1997 was one of the last years printed and other media were allowed to criticize Gates or his movement. That particular article was probably what cause him to gun for Salon [salon.com] by means of Slate.
First: Slate was created in 1996. A couple of years before this article. So your theory makes no sense.
Second: You obviously have no idea about business. You think that the way to "make money from big pharma" is to give billions of dollars to third-world causes. You think that the way to deal with criticism from an online magazine is to CREATE an online magazine. This is just not how the business world works. The interventions you posit are totally inefficient.
Too often times (but not always) a free handout does more harm than good.
The Gates foundation is most famous for its investments into research into a Malaria vaccine. Can you please describe how that would do "more harm than good?" Also, wouldn't you say that investment also often times does "more harm than good"? e.g. someone invested in pets.com and eToys. Were those effective uses of money?
Also reinvesting it in American business/education can give us a heads up over the up and coming Chinese.
According to the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, one of their core beliefs is that every human being is equal no matter where they live. Therefore your wish to get a "heads up" over the Chinese is against their guiding principles. Why shouldn't they equally invest in China to give the Chinese a "heads up" over you? Or better yet, they could invest in Africa, where people need a "heads up" more than anyone.
I don't know why you feel the need to dig up an article from 1997 which is about MICROSOFT'S CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY and unrelated to the Gates Foundation. The article predates the EXISTENCE of the Foundation that we are talking about here. The other article is from 2004 but again it confuses Microsoft's corporate philanthropy (which, surprise surprise, is probably designed to benfit the corporation) from the Gates' PERSONAL philanthropy which is probably designed to ensure their place in history.
Frankly I think that it is sad that your jealousy and anger are so blinding that you cannot step back for even a second and see the good that billions of dollars directed at Malaria and AIDS research could do in this world. If (heaven forbid!) Bill Gates read Slashdot he might well think that it would be better for him to keep his money in his pocket because he gets more fiercely cricized for trying to do good with it than he does with just sitting on it. That's a sad commentary on the anti-Gates trolls on Slashdot (not a majority here by any means!).
Bill has given $29 Billion to the Gates foundation. Have you considered how incredibly hard it would be to make that back through lobbying? That would be the most expensive, inefficient and wasteful lobbying campaign in the history of the world! It would be MUCH cheaper to just directly buy politicians as other industries do. Curing malaria is a very round-about way of making money. There comes a point where the simpler explanation is more believable than the conspiracy theory. Why wouldn't Bill Gates and Warren Buffet simply wish to secure a place for themselves in history?
By the way, where in your conspiracy theory does Warren Buffet's donation fit? Surely it is a way for him to feather his own nest as well. He gives away billions but the underlying goal is to sell more Coca Cola so he can benefit on the order of trillions later, right? Brilliant!
It frankly depresses me that someone can be so closed-minded. It's a form of prejudice. You have "pre-judged" every action Bill Gates will ever take. Has he done wrong in the past? Yes. Does that mean he is incapable of doing right in the future? No.
What I mean is, the most highest purpose of a man's life is his family, to care for them and to protect them, with body and soul, and that also includes financial matters.
Frankly, that's naked tribalism and is not a position that would be endorsed by any major world religion nor by secular humanism or rationalism. The only basis on which it makes sense is a primal, genetic one like the one that motivates a mother bear. I love my daughter and would give her anything that is mine to give. But if I elevate her needs above societies then I am being essentially selfish just as if I elevated my own needs above society's. I mean we are genetically programmed to care first about ourselves and our kin. The capacity to pursue a higher purpose is what differentiates us from the animals.
The technology under the hood is totally irrelevant from a business profitability point of view. IIRC, Hotmail did not run on Windows at first either. Over time, Microsoft ported it over. It really isn't so hard to believe that they would do that with Yahoo as well. They would start by porting the back end services (already accessed via internal web services) and then work towards the user interface. They might offshore the work because it is fairly straightforward. It might take five years, but who cares? It would be a small expense compared to the acquisition cost of Yahoo itself.
