Sending robotic probes to do chemical analysis is probably more worthwhile in a science-for-you-buck sense, but more spectacular missions help drum up general public interest, which helps NASA secure funding.
Think of the microphone on the current Mars mission. Not much real scientific value, but it is cool and will (hopefully) get some positive publicity.
Mind you, they should probably work one their Mission To Mars Success Ratio before they send humans out there:)
I heard in the news a week or two ago that Mosaic 2000 is being presented to some school officials in Canada (in the Toronto area IIRC).
I'll be interested to see what is done with the results from these profiles, once someone is labeled a pontential killer, I wonder what they will do with them. Force them to become jocks?
Incidently, there has been a few incidents of school violence up here recently. One shooting incident in Canada that made the national headline. A little while after Columbine, a kid in Alberta shot 2 of his classmates. More recently, in TO, there have been a couple of kids beaten (one to death). Another gang-beating in BC last year and 1 kid stabbed over a box of Pokemon cards a month or so ago in Montreal. That's about half a dozen deaths, probably way less than the number killed in car accidents. Haven't seen any Bad Driver profiling being proposed!
I read a newspaper article yesterday about this. IIRC, the G7 nations had agreed to give the Ukraine about a billion dollars to build new reactors to replace Chernobyl, but haven't coughed up the dough yet. Since they need power, the government feels it neccessary to re-open the old plant.
(I was surprised too, I thought the whole area was going to be un-inhabitable for the next few hundred years)
There is one little flaw in the 'Must be 18 so they cannot agree to the GPL' argument...plenty of software is sold to minors under various lisences. I bought DOS and a couple of compilers when I was minor and even though there was a EULA, no one asked me for ID. When I bought WordPerfect from Corel, no one checked to see if I was of age. Why are they treating their Linux differently? I've downloaded browsers by clicking on 'Yes I agree' buttons, never asked if I was 18.
(Side note: does that then mean my little newphew can make illegal copies, and de-compile games because he cannot be bound by the EULA?)
What is the state of encryption laws Down Under? If they don't have Britain-esque laws regarding encoding your data, then at least they can download GnuPG or PGP and protect the contents of their computers.
Also, do the laws give the government permission to break into your computer, or do you have to install software that opens the door for them. If the later, ugh, seems like a big security risk. *I* wouldn't want to store my company's financial data on a computer where I have to have a backdoor that lefts government (or criminals using the backdoor) come in and snoop around. Conversely, if they merely have permission to break in, I would be doing everything in my power to prevent it. If the Feds can get in, so can criminals or just nosey people.
Canada still seems friendly to privacy issues, but it scares me because the more countries that adopt measures like this, the more likely our government is to jump on the bandwagon.
I think what he meant by innovative has creating something new, never been done before and totally cool. He is right in that so far, the OSS community hasn't been innovative in that sense. So far, it looks like most of the developer's itches have been along the lines of, "I need a program that does this..."
I don't think he meant it as an insult, but for a very long period (and it's still continuing), Linux has been adding features that other OSes have, or are fairly fundamental. The code itself was probably well done and innovative, but it's not like the Linux community has created many fundamental concepts (OOP, Relational Database Design, the notion of GUIs,...) of computer science.
It seems to me that Intel investing in other OSes is almost old hat. Not only did then send money RedHat's way, the sent Intel engineers over to Be Inc. in order to help them with the port of BeOS to x86 platform.
Mind you, that was also before Linux was generally considered a serious threat to Windows.
You've got to wonder, though, what the astronomers have discovered when they refuse to talk to the BBC
They are probably just being cautious with there discovery. I imagine they don't want to over-hype stuff, get everyone's hope up and then say, "Oops, we made a mistake, the results were false."
Apparently, they hadn't sent the results to any journals, so their results probably have not been peer-reviewed yet.
I think it's good for programmer/geeks to get a dose of stuff they don't understand. I imagine that I had much the same look on my face when I read "modular form of weight two and level N which is an Eigenform under the Hecke seriers and has a Fourier series" as my friends & relatives get when I talk about pointers, polymorphism and other programming stuff. A little confusion can be educational.
As to those of you who understand both the STW conjecture AND coding.....TTHHHHPPTTT:)
2. Money for ESR. Remember, this is a _gift_ culture. If he can't feed his family from books, he's going to find some other (possibly not programming) way to do it. Buy the book and kick a few bucks his way.
I'm not sure I agree with 2. We should buy the book on its merits. If it was well written and interesting, then fine. But I think it is a little dangerous to buy something just because ESR wrote it.
