it excludes pregnant women, who are young and otherwise healthy but not defined as "young, healthy people" because they are immune suppressed during their pregnancy and highly vulnerable to death from the flu
Dude, I've never seen a pregnant woman even sneeze. Barf yes, but not due to infection. OTOH, women I know get good care and take their vitamins while pregnant. Infants are also said to have very good immunity due to extra stuff they got from their mom before birth.
On another note, there is nothing unethical about doing voluntary double-blind trials. I'm not getting a vaccine, but I might participate in a trial where I may or may not get one.
Nope. Copyright law has never been about restricting what you can do with a work. You can burn a book for example, you can be a library and load it to people, etc. You could even mark it up with comments in the margins, tear out and replace a few pages, and still loan it to people (I *think*). The GPL is about giving users freedom, so they're trying to go beyond the norm here and say that people visiting a web site are in some sense "using" the software installed on the server. It's a stretch that may not work, and hence there is the AGPL for such cases - wouldn't want to jeopardize the regular GPL with such an attempt.
The sum of the standard responses will be:
1) Develop the thing on your own. If you can't prototype it you don't have anything of interest to the folks you want to sell to.
2) Get a provisional patent - they're cheap and should protect you while trying to pimp your prototype.
3) There is NO market for pure ideas - if that's all you've got, nobody cares enough to pay you for that. Bringing something to market is far-far harder than coming up with an idea.
Being a person whose has ideas and these same questions for a long time, I can say I agree with all the above.
If it's possible for slashdot to agree on anything, it's this. Oh, and you'll get the "patents are evil" stuff too, but that doesn't actually answer your question.
I have had a copyright notice at the bottom of my resume for a long time now - bottom of page 2 in a small font. Unauthorized distribution of derivative work (modified resumes) is a DMCA violation worth a small fortune. Never mind all those nebulous damages. If you wanted, you could also point out that a resume submission without your permission is a violation, but I generally don't talk about it.
The power-split concept used in the Prius was first described in a paper by some TRW guys in 1971. Also, in regard to the present patent, I think the Toyota RX400h is damn close. The patent compares itself to a bunch of others is such a way: we're better than A in this way. We're better than B in this way (never mind that so is A). We're better than C in this way (and so was Q). and so on. I didn't see anything novel here, and I DO work in the industry. It would be helpful to see a diagram with a circle around the "new" part. AFAICT it might be a particular placement of a clutch, but I'm not going to spend the time figuring it out as it appears to be a troll trying to nail Toyota on a minor issue.
When I had a computer with 16K of memory and the new 32bit processors were becoming available, 4Gig seemed unimaginable. Now I have 1GB in my old system and imagine the next will have a bit more - if only because DDR2 & DDR3 seem to come in larger module sizes. Normally I don't see a need for 64 bit addressing, but I have actually thought about using 48bit or larger addresses for a large sparse data structure. If you've got a sparse binary tree for example, you could lay it out mathematically and waste a huge amount of address space (mostly empty) but get rid of the pointers. It's crazy, but you push the work onto the cache and virtual memory system - I never tested this to see if it performs well in my application. Anyway, if it worked, it would be a use for 64bit addressing on the desktop. 128 seems a stretch, but my mind is at least open to such things these days.
Actually, IIRC Dirac predicted a particle with negative mass. Depending on how you do the math, opposite charge and negative mass can have the same behavior. It is still an open question how gravity affects antimatter, and some folks are trying to figure a way to measure it.
"No biological reason *that we know of* for this". It probably is an error, but I really hate how "experts" always think they know *everything* and can reject something new (this flu is less than 12 months old) just because it doesn't fit their world view. Except for physicists of course, who try to explain all sorts of stuff with exotic "dark" explanations;-)
You seem to be confusing annual flu shots with an eradication program like the one used against small pox, and polio. One of those worked fantastically, the other is going very well except in a few places they just can't seem to make it stick. I would actually prefer our resources go into finishing off polio rather than this flu stuff where we make such a small effort against "this years strain".