Let me start by saying I'm not a "greedhead". I think that this issue is genuinely complex and hard to get your head around. Ultimately I want the best for people in the third world. But I can easily see how we could accidentally REDUCE the amount of third world labour (and prosperity) at the same time that we ease our consciences by imposing incorrect minimum wages on them. That would actually be selfish. After all, the more expensive third-world labour is, the more we will:
try to switch to automation,
decline to buy more expensive products,
decline to invest in money-losing businesses,
use black market labour
When a commodity goes up in price (even labour), demand will typically go down (but not necessarily proportionally!).
The part of the world I live in has 4% unemployment. That's basically nothing. So you could start a sweatshop here, but nobody would work there. Is it really so unbelivable that with patience we could see this same situation arise the world over?
When you are trying to recreate an event you collect evidence. Given enough evidence you can have a high degree of certainty that it happened. My wife tells me she grew up on a farm. Her six sisters corroborate the story. I've seen pictures. Her parents live there now. That is a TON of evidence.
On the other hand, if some stranger walks up to me on the street and says she grew up in the Louvre then I'm going to be skeptical because I don't know that anybody grows up in the Louvre and on the street I have no further evidence to back up her claim.
There is a LOT of evidence about the French Revolution. I could touch artifacts created at that time and subject them to scientific experiments that will validate their age. The same is not true of the Garden of Eden or Noah's Ark. Fundamentalist christians are using a SINGLE, HIGHLY UNRELIABLE source to draw conclusions about SINGULAR, HIGHLY UNLIKELY events in the distant past...DESPITE the lack of scientific corroboration.
That is nothing, whatsoever, like believing in the French Revolution, and you know it. I don't have faith in the French Revolution. I have seen convincing EVIDENCE of it.
You may well be correct on the economics. Perhaps even on the libertarian philosophy. But why do you feel the need to impugn the morals of those who disagree with you? If you really believe that liberal are IN FAVOUR of third-world poverty then I pity you for your lack of empathy (i.e. inability to see the world from their point of view). On the other hand, if you were just using a rhetorical flourish to sharpen your criticism, then I wonder why. What could it possibly achieve to turn debate opponents into actual enemies?
Even if one of the examples is an anonymous corporate critic and the other is part of the public marketing face of the company. Even if one is going quiet but continuing to work at Microsoft and the other is going to a software startup but intends to continue evangelism for Microsoft. Even if one claims to be worn out and the other enthusiastic about their position.
If they pull out of China, it will be for business reasons, not moral ones. Sure, they get to act like they're doing it so they won't be "evil," but they'll really be doing it because they're afraid the bad publicity the China issue has been generating and will continue to generate will drag down their numbers in other areas.
There really is no externally observable difference between morality and publicity in this case. Their motto is "don't be evil." So they've set up their business so that being evil will generate a disproportionate amount of bad publicity. They've organized everything so that morality and publicity are inextricable: more so than in ordinary businesses. That in itself is admirable. But in the end, why does it matter what their internal motivations are? Why do you care? If we reward companies that do good and punish those that do bad, more will do good. If we punish those that do good with cynicism then there is no (business) reason for them to do good.
Performance optimization should be extremely limited before the product is feature complete and in the hands of at least expert customers, and preferably the real customers.
Are you seriously suggesting that version 13 of Microsoft Office is not "feature complete" and "in the hands of customers?"
Performance optimization is in tension with programmer friendliness. ODF is zipped ASCII XML with binary embeds (eg: raster graphics) stored in a separate part of the zip - it is really easy to generate documents (I have written a few apps that do it).
OpenXML is also a zipped file format. I said so in my previous email. Please take a stroll over to Wikipedia so that you can comment based upon facts.
MS XML is not going to be so easy - inline binary and lookup tables for content. Do you want nicely encapsulated code that can meet the customer's evolving needs without developing bugs (eg: Office's security holes), or do you want a document format that can run on a Pentium 60?
Microsoft has billions of dollars in the bank. I really shouldn't have to choose between performance and security. And in practice, I don't. Microsoft's security problems have nothing to do with how files are ordered in zip files or whether the file reading is streamed or batch.
