"Once the technology exists for medical use disreputable people will be putting the stuff in athletes," he warned.
If people want to do that with their bodies, let them.
I think much of this fear of doping has to do with the fact that the olympic committee and sports clubs just don't want the futility of their "competitions" exposed. Right now, they tenuously maintain some illusion of participatory sports.
What difference should it make to anybody whether some olympic athlete pumps himself full of genes? Those people are so far removed from regular human beings that it is like watching a carnival side show anyway.
If you like sports, do it yourself. Compete, in a friendly way, with people you know and like. Anything else is not sports but voyeurism and soap opera.
But the workers in India and China are working for US and European corporations.
There are few "US" or "European" corporations--they are all transnationals. And they do bring international working conditions and practices to other nations, which may not be a bad thing.
The US wasn't lucky or advantaged. Instead the US had a freer market (relatively speaking) than the "unlucky and disadvantaged" nations. Luck is finding a wonderful opportunity, but luck isn't what created that opportunity.
Sure it was luck. You seem to subscribe to the notion that the US has some magical formula of laws and markets that, if some nation adopts it, they, too, will become as wealthy as the US. I think that's completely naive. The way US markets look today is as much a consequence of other factors that brought wealth to the US in the first place as the other way around.
And I think the US will discover that first hand, as it has to compete with lean, mean, young nations like India and China. In fact, that's what this discussion is about: if US style markets guaranteed dominance and wealth, we wouldn't even be talking about this.
Think about it--what's the alternative? China and India are getting ever more educated. Do you think two billion people are going to do sweat shop labor forever? They are smart, young, and the media are showing them the kind of wealth they can attain. They want nice jobs and they are going to get them.
The US was incredibly lucky and advantaged for about 50 years following WWII. There is no way that kind of disparity and advantage can continue, even if the US were continuing its strong initial investment in research and technology.
I suspect that those kinds of results are largely due to poor window management, in particular in Windows. Windows doesn't even have virtual desktops out of the box. If you use a decent window manager, I'd conjecture that multiple monitors don't help much for most applications compared to a decent high-resolution single monitor (1280x1024 or above).
Sure, they added lots of gimmicks and features, and they made IE prettier and a bit more usable than when it started. But I don't recall much "innovation", as in "genuinely new ideas".
Thus, they have that silly notion of proving intent to commit a crime in addition to the commission of the crime itself (hence the diffference between manslaughter and murder 1, in the extreme case, or the difference between a tortious instance of neglect and a prosecutable instance of malice, in the more common case).
Right. And I think notions of intent, while not completely avoidable, should be kept to a minimum in the law. This seems like one of those cases where it is superfluous.
The hypocricy was quite apparent. Here you had the man behind the most absurd of recent patents--one click shopping--claiming to be behind patent reform.
I don't see a problem with that. The rules right now allow silly patents. If you want to be in business, you have to file silly patents, otherwise, you can't compete.
At the same time, many companies realize that filing silly patents is a big drain on their time and resources and will never give them any revenue. So, they would like to stop doing it. But they only can stop doing it if everybody else does, and that's why they participate in efforts to reform the patent system.
That shouldn't stop you or me or anybody else from holding Bezos's feet to the fire (e.g., by buying at places other than Amazon) over filing silly patents: that is just additional pressure to get them (i.e., the people with money and power) to work towards changing the system.
I think the most robust way of running something that large without system admin support is to create a CD-ROM-based distribution (Knoppix, Morphix) and have students always boot from CD. That way, everybody is guaranteed to have a working, virus-free system.
While Macs are perhaps a little easier to administer than Windows machines, they still require extensive handholding and their disk-based installations do "go bad" when users start installing software or messing around in system directories (and they will).
The part about hacking into people's computers should arguably be a prosecutable offense. But "spoofing" the from address should not be: the "From:" line is currently pretty much only advisory and will remain so until there are significant technical changes to the email infrastructure.
And it's too easy to put in the wrong "From:" line accidentally when configuring mail systems. For example, I was using the right account name with the wrong domain name for a week once in my From: line (I thought my mail was broken). Someone else actually got some of the responses intended for me.
