These are good points, especially for southerners. If your a/c kicks on "way before" 84, you have it set to too low a temperature.
This would, however, be an additional piece of equipment in the effort to keep cooling costs down. You can insulate your building's walls and ceiling to keep the 110-degree ambient air from getting too much heat in, along with double- or triple-paned glass. But since we all don't like to live in dark caves with no windows, this would help keep IR light from heating up the inside by sneaking in through the windows. In fact, if you just put it on the outside pane of a multi-pane window, it would work perfectly as the 110-degree air made that pane turn out the heat, making the insulation of the windows even more effective. Very cool...
This may actually be more logical than that article. How would aliens know that we even had DNA, as opposed to what might be a variety of other possible arrangements? How did they know that we primarily use ATGC instead of the other, much less common, nucleotides, so that it would have gone unnoticed? Did they just get really really lucky?
Or, could it be that they thought some sort of DNA-based lifeform was out there somewhere, whatever nucleotides it was using. They could then send out their own self-replicating, very friendly, single-cell organism, which happens to have the incredible ability to create its own energy (given certain chemicals) all across the galaxy, knowing that a very simple DNA-based organism, if placed next to their designer bug, would eventually wind up incorporating it into its lifecycle such that it's permanent. We call them mitochondria. They made us a deal we couldn't refuse.
It kind of all fits (in a very sci-fi way) because mitochondria are not DNA-based, and their genome is incredibly well-preserved from generation to generation, with a very very slow mutation rate (we use it to date the spread of mankind from various ancestors). Perhaps their message isn't really a message like "Hi, we are your alien neighbors, look us up when you can read this" but is instead simply that they wanted to assist the development of life in the universe. Knowing that random nucleotides bumping into each other could eventually form life, but knowing that if they had a little mitochondria there it increased the chances and rate by 1000%, they seeded the galaxy with it as some way to put money in the bank. Maybe they eat brains of sentient beings, so they're "gardening". Maybe they just want some friends, or are very scientific and this is a grand experiment.
Although you raise a good point, there is nothing that I've ever seen (and there have been some whopping clinical system failures to study for this) has shown a single mortality from a clinical computer system crashing. It makes sense that it might, however (for now at least) most hospitals seem to be able to readily revert back to the old ways of doing things in order to survive.
On the other hand, I have seen strong evidence that 10's of thousands of americans die a year from medical errors. A large chunk of those errors (something like 60% of pharmacy errors, which made up 19% of the deaths in the above report) were caused by lack of knowledge at the time of a decision, either about the patient or about the drug. If you really had to choose, I would suggest you choose networked clinical information, even if that happened to come from an unpatched Windows XP device...
All this being said, however, I have yet to see a system running on Windows XP, other than at the client-side, which is what the article was talking about (although it didn't make that clear). Since many of these apps (for reasons I can't fathom) use ActiveX components in IE6 to be "interactive", this causes breaks with even minor tweaking. I'm not sure why vendors still do this, rather than just using regular web pages or a regular thick client (they often cite "customer demands") but like I said in my other post, we're often behind the times.
The article mentions one thing that needs to be emphasized, which is where the FDA guy states that they're not going back to the dark ages where systems don't talk to anything else. For years, every device was on its own proprietary network (if it was on a network at all), and talked to itself and absolutely nothing else. This was bad.
In only the last couple of years (because medical IT is very behind the rest of the IT industry in a lot of ways) these devices have moved rapidly to using commodity protocols and network infrastructures, driven by hospitals' needs to do all of this more cheaply, and not have a lot of chaos.
Also, they want to provide some value add on top of the monitoring systems. For instance, it's nice to be standing by the patient's bed and see the monitoring data. It's even better to be able to export that data to another system so that it's more useful, or display it on a website so MDs can see it. All of this requires networking capability, and Microsoft (like it or not) is considered a leader in the field for server software, and has a large division providing solutions to healthcare.
Overall, the more advanced features you want a clinical system to provide, the more that system needs to integrate with other systems. Companies have given up reinventing the wheel on this every time, and are basing what they do on standard software and protocols. Microsoft is one of those. We try to avoid it whenever possible, however in most instances the decision for one product over another is based on clinical value, and not IT preference.
The above is true, but I think what w3c is trying to get people to do is to start following the standard. There's a chicken-and-egg thing going on with the standards and implementation now (and always) where the standards are generally considered a "good thing", but people don't use them because no applications use them, and since people don't use them, companies don't make products that incorporate them, which means people can't use them or don't find benefit from using them. More often than not, us developers have waited for companies to give us something before we do it. If we all did it first, then they'd have to give it to us, and they'd have to give us what we wanted and not what they thought we might want.
