The massive clustering infrastructure google has developed sure could help with protein analysis. I would bet that their idle cycles could easily match or exceed what is being done today with United Devices or Folding at home.
They may not cure cancer, but I could see them partnering to help those that will.
The reasoning for having a/bin and a/usr/bin is that you can have a very small root partition. Then when/usr gets mounted you pick up the rest of the binaries that you want for a fully functioning system. Moving/usr/local/bin and/usr/bin out of/usr and into/bin would defeat the whole purpose.
The reason you want a minimal root partition is that a smaller partition with fewer files will have less oportunity for corruption. That way if your larger/usr partition gets corrupted you can still boot and have the tools you need to get they system functioning again. Kind of like a built-in rescue disk.
The/usr/local/bin directory exists for binaries that are not managed by the distribution's packaging system. That prevents add-on software from breaking dependencies in the underlying OS. That is why most software that you download and compile yourself installs itself in/usr/local.
The/usr/share/bin directory is for binaries that may be shared among multiple systems. For instance an in-house network may have an NFS shared volume with binaries that are used on all systems. Man pages are often included here because they tend not to change much from system to system.
IMHO people who complain about this structure are just looknig for something to whine about. All of these directories are automaticaly added to the path, so most users should never have to think about them at all.
I often hear from windows users that the/etc directory is much more complicated than it needs to be, and that things are hard to find. After I point out how much cleaner/etc is than the windows registry those complaints tend to go away as well.
If there is a problem with the unix directory structure its that the names are far from clear. What exactly do etc and usr stand for? If usr is for user then isn't that where the home directories should be? var makes a certain amount of sense to developers, but I don't know that most people would understand that means "stuff that changes a lot". I don't suggest that the names change because that could be an even bigger mess, but I do think that experienced users need to keep all this in mind when helping new users to understand the system.
This has been a great strategy for me. I have my own domain that forwards to my gmail account, and google now allows me to send mail using the gmail interface from whatever email address I choose. (As long as I can recieve mail sent to that address.) My domain is hosted at mydomain.com which has free dns hosting and email forwarding, so its all real easy to manage and costs almost nothing.
The one gotcha is that I had an SPF record to restrict what servers could send email from my domain. When I started sending from google I added "-all a:google.com" to the SPF record and its been working great.
I fear I'm feeding a troll, but there is an important point to be made here. It's not OpenDocument that first demanded "ONE TRUE FORMAT" for office documents, it was the consumer. Consumer's have demanded, justifiably, that they can read documents written by others, and that other can read documents that they create. The ephemeral "Microsoft Lock-in" exists because consumers want a single format; and for whatever reason they handed Microsoft the role to dictate it.
If there is going to be interoperability in office documents, someone is going to have to bless a standard. I would rather that standard come from a consortium of interested companies and individuals then from a single corperation with a clear conflict of interest.
Microsoft has a long history of forcing upgrades by breaking formats from one version of their software to another. Microsoft has the only Office suite that is not cabable of properly using old Microsoft formats. They have the resources to do it if they wished, but long term data retention is not a Microsoft priority.
The question isn't whether we want "ONE TRUE FORMAT". I think it is clear we do. The question is whether we want "ONE TRUE OFFICE SUITE". I'll never understand why some people claim to believe that Microsoft offers a freedom that open standards threaten to take away.
In the early days of the Internet, Microsoft resisted because they prefered the early vision of AOL where the owner of the network could charge a fee for every page that was hosted. One company could be the gatekeeper for all the content in the network. For those that recall, that was the early dream of MSN. It was only when the Internet became clearly inevitable that Microsoft began to support TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, and all the other standards that make the Internet as free a place as it is. Now, with any luck the same thing can begin to happen with office documents as well.
Most people never use the Urgent flag on email, but those that do use it for every single email they send. Its usualy the most useless people that do this because otherwise their messages would be ignored completely. I find that flag to be utterly useless, unless you consider in a contra-indicator of importance.
Early TV standards halted the initial growth of Cable and Satellite. Waiting for a standard for HDTV almost killed it, too.
So your saying that if CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS all required different TVs it would have been easier for cable to enter the market? Huh? It was because the networks all agreed on a standard that TV even became popular enough for anyone to have interest in cable. Cable TV would have been much more dificult to roll out if they had to support 7 different standards, or convince everyone to buy a new TV.