Sun Java Desktop System is a good product overall, built on the well-established SuSE system with integration from Sun. It delivers what appears to be a very useful desktop OS and it has the chance to make a dent in the Windows monopoly.
Whoever thinks that Sun has it in them to make a high-quality desktop must never have used a Sun GUI. Try OpenWindows to get an idea of what Sun thinks is a good GUI. To the degree that MadHatter is a great desktop, it's a great desktop because of Gnome, not because of what Sun added to it (which is very little).
In fact, MadHatter is a big admission of defeat for Sun: Sun should have delivered a Java desktop environment. That is, they should have delivered an environment in which applications and tools are written in Java. Instead, they are shipping an open source desktop environment written mostly in C/C++, ship a JVM along with it, and call it a "Java desktop". Apparently, it's beyond the capabilities of a multi-billion dollar company to develop a usable desktop in what they claim to be the premier programming platform for the 21st century.
SuSE, RedHat, and Gnome can make a dent in Microsoft's monopoly--they have the software, ease of installation, and driver support for PCs. Sun has nothing to contribute that I can see.
Publishing a list of words and phrases that are considered unacceptable to a specific belief, opinion, or legal system very closely resembles censorship
No. "Censorship" is when a state or other entity uses violence, threats of violence, or other powers to suppresses speech.
The only tangible difference here is that, as you pointed out, GNU can't actually enforce it.
That's like saying that the only tangible difference between an ocean and land is the presence of water.
They can, however, influence those who can enforce it.
The FSF isn't trying to influcence people to "censor" other people. The FSF is telling you, quite correctly, that terms like "intellectual property" are deliberately misleading creations by people with a special interest in pushing a particular point of view. If you value free speech or free software, you shouldn't use them, and you shouldn't use them out of self-interest.
This is one of my problems with GNU as an organization. I whole-heartedly share their motives and philosophy, mostly, but I strongly disagree with some of their methods.
GNU's "methods" are free expression and debate.
Is this wrong?
Yes. You claim to be for free speech, yet when the FSF exercises their right to free speech, with no indication that they are calling on anybody to exercise power to stop anybody else from doing anything, you accuse them of "censorship". That is intellectually "wrong" in the sense of being inconsistent. Whether it is morally wrong, you'll have to decide for yourself.
GNU is seriously resembling less an operating system and more a religion. Your reaction to my observation smacks of fanaticism commonly associated with religion, and *never* associated with software development.
Yes, I'm quite fanatical about free speech and the ability to engage in rational discourse, as is GNU and the FSF. Because free speech is, in large part, what GNU and the FSF is all about. And part of free speech is to understand how people are trying to manipulate language in order to manipulate people. Terms like "intellectual property" aren't neutral, they were created with a goal, a goal that is related to restricting free speech.
Are they a group of developers making Free Software, or are they a group of believers more concerned with telling the world the right way to think?
Of course, they are concerned with "telling the world the right way to think", the operative word being "telling". That is what intellectual discourse is all about. It is only when groups become concerned with "making people think the right way" that they cross the line from intellectual discourse to censorship.
Our lovely president has been spending a lot of time telling us what patriotic, free-thinking Americans are supposed to think.
Yes, and while Bush says a lot of stupid things and engages in the same kind of irrational and unwarranted attacks on people and groups as you, stupidity and irrational arguments are not censorship. I want Bush to be able to say lots of stupid things. The censorship, however, begins with the concentration of media ownership.
GNU is doing it too. Is that fitting with your definition of freedom? It's not fitting with mine
You bet it's fitting with my definition of freedom that Bush can stand up and say what he says. It is also fitting with my definition of freedom that you can publicly accuse the FSF of "censorship". That doesn't change the fact that I think that your argument is utterly wrong and that your kind of argumentation is a threat to free speech. But the way to respond to threats to free speech is not through censorship, which would be self-contradictory, it's through more speech.
