to leave the WTO to do anything about that now.
Actually, the reason for Blue Gene is the following:
The life science division of IBM was looking at doing protein folding, and calculations showed that you'd need a 1 Teraflop computer running for a year to fold an average protein (about the same as doing it in the web lab).
So they're building it now and Blue Gene/L is the first version of that computer.
I've been working in various university labs in the last couple years (as an undergrad and now starting my Master's), and competent sysadmins are prized people there. Especially when you don't have any sysadmin at all (let alone a competent one). I've seen this especially in biology-related lab.
Successful profs will have pretty large amounts of money under their disposal, and a part of that goes on computers. But profs don't necessarily know anything about computers, and networks there have a tendency to grow by evolving rather than being organized.
Unfortunately, lots of them don't realize the value of a good sysadmin. They're afraid of spending the money there and don't realize how much of a difference it can make.
Of course, if you have an interest in biology and are not bad at programming/algorithms, a job with a bio-informatics component can be a blast (I'm biassed there, that's what I'm going into).
Even an ability to analyze the packages that exist out there and helping them decide what is relevant/useful for them. Then you can look at the algorithms used and see the pros/cons in each.
Of course, the pay is probably not that high there, and other people have posted a bit more about the work environment and such, but if you want to make a difference, that's one pretty good place.
And if you want to try science and stay in the corporate world, there are a bunch of scientific companies out there too, like pharmaceutical companies, that have big IT staffs there.
It would be unfortunate if in their zeal to go and hack any computer they think has copyright material they end up on an Canadian or European computer there.
They'd probably have a few nice lawsuits on their hands there after all.
And even trying to limit their searches to the US would most likely end up working imperfectly. I don't think that there's anyone who figured out a fool-proof way of mapping IP addresses to specific country.
One little thing to think about: About half (maybe just 1/3) of all pregnancies actually end up aborting naturally. Those have more than 4-5 cells. People don't go and cry about those because they don't know there was a pregnancy. Period arrives a few days later, embryo gets lost with the flow. I have some problems considering alive and deserving all the protection you'd give to an adult for example since so many don't survive. Maybe you could say those are worth every effort to save them, but it remains a very natural process. Start again next month and maybe you'll get lucky. As opposed to having lost the full 9 months of pregnancy and things like that.
Actually, there are a way that you could find a nice solution for that problem:
The GPL still allow you to license the work to someone else. License to the university however they want it, license to others with the GPL.
I'm sure you should be able put a notice on it that it's released through the GPL and that the University is granted additional rights to the work.
I'm not going into the technicalities of the GPL if it would allow it without that notice, I'm sure people with more knowledge than me will be posting that. But if you want to play it safe, just release it like that.
Well, probably because a SQL/NT can be reasonably secure if you have someone who knows that they're doing. Yeah it means that there are a bunch of patches, but if you're on top of your things, it's not that bad.
Those guys would've made that mistake with any implementations I'm guessing. This is a blatant and gaping security hole that can be easily fixed.
Yo can't really know in advance that the competition going to be that stupid. At least not the first time around.
Look at it people, it's not as if MS was going to make sure that no MP3 are going to be able to play on the Windows XP.
All they're doing is give a low-quality MP3 encoder with it (as compared to none), and have it be able to encode in their own proprietary format with high quality.
The current encoders might not work all that well right now with it, but they'll be updated so that they can run with it pretty quickly I think.
Lazy people who just want to use what is built-in might want to start using the Windows Audio format, but there's not much preventing you from keeping your MP3 around.
Sure MS wants to push against MP3s, but so far they haven't planned anything drastic with it like banning them from their new OS. Yes, they're using their clout to encourage people not to use it and they'll be pretty successful I think, but people will still have a choice.
Movies could easily be put in France just at the same time as in the US. More films are dubbed in French by the time they come out in the US. They come out in Canada at the same time as in the US (maybe a few days late sometimes), and the French version is available here in Quebec at the same time as the English version.
And the films are dubbed in France almost all the time, because France won't import a film that isn't dubbed locally and filmmakers don't want to have to pay twice for that dubbing. So the same reels could be sent over there if they wanted to.