I also don't see any supporting evidence that the existence of one standard held back the emergence of HDTV. The research to make HDTV consumer ready went on into the 1990s. Once the technology was ready and cheap enough its started getting rolled out. However, if the broadcasters and manufacturers hadn't agreed on a new standard for HDTV we would all still be waiting, because nobody would be interested in buying a high-tech TV that only gets FOX.
Early telephone standards made cell phone research take decades. It slowed DSL rollouts and kept features like CID out for a decade, too.
The same thing goes for your telephone analogy. (You do love reasoning by analogy don't you.) If it weren't for early standards then the telephone system would probably never have become popular enough to make research into cell phones possible. (Where do you think that research funding came from?) That also leads into another great point though. If you buy a cell phone and then want to change providers you can't, because they use different standards. If you want to use walkie talkie features to talk to someone on the Nextel network, you have to buy a Nextel and get Nextel service. How does this serve the consumer? Nextel is one of the most overpriced networks out there, and that is in part because of the network effect on the walkie-talkie feature.
IM is doing just fine for hundreds of millions of users. If they decide (through millions of individual choices) that they want interoperability, it
will happen.
Not sure how you can speak for hundreds of millions of users, but most that I know are frustrated by the various incompatible networks. Why else would a product like Trillian be so popular? And I believe that the millions of individual choices you speak of are going to happen soon, now that there is a better choice. (Please Google, hurry up on S2S.) It will be hindered by the network effect, but I believe it will happen.
In the topic of innovation, the proprietary IM networks have been around for about 10 years now. If your point about non-existent standards promoting innovation is true we should have seen a ton of innovation in this area. Where is it? About the only innovations I can think of are logging and automatic wikipedia links. Neither of those came from the big three.
Look for innovation when any competitor can enter the market, not when it is dominated by a few entrenched players. Good standards provide for extensions, and do not hinder innovation. For instance, when HTML was created nobody had dreamed of Flash or Javascript, but the need for extensions was built into the standards. The Jabber standards have been written in much the same way.
On the topic of analogies: they are great for illustrating a point, but should never be used as a basis for reasoning. They almost always lead you down the wrong path. Start by looking at the realities of a subject, and when you reach a point where you think you have a unique understanding then you can use analogy to connect that understanding with something someone already knows. Your posts talk about grocery stores, television networks, telephone networks, and automobiles. I don't see any real supported points about IM at all. (And support is really lacking in your other points as well.)
If you read the posts in the Google Talk development forums, Google is currently working on S2S, and is commited to allowing open S2S connectivity to their service.
Their chief concern ATM is that the IM network will become as subject to spam as the email network is today. They are looking at ways to prevent that problem before enabling full S2S connectivity. Better to try an address the issue now, because security is hard to add-on to an existing global network, as we have seen with SMTP.
So why do you think Microsoft and AOL provide this free (beer) service? As an act of charity? And why do you think that they have had such strong resistance to inter-operation? Bad hair day?
Both companies believe that they can use IM as a platform to make money, or as a platform to lock people into other services that cost money. Otherwise they wouldn't be providing the service and resisting inter-operation. Both companies sell enterprise servers that can be used within corporate environments to provide features unavailable with the free client. You can bet that any "innovations" will appear in that environment and not in the free version.
For instance, there is a limited number of contacts that you can use in MSN, but that limit is removed with the enterprise server. For many people thats not an issue, but I know of a lot of helpdesk and GNOC people who need more than an average number of contacts, and they run into the limit all the time. If I try to create a new inovative service that runs on top of IM networks, I will need to pay a tithe to Microsoft to use more than the limited number of contacts they allow. If Microsoft didn't like my new service they could block it at the server and I would be powerless to stop them, and even today my choice of alternate providers would be quite limited.
Microsoft has already started to talk about integrating MSIM into exchange and outlook. Just one more example of how Microsoft can extend one monopoly into another, and how they plan to tie IM inovations to overpriced software.
Your grocery store is about as lame an analogy as I have ever seen, but I will attempt to use it to show where you are confused. I can go to any grocery store I like and buy a bag of apples, bring them home, and bake a pie with ingredients purchased at any other store I like, and the grocery store has no way to stop me. There is no such promise with MSIM or AIM.
Yes there is _some_ choice of clients at present, but that is only by fiat of Microsoft and AOL. They can use encryption and soon trusted computing to lock out competing clients, or to charge competing vendors licensing if they want to inter-operate. This is not a question of "if", but "when". At some point they _will_ see an opportunity and they _will_ take it.
