Microsoft's profitability has little to do with its monopoly and more to do with the fact that Microsoft, virtually alone of all software vendors has created the means to insure that they get reliably paid for their software. Microsoft's trick is to make large institutions purchase their software and to aggressively make sure that the institutions pay. CPU manufactures pay for the OS and companies, schools and the government pay for Office. Suing millions of consumers for "piracy" is a major task but suing a CPU manufacture is easy. Microsoft gets a far higher rate of return for every dollar it spends on its products than does any other software vendor. It is this ability to get paid at far higher rates than others that lets Microsoft maintain it monopoly in the first place.
Those Exxon/BP/Shell/Total guys have not released a new product in 50 years but still haul in record profits.
Lets not forget farmers. How long has it been since they came up with a truly new food crop? There is nothing wrong or even undesirable about companies reliably and efficiently providing needed products year after year like clockwork and making a good return doing so. Everyone bitches when oil companies get a boom time but no one feels any sympathy when they go through a bust.
The vast majority of people who must use morphine for medical reasons, even those requiring long term use, don't become morphine "addicts" as we normally use the term. Most users wean themselves off the drug relatively easily when the pain they used the morphine to suppress goes away. Many drugs, with and without neurological effects, are physically addictive in that suddenly stopping the intake of the drug causes illness yet no one speaks of "beta blocker addicts."
Addiction to psychoactive drugs arises from the psychological instead of the physiological effects of the drugs. New drugs that offer the the same psychological effects as traditional drugs will present most of the same addiction issues.
I worked in Apple Tech support during the Great Quality Implosion of 95-96. Virtually every product, especially at the low end, had major quality issues. To this day, I collapse weeping into a fetal ball when I hear "Performa 5200" and other models "of which we never speak."
I think I will go take another shower and try to wash off the horror.
Speaking of Macs, does anybody recall the voodoo involved in getting multiple SCSI devices working?
Good god yes! I worked for years in Apple Tech support and the stories about weird SCSI configs were plentiful. The basic problem with SCSI was that it was an analog technology masquerading as a digital one. Every component added to the chain altered its analog properties and if it altered them to much the chain stopped working digitally.
So what are some of the other cases of companies losing their trademarks due to "hair trigger willingness" to rule them in the public domain?
I think the most famous example would be the loss of the trademark for the "Monopoly" board game by Parker brothers back in the 80's. They got the trademark back by legislation. The spate of trademark cases in the early days of the internet where small companies or (more often) cybersquatters would registers domains with the names of larger companies or products has a few examples of some big company products that lost their trademarks. Not being a lawyer I don't remember exact cases off the top of my head.
Anecdotally, I can say that an Apple lawyer I happened to converse with complained that the vast majority of the trademark cases he had to file (this was back in the mid-90's) were fairly silly but did so anyway because they feared they had to defend the trademarks "out on the hinterlands" just show that the company was paying attention to its trademark. He was well and truly annoyed by the time and money it took. Perhaps that conversation overly shaded my perceptions of the problem but I have read similar arguments over the year.
Remember that trademarks exist primarily to protect the consumer not the trademark owner. Trademarks make it easy for consumer to know who is responsible for the products they buy. That lets the consumer judge the likely quality of a product before purchase and lets them more easily get redress if they have problems. Weak trademark enforcement benefits the fly-by-night operators who can parasitize another company's or products reputation. When real trademark confusion arises the only way to benefit is to be the seller of the product that consumers purchase thinking they are getting something else.
The sad truth is that unless a trademark holder defends their trademark to a near insane degree courts in the last 30 years have shown a hair trigger willingness to rule that the trademark has moved into the public domain. The courts don't just take into evidence the infringement cases that a holder won but all the cases the holder filed. The courts consider the mere filing of the suit as evidence of defense of the trademark regardless of the merits of the case. Accused infringers will defend themselves by pointing out all possible cases of infringement in which the holder did not sue. As a result the trademark holder files a blizzard of suits, many if not most without strong merit, merely to demonstrated to the courts that they vigorously defend their trademark.