The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.
That is the very epitome of inappropriate technical magic put in place by the, "Shouldn't our code handle hypothetical situation X?" people.
So I should take your word for it whether truncation happens in loading, transmission, saving to disk, saving to USB drive, etc., rather than taking the word of a program manager at Microsoft who talks to hundreds of customers and has crash data collected through their crash tracker. Right.
If you need your data to withstand drive failures, use an off-disk, off-site, or off-line repository as appropriate.
So the Microsoft Office box should encourage people to buy particular hardware rather than having the programmers do what they can based upon the problems that have been reported? You should go work at a software vendor. It might be an eye-opening experience.
Although it is complete true that the distinction between application and document format is key, it is quite possible to design a document format with performance in mind versus merely counting on Moore's law to handle performance issues. My observation is that Microsoft has thought through some performance and reliability details to an impressive degree in OpenXML. The files are sorted in the zip file in the order that they are needed for incremental loading. The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.
Obviously this Microsoft dude is not making any kind of fine distinctions. But I would love to see a careful analysis of the performance and reliability choices made in OpenDocument versus OpenXML if only so that OpenDocument can copy the best (unpatented) ideas from OpenXML. Microsoft has a lot of experience optimizing the performance of office suites and their file formats. I know from experience that those considerations tend to get lost in the standardization process.
First, it is funny how various countries are putting a nationalistic spin on it. Israeli newspapers are focusing on the fact that the inventor is an Israeli. Australian newspapers are focusing on the fact that he is Australian. Only the national newspapers are spinning this as "revolutionary technology."
Second, the description sounds alot like what Google and others do already.
Third, buying a single algorithm is not generally such a big deal. Maybe it is reasonably valuable. Maybe so valuable that Google paid ten million dollars for it. In the big scheme of things, that's chump change for them and for their competitors.
Janet Halliwell, the SSHRC's executive vice-president and a chemist by training, acknowledged that the "framing" of the committee's comments to Alters left the letter "open to misinterpretation."
Halliwell said confidentiality obligations made it difficult for her to discuss Alters's case in detail, but she argued that the professor had taken one line in the letter "out of context" and the rejection of his application should not indicate that SSHRC was expressing "doubts about the theory of evolution."
His point is that the Shannon limit provides a mathematical upper bound for how good a lossless compression algorithm can be for arbitrary data sets. gzip gets 98% of that maximum bound, so any algorithm that claims to be 12x that is either not lossless, or not generic. Gzip etc. are all based on several related algorithms known generally as "entropy coders"
I think you mean to say that gzip gets 98% of the efficiency of an algorithm based upon entropy coding. You can imagine data sets that are resistent to that technique but very friendly to some other technique. For example, you can imagine a very efficient encoding of "the prime numbers from one to ten thousand." In fact, the phrase IS a very efficient encoding of those numbers (compared to gzip).
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that even gzip is not really generic. It just depends on particular patterns of redundancy that happen to be frequent in the data sets most people work with most of the time. Wouldn't it be accurate to say that given truly arbitrary (random) input, gzip increases the length of most strings?
Everything in your post makes sense until the last sentence. You say that every state is a nation without giving any definition for nation. If you look at dictionary.com, you'll see that none of the definitions applies. You won't convince me that Minnesota "independent" or "sovereign" or that its people share "common customers and origin".
In addition, the United States has a single representative at the United Nations.
My every desire is to be as much like him [Jesus Christ] as I can.
To be frank. This is one reason why I have no pity for %90 of AIDS patients. Sure, there are some ligit cases, like getting stabbed with somthing that has AIDS on it. But still, the best way to protect yourself from AIDS is to stop sleeping around.
Whatever happened to love the sin but hate the sinner? It sounds like you hate both, despite the fact that Jesus professed love for prostitutes. He would certainly not have said to them: "It's your fault that you are sick. Tough luck."
Guys: I am a member of the group that Microsoft joined, JTC1 SC34. This is a very broad group that encompasses SGML, XML, HyTime, topic maps, Font Interchange and ODF. As per Microsoft's claim, it would probably include Microsoft's formats when they show up at ISO.