I don't want to have to rely on Microsoft and AOL to give me permission to use IM or whatever new innovations are be created to use an IM network. Not when it is possible to have an open network to provide the same thing. This is not a case of trading multiple providers for one. It is trading three providers for as many others that want to enter the market. Yes, the core protocols will be the same. But that stops nobody from extending them or adding additional features to clients. Open standards provide a common platform from which anyone can inovate, while closed standards limit inovation to the corporations in power.
The Jabber network really is the answer here, and with Google's new involvement, and commitment to support S2S federation we might stand a chance to make this part of the Internet as free (as in speech) as HTTP and SMTP are today. In fact, this may be our only chance.
Try to look past the next year when thinking about what direction we want our network to go. Less corporate control will always be preferable in the log term, even if it is not in the short term.
Newer chips may have higher power requirements than older chips, but that doesn't mean they will use more power when put under an identical load.
It is likely that newer chips would use less power because a lot of optimization has to be done to minimize heat generation when increasing the speed of the chip.
Regardless of wealth, there are rules. Just ask Larry Ellison and his takeover of Peoplesoft.
I think you just proved yourself wrong. Ellison was not constrained by the rules. With the power of his wealth he was able to override them. Same is true with Gates/MS and the US anti-trust case.
I hope this doesn't have to be said, but I'll say it anyways. The parent is not a doctor or a bio-chemist, or at least didn't claim to be. It sounds like his advice is purely anicdotal and shouldn't be given too much weight.
While I can't speak to your conclusion, California deregulation is not a fair example. The market was never really deregulated. The old regulations were thrown out and replaced with an entire new set that was designed for political expediancy, not functionality or effeciency.
Setting your domain to expire every 5 minutes does not mean that every ISP will honor that setting. Several major ISPs routinely ignore short expire settings. Also, this doesn't solve the orignal problem. Now your DNS server will get pounded instead of your RSS box.
That may be true, but how exactly does the US government enforce proper working conditions in forign countries. Even if we impose terrifs or lock-outs on products where labor was mistreated, we have no authority to launch investigations on forign soil. I agree with you on the problem, but I don't think the US government has any control.
The only thing that can really help those workers improve their conditions is if more employers move into (or develop in) the region. Then employers will have to compete for their labor. Of course at that point they will just jump to the next developing country.
The case of the steel workers is a great illustration of the problem with terrifs. If we raise terrifs on forign steel it may help the US steel industry, but it will hurt every US industry that uses that steel. US manufacturers will have to pay more for their raw materials so they wont be able to compete with forign manufacturers. Companies that can't compete go out of business and people loose jobs.
The best way to fix the problem is to push through it by stimulating the global economy, and remove dictators and governments that participate in the exploitation of workers.
BTW: Whats wrong with working naked? Don't you ever telecommute.;)
I still don't understand what Bush has to do with outsourcing. In a global economy there is nothing the government can do to stop it. If they require that US companies only hire US people, then US companies will not be able to compete in the global marketplace because their products will be too damn expensive.
Imposing such laws is a good way to force US companies to move offshore. Not a good idea if you want to create jobs.
The only way the government can really stop outsourcing would be to close the borders to trade, or impose ridiculous terrifs to prevent cheaper products from coming in. Either act would be an economic disaster for both the US and the world.
True, but thats the case with ALL security. There is always a way to break the security. The trick is to make it hard enough to not be worth doing. I think that recovering data from a drive that has been completely re-written 500 times is possible, but would probably be quite expensive even for a large government. Nobody wants to see your home-made porn that badly.
When did I assume anything? Read my post. I simply pointed out that from a scientific point of view the decision is arbitrary. I also made the point that we can't rely on science to tell us right from wrong.
You can't prove that there is any moment where that mass of cells becomes a human, so from a purely scientific standpoint one position is just as valid as the other. Really what it gets down to is what specific definition of human you want to use. I choose to be conservative in my definition because the consequences of being wrong are so serious.
As for those who are already suffering, I suggest that you could find many more productive ways of helping them then wasting your time on slashdot. Looking at your history you have commented on stories ranging from patents to encryption. How can you waste your time arguing on such trivial issues when there are people suffering in the world?!?! You shouldn't waste your time on those issues until you "take care of all of those who're already in the world".
When a religious person wants to justify blind faith they call it a mystery. When anyone else tries to justify blind faith they call it common sense.