In other words, just like voting with your feet or your wallet, vote with your code.
Comparing a model like Zend to a model like Apache is apples and oranges, frankly. Apache is an non-profit, organization that is both privately held (i.e. not publically traded) and does not sell products based on the apps that they create. Whenever any company starts requiring a profit from whatever they're doing, and worse if they are accountable for quarterly earnings reports for the stock market, there is the potential for what I will loosely call "bad things". I'm not suggesting Zend or other groups like MySQL or JBoss have done any bad things, but it's always possible.
There's certainly nothing wrong with this business model, although that's no reason to not be concerned about potential problems. As you said, they create a significant part of the core for PHP and make it open source and available for free, all of which is good. In a perfect world, this would be the perfect solution.
However, it is right to be watchful (not necessarily concerned) when the core of an open-source app is created and driven by a for-profit company. Since they sell a lot of surrounding support applications to make their money, they are clearly driven at some level to pay for that development. At the very least, it means that any really good idea that they have will get turned into a commercial product instead of rolled into an open source solution. Again, perfectly fine business model, but not awesome.
The other thing it does is that there is a subtle but probably powerful pressure pushing other developers working in the PHP space to consider not working there, because they will by definition start out behind this core company. It wouldn't hold off a determined company, but if a determined company began to come into the mix, it would be surprising if the core company didn't somehow use the fact that they are so essential to their advantage somehow. Without competition they can be magnanimous, but with it much less so.
At any rate, I'm just pointing out that there's reason to keep an eye on it, even if nothing ever comes of it. It's also important to encourage more businesses to adopt this model so something as good as this can come along, and it's important for them to be watched by others to make sure they don't abuse it. The lessons of Microsoft, although in a different league entirely, are too strong to ignore.
Sadly, it happens every day...
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Open Source Life?
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· Score: 3, Informative
This stuff is taking place on a much less headline-grabbing scale every day around us. For instance, just today in the LA Times there's an article that talks about how the fees on patents on the hepatitis C genome were stifling research over the past decade on what many infectious disease experts believe will likely become the next mega-killer in our society. It will be tragic when that ten-year-long lag is found to have delayed the creation of good treatment or a cure, costing thousands of lives. This is a much more real and probable situation.
What makes it worse is that (I'm guessing here) these genes were probably discovered with public funding of some sort. A similar thing happened a few years ago when the Staph aureus genome was decoded using a lot of NIH (i.e. taxpayer) money to pay for the research. The company then went out and patented it, to a great deal of uproar in the community. If you were paying attention, it also happened during the SARS scare, and I remember two companies were trying to figure out who was really the first to get to it, cuz the one in Toronto was going to essentially release it free to the world, and the other was a company that was going to patent it and make the world wait for their marketability research to figure out what name they should choose for the vaccine. Hopefully this stuff will be headed off soon, but the gov't is so hopelessly in the pharmaceutical companies pockets on this and everything else, I have little hope.
Schwarzenegger said it, and now I'm starting to believe it, that our full-time legislature simply has too much free time on its hands and is passing all sorts of silly laws (I think that's almost a direct quote). It's mind-boggling to me that they would waste my tax money to pay for them looking at this sort of useless crap, but they can't be bothered to look at other stuff that is actually important (education, environment, etc).
You have but to look at our own Revolutionary War (in the USA) to see how these "unfair tactics" were applied to great advantage. In most cases, a tactic is a tactic, and guerilla warfare is just another tactic that can be useful in the right situation.
Fair is in the eye of the beholder until the battle is over. Then it is determined by the victor.
Is anyone else a little bit disturbed by this change in licensing? Perhaps it was the CA guy referring to the GPL as "viral" in the article, or perhaps it was that they went out of the way to reassure us that nothing "sinister" was going on. Maybe it's the fact that they are coming up with (yet another) open source license, which typically means they have some hokey rule in there that fits the OSI's definition legally, but not in spirit.
I could definitely be considered paranoid, but they could have easily dual-licensed it as GPL and something else (which they state above in the FAQ) without coming across as a little sinister, but nowhere in the article do they mention dual-licensing w/ GPL. Add that to the "viral" comment and some of the other stuff they said, and I don't think the open source license will wind up being as good as you might think. Time to fork Plone? (j/k) I hope that I'm proven to simply be a bit jumpy, and not actually right...
Reading the original post and the above posts makes it very obvious that schizophrenia is one of the most misunderstood diseases. Schizophrenia is actually quite well studied, and there are some great medicines to help treat it. The problem is that schizophrenics are not well-prepared (gross generalization here) to take their medicine consistently, and sometimes need help with that.