What I get out of ESR's writing is that it is possible to live, make money and feed your family as part of the open source community. Guys like Alan Cox find coding jobs. ESR is living as a consultant and writer. If he succeeds, it shows the OSS model is a success. If we all run out and buy it just because ESR wrote it, it only shows that we really like Eric:)
(This isn't a flame, I just find hero worship kind of scary)
Interestingly, something awfully similar is happeneding up here in Canada. It turns out that our Federal government has been taking in WAY more money in Employment Insurance than it is paying out and now has a surplus in the range of $15 billion. They want to take the money and use it in other parts of the government, but a lot of people think it is money that should either stay in the EI pool or be refunded to workers.
I suppose since they were collecting way more money than they paid out, UPS could have (should have?) used the money to lower rates on insurance or provide free insurance. But that doesn't seem illegal, just greedy. And the figures asked for in the court case still seem ludicrous.
I'm still not entirely sure what it is they say UPS did that was wrong (although I've always thought it was silly to have to pay extra to have a shipping company pay me if THEY break my stuff).
What I don't get is how the plaintiffs think they were defrauded. They pay the cash, if UPS damages their package, UPS reimburses them. It seems straight forward. If UPS bought a Bermuda company, they insurance was still payed out.
But......$42 billion (the figure if it becomes a class action suit) for 20 customers? If UPS took in $100 million (as they did in '84) in insurance every year for 16 years, that's just 1.6 billion for ALL UPS CUSTOMERS! How do they figure UPS should have to pay $42 billion to 20 of them. (BTW there's a Bill Gates joke in here somewhere, but I can't quite think of it...)
I probably won't understand the Manyfold universe theory, but this was a great article anyway, in that it pointed me towards arXiv.org, which looks like a pretty cool and (currently browsing the comp sci section) interesting site.
But, locking up the source won't stop bugs from creeping in. The argument is, which model get the bugs fixed faster, my guess is open source, if only because Seti's audience is hugely skewed towards geeks. You'd have plenty of competent programmers reviewing the code, and they could set up a system where the 'unstable' versions of Seti client only handle old data where in the results are known (which is what they probably have to do for testing purposes anyway).
The only two arguments I can see for closed source are
1) The plan to get a patent for the code at some point, or otherwise make money off it.
or
2) They are worried that someone will maliciously re-write there client to return junk data. But if someone wanted to do that, they could probably do it without the Seti source.
But the first post, which essentially said, "HAHAHA Bill Gates, windows sux!!!", got marked up as Insightfuk, which would suggest that it was a topic of interest worth discussing. Then, Sanity posts a well thought out counter argument and gets moderated down, presumably because he wasn't pro-Linux enough. If the moderator disagreed with him, he could have posted a useful response to his argument, rather than just knocking him down a point!
Possibly you may also want to send your protest and petition along to IBM, who has proven to be both more willing, and more capable than Sun of porting Java to various platforms. They've ported 1.1.x to at least three platforms I can think of (AIX, Linus & OS/2) and their implementations have been superior to Sun's. And Jikes, their java compiler, is already open sourced which may help with the porting.
That really didn't seem like flamebate to me! (Hopefully it will be vindicated in MetaModeration) It's a valid point...is linux immune to virii, or has no one written one yet?
The Evil Perl Script described ('though I guess it is more of a trojan horse) sounds plausible to me. What about linux is actually supposed to stop it from being infected?
And remember, before Melissa came along, the most famous evil nasty program was the Internet Worm, which lived squarely in *nix camp. (Although it predated Linux, does anyone know if the security flaws it exploited ever existed in the linux sources?)
I am a little wary that this may just be a publicity thing. SGI has spun it's Cray division, and wasn't that in part because it wasn't as successful at they had hoped.
Linux may be full of hype right now, but if they weren't successfully with an already established supercomputing platform (ie. the Cray), how will they manage with something new.
On the bright side, even if their endevour fails, perhaps we'll get some cool new (and hopefully GPLed) stuff ported over to linux.
Whenever a stupid/nasty/annoying (and there do seem to be a lot of them!) article gets posted on/. there is usually discussion about Prior Art, so I have a question (being a dumb Canadian who knows nothing about the patent system, let alone the american one):
If someone has a Prior Art case, is the patent null and void, or does the patent get passed to the folks who have the PA?
Luckily, we have to GPL to prevent them from *forcing* us to use their compiler. gcc is gpl'ed, so no one really owns it. The other dists can compile their own gcc and use that.