You sound convincing, but you didn't tell us the fatality rate for flu among young healthy people. I would bet it's less than 1 in a million, but I don't actually have any data - just like you. In fact, I do bet every year I don't get the shot. To repeat what the other guy said, we should vaccinate the people at higher risk. If you want an all-out public vaccination, let's aim for eradication rather than play games letting it evolve while making annual payments for that service.
Why should *I* get the vaccination and not my old granny? She's the one who might die from it, and I'm not the only person whom she may come in contact with. Not to mention if there's a problem with the vaccine, she's less loss to society than me and the other folks who you'd suggest need to be vaccinated - you know, considering the public good.
My grandmother (who was in fact affectionately known as "Granny") did in fact die of the flu at age 92. Half of my family caught it from relatives at the funeral - including my grandfather who survived it quite well along with the rest of us. I don't recall hearing about any secondary infections either. Again, if your immune system is not up to par, you're probably a good candidate for vaccination. If it is, you really don't have much to worry about.
Moreover, there is a perfectly good reason why there is not nor will there be double-blind placebo controlled trials for vaccines. It's simply unethical.
Why exactly is that unethical? A double-blind study doesn't mean you have to test on an unsuspecting public. It just means neither the "patients" or the people directly tending to them don't know who got the real vaccine. You can do this with volunteers. What seems unethical is pushing so hard to vaccinate the public *without* doing such a study.
To suggest that vaccination is a plot of "Big Pharma" is to (1) have no understanding of vaccines and the incredible evidence for their general efficacy (2) have no understanding of the relationship between pharma and physicians. You are basically accusing most physicians of being corporate shills. That's a quiet a disgusting sentiment, really.
Actually in many cases it's a quite disgusting reality. We have a chain of hospitals locally that have really great TV commercials - they essentially say "If you don't have one of our doctors, you'll fucking DIE". They're really dramatic and obviously designed to instil fear in the audience.
No, the large number of people who dislike the medical establishment should be taken as an indicator of something. Could be anything from bad P.R. to misunderstanding to actual bad practice. Don't rail against these folks, behind such a "movement" there is always some grain of truth.
The purpose of the "DRM" stuff has nothing to do with homebrew and possibly nothing to do with copy protection. It's to make sure companies have to pay Nintendo to get their games on the machine. If you can run whatever you want, then nothing is stopping you from running commercial software that isn't giving it's cut to Nintendo. They're not trying to stop users, they're making sure they get paid for commercial titles.
Having pressure pulses should tend to make blood flow into places that are harder to get at. It's probably bad to operate continuously at high pressure, and it's probably bad not to go to high pressure. Like TFA says, further investigation into this type of pump is needed and planned if they can get funding. I just hope they don't test on some type population that happens to do well with it.
He said the jury "lacked a grasp of the issues". But the traditional jury selection process rejects people with critical thinking skills - engineers in particular. So why didn't he say to start over with a qualified jury, rather than change the decision to his own? This suggests that ALL trials with highly technical issues will be decided by a judge alone - and we know they aren't always up on such things either.
I'm new to GPL; Do I misunderstand? You aren't required to release everything that links to GPL libraries, right? Just any changes you make to the libraries themselves? Couldn't you continue to keep your shareware source closed, even if you use a GPL library?
No. If you link to a GPL licensed library, the executable is a derivative work of that code and hence you must release all of the source code for the executable. Fortunately, many "Free Software" libraries are licensed under the LGPL license, in which case you would be correct so long as you dynamically link the library. You still have to offer source for the library when you distribute it (or provide the source to the library with the binary library) but you do NOT have to release source for your application. There are plenty of commercial and shareware game that use the SDL library for example, which uses the LGPL. IIRC, static linking an LGPL library puts you in the same position as if it were a GPL library and you need to provide/offer source to the whole application.
OMG, some company wants to make money by making farming more efficient , eco friendly, and create safer foods.