It's a purely economical reason why the films are not shown at the same time. And it kinds of make sense to the French to say: Well if you're not going to send us the reels to show in theatres, you're not going to make money out of your DVDs too with the people who would buy them instead of seeing it in theatre.
Rather hypocritical IMHO, but that's how international commerce works.
If you read the article, I'm finding that Science acted pretty well on that manner. The sequences are available. If you need to download more than 1 megabase at the same time, you're doing some uncommon research there.
The limits put there are a bit unfortunate, but still reasonable. You can still search, you can verify all the data that came from their papers, you can replicate the experiments. You might have problems designing new experiments from it if you need a very large sequence (which would be unusual in most cases), but then you can try to get an agreement with them.
And what Science did a good thing, because Celera didn't have it available before, and they can check the integrity of the database if there is any doubt about that. It's probably one of the best compromise available for everyone in that situation, IMHO.
Well, trying to get a TLD out of it under their own control is very ambitious, but if I read their project right, it could be worth a TLD to do it (or it might not).
.org, not a .com. We're talking about the WHO here after all, not a pharmaceutical company.
If they can manage to get enough sites under their TLD, that means thta they can offer a lot of information to a lot of subjects. Reliable information on a subject as important as your health and those of your loved ones, how important is that?
How many go to the library to consult medical dictionnaries when they have a health problems? Most importantly, how many people in the general population, in the global population?
To give them an easy way to get the information would be a big bonus. And existing sites could probably get their sites there rather quickly (if they can get the approval done in a reasonable manner). That gives a seal of approval and trust for people who might not know a lot about the subject.
This kind of things would be inconvenient to put under a subdomain name I would think. It is more combersome, and more difficult to reach the whole population as easily like that. BTW, if that is ever done, it would be under a
Of course there are all the alternative medecine sites, but they don't want to remove those, only put the "right sites" on the spotlight. Comparatively it could harm those sites if they can't get in there, but in this I'd side with the WHO. You don't really want to be using hemeopathy to treat your cancer. I'm fine with people using it, but I would sure never recommend it to anyone like that. Not when I don't know the active principles and how it works and study thereof.
And if there's any organization who could and should put something like that off, I think it's the WHO, I hope they manage to get the project going (and hope they will even if they can't get their TLD).
There is one advantage of the .kids TLD in this situation. I for one wouldn't mind to have an aggressive filter system on that.
.kids make sure you can go through whatever censorware people will want. If you want to target kids, make sure it is appropriate.
.kids could be useful.
Say you only allow those domains for your kids. Then put an filter that'll remove any traces of sexual content or whatever. A 10 years old doesn't necessarily need to be able to get to site about abortion.
So if you put your site on
That's at least one way why
No, you won't see projections like that here. Mostly because there are no exit polls (are they illegal? I have no idea). That's what they use to predict the winners.
I'll point out that in all the Canadian elections I've seen (based on the CBC coverage in French), I have rarely seen them make wrong calls. Of course they wait to make sure before they do, unlike here it would seem.
2 reasons why they're not waiting:
1- You look better when you can predict the winner earlier.
2- They base themselves on the exit polls to say who will win.
If you look at the California polls, Gore wins in all categories (almost). So they declared him winner as soon as the polls closed. Of course, right now Bush has 54% of the vote with around 20% of the precinct opened.
On the first screens, you have a copyright notice with the year usually. I'm pretty sure Galaga and all those old games have them.
And copyrights last a long deal longer than patents also (I think it's something like 25 years about the death of the author for books).
If it was based on a patent, they'd lost because they didn't make any move to protect those patents earlier, if you don't want them enough to try to protect them, the courts ain't going to give them back to you years later when you finally wake up.
But here the companies didn't loose, they just decided to settle to get Hasbro off their back. If the lawsuit would cost you more than those game would give you in 10 years, I understand why they would want to settle as well. This doesn't mean that every Tetris clone is illegal, though it could encourage Hasbro to go against them in court of law as well now that they settle with those two.
Because a system have problem doesn't mean that you the system in inherently bad.