This is definitely a case of "don't blame the player, blame the game."
The difference between a search engine and a filter is simple. The search engine returns hits based on occurrence of words in my search string only, Filters remove found items based on content. Suppose I had wanted to use Google to research rightwing blog postings about Islam. Thanks to Google's attempt to manipulate what I see after a search, I could not do so. Google will not show me pages based on content but rather on what viewpoint of the world they think I should see. Apparently, Google will let me see pages that are effusively positive about Islam but not those who are highly negative.
I don't have any ethical problem with a private company doing that as long as they are up front about. A simple note at the top of a page saying they have filtered out some results because they didn't approve of the content would be fine. However, at this point Google advertises itself as content neutral search engine (except for adult content).
I do pay for Google's services in that I view their ads. Their business model depends on me trusting their searches enough that I will use their service and view their ads as a result. I don't wish to be protected by Google from "hate speech" or any other information. Google should stop trying to engage in social engineering and instead strive to be the best search engine possible. They will do far more good in the long run.
There would seem to be an implicit contract between myself and Goggle that they do their best to find the information I am looking for and not that they are trying to manipulate me. I use Goggle and other search engines to find information not to be protected from it. When Google starts seeing itself in the business of deciding what sites I should or should not see based on their evaluation of the sites content, they become useless to me.
To give you an idea about that, how much would you expect to pay a consultant (one man, not a company) that had even most of the following skills?
I worked in Applecare for 9 years and saw a lot of this attitude. Tech support specialist feel more knowledgeable than we actually are because we forget the enormous support given to us by our teammates and the support infrastructure of the company. It might be true that any particular high level support tech could leave the company and get highly paid for the knowledge they possess but that superior knowledge would grow stale in hurry. They would have an edge for 3-6 months but after that slip down the knowledge slope and end up just like everyone else.
Applecare techs can quickly solve problem that would take expensive consultants because they have an instant reservoir of high quality information at their fingertips. First, they have their teammates who are also specialist in area who can be tapped just by poking one's head over a cube wall. Second, they have the databases, training and testing labs provided by the company that lets them find answers quickly. Thirdly, they can escalate problems up the technical food chain until it hits the people who actually created the product in the first place.
All this support makes the individual feel super-knowledgeable but I saw a lot of people leave for consulting gigs who didn't make it for long because they under-estimated how important their support was.
Tech support isn't for everyone. Its not a high status job by any means no matter how well compensated. However, if you like rapid problem solving, have basic personal skills and can just remember that if everyone knew what you knew you wouldn't have job in the first place, it can be a good career.
I can't help but wonder whether many of these odd clusters of various cancers could be better explained by viruses than by some tenuous radiological or chemical cause. Viruses do cause some cancers like cervical cancer and Burket's lymphoma so it is not a stretch to think that they could cause others as well.
So many people seem passionately convinced that our technology and the people who create and manage our technology are actively killing us that I really have to think that there is a big social or cultural driver for the belief. People just seem to assume that the cause of unexplained cancers are in the technological environment and they latch onto the first quasi-plausible source and blame that without considering, as in this case, that literally millions of other people are living and working in the same environment without encountering problems.
Years from now we may find that our contemporary fetish for blaming our technology for cancer was as valid and perhaps had the same sociological roots, as those in the past who blamed various ethnic minorities for plagues.
Learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models.
Gosh, aren't we told repeatedly that we already have climate models of sufficient accuracy that we can use them to make sweeping changes to our economy and infrastructure? Don't we already have a "scientific consensus" that we are all doomed? Why do we need more research just to tell us what we already know?
Actually it's trivial. Running code as root is marginally easier than actually logging in to the GUI as root, but neither are particularly difficult to do.