Also (and this is a big pet peeve of everyone who actually knows anything about the disease), schizophrenia does NOT mean you have multiple personalities. That is multiple personality disorder. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind" if you look at the roots of the word, but that means that their mind is split from reality and that they live in their own internally-created world, not that their mind is split into two or more pieces.
To answer your question, though, it's something that you need to take seriously, and you've done that by asking the right question (although frankly from the wrong people). There are probably a lot of online groups where you could learn more facts about the disease (i.e. schizophrenia.com seems legit). Educate yourself as much as you can.
The parent is totally correct on this one, I'm afraid. Doing it deliberately in order to facilitate others to do illegal things is not going to save you in court. ISP's don't even get away with allowing this sort of stuff unwillingly (i.e. DMCA). Besides, you're ignoring the fact that they will terminate first and ask questions later, basically making you need to prove that it wasn't you who did it, instead of the other way around. Unless you pay them $1000 monthly, you are not worth it to them to figure it out for your good. They lose your $20 a month and won't even look back...
Re:Another "Beyond the Limits"
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Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
I actually think that's a valid argument, because we've spent tons and tons of money and decades on researching the alternatives and they still don't work well (e.g. fission & fusion). Our know-how of physics/chemistry vastly exceed what we knew in the late 1800's when we started to use oil. The fact that we have failed so miserably in this arena when we have succeeded so incredibly in other areas (like biotech) in recent years is sufficient cause for alarm.
However, even if it's not a valid argument, I don't make the assumption that technology has peaked. I make the assumption that we are not spending enough to get technology to the point where it will meet our need in time. We currently don't have a lot of good leads on alternative solutions. The ones we thought we had leads on (fission & fusion) haven't worked like we hoped. We are going to have to spend tons of money and time finding a viable solution, and if we don't start now we won't do it. The doomsayers are right, if we don't start we will never reach there. Sitting back and saying "just relax, technology will get us there" is not a realistic view of how these solutions are found (money = minds&labs = solutions). There is a good deal of evidence that we hit the peak oil production a few years ago, and it's all downhill from here. Given our increased consumption, we can expect prices to rapidly increase in the years ahead.
The way I look at it, the price of you being wrong is that billions of people will perish in a new dark age from starvation and lack of medicines that can't be manufactured (yes, dramatic but entirely possible given our reliance in all respects on oil for food production/distribution and general survival). The price of me being wrong is that we have replacement technology for oil that hasn't run out yet. The reality is probably somewhere in between, but if the doomsayers scare people enough to twist it towards me being wrong, that's a risk I'm willing to take.
Re:Another "Beyond the Limits"
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Out of Gas
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There are replacements for some of the uses of oil, that is true. The example you give of power for your house is something everyone should be doing. I live in LA, and every roof here should be lined end to end with solar panels. They're costly, but they pay for themselves in a few years and the long-term savings is incredible. However, electric companies tend to not let you dump your energy back onto the grid, and in some cases even charge you to do it.
Some other uses of oil, however, have no adequate replacement. Airplanes are a good example of this, there is no battery we can even imagine that could store enough energy to get those things into the air. The only sufficient replacement we can imagine right now would be a portable fusion system that created enough electricity to power the turbines. Cars are almost as bad (where do you think all they hydrogen comes from for fuel cells, or the electricity for the electric ones?). How about tractors used to harvest the tons of food used to provide the ever-expanding population? The list goes on and on of things that oil provides for where there exists no legitimate alternative.
I agree with you. I hope that alternative technologies will fill in the gap. But I'd be insane if I said right now that they could work in the next ten years, and we need to start addressing it.
Re:Another "Beyond the Limits"
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Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
The problem with this argument that I can see is that in the past, whenever we hit a roadblock on the scarcity of things in the past 150 years or so, we've found a substitute using oil and oil byproducts. The problem now is that oil is the problem (obviously) and that any of the substitutes we've looked at haven't yet worked well (fission/fusion for energy, ? for a plastic replacement) and require energy to produce in the first place. As the price of oil goes up and up, if we hit a point where we start scrambling for an oil replacement, the cost in oil to produce it would be radically prohibitive.
I think this is why people are clamoring for governments to examine this now, because if you wait too long, wars will erupt as we desparately try to obtain enough oil to create our alternative, whatever that is. If we don't look now, the alternative we choose may not even work. This is definitely an issue where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
How much oil will it take to create a massive solar array in space to send energy to earth, do you think? I'll give you a hint, so much that the current cost has been prohibitive enough that we haven't done it. What will it cost when even George Bush admits we have a shortage?