What in the wikipedia entry is biased? What is inaccurate? The grandparent's quote was quite reasonable and mild. It is an indisputable fact that shared source is not open source. That's why it has a different term. Similarly, zebras are not horses. Am I biased for pointing that out?
The thing I hate most about Slashdot usability is that it does not give you any good indication when a message in the middle of a thread has been filtered out. So the grandparent could say: "Slashdot sucks". Then the filtered message could say: "No, it rules". Then the current messages says: "I disagree." It looks like he is disagreeing with the grandparent. Yikes: that's absolutely brutal from a usability and social software point of view.
When the Chinese government does something, everybody yells 'OMG those communist bastards are 3v1l!!!'. But when the US government does something, almost nobody says a word.
Right. Like nobody said anything about the Iraq war. Or Cheney's hunting accident. Or Guantanamo bay. Nobody says anything. The Daily Show does not exist. The New York Times does not exist. Cindy Sheehan does not exist.
Libetarianism is about civil liberties and free-market economics. The socialism that you are pandering doesn't work in the long run and restricts the freedoms of its citizens.
When government takes money from a millionaire and uses it to educate an immigrant's son, it does several useful things:
It maximizes average well-being by moving money from where it is undervalued to where it is highly valued. An extreme example of this is those World Vision commercials about how the price of a coffee per day can save a third-world child from going blind.
It maximizes the overall size of the economy by improving the quality of the work force.
It minimizes the social tension that arises from extreme disparities in wealth and power.
The benefits of this are obvious to the person on the street, from a high school drop-out to a mainstream economist. This is why libertarianism can never succeed. Furthermore, libertarianism is its own worst enemy. If it is ever close to succeeding it will just trigger a socialist reaction that will strengthen unions and communist parties.
The "ideal" system is one that rewards people in proportion to their individual (not familial) contribution to society. When you get very far from this ideal (as under pure libertarianism or pure communism) people will cry fowl. Their sense of justice is much stronger than their dedication to any abstraction.
Slashdot Mirror
1997 was one of the last years printed and other media were allowed to criticize Gates or his movement. That particular article was probably what cause him to gun for Salon [salon.com] by means of Slate.
First: Slate was created in 1996. A couple of years before this article. So your theory makes no sense.
Second: You obviously have no idea about business. You think that the way to "make money from big pharma" is to give billions of dollars to third-world causes. You think that the way to deal with criticism from an online magazine is to CREATE an online magazine. This is just not how the business world works. The interventions you posit are totally inefficient.
You sir, are a troll.
Too often times (but not always) a free handout does more harm than good.
The Gates foundation is most famous for its investments into research into a Malaria vaccine. Can you please describe how that would do "more harm than good?" Also, wouldn't you say that investment also often times does "more harm than good"? e.g. someone invested in pets.com and eToys. Were those effective uses of money?
Also reinvesting it in American business/education can give us a heads up over the up and coming Chinese.
According to the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, one of their core beliefs is that every human being is equal no matter where they live. Therefore your wish to get a "heads up" over the Chinese is against their guiding principles. Why shouldn't they equally invest in China to give the Chinese a "heads up" over you? Or better yet, they could invest in Africa, where people need a "heads up" more than anyone.
I don't know why you feel the need to dig up an article from 1997 which is about MICROSOFT'S CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY and unrelated to the Gates Foundation. The article predates the EXISTENCE of the Foundation that we are talking about here. The other article is from 2004 but again it confuses Microsoft's corporate philanthropy (which, surprise surprise, is probably designed to benfit the corporation) from the Gates' PERSONAL philanthropy which is probably designed to ensure their place in history.
Frankly I think that it is sad that your jealousy and anger are so blinding that you cannot step back for even a second and see the good that billions of dollars directed at Malaria and AIDS research could do in this world. If (heaven forbid!) Bill Gates read Slashdot he might well think that it would be better for him to keep his money in his pocket because he gets more fiercely cricized for trying to do good with it than he does with just sitting on it. That's a sad commentary on the anti-Gates trolls on Slashdot (not a majority here by any means!).