The US government has governmental powers. That's why it is a problem when the US government acts based on what you think. The GNU project has no special legal powers, they are just putting up their opinion on a web site. What they are criticizing is a powerful, multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry composed of PR people, marketing people, and lobbyists. The primary purpose of that industry is to manipulate language in order to get people to do things they would otherwise not do in a million years.
But, hey, attacking people for speaking out rationally and freely by calling them "the thought police" and "politically correct" is just another strategy by people who don't like free speech to begin with. The only question is whether you know what you are doing or whether you have merely been taken in like millions of others.
The fact is, most Universities won't care if you wear your underwear outside of your pants if you manage to do something truly brilliant. You won't be hired to teach, you'll be hired simply so the University can advertise that you're on staff.
Well, maybe. European universities are somewhat different. They are competitive, but it is less a question of money for them.
Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?).
Well, they can define "intellectual property" however they want to--the term has no legal significance. "Intellectual property" is merely a collective (and misleading) term to refer generally to certain intagible rights. Copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets each have a specific legal status, specific obligations, and specific enforceable rights.
The term "intellectual property" is actually quite misleading (and this is no doubt a deliberate choice by many of the people using the term) because those rights work very differently from other property rights. For example, they expire. You should think of them more as a temporary contract between you and the government, a kind of non-renewable "lease".
Networked games are full of security holes: their users don't think about it, they crash often enough on their own, they tend to be written in C, and their programmers are graphics hackers, not security experts. You have a prescription for disaster.
Whether anybody actively uses those holes to drain money out of bank accounts, I don't know. But if you run anything buggy on the same machine as Quicken or Money, your finances are wide-open.
X11 is happy to use whatever transport protocol you like. It used to run over DECnet, and if HyperQueues are twice as fast as Linux UNIX-domain sockets, it may make sense to add HyperQueues support as an alternative transport mechanism for X11 in Linux.
Adding this sort of thing to X11 is trivial because it has been designed from the ground up as a client/server system (unlike Windows or Macintosh, which have become client/server only comparatively recently).
I guarantee you that running the standard X11 protocol over HyperQueues is going to be faster than running any kind of XML-based protocol over HyperQueues. (Note also that work is underway to add display-side stored SVG graphics to X11 to give you DisplayPDF-like capabilities.)
Overall, with X11, you can get the best of all worlds: stay backwards compatible and actually be more efficient than Frontiers. There is no need to throw out X11 just to use a new transport mechanism.
Could this get rid of the speed problems of XFree86 while still retaining Xlib compatibility?
There is no "speed problem". XFree86 is a client/server window system, just like Windows and MacOS. All of them require IPC for clients to communicate with the server. Unlike Windows or MacOS, X11 has been designed for this mode of operation from the ground up, which is why most of its calls are asynchronous and why most toolkits can deal with that. In contrast, Windows and MacOS support applications and programmers that assume they are running no top of a framebuffer library. And the X11 protocol, Unix-domain sockets, and its shared memory mechanisms are about as efficient as you are going to get.
These days, X11 desktops like Gnome and KDE are slow on low-end machines not because of anything having to do with X11 but because they are big, complex pieces of software that haven't been optimized or tuned very well.
Now it's all exposed. People were going to give their credit card numbers to this thing. Now it's open for all to see and anyone can exploit/spoof it.
Yes, just like Mozilla, PGP, and lots of other secure software. There are lots of instances of open source software that is secure.
But you are missing the point: the real reason these people have to delay the launch is not because someone knows their source code but because someone may have planted something. They now have to go through their code with a fine toothed comb to see whether anybody has installed anything.
And the real reason not to type your credit card number at this thing is not that the source code is known, but that it was written by people whose many million dollar source code was stolen through a bug in Outlook Express. I mean, how incompetent can they get? Obviously, these guys have no idea what they are doing in terms of security. Given their history, you have to assume that HL2 will be full of security holes and backdoors.
In fact, you are a fool if you install any kind of networked game on a machine you use for anything important: game programmers are unlikely to be attuned to security, and your bank account will be just as drained whether people break into your MS Money software through IE or through HL2.
Yes--contrary to the Slashbot idealist mindset--there are cases where security through obscurity is the best method. You have to look at each situation inviduallly and logically (instead of covering everything with a veil of ideology).