Your fix will not get implemented, is my guess, unless you agree to the potential licenses that they use. Since you used it as GPL, you really couldn't claim copyright on it any more than they could. It is an interesting question, though, cuz by nature the fix you make could not be licensed in a dual nature unless you originally had the non-GPL version, which I'm guessing you would not. If you started with the GPL you couldn't relicense it as dual-license for them to reincorporate back into their dual-licensed version.
Anyone with some legal knowledge know if this has played out before anywhere?
Considering that nobody has really done this (there's one that I know of, can't remember the name, but the one that ran Tribes) with an engine that anybody would actually use, I think it's safe to say it has not been proven. It is certainly attractive, since game companies spend a ton of money reinventing the wheel by creating yet another game engine, but I can't imagine someone open sourcing one of the very popular ones because they derive a ton of revenue selling that engine to other game companies.
Very good point, which is actually why I live so close to work (I used to live 2 miles away, but then got a different job, so now 5). I'm planning on moving back within the 2-mile radius in the next few months. I only have to fill up my tank once every week and a half or so (more or less) which isn't so bad...
Exactly. I've been disappointed with my Volvo, which was rated at something like 28/32 when I bought it. Since I drive 5 miles to and from work most of the time (with shorter hops around town) through metro LA, I can't break 20-21 mpg. Add to that the fact that I spent $30 today filling up my 12-gallon tank, and I'm a little bit annoyed by all this.
However, the point that wasn't emphasized in all that is that this is still significantly better than a non-hybrid vehicle. My Civic that I owned before this didn't break 24 mpg, and was rated in the low 30's. A hybrid version that got 32 would be a significant step up from there (33% less gas) and so is a good thing. It's not 50, but it's better.
The problem with that, of course, is that these cars cost more than the non-hybrid version, somewhere around $2,000 more. The websites for the car manufacturers have calculators to show how much money you would save by getting the hybrid based on the EPA statements. If those are wrong (as they are) then they should not be pushing the cost savings, since they know people aren't going to see it.
This is really an international issue. These things cost them a ton of money, and whether or not you believe the industry's reports on downloads costing them money (I don't) the bootleg movies certainly do. Most of the money it costs them is overseas, however, and it probably costs them almost nothing in the states.
The problem with overseas and bootlegs is that the movie is usually released in the US first, and doesn't get to another country for quite a while. If you ever travel to England and look at the movie theatres, it's like stepping back in time 9 months when you see what's playing there. Due to logistics they generally don't release movies simultaneously overseas, although some high-profile movies they did so (e.g. Matrix Reloaded) in order to prevent the losses they experience with bootlegs.
The bootlegs are recorded very early on in the release in the USA, and typically sent overseas where they show up on vendors' tables a few days later, and many months before anyone in that country can see it in the theatre. Desperate viewers will suffer through the horrible recording rather than wait months to see it, and if the movie isn't so hot (e.g. Matrix Reloaded) they won't follow up by seeing it in the theatre, therefore the studio loses money. Since there's no need to see a non-action movie on the big screen (who cares if they look grainy - think "independent film"), for those movies I'm sure they lose even more.
The point is, if you're talking losing money domestically I agree with you. Internationally is another matter entirely, however, and most movies make as much or more internationally overall than they do domestically.
Amen, you beat me to posting this. If anything, this is exactly what we want the MPAA to be spending its time and resources combating, not running around trying to get laws passed that prohibit legitimate fair use. These are the people that cost them actual money, and if they could shut them down, they would no longer be able to show that piracy is causing them so much damage that they need ridiculous legal protections that screw over people like you and me. Thank god they're doing this.
Probably cardiac problems as well
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Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 1
Since caffeine is a stimulant, it could probably cause cardiac problems as well. Everyone's heart beats faster on caffeine (unless you're tolerant to it), but that overdrive mode always runs the risk of causing an arrhythmia that could kill you. It's not very often, probably on par with young people who have sudden cardiac death while exercising (there's lots of medical caveats to that statement, but I'll spare you), but it's real.
Re:Coffee Dehydration is a Myth
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Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 1
If you actually read that page, it's a very interestingly worded bit of literature. The above-mentioned quote is actually *not* what that page describes. He accepts that caffeine is a mild diuretic itself, and that moderate caffeine intake (irrespective of fluid intake) is equivalent to drinking larger amounts of water, which is a roundabout way of saying caffeine is a diuretic, since large amounts of water will make everyone urinate more frequently and undergo "diuresis", even though water is not a diuretic from a medicinal standpoint.