Bill has given $29 Billion to the Gates foundation. Have you considered how incredibly hard it would be to make that back through lobbying? That would be the most expensive, inefficient and wasteful lobbying campaign in the history of the world! It would be MUCH cheaper to just directly buy politicians as other industries do. Curing malaria is a very round-about way of making money. There comes a point where the simpler explanation is more believable than the conspiracy theory. Why wouldn't Bill Gates and Warren Buffet simply wish to secure a place for themselves in history?
By the way, where in your conspiracy theory does Warren Buffet's donation fit? Surely it is a way for him to feather his own nest as well. He gives away billions but the underlying goal is to sell more Coca Cola so he can benefit on the order of trillions later, right? Brilliant!
It frankly depresses me that someone can be so closed-minded. It's a form of prejudice. You have "pre-judged" every action Bill Gates will ever take. Has he done wrong in the past? Yes. Does that mean he is incapable of doing right in the future? No.
What I mean is, the most highest purpose of a man's life is his family, to care for them and to protect them, with body and soul, and that also includes financial matters.
Frankly, that's naked tribalism and is not a position that would be endorsed by any major world religion nor by secular humanism or rationalism. The only basis on which it makes sense is a primal, genetic one like the one that motivates a mother bear. I love my daughter and would give her anything that is mine to give. But if I elevate her needs above societies then I am being essentially selfish just as if I elevated my own needs above society's. I mean we are genetically programmed to care first about ourselves and our kin. The capacity to pursue a higher purpose is what differentiates us from the animals.
The technology under the hood is totally irrelevant from a business profitability point of view. IIRC, Hotmail did not run on Windows at first either. Over time, Microsoft ported it over. It really isn't so hard to believe that they would do that with Yahoo as well. They would start by porting the back end services (already accessed via internal web services) and then work towards the user interface. They might offshore the work because it is fairly straightforward. It might take five years, but who cares? It would be a small expense compared to the acquisition cost of Yahoo itself.
Let me start by saying I'm not a "greedhead". I think that this issue is genuinely complex and hard to get your head around. Ultimately I want the best for people in the third world. But I can easily see how we could accidentally REDUCE the amount of third world labour (and prosperity) at the same time that we ease our consciences by imposing incorrect minimum wages on them. That would actually be selfish. After all, the more expensive third-world labour is, the more we will:
When a commodity goes up in price (even labour), demand will typically go down (but not necessarily proportionally!).
The part of the world I live in has 4% unemployment. That's basically nothing. So you could start a sweatshop here, but nobody would work there. Is it really so unbelivable that with patience we could see this same situation arise the world over?
When you are trying to recreate an event you collect evidence. Given enough evidence you can have a high degree of certainty that it happened. My wife tells me she grew up on a farm. Her six sisters corroborate the story. I've seen pictures. Her parents live there now. That is a TON of evidence. On the other hand, if some stranger walks up to me on the street and says she grew up in the Louvre then I'm going to be skeptical because I don't know that anybody grows up in the Louvre and on the street I have no further evidence to back up her claim. There is a LOT of evidence about the French Revolution. I could touch artifacts created at that time and subject them to scientific experiments that will validate their age. The same is not true of the Garden of Eden or Noah's Ark. Fundamentalist christians are using a SINGLE, HIGHLY UNRELIABLE source to draw conclusions about SINGULAR, HIGHLY UNLIKELY events in the distant past...DESPITE the lack of scientific corroboration. That is nothing, whatsoever, like believing in the French Revolution, and you know it. I don't have faith in the French Revolution. I have seen convincing EVIDENCE of it.
You may well be correct on the economics. Perhaps even on the libertarian philosophy. But why do you feel the need to impugn the morals of those who disagree with you? If you really believe that liberal are IN FAVOUR of third-world poverty then I pity you for your lack of empathy (i.e. inability to see the world from their point of view). On the other hand, if you were just using a rhetorical flourish to sharpen your criticism, then I wonder why. What could it possibly achieve to turn debate opponents into actual enemies?