First of all, even dismissing all religious arguments, there are serious philisophical issues that can be raised with this kind of research. What is the point of learning how to better human life if we place no value on it? If you can't at least aknowledge that there can be a valid discussion then you are probably just afraid to address the issue. Casting the other side as "religious freaks" is just a way to justify your own ignorance.
Second, the idea that religion tries to oppress science is completely false. I'll only speak of Catholicism, because that is what I know, and because you invoked the "Galileo" arguement.
Claiming that religion is against knowledge because a single Pope chose to imprison Galileo is like saying all software is bad because Microsoft writes bad software. Microsoft writes bad software because their goal is market dominance, not good code. In the time of Galileo, the church was also a government. As a government its primary goal was to maintain control, and it was feared that revealing Galileo's discoveries would weaken that control. The documents that we have from that time indicate that it was a political, not a religious decision. There is no evidence that the church rejected the science. I don't defend the action, but I reject it as a mark against religion.
In Catholic theology/philosphy all knowledge is good. There is no reason that we should not understand how orbits, electrons and genetics work. The issue is what we do to obtain the knowledge, and what we do once we have it.
Science without philosopy is useless. From a purely scientific viewpoint it doesn't matter if we cure cancer, blow our world apart, or worship toads. Humans are just chemical reactions that the universe can do with or without. Human life and suffering don't matter a bit.
Of course you don't believe that, but thats because you have placed an arbitrary value on an arbitrary definition of humanity. You probably believe that science should serve humanity, but you define humanity as being exclusive of the unborn. Others define it as including the unborn.
You have called those that disagree with you "a bunch of ignoramuses" so I assume you have some solid scientific basis for your position. Please enlighten me with the science that I am missing. While you are at it, can you explain why genicide, enslavement, murder, theft, and bad manners are wrong?
If we learn anything from history, we should learn that it is far too easy to re-define some group as less than human for selfish gain. You can't prove that slaves should be free, but that doesn't make it less true. We are in big trouble if we only protect that which science can prove is worth protecting.
First of all, RFIDs don't have much, if any, processing capability. They respond to a magnetic field and spit out a number. Yes that number my be encrypted with a private key, but the number itself always stays the same. If someone can get the encrypted number from my license then they can pretend to be me without ever decrypting it.
If the RFID simply stores a random unique ID that identifies "Fred", then encrypting it will only result in a different random unique ID that identifies "Fred".
Another option would be to encode the actual data, or a hash of the data, into the number. (Name, address, SS, etc) But the result would still be a static identifying number that anyone could collect. In this case the encryption may make it harder to forge the card, but the same thing could be done with a barcode without the same privacy concerns. So really RFID isn't making forgery difficult, the encryption is.
Think of the fun that someone could have if they got a hold of the private key used to encrypt everyone's ID. Yes it might be practicaly impossible to find it by brute force, but that doesn't prevent human error or corruption from letting it leak.
The only reason for RFID is convienence because nobody has to touch the card to verify your ID. But if nobody touches the card, RFID by itself is way to easy to forge.
I could get all the information I need to forge your ID just by walking past with a scanner. If someone bothered to look at my forgery they could compare the printed information to the information in the database and I may be caught. But if someone is going to handle the ID anyways, why not use a barcode or a magnetic strip?
Encryption is no magic bullet for privacy, and RFID does nothing that can't be done just as well or better with other means.
And how exactly does RFID make a license harder to counterfeit? RFID will soon be as common as barcodes are today. Implanting a chip with a desired code wont be any harder than forging the holograms frequently in use today.
In fact, it is likely that people wont look as closely at the card anymore because they will learn to trust the reader instead. So now it may be even easier to steal someones identity.
remember that many Slashdotter's have 401k's and it's a rare 401k that doesn't hold some Microsoft stock.
So what? Then they also hold stock in thousands of other companies that pay the "Microsoft Tax" in order to do business. Anything that forces MS to compete on a level playing field is good for those thousands of other companies.
The problem is that Longhorn will be able to play DRM and non-DRM formats while Linux will only be able to play non-DRM. Consumers will be forced to commit a criminal act to listen to the CD they legitimately bought on Linux. Not much different than DVD today. Linux will be seen as less capable, not more free.