However, I suppose they could provide a proprietary, but nice & slick, IDE that everyone chooses to use. But it doesn't seem RedHat's style to become a monopolist. Their business model is based on the notion that open source is a good thing (tm), as is Cygnus. I think it will end up being more like a 'pooling of skills', they weren't gobbling up a competitor. Cygnus was based (more or less) on selling support for open source software, as is Redhat, so there is no reason they won't continue on like that.
And remember, this is the company that hired Alan Cox and said he could pretty much do whatever the heck he wants. I'm not worried or nervous in the least.
Dana
Re:This is why there are moderated groups
on
Usenet Gag Order
·
· Score: 1
Well...I don't think I'd make anyone throw up, but I probably wouldn't make any money either:)
Well, people can still be arrested for being disorderly in the street.
If the authorities wish, they can arrest him for the actual threats, etc. posted to the Usenet, but banning him from posting altogether is exercising their control to an unacceptable extent. The powers that be (politicians, judiciaries, etc.) are authoritarian by their very nature. Give them an inch (of our freedom) and they'll take a mile.
But anyway, what you said makes it sounds as though you would rather him arrested than not allowed to post to one newsgroup! If he's in jail, he probably won't get to post to any newsgroups at all:) I can't see how this is in anyway a violation of any of his rights. The judge basicly said, you were being a nuisance, you were hassling people, we don't want you to do it. He's not banned from the Internet, he's not banned from Usenet, he's just not allowed to post to one little part of it where he was making an ass of himself. It's a reasonable, rational punnishment.
Dana
Re:This is why there are moderated groups
on
Usenet Gag Order
·
· Score: 2
KKK members have a right to think what they think, sure, but there ARE limits to how they can express themselves. Ie, no threats, harassment, public mischief. You can't arrest someone for being a KKK member, but you can arrest them if they show up at my house and hassle me.
Besides, I see this matter rather more like banning a rude/drunk/idiot from a business establishment. If I'm making an idiot of myself in a bar or a restaurant, the manager can call the police and have me removed. If I keep going back and making a nuisance of myself, they can probably ban me and have a judge prevent me from returning. This isn't censoring my right to free speech or thoughts, it falls under the public nuisance areas of law. My suggestion is that this whole incident falls under that category.
Slashdot Mirror
Sending robotic probes to do chemical analysis is probably more worthwhile in a science-for-you-buck sense, but more spectacular missions help drum up general public interest, which helps NASA secure funding.
:)
Think of the microphone on the current Mars mission. Not much real scientific value, but it is cool and will (hopefully) get some positive publicity.
Mind you, they should probably work one their Mission To Mars Success Ratio before they send humans out there
Dana
I heard in the news a week or two ago that Mosaic 2000 is being presented to some school officials in Canada (in the Toronto area IIRC).
I'll be interested to see what is done with the results from these profiles, once someone is labeled a pontential killer, I wonder what they will do with them. Force them to become jocks?
Incidently, there has been a few incidents of school violence up here recently. One shooting incident in Canada that made the national headline. A little while after Columbine, a kid in Alberta shot 2 of his classmates. More recently, in TO, there have been a couple of kids beaten (one to death). Another gang-beating in BC last year and 1 kid stabbed over a box of Pokemon cards a month or so ago in Montreal. That's about half a dozen deaths, probably way less than the number killed in car accidents. Haven't seen any Bad Driver profiling being proposed!
Dana
I read a newspaper article yesterday about this. IIRC, the G7 nations had agreed to give the Ukraine about a billion dollars to build new reactors to replace Chernobyl, but haven't coughed up the dough yet. Since they need power, the government feels it neccessary to re-open the old plant.
(I was surprised too, I thought the whole area was going to be un-inhabitable for the next few hundred years)
Dana
There is one little flaw in the 'Must be 18 so they cannot agree to the GPL' argument...plenty of software is sold to minors under various lisences. I bought DOS and a couple of compilers when I was minor and even though there was a EULA, no one asked me for ID. When I bought WordPerfect from Corel, no one checked to see if I was of age. Why are they treating their Linux differently? I've downloaded browsers by clicking on 'Yes I agree' buttons, never asked if I was 18.
(Side note: does that then mean my little newphew can make illegal copies, and de-compile games because he cannot be bound by the EULA?)
Dana
What is the state of encryption laws Down Under? If they don't have Britain-esque laws regarding encoding your data, then at least they can download GnuPG or PGP and protect the contents of their computers.
Also, do the laws give the government permission to break into your computer, or do you have to install software that opens the door for them. If the later, ugh, seems like a big security risk. *I* wouldn't want to store my company's financial data on a computer where I have to have a backdoor that lefts government (or criminals using the backdoor) come in and snoop around. Conversely, if they merely have permission to break in, I would be doing everything in my power to prevent it. If the Feds can get in, so can criminals or just nosey people.