You can scratch that "safer foods" part - no evidence to support that. In fact, one might try to argue that roundup-ready foods are full of pesticides which is another level altogether from the food modification itself. The other thing is that they are known to go after people who had their crops unintentionally cross pollinated with their proprietary crops.
Their goal is to make money by taxing food, while possibly having a detrimental effect on food safety.
In the case of any work other than a work made for hire, the exclusive or nonexclusive grant of a transfer or license of copyright or of any right under a copyright, executed by the author on or after January 1, 1978, otherwise than by will, is subject to termination under the following conditions:
You linked to something that directly contradicts what you said. Or is it in another section?
Is this a Star Raiders clone/enhancement?
on
Elite Turns 25
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· Score: 1
It looks like a super-deluxe version of Star Raiders from the Atari 8-bit. Or is that a bad analogy?
In what way is requiring firmware to be signed with a particular key not DRM?
It is not protecting copying of the firmware, it's preventing the running of unsigned firmware. It's probably not preventing the copy of applications either. It's simply preventing "unauthorized" software from running on the hardware. It's a lock, not copy protection. See the garage door opener case for an example where this is not protected under the DMCA.
I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.
I'm sure the students would argue that they don't need to learn algebra or even calculus. Why spend years learning mathematics when you can just have Maxima or Mathematica give you the answer....
No, this change is coming directly from the administration. Probably from people who don't know how to write themselves.
It's how Americans steal history, so they can define it in their own favor.
No, it's how academics think nobody else can do anything right because they're smarter. You can be doing state of the art work with a sound foundation, but until some PhD comes along and "formalizes" what you're doing, you're just a hacker.
Insurance is supposed to amortize the cost of unexpected events over time and the population. Once you allow the insurance companies information to allow redefinition of "unexpected" you're on a slope - if they could predict perfectly they could deny coverage for everyone who is going to have a problem down the road. At that point, the people who are eligible would not buy insurance, because hopefully they too could predict the future and know they don't need it. In the other direction, with competition, if one company can lower premiums by not covering people who will cost more, they can win more business and hence burden the competition with those high risk people.
The solution at first seems obvious - mandate non-discrimination and a willingness to accept all comers. The problem is that some policies will not cover some things, and people will change company/policy when the need to. That will raise prices on those polices and we're back to screwing the people who need it. So the next obvious thing to do is mandate that policies cover "everything" for some suitable definition of "everything". Then the insurance companies have no way to differentiate (ATM I wonder if this is OK). Then we're getting very close to government control. The problem with that is of course that the government can't manage things well, and if it does it cost more than anything.
No, I don't have a solution, I'm just clarifying the problems for myself out loud. Did I miss anything important?
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I've never seen a pregnant woman even sneeze. Barf yes, but not due to infection. OTOH, women I know get good care and take their vitamins while pregnant. Infants are also said to have very good immunity due to extra stuff they got from their mom before birth.
On another note, there is nothing unethical about doing voluntary double-blind trials. I'm not getting a vaccine, but I might participate in a trial where I may or may not get one.
Nope. Copyright law has never been about restricting what you can do with a work. You can burn a book for example, you can be a library and load it to people, etc. You could even mark it up with comments in the margins, tear out and replace a few pages, and still loan it to people (I *think*). The GPL is about giving users freedom, so they're trying to go beyond the norm here and say that people visiting a web site are in some sense "using" the software installed on the server. It's a stretch that may not work, and hence there is the AGPL for such cases - wouldn't want to jeopardize the regular GPL with such an attempt.
The sum of the standard responses will be:
1) Develop the thing on your own. If you can't prototype it you don't have anything of interest to the folks you want to sell to.
2) Get a provisional patent - they're cheap and should protect you while trying to pimp your prototype.
3) There is NO market for pure ideas - if that's all you've got, nobody cares enough to pay you for that. Bringing something to market is far-far harder than coming up with an idea.
Being a person whose has ideas and these same questions for a long time, I can say I agree with all the above.
If it's possible for slashdot to agree on anything, it's this. Oh, and you'll get the "patents are evil" stuff too, but that doesn't actually answer your question.