When people like you have trouble with inconvenient facts of life, you try to shut up people by labeling them as "idealism" and "ideology". Sorry, but that's just covering up incompetence. And incompetence in the area of security is apparently rampant at Valve; what shows that is not the hypothesis that they may have been achieving security-through-obscurity, but the fact that someone managed to break in and install a keyboard logger on one of their developers machines.
It has been said that evolution of cells must have been impossible, because each part of the cell is necessary for the cell to live, and thus they must have all evolved at the same time, which is highly unlikely.
There is no real mystery in this. Modern cells are composed of multiple parts that used to be able to live independently. At some point, they joined up and subsequently lost their ability to live independently.
That's a common theme in evolution. Your body is composed of parts that are interdependent as well (your liver, your kidney, your brain, your heart, etc.). The cells of your body cannot survive in the outside world on their own either, yet they are demonstrably derived from cells that used to be able to do so. By joining together into a bigger unit, they managed to survive better, but they also became interdependent.
Of course, Linux users shouldn't have to make such comparisons at all--SCO should just come forth with concrete cases of infringement. However, as long as SGI is trying to make the argument, they have to do a little more: they need to carry out the same comparison with some historical versions of UNIX as well (earlier releases of System V, V7 UNIX, etc.). Otherwise, SCO will just claim that their similarities are from a different version.
However, this doesn't get at another important part of SCO's argument at all. In addition to specific instances of alleged verbatim copying, SCO also seems to claim that basically anybody that ever looked at UNIX source code is creating a derivative work when they work on any operating system. Preposterous as that may sound, there is actually ample precedent for those kinds of claims.
So, it's good for efforts like SGI's to eat away at SCO's claims, but there is still a lot more to go if we want to actively defend ourselves against the kinds of nebulous and unspecific claims SCO is making.
"""you don't gain any information from an experiment whose results agree with your theory """
Taking that logic to the extreme no scientist need ever take more than one measurement.
You are quoting out of context. What I wrote was:
If you don't have any alternative theories, you don't gain any information from an experiment whose results agree with your theory.
Notice that there are two conditions: (1) you don't have an alternative theory (i.e. one that predicts a different outcome and hasn't already been ruled out by other experiments) and (2) your experimental results agreed with the predictions your theory already makes. In that case, and only in that case, you do not learn anything from the experiment. These measurements satisfy both conditions.
I was under the impression that you'd find scientists trying to reproduce their and other's results, but maybe the scientific world has become fat and lazy in recent years.
It makes a lot of sense to try to reproduce results because of the possibility of fraud, logical inconsistencies in the formulation of a theory, or unexpected phenomena. But,fraud and logical inconsistencies aren't an issue anymore in the theory of GR (at least when it comes to this simple aspect of the theory) and the results agree with prediction, so you don't learn anything from them.
You're being silly - unless sandboxed, any application with access to the OS API can delete files.
Yes. And furthermore, just about any installation/update program will contain data-driven file system manipulation. It will therefore appear to contain a system call to delete files whose names are specified by data.
The ES5 explanation that this was part of their remote auto-update feature is perfectly credible.
However, even if you believe this ES5 mis-feature, was really for updates, it was the worst possible way to do it.
Of course it was. They said so themselves. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether there is any evidence that they did anything malicious, rather than merely being stupid. And, from what we know, there is no evidence that they did.
As I explained above, there's no need for the server to "push" the update to begin with, and there's no excuse for allowing anyone
We are not debating whether their update mechanism was good (it wasn't), but whether the presence of arbitrary, data-driven file deletion code indicates malicious intent. It doesn't. That's all there is to it. They already admitted to the stupidity of their actions themselves.
With the G5, Apple is finally competitive on speed with Intel/AMD. It's not "supercomputer" performance, but it's a little faster than the P4 and probably comparable to the AMD 64bit offerings. It's also still somewhat more expensive, although Apple's prices are more reasonable now than they used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
"Once the technology exists for medical use disreputable people will be putting the stuff in athletes," he warned.