His assertion is that he is attempting to debunk the belief that people who exercise are not actually winding up water-negative by drinking caffeinated beverages, but wind up overall water positive because the amount of water they urinate due to the caffeine is less than what they take in with the caffeinated beverage. So if you drink a liter, you wind up 0.5 liters positive if it's caffeinated; you would have been 1 liter positive without the caffeine (these numbers are made up, but that's the general idea).
Be careful what you read, but remember that being careful works in both directions...
Slashdot Mirror
I did find a cool article on it, though, which discusses mitochondria, chloroplasts, and the theory of engulfment...
These are good points, especially for southerners. If your a/c kicks on "way before" 84, you have it set to too low a temperature.
This would, however, be an additional piece of equipment in the effort to keep cooling costs down. You can insulate your building's walls and ceiling to keep the 110-degree ambient air from getting too much heat in, along with double- or triple-paned glass. But since we all don't like to live in dark caves with no windows, this would help keep IR light from heating up the inside by sneaking in through the windows. In fact, if you just put it on the outside pane of a multi-pane window, it would work perfectly as the 110-degree air made that pane turn out the heat, making the insulation of the windows even more effective. Very cool...
This may actually be more logical than that article. How would aliens know that we even had DNA, as opposed to what might be a variety of other possible arrangements? How did they know that we primarily use ATGC instead of the other, much less common, nucleotides, so that it would have gone unnoticed? Did they just get really really lucky?
Or, could it be that they thought some sort of DNA-based lifeform was out there somewhere, whatever nucleotides it was using. They could then send out their own self-replicating, very friendly, single-cell organism, which happens to have the incredible ability to create its own energy (given certain chemicals) all across the galaxy, knowing that a very simple DNA-based organism, if placed next to their designer bug, would eventually wind up incorporating it into its lifecycle such that it's permanent. We call them mitochondria. They made us a deal we couldn't refuse.
It kind of all fits (in a very sci-fi way) because mitochondria are not DNA-based, and their genome is incredibly well-preserved from generation to generation, with a very very slow mutation rate (we use it to date the spread of mankind from various ancestors). Perhaps their message isn't really a message like "Hi, we are your alien neighbors, look us up when you can read this" but is instead simply that they wanted to assist the development of life in the universe. Knowing that random nucleotides bumping into each other could eventually form life, but knowing that if they had a little mitochondria there it increased the chances and rate by 1000%, they seeded the galaxy with it as some way to put money in the bank. Maybe they eat brains of sentient beings, so they're "gardening". Maybe they just want some friends, or are very scientific and this is a grand experiment.
Although you raise a good point, there is nothing that I've ever seen (and there have been some whopping clinical system failures to study for this) has shown a single mortality from a clinical computer system crashing. It makes sense that it might, however (for now at least) most hospitals seem to be able to readily revert back to the old ways of doing things in order to survive.
On the other hand, I have seen strong evidence that 10's of thousands of americans die a year from medical errors. A large chunk of those errors (something like 60% of pharmacy errors, which made up 19% of the deaths in the above report) were caused by lack of knowledge at the time of a decision, either about the patient or about the drug. If you really had to choose, I would suggest you choose networked clinical information, even if that happened to come from an unpatched Windows XP device...
All this being said, however, I have yet to see a system running on Windows XP, other than at the client-side, which is what the article was talking about (although it didn't make that clear). Since many of these apps (for reasons I can't fathom) use ActiveX components in IE6 to be "interactive", this causes breaks with even minor tweaking. I'm not sure why vendors still do this, rather than just using regular web pages or a regular thick client (they often cite "customer demands") but like I said in my other post, we're often behind the times.
The article mentions one thing that needs to be emphasized, which is where the FDA guy states that they're not going back to the dark ages where systems don't talk to anything else. For years, every device was on its own proprietary network (if it was on a network at all), and talked to itself and absolutely nothing else. This was bad.
In only the last couple of years (because medical IT is very behind the rest of the IT industry in a lot of ways) these devices have moved rapidly to using commodity protocols and network infrastructures, driven by hospitals' needs to do all of this more cheaply, and not have a lot of chaos.
Also, they want to provide some value add on top of the monitoring systems. For instance, it's nice to be standing by the patient's bed and see the monitoring data. It's even better to be able to export that data to another system so that it's more useful, or display it on a website so MDs can see it. All of this requires networking capability, and Microsoft (like it or not) is considered a leader in the field for server software, and has a large division providing solutions to healthcare.
Overall, the more advanced features you want a clinical system to provide, the more that system needs to integrate with other systems. Companies have given up reinventing the wheel on this every time, and are basing what they do on standard software and protocols. Microsoft is one of those. We try to avoid it whenever possible, however in most instances the decision for one product over another is based on clinical value, and not IT preference.