Canada still seems friendly to privacy issues, but it scares me because the more countries that adopt measures like this, the more likely our government is to jump on the bandwagon.
Dana
Itanium, Pentium?
I like to see what keyboards look like over at Intel, their alphabet sure seems to have a lot fewer letters than the rest of us.
Dana
I think what he meant by innovative has creating something new, never been done before and totally cool. He is right in that so far, the OSS community hasn't been innovative in that sense. So far, it looks like most of the developer's itches have been along the lines of, "I need a program that does this..."
...) of computer science.
I don't think he meant it as an insult, but for a very long period (and it's still continuing), Linux has been adding features that other OSes have, or are fairly fundamental. The code itself was probably well done and innovative, but it's not like the Linux community has created many fundamental concepts (OOP, Relational Database Design, the notion of GUIs,
It seems to me that Intel investing in other OSes is almost old hat. Not only did then send money RedHat's way, the sent Intel engineers over to Be Inc. in order to help them with the port of BeOS to x86 platform.
Mind you, that was also before Linux was generally considered a serious threat to Windows.
Dana
You've got to wonder, though, what the astronomers have discovered when they refuse to talk to the BBC
They are probably just being cautious with there discovery. I imagine they don't want to over-hype stuff, get everyone's hope up and then say, "Oops, we made a mistake, the results were false."
Apparently, they hadn't sent the results to any journals, so their results probably have not been peer-reviewed yet.
Dana
I think it's good for programmer/geeks to get a dose of stuff they don't understand. I imagine that I had much the same look on my face when I read "modular form of weight two and level N which is an Eigenform under the Hecke seriers and has a Fourier series" as my friends & relatives get when I talk about pointers, polymorphism and other programming stuff. A little confusion can be educational.
:)
As to those of you who understand both the STW conjecture AND coding.....TTHHHHPPTTT
2. Money for ESR. Remember, this is a _gift_ culture. If he can't feed his family from books, he's going to find some other (possibly not programming) way to do it. Buy the book and kick a few bucks his way.
:)
I'm not sure I agree with 2. We should buy the book on its merits. If it was well written and interesting, then fine. But I think it is a little dangerous to buy something just because ESR wrote it.
What I get out of ESR's writing is that it is possible to live, make money and feed your family as part of the open source community. Guys like Alan Cox find coding jobs. ESR is living as a consultant and writer. If he succeeds, it shows the OSS model is a success. If we all run out and buy it just because ESR wrote it, it only shows that we really like Eric
(This isn't a flame, I just find hero worship kind of scary)
Dana
Interestingly, something awfully similar is happeneding up here in Canada. It turns out that our Federal government has been taking in WAY more money in Employment Insurance than it is paying out and now has a surplus in the range of $15 billion. They want to take the money and use it in other parts of the government, but a lot of people think it is money that should either stay in the EI pool or be refunded to workers.
I suppose since they were collecting way more money than they paid out, UPS could have (should have?) used the money to lower rates on insurance or provide free insurance. But that doesn't seem illegal, just greedy. And the figures asked for in the court case still seem ludicrous.
Dana
I'm still not entirely sure what it is they say UPS did that was wrong (although I've always thought it was silly to have to pay extra to have a shipping company pay me if THEY break my stuff).
What I don't get is how the plaintiffs think they were defrauded. They pay the cash, if UPS damages their package, UPS reimburses them. It seems straight forward. If UPS bought a Bermuda company, they insurance was still payed out.
But......$42 billion (the figure if it becomes a class action suit) for 20 customers? If UPS took in $100 million (as they did in '84) in insurance every year for 16 years, that's just 1.6 billion for ALL UPS CUSTOMERS! How do they figure UPS should have to pay $42 billion to 20 of them. (BTW there's a Bill Gates joke in here somewhere, but I can't quite think of it...)
Dana
I probably won't understand the Manyfold universe theory, but this was a great article anyway, in that it pointed me towards arXiv.org, which looks like a pretty cool and (currently browsing the comp sci section) interesting site.
Dana
But, locking up the source won't stop bugs from creeping in. The argument is, which model get the bugs fixed faster, my guess is open source, if only because Seti's audience is hugely skewed towards geeks. You'd have plenty of competent programmers reviewing the code, and they could set up a system where the 'unstable' versions of Seti client only handle old data where in the results are known (which is what they probably have to do for testing purposes anyway).
