Isn't that what it is? Planet, planetoid, planetette, plantlette?, asteroid, TMO... It's the few screws left over when you put together your kid's bike.
That the IOC picks a place that won't go over well from a local marketing/gladhandling perspective or that they expect they local gov't to suspend laws just to appease them? I agree that SLC should not change any laws for the event but you have to wonder what the IOC was thinking when they try to put a corporate love-fest in a place where The Official Beer of the Olympics can't be easily purchased, ne'st pa?
What they decided is really rather simple. That is, if the State Supreme Court makes the case Federal Issue because it is a Federal Election then the State Supreme Court should have referred its justification under USC5. Since the State Supreme Court did not make clear any argument under USC5 and the USSC agrees that it is probably a Federal issue nor is it clearly an issue where the State Supreme Court has circumscribed the authority of the State Legislature then the State Supreme Court must artculate its reasoning better. In fact the USSC points to the case law in BLACKER that makes use of USC5.
So SLC is now under fire to change their liquor laws for the 2002 games because the LDS's make it mandatory that if you want to drink w/o eating you have to belong to one of those bogus clubs. But bribe taking is ok I guess.
The plot isn't all that interesting or new, the characters aren't all that deep or symbolic and theme isn't particularly wonderful. What's left is just a remake of the same slow tedious story in the first movie just dumbed down a little so that when the bad guy says things like "make them confident, it leads to carelessness" we all know what he means.... The visuals are new and different but that's not enough to carry the whole load. What's with William Hurt anyway? You'd think that he'd be thrilled to be working instead of shuffling through his gig like he's tranq'd out. And the Paul character...sounds like a whining jerk from Dawson's90210Buffy complaining that the world needs to kiss his on both cheeks
Is Anna Pacquin in this version????????
It was crap. Sorry. The adventures of ZoloftMan
on
Review: "Unbreakable"
·
· Score: 2
Bruce Willis's next movie will be where everyone except him is dead but he thinks he is dead but doesn't know that he isn't dead yet. After that his next movie will be where everyone in the audience is dead but doesn't know it yet.
Maybe for a Clint Eastwood western you can get away with 350 words of dialog in the whole movie but isn't this getting tedious for these afterlife-spiritual-metaphor flicks? Ok so Bruce plays characters who are clinically depressed. I get it.
And what's with the everything is sickly green film technique? Why does his wife look all strung out and why does his kid wake up the next day just like normal after pulling a gun on his dad and screaming that he has to shoot him to prove to the world that he's a superhero. How fucked up is that?
I get it - it's a comic book and this is the evolution of his self awareness. Ok then why not make more like a comic book and less like the slow motion parts of a car commercial (flying raindrops etc.)
Infrastructure was expensive, hard to build and required rights of way.
Investment horizons were in the 25-100 year range
It was the creation of a new public utility.
The flip side of guaranteed rates of return is regulation needed to insure that.
Do we need a guaranteed rates of return for netphones? Do we need to eliminate competition just because MegaTelco can't move out of its own way? Do we need to erect MORE barriers around the local CO? Do we want to ceed rights of way, or spectrum to more private companies? Regulation is a mixture of good and bad. Here's a brief list:
Almost universal phone coverage paid for by taxes so that anyone who really needs a phone can get at least some service.
Expensive residential service that subsidizes business service discounts.
Extremely slow pace of technology or service change.
Non existant customer service.
On the whole a very reliable system.
A complex Byzantine billing and tariff structure designed to make competition harder not easier.
We use NS4.7x as the corporate dictat. IE isn't officially supported and standard builds eliminate the icon from the desktop. In fact we have a bunch of fairly important internal apps that were built for NS and don't work right or display correctly on IE. Go figure. And oh yeah we still support an OS/2 flavor. I think the belief was that we would somehow make Netscape (the company) the next Lotus. For what it's worth we have a corporate security standard that says "don't use cookies" alongside a bunch of general corporate internal apps that require them.