I have had a copyright notice at the bottom of my resume for a long time now - bottom of page 2 in a small font. Unauthorized distribution of derivative work (modified resumes) is a DMCA violation worth a small fortune. Never mind all those nebulous damages. If you wanted, you could also point out that a resume submission without your permission is a violation, but I generally don't talk about it.
The power-split concept used in the Prius was first described in a paper by some TRW guys in 1971. Also, in regard to the present patent, I think the Toyota RX400h is damn close. The patent compares itself to a bunch of others is such a way: we're better than A in this way. We're better than B in this way (never mind that so is A). We're better than C in this way (and so was Q). and so on. I didn't see anything novel here, and I DO work in the industry. It would be helpful to see a diagram with a circle around the "new" part. AFAICT it might be a particular placement of a clutch, but I'm not going to spend the time figuring it out as it appears to be a troll trying to nail Toyota on a minor issue.
When I had a computer with 16K of memory and the new 32bit processors were becoming available, 4Gig seemed unimaginable. Now I have 1GB in my old system and imagine the next will have a bit more - if only because DDR2 & DDR3 seem to come in larger module sizes. Normally I don't see a need for 64 bit addressing, but I have actually thought about using 48bit or larger addresses for a large sparse data structure. If you've got a sparse binary tree for example, you could lay it out mathematically and waste a huge amount of address space (mostly empty) but get rid of the pointers. It's crazy, but you push the work onto the cache and virtual memory system - I never tested this to see if it performs well in my application. Anyway, if it worked, it would be a use for 64bit addressing on the desktop. 128 seems a stretch, but my mind is at least open to such things these days.
Actually, IIRC Dirac predicted a particle with negative mass. Depending on how you do the math, opposite charge and negative mass can have the same behavior. It is still an open question how gravity affects antimatter, and some folks are trying to figure a way to measure it.
No, it's much cooler than the Apple logo, and methinks that is the problem ;-)
"No biological reason *that we know of* for this". It probably is an error, but I really hate how "experts" always think they know *everything* and can reject something new (this flu is less than 12 months old) just because it doesn't fit their world view. Except for physicists of course, who try to explain all sorts of stuff with exotic "dark" explanations ;-)
You seem to be confusing annual flu shots with an eradication program like the one used against small pox, and polio. One of those worked fantastically, the other is going very well except in a few places they just can't seem to make it stick. I would actually prefer our resources go into finishing off polio rather than this flu stuff where we make such a small effort against "this years strain".
You sound convincing, but you didn't tell us the fatality rate for flu among young healthy people. I would bet it's less than 1 in a million, but I don't actually have any data - just like you. In fact, I do bet every year I don't get the shot. To repeat what the other guy said, we should vaccinate the people at higher risk. If you want an all-out public vaccination, let's aim for eradication rather than play games letting it evolve while making annual payments for that service.
Why should *I* get the vaccination and not my old granny? She's the one who might die from it, and I'm not the only person whom she may come in contact with. Not to mention if there's a problem with the vaccine, she's less loss to society than me and the other folks who you'd suggest need to be vaccinated - you know, considering the public good.
My grandmother (who was in fact affectionately known as "Granny") did in fact die of the flu at age 92. Half of my family caught it from relatives at the funeral - including my grandfather who survived it quite well along with the rest of us. I don't recall hearing about any secondary infections either. Again, if your immune system is not up to par, you're probably a good candidate for vaccination. If it is, you really don't have much to worry about.
Why exactly is that unethical? A double-blind study doesn't mean you have to test on an unsuspecting public. It just means neither the "patients" or the people directly tending to them don't know who got the real vaccine. You can do this with volunteers. What seems unethical is pushing so hard to vaccinate the public *without* doing such a study.
Actually in many cases it's a quite disgusting reality. We have a chain of hospitals locally that have really great TV commercials - they essentially say "If you don't have one of our doctors, you'll fucking DIE". They're really dramatic and obviously designed to instil fear in the audience.
