It's widely accepted at this point that the manuscript is a deliberate fiction, intended to look mysterious for the purpose of enriching its author. Looked at in that light, it's still an amazing work of art, particularly because the author needed to be literate about cryptanalysis to make such a convincing fake.
Patents were used that way in 1968, and in 1938 for that matter. So yes, patents are a problem, in the same way any weapon is a problem - if you put a loaded gun in the hands of a psychopath, don't be surprised when you get shot. When you put a patent in the hands of a greedy person, don't be surprised when you get sued.
Goetz is right - as a matter of principle, software and hardware patents are no different. They are both taking something from the public and giving it to a private individual, and hence, in the abstract, immoral. The difference, such as it is, is that developing new hardware innovations is relatively expensive compared to developing new software innovations, by many orders of magnitude. So in the realm of hardware, patents may provide a useful incentive. In the realm of software, they do not - there's no barrier to entry that patents are helping to overcome. Since they are immoral in the abstract, if they do no good they should not be allowed.
So the distinction between software and hardware patents is not one of principle, but of tactics.
Not everyone cares. It's hard for me to relate to people who just by the cheapest computer, but it makes sense to them. But with pizza I really can relate. Cheap crappy pizza is *really* convenient. When I was living near Wall Street there was a crappy pizza place across the street from my apartment, and I frequently got lunch there, because saving time was more important to me than getting the best pizza. The pizza was edible, about the level of Sbarro. Most pizza in New York is at that level. It does the job, and I'm not complaining. When I want kick-ass pizza in New York, I go to Two Boots or a place like that.
If that were true, then it would be true that pizza in New York was uniformly (or at least usually) good. In fact, though, most pizza in New York is edible, but not very good. That's not to say that there isn't such a thing as a good New York pizza--there is. But there's a phenomenal amount of mediocre pizza in New York. So your analysis doesn't apply. Why? I suspect that cheap pizza out-competes good pizza. So if you can predict the future of computing from the New York pizza situation, the future of computing is probably a ton of crap, with good stuff that's slightly more expensive if you put in the effort to find it. Which, to tell you the truth, sounds pretty familiar.
The good news is that Two Boots is making pizzas as fast as they can, they have an uptown location now, and the pizza there is still good.
Er, no, the whole point of getting your data out into the cloud is that it's stuck there. Once you're invested, you can't let go. From Google's perspective, this is a big win--no matter what computer you have, you're still going to be going to Google. From Microsoft's perspective, it's a big lose: they don't want you to be able to choose a non-Windows computer.
Google doesn't care that you can switch to Bing, because in fact you are locked in to Google, so you won't switch. The good news is that a lot of that lock-in comes from Google being more competent than Microsoft in the web services they provide, so you're locked in to something that doesn't suck. But you're still locked in.
Maybe you want to believe that crap, but most of us want to stop hearing jingoistic misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies. Unfortunately, neither you nor the rest of us seem destined to get what we want.
The researchers did a very naive thing - they followed the standard aerobic exercise program, which is widely known not to help with weight loss. Everybody knows that if you want to lose weight, the right way to do it is to exercise hard, not to do aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise is for improving your cardiopulmonary fitness, not for losing weight. What surprises me is that these researchers didn't know that, and didn't study the regimen that fitness trainers actually recommend for weight loss: building muscle mass with exercise much closer to your aerobic limit. Burning calories in the workout is a waste of time - what you want to do is increase the number of calories your body burns outside of the workout, and you do that by building muscle and not bonking (not allowing your glycogen levels to drop to zero during the workout).
The current president started out in a pile of shit several miles deep. I think he's taking too long to change some fundamental things, and indeed some of the things he's done have been motion in the wrong direction. I'd sure love it if we, the people, were capable of electing a president who would always do what I think is right. But we're not. Get over it. He's a big improvement on the incumbent. Unfortunately, that's always the best we can hope for.