Not sure how you define trivial. The root user is disabled by default and can only be enabled by going into the network utility. The vast majority of users have no idea the root user even exist. The administrative user, which can su to root, is not the user default either. Even if someone is running as admin, they are presented with password request for every process launched. Most Macs spend most of their time running in standard user space making it hard to seize control of the machine remotely.
I would say that the biggest problem windows permissions is not the permissions model per se but rather the large number of legacy/poorly written apps that will not work under it. A lot of windows boxes are running exposed because their apps won't work any other way.
Golly, you would think the spooks would have thought of that. Oh, wait they did.
Most of the information that gets reclassified is probably innocuous and that is why it easy to select particular documents and poke fun at them. In order to hide something that got declassified but shouldn't have you would have to reclassify a bunch harmless stuff in order to disguise the significant material.
Only someone with a broad picture could understand the relevance of any particular document. Someone from the outside with access to a large amount of information from many sources could build up a picture similar to the one held by someone on the inside. Indeed, that is the entire goal of intelligence.
This is one of those reoccurring news stories that pops up every 3-5 years and the stories always feature a particular supposedly innocuous document that got classified which the supposed knowledgeable critics point to as evidence that the classifications are silly. Yet outside of the broad context, individual documents mean nothing. No one without the context can say whether the classification was justified or not.
Another reason that innocuous documents might get classified is to hide the significance of other documents. If something important got declassified by mistake, you couldn't just reclassify that document without alerting a watcher that it contained something important so you would reclassify it in a batch of other meaningless documents.
Virtually nobody in the general public understands how intelligence collecting works or how classification schemes are intended to thwart them. Hollywood and novels have conditioned us to think of vital information as being a small discrete units, say a single document, that must be protected. In truth, this is a mere plot device to create what Hitchcock called a "McGuffin", some single thing the characters can run around trying to obtain in order to drive the story. People believe that only a small amount of the "McGuffin" information honestly needs to be kept secret and that the rest is just dishonesty.
However, real-world intelligence does not come in discrete units but rather it arises from an analysis of broad patterns. It comes from data mining. Many separate and seemingly innocuous pieces of information are stitched together to create a picture of something hidden. The reason that the military (or even corporations) "over-classify" is to prevent the data mining of otherwise trivial items. The 1947 balloon program sounds historic and trivial but that program fit into a budget and organization somewhere and that effected the form of other, perhaps more interesting and relevant, programs.
Only someone from the inside, with a broad picture of how all the pieces fit together, could possibly judge whether the classification of any particular piece of information is justified or not. Anyone else is doing so based on ignorant hubris.
"How many cells can a scientist randomly bombard with radiation and hope to find a resistant gene out of that?"
Modern plant breeders zap tens of thousand of seeds in every batch. In college one of my friends worked on mutating wheat for drought resistance. They irradiated thousands of grains at a time, let them spout under the desired conditions, sorted the ones that grew fastest while still seedlings, transplanted those, let them come to fruition, then zapped those grains, etc. Basically, its a massively parallel computing system. In the course of single year, you can sort through literally millions of individual mutated cells looking for one that has the properties you want.
We know with absolute certainty that heavily bred domestic plants contain novel genes because we can sequence their genomes. Even without looking so closely we have long known they have changed significantly because many crop plants will no longer interbreed with their wild ancestors or cousins. It is quite clear that we have been generating unknown and untested genes and scattering them into the environment for over a century now.
"Remember all dogs of different breeds are in the same species..."
Dogs are now classified as a ring-species because you cannot successfully breed all breeds of dogs to all others even though you can breed through intermediates. Just a factoid.
That's why I'm saying it's in the same gene pool..
That is where you are wrong. Creating new genes though intentional mutation alters the gene pool. That is rather my entire point. We have been generating new genes at a fantastic rate over the past century. For the most part, we have no idea what the individual genes are, what they do, how many occur in each new breed, or how many migrate to species. If this were a new process that came about in the last decade, people would be terrified of it but since it evolved gradually over time and we have lived with it for decades, no one cares.
