I would like to be as optimistic but history has shown us that, time and again, if the big players don't win in the first round they will go back, rewrite the rules, and try again.
AT&T couldn't shut down BSD because UC-Berkeley is a public institution in the US with lots of political muscle behind it.
From the tin-foil legal viewpoint I'm thinking about this angle: what gives any of us the right to publish any of our work under GPL? If we publish our work under GPL and someone else can show that they have intellectual property over it due to a preexisting patent can they demand that we cease distributing our GPL code?
If MS, SCO, and others can produce enough legal FUD to sway a judge, who isn't computer/software/technology savvy, into thinking that the GPL kernel violates prior art protected by preexisting copyrights on POSIX or licenses held by the The Open Group then we have a significant problem. This open news article questioning who is the "inventor of Linux" points straight in this direction.
At first reading I saw this as a deplorable move to sway public opinion against Linus, Linux, and other open source providers. After a few moments of thought, however, I see that this may be the forefront of a larger, even more deplorable, endeavor. Consider the following quote:
----- "The report," according to Gregory Fossedal, a Tocqueville senior fellow, "raises important questions...While you cannot group all open source programmers and programs together; many are rigorous and respectful of the intellectual property rights..." ----- Could this be a movement to undermine Linus' right to release Linux under GNU/GPL? Could this even be the beginning of legal research to undermine GNU/GPL itself?
If enough lawyers and businessmen can be swayed to believe that Linux itself is a product of UNIX then, though a convoluted interpretation of patent law and prior art, is it possible to invalidate GPL as it applies to programs written to conform to POSIX standards? Can the publishing rights for POSIX compliant programs then be assigned to the creators of the POSIX standards or the organizations that have implemented them first: ie. Bell Labs, AT&T, and UNIX?
Consider that MS didn't invent HTML, TCP, SMTP, or other common standardized protocols yet they seem to have an enormous amount of intellectual property assigned to them which prevents other people from producing software which competes with them in those arenas on the MS platform. I don't know the nature of the POSIX organization, where it's funded, or how cohesive it is with respect to legal and business support. However it does seem possible that malicious lawyers could argue that *NIX type operating systems, patented by corporate entities, are the first major implmentation of POSIX standards and that any products which come afterwards are an infringement of those intellectual property rights. This then leads to the arena of the status and age of the patents and how willing the original patent holders would be in funding the legal endeavor to pursue this track.
It sounds far-fetched but we all know that this similar roundabout claim of intellectual property has been pursued by SCO. With MS grasping for straws to slow the advance of Linux it could be a legal filibuster to sandtrap Linux. MS and their allies can afford enormous teams of lawyers that can turn out legal briefs by the thousands and the stories of their rapid acceleration of patent submission have also become popularly known. With enough patent filings and a popularly accepted, however untrue, argument about the nature and origin of Linux and its right to be distributed under GPL it might be their strategy to legally discourage organizations from adopting it.
With enough legal clout it is conceivable that, if the legal community could assign POSIX standards and *NIX operating systems as prior art preceding Linux, that they could force Linus to legally accept being bought out by the major operating system vendors who could choose to shelf it or turn its direction into nonproductive, bloating development.
The 100 mpg carburetor may be tin-foil but this situation is certainly real.
Consider this analogy: intellectual property is like a liquid beverage. It's everywhere and everyone has some. One day a large corporation patents lemonade. A week later a local company begins producing lemonade and giving it away for free charging only for the cost of distribution and the container (a cup, glass, mug, whatever). A month later the large corporation claims that its lemonade patent incorporates the property of any similar beverage based on lemons and sends a team of lawyers to shut down the local lemonade company. In this analogy software is a beverage. POSIX is a lemon based beverage. The large corporations would be those who made *NIX type operating systems and the local distributor would be Linux.
I have experienced, on many occasions, the burn of a scrutinous pedant seeking to demerit my efforts. In this particular case K. Brown is deliberately misunderstanding Linus' "invention of Linux". Linus has never claimed to be the father of open source nor has he ever claimed to be the father of the POSIX standards upon which *NIX-like operating systems are built. As Linux has achieved a mild popularity those in the public who are not familiar with the history of computing have begun to associate Linus with the invention of *NIX-like operating systems since they only know of one: Linux. They have associated Linus with the inception of open source software because they are ignorant of the origins of software and only know of one open source arena: Linux.
Linus is being attacked because of common perception built upon a basis of ignorance. This is a common tactic used to discredit and undermine support for anyone who stands at the forefront of a collection of ideas which challenges the established financially successful, and often monopolistic, "powers-that-be".
If this even bothers Linux, if he even takes more than a few moments out of his day to be concerned with it, then I can empathize with him. For his sake I hope he takes the higher road: ignore it and concentrate on what he does best.
Your articles adapt many of their models based upon a measured intensity at 750 nm (which is then scaled to 550 nm).
According to UW-Madison O2 has a significant absorption band conveniently located right around 750 nm.
Since the absorption band at 750, scaled to 550, and then extapolated to universally be respective of the entire spectrum, is saturated by oxygen absorption it's much easier to let arbitrarily assigned values in the equation (such as the Angstrom coefficient) to have a much greater impact in overstating the results.
I'll continue to google, and you can continue to live in your pompous world.
Ignoring a legitimate rebuttal because your feathers have been ruffled is, while common in the world, the cause of 99% of the bad science in the world.
So _that's_ how the administration managed to get a budget surplus. They ran the projected numbers for the next 100 years and then interpolated back to the present using a simple average.