I'm not familiar with dnslog, and searches in google, apt-cache, and sourceforge all came up empty. It looks like a cool tool. Mind telling me where to find it?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'll bite. :)
The massive clustering infrastructure google has developed sure could help with protein analysis. I would bet that their idle cycles could easily match or exceed what is being done today with United Devices or Folding at home.
They may not cure cancer, but I could see them partnering to help those that will.
The reasoning for having a /bin and a /usr/bin is that you can have a very small root partition. Then when /usr gets mounted you pick up the rest of the binaries that you want for a fully functioning system. Moving /usr/local/bin and /usr/bin out of /usr and into /bin would defeat the whole purpose.
/usr partition gets corrupted you can still boot and have the tools you need to get they system functioning again. Kind of like a built-in rescue disk.
/usr/local/bin directory exists for binaries that are not managed by the distribution's packaging system. That prevents add-on software from breaking dependencies in the underlying OS. That is why most software that you download and compile yourself installs itself in /usr/local.
/usr/share/bin directory is for binaries that may be shared among multiple systems. For instance an in-house network may have an NFS shared volume with binaries that are used on all systems. Man pages are often included here because they tend not to change much from system to system.
/etc directory is much more complicated than it needs to be, and that things are hard to find. After I point out how much cleaner /etc is than the windows registry those complaints tend to go away as well.
The reason you want a minimal root partition is that a smaller partition with fewer files will have less oportunity for corruption. That way if your larger
The
The
IMHO people who complain about this structure are just looknig for something to whine about. All of these directories are automaticaly added to the path, so most users should never have to think about them at all.
I often hear from windows users that the
If there is a problem with the unix directory structure its that the names are far from clear. What exactly do etc and usr stand for? If usr is for user then isn't that where the home directories should be? var makes a certain amount of sense to developers, but I don't know that most people would understand that means "stuff that changes a lot". I don't suggest that the names change because that could be an even bigger mess, but I do think that experienced users need to keep all this in mind when helping new users to understand the system.
This has been a great strategy for me. I have my own domain that forwards to my gmail account, and google now allows me to send mail using the gmail interface from whatever email address I choose. (As long as I can recieve mail sent to that address.) My domain is hosted at mydomain.com which has free dns hosting and email forwarding, so its all real easy to manage and costs almost nothing.
The one gotcha is that I had an SPF record to restrict what servers could send email from my domain. When I started sending from google I added "-all a:google.com" to the SPF record and its been working great.
I fear I'm feeding a troll, but there is an important point to be made here. It's not OpenDocument that first demanded "ONE TRUE FORMAT" for office documents, it was the consumer. Consumer's have demanded, justifiably, that they can read documents written by others, and that other can read documents that they create. The ephemeral "Microsoft Lock-in" exists because consumers want a single format; and for whatever reason they handed Microsoft the role to dictate it.
If there is going to be interoperability in office documents, someone is going to have to bless a standard. I would rather that standard come from a consortium of interested companies and individuals then from a single corperation with a clear conflict of interest.
Microsoft has a long history of forcing upgrades by breaking formats from one version of their software to another. Microsoft has the only Office suite that is not cabable of properly using old Microsoft formats. They have the resources to do it if they wished, but long term data retention is not a Microsoft priority.
The question isn't whether we want "ONE TRUE FORMAT". I think it is clear we do. The question is whether we want "ONE TRUE OFFICE SUITE". I'll never understand why some people claim to believe that Microsoft offers a freedom that open standards threaten to take away.
In the early days of the Internet, Microsoft resisted because they prefered the early vision of AOL where the owner of the network could charge a fee for every page that was hosted. One company could be the gatekeeper for all the content in the network. For those that recall, that was the early dream of MSN. It was only when the Internet became clearly inevitable that Microsoft began to support TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, and all the other standards that make the Internet as free a place as it is. Now, with any luck the same thing can begin to happen with office documents as well.
Thank you Massachusetts and OpenDocument.
Amen brother.
Most people never use the Urgent flag on email, but those that do use it for every single email they send. Its usualy the most useless people that do this because otherwise their messages would be ignored completely. I find that flag to be utterly useless, unless you consider in a contra-indicator of importance.
So your saying that if CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS all required different TVs it would have been easier for cable to enter the market? Huh? It was because the networks all agreed on a standard that TV even became popular enough for anyone to have interest in cable. Cable TV would have been much more dificult to roll out if they had to support 7 different standards, or convince everyone to buy a new TV.