If people want to do that with their bodies, let them.
I think much of this fear of doping has to do with the fact that the olympic committee and sports clubs just don't want the futility of their "competitions" exposed. Right now, they tenuously maintain some illusion of participatory sports.
What difference should it make to anybody whether some olympic athlete pumps himself full of genes? Those people are so far removed from regular human beings that it is like watching a carnival side show anyway.
If you like sports, do it yourself. Compete, in a friendly way, with people you know and like. Anything else is not sports but voyeurism and soap opera.
But the workers in India and China are working for US and European corporations.
There are few "US" or "European" corporations--they are all transnationals. And they do bring international working conditions and practices to other nations, which may not be a bad thing.
The US wasn't lucky or advantaged. Instead the US had a freer market (relatively speaking) than the "unlucky and disadvantaged" nations. Luck is finding a wonderful opportunity, but luck isn't what created that opportunity.
Sure it was luck. You seem to subscribe to the notion that the US has some magical formula of laws and markets that, if some nation adopts it, they, too, will become as wealthy as the US. I think that's completely naive. The way US markets look today is as much a consequence of other factors that brought wealth to the US in the first place as the other way around.
And I think the US will discover that first hand, as it has to compete with lean, mean, young nations like India and China. In fact, that's what this discussion is about: if US style markets guaranteed dominance and wealth, we wouldn't even be talking about this.
Think about it--what's the alternative? China and India are getting ever more educated. Do you think two billion people are going to do sweat shop labor forever? They are smart, young, and the media are showing them the kind of wealth they can attain. They want nice jobs and they are going to get them.
The US was incredibly lucky and advantaged for about 50 years following WWII. There is no way that kind of disparity and advantage can continue, even if the US were continuing its strong initial investment in research and technology.
I suspect that those kinds of results are largely due to poor window management, in particular in Windows. Windows doesn't even have virtual desktops out of the box. If you use a decent window manager, I'd conjecture that multiple monitors don't help much for most applications compared to a decent high-resolution single monitor (1280x1024 or above).
Sure, they added lots of gimmicks and features, and they made IE prettier and a bit more usable than when it started. But I don't recall much "innovation", as in "genuinely new ideas".
Thus, they have that silly notion of proving intent to commit a crime in addition to the commission of the crime itself (hence the diffference between manslaughter and murder 1, in the extreme case, or the difference between a tortious instance of neglect and a prosecutable instance of malice, in the more common case).
Right. And I think notions of intent, while not completely avoidable, should be kept to a minimum in the law. This seems like one of those cases where it is superfluous.
The hypocricy was quite apparent. Here you had the man behind the most absurd of recent patents--one click shopping--claiming to be behind patent reform.
I don't see a problem with that. The rules right now allow silly patents. If you want to be in business, you have to file silly patents, otherwise, you can't compete.
At the same time, many companies realize that filing silly patents is a big drain on their time and resources and will never give them any revenue. So, they would like to stop doing it. But they only can stop doing it if everybody else does, and that's why they participate in efforts to reform the patent system.
That shouldn't stop you or me or anybody else from holding Bezos's feet to the fire (e.g., by buying at places other than Amazon) over filing silly patents: that is just additional pressure to get them (i.e., the people with money and power) to work towards changing the system.
I think the most robust way of running something that large without system admin support is to create a CD-ROM-based distribution (Knoppix, Morphix) and have students always boot from CD. That way, everybody is guaranteed to have a working, virus-free system.
While Macs are perhaps a little easier to administer than Windows machines, they still require extensive handholding and their disk-based installations do "go bad" when users start installing software or messing around in system directories (and they will).
The part about hacking into people's computers should arguably be a prosecutable offense. But "spoofing" the from address should not be: the "From:" line is currently pretty much only advisory and will remain so until there are significant technical changes to the email infrastructure.
And it's too easy to put in the wrong "From:" line accidentally when configuring mail systems. For example, I was using the right account name with the wrong domain name for a week once in my From: line (I thought my mail was broken). Someone else actually got some of the responses intended for me.