"many notable companies, primarily CoffeeCup"? Also, is this group supposed to include ISVs like Adobe and SAP?
Even if one of the examples is an anonymous corporate critic and the other is part of the public marketing face of the company. Even if one is going quiet but continuing to work at Microsoft and the other is going to a software startup but intends to continue evangelism for Microsoft. Even if one claims to be worn out and the other enthusiastic about their position.
There really is no externally observable difference between morality and publicity in this case. Their motto is "don't be evil." So they've set up their business so that being evil will generate a disproportionate amount of bad publicity. They've organized everything so that morality and publicity are inextricable: more so than in ordinary businesses. That in itself is admirable. But in the end, why does it matter what their internal motivations are? Why do you care? If we reward companies that do good and punish those that do bad, more will do good. If we punish those that do good with cynicism then there is no (business) reason for them to do good.
Performance optimization should be extremely limited before the product is feature complete and in the hands of at least expert customers, and preferably the real customers.
Are you seriously suggesting that version 13 of Microsoft Office is not "feature complete" and "in the hands of customers?"
Performance optimization is in tension with programmer friendliness. ODF is zipped ASCII XML with binary embeds (eg: raster graphics) stored in a separate part of the zip - it is really easy to generate documents (I have written a few apps that do it).
OpenXML is also a zipped file format. I said so in my previous email. Please take a stroll over to Wikipedia so that you can comment based upon facts.
MS XML is not going to be so easy - inline binary and lookup tables for content. Do you want nicely encapsulated code that can meet the customer's evolving needs without developing bugs (eg: Office's security holes), or do you want a document format that can run on a Pentium 60?
Microsoft has billions of dollars in the bank. I really shouldn't have to choose between performance and security. And in practice, I don't. Microsoft's security problems have nothing to do with how files are ordered in zip files or whether the file reading is streamed or batch.
The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.
That is the very epitome of inappropriate technical magic put in place by the, "Shouldn't our code handle hypothetical situation X?" people.
So I should take your word for it whether truncation happens in loading, transmission, saving to disk, saving to USB drive, etc., rather than taking the word of a program manager at Microsoft who talks to hundreds of customers and has crash data collected through their crash tracker. Right.
If you need your data to withstand drive failures, use an off-disk, off-site, or off-line repository as appropriate.
So the Microsoft Office box should encourage people to buy particular hardware rather than having the programmers do what they can based upon the problems that have been reported? You should go work at a software vendor. It might be an eye-opening experience.
Although it is complete true that the distinction between application and document format is key, it is quite possible to design a document format with performance in mind versus merely counting on Moore's law to handle performance issues. My observation is that Microsoft has thought through some performance and reliability details to an impressive degree in OpenXML. The files are sorted in the zip file in the order that they are needed for incremental loading. The zip file is stream decompressed so that a lost bit halfway through the file does not prevent decompression of the beginning. Textual data is earlier in the file than bitmap data both because it is needed sooner and also because a truncated file will still have its text and basic formatting intact.
Obviously this Microsoft dude is not making any kind of fine distinctions. But I would love to see a careful analysis of the performance and reliability choices made in OpenDocument versus OpenXML if only so that OpenDocument can copy the best (unpatented) ideas from OpenXML. Microsoft has a lot of experience optimizing the performance of office suites and their file formats. I know from experience that those considerations tend to get lost in the standardization process.
First, it is funny how various countries are putting a nationalistic spin on it. Israeli newspapers are focusing on the fact that the inventor is an Israeli. Australian newspapers are focusing on the fact that he is Australian. Only the national newspapers are spinning this as "revolutionary technology."
Second, the description sounds alot like what Google and others do already.
Third, buying a single algorithm is not generally such a big deal. Maybe it is reasonably valuable. Maybe so valuable that Google paid ten million dollars for it. In the big scheme of things, that's chump change for them and for their competitors.
The whole thing sounds overhyped to me.