Really, the lesson here is that an electorate that doesn't bother to understand the issues and doesn't bother to punish politicians who do genuinely wrong things has only itself to blame when it's repeatedly shafted by entrenched powers. The reason government is out of control is not that there's a problem with government. It's that there are no more citizens; only consumers.
You say that like "government" is a dial that you can turn up and down. And that all the people who want "more government," as you put it, want, is to turn the dial up.
But that's not the case at all. There's another dial you can turn: competent versus incompetent. Because the Bush and Reagan narrative was basically "government can't work", they felt free to turn the competence dial down to zero. You're right that they also turned the "more/less" dial up to more. That's not what "government works" people want to do. Some of us want to turn it down, some of us want to turn it up. But the dial we're most concerned about is the competence dial. We want to turn that dial up.
Basically, the thesis of this piece is the same thing the right wing has been pushing since Reagan's time: government can't work. Nothing that comes out of government can ever be good. We might as well just give up.
Maybe she's right, but history isn't on her side. So this sounds more like sour grapes: Peggy has no hope, because her people have no relevance, and she doesn't like who's in power. So she hopes we will listen to her and lose hope as well, because that way nobody will have hope. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the independents, not the geeks. In that nihilistic world, her folks can waltz in and take over the government and keep pouring our tax dollars into their pockets the way they did under Reagan and both Bushes. Government doesn't work. Might as well send your tax money to Halliburton and Xe.
...our shelves were starting to get full, and we weren't re-watching them. There's no structural change the motion picture industry can change that will help with that. Instead of trying to figure out how to screw your customers, guys, maybe you should try serving our needs. Why can't I get stuff right away on iTunes? This is like the book industry and their hardcover/paperback model. Basically, they're getting a big hit upfront in hardcover sales at the cost of making people who would have bought the paperback go to the library instead.
When are these guys going to get that the way you make money is by serving your customers?
If you are healthy, your chances of dying of the flu are pretty close to zero, unless you get hit by a truck because you're groggy. The point of healthy people taking the vaccine is that then they don't get the flu at all, or get a much milder reaction to it, and thus they don't spread it. It's not to prevent mortality, but to limit the spread of the virus.
You're oversimplifying. Generally speaking, the flu strains that are going around in any given year are related. Yes, there are different strains, but they usually have very similar surface proteins. So it's true that the vaccine you get in any given year is not guaranteed to exactly match the strains you are exposed to. Nobody even pretends that it will. Mass vaccination is all about statistics - reducing the number of people who get infected so that the spread of the disease is limited, and people who are vulnerable aren't exposed in the first place.
So yeah, the flu vaccine you get may not necessarily protect you. Indeed, in any given year there's a significant chance (something like 30%) that they'll guess wrong and put the wrong strain in the vaccine, and it won't protect anybody. But 70% of the time it does protect, and that's worth the 30% of the time when it doesn't.
The problem with this article is that Ms. Jackson isn't even asking the right *question*. Of *course* healthy people don't get a significant personal benefit from being vaccinated. Nobody ever said they did. If all you care about is yourself, and you are healthy as an ox, then by all means don't get vaccinated. Not getting vaccinated is a great way to get your inheritance early. Just get H1N1, then visit your elderly uncle to cheer him up. You'll transmit the virus to him, he'll die, and you'll be rich. But if you want your elderly uncle to live, or, worse luck, he's already written you out of the will, then you might as well get vaccinated.
IOW, the point of the vaccine is to prevent the pandemic, not to protect you. So the *right* question to ask is, does the H1N1 vaccine confer any immunity to the recipient? This is a question that can readily be answered by an epidemiology study, and that can also be ethically studied in a double-blind study - just vaccinate half of a healthy population, don't vaccinate the other half, and see how many get H1N1 and how many don't. The problem is that if the vaccine works, you don't know until it's too late. So it's good for checking your work, but no good for making the decision as to whether to do mass vaccinations - mass vaccinations are pointless after the pandemic has run its course.
I suspect that epidemiology studies are just as good for evaluating the efficacy of the vaccine *after* the pandemic has passed anyway, so that's probably why they don't do double blind studies. But I'm not a virologist, so that's just a WAG.