If every sperm-egg combo produces a taxpayer, in 100 years we'll have a few kazillion taxpayers, making tax revenue per year a few bazillion dollars. Divide by 100 and that means that next year's projected tax revenue is [much more than what it really is].
That's how the dot-com boom was created, wasn't it? Potential customers? Projected sales?
I'm not so certain that there's ever really a good reason to fight. Consider the examples from the African or Asian continents. Are these people just bored or what's going on here? Fighting over which tribe? Fighting over which race? Fighting over religion?
Honestly I think that all wars stem from love. Two people want to get married, their parents are embittered because they're not marrying the person that the _parents_ had in mind, and then the parents start to concoct excuses for why the marriage is bad (different tribe, different race, different religion, etc.). If the parents sit in sufficiently high positions of social or political influence, or if their social network is sufficiently gullible, then a coordinated aggression can be initiated. This may escalate into a war.
I'm not so sure that the European example is any different. The history books may write wars up as products of religious differences or resource disputes but I think it boils down to two things: love and greed.
We've sure been hit with an overdose of crap science lately.
First the earth is going through global warming. Then the earth is going through reduced solar irradiation. Then all the crops are going to fail because aerosols are blocking all the light. Now we have parallel universes from red photons?
Get out from behind that AC curtain and I'll calibrate you! Whether or not its done correctly will be a difference in opinion. You probably won't enjoy it.
You post two links to give yourself credit as if they were two separate citations? They're both the same you nimwit. Additionally, the researchers in this citation don't use a black plate under a glass dome but are actually recording magnitudes at particular wavelengths.
As long as you're on a high horse, though, allow me to bring you down:
First, searching the article for the character string "assum" returned 20 hits from "assume" "assumed" and "assumption". There were 22 hits for "estim"ate/d. I don't really need to say any more but I will.
From the article which you reference:
----- The model-estimated optical depths are significantly smaller than those derived from observations, perhaps because of errors in one or both sets of optical depths or because the data from the meteorological stations has been affected by local pollution. ----- Uh-huh. Otherwise stated as,"The data which we've collected doesn't quite fit our doom and gloom model but this is probably because the doom and gloom model has affected the data which we collected." That's a great way to start out.
----- Collectively, these calculations suggest that regional haze in China is currently depressing optimal yields of Ö70% of the crops grown in China by at least 5C30% ----- Do we have any real production numbers to back this up or are they just talking out their backsides? There's no reference number on this.
----- Values for ta are usually reported for ¦Ë = 550 nm. Extrapolation of this value to other wavelengths is often made by using an empirically derived parameter, a, referred to as the Angstrom exponent ----- They measure at ONE WAVELENGTH and then extrapolate that model for the entire spectrum? That's good? I'm suspicious that 550 nm is a wavelength which is absorbed and reemitted through an intersystem crossing and phosphorescence mechanism. That'll maximize the doom and gloom.
----- Total Ozone Measurement Satellite (TOMS) Version 7. Zhou et al. (23) reported tas for a wavelength of 750 nm. In Fig. 2, we have scaled these values to a wavelength of 550 nm (which is a more conventional wavelength for reporting ta), assuming an Angstrom exponent of 1 ----- Someone else reports data at 750 nm. You don't like that data so you SCALE it to 550 nm based upon some model where you can arbitrarily feed in one of the significant values in order to massage the data. Does that really sound scientific? It sounds more like stock market and political fraud.
----- The solar spectrum from 200 nm to 4 ¦Ìm (i.e., the wavelengths that encompass Ö99% of the total solar irradiance reaching the top of the atmosphere) was divided into 15 bands ----- Too bad it's under the heading "Calculations of Is Over China. To estimate the direct effect of the aerosol loadings discussed above on solar radiation, a broad-band, one-dimensional radiative transfer model (49) was used to calculate..."
----- The calculations were made by using July-averaged tas and July 15 solar zenith angles appropriate for each location ----- More calculation...
----- We have chosen summertime conditions because, although not shown here, the discrepancies between model-estimated and measurement-based tas tended to be smallest during July ----- Seemingly the model only works when the signal strength is at its highest. At any other point in the year the model doesn't jack when inferring the total solar irradiance.
So tell me again how this has any real scientific merit when held under a close eye of scrutiny? Data? Yes. Calculations? Yes. Models? Yes. Good work? Yes. Nice presentation? Yes. Worthy of further _academic_ research funding? Sure.
Worth any more than an amusing chuckle over a cup of coffee? No.
Re:Because I'm too lazy to look it up...
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More on Global Dimming
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· Score: 1, Insightful
----- The measuring instrument, a radiometer, is simple, a black plate under a glass dome. Like asphalt in summer, the black plate turns hot as it absorbs the sun's energy. Its temperature tells the amount of sunlight that has shone on it. ----- It's not really that simple. The nature of the black plate will change how the temperature is affected. Temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy. The profile of (vs wavelength) and magnitude of the energy which is absorbed, dispersed, and reemitted will change depending upon the composition of the metal or ceramic of the plate and the nature of the coating material which makes it black.
Consider several black objects underneath a glass dome: a block of obsidian, a block of slate (as in blackboard slate), a stainless steel plate painted black, a badly tarnished silver plate, a lump of charcoal, or crushed up charcoal suspended in an epoxy resin over a stainless steel plate.
I can't begin to rank and categorize the profiles of the above objects but to illustrate the principle try the following: on a hot summer day leave a piece of charcoal out in the sun and then pick it up. On the same day place your hand on the black asphalt of a freshly laid blacktop highway. Paint a stainless steel plate in glossy black and in flat black and feel both on the same hot day.