The only two arguments I can see for closed source are
1) The plan to get a patent for the code at some point, or otherwise make money off it.
or
2) They are worried that someone will maliciously re-write there client to return junk data. But if someone wanted to do that, they could probably do it without the Seti source.
Dana
But the first post, which essentially said, "HAHAHA Bill Gates, windows sux!!!", got marked up as Insightfuk, which would suggest that it was a topic of interest worth discussing. Then, Sanity posts a well thought out counter argument and gets moderated down, presumably because he wasn't pro-Linux enough. If the moderator disagreed with him, he could have posted a useful response to his argument, rather than just knocking him down a point!
Dana
Possibly you may also want to send your protest and petition along to IBM, who has proven to be both more willing, and more capable than Sun of porting Java to various platforms. They've ported 1.1.x to at least three platforms I can think of (AIX, Linus & OS/2) and their implementations have been superior to Sun's. And Jikes, their java compiler, is already open sourced which may help with the porting.
Dana
That really didn't seem like flamebate to me! (Hopefully it will be vindicated in MetaModeration) It's a valid point...is linux immune to virii, or has no one written one yet?
The Evil Perl Script described ('though I guess it is more of a trojan horse) sounds plausible to me.
What about linux is actually supposed to stop it from being infected?
And remember, before Melissa came along, the most famous evil nasty program was the Internet Worm, which lived squarely in *nix camp. (Although it predated Linux, does anyone know if the security flaws it exploited ever existed in the linux sources?)
Dana
I am a little wary that this may just be a publicity thing. SGI has spun it's Cray division, and wasn't that in part because it wasn't as successful at they had hoped.
Linux may be full of hype right now, but if they weren't successfully with an already established supercomputing platform (ie. the Cray), how will they manage with something new.
On the bright side, even if their endevour fails, perhaps we'll get some cool new (and hopefully GPLed) stuff ported over to linux.
Dana
We'll apologize for Celine, Alanis & Alan when you American pigs apologize for
1) Tom Arnold/Rosanne Barr
2) Microsoft
and
3) Stealing basketball from us
:)
Dana
Whenever a stupid/nasty/annoying (and there do seem to be a lot of them!) article gets posted on /. there is usually discussion about Prior Art, so I have a question (being a dumb Canadian who knows nothing about the patent system, let alone the american one):
If someone has a Prior Art case, is the patent null and void, or does the patent get passed to the folks who have the PA?
Dana
Luckily, we have to GPL to prevent them from *forcing* us to use their compiler. gcc is gpl'ed, so no one really owns it. The other dists can compile their own gcc and use that.
However, I suppose they could provide a proprietary, but nice & slick, IDE that everyone chooses to use. But it doesn't seem RedHat's style to become a monopolist. Their business model is based on the notion that open source is a good thing (tm), as is Cygnus. I think it will end up being more like a 'pooling of skills', they weren't gobbling up a competitor. Cygnus was based (more or less) on selling support for open source software, as is Redhat, so there is no reason they won't continue on like that.
And remember, this is the company that hired Alan Cox and said he could pretty much do whatever the heck he wants. I'm not worried or nervous in the least.
Dana
Well...I don't think I'd make anyone throw up, but I probably wouldn't make any money either :)
Dana
Well, people can still be arrested for being disorderly in the street.
:) I can't see how this is in anyway a violation of any of his rights. The judge basicly said, you were being a nuisance, you were hassling people, we don't want you to do it. He's not banned from the Internet, he's not banned from Usenet, he's just not allowed to post to one little part of it where he was making an ass of himself. It's a reasonable, rational punnishment.
If the authorities wish, they can arrest him for the actual threats, etc. posted to the Usenet, but banning him from posting altogether is exercising their control to an unacceptable extent. The powers that be (politicians, judiciaries, etc.) are authoritarian by their very nature. Give them an inch (of our freedom) and they'll take a mile.
But anyway, what you said makes it sounds as though you would rather him arrested than not allowed to post to one newsgroup! If he's in jail, he probably won't get to post to any newsgroups at all
Dana
KKK members have a right to think what they think, sure, but there ARE limits to how they can express themselves. Ie, no threats, harassment, public mischief. You can't arrest someone for being a KKK member, but you can arrest them if they show up at my house and hassle me.
Besides, I see this matter rather more like banning a rude/drunk/idiot from a business establishment. If I'm making an idiot of myself in a bar or a restaurant, the manager can call the police and have me removed. If I keep going back and making a nuisance of myself, they can probably ban me and have a judge prevent me from returning. This isn't censoring my right to free speech or thoughts, it falls under the public nuisance areas of law. My suggestion is that this whole incident falls under that category.
Dana