What I really wish people would do would be to stop coming up with conspiracy theories about vaccines - these are really harmful. Information is what we need, not panicked hyperbole.
That's kind of a bogus observation. If you aren't world-class, then you are at the mercy of those who are. "World-class" doesn't mean "better than anyone else in the world." It just means "good enough to hold your own with the best in the world." Really, everybody needs world-class people. The pity is that not everyone can afford them.
One of these screens with a low-power ARM CPU motherboard would be a really sweet geek laptop. It seems like that could hit a price that would be attractive to a lot of people while performing well enough to actually be useful. But all we're hearing from Pixel Qi at the moment is silence, and I'm betting the first laptop to come with this screen, if one ever does, will have an Atom CPU and run Windows. I wonder if Pixel Qi would be willing to sell these in hobbyist quantities...:'}
They won't. If you want an ARM-only netbook, make one yourself. Otherwise you'll never see one.
Seriously, how hard would it be to come up with an ARM motherboard design that would just replace an intel laptop motherboard and draw a tenth the power while doing the same amount of work? It's really getting to be time we open source geeks stopped waiting for somebody at Dell to make a product for us.
Unfortunately, the ARM CPU doesn't have access to the memory you paid for, or the hard drive you paid for - it runs out of flash memory. So it delivers precisely the feature they want to deliver, using Linux, without actually making anyone who wants to run Linux for real happy. That would be a damned sweet machine if they had left out the Intel CPU. Oh well.
I'm getting to the point where I'm thinking of just gutting an existing netbook and putting a GumStix CPU in. I'm pretty sure it would fit...
We used to do commercial support for ISC products, but that didn't work out very well. The company's been reinvented a couple of times since then, and at this point all of our products are homegrown. But many of the original BIND 9 developers work at Nominum, and the author of the ISC DHCP server (me) works there too. That was then, this is now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's widely accepted at this point that the manuscript is a deliberate fiction, intended to look mysterious for the purpose of enriching its author. Looked at in that light, it's still an amazing work of art, particularly because the author needed to be literate about cryptanalysis to make such a convincing fake.
Patents were used that way in 1968, and in 1938 for that matter. So yes, patents are a problem, in the same way any weapon is a problem - if you put a loaded gun in the hands of a psychopath, don't be surprised when you get shot. When you put a patent in the hands of a greedy person, don't be surprised when you get sued.
Goetz is right - as a matter of principle, software and hardware patents are no different. They are both taking something from the public and giving it to a private individual, and hence, in the abstract, immoral. The difference, such as it is, is that developing new hardware innovations is relatively expensive compared to developing new software innovations, by many orders of magnitude. So in the realm of hardware, patents may provide a useful incentive. In the realm of software, they do not - there's no barrier to entry that patents are helping to overcome. Since they are immoral in the abstract, if they do no good they should not be allowed.
So the distinction between software and hardware patents is not one of principle, but of tactics.
Not everyone cares. It's hard for me to relate to people who just by the cheapest computer, but it makes sense to them. But with pizza I really can relate. Cheap crappy pizza is *really* convenient. When I was living near Wall Street there was a crappy pizza place across the street from my apartment, and I frequently got lunch there, because saving time was more important to me than getting the best pizza. The pizza was edible, about the level of Sbarro. Most pizza in New York is at that level. It does the job, and I'm not complaining. When I want kick-ass pizza in New York, I go to Two Boots or a place like that.
If that were true, then it would be true that pizza in New York was uniformly (or at least usually) good. In fact, though, most pizza in New York is edible, but not very good. That's not to say that there isn't such a thing as a good New York pizza--there is. But there's a phenomenal amount of mediocre pizza in New York. So your analysis doesn't apply. Why? I suspect that cheap pizza out-competes good pizza. So if you can predict the future of computing from the New York pizza situation, the future of computing is probably a ton of crap, with good stuff that's slightly more expensive if you put in the effort to find it. Which, to tell you the truth, sounds pretty familiar.