No, the large number of people who dislike the medical establishment should be taken as an indicator of something. Could be anything from bad P.R. to misunderstanding to actual bad practice. Don't rail against these folks, behind such a "movement" there is always some grain of truth.
The purpose of the "DRM" stuff has nothing to do with homebrew and possibly nothing to do with copy protection. It's to make sure companies have to pay Nintendo to get their games on the machine. If you can run whatever you want, then nothing is stopping you from running commercial software that isn't giving it's cut to Nintendo. They're not trying to stop users, they're making sure they get paid for commercial titles.
Having pressure pulses should tend to make blood flow into places that are harder to get at. It's probably bad to operate continuously at high pressure, and it's probably bad not to go to high pressure. Like TFA says, further investigation into this type of pump is needed and planned if they can get funding. I just hope they don't test on some type population that happens to do well with it.
He said the jury "lacked a grasp of the issues". But the traditional jury selection process rejects people with critical thinking skills - engineers in particular. So why didn't he say to start over with a qualified jury, rather than change the decision to his own? This suggests that ALL trials with highly technical issues will be decided by a judge alone - and we know they aren't always up on such things either.
No. If you link to a GPL licensed library, the executable is a derivative work of that code and hence you must release all of the source code for the executable. Fortunately, many "Free Software" libraries are licensed under the LGPL license, in which case you would be correct so long as you dynamically link the library. You still have to offer source for the library when you distribute it (or provide the source to the library with the binary library) but you do NOT have to release source for your application. There are plenty of commercial and shareware game that use the SDL library for example, which uses the LGPL. IIRC, static linking an LGPL library puts you in the same position as if it were a GPL library and you need to provide/offer source to the whole application.
You can scratch that "safer foods" part - no evidence to support that. In fact, one might try to argue that roundup-ready foods are full of pesticides which is another level altogether from the food modification itself. The other thing is that they are known to go after people who had their crops unintentionally cross pollinated with their proprietary crops.
Their goal is to make money by taxing food, while possibly having a detrimental effect on food safety.
You linked to something that directly contradicts what you said. Or is it in another section?
It looks like a super-deluxe version of Star Raiders from the Atari 8-bit. Or is that a bad analogy?
It is not protecting copying of the firmware, it's preventing the running of unsigned firmware. It's probably not preventing the copy of applications either. It's simply preventing "unauthorized" software from running on the hardware. It's a lock, not copy protection. See the garage door opener case for an example where this is not protected under the DMCA.
I'm sure the students would argue that they don't need to learn algebra or even calculus. Why spend years learning mathematics when you can just have Maxima or Mathematica give you the answer....
No, this change is coming directly from the administration. Probably from people who don't know how to write themselves.
No, it's how academics think nobody else can do anything right because they're smarter. You can be doing state of the art work with a sound foundation, but until some PhD comes along and "formalizes" what you're doing, you're just a hacker.
Insurance is supposed to amortize the cost of unexpected events over time and the population. Once you allow the insurance companies information to allow redefinition of "unexpected" you're on a slope - if they could predict perfectly they could deny coverage for everyone who is going to have a problem down the road. At that point, the people who are eligible would not buy insurance, because hopefully they too could predict the future and know they don't need it. In the other direction, with competition, if one company can lower premiums by not covering people who will cost more, they can win more business and hence burden the competition with those high risk people.
The solution at first seems obvious - mandate non-discrimination and a willingness to accept all comers. The problem is that some policies will not cover some things, and people will change company/policy when the need to. That will raise prices on those polices and we're back to screwing the people who need it. So the next obvious thing to do is mandate that policies cover "everything" for some suitable definition of "everything". Then the insurance companies have no way to differentiate (ATM I wonder if this is OK). Then we're getting very close to government control. The problem with that is of course that the government can't manage things well, and if it does it cost more than anything.
No, I don't have a solution, I'm just clarifying the problems for myself out loud. Did I miss anything important?
The money is mostly to buy off the other politicians who will need to vote YES to make it law. There is no actual study.