I haven't enjoyed a good old-fashioned proto-rational flame war since I stopped reading USENET. I'm delighted to see it has thoroughly made its way to slashdot.
Face it, dude, you are a troll. You're just after attention, and you've got it. We've all seen this behavior before.
a working (simple) quantum computer has already been built
I don't think so. There has not, to my knowledge, been a single experiment proving that quantum entanglement exists that didn't rely on fudged data. (Usually, they extrapolate based on probabilities of photon detection). All observed phenomena (we're talking about entanglement here) can be easily explained by local processes - instantaneous 'action at a distance' has never been shown definitively.
The amount of misconception and hype surrounding quantum computing is absolutely staggering. There is absolutely no experimental evidence or rational justification that QC will require zero energy, nor is there any evidence that QC will EVER be feasible for computation.
What does happen, in many of these cases (as cold fusion was to some degree) is that a LOT of physicists survive on grants gleefully awarded by unknowing foundations and governmental agencies (in other words, by money from you and me folks). Any questioning of QC is instantly stamped 'troll' and dismissed from journals - too many people rely on it for their livelihood. When one does manage to pin them down, even the physicists will argue for 'quantum magic' and mysticism! Puh-lease!
This came up a couple of times before in Slashdot, and there was a really interesting commentary by someone (Nightlight3) who seemed to know what they were talking about, and had some very rational reasons for why quantum computing won't happen. Read it here. It also contains links to other informative articles.
But, these fantasy stories certainly do draw readership.
Read the patent. This statement is misleading. They have no proprietary right to the gene in its basic form, only the specific application of genetic knowledge as described in the claims of the patent. Nothing more.
Then the article was misleading. One cannot patent a genetic code itself any more than one can patent a landscape. The genetic code is a simple transcription, and nothing more. The article was sensationalist.
When, oh when, will people realize that these patents are not covering genes???
The patents we're discussing cover some specific test methods which make use of genetic information. They don't own any part of the information itself, just one way it can be used.
THINK, people. The misconception around this issue is astounding, even for this crowd.
No one has ever patented a gene, but people have, like in this case, patented various tests and processes that are BASED on genes. These are completely different, the this misconception, while it does stir up attention, leads to people being completely misinformed about this issue.
Slashdot, of all places (well..) should know better than to continue leveraging hype off of this misconception. And from the looks of the other comments, people actually still think you CAN patent genes. You can't, anymore than I can patent a tree. Get with it.
Sorry, but I don't understand why people are advocating that a person's employer be liable for covering their medical expenses, due to a stroke of bad luck. It's your health at stake, and your responsibility. How dare you pass off this responsibility to your employer?
If anything, the insurance companies should be liable for the risk, and they should be the ones negotiating the policies with the employers and their employees. Insurance companies are in the business of selling risk, and can do so. A typical employer is not, and should not be liable for high costs of your medical bills.
It sickens me to hear of people who would simply pass their problems off to their employers, and demand that THEY be the ones responsible for your bad health.
Folks, take responsibility for your own well-being. If an employer does not want to hire you based on your high risk of undue expense, that's their right. Take it up with the insurance companies, who are really the ones dicating terms..
If it wasn't money coming out of my pocket paying for it, I would be curious to know more about Pluto.
NASA is merely fishing for additional attractive projects to justify its own existance. There is very little of real value to be obtained from a mission as this, and a there's a lot to lose.
Because after the initial thrill of "hacking" RC5 wears off, and they see something that's both more productive and interesting to do with their spare cycles, they'll switch over. Or they'll just stop wasting electricity and let their machine rest.
A few will probably stick around for a while, perhaps waiting patiently for the day they hit the lottery and win the $10,000 RC5 prize. Others will just continue out of habit. distributed.net probably won't lose ALL of their users, just most of them. They will also have difficulty attracting 'new blood', becuase there are alternatives which are more interesting to more people.
Just a prediction, based on what I see. Nothing wrong with that, and there's no need to get defensive. My personal choice is to not run any of that stuff; my main machine is a laptop.
The only references on the distributed.net page list esoteric mathematical papers - not one mention of a practical application. It sounds to me like distributed.net is desperate to do SOMETHING, so it simply picks a hard, but useless, mathematical novelty.
Why not just calculate pi to a zillion places? Or better yet, a still higher prime number (which IS actually useful)? Or render a raytrace movie?
They're going to lose their users very quickly unless they re-tool and start doing real work with those cycles.
I took a look at the current projects running from distributed.net, and couldn't find anything that appeared even marginally useful or interesting. Running brute-force hacks on encryption algorithms isn't much different than running a random number generator until your target value happens to appear. Both are equally useless.