People access risk based largely on familiarity. Randomly mutated food crops are old and familiar so people accept them. GM food crops are new and unfamiliar so people fear them. Some people have figured out they can exploit that fear for their own political, social and economic benefit. End of story.
"I'm not sure you know diddly about agriculture either, sir."
Well, maybe you're right. I only grew up on ranches and farms, my grandfather operated an agricultural arial spraying business and I was educated as a biologist. Beyond that I haven't a clue.
"The issue with these weeds is that they don't grow convieniently on the borders and in the hedgerows, they grow in the midst of the crops."
Which makes them just like all other pest plants. Something you know if you had spent as much time on tractors as I have.
"Now the weeds are impervious to the herbicides that might have been used to rid the crop of them."
Which happens completely naturally. In fact, we are on about our fourth generation of herbicides right now. Even if we eschew the use of all genetic engineering, pest plants will rapidly acquire resistance. In fact, we don't even know if the observed resistance in the article is in any way related to the GM crops. Even if GM'd genes did jump to the pest plants it would simply require the development of new herbicides. If this happens a lot, the economic incentive to use GM'd crops will disappear. Its a self limiting problem.
"Further, these are genetically modified (that's what GM stands for) crops."
As are all our modern crop plants. See my previous post for the gory details.
"The countryside looks cute, but up close is a complex battle ground where a stupid mistake can lead to decades of problems."
Yes, but there is no reason to believe that GM crops poise any specific risk for the reasons I outlined above. GM crops let us solve real problems that help real people right now. Why should let people and the environment suffer in order to avoid vague improbable future problems?
"So, there is nothing in the word super; it's just a moniker."
No, words mean things, especially words carefully chosen by the jerks in marketing. In this case, the word "super" is used to create the appearance of a dire threat were none exist. Fear sells as well as sex and in politics even better.
"Are killer bees and ants as annoying as the regular honey bees?"
No, but killer bees are what you get when humans DON'T meddle. Killer bees are descended from undomesticated wild bees introduced into Brazil in the 1960's.Prior to then, all honey bees were descended from old world domesticated bees. Killer bees displace honeybees in warmer climes because the honeybees have been selectively bred by humans to produce honey at the expense of their own numbers. When confronted by wild bees without the human imposed overhead they fold like a house of cards.
Almost all invasive species are transplanted wild species. Domesticated species must expend so much energy meeting human needs that they cannot compete with wild species.
"wouldn't it be probabilistically more likely that one some grabbed that section of the inserted gene and passed it onto the weed species?"
No, because resistance occurs naturally. Like I said above, herbicide resistant weeds evolved long before genetic engineering. It's one factor that keeps herbicide companies in business. Naturally evolved resistance is the first thing you must eliminate is you wish to make the argument that the resistance is artificial.
"Before the genes were always in the population gene pool...Plus, as I said before radiation and mutagenic chemicals were not used to create completely new DNA. It was to overcome sterility in the cross bred plants."
Sorry but this is completely wrong. The entire point of using mutation is to produce novel genes. Simply swapping around existing genes will only get you so far. Given contemporary sequencing technology it is trivial to show that heavily bred domesticated plants possess genes that their wild ancestors do not.
"Trying to get a good gene out of random radiation or mutagenic chemicals would be like getting a bunch of monkeys together in typewriters and looking for a Victorian play to come out."
Great, now you're (probably accidentally) channeling creationist. How do think organism evolve in the first place? A human has many more genes than a single cell organism where did those genes come from?
I don't say this to be insulting but you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how genetics and natural and artificial selection works. Novel genes arise from natural mutation. Genes hop species lines all the time especially in plants and single cell organism. Retrovirus and some bacteria carry genes between multicellular species on a routine basis. We are merely using these same phenomenon in a directed fashion.
"The modern genetic engineering isn't precision stuff."