What is the difference between success and failure
on
Catch Me If You Can
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· Score: 5
Whether all or some of this is true or not the thing that creeps me out the most is that in many situations there is no qualitative difference between success and failure, between truth and bullshit, between having a skill and making it up. Sure we've all been in jobs over our heads sometime in our lives but what does it say when a guy can get behind the controls of an airliner and take off and land w/o screwing it into the tarmac?
So is everyone just an overvalued bullshit burger flipper? Does it really matter that your vascular surgeon went to school? Do you we all wear smocks and have our names stitched on our shirts only we don't know it? Stories like this in a small way convince me more and more to pay little if any attention to experts, professionals and specialists.
By example the third or fourth leading cause of death in America is apparently, if you believe the news in the last 6 months, medical malpractice and incompetance. And these are the people ostensibly trained to perform these jobs. And think about this the next time you have to power up your laptop in the patdown lane in the airport. Virtually every air traffic death since the inception of commercial air travel was the result of human error; either in the air on the maintenance floor or in the control tower, or, worse yet, the absolute refusal to heed weather warnings.
If it's so FFForking dangerous why they can't they uh....fine him up to some arbitrary amount and take away the GUY's Licence?????? I mean what's the goal here? Make people drive safely or tax fast cars or what? This is like fining drunk drivers over and over and then revoking the fine because the drunk driver now can't afford to drive his car to get to work to earn the money to pay the fine.
I know that where I live if I get caught speeding in a school zone there is a better than even chance I will lose my driving privileges. If I also have to pay a few thousand dollars in fines that is the easy part.
for the sound that the UN black helicopters make when they're hovering over your house while aiming the mass delusional raygun at you. Didn't you get the secret memo on that?
A large monopolistic company in the pocket of a candidate dedicated to the proposition that hard copy records are just too innaccurate and we should rely soley on the electronic tally - suing a government that can't produce the hardcopy record of the the number of 'ballots' cast for said software product.
Many many things we take for granted. Sure, my 12 year old has real time multitasking built into his brain wiring now: 7 or 8 simultaneous chat sessions while concurrently juggling 2 different party line phones. Sure my older kid can actually work while listening to music loud enough to buzz the windows. Sure my 9 year old has probably learned to learn with an amazingly short attention span. But I don't see people becomming more interactive as the be and end all of entertainment. That is, you may see the half dozen or so distinct information regions on the screen of the monitor or the TV whether it's a game or a webcast or BET but that translates into constantly task switching for a few seconds. If you ask someone performing this way what it is they just looked at or were doing you'll get an "I don't know" answer. OTOH board games are more popular than ever including traditional or cultural boardgames like Go, Mancala and so on. I think this "games as culture" is the same thing as people thinking that in the future we'll be artists and poets and that our culture and our economy will be based on producing and selling art to each other. Unfortunately somebody still has to own the power company and still has to create a process model for the auction house.
You can't sell a service if you can't name it so this is the name attached to selling that service. You sell privacy services - makes sense since as the article mentions you can't sell security explicitly. It's like trying to sell life insurance or tombstones. No one wants to deal with it until they have to. Moreover since security and privacy tends to take a tools approach its very hard to put the tools wonks in front of customers and execs. They don't communicate well with one another.
Trust me - IBM would not make a public announcement of an executive level lawyer/engineer (can you say patent attorney?) just because 'privacy' gives someone a woody. It's to create a business function that can be used to sell privacy products like PKI and smart cards, encrypted MQ, safe Notes, private email. Or it's to sell consulting services like 'how to insure your customers' privacy' or 'how to insure that employee web surfing is being tracked legally' or 'getting that search warrant for your employees home computers' and so on.
Or if I were cynical I'd put it in the "Minister of Information" category - to whit - insuring that there is absolutely no privacy at all.
So this is about a beta lic that expires and can't be renewed. Hmmmmpppfff. You folks put a major investment in your academic careers into a piece of demoware? Yeah it sucx that John Warnock doesn't see this as a viable product or, given whatever resources they have can't devote appropriate resources to Linux as a fully supported platform. But that's life - ya pays ya money ya makes ya cherse!