The good news is that Two Boots is making pizzas as fast as they can, they have an uptown location now, and the pizza there is still good.
Er, no, the whole point of getting your data out into the cloud is that it's stuck there. Once you're invested, you can't let go. From Google's perspective, this is a big win--no matter what computer you have, you're still going to be going to Google. From Microsoft's perspective, it's a big lose: they don't want you to be able to choose a non-Windows computer.
Google doesn't care that you can switch to Bing, because in fact you are locked in to Google, so you won't switch. The good news is that a lot of that lock-in comes from Google being more competent than Microsoft in the web services they provide, so you're locked in to something that doesn't suck. But you're still locked in.
Maybe you want to believe that crap, but most of us want to stop hearing jingoistic misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies. Unfortunately, neither you nor the rest of us seem destined to get what we want.
I am *totally* moving to Vermont now.
Or, worse yet, a noticeable hiss...
That last part is why. :'|
Well, technically, don't they use heavy isotopes?
The researchers did a very naive thing - they followed the standard aerobic exercise program, which is widely known not to help with weight loss. Everybody knows that if you want to lose weight, the right way to do it is to exercise hard, not to do aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise is for improving your cardiopulmonary fitness, not for losing weight. What surprises me is that these researchers didn't know that, and didn't study the regimen that fitness trainers actually recommend for weight loss: building muscle mass with exercise much closer to your aerobic limit. Burning calories in the workout is a waste of time - what you want to do is increase the number of calories your body burns outside of the workout, and you do that by building muscle and not bonking (not allowing your glycogen levels to drop to zero during the workout).
The current president started out in a pile of shit several miles deep. I think he's taking too long to change some fundamental things, and indeed some of the things he's done have been motion in the wrong direction. I'd sure love it if we, the people, were capable of electing a president who would always do what I think is right. But we're not. Get over it. He's a big improvement on the incumbent. Unfortunately, that's always the best we can hope for.
Really, the lesson here is that an electorate that doesn't bother to understand the issues and doesn't bother to punish politicians who do genuinely wrong things has only itself to blame when it's repeatedly shafted by entrenched powers. The reason government is out of control is not that there's a problem with government. It's that there are no more citizens; only consumers.
You say that like "government" is a dial that you can turn up and down. And that all the people who want "more government," as you put it, want, is to turn the dial up.
But that's not the case at all. There's another dial you can turn: competent versus incompetent. Because the Bush and Reagan narrative was basically "government can't work", they felt free to turn the competence dial down to zero. You're right that they also turned the "more/less" dial up to more. That's not what "government works" people want to do. Some of us want to turn it down, some of us want to turn it up. But the dial we're most concerned about is the competence dial. We want to turn that dial up.
Basically, the thesis of this piece is the same thing the right wing has been pushing since Reagan's time: government can't work. Nothing that comes out of government can ever be good. We might as well just give up.
Maybe she's right, but history isn't on her side. So this sounds more like sour grapes: Peggy has no hope, because her people have no relevance, and she doesn't like who's in power. So she hopes we will listen to her and lose hope as well, because that way nobody will have hope. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the independents, not the geeks. In that nihilistic world, her folks can waltz in and take over the government and keep pouring our tax dollars into their pockets the way they did under Reagan and both Bushes. Government doesn't work. Might as well send your tax money to Halliburton and Xe.
...our shelves were starting to get full, and we weren't re-watching them. There's no structural change the motion picture industry can change that will help with that. Instead of trying to figure out how to screw your customers, guys, maybe you should try serving our needs. Why can't I get stuff right away on iTunes? This is like the book industry and their hardcover/paperback model. Basically, they're getting a big hit upfront in hardcover sales at the cost of making people who would have bought the paperback go to the library instead.
When are these guys going to get that the way you make money is by serving your customers?
If you are healthy, your chances of dying of the flu are pretty close to zero, unless you get hit by a truck because you're groggy. The point of healthy people taking the vaccine is that then they don't get the flu at all, or get a much milder reaction to it, and thus they don't spread it. It's not to prevent mortality, but to limit the spread of the virus.