The above is true, but I think what w3c is trying to get people to do is to start following the standard. There's a chicken-and-egg thing going on with the standards and implementation now (and always) where the standards are generally considered a "good thing", but people don't use them because no applications use them, and since people don't use them, companies don't make products that incorporate them, which means people can't use them or don't find benefit from using them. More often than not, us developers have waited for companies to give us something before we do it. If we all did it first, then they'd have to give it to us, and they'd have to give us what we wanted and not what they thought we might want.
In other words, just like voting with your feet or your wallet, vote with your code.
Comparing a model like Zend to a model like Apache is apples and oranges, frankly. Apache is an non-profit, organization that is both privately held (i.e. not publically traded) and does not sell products based on the apps that they create. Whenever any company starts requiring a profit from whatever they're doing, and worse if they are accountable for quarterly earnings reports for the stock market, there is the potential for what I will loosely call "bad things". I'm not suggesting Zend or other groups like MySQL or JBoss have done any bad things, but it's always possible.
There's certainly nothing wrong with this business model, although that's no reason to not be concerned about potential problems. As you said, they create a significant part of the core for PHP and make it open source and available for free, all of which is good. In a perfect world, this would be the perfect solution.
However, it is right to be watchful (not necessarily concerned) when the core of an open-source app is created and driven by a for-profit company. Since they sell a lot of surrounding support applications to make their money, they are clearly driven at some level to pay for that development. At the very least, it means that any really good idea that they have will get turned into a commercial product instead of rolled into an open source solution. Again, perfectly fine business model, but not awesome.
The other thing it does is that there is a subtle but probably powerful pressure pushing other developers working in the PHP space to consider not working there, because they will by definition start out behind this core company. It wouldn't hold off a determined company, but if a determined company began to come into the mix, it would be surprising if the core company didn't somehow use the fact that they are so essential to their advantage somehow. Without competition they can be magnanimous, but with it much less so.
At any rate, I'm just pointing out that there's reason to keep an eye on it, even if nothing ever comes of it. It's also important to encourage more businesses to adopt this model so something as good as this can come along, and it's important for them to be watched by others to make sure they don't abuse it. The lessons of Microsoft, although in a different league entirely, are too strong to ignore.
What makes it worse is that (I'm guessing here) these genes were probably discovered with public funding of some sort. A similar thing happened a few years ago when the Staph aureus genome was decoded using a lot of NIH (i.e. taxpayer) money to pay for the research. The company then went out and patented it, to a great deal of uproar in the community. If you were paying attention, it also happened during the SARS scare, and I remember two companies were trying to figure out who was really the first to get to it, cuz the one in Toronto was going to essentially release it free to the world, and the other was a company that was going to patent it and make the world wait for their marketability research to figure out what name they should choose for the vaccine. Hopefully this stuff will be headed off soon, but the gov't is so hopelessly in the pharmaceutical companies pockets on this and everything else, I have little hope.
Schwarzenegger said it, and now I'm starting to believe it, that our full-time legislature simply has too much free time on its hands and is passing all sorts of silly laws (I think that's almost a direct quote). It's mind-boggling to me that they would waste my tax money to pay for them looking at this sort of useless crap, but they can't be bothered to look at other stuff that is actually important (education, environment, etc).
You have but to look at our own Revolutionary War (in the USA) to see how these "unfair tactics" were applied to great advantage. In most cases, a tactic is a tactic, and guerilla warfare is just another tactic that can be useful in the right situation.
Fair is in the eye of the beholder until the battle is over. Then it is determined by the victor.
Is anyone else a little bit disturbed by this change in licensing? Perhaps it was the CA guy referring to the GPL as "viral" in the article, or perhaps it was that they went out of the way to reassure us that nothing "sinister" was going on. Maybe it's the fact that they are coming up with (yet another) open source license, which typically means they have some hokey rule in there that fits the OSI's definition legally, but not in spirit.
I could definitely be considered paranoid, but they could have easily dual-licensed it as GPL and something else (which they state above in the FAQ) without coming across as a little sinister, but nowhere in the article do they mention dual-licensing w/ GPL. Add that to the "viral" comment and some of the other stuff they said, and I don't think the open source license will wind up being as good as you might think. Time to fork Plone? (j/k) I hope that I'm proven to simply be a bit jumpy, and not actually right...
Reading the original post and the above posts makes it very obvious that schizophrenia is one of the most misunderstood diseases. Schizophrenia is actually quite well studied, and there are some great medicines to help treat it. The problem is that schizophrenics are not well-prepared (gross generalization here) to take their medicine consistently, and sometimes need help with that.