Welcome to the real world of software product development for the desktop.
Bush(tm) (marca registrada) The President? Nah. Well maybe in the same way small children think Mickey Mouse is the King of Disneyworld. The President of the US o' A is James A. Baker III. He ran shit when Reagan was the Leader of the MoFo Free World and he will do it again with Reagan Jr.-Lite (tm). I'm sure Frat Boy will try to inject himself into the process but they'll talk over his head and use big words until he falls asleep or has a tantrum and leaves the room.
BTW, expect that after Cheney keels over that Cardinal Baker appoints SchwartzPowell to the office.
You're right, so is overpopulation
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 2
So for example if you are one of two groups that are contesting a piece of land for a few hundred years or so if one side can't overcome the other through specific means then it can just as easily displace the other through overpopulation. And anyway it was only a modest proposal. Maybe this is another urban myth but one of the pet food companies in the US wanted to introduce contraceptives in their pet food to do their part for reducing the stray animal population. Until they discovered that about a third of it is consumed by people.
In the high bandwidth world maybe something like the rich complex group calendar functions in Notes is the way to go. Granted Notes works in a dialup mode but I'd hate like hell to have to check a group calendar that way. The best way to approach that is to send out invites and allow the recipient to reject or accept which isn't much of an improvement at all really. What you want to be able to do is search for free time by person in a group by various categories: classifications of work, priority topic and then allow for or disallow things like double-triple booking, selective autoprocessing of inbound and outbound invites.
Then there's the whole subject of shared vs. partially shared vs unshared address books. You want to be able to respond to a message or a calendar entry or a note in one but you also want to respond to every name in a list of recipients as well as some that are not on the list and not respond to some that are. Parts of the local address book should be shared upstream for common use as long as deltas for shared entries are handled correctly. If you look at Wesync they try to do this with some success. It sounds like a shared lock while update problem on a relational DB.
The application has to allow for automatic handling of entries inside/outside of the profile so that something happens differently when you are requested or request someone to atten a meeting @ 4am or some outlier time. You also need to handle timezones so that the shared address book has some notion of the recipients time zones. Without this you would have to know the timezone of every recipient. What you want to do is have the calendar function automatically adjust the local time. You also have to handle DST. Next you have to be able to allow for local timezone adjustments outside of the calendar so that recipients can travel and plug their new timezone in a temporary profile override.
Now all this is fine and good in, as I said the high bandwidth world. In the low bandwidth or wireless world you have a different notion of the timeliness of a shared event or a shared data entry and how you reconcile multiple updates to the same sahred event are different. For example you can send invites to many people. In one scenario you have agree/reject or you have autoprocess for a majority or you reject the whole list for a single reject. Do you have a central server look for a best fit and reschedule the event based on that and then notify everyone on the list? Or do you rely on multiple iterations of a person's intervention to reschedule until some number of people agree on a time.
Next, how do you handle recurring events? Do you ship a whole entry down to the client for every occurence or do you have some different data structure that represents multiple occurences. And of so how do you edit each occurence later on if for example you happen to schedule something on a holiday and it has to be moved? The individual entry method is easier to handle after the fact as long as you repropagate updates upstream. But the multiple occurence data record approach works better for low bandwidth.
Last but not least you need a method to perform some level of authentication or record ownership so that only the originator or its delegate can chnage an entry if you deem that people should change a record after the fact or in the 'best fit' case. Otherwise scheduling chaos ensues if anyone can change any group event.