No, it is precision stuff. The techniques we used previously were haphazard and blind. Before we had no idea what we were doing to plants and animals. Now we do.
"What I see it as is Russian Roulette but 1 bullet in a 10,000 chamber gun. What if it fires?
Because the other 9,999 we get a positive benefit. We are using genetic engineering to address real problems. Why should we suffer real harm here and now merely to fend of sci-fi fears? Have you considered that agriculture is the single most environmentally destructive human activity? Have you considered that the most destructive factor of agriculture is the sheer room that it takes to grow crops? Have you considered that our only hope of raising standards of living for world's poor without totally wrecking the environment is to grow more food in less space? Have you considered that GM crops let us do precisely that?
Sacrificing real people and real ecosystems for the sake of vague improbable dangers is immoral and self-defeating in the long run.
No offense but you obviously know diddly-squat about agriculture, genetics and evolutionary theory:
"Neither did superman."
To repeat myself, the "super" weeds are no more harmful than non-super weeds. They cannot perform the plant equivalent of running faster than a speeding bullet, leaping over tall buildings or wearing tights and cape. In fact, if you ran an "all-organic" farm that used no herbicides whatsoever, the "super" weeds would be exactly as annoying as non-super weeds. Opponents of the use of herbicides should be thrilled at this development since it will help destroy the economic advantage that herbicide using farms have over organic farms.
"In other words since they didn't have funds to do the gene-sequencing proof, so their arguement is invalid."
I didn't say the argument was invalid. I said it was a supposition. Since all weeds acquire resistance to all herbicides over time by natural evolution, you must first eliminate these natural causes before you can claim that the resistance is artificial. Sequencing a genome for a known gene is actually quite inexpensive so I am suspicious that they don't appear to have done so. Of course, this could just be a result of the Guardian's poor science reporting.
"Herbicide resistant crop plants using radiation and mutagenic chemicals?"
This is plant breeding 101. Plant breeders select from all available variations for the characteristics they seek. To increase the pool of variation they intentionally mutate the genome of test populations using mutagens. Since around 1910, Bis (2-chloroethyl) sulfide or Mustard gas, and related chemicals have been routinely used to increase the pool of variation. After WWII, radiation was used to the same ends.
Virtually, every plant you have ever eaten in your entire life has been through at least one generation of random mutation. Practically, you have consumed thousands of unknown randomly mutated genes. It is a matter of some amusement to me that so many people are terrified at the prospect of GM plants, which have specific and well defined alterations, but who calmly accept plants created with pre-GM methods that contains hundreds if not thousands of completely unexamined and untested genes.
"I think it's the weeds getting the "super" genes and spreading rapidly"
Well again, the only genes that the "super"-weeds can acquire from GM crop plants is herbicide resistance. Once they spread out from the fields where herbicides are used they lose any selective advantage and must compete on equal terms with the non-super weeds. So, without the presence of the herbicides, the weeds are not super, they are Clark Kent weeds.
"The concern I think is more of the GM plants' genes getting out in the wild and causing havoc in other ecosystems;"
Just to repeat, without the presence of the herbicide, the GM plants lose their selective advantage, so, no herbicide, no going wild. Looking at the problem more broadly, we have been altering crop plants for literally centuries. In the last century, we have artificially created genes through accelerated mutation, yet in all that time we have never seen a case of either runaway domestics plants or harmful gene transfer to a pest or neutral species.The explanation for this is simple: We alter crop plants to serve our ends. The genes we create in doing so puts the plants at a competitive disadvantage. This puts the plants at a competitive disadvantage outside of the protected domestic environs. The same disadvantage will accrue to any other species that picks up the domestic genes.