At least SETI has a clear goal, and is a useful (and entertaining) pursuit which is naturally parallelizable. Other systems (PopularPower, etc.) also have useful things you can do with 'spare' cycles (at least if you're not the one paying the electric bill).
I fail to understand why anyone is advocating spending cycles on hunting for random numbers, a la distributed.net . Care to enlighten me?
The white LED's are not anywhere close to 1% of the output of a HPS or mercury vapor bulb. And I see no evidence or data that the LED's have any substantial increase in efficiency over the mercury vapor lamps for similar light output.
What Buchanan says is absolutely irrelevant, and may not be used to sway the judgement of a court. Buchanan doesn't 'own' those votes, and has no say in the matter!
The Democrats approved the ballot, and have no right to complain now. I think it is highly unlikely that they would be complaining if Gore was in the lead in Florida, don't you?
There's going to be quite a mess of dirty lawsuits filed by the likes of Jesse Jackson and others like him, who will do anything in their power, however unethical or illegal, to put their candidate in the white house.
As well, whichever candidate wins will be forever questioned and disrespected by about half the population.
While I'm sure this is buried within the fine print of MIcrosoft's EULA, do you think it is actually enforcable?
I would imagine that this could be interpreted as an excessive burden on the government or company involved, and, in fact, may violate the privacy of the organization.
If my office bought a bunch of chairs, how silly would it be to allow the manufacturer to demand an inventory of what we're using, and where? Why is it any different in software? While software is obviously easier to copy, the principle is the same. It's simply none of their business. If we refuse, what then? Are they going to break down the door? Obtain a search warrant?
I'd love to see this challenged in court. From the article, it doesn't sound likely in this case; the city will just bend over for them...
The majority of the hostility appears to be from Jon Katz himself; your post would be more accurately written as:
I think it's perfectly healthy and normal for Katz to disagree, even strongly, with his readers' opinions.. but some of the hostility toward his readers seen on/. goes far beyond "healthy and normal" disagreeing - Jon Katz seems to react incredibly emotionally and aggressively defensive, as if people are making some kind of attack on him or something...
"Some phrases should technically have had quotes around them." "Reading over this now I can see there is a paragraph that should have quotes from the Daily Breeze."
The original story that you submitted, while it looked like you provided the links, made no clear distinction between the original story and your own contributions. The burden of distinguishing between your writing and the original story should not be left to the reader - as the writer that is your responsibility and yours alone, and in that respect, you failed.
It may (we hope) have been an oversight, and perhaps you had no intention to mislead your audience, but this omission did, in fact, constitute plagiarism, and people had every right to openly accuse you and call for a correction.
An apology from you to your editors and readers, for failing to properly attribute sections of your writing, as well as to your accusers for immaturely lashing out, would be appropriate.
I'm a fan of art, and I very much enjoy visiting galleries to see people's creations.
HOWEVER, the government has no business demanding money from people to fund artistic endeavors. I am more than happy to pay for entrance to an art exhibit, and, if I have the financial means someday, I would consider sponsoring individual artists whose art I value.
But having the government literally point a gun to my head, and demand that I hand over money to fund artists in the mission of a 'promise of tomorrow' absolutely disgusts me, as do those people who attempt to convince us that it's the morally correct thing to do.
It's time to re-think those moral priorities, my friend. Would you steal to support art? Would you mug? No? Then why are you asking the government to?
There are several utilities available that do transparent, on-the-fly robust encryption. Put all your important files on an encrypted partition and you're good to go. Any stealing of the laptop would be inconsequential.
Why on EARTH did your CIO not do this?? Reminds me of that awful blunder by the Qualcomm exec. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
A patent affords the ultimate protection, I agree, but how on EARTH can you possibly argue that people don't have the right to make reverse-engineering difficult?
Patent battles, when they can be waged, are very expensive. While this is, of course, where you make your living, the rest of us aren't thrilled by this notion.
The author may have been loose when defining what 'theft' really was - people do steal designs outright, but face it - we have the right to protect our designs and make barriers to reverse-engineering. Otherwise, why not let the world look at all of your blueprints and files? It's patented, right?
We have every right (and responsibility to our employer) to take reasonable precautions against reverse-engineering. The article simply outlined various methods. I found it very informative.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't enjoyed a good old-fashioned proto-rational flame war since I stopped reading USENET. I'm delighted to see it has thoroughly made its way to slashdot.
Face it, dude, you are a troll. You're just after attention, and you've got it. We've all seen this behavior before.