Even if they are still using the _exact_ same radiometer today that they were using 50 years ago its absorption and reemission profile will have changed unless they've kept the glass dome sealed and either evacuated or filled with some inert gas. Even at that level there could be a change in absorptive and emissive properties from surface phenomenon.
On top of all of that there's also the cooling rate of the glass dome. On humid days the water in the air will carry kinetic energy away from the glass more quickly and could cause the interior temperature to be lower than on dry days.
It's all a crapshoot. I don't buy the doom and gloom.
----- because Linux-desktop is all over the map and has been for years ----- Quit whining about desktops.
What are Gnome, KDE, or any other desktop environment? It's just a collection of toolbars, icons, buttons, and window dressing. It's just like MagicWorkbench on the Amiga. MWB was neat and cool but, in the end, it was just a collection of backdrops, color schemes, a toolbar, and icons that worked well together.
What do you really want on your desktop? If you want fast access to installed programs just about any WM will offer a right-click menu. If you want a backdrop just about any WM will offer it. If you want neat icons you can install the packages. What do you need a 2.5 mb window manager for?
Keep it simple. Keep it fast. Keep it efficient. UDE!
My XChat, Mozilla, gRip, Gimp, etc. etc. etc. look just as pretty as yours and I don't have to worry about the impending doom of a fledgling registry (gconf and whatever KDEs equivalent is) eventually evolving into the next spawn of Satan.
I believe in a more tin-foil approach. I believe that they have a whole team of statisticians and accountants figuring out how much money needs to be pushed through loopholes and secondary contracts in order to feed pet projects and pet industries controlled by the people in charge of administering the rate hikes.
----- In the business world this sort of action is like more "leveling the playing field," than a "bate and switch" This is common business (and political) practices ----- This isn't levelling the playing field. That would imply that the playing field was ever tipped in the favor of the consumer. This is more like increasing the grade. Your other comments about startup subsidy are right on target.
My issue is that the common business (and political) practice is not to subsidize and then level the playing field. The common practice is to bait the consumer with the lowest grade and then increase the grade at will.
We're still getting worked over by the "bait and switch".
I think that the big investors on Wall Street are still trying to figure out how to make money off of free distribution and open source software. The Apple iTunes store was their experiment in bending to the will of internet distribution. It was mildly successful and so many of them are betting it'll be their next.com boom--online music retailers.
If 100 of the biggest Wall Street bankers go and loan shark out to some online music retailers, however, they need a way to ensure that people will go to those retailers. Why would anyone leave Apple if it provides the best service? Instead, they influence _someone_ (who?) to push for rate hikes on iTunes to sweep customers off to the other online music retailers with special deals, introductory offers, etc.
Makes perfect business sense from a top down view.
----- They are forbidden by law to collect more than they need and all propsed rate hikes have to go through a long, tedious review process to make sure they're not ----- I believe that's how the process is written to work but I don't believe for a second that it's not being manipulated.
In '91 postage rates were raised $0.07. This money was funnelled through the accounting books to make 401(k)s look appealing by priming the pump. In '95 postage rates took on another $0.03 to keep the cart rolling. In '99 and '01 they took another $0.01 each to keep the pathways open while the politicians and business heads emptied the cash from the stock market. In '02 rates took another $0.03 to help Greenspan's recovery predictions. IIRC, '02 was also the year that some politicians wanted to invest social security funds in a failing stock market. This was also most likely a move to line their own pockets.
On topic: iTunes. Rate hikes. Hmmmm.
How about this: Major media executives can all afford an online music store startup. Face it, they have the capital for the servers and the cables and the support and billing. They want Apple to push customers away from iTunes so that everyone can get a "slice of the pie" with their own online music store startups.
It makes perfect business sense. Why should Apple get all the customers?
I think the larger part of the problem is the power given to the Windows registry.
Say I purposely install Spyware on my Debian system. I look at the process list and see "gTkSpYwArE", so I kill the app, find out where it started, and I'm done. The app isn't coming back.
Say I purposely install Spyware on my Windows system. I look at the process list and see "WinSpyware", so I kill the app, find out where it was started from, and I'm done. Except that the WinSpyware has polluted the Windows registry with a million different ways to have itself started has added a billion new registry keys which cause other programs to take on different behavior and may even cause them to become vectors for new spyware.
We may be Windows-bashers but, all in all, MS created a large portion of the problem by legally buying the right for an EULA to expunge the software maker of any liability for a quality product. MS also created a large portion of the problem by including so much power in the registry.
When Gnome and KDE begin to assume more control of the Linux world and they start their integration apps and desktop apps and registry apps... then Linux will have the same problem. Happily I don't depend on a desktop environment to spoonfeed me. Spyware is bugs on the spoon.
----- Anyway that misses the point. I don't see why the FBI etc are busy throwing silly kids into jail but letting this spyware people get away with their crap ----- I agree. It's not about enforcing the spirit of the law. It's about manipulating the letter of the law to keep the moneybags happy.
----- If the spyware people can do what they do just because of some stupid "agreement" then the worm makers could do the same thing ----- The precedent was set by MS in '95 when they released a beta edition of Windows to the general public. Their EULA was the umbrella which allowed them to escape any liability. The US has been building unethical businesses on top of a flawed foundation ever since.
If MS could've gotten tanked over the Win95 debacle we never would've seen the.com boom. We also never would've seen the.com bust. We also would have preserved at least a measure of internet integrity.
If it doesn't make sense then you're thinking in a progressive, logical fashion. Switch to a thought pattern of "follow the money" and everything will make perfect sense.