This article is so bad it almost defies description. One almost doesn't know where to start:
(1) There is nothing "super" about the weeds, they have merely acquired resistance to herbicides. They don't grow faster or crowd out crops more aggressively than their non-resistant cousins. It just as stupid as calling anti-biotic resistant microbes "super" germs. "Super" is a term meant to imply something new and unusually powerful and deadly. Every weed growing in every crop area in the developed world is largely immune to pesticides that entered widespread use over 30 years years ago. Are they "super" weeds as well?
(2) The article presents no evidence that the acquired resistance is in fact the result of cross-pollination and not natural evolution. In fact the artical says that:
"The new plants were dubbed superweeds because they proved resistant to three herbicides while the crops they were growing among had been genetically engineered to be resistant to only one."
This strongly suggest that the resistance is naturally acquired. It also doesn't seem that anyone took the elemental step of sequencing the pest-plants to see if they are actually using the same genes as the engineered crop plants. Unless someone can show that weeds contain engineered genes this article is nothing but hysterical supposition.
(3) We have been breeding herbicide resistant crop plants using radiation and mutagenic chemicals for over a century. Where is the evidence that gene transfer has occurred using the older technology? After all, nature doesn't care where the genes came from only whether they benefit the species they jump to. If acquiring herbicide resistance from crop plants was a major problem we would have seen it long ago.
(4) The supposition that crop plants will spread quickly through the wild is garbage gainsaid by centuries if not millennia or practical experience. We force crop plants to divert resources from their own survival in order to produce the plant products we need. As a result, they cannot survive in competition with natural plants that do not have the artificial overhead. If not protected from natural competition they are quickly wiped out.
Opponents of GM crops also neglect to mention that if genes jump across species as fast as they claim then the problem will be economically self-limiting. The GM crops are only used because allow the easy killing of associate pest-plants. If the pest plants acquire resistance rapidly then the GM plants lose all their economic advantage. No one will use them because they will offer no benefits for their increased cost.
Sorry, but those fads *are* the real choices that must be made.
Not on the scale I am talking about. Nifty though they may be, we will be very lucky to get 20% of our energy from "alternative" sources in the next 25 years. The amount of attention paid to them is not warranted by their likely payoffs. Worse, the attention lavished on these technologies creates the impression in the non-technical general populace that "alternative" sources of energy can produce the lion's share of our future energy needs.
Take solar power. Solar power is very useful in some circumstances but there is not a a single factory anywhere in the world powered by solar. Yet there are politically significant numbers of people who sincerely believe that we can easily and quickly replace all our coal, natural gas and nuclear power generation with solar power. Such people use their political power to actively block the technologies that can actual provide the power.
Biodiesel is just another in a long line proposed new energy sources that will never scale to point of true usefulness. I came of age during the "Energy Crisis" of '78-85 and I have see more of these boutique energy sources come and go than I can count.
Its the same pattern every time. Its the same pattern every time: Super-intellegent, (usually young) techies turning out nifty projects in their garages and grad schools, ernest politicians voting money for demo projects, special interest grubby for subisdies, much media fan fare and then nothing. I remember when bio-methane and ethanol were going to save the world to.
Biofuels will always be like solar power, useful in a handful of unique environments but largely irrelevant otherwise. The real harm done by the fads is that they distract people from the real choices that much be made. Replacing a few coal and natural gas powered power plants with a nuke would reduce CO2 emissions more than all the biodiesel that will ever be produced.
Most the information under discussion is not information about people per se but rather information about transactions. Since a transaction takes two at least two entities it is an open question as to who owns the information about the transaction.
If I sell you something, do I have rights to the information that I sold you something? Why should either side of the transaction have to "forget" that the transaction ever took place? If the information about the transaction is itself valuable, why shouldn't either side be able to sell it?
I think the presumption that all information that includes data about a individual is the property of the individual is highly simplistic.
Instead of looking to product liability as a model for software responsibility perhaps we should consider using the malpractice model that is used in medicine, accounting, law and other professions.