(as I fan the flames... whee!)
a working (simple) quantum computer has already been built
I don't think so. There has not, to my knowledge, been a single experiment proving that quantum entanglement exists that didn't rely on fudged data. (Usually, they extrapolate based on probabilities of photon detection). All observed phenomena (we're talking about entanglement here) can be easily explained by local processes - instantaneous 'action at a distance' has never been shown definitively.
The amount of misconception and hype surrounding quantum computing is absolutely staggering. There is absolutely no experimental evidence or rational justification that QC will require zero energy, nor is there any evidence that QC will EVER be feasible for computation.
What does happen, in many of these cases (as cold fusion was to some degree) is that a LOT of physicists survive on grants gleefully awarded by unknowing foundations and governmental agencies (in other words, by money from you and me folks). Any questioning of QC is instantly stamped 'troll' and dismissed from journals - too many people rely on it for their livelihood. When one does manage to pin them down, even the physicists will argue for 'quantum magic' and mysticism! Puh-lease!
This came up a couple of times before in Slashdot, and there was a really interesting commentary by someone (Nightlight3) who seemed to know what they were talking about, and had some very rational reasons for why quantum computing won't happen. Read it here. It also contains links to other informative articles.
But, these fantasy stories certainly do draw readership.
Hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype!
Read the patent. This statement is misleading. They have no proprietary right to the gene in its basic form, only the specific application of genetic knowledge as described in the claims of the patent. Nothing more.
Then the article was misleading. One cannot patent a genetic code itself any more than one can patent a landscape. The genetic code is a simple transcription, and nothing more. The article was sensationalist.
When, oh when, will people realize that these patents are not covering genes???
The patents we're discussing cover some specific test methods which make use of genetic information. They don't own any part of the information itself, just one way it can be used.
THINK, people. The misconception around this issue is astounding, even for this crowd.
Did you Read The (F'n) Article??
The genes weren't patented. The test process was. The PTO has problems, yes, but allowing the patenting of genes is not one of them.
Repeat after me people:
GENES ARE NOT PATENTABLE
No one has ever patented a gene, but people have, like in this case, patented various tests and processes that are BASED on genes. These are completely different, the this misconception, while it does stir up attention, leads to people being completely misinformed about this issue.
Slashdot, of all places (well..) should know better than to continue leveraging hype off of this misconception. And from the looks of the other comments, people actually still think you CAN patent genes. You can't, anymore than I can patent a tree. Get with it.
Sorry, but I don't understand why people are advocating that a person's employer be liable for covering their medical expenses, due to a stroke of bad luck. It's your health at stake, and your responsibility. How dare you pass off this responsibility to your employer?
If anything, the insurance companies should be liable for the risk, and they should be the ones negotiating the policies with the employers and their employees. Insurance companies are in the business of selling risk, and can do so. A typical employer is not, and should not be liable for high costs of your medical bills.
It sickens me to hear of people who would simply pass their problems off to their employers, and demand that THEY be the ones responsible for your bad health.
Folks, take responsibility for your own well-being. If an employer does not want to hire you based on your high risk of undue expense, that's their right. Take it up with the insurance companies, who are really the ones dicating terms..
If it wasn't money coming out of my pocket paying for it, I would be curious to know more about Pluto.
NASA is merely fishing for additional attractive projects to justify its own existance. There is very little of real value to be obtained from a mission as this, and a there's a lot to lose.
Because after the initial thrill of "hacking" RC5 wears off, and they see something that's both more productive and interesting to do with their spare cycles, they'll switch over. Or they'll just stop wasting electricity and let their machine rest.
A few will probably stick around for a while, perhaps waiting patiently for the day they hit the lottery and win the $10,000 RC5 prize. Others will just continue out of habit. distributed.net probably won't lose ALL of their users, just most of them. They will also have difficulty attracting 'new blood', becuase there are alternatives which are more interesting to more people.
Just a prediction, based on what I see. Nothing wrong with that, and there's no need to get defensive. My personal choice is to not run any of that stuff; my main machine is a laptop.
What on earth for?
The only references on the distributed.net page list esoteric mathematical papers - not one mention of a practical application. It sounds to me like distributed.net is desperate to do SOMETHING, so it simply picks a hard, but useless, mathematical novelty.
Why not just calculate pi to a zillion places? Or better yet, a still higher prime number (which IS actually useful)? Or render a raytrace movie?
They're going to lose their users very quickly unless they re-tool and start doing real work with those cycles.
I took a look at the current projects running from distributed.net, and couldn't find anything that appeared even marginally useful or interesting. Running brute-force hacks on encryption algorithms isn't much different than running a random number generator until your target value happens to appear. Both are equally useless.