I also don't see any supporting evidence that the existence of one standard held back the emergence of HDTV. The research to make HDTV consumer ready went on into the 1990s. Once the technology was ready and cheap enough its started getting rolled out. However, if the broadcasters and manufacturers hadn't agreed on a new standard for HDTV we would all still be waiting, because nobody would be interested in buying a high-tech TV that only gets FOX.
Early telephone standards made cell phone research take decades. It slowed DSL rollouts and kept features like CID out for a decade, too.
The same thing goes for your telephone analogy. (You do love reasoning by analogy don't you.) If it weren't for early standards then the telephone system would probably never have become popular enough to make research into cell phones possible. (Where do you think that research funding came from?) That also leads into another great point though. If you buy a cell phone and then want to change providers you can't, because they use different standards. If you want to use walkie talkie features to talk to someone on the Nextel network, you have to buy a Nextel and get Nextel service. How does this serve the consumer? Nextel is one of the most overpriced networks out there, and that is in part because of the network effect on the walkie-talkie feature.
IM is doing just fine for hundreds of millions of users. If they decide (through millions of individual choices) that they want interoperability, it will happen.
Not sure how you can speak for hundreds of millions of users, but most that I know are frustrated by the various incompatible networks. Why else would a product like Trillian be so popular? And I believe that the millions of individual choices you speak of are going to happen soon, now that there is a better choice. (Please Google, hurry up on S2S.) It will be hindered by the network effect, but I believe it will happen.
In the topic of innovation, the proprietary IM networks have been around for about 10 years now. If your point about non-existent standards promoting innovation is true we should have seen a ton of innovation in this area. Where is it? About the only innovations I can think of are logging and automatic wikipedia links. Neither of those came from the big three.
Look for innovation when any competitor can enter the market, not when it is dominated by a few entrenched players. Good standards provide for extensions, and do not hinder innovation. For instance, when HTML was created nobody had dreamed of Flash or Javascript, but the need for extensions was built into the standards. The Jabber standards have been written in much the same way.
On the topic of analogies: they are great for illustrating a point, but should never be used as a basis for reasoning. They almost always lead you down the wrong path. Start by looking at the realities of a subject, and when you reach a point where you think you have a unique understanding then you can use analogy to connect that understanding with something someone already knows. Your posts talk about grocery stores, television networks, telephone networks, and automobiles. I don't see any real supported points about IM at all. (And support is really lacking in your other points as well.)
An open network would do nothing to prevent this. You could just as easily have two IDs on the same network and achieve the same thing.
If you read the posts in the Google Talk development forums, Google is currently working on S2S, and is commited to allowing open S2S connectivity to their service.
Their chief concern ATM is that the IM network will become as subject to spam as the email network is today. They are looking at ways to prevent that problem before enabling full S2S connectivity. Better to try an address the issue now, because security is hard to add-on to an existing global network, as we have seen with SMTP.
So why do you think Microsoft and AOL provide this free (beer) service? As an act of charity? And why do you think that they have had such strong resistance to inter-operation? Bad hair day?
Both companies believe that they can use IM as a platform to make money, or as a platform to lock people into other services that cost money. Otherwise they wouldn't be providing the service and resisting inter-operation. Both companies sell enterprise servers that can be used within corporate environments to provide features unavailable with the free client. You can bet that any "innovations" will appear in that environment and not in the free version.
For instance, there is a limited number of contacts that you can use in MSN, but that limit is removed with the enterprise server. For many people thats not an issue, but I know of a lot of helpdesk and GNOC people who need more than an average number of contacts, and they run into the limit all the time. If I try to create a new inovative service that runs on top of IM networks, I will need to pay a tithe to Microsoft to use more than the limited number of contacts they allow. If Microsoft didn't like my new service they could block it at the server and I would be powerless to stop them, and even today my choice of alternate providers would be quite limited.
Microsoft has already started to talk about integrating MSIM into exchange and outlook. Just one more example of how Microsoft can extend one monopoly into another, and how they plan to tie IM inovations to overpriced software.
Your grocery store is about as lame an analogy as I have ever seen, but I will attempt to use it to show where you are confused. I can go to any grocery store I like and buy a bag of apples, bring them home, and bake a pie with ingredients purchased at any other store I like, and the grocery store has no way to stop me. There is no such promise with MSIM or AIM.