Also (and this is a big pet peeve of everyone who actually knows anything about the disease), schizophrenia does NOT mean you have multiple personalities. That is multiple personality disorder. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind" if you look at the roots of the word, but that means that their mind is split from reality and that they live in their own internally-created world, not that their mind is split into two or more pieces.
To answer your question, though, it's something that you need to take seriously, and you've done that by asking the right question (although frankly from the wrong people). There are probably a lot of online groups where you could learn more facts about the disease (i.e. schizophrenia.com seems legit). Educate yourself as much as you can.
The parent is totally correct on this one, I'm afraid. Doing it deliberately in order to facilitate others to do illegal things is not going to save you in court. ISP's don't even get away with allowing this sort of stuff unwillingly (i.e. DMCA). Besides, you're ignoring the fact that they will terminate first and ask questions later, basically making you need to prove that it wasn't you who did it, instead of the other way around. Unless you pay them $1000 monthly, you are not worth it to them to figure it out for your good. They lose your $20 a month and won't even look back...
I actually think that's a valid argument, because we've spent tons and tons of money and decades on researching the alternatives and they still don't work well (e.g. fission & fusion). Our know-how of physics/chemistry vastly exceed what we knew in the late 1800's when we started to use oil. The fact that we have failed so miserably in this arena when we have succeeded so incredibly in other areas (like biotech) in recent years is sufficient cause for alarm.
However, even if it's not a valid argument, I don't make the assumption that technology has peaked. I make the assumption that we are not spending enough to get technology to the point where it will meet our need in time. We currently don't have a lot of good leads on alternative solutions. The ones we thought we had leads on (fission & fusion) haven't worked like we hoped. We are going to have to spend tons of money and time finding a viable solution, and if we don't start now we won't do it. The doomsayers are right, if we don't start we will never reach there. Sitting back and saying "just relax, technology will get us there" is not a realistic view of how these solutions are found (money = minds&labs = solutions). There is a good deal of evidence that we hit the peak oil production a few years ago, and it's all downhill from here. Given our increased consumption, we can expect prices to rapidly increase in the years ahead.
The way I look at it, the price of you being wrong is that billions of people will perish in a new dark age from starvation and lack of medicines that can't be manufactured (yes, dramatic but entirely possible given our reliance in all respects on oil for food production/distribution and general survival). The price of me being wrong is that we have replacement technology for oil that hasn't run out yet. The reality is probably somewhere in between, but if the doomsayers scare people enough to twist it towards me being wrong, that's a risk I'm willing to take.
There are replacements for some of the uses of oil, that is true. The example you give of power for your house is something everyone should be doing. I live in LA, and every roof here should be lined end to end with solar panels. They're costly, but they pay for themselves in a few years and the long-term savings is incredible. However, electric companies tend to not let you dump your energy back onto the grid, and in some cases even charge you to do it.
Some other uses of oil, however, have no adequate replacement. Airplanes are a good example of this, there is no battery we can even imagine that could store enough energy to get those things into the air. The only sufficient replacement we can imagine right now would be a portable fusion system that created enough electricity to power the turbines. Cars are almost as bad (where do you think all they hydrogen comes from for fuel cells, or the electricity for the electric ones?). How about tractors used to harvest the tons of food used to provide the ever-expanding population? The list goes on and on of things that oil provides for where there exists no legitimate alternative.
I agree with you. I hope that alternative technologies will fill in the gap. But I'd be insane if I said right now that they could work in the next ten years, and we need to start addressing it.
The problem with this argument that I can see is that in the past, whenever we hit a roadblock on the scarcity of things in the past 150 years or so, we've found a substitute using oil and oil byproducts. The problem now is that oil is the problem (obviously) and that any of the substitutes we've looked at haven't yet worked well (fission/fusion for energy, ? for a plastic replacement) and require energy to produce in the first place. As the price of oil goes up and up, if we hit a point where we start scrambling for an oil replacement, the cost in oil to produce it would be radically prohibitive.
I think this is why people are clamoring for governments to examine this now, because if you wait too long, wars will erupt as we desparately try to obtain enough oil to create our alternative, whatever that is. If we don't look now, the alternative we choose may not even work. This is definitely an issue where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
How much oil will it take to create a massive solar array in space to send energy to earth, do you think? I'll give you a hint, so much that the current cost has been prohibitive enough that we haven't done it. What will it cost when even George Bush admits we have a shortage?
Your fix will not get implemented, is my guess, unless you agree to the potential licenses that they use. Since you used it as GPL, you really couldn't claim copyright on it any more than they could. It is an interesting question, though, cuz by nature the fix you make could not be licensed in a dual nature unless you originally had the non-GPL version, which I'm guessing you would not. If you started with the GPL you couldn't relicense it as dual-license for them to reincorporate back into their dual-licensed version.