At least SETI has a clear goal, and is a useful (and entertaining) pursuit which is naturally parallelizable. Other systems (PopularPower, etc.) also have useful things you can do with 'spare' cycles (at least if you're not the one paying the electric bill).
I fail to understand why anyone is advocating spending cycles on hunting for random numbers, a la distributed.net . Care to enlighten me?
The white LED's are not anywhere close to 1% of the output of a HPS or mercury vapor bulb. And I see no evidence or data that the LED's have any substantial increase in efficiency over the mercury vapor lamps for similar light output.
What Buchanan says is absolutely irrelevant, and may not be used to sway the judgement of a court. Buchanan doesn't 'own' those votes, and has no say in the matter!
Absolutely.
The Democrats approved the ballot, and have no right to complain now. I think it is highly unlikely that they would be complaining if Gore was in the lead in Florida, don't you?
There's going to be quite a mess of dirty lawsuits filed by the likes of Jesse Jackson and others like him, who will do anything in their power, however unethical or illegal, to put their candidate in the white house.
As well, whichever candidate wins will be forever questioned and disrespected by about half the population.
I was looking forward to getting my updates from Drudge, but the website has been down all day. Anyone know the skinny?
Excellent comment. Would anyone on this board care at all if Linus wasn't involved? Absolutely not.
While I'm sure this is buried within the fine print of MIcrosoft's EULA, do you think it is actually enforcable?
I would imagine that this could be interpreted as an excessive burden on the government or company involved, and, in fact, may violate the privacy of the organization.
If my office bought a bunch of chairs, how silly would it be to allow the manufacturer to demand an inventory of what we're using, and where? Why is it any different in software? While software is obviously easier to copy, the principle is the same. It's simply none of their business. If we refuse, what then? Are they going to break down the door? Obtain a search warrant?
I'd love to see this challenged in court. From the article, it doesn't sound likely in this case; the city will just bend over for them...
The majority of the hostility appears to be from Jon Katz himself; your post would be more accurately written as:
.. but some of the hostility toward his readers seen on /. goes far beyond "healthy and normal" disagreeing - Jon Katz seems to react incredibly emotionally and aggressively defensive, as if people are making some kind of attack on him or something ...
I think it's perfectly healthy and normal for Katz to disagree, even strongly, with his readers' opinions
"Some phrases should technically have had quotes around them."
"Reading over this now I can see there is a paragraph that should have quotes from the Daily Breeze."
The original story that you submitted, while it looked like you provided the links, made no clear distinction between the original story and your own contributions. The burden of distinguishing between your writing and the original story should not be left to the reader - as the writer that is your responsibility and yours alone, and in that respect, you failed.
It may (we hope) have been an oversight, and perhaps you had no intention to mislead your audience, but this omission did, in fact, constitute plagiarism, and people had every right to openly accuse you and call for a correction.
An apology from you to your editors and readers, for failing to properly attribute sections of your writing, as well as to your accusers for immaturely lashing out, would be appropriate.
I'm sure you'll be much more careful next time.
I'm a fan of art, and I very much enjoy visiting galleries to see people's creations.
HOWEVER, the government has no business demanding money from people to fund artistic endeavors. I am more than happy to pay for entrance to an art exhibit, and, if I have the financial means someday, I would consider sponsoring individual artists whose art I value.
But having the government literally point a gun to my head, and demand that I hand over money to fund artists in the mission of a 'promise of tomorrow' absolutely disgusts me, as do those people who attempt to convince us that it's the morally correct thing to do.
It's time to re-think those moral priorities, my friend. Would you steal to support art? Would you mug? No? Then why are you asking the government to?
There are several utilities available that do transparent, on-the-fly robust encryption. Put all your important files on an encrypted partition and you're good to go. Any stealing of the laptop would be inconsequential.
Why on EARTH did your CIO not do this?? Reminds me of that awful blunder by the Qualcomm exec. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Must have been a tremendously slow news day. You're fading fast, slashdot.
A patent affords the ultimate protection, I agree, but how on EARTH can you possibly argue that people don't have the right to make reverse-engineering difficult?
Patent battles, when they can be waged, are very expensive. While this is, of course, where you make your living, the rest of us aren't thrilled by this notion.
The author may have been loose when defining what 'theft' really was - people do steal designs outright, but face it - we have the right to protect our designs and make barriers to reverse-engineering. Otherwise, why not let the world look at all of your blueprints and files? It's patented, right?
We have every right (and responsibility to our employer) to take reasonable precautions against reverse-engineering. The article simply outlined various methods. I found it very informative.