GE foods are bad, compared to what
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 2
While I agree that testing is good and you can't rely on any manufacturer to perform self regulation and due dilligence, I have to wonder what world the people who single out GE foods as the great evil live in. In my lifetime I've lived through one toxic food/chemical/additive/drug story after another from Alar to Paraquat. Some have been real some have been misinformed or hoaxes while other are just plain inconclusive. And while we're on the subject let's not forget that even according to the WHO - DDT has saved more lives than all medicine and medical technology since the dawn of time. This really speaks to public health and not just DDT specifically. If you have clean water to drink and educate people how to avoid infectious diseases you will go as far as anything else to insure that if or when you are able to feed these people using GE crops or better fertilizer or whatnot that they will actually survive into adulthood so that they can breed another generation of mouths to feed.
So in the end you have to decide whether the risks inherent in using GE foods is worth what you yourself deem to be the overarching critical need to do so. And if it is are you talking about taco shells in the supermarket or are you talking about basic foodstuffs in far off Bangladesh where just thinking that you are concerned is sufficient.
Rice with contraceptives instead !
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 3
This is an awful lot of effort simply to insure we have more mouths to feed. And if you think that the whole world can eat and live like the US you are mistaken. The US has about 7% of worlds pop and consumes almost 40% of its food. About 20% of the total energy consumption in the US is for the production and manufacturing of food.
OTOH 1 million children a year is 0.1% of the number of people who don't have clean potable water to drink. Also, while the birthrates for the bottom 5th of economies is high, the corresponding rate for slightly more advanced economies is only marginally lower. Combined with higher survival rates post age 5 you have a population pyramid that explodes at the bottom, pushes the media age down and provides an enormous base for another population explosion from the next generation. So while the poorest contries may have a birth rate over 4% and media life expectancy of 44, the next poorest countries may have a birthrate of 3.5% and a life expectancy of 59. The excepts most of sub Saharan Africa which because of AIDS is expected to have a net negative birthrate, a decrease in life expectancy to 40 and an absolute near elimination in the population between age 14-60 in the next 10 to 15 years.
So while we argue about engineered corn and rice, pest resistant fruit and enhanced protein water plants let's keep in mind that feeding someone is life long proposition. Developing economies do not have sustainable models - at least none that anyone has been able to apply yet. So the notion that all you have to do is feed the children is wishful thinking. With all of those now-fed children come a host of other problems like urban density, sewage treatment, public health and hygiene, education that no one who's screaming about the evils of genetic engineering is prepared to think about. The argument so far seems to be a debate about who is more fearful of being ignorant. We have the "it's an unknown we don't know what mutant we'll unleash on the world" argument. Or we have the "it's against Gods plan to mess with fertility" argument. On the other side of the aisle we have the "technology will save us" battle cry. Neither argument really takes into consideration what happens if you are successful because in both cases you have a world filled with miserable starving fecund people.
United Space Mine Workers Union Local #6
on
On Asteroid Mining
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· Score: 2
Who going to do this job? Got to leave your shitty little town? Barely got out of high school? Spend the weekend drinking, shooting stop signs and beating your girlfriend? Hey - become a space miner ! Great Pay ! Union Benefits !
This is simply and only a lock on what code you can run and when. This is simply giving subscription type control for ANY chunk of code to the OS. So it's not just drivers. Even for a moment if it were just drivers consider this. Compaq now can have a certified version of the OS that only runs on their hardware and only supports the hardware that they want to sell you. Same for Dell or IBM or anyone else. So if you want a sexy new liquid helium cooled plutonioum powered 9 dimensional video adapter and Brand "Z" wants you to buy only their crappy ol' model then you are S.O.L. Now let's expand that. Say there is a hardware company - let's call it HP for example and now let's say that they buy a management consulting company - let's say its called PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and let's assume that this management consulting company makes most of their money selling Siebel software to Fortune 500 companies. Ummmm . . . . d'ya think that there is a possibility that those HP units will only be able to run a flavor of Siebel that was installed by PWC. d'ya think that the DMCA has ANYTHING to do with this? ? ? ? ? Can you imagine a time when software vendors can use the OS to prohibit running an application that was restored from another media like an uncertified backup or a gold CD used internally for common build distribution? ? ? Can you imagine a day when SMS becomes an application subscription licence management system and its the only game in town? ?