----- then your perfectly safe ----- "Perfectly" might be optimistic but I'd settle for "reasonably". I have suspicions that Mozilla has a few exploitable code faults as well, especially if coupled with Javascript, JVM, PHP, Flash, etc.
It's been a common thread for MS to build large platforms based upon common ideas and then encourage some higher authority to bequeath all ownership to them. It may be anticompetitive but it's the way to make money. It's easy enough for the lawyers to haggle over the legal details.
I see it like this: a bunch of brainiacs get together and come up with the YTTR standard for the good of the computing world. MS throws a thousand programmers at writing applications which expand on the YTTR standard and add new features. The MS effort also, if it can, usurps control of the YTTR standard from the brainiacs who simply can't afford the time and money to keep up in the race. MS then patents the applications based on the features and includes the YTTR standard by reference. Three years down the road, when someone else attempts to build a competing application based on the YTTR standard, MS can sue for infringement of IP.
Is that not at least part of how Netscape was harassed to death? Maybe the IP lawsuits themselves didn't kill NS but the added strain took away from productive development.
The entertainment industry did it with DeCSS. They own a patent on a particular form of encryption not on encryption itself. Using that patent as a basis they were able to harass others who were developing competing encryption algorithms.
I'm positive that if Fruehofer had a big enough legal team he would've attempted similar maneuvers against competing mp3 encoders (hasn't he already?) and possibly Ogg/Vorbis.
----- Get a virus scanner, making sure it's updated as fast as possible ----- Autoupdate features are just as likely to provide a route of entry.
----- Get a firewall, a hardware one preferably but a software one is better than nothing ----- Hardware firewalls are pretty nice. They suck if someone ever does figure out a hardware exploit. Software firewalls can give a false sense of security unless it's iptables--You just have to learn something of the way connections are made and tracked to use it. I'm not saying that ZA and Norton and the others are worthless but, in order to be usable by a typical customer, they're not very secure. It'd be easy for a virus to tell the firewall "hey! I'm telnet.exe. Give me an outgoing port and an incoming port!" Most firewalls, on Windows, automagically scan the machine for potential network apps to minimize headaches for the user. Compound that with all the apps that want autoupdate or network play. So many potential holes.
----- Install a spyware scanner ----- I agree in principle. Something in the back of my head makes me think about radar companies and radar detectors. They're all owned by the same people who have patents on the same technology.
----- even if you have to unroll the occasional unstable patch ----- This is why I distrust the Windows registry. How can one guarantee that it doesn't leave reg keys behind which may open possibilities for future exploits? On my *nix, if I kill an app, I know that it hasn't left junk around which may compromise the function of other things. As Mozilla, Gnome, and KDE get larger, though, this will soon become a problem for Linux as well.
Untrusted, invisible code on webpages does have the ability to open holes in any firewall as most users let the firewall autoconfigure for common apps like web browsers. I also wouldn't be too surprised if virus/trojan writers have figured out a way to implement a modified port forwarding which circumvents the holier-than-holy 7 layer model of networking. Any port, even port 80, can be hazardous if there's some webapp which has made itself resident for as long as your web browser is open.
With web browsers becoming entire OS environments on their own I look forward to the next slew of relays and trojans which filter and pass packets from inside the web browser. Call it a "wrapper" around the interior machinery of the web browser.
"Hmmmm... packets on port 80 through the firewall. One for me, one for the legitimate user. One for me, one for the legitimate user."
Does anyone else but me lose faith in an organization (McAfee) which makes use of an advertising window which places itself off-screen? Aren't these guys supposed to be helping the user to prevent cheap tricks that result in compromised machines? http://us.mcafee.com/root/ExitCampaign.asp?Clien tD ate=5/4/2004&ClientTime=10:19:55
----- First, it's not to save one child. Hundreds of millions of children are exploited for sexual purposes every year. ----- There's a quantum logic that says that you'll find anything if you look for it hard enough. Would you mind stating, for the jury, why you're obsessed with child pornography? We have hundreds of witnesses waiting in the wings who will attest to never having viewed child pornography nor have they participated in the abduction of children for exploitative purposes. How is it that you're surrounded by this filth?
----- Second, there is no "Freedom to Download Movies" to be infringed ----- On this you are correct. I propose the following solution: 1> Make all filesharing punishable by death. Let's quit dinkering around with this crap. 2> Give the media companies a full, unchallengeable, government enforced monopoly and see just how truly fair priced they are. 3> Watch CD and DVD prices double, triple, or quadruple within five years of establishing the monopoly. 4> Watch as media conglomerates starting sponsoring prisons just as often as they sponsor baseball parks. 5> Profit from prosecuting every poor shmoe that can't afford their overpriced crap. 6> Watch civilization degenerate.
God I wish you people would start thinking a little more than five minutes into the future. Pharmaceutical companies jack prices and every single Prozac-head in the nation cries foul but when media companies start throwing around RIAA/MPAA pronouncements you all bow down like your HMO threatened to cut off your fix.
1> Copyright laws are strictly enforced by death 2> The public is cowed into submission 3> Media companies invest in prisons 4> Media companies raise DVD and CD prices to around $200/ea. 5> Rich people can afford to pay. 6> Media companies profit by sending poor 12-yr olds to prison and by charging $200/copy. 7> Rich people get an ego boost by having their neighbors come cowering to them to borrow the latest DVD for their underfed children to watch. 8> Rich people get a second ego boost by laughing, saying,"NO YOU WRETCHED UNDERPAID FILTH!", and slamming the door. 9> Poor people eventually revolt. 10> Rich people use WMDs to wipe out the poor people. 11> Rich people begin to partition themselves into a new set of rich and powerful, poor and exploited. 12> Repeat.