You're oversimplifying. Generally speaking, the flu strains that are going around in any given year are related. Yes, there are different strains, but they usually have very similar surface proteins. So it's true that the vaccine you get in any given year is not guaranteed to exactly match the strains you are exposed to. Nobody even pretends that it will. Mass vaccination is all about statistics - reducing the number of people who get infected so that the spread of the disease is limited, and people who are vulnerable aren't exposed in the first place.
So yeah, the flu vaccine you get may not necessarily protect you. Indeed, in any given year there's a significant chance (something like 30%) that they'll guess wrong and put the wrong strain in the vaccine, and it won't protect anybody. But 70% of the time it does protect, and that's worth the 30% of the time when it doesn't.
The problem with this article is that Ms. Jackson isn't even asking the right *question*. Of *course* healthy people don't get a significant personal benefit from being vaccinated. Nobody ever said they did. If all you care about is yourself, and you are healthy as an ox, then by all means don't get vaccinated. Not getting vaccinated is a great way to get your inheritance early. Just get H1N1, then visit your elderly uncle to cheer him up. You'll transmit the virus to him, he'll die, and you'll be rich. But if you want your elderly uncle to live, or, worse luck, he's already written you out of the will, then you might as well get vaccinated.
IOW, the point of the vaccine is to prevent the pandemic, not to protect you. So the *right* question to ask is, does the H1N1 vaccine confer any immunity to the recipient? This is a question that can readily be answered by an epidemiology study, and that can also be ethically studied in a double-blind study - just vaccinate half of a healthy population, don't vaccinate the other half, and see how many get H1N1 and how many don't. The problem is that if the vaccine works, you don't know until it's too late. So it's good for checking your work, but no good for making the decision as to whether to do mass vaccinations - mass vaccinations are pointless after the pandemic has run its course.
I suspect that epidemiology studies are just as good for evaluating the efficacy of the vaccine *after* the pandemic has passed anyway, so that's probably why they don't do double blind studies. But I'm not a virologist, so that's just a WAG.
What I really wish people would do would be to stop coming up with conspiracy theories about vaccines - these are really harmful. Information is what we need, not panicked hyperbole.
That's kind of a bogus observation. If you aren't world-class, then you are at the mercy of those who are. "World-class" doesn't mean "better than anyone else in the world." It just means "good enough to hold your own with the best in the world." Really, everybody needs world-class people. The pity is that not everyone can afford them.
One of these screens with a low-power ARM CPU motherboard would be a really sweet geek laptop. It seems like that could hit a price that would be attractive to a lot of people while performing well enough to actually be useful. But all we're hearing from Pixel Qi at the moment is silence, and I'm betting the first laptop to come with this screen, if one ever does, will have an Atom CPU and run Windows. I wonder if Pixel Qi would be willing to sell these in hobbyist quantities... :'}
They won't. If you want an ARM-only netbook, make one yourself. Otherwise you'll never see one.
Seriously, how hard would it be to come up with an ARM motherboard design that would just replace an intel laptop motherboard and draw a tenth the power while doing the same amount of work? It's really getting to be time we open source geeks stopped waiting for somebody at Dell to make a product for us.
Unfortunately, the ARM CPU doesn't have access to the memory you paid for, or the hard drive you paid for - it runs out of flash memory. So it delivers precisely the feature they want to deliver, using Linux, without actually making anyone who wants to run Linux for real happy. That would be a damned sweet machine if they had left out the Intel CPU. Oh well.
I'm getting to the point where I'm thinking of just gutting an existing netbook and putting a GumStix CPU in. I'm pretty sure it would fit...
(Sorry, couldn't resist. Listing the ability to share data across sites as a plus is kind of funny...)
We used to do commercial support for ISC products, but that didn't work out very well. The company's been reinvented a couple of times since then, and at this point all of our products are homegrown. But many of the original BIND 9 developers work at Nominum, and the author of the ISC DHCP server (me) works there too. That was then, this is now.