Janet Halliwell, the SSHRC's executive vice-president and a chemist by training, acknowledged that the "framing" of the committee's comments to Alters left the letter "open to misinterpretation." Halliwell said confidentiality obligations made it difficult for her to discuss Alters's case in detail, but she argued that the professor had taken one line in the letter "out of context" and the rejection of his application should not indicate that SSHRC was expressing "doubts about the theory of evolution."
His point is that the Shannon limit provides a mathematical upper bound for how good a lossless compression algorithm can be for arbitrary data sets. gzip gets 98% of that maximum bound, so any algorithm that claims to be 12x that is either not lossless, or not generic. Gzip etc. are all based on several related algorithms known generally as "entropy coders"
I think you mean to say that gzip gets 98% of the efficiency of an algorithm based upon entropy coding. You can imagine data sets that are resistent to that technique but very friendly to some other technique. For example, you can imagine a very efficient encoding of "the prime numbers from one to ten thousand." In fact, the phrase IS a very efficient encoding of those numbers (compared to gzip).
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that even gzip is not really generic. It just depends on particular patterns of redundancy that happen to be frequent in the data sets most people work with most of the time. Wouldn't it be accurate to say that given truly arbitrary (random) input, gzip increases the length of most strings?
How can an interview with an ex-employee be regarded as "An Interview with 180 Solutions?"
Everything in your post makes sense until the last sentence. You say that every state is a nation without giving any definition for nation. If you look at dictionary.com, you'll see that none of the definitions applies. You won't convince me that Minnesota "independent" or "sovereign" or that its people share "common customers and origin". In addition, the United States has a single representative at the United Nations.
My every desire is to be as much like him [Jesus Christ] as I can.
To be frank. This is one reason why I have no pity for %90 of AIDS patients. Sure, there are some ligit cases, like getting stabbed with somthing that has AIDS on it. But still, the best way to protect yourself from AIDS is to stop sleeping around.
Whatever happened to love the sin but hate the sinner? It sounds like you hate both, despite the fact that Jesus professed love for prostitutes. He would certainly not have said to them: "It's your fault that you are sick. Tough luck."
Guys: I am a member of the group that Microsoft joined, JTC1 SC34. This is a very broad group that encompasses SGML, XML, HyTime, topic maps, Font Interchange and ODF. As per Microsoft's claim, it would probably include Microsoft's formats when they show up at ISO.
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/#scope
The Slashdot heading is VERY incorrect and biased against Microsoft.
What in the wikipedia entry is biased? What is inaccurate? The grandparent's quote was quite reasonable and mild. It is an indisputable fact that shared source is not open source. That's why it has a different term. Similarly, zebras are not horses. Am I biased for pointing that out?
The thing I hate most about Slashdot usability is that it does not give you any good indication when a message in the middle of a thread has been filtered out. So the grandparent could say: "Slashdot sucks". Then the filtered message could say: "No, it rules". Then the current messages says: "I disagree." It looks like he is disagreeing with the grandparent. Yikes: that's absolutely brutal from a usability and social software point of view.
When the Chinese government does something, everybody yells 'OMG those communist bastards are 3v1l!!!'. But when the US government does something, almost nobody says a word.
Right. Like nobody said anything about the Iraq war. Or Cheney's hunting accident. Or Guantanamo bay. Nobody says anything. The Daily Show does not exist. The New York Times does not exist. Cindy Sheehan does not exist.
Libetarianism is about civil liberties and free-market economics. The socialism that you are pandering doesn't work in the long run and restricts the freedoms of its citizens.
When government takes money from a millionaire and uses it to educate an immigrant's son, it does several useful things:
The benefits of this are obvious to the person on the street, from a high school drop-out to a mainstream economist. This is why libertarianism can never succeed. Furthermore, libertarianism is its own worst enemy. If it is ever close to succeeding it will just trigger a socialist reaction that will strengthen unions and communist parties.
The "ideal" system is one that rewards people in proportion to their individual (not familial) contribution to society. When you get very far from this ideal (as under pure libertarianism or pure communism) people will cry fowl. Their sense of justice is much stronger than their dedication to any abstraction.