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that what it is? Planet, planetoid, planetette, plantlette?, asteroid, TMO... It's the few screws left over when you put together your kid's bike.
That the IOC picks a place that won't go over well from a local marketing/gladhandling perspective or that they expect they local gov't to suspend laws just to appease them? I agree that SLC should not change any laws for the event but you have to wonder what the IOC was thinking when they try to put a corporate love-fest in a place where The Official Beer of the Olympics can't be easily purchased, ne'st pa?
What they decided is really rather simple. That is, if the State Supreme Court makes the case Federal Issue because it is a Federal Election then the State Supreme Court should have referred its justification under USC5. Since the State Supreme Court did not make clear any argument under USC5 and the USSC agrees that it is probably a Federal issue nor is it clearly an issue where the State Supreme Court has circumscribed the authority of the State Legislature then the State Supreme Court must artculate its reasoning better. In fact the USSC points to the case law in BLACKER that makes use of USC5.
So SLC is now under fire to change their liquor laws for the 2002 games because the LDS's make it mandatory that if you want to drink w/o eating you have to belong to one of those bogus clubs. But bribe taking is ok I guess.
The plot isn't all that interesting or new, the characters aren't all that deep or symbolic and theme isn't particularly wonderful. What's left is just a remake of the same slow tedious story in the first movie just dumbed down a little so that when the bad guy says things like "make them confident, it leads to carelessness" we all know what he means.... The visuals are new and different but that's not enough to carry the whole load. What's with William Hurt anyway? You'd think that he'd be thrilled to be working instead of shuffling through his gig like he's tranq'd out. And the Paul character...sounds like a whining jerk from Dawson's90210Buffy complaining that the world needs to kiss his on both cheeks
Is Anna Pacquin in this version????????
Bruce Willis's next movie will be where everyone except him is dead but he thinks he is dead but doesn't know that he isn't dead yet. After that his next movie will be where everyone in the audience is dead but doesn't know it yet.
Maybe for a Clint Eastwood western you can get away with 350 words of dialog in the whole movie but isn't this getting tedious for these afterlife-spiritual-metaphor flicks? Ok so Bruce plays characters who are clinically depressed. I get it.
And what's with the everything is sickly green film technique? Why does his wife look all strung out and why does his kid wake up the next day just like normal after pulling a gun on his dad and screaming that he has to shoot him to prove to the world that he's a superhero. How fucked up is that?
I get it - it's a comic book and this is the evolution of his self awareness. Ok then why not make more like a comic book and less like the slow motion parts of a car commercial (flying raindrops etc.)
Phones were regulated because:
Infrastructure was expensive, hard to build and required rights of way.
Investment horizons were in the 25-100 year range
It was the creation of a new public utility.
The flip side of guaranteed rates of return is regulation needed to insure that.
Do we need a guaranteed rates of return for netphones? Do we need to eliminate competition just because MegaTelco can't move out of its own way? Do we need to erect MORE barriers around the local CO? Do we want to ceed rights of way, or spectrum to more private companies? Regulation is a mixture of good and bad. Here's a brief list:
Almost universal phone coverage paid for by taxes so that anyone who really needs a phone can get at least some service.
Expensive residential service that subsidizes business service discounts.
Extremely slow pace of technology or service change.
Non existant customer service.
On the whole a very reliable system.
A complex Byzantine billing and tariff structure designed to make competition harder not easier.
Is this what you want for VoIP?
Therefore gentlemen; what?
We use NS4.7x as the corporate dictat. IE isn't officially supported and standard builds eliminate the icon from the desktop. In fact we have a bunch of fairly important internal apps that were built for NS and don't work right or display correctly on IE. Go figure. And oh yeah we still support an OS/2 flavor. I think the belief was that we would somehow make Netscape (the company) the next Lotus. For what it's worth we have a corporate security standard that says "don't use cookies" alongside a bunch of general corporate internal apps that require them.