School system has LOTS of problems, I'll be the first to agree, but would parents do any better if they had to educate their children themselves? I doubt it a lot. Parents who do it now are pretty successful, but they're motivated to do it, most parents wouldn't put all that energy into it.
I've seen other kinds of school the traditional one. There are alternatives that are possible. I don't know how available it is in the US, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible.
If you have a better way to teaching kids together, by all means, go for and start your own school system. If it's good, it might replace the actual system at some point. Or become a teacher in education to try to change the way teachers are taught to handle a class. Or just send your kids (if any) to a school where you are more satisfied with the education to promote it.
There are lots of ways to try to change the system without first sending it crumbling to the ground.
Are you going to hold a mirror if Mattel sues your ass?
They've now got the right for the program, so everyone with distributing it is doing it illegally. They can also pretty easily chance their encryption scheme. In some time, there won't be a lot left of CPHack lying around.
In most of the interviews that Linus gives, he says that he's an engineer first of all. That if you really want an open source advocate, pick Stallman instead, he's more of an ideologist. Look at his motive and you'll see that he's very honest about it. He started Linux because it is a cool and interesting project. It still is, the same way he finds the job he does at Transmeta to be very interesting.
The way I understand it, he sees the open source movement as being a way to reach a mean, but not necessarily the mean by itself. It's an interesting idea, but that doesn't mean that other ideas aren't interesting.
If it means that Linus has some little selfishness in him by working for a close-sourced project that he likes, and doesn't focus his whole life on open source projects, does that make him bad. No, he has to eat like everyone else and he probably wants to try different things now and then. He never said he was like that, so please don't say he's not being honest and start questioning his motives because he works for Transmeta.
From their point of view there's no reasons to tell it, you avoid the panic and anyway, you're going to pay for whatever happens so the public doesn't loose anything by not knowing.
They stole corporate secrets and things like that, they didn't steal credit cart numbers, so this is more of an internal matter and all it does is make them seem incompetent, which I'm really not sure if it's true or not.
Companies have the right to have a little privacy too, maybe not much, but enough that they don't need to tell the public if it doesn't effect it (and Visa would need to loose a lot more than 10 millions of pounds before the customers see a difference).
Calm down, this is just an article. It might be crap, but then everything is someone else's crap in some way.
This was probably moderated up because some people enjoy having more than one side of the story. That wasn't really a bad comment in itself even if it was wrong (and I'm not saying anything about that). Anyone who moderated this might now have your information and even that doesn't mean that it was wrong to moderate it. If that guy has that much Karma, only one +1 would send it to 3, not that much considering the comments that get 3 and 4.
Yeah, you're right. I meant he didn't got a lot of money, but I think he did actually got some. The Nobel prize was in 1993.
As for the patent, his name wasn't in the article and the process is a little too straightforward to be invalidated by technical arguments like that. It was new, it worked, it wasn't obvious, we knew for sure who invented it. There's not much space for invalidation there.
The process of the PCR (that's the right abbreviation) is a very patentable process. It's a mix of using bacterial enzymes (which was what the patent was about) and putting it into a thermocycler (it simply raises and drops the temperature over and over) with the segment of DNA and primers and an hour later you have billions of copies of sequence you're interested in.
The idea of putting it all together is rather simple when you thing about it, but it's still a stroke of genius. That patent still holds if I remember well (but no money went to the inventor though). At the begininng, you had to put a new enzyme mix at each cycle because the heat would destroy it. If I understand it well, the patent in question was about another mix that can survive the temperature, so you put it once and forget about it. So THAT patent was more of using something that already exist in nature (and not a new process).
Processes like that are and should be patentable because they are still brilliant inventions with a human mechanical side and they're the ones that helps the science go advance so fast these days.
There is also a slight problem of the practicality of having a distributed client. The problem here isn't really a matter of brute force.
You need to sequence the gene first. This is the long and costly part if I remember well.
The computing power is used mainly to see the similarities with other genes already discovered (in humans and in other species). Here you need more of a huge database holding all the information as you simply search for matches and near matches in the sequences.
I'm not sure it would be very useful to have a distributed client for this. And for myself, I'd rather wait a few more years and be sure that I can trust those results.