Sun Java Desktop System is a good product overall, built on the well-established SuSE system with integration from Sun. It delivers what appears to be a very useful desktop OS and it has the chance to make a dent in the Windows monopoly.
Whoever thinks that Sun has it in them to make a high-quality desktop must never have used a Sun GUI. Try OpenWindows to get an idea of what Sun thinks is a good GUI. To the degree that MadHatter is a great desktop, it's a great desktop because of Gnome, not because of what Sun added to it (which is very little).
In fact, MadHatter is a big admission of defeat for Sun: Sun should have delivered a Java desktop environment. That is, they should have delivered an environment in which applications and tools are written in Java. Instead, they are shipping an open source desktop environment written mostly in C/C++, ship a JVM along with it, and call it a "Java desktop". Apparently, it's beyond the capabilities of a multi-billion dollar company to develop a usable desktop in what they claim to be the premier programming platform for the 21st century.
SuSE, RedHat, and Gnome can make a dent in Microsoft's monopoly--they have the software, ease of installation, and driver support for PCs. Sun has nothing to contribute that I can see.
Publishing a list of words and phrases that are considered unacceptable to a specific belief, opinion, or legal system very closely resembles censorship
No. "Censorship" is when a state or other entity uses violence, threats of violence, or other powers to suppresses speech.
The only tangible difference here is that, as you pointed out, GNU can't actually enforce it.
That's like saying that the only tangible difference between an ocean and land is the presence of water.
They can, however, influence those who can enforce it.
The FSF isn't trying to influcence people to "censor" other people. The FSF is telling you, quite correctly, that terms like "intellectual property" are deliberately misleading creations by people with a special interest in pushing a particular point of view. If you value free speech or free software, you shouldn't use them, and you shouldn't use them out of self-interest.
This is one of my problems with GNU as an organization. I whole-heartedly share their motives and philosophy, mostly, but I strongly disagree with some of their methods.
GNU's "methods" are free expression and debate.
Is this wrong?
Yes. You claim to be for free speech, yet when the FSF exercises their right to free speech, with no indication that they are calling on anybody to exercise power to stop anybody else from doing anything, you accuse them of "censorship". That is intellectually "wrong" in the sense of being inconsistent. Whether it is morally wrong, you'll have to decide for yourself.
GNU is seriously resembling less an operating system and more a religion. Your reaction to my observation smacks of fanaticism commonly associated with religion, and *never* associated with software development.
Yes, I'm quite fanatical about free speech and the ability to engage in rational discourse, as is GNU and the FSF. Because free speech is, in large part, what GNU and the FSF is all about. And part of free speech is to understand how people are trying to manipulate language in order to manipulate people. Terms like "intellectual property" aren't neutral, they were created with a goal, a goal that is related to restricting free speech.
Are they a group of developers making Free Software, or are they a group of believers more concerned with telling the world the right way to think?
Of course, they are concerned with "telling the world the right way to think", the operative word being "telling". That is what intellectual discourse is all about. It is only when groups become concerned with "making people think the right way" that they cross the line from intellectual discourse to censorship.
Our lovely president has been spending a lot of time telling us what patriotic, free-thinking Americans are supposed to think.
Yes, and while Bush says a lot of stupid things and engages in the same kind of irrational and unwarranted attacks on people and groups as you, stupidity and irrational arguments are not censorship. I want Bush to be able to say lots of stupid things. The censorship, however, begins with the concentration of media ownership.
GNU is doing it too. Is that fitting with your definition of freedom? It's not fitting with mine
You bet it's fitting with my definition of freedom that Bush can stand up and say what he says. It is also fitting with my definition of freedom that you can publicly accuse the FSF of "censorship". That doesn't change the fact that I think that your argument is utterly wrong and that your kind of argumentation is a threat to free speech. But the way to respond to threats to free speech is not through censorship, which would be self-contradictory, it's through more speech.
The US government has governmental powers. That's why it is a problem when the US government acts based on what you think. The GNU project has no special legal powers, they are just putting up their opinion on a web site. What they are criticizing is a powerful, multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry composed of PR people, marketing people, and lobbyists. The primary purpose of that industry is to manipulate language in order to get people to do things they would otherwise not do in a million years.