Yes there is _some_ choice of clients at present, but that is only by fiat of Microsoft and AOL. They can use encryption and soon trusted computing to lock out competing clients, or to charge competing vendors licensing if they want to inter-operate. This is not a question of "if", but "when". At some point they _will_ see an opportunity and they _will_ take it.
I don't want to have to rely on Microsoft and AOL to give me permission to use IM or whatever new innovations are be created to use an IM network. Not when it is possible to have an open network to provide the same thing. This is not a case of trading multiple providers for one. It is trading three providers for as many others that want to enter the market. Yes, the core protocols will be the same. But that stops nobody from extending them or adding additional features to clients. Open standards provide a common platform from which anyone can inovate, while closed standards limit inovation to the corporations in power.
The Jabber network really is the answer here, and with Google's new involvement, and commitment to support S2S federation we might stand a chance to make this part of the Internet as free (as in speech) as HTTP and SMTP are today. In fact, this may be our only chance.
Try to look past the next year when thinking about what direction we want our network to go. Less corporate control will always be preferable in the log term, even if it is not in the short term.
Newer chips may have higher power requirements than older chips, but that doesn't mean they will use more power when put under an identical load.
It is likely that newer chips would use less power because a lot of optimization has to be done to minimize heat generation when increasing the speed of the chip.
Because on time would have been in 2004?
I think you just proved yourself wrong. Ellison was not constrained by the rules. With the power of his wealth he was able to override them. Same is true with Gates/MS and the US anti-trust case.
I hope this doesn't have to be said, but I'll say it anyways. The parent is not a doctor or a bio-chemist, or at least didn't claim to be. It sounds like his advice is purely anicdotal and shouldn't be given too much weight.
While I can't speak to your conclusion, California deregulation is not a fair example. The market was never really deregulated. The old regulations were thrown out and replaced with an entire new set that was designed for political expediancy, not functionality or effeciency.
Setting your domain to expire every 5 minutes does not mean that every ISP will honor that setting. Several major ISPs routinely ignore short expire settings. Also, this doesn't solve the orignal problem. Now your DNS server will get pounded instead of your RSS box.
That may be true, but how exactly does the US government enforce proper working conditions in forign countries. Even if we impose terrifs or lock-outs on products where labor was mistreated, we have no authority to launch investigations on forign soil. I agree with you on the problem, but I don't think the US government has any control.
;)
The only thing that can really help those workers improve their conditions is if more employers move into (or develop in) the region. Then employers will have to compete for their labor. Of course at that point they will just jump to the next developing country.
The case of the steel workers is a great illustration of the problem with terrifs. If we raise terrifs on forign steel it may help the US steel industry, but it will hurt every US industry that uses that steel. US manufacturers will have to pay more for their raw materials so they wont be able to compete with forign manufacturers. Companies that can't compete go out of business and people loose jobs.
The best way to fix the problem is to push through it by stimulating the global economy, and remove dictators and governments that participate in the exploitation of workers.
BTW: Whats wrong with working naked? Don't you ever telecommute.
I still don't understand what Bush has to do with outsourcing. In a global economy there is nothing the government can do to stop it. If they require that US companies only hire US people, then US companies will not be able to compete in the global marketplace because their products will be too damn expensive.
Imposing such laws is a good way to force US companies to move offshore. Not a good idea if you want to create jobs.
The only way the government can really stop outsourcing would be to close the borders to trade, or impose ridiculous terrifs to prevent cheaper products from coming in. Either act would be an economic disaster for both the US and the world.
True, but thats the case with ALL security. There is always a way to break the security. The trick is to make it hard enough to not be worth doing. I think that recovering data from a drive that has been completely re-written 500 times is possible, but would probably be quite expensive even for a large government. Nobody wants to see your home-made porn that badly.
When did I assume anything? Read my post. I simply pointed out that from a scientific point of view the decision is arbitrary. I also made the point that we can't rely on science to tell us right from wrong.
You can't prove that there is any moment where that mass of cells becomes a human, so from a purely scientific standpoint one position is just as valid as the other. Really what it gets down to is what specific definition of human you want to use. I choose to be conservative in my definition because the consequences of being wrong are so serious.
As for those who are already suffering, I suggest that you could find many more productive ways of helping them then wasting your time on slashdot. Looking at your history you have commented on stories ranging from patents to encryption. How can you waste your time arguing on such trivial issues when there are people suffering in the world?!?! You shouldn't waste your time on those issues until you "take care of all of those who're already in the world".