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I would like to be as optimistic but history has shown us that, time and again, if the big players don't win in the first round they will go back, rewrite the rules, and try again.
AT&T couldn't shut down BSD because UC-Berkeley is a public institution in the US with lots of political muscle behind it.
From the tin-foil legal viewpoint I'm thinking about this angle: what gives any of us the right to publish any of our work under GPL? If we publish our work under GPL and someone else can show that they have intellectual property over it due to a preexisting patent can they demand that we cease distributing our GPL code?
If MS, SCO, and others can produce enough legal FUD to sway a judge, who isn't computer/software/technology savvy, into thinking that the GPL kernel violates prior art protected by preexisting copyrights on POSIX or licenses held by the The Open Group then we have a significant problem. This open news article questioning who is the "inventor of Linux" points straight in this direction.
Just tin-foil...
At first reading I saw this as a deplorable move to sway public opinion against Linus, Linux, and other open source providers. After a few moments of thought, however, I see that this may be the forefront of a larger, even more deplorable, endeavor. Consider the following quote:
-----
"The report," according to Gregory Fossedal, a Tocqueville senior fellow, "raises important questions...While you cannot group all open source programmers and programs together; many are rigorous and respectful of the intellectual property rights..."
-----
Could this be a movement to undermine Linus' right to release Linux under GNU/GPL? Could this even be the beginning of legal research to undermine GNU/GPL itself?
If enough lawyers and businessmen can be swayed to believe that Linux itself is a product of UNIX then, though a convoluted interpretation of patent law and prior art, is it possible to invalidate GPL as it applies to programs written to conform to POSIX standards? Can the publishing rights for POSIX compliant programs then be assigned to the creators of the POSIX standards or the organizations that have implemented them first: ie. Bell Labs, AT&T, and UNIX?
Consider that MS didn't invent HTML, TCP, SMTP, or other common standardized protocols yet they seem to have an enormous amount of intellectual property assigned to them which prevents other people from producing software which competes with them in those arenas on the MS platform. I don't know the nature of the POSIX organization, where it's funded, or how cohesive it is with respect to legal and business support. However it does seem possible that malicious lawyers could argue that *NIX type operating systems, patented by corporate entities, are the first major implmentation of POSIX standards and that any products which come afterwards are an infringement of those intellectual property rights. This then leads to the arena of the status and age of the patents and how willing the original patent holders would be in funding the legal endeavor to pursue this track.
It sounds far-fetched but we all know that this similar roundabout claim of intellectual property has been pursued by SCO. With MS grasping for straws to slow the advance of Linux it could be a legal filibuster to sandtrap Linux. MS and their allies can afford enormous teams of lawyers that can turn out legal briefs by the thousands and the stories of their rapid acceleration of patent submission have also become popularly known. With enough patent filings and a popularly accepted, however untrue, argument about the nature and origin of Linux and its right to be distributed under GPL it might be their strategy to legally discourage organizations from adopting it.
With enough legal clout it is conceivable that, if the legal community could assign POSIX standards and *NIX operating systems as prior art preceding Linux, that they could force Linus to legally accept being bought out by the major operating system vendors who could choose to shelf it or turn its direction into nonproductive, bloating development.
The 100 mpg carburetor may be tin-foil but this situation is certainly real.
Consider this analogy: intellectual property is like a liquid beverage. It's everywhere and everyone has some. One day a large corporation patents lemonade. A week later a local company begins producing lemonade and giving it away for free charging only for the cost of distribution and the container (a cup, glass, mug, whatever). A month later the large corporation claims that its lemonade patent incorporates the property of any similar beverage based on lemons and sends a team of lawyers to shut down the local lemonade company. In this analogy software is a beverage. POSIX is a lemon based beverage. The large corporations would be those who made *NIX type operating systems and the local distributor would be Linux.
I have experienced, on many occasions, the burn of a scrutinous pedant seeking to demerit my efforts. In this particular case K. Brown is deliberately misunderstanding Linus' "invention of Linux". Linus has never claimed to be the father of open source nor has he ever claimed to be the father of the POSIX standards upon which *NIX-like operating systems are built. As Linux has achieved a mild popularity those in the public who are not familiar with the history of computing have begun to associate Linus with the invention of *NIX-like operating systems since they only know of one: Linux. They have associated Linus with the inception of open source software because they are ignorant of the origins of software and only know of one open source arena: Linux.
Linus is being attacked because of common perception built upon a basis of ignorance. This is a common tactic used to discredit and undermine support for anyone who stands at the forefront of a collection of ideas which challenges the established financially successful, and often monopolistic, "powers-that-be".
If this even bothers Linux, if he even takes more than a few moments out of his day to be concerned with it, then I can empathize with him. For his sake I hope he takes the higher road: ignore it and concentrate on what he does best.
Your articles adapt many of their models based upon a measured intensity at 750 nm (which is then scaled to 550 nm).
According to UW-Madison O2 has a significant absorption band conveniently located right around 750 nm.
Since the absorption band at 750, scaled to 550, and then extapolated to universally be respective of the entire spectrum, is saturated by oxygen absorption it's much easier to let arbitrarily assigned values in the equation (such as the Angstrom coefficient) to have a much greater impact in overstating the results.
I'll continue to google, and you can continue to live in your pompous world.
Ignoring a legitimate rebuttal because your feathers have been ruffled is, while common in the world, the cause of 99% of the bad science in the world.
Potential taxpayer?
So _that's_ how the administration managed to get a budget surplus. They ran the projected numbers for the next 100 years and then interpolated back to the present using a simple average.