Whether all or some of this is true or not the thing that creeps me out the most is that in many situations there is no qualitative difference between success and failure, between truth and bullshit, between having a skill and making it up. Sure we've all been in jobs over our heads sometime in our lives but what does it say when a guy can get behind the controls of an airliner and take off and land w/o screwing it into the tarmac?
So is everyone just an overvalued bullshit burger flipper? Does it really matter that your vascular surgeon went to school? Do you we all wear smocks and have our names stitched on our shirts only we don't know it? Stories like this in a small way convince me more and more to pay little if any attention to experts, professionals and specialists.
By example the third or fourth leading cause of death in America is apparently, if you believe the news in the last 6 months, medical malpractice and incompetance. And these are the people ostensibly trained to perform these jobs. And think about this the next time you have to power up your laptop in the patdown lane in the airport. Virtually every air traffic death since the inception of commercial air travel was the result of human error; either in the air on the maintenance floor or in the control tower, or, worse yet, the absolute refusal to heed weather warnings.
If it's so FFForking dangerous why they can't they uh....fine him up to some arbitrary amount and take away the GUY's Licence?????? I mean what's the goal here? Make people drive safely or tax fast cars or what? This is like fining drunk drivers over and over and then revoking the fine because the drunk driver now can't afford to drive his car to get to work to earn the money to pay the fine.
I know that where I live if I get caught speeding in a school zone there is a better than even chance I will lose my driving privileges. If I also have to pay a few thousand dollars in fines that is the easy part.
Doesn't that translate to 600,000 people being hurt? Sounds like a major catastrophe to me. Damn better wear my hardhat.
for the sound that the UN black helicopters make when they're hovering over your house while aiming the mass delusional raygun at you. Didn't you get the secret memo on that?
A large monopolistic company in the pocket of a candidate dedicated to the proposition that hard copy records are just too innaccurate and we should rely soley on the electronic tally - suing a government that can't produce the hardcopy record of the the number of 'ballots' cast for said software product.
Many many things we take for granted. Sure, my 12 year old has real time multitasking built into his brain wiring now: 7 or 8 simultaneous chat sessions while concurrently juggling 2 different party line phones. Sure my older kid can actually work while listening to music loud enough to buzz the windows. Sure my 9 year old has probably learned to learn with an amazingly short attention span. But I don't see people becomming more interactive as the be and end all of entertainment. That is, you may see the half dozen or so distinct information regions on the screen of the monitor or the TV whether it's a game or a webcast or BET but that translates into constantly task switching for a few seconds. If you ask someone performing this way what it is they just looked at or were doing you'll get an "I don't know" answer. OTOH board games are more popular than ever including traditional or cultural boardgames like Go, Mancala and so on. I think this "games as culture" is the same thing as people thinking that in the future we'll be artists and poets and that our culture and our economy will be based on producing and selling art to each other. Unfortunately somebody still has to own the power company and still has to create a process model for the auction house.
You can't sell a service if you can't name it so this is the name attached to selling that service. You sell privacy services - makes sense since as the article mentions you can't sell security explicitly. It's like trying to sell life insurance or tombstones. No one wants to deal with it until they have to. Moreover since security and privacy tends to take a tools approach its very hard to put the tools wonks in front of customers and execs. They don't communicate well with one another.
Trust me - IBM would not make a public announcement of an executive level lawyer/engineer (can you say patent attorney?) just because 'privacy' gives someone a woody. It's to create a business function that can be used to sell privacy products like PKI and smart cards, encrypted MQ, safe Notes, private email. Or it's to sell consulting services like 'how to insure your customers' privacy' or 'how to insure that employee web surfing is being tracked legally' or 'getting that search warrant for your employees home computers' and so on.
Or if I were cynical I'd put it in the "Minister of Information" category - to whit - insuring that there is absolutely no privacy at all.
So this is about a beta lic that expires and can't be renewed. Hmmmmpppfff. You folks put a major investment in your academic careers into a piece of demoware? Yeah it sucx that John Warnock doesn't see this as a viable product or, given whatever resources they have can't devote appropriate resources to Linux as a fully supported platform. But that's life - ya pays ya money ya makes ya cherse!