When a religious person wants to justify blind faith they call it a mystery. When anyone else tries to justify blind faith they call it common sense.
I call BS
First of all, even dismissing all religious arguments, there are serious philisophical issues that can be raised with this kind of research. What is the point of learning how to better human life if we place no value on it? If you can't at least aknowledge that there can be a valid discussion then you are probably just afraid to address the issue. Casting the other side as "religious freaks" is just a way to justify your own ignorance.
Second, the idea that religion tries to oppress science is completely false. I'll only speak of Catholicism, because that is what I know, and because you invoked the "Galileo" arguement.
Claiming that religion is against knowledge because a single Pope chose to imprison Galileo is like saying all software is bad because Microsoft writes bad software. Microsoft writes bad software because their goal is market dominance, not good code. In the time of Galileo, the church was also a government. As a government its primary goal was to maintain control, and it was feared that revealing Galileo's discoveries would weaken that control. The documents that we have from that time indicate that it was a political, not a religious decision. There is no evidence that the church rejected the science. I don't defend the action, but I reject it as a mark against religion.
In Catholic theology/philosphy all knowledge is good. There is no reason that we should not understand how orbits, electrons and genetics work. The issue is what we do to obtain the knowledge, and what we do once we have it.
Science without philosopy is useless. From a purely scientific viewpoint it doesn't matter if we cure cancer, blow our world apart, or worship toads. Humans are just chemical reactions that the universe can do with or without. Human life and suffering don't matter a bit.
Of course you don't believe that, but thats because you have placed an arbitrary value on an arbitrary definition of humanity. You probably believe that science should serve humanity, but you define humanity as being exclusive of the unborn. Others define it as including the unborn.
You have called those that disagree with you "a bunch of ignoramuses" so I assume you have some solid scientific basis for your position. Please enlighten me with the science that I am missing. While you are at it, can you explain why genicide, enslavement, murder, theft, and bad manners are wrong?
If we learn anything from history, we should learn that it is far too easy to re-define some group as less than human for selfish gain. You can't prove that slaves should be free, but that doesn't make it less true. We are in big trouble if we only protect that which science can prove is worth protecting.
Sorry, doesn't fly.
First of all, RFIDs don't have much, if any, processing capability. They respond to a magnetic field and spit out a number. Yes that number my be encrypted with a private key, but the number itself always stays the same. If someone can get the encrypted number from my license then they can pretend to be me without ever decrypting it.
If the RFID simply stores a random unique ID that identifies "Fred", then encrypting it will only result in a different random unique ID that identifies "Fred".
Another option would be to encode the actual data, or a hash of the data, into the number. (Name, address, SS, etc) But the result would still be a static identifying number that anyone could collect. In this case the encryption may make it harder to forge the card, but the same thing could be done with a barcode without the same privacy concerns. So really RFID isn't making forgery difficult, the encryption is.
Think of the fun that someone could have if they got a hold of the private key used to encrypt everyone's ID. Yes it might be practicaly impossible to find it by brute force, but that doesn't prevent human error or corruption from letting it leak.
The only reason for RFID is convienence because nobody has to touch the card to verify your ID. But if nobody touches the card, RFID by itself is way to easy to forge.
I could get all the information I need to forge your ID just by walking past with a scanner. If someone bothered to look at my forgery they could compare the printed information to the information in the database and I may be caught. But if someone is going to handle the ID anyways, why not use a barcode or a magnetic strip?
Encryption is no magic bullet for privacy, and RFID does nothing that can't be done just as well or better with other means.
And how exactly does RFID make a license harder to counterfeit? RFID will soon be as common as barcodes are today. Implanting a chip with a desired code wont be any harder than forging the holograms frequently in use today.
In fact, it is likely that people wont look as closely at the card anymore because they will learn to trust the reader instead. So now it may be even easier to steal someones identity.
So what? Then they also hold stock in thousands of other companies that pay the "Microsoft Tax" in order to do business. Anything that forces MS to compete on a level playing field is good for those thousands of other companies.
The problem is that Longhorn will be able to play DRM and non-DRM formats while Linux will only be able to play non-DRM. Consumers will be forced to commit a criminal act to listen to the CD they legitimately bought on Linux. Not much different than DVD today. Linux will be seen as less capable, not more free.
I'm not familiar with dnslog, and searches in google, apt-cache, and sourceforge all came up empty. It looks like a cool tool. Mind telling me where to find it?