If every sperm-egg combo produces a taxpayer, in 100 years we'll have a few kazillion taxpayers, making tax revenue per year a few bazillion dollars. Divide by 100 and that means that next year's projected tax revenue is [much more than what it really is].
That's how the dot-com boom was created, wasn't it? Potential customers? Projected sales?
Gah... I'd quit being bitter if I got laid.
I'm not so certain that there's ever really a good reason to fight. Consider the examples from the African or Asian continents. Are these people just bored or what's going on here? Fighting over which tribe? Fighting over which race? Fighting over religion?
Honestly I think that all wars stem from love. Two people want to get married, their parents are embittered because they're not marrying the person that the _parents_ had in mind, and then the parents start to concoct excuses for why the marriage is bad (different tribe, different race, different religion, etc.). If the parents sit in sufficiently high positions of social or political influence, or if their social network is sufficiently gullible, then a coordinated aggression can be initiated. This may escalate into a war.
I'm not so sure that the European example is any different. The history books may write wars up as products of religious differences or resource disputes but I think it boils down to two things: love and greed.
We've sure been hit with an overdose of crap science lately.
First the earth is going through global warming.
Then the earth is going through reduced solar irradiation.
Then all the crops are going to fail because aerosols are blocking all the light.
Now we have parallel universes from red photons?
I'm going back to the real world.
Get out from behind that AC curtain and I'll calibrate you! Whether or not its done correctly will be a difference in opinion. You probably won't enjoy it.
You post two links to give yourself credit as if they were two separate citations? They're both the same you nimwit. Additionally, the researchers in this citation don't use a black plate under a glass dome but are actually recording magnitudes at particular wavelengths.
As long as you're on a high horse, though, allow me to bring you down:
First, searching the article for the character string "assum" returned 20 hits from "assume" "assumed" and "assumption". There were 22 hits for "estim"ate/d. I don't really need to say any more but I will.
From the article which you reference:
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The model-estimated optical depths are significantly smaller than those derived from observations, perhaps because of errors in one or both sets of optical depths or because the data from the meteorological stations has been affected by local pollution.
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Uh-huh. Otherwise stated as,"The data which we've collected doesn't quite fit our doom and gloom model but this is probably because the doom and gloom model has affected the data which we collected." That's a great way to start out.
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Collectively, these calculations suggest that regional haze in China is currently depressing optimal yields of Ö70% of the crops grown in China by at least 5C30%
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Do we have any real production numbers to back this up or are they just talking out their backsides? There's no reference number on this.
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Values for ta are usually reported for ¦Ë = 550 nm. Extrapolation of this value to other wavelengths is often made by using an empirically derived parameter, a, referred to as the Angstrom exponent
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They measure at ONE WAVELENGTH and then extrapolate that model for the entire spectrum? That's good? I'm suspicious that 550 nm is a wavelength which is absorbed and reemitted through an intersystem crossing and phosphorescence mechanism. That'll maximize the doom and gloom.
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Total Ozone Measurement Satellite (TOMS) Version 7. Zhou et al. (23) reported tas for a wavelength of 750 nm. In Fig. 2, we have scaled these values to a wavelength of 550 nm (which is a more conventional wavelength for reporting ta), assuming an Angstrom exponent of 1
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Someone else reports data at 750 nm. You don't like that data so you SCALE it to 550 nm based upon some model where you can arbitrarily feed in one of the significant values in order to massage the data. Does that really sound scientific? It sounds more like stock market and political fraud.
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The solar spectrum from 200 nm to 4 ¦Ìm (i.e., the wavelengths that encompass Ö99% of the total solar irradiance reaching the top of the atmosphere) was divided into 15 bands
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Too bad it's under the heading "Calculations of Is Over China. To estimate the direct effect of the aerosol loadings discussed above on solar radiation, a broad-band, one-dimensional radiative transfer model (49) was used to calculate..."
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The calculations were made by using July-averaged tas and July 15 solar zenith angles appropriate for each location
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More calculation...
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We have chosen summertime conditions because, although not shown here, the discrepancies between model-estimated and measurement-based tas tended to be smallest during July
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Seemingly the model only works when the signal strength is at its highest. At any other point in the year the model doesn't jack when inferring the total solar irradiance.
So tell me again how this has any real scientific merit when held under a close eye of scrutiny? Data? Yes. Calculations? Yes. Models? Yes. Good work? Yes. Nice presentation? Yes. Worthy of further _academic_ research funding? Sure.
Worth any more than an amusing chuckle over a cup of coffee? No.
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The measuring instrument, a radiometer, is simple, a black plate under a glass dome. Like asphalt in summer, the black plate turns hot as it absorbs the sun's energy. Its temperature tells the amount of sunlight that has shone on it.
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It's not really that simple. The nature of the black plate will change how the temperature is affected. Temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy. The profile of (vs wavelength) and magnitude of the energy which is absorbed, dispersed, and reemitted will change depending upon the composition of the metal or ceramic of the plate and the nature of the coating material which makes it black.
Consider several black objects underneath a glass dome: a block of obsidian, a block of slate (as in blackboard slate), a stainless steel plate painted black, a badly tarnished silver plate, a lump of charcoal, or crushed up charcoal suspended in an epoxy resin over a stainless steel plate.
I can't begin to rank and categorize the profiles of the above objects but to illustrate the principle try the following: on a hot summer day leave a piece of charcoal out in the sun and then pick it up. On the same day place your hand on the black asphalt of a freshly laid blacktop highway. Paint a stainless steel plate in glossy black and in flat black and feel both on the same hot day.