Welcome to the real world of software product development for the desktop.
Bush(tm) (marca registrada) The President? Nah. Well maybe in the same way small children think Mickey Mouse is the King of Disneyworld. The President of the US o' A is James A. Baker III. He ran shit when Reagan was the Leader of the MoFo Free World and he will do it again with Reagan Jr.-Lite (tm). I'm sure Frat Boy will try to inject himself into the process but they'll talk over his head and use big words until he falls asleep or has a tantrum and leaves the room.
BTW, expect that after Cheney keels over that Cardinal Baker appoints SchwartzPowell to the office.
So for example if you are one of two groups that are contesting a piece of land for a few hundred years or so if one side can't overcome the other through specific means then it can just as easily displace the other through overpopulation. And anyway it was only a modest proposal. Maybe this is another urban myth but one of the pet food companies in the US wanted to introduce contraceptives in their pet food to do their part for reducing the stray animal population. Until they discovered that about a third of it is consumed by people.
In the high bandwidth world maybe something like the rich complex group calendar functions in Notes is the way to go. Granted Notes works in a dialup mode but I'd hate like hell to have to check a group calendar that way. The best way to approach that is to send out invites and allow the recipient to reject or accept which isn't much of an improvement at all really. What you want to be able to do is search for free time by person in a group by various categories: classifications of work, priority topic and then allow for or disallow things like double-triple booking, selective autoprocessing of inbound and outbound invites.
Then there's the whole subject of shared vs. partially shared vs unshared address books. You want to be able to respond to a message or a calendar entry or a note in one but you also want to respond to every name in a list of recipients as well as some that are not on the list and not respond to some that are. Parts of the local address book should be shared upstream for common use as long as deltas for shared entries are handled correctly. If you look at Wesync they try to do this with some success. It sounds like a shared lock while update problem on a relational DB.
The application has to allow for automatic handling of entries inside/outside of the profile so that something happens differently when you are requested or request someone to atten a meeting @ 4am or some outlier time. You also need to handle timezones so that the shared address book has some notion of the recipients time zones. Without this you would have to know the timezone of every recipient. What you want to do is have the calendar function automatically adjust the local time. You also have to handle DST. Next you have to be able to allow for local timezone adjustments outside of the calendar so that recipients can travel and plug their new timezone in a temporary profile override.
Now all this is fine and good in, as I said the high bandwidth world. In the low bandwidth or wireless world you have a different notion of the timeliness of a shared event or a shared data entry and how you reconcile multiple updates to the same sahred event are different. For example you can send invites to many people. In one scenario you have agree/reject or you have autoprocess for a majority or you reject the whole list for a single reject. Do you have a central server look for a best fit and reschedule the event based on that and then notify everyone on the list? Or do you rely on multiple iterations of a person's intervention to reschedule until some number of people agree on a time.
Next, how do you handle recurring events? Do you ship a whole entry down to the client for every occurence or do you have some different data structure that represents multiple occurences. And of so how do you edit each occurence later on if for example you happen to schedule something on a holiday and it has to be moved? The individual entry method is easier to handle after the fact as long as you repropagate updates upstream. But the multiple occurence data record approach works better for low bandwidth.
Last but not least you need a method to perform some level of authentication or record ownership so that only the originator or its delegate can chnage an entry if you deem that people should change a record after the fact or in the 'best fit' case. Otherwise scheduling chaos ensues if anyone can change any group event.
While I agree that testing is good and you can't rely on any manufacturer to perform self regulation and due dilligence, I have to wonder what world the people who single out GE foods as the great evil live in. In my lifetime I've lived through one toxic food/chemical/additive/drug story after another from Alar to Paraquat. Some have been real some have been misinformed or hoaxes while other are just plain inconclusive. And while we're on the subject let's not forget that even according to the WHO - DDT has saved more lives than all medicine and medical technology since the dawn of time. This really speaks to public health and not just DDT specifically. If you have clean water to drink and educate people how to avoid infectious diseases you will go as far as anything else to insure that if or when you are able to feed these people using GE crops or better fertilizer or whatnot that they will actually survive into adulthood so that they can breed another generation of mouths to feed.