But, hey, attacking people for speaking out rationally and freely by calling them "the thought police" and "politically correct" is just another strategy by people who don't like free speech to begin with. The only question is whether you know what you are doing or whether you have merely been taken in like millions of others.
Newton did make most of his equipment himself, such as grinding his own lenses for Studies in Opticks. I doubt that he would be able to go that today.
Experimental physicists, biologists, and chemists all do shop work; it's part of the job.
And computer scientists do the equivalent--they program and write tools. Part of the job, too.
The fact is, most Universities won't care if you wear your underwear outside of your pants if you manage to do something truly brilliant. You won't be hired to teach, you'll be hired simply so the University can advertise that you're on staff.
Well, maybe. European universities are somewhat different. They are competitive, but it is less a question of money for them.
Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?).
Well, they can define "intellectual property" however they want to--the term has no legal significance. "Intellectual property" is merely a collective (and misleading) term to refer generally to certain intagible rights. Copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets each have a specific legal status, specific obligations, and specific enforceable rights.
The term "intellectual property" is actually quite misleading (and this is no doubt a deliberate choice by many of the people using the term) because those rights work very differently from other property rights. For example, they expire. You should think of them more as a temporary contract between you and the government, a kind of non-renewable "lease".
See here.
Networked games are full of security holes: their users don't think about it, they crash often enough on their own, they tend to be written in C, and their programmers are graphics hackers, not security experts. You have a prescription for disaster.
Whether anybody actively uses those holes to drain money out of bank accounts, I don't know. But if you run anything buggy on the same machine as Quicken or Money, your finances are wide-open.
X11 is happy to use whatever transport protocol you like. It used to run over DECnet, and if HyperQueues are twice as fast as Linux UNIX-domain sockets, it may make sense to add HyperQueues support as an alternative transport mechanism for X11 in Linux.
Adding this sort of thing to X11 is trivial because it has been designed from the ground up as a client/server system (unlike Windows or Macintosh, which have become client/server only comparatively recently).
I guarantee you that running the standard X11 protocol over HyperQueues is going to be faster than running any kind of XML-based protocol over HyperQueues. (Note also that work is underway to add display-side stored SVG graphics to X11 to give you DisplayPDF-like capabilities.)
Overall, with X11, you can get the best of all worlds: stay backwards compatible and actually be more efficient than Frontiers. There is no need to throw out X11 just to use a new transport mechanism.
Could this get rid of the speed problems of XFree86 while still retaining Xlib compatibility?
There is no "speed problem". XFree86 is a client/server window system, just like Windows and MacOS. All of them require IPC for clients to communicate with the server. Unlike Windows or MacOS, X11 has been designed for this mode of operation from the ground up, which is why most of its calls are asynchronous and why most toolkits can deal with that. In contrast, Windows and MacOS support applications and programmers that assume they are running no top of a framebuffer library. And the X11 protocol, Unix-domain sockets, and its shared memory mechanisms are about as efficient as you are going to get.
These days, X11 desktops like Gnome and KDE are slow on low-end machines not because of anything having to do with X11 but because they are big, complex pieces of software that haven't been optimized or tuned very well.
Now it's all exposed. People were going to give their credit card numbers to this thing. Now it's open for all to see and anyone can exploit/spoof it.
Yes, just like Mozilla, PGP, and lots of other secure software. There are lots of instances of open source software that is secure.
But you are missing the point: the real reason these people have to delay the launch is not because someone knows their source code but because someone may have planted something. They now have to go through their code with a fine toothed comb to see whether anybody has installed anything.
And the real reason not to type your credit card number at this thing is not that the source code is known, but that it was written by people whose many million dollar source code was stolen through a bug in Outlook Express. I mean, how incompetent can they get? Obviously, these guys have no idea what they are doing in terms of security. Given their history, you have to assume that HL2 will be full of security holes and backdoors.