Even if they are still using the _exact_ same radiometer today that they were using 50 years ago its absorption and reemission profile will have changed unless they've kept the glass dome sealed and either evacuated or filled with some inert gas. Even at that level there could be a change in absorptive and emissive properties from surface phenomenon.
On top of all of that there's also the cooling rate of the glass dome. On humid days the water in the air will carry kinetic energy away from the glass more quickly and could cause the interior temperature to be lower than on dry days.
It's all a crapshoot. I don't buy the doom and gloom.
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because Linux-desktop is all over the map and has been for years
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Quit whining about desktops.
What are Gnome, KDE, or any other desktop environment? It's just a collection of toolbars, icons, buttons, and window dressing. It's just like MagicWorkbench on the Amiga. MWB was neat and cool but, in the end, it was just a collection of backdrops, color schemes, a toolbar, and icons that worked well together.
What do you really want on your desktop? If you want fast access to installed programs just about any WM will offer a right-click menu. If you want a backdrop just about any WM will offer it. If you want neat icons you can install the packages. What do you need a 2.5 mb window manager for?
Keep it simple. Keep it fast. Keep it efficient. UDE!
My XChat, Mozilla, gRip, Gimp, etc. etc. etc. look just as pretty as yours and I don't have to worry about the impending doom of a fledgling registry (gconf and whatever KDEs equivalent is) eventually evolving into the next spawn of Satan.
I believe in a more tin-foil approach. I believe that they have a whole team of statisticians and accountants figuring out how much money needs to be pushed through loopholes and secondary contracts in order to feed pet projects and pet industries controlled by the people in charge of administering the rate hikes.
Call me cynical...
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In the business world this sort of action is like more "leveling the playing field," than a "bate and switch"
This is common business (and political) practices
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This isn't levelling the playing field. That would imply that the playing field was ever tipped in the favor of the consumer. This is more like increasing the grade. Your other comments about startup subsidy are right on target.
My issue is that the common business (and political) practice is not to subsidize and then level the playing field. The common practice is to bait the consumer with the lowest grade and then increase the grade at will.
We're still getting worked over by the "bait and switch".
I think that the big investors on Wall Street are still trying to figure out how to make money off of free distribution and open source software. The Apple iTunes store was their experiment in bending to the will of internet distribution. It was mildly successful and so many of them are betting it'll be their next .com boom--online music retailers.
If 100 of the biggest Wall Street bankers go and loan shark out to some online music retailers, however, they need a way to ensure that people will go to those retailers. Why would anyone leave Apple if it provides the best service? Instead, they influence _someone_ (who?) to push for rate hikes on iTunes to sweep customers off to the other online music retailers with special deals, introductory offers, etc.
Makes perfect business sense from a top down view.
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They are forbidden by law to collect more than they need and all propsed rate hikes have to go through a long, tedious review process to make sure they're not
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I believe that's how the process is written to work but I don't believe for a second that it's not being manipulated.
Look at rate history. Here's my tin foil:
In '91 postage rates were raised $0.07. This money was funnelled through the accounting books to make 401(k)s look appealing by priming the pump. In '95 postage rates took on another $0.03 to keep the cart rolling. In '99 and '01 they took another $0.01 each to keep the pathways open while the politicians and business heads emptied the cash from the stock market. In '02 rates took another $0.03 to help Greenspan's recovery predictions. IIRC, '02 was also the year that some politicians wanted to invest social security funds in a failing stock market. This was also most likely a move to line their own pockets.
On topic: iTunes. Rate hikes. Hmmmm.
How about this: Major media executives can all afford an online music store startup. Face it, they have the capital for the servers and the cables and the support and billing. They want Apple to push customers away from iTunes so that everyone can get a "slice of the pie" with their own online music store startups.
It makes perfect business sense. Why should Apple get all the customers?
I think the larger part of the problem is the power given to the Windows registry.
Say I purposely install Spyware on my Debian system. I look at the process list and see "gTkSpYwArE", so I kill the app, find out where it started, and I'm done. The app isn't coming back.
Say I purposely install Spyware on my Windows system. I look at the process list and see "WinSpyware", so I kill the app, find out where it was started from, and I'm done. Except that the WinSpyware has polluted the Windows registry with a million different ways to have itself started has added a billion new registry keys which cause other programs to take on different behavior and may even cause them to become vectors for new spyware.
We may be Windows-bashers but, all in all, MS created a large portion of the problem by legally buying the right for an EULA to expunge the software maker of any liability for a quality product. MS also created a large portion of the problem by including so much power in the registry.
When Gnome and KDE begin to assume more control of the Linux world and they start their integration apps and desktop apps and registry apps... then Linux will have the same problem. Happily I don't depend on a desktop environment to spoonfeed me. Spyware is bugs on the spoon.
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.com boom. We also never would've seen the .com bust. We also would have preserved at least a measure of internet integrity.
Anyway that misses the point. I don't see why the FBI etc are busy throwing silly kids into jail but letting this spyware people get away with their crap
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I agree. It's not about enforcing the spirit of the law. It's about manipulating the letter of the law to keep the moneybags happy.
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If the spyware people can do what they do just because of some stupid "agreement" then the worm makers could do the same thing
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The precedent was set by MS in '95 when they released a beta edition of Windows to the general public. Their EULA was the umbrella which allowed them to escape any liability. The US has been building unethical businesses on top of a flawed foundation ever since.
If MS could've gotten tanked over the Win95 debacle we never would've seen the
If it doesn't make sense then you're thinking in a progressive, logical fashion. Switch to a thought pattern of "follow the money" and everything will make perfect sense.