Anyone with some legal knowledge know if this has played out before anywhere?
Considering that nobody has really done this (there's one that I know of, can't remember the name, but the one that ran Tribes) with an engine that anybody would actually use, I think it's safe to say it has not been proven. It is certainly attractive, since game companies spend a ton of money reinventing the wheel by creating yet another game engine, but I can't imagine someone open sourcing one of the very popular ones because they derive a ton of revenue selling that engine to other game companies.
Very good point, which is actually why I live so close to work (I used to live 2 miles away, but then got a different job, so now 5). I'm planning on moving back within the 2-mile radius in the next few months. I only have to fill up my tank once every week and a half or so (more or less) which isn't so bad...
Exactly. I've been disappointed with my Volvo, which was rated at something like 28/32 when I bought it. Since I drive 5 miles to and from work most of the time (with shorter hops around town) through metro LA, I can't break 20-21 mpg. Add to that the fact that I spent $30 today filling up my 12-gallon tank, and I'm a little bit annoyed by all this.
However, the point that wasn't emphasized in all that is that this is still significantly better than a non-hybrid vehicle. My Civic that I owned before this didn't break 24 mpg, and was rated in the low 30's. A hybrid version that got 32 would be a significant step up from there (33% less gas) and so is a good thing. It's not 50, but it's better.
The problem with that, of course, is that these cars cost more than the non-hybrid version, somewhere around $2,000 more. The websites for the car manufacturers have calculators to show how much money you would save by getting the hybrid based on the EPA statements. If those are wrong (as they are) then they should not be pushing the cost savings, since they know people aren't going to see it.
This is really an international issue. These things cost them a ton of money, and whether or not you believe the industry's reports on downloads costing them money (I don't) the bootleg movies certainly do. Most of the money it costs them is overseas, however, and it probably costs them almost nothing in the states.
The problem with overseas and bootlegs is that the movie is usually released in the US first, and doesn't get to another country for quite a while. If you ever travel to England and look at the movie theatres, it's like stepping back in time 9 months when you see what's playing there. Due to logistics they generally don't release movies simultaneously overseas, although some high-profile movies they did so (e.g. Matrix Reloaded) in order to prevent the losses they experience with bootlegs.
The bootlegs are recorded very early on in the release in the USA, and typically sent overseas where they show up on vendors' tables a few days later, and many months before anyone in that country can see it in the theatre. Desperate viewers will suffer through the horrible recording rather than wait months to see it, and if the movie isn't so hot (e.g. Matrix Reloaded) they won't follow up by seeing it in the theatre, therefore the studio loses money. Since there's no need to see a non-action movie on the big screen (who cares if they look grainy - think "independent film"), for those movies I'm sure they lose even more.
The point is, if you're talking losing money domestically I agree with you. Internationally is another matter entirely, however, and most movies make as much or more internationally overall than they do domestically.
Amen, you beat me to posting this. If anything, this is exactly what we want the MPAA to be spending its time and resources combating, not running around trying to get laws passed that prohibit legitimate fair use. These are the people that cost them actual money, and if they could shut them down, they would no longer be able to show that piracy is causing them so much damage that they need ridiculous legal protections that screw over people like you and me. Thank god they're doing this.
Since caffeine is a stimulant, it could probably cause cardiac problems as well. Everyone's heart beats faster on caffeine (unless you're tolerant to it), but that overdrive mode always runs the risk of causing an arrhythmia that could kill you. It's not very often, probably on par with young people who have sudden cardiac death while exercising (there's lots of medical caveats to that statement, but I'll spare you), but it's real.
If you actually read that page, it's a very interestingly worded bit of literature. The above-mentioned quote is actually *not* what that page describes. He accepts that caffeine is a mild diuretic itself, and that moderate caffeine intake (irrespective of fluid intake) is equivalent to drinking larger amounts of water, which is a roundabout way of saying caffeine is a diuretic, since large amounts of water will make everyone urinate more frequently and undergo "diuresis", even though water is not a diuretic from a medicinal standpoint.
His assertion is that he is attempting to debunk the belief that people who exercise are not actually winding up water-negative by drinking caffeinated beverages, but wind up overall water positive because the amount of water they urinate due to the caffeine is less than what they take in with the caffeinated beverage. So if you drink a liter, you wind up 0.5 liters positive if it's caffeinated; you would have been 1 liter positive without the caffeine (these numbers are made up, but that's the general idea).
Be careful what you read, but remember that being careful works in both directions...