In fact, you are a fool if you install any kind of networked game on a machine you use for anything important: game programmers are unlikely to be attuned to security, and your bank account will be just as drained whether people break into your MS Money software through IE or through HL2.
Yes--contrary to the Slashbot idealist mindset--there are cases where security through obscurity is the best method. You have to look at each situation inviduallly and logically (instead of covering everything with a veil of ideology).
When people like you have trouble with inconvenient facts of life, you try to shut up people by labeling them as "idealism" and "ideology". Sorry, but that's just covering up incompetence. And incompetence in the area of security is apparently rampant at Valve; what shows that is not the hypothesis that they may have been achieving security-through-obscurity, but the fact that someone managed to break in and install a keyboard logger on one of their developers machines.
It has been said that evolution of cells must have been impossible, because each part of the cell is necessary for the cell to live, and thus they must have all evolved at the same time, which is highly unlikely.
There is no real mystery in this. Modern cells are composed of multiple parts that used to be able to live independently. At some point, they joined up and subsequently lost their ability to live independently.
That's a common theme in evolution. Your body is composed of parts that are interdependent as well (your liver, your kidney, your brain, your heart, etc.). The cells of your body cannot survive in the outside world on their own either, yet they are demonstrably derived from cells that used to be able to do so. By joining together into a bigger unit, they managed to survive better, but they also became interdependent.
Of course, Linux users shouldn't have to make such comparisons at all--SCO should just come forth with concrete cases of infringement. However, as long as SGI is trying to make the argument, they have to do a little more: they need to carry out the same comparison with some historical versions of UNIX as well (earlier releases of System V, V7 UNIX, etc.). Otherwise, SCO will just claim that their similarities are from a different version.
However, this doesn't get at another important part of SCO's argument at all. In addition to specific instances of alleged verbatim copying, SCO also seems to claim that basically anybody that ever looked at UNIX source code is creating a derivative work when they work on any operating system. Preposterous as that may sound, there is actually ample precedent for those kinds of claims.
So, it's good for efforts like SGI's to eat away at SCO's claims, but there is still a lot more to go if we want to actively defend ourselves against the kinds of nebulous and unspecific claims SCO is making.
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Taking that logic to the extreme no scientist need ever take more than one measurement.
You are quoting out of context. What I wrote was:
Notice that there are two conditions: (1) you don't have an alternative theory (i.e. one that predicts a different outcome and hasn't already been ruled out by other experiments) and (2) your experimental results agreed with the predictions your theory already makes. In that case, and only in that case, you do not learn anything from the experiment. These measurements satisfy both conditions.
I was under the impression that you'd find scientists trying to reproduce their and other's results, but maybe the scientific world has become fat and lazy in recent years.
It makes a lot of sense to try to reproduce results because of the possibility of fraud, logical inconsistencies in the formulation of a theory, or unexpected phenomena. But,fraud and logical inconsistencies aren't an issue anymore in the theory of GR (at least when it comes to this simple aspect of the theory) and the results agree with prediction, so you don't learn anything from them.
You're being silly - unless sandboxed, any application with access to the OS API can delete files.
Yes. And furthermore, just about any installation/update program will contain data-driven file system manipulation. It will therefore appear to contain a system call to delete files whose names are specified by data.
The ES5 explanation that this was part of their remote auto-update feature is perfectly credible.
However, even if you believe this ES5 mis-feature, was really for updates, it was the worst possible way to do it.
Of course it was. They said so themselves. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether there is any evidence that they did anything malicious, rather than merely being stupid. And, from what we know, there is no evidence that they did.
As I explained above, there's no need for the server to "push" the update to begin with, and there's no excuse for allowing anyone
We are not debating whether their update mechanism was good (it wasn't), but whether the presence of arbitrary, data-driven file deletion code indicates malicious intent. It doesn't. That's all there is to it. They already admitted to the stupidity of their actions themselves.
With the G5, Apple is finally competitive on speed with Intel/AMD. It's not "supercomputer" performance, but it's a little faster than the P4 and probably comparable to the AMD 64bit offerings. It's also still somewhat more expensive, although Apple's prices are more reasonable now than they used to be.