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then your perfectly safe
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"Perfectly" might be optimistic but I'd settle for "reasonably". I have suspicions that Mozilla has a few exploitable code faults as well, especially if coupled with Javascript, JVM, PHP, Flash, etc.
It's been a common thread for MS to build large platforms based upon common ideas and then encourage some higher authority to bequeath all ownership to them. It may be anticompetitive but it's the way to make money. It's easy enough for the lawyers to haggle over the legal details.
I see it like this: a bunch of brainiacs get together and come up with the YTTR standard for the good of the computing world. MS throws a thousand programmers at writing applications which expand on the YTTR standard and add new features. The MS effort also, if it can, usurps control of the YTTR standard from the brainiacs who simply can't afford the time and money to keep up in the race. MS then patents the applications based on the features and includes the YTTR standard by reference. Three years down the road, when someone else attempts to build a competing application based on the YTTR standard, MS can sue for infringement of IP.
Is that not at least part of how Netscape was harassed to death? Maybe the IP lawsuits themselves didn't kill NS but the added strain took away from productive development.
The entertainment industry did it with DeCSS. They own a patent on a particular form of encryption not on encryption itself. Using that patent as a basis they were able to harass others who were developing competing encryption algorithms.
I'm positive that if Fruehofer had a big enough legal team he would've attempted similar maneuvers against competing mp3 encoders (hasn't he already?) and possibly Ogg/Vorbis.
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Get a virus scanner, making sure it's updated as fast as possible
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Autoupdate features are just as likely to provide a route of entry.
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Get a firewall, a hardware one preferably but a software one is better than nothing
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Hardware firewalls are pretty nice. They suck if someone ever does figure out a hardware exploit. Software firewalls can give a false sense of security unless it's iptables--You just have to learn something of the way connections are made and tracked to use it. I'm not saying that ZA and Norton and the others are worthless but, in order to be usable by a typical customer, they're not very secure. It'd be easy for a virus to tell the firewall "hey! I'm telnet.exe. Give me an outgoing port and an incoming port!" Most firewalls, on Windows, automagically scan the machine for potential network apps to minimize headaches for the user. Compound that with all the apps that want autoupdate or network play. So many potential holes.
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Install a spyware scanner
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I agree in principle. Something in the back of my head makes me think about radar companies and radar detectors. They're all owned by the same people who have patents on the same technology.
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even if you have to unroll the occasional unstable patch
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This is why I distrust the Windows registry. How can one guarantee that it doesn't leave reg keys behind which may open possibilities for future exploits? On my *nix, if I kill an app, I know that it hasn't left junk around which may compromise the function of other things. As Mozilla, Gnome, and KDE get larger, though, this will soon become a problem for Linux as well.
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Is this not safe
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No, it's not safe.
Untrusted, invisible code on webpages does have the ability to open holes in any firewall as most users let the firewall autoconfigure for common apps like web browsers. I also wouldn't be too surprised if virus/trojan writers have figured out a way to implement a modified port forwarding which circumvents the holier-than-holy 7 layer model of networking. Any port, even port 80, can be hazardous if there's some webapp which has made itself resident for as long as your web browser is open.
With web browsers becoming entire OS environments on their own I look forward to the next slew of relays and trojans which filter and pass packets from inside the web browser. Call it a "wrapper" around the interior machinery of the web browser.
"Hmmmm... packets on port 80 through the firewall. One for me, one for the legitimate user. One for me, one for the legitimate user."
Does anyone else but me lose faith in an organization (McAfee) which makes use of an advertising window which places itself off-screen? Aren't these guys supposed to be helping the user to prevent cheap tricks that result in compromised machines?
http://us.mcafee.com/root/ExitCampaign.asp?Clie
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First, it's not to save one child. Hundreds of millions of children are exploited for sexual purposes every year.
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There's a quantum logic that says that you'll find anything if you look for it hard enough. Would you mind stating, for the jury, why you're obsessed with child pornography? We have hundreds of witnesses waiting in the wings who will attest to never having viewed child pornography nor have they participated in the abduction of children for exploitative purposes. How is it that you're surrounded by this filth?
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Second, there is no "Freedom to Download Movies" to be infringed
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On this you are correct. I propose the following solution:
1> Make all filesharing punishable by death. Let's quit dinkering around with this crap.
2> Give the media companies a full, unchallengeable, government enforced monopoly and see just how truly fair priced they are.
3> Watch CD and DVD prices double, triple, or quadruple within five years of establishing the monopoly.
4> Watch as media conglomerates starting sponsoring prisons just as often as they sponsor baseball parks.
5> Profit from prosecuting every poor shmoe that can't afford their overpriced crap.
6> Watch civilization degenerate.
God I wish you people would start thinking a little more than five minutes into the future. Pharmaceutical companies jack prices and every single Prozac-head in the nation cries foul but when media companies start throwing around RIAA/MPAA pronouncements you all bow down like your HMO threatened to cut off your fix.
1> Copyright laws are strictly enforced by death
2> The public is cowed into submission
3> Media companies invest in prisons
4> Media companies raise DVD and CD prices to around $200/ea.
5> Rich people can afford to pay.
6> Media companies profit by sending poor 12-yr olds to prison and by charging $200/copy.
7> Rich people get an ego boost by having their neighbors come cowering to them to borrow the latest DVD for their underfed children to watch.
8> Rich people get a second ego boost by laughing, saying,"NO YOU WRETCHED UNDERPAID FILTH!", and slamming the door.
9> Poor people eventually revolt.
10> Rich people use WMDs to wipe out the poor people.
11> Rich people begin to partition themselves into a new set of rich and powerful, poor and exploited.
12> Repeat.
How can I profit?