So in the end you have to decide whether the risks inherent in using GE foods is worth what you yourself deem to be the overarching critical need to do so. And if it is are you talking about taco shells in the supermarket or are you talking about basic foodstuffs in far off Bangladesh where just thinking that you are concerned is sufficient.
This is an awful lot of effort simply to insure we have more mouths to feed. And if you think that the whole world can eat and live like the US you are mistaken. The US has about 7% of worlds pop and consumes almost 40% of its food. About 20% of the total energy consumption in the US is for the production and manufacturing of food.
OTOH 1 million children a year is 0.1% of the number of people who don't have clean potable water to drink. Also, while the birthrates for the bottom 5th of economies is high, the corresponding rate for slightly more advanced economies is only marginally lower. Combined with higher survival rates post age 5 you have a population pyramid that explodes at the bottom, pushes the media age down and provides an enormous base for another population explosion from the next generation. So while the poorest contries may have a birth rate over 4% and media life expectancy of 44, the next poorest countries may have a birthrate of 3.5% and a life expectancy of 59. The excepts most of sub Saharan Africa which because of AIDS is expected to have a net negative birthrate, a decrease in life expectancy to 40 and an absolute near elimination in the population between age 14-60 in the next 10 to 15 years.
So while we argue about engineered corn and rice, pest resistant fruit and enhanced protein water plants let's keep in mind that feeding someone is life long proposition. Developing economies do not have sustainable models - at least none that anyone has been able to apply yet. So the notion that all you have to do is feed the children is wishful thinking. With all of those now-fed children come a host of other problems like urban density, sewage treatment, public health and hygiene, education that no one who's screaming about the evils of genetic engineering is prepared to think about. The argument so far seems to be a debate about who is more fearful of being ignorant. We have the "it's an unknown we don't know what mutant we'll unleash on the world" argument. Or we have the "it's against Gods plan to mess with fertility" argument. On the other side of the aisle we have the "technology will save us" battle cry. Neither argument really takes into consideration what happens if you are successful because in both cases you have a world filled with miserable starving fecund people.
Who going to do this job? Got to leave your shitty little town? Barely got out of high school? Spend the weekend drinking, shooting stop signs and beating your girlfriend? Hey - become a space miner ! Great Pay ! Union Benefits !
Is: "Anything that can be used for sex and anything else, will be used for sex".
I can imagine the fake Visa adds already:
Tube of hydraulic fluid: $15
Honda robot: $9000
Your name becomes a sexual verb: Priceless
This is simply and only a lock on what code you can run and when. This is simply giving subscription type control for ANY chunk of code to the OS. So it's not just drivers. Even for a moment if it were just drivers consider this. Compaq now can have a certified version of the OS that only runs on their hardware and only supports the hardware that they want to sell you. Same for Dell or IBM or anyone else. So if you want a sexy new liquid helium cooled plutonioum powered 9 dimensional video adapter and Brand "Z" wants you to buy only their crappy ol' model then you are S.O.L. Now let's expand that. Say there is a hardware company - let's call it HP for example and now let's say that they buy a management consulting company - let's say its called PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and let's assume that this management consulting company makes most of their money selling Siebel software to Fortune 500 companies. Ummmm . . . . d'ya think that there is a possibility that those HP units will only be able to run a flavor of Siebel that was installed by PWC. d'ya think that the DMCA has ANYTHING to do with this? ? ? ? ? Can you imagine a time when software vendors can use the OS to prohibit running an application that was restored from another media like an uncertified backup or a gold CD used internally for common build distribution? ? ? Can you imagine a day when SMS becomes an application subscription licence management system and its the only game in town? ?