The legal standard for malpractice isn't that something bad happened, you can't sue a doctor just because he didn't cure you, but whether the professional followed the standard practices of their field. Applied to software, the concept would mean that customers couldn't sue because the software had faults but because the design and implementation choices reflected bad practices.
I would note that many of the factors that make Windows such a security nightmare are the results of design decisions that were heavily criticized at the time they were made. Had Microsoft followed better practices, the billions in losses to Window's security faults would not have occurred.
The real question is whether software development has matured as an industry to the point where we can start talking about it having actual standards. As more and more of our lives becomes dependent on software the general public will begin to demand accountability in some form. We should all start thinking about this.
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Microsoft's profitability has little to do with its monopoly and more to do with the fact that Microsoft, virtually alone of all software vendors has created the means to insure that they get reliably paid for their software. Microsoft's trick is to make large institutions purchase their software and to aggressively make sure that the institutions pay. CPU manufactures pay for the OS and companies, schools and the government pay for Office. Suing millions of consumers for "piracy" is a major task but suing a CPU manufacture is easy. Microsoft gets a far higher rate of return for every dollar it spends on its products than does any other software vendor. It is this ability to get paid at far higher rates than others that lets Microsoft maintain it monopoly in the first place.
Those Exxon/BP/Shell/Total guys have not released a new product in 50 years but still haul in record profits.
Lets not forget farmers. How long has it been since they came up with a truly new food crop? There is nothing wrong or even undesirable about companies reliably and efficiently providing needed products year after year like clockwork and making a good return doing so. Everyone bitches when oil companies get a boom time but no one feels any sympathy when they go through a bust.
The vast majority of people who must use morphine for medical reasons, even those requiring long term use, don't become morphine "addicts" as we normally use the term. Most users wean themselves off the drug relatively easily when the pain they used the morphine to suppress goes away. Many drugs, with and without neurological effects, are physically addictive in that suddenly stopping the intake of the drug causes illness yet no one speaks of "beta blocker addicts."
Addiction to psychoactive drugs arises from the psychological instead of the physiological effects of the drugs. New drugs that offer the the same psychological effects as traditional drugs will present most of the same addiction issues.
I worked in Apple Tech support during the Great Quality Implosion of 95-96. Virtually every product, especially at the low end, had major quality issues. To this day, I collapse weeping into a fetal ball when I hear "Performa 5200" and other models "of which we never speak."
I think I will go take another shower and try to wash off the horror.
Good god yes! I worked for years in Apple Tech support and the stories about weird SCSI configs were plentiful. The basic problem with SCSI was that it was an analog technology masquerading as a digital one. Every component added to the chain altered its analog properties and if it altered them to much the chain stopped working digitally.
I think the most famous example would be the loss of the trademark for the "Monopoly" board game by Parker brothers back in the 80's. They got the trademark back by legislation. The spate of trademark cases in the early days of the internet where small companies or (more often) cybersquatters would registers domains with the names of larger companies or products has a few examples of some big company products that lost their trademarks. Not being a lawyer I don't remember exact cases off the top of my head.
Anecdotally, I can say that an Apple lawyer I happened to converse with complained that the vast majority of the trademark cases he had to file (this was back in the mid-90's) were fairly silly but did so anyway because they feared they had to defend the trademarks "out on the hinterlands" just show that the company was paying attention to its trademark. He was well and truly annoyed by the time and money it took. Perhaps that conversation overly shaded my perceptions of the problem but I have read similar arguments over the year.
Remember that trademarks exist primarily to protect the consumer not the trademark owner. Trademarks make it easy for consumer to know who is responsible for the products they buy. That lets the consumer judge the likely quality of a product before purchase and lets them more easily get redress if they have problems. Weak trademark enforcement benefits the fly-by-night operators who can parasitize another company's or products reputation. When real trademark confusion arises the only way to benefit is to be the seller of the product that consumers purchase thinking they are getting something else.
The sad truth is that unless a trademark holder defends their trademark to a near insane degree courts in the last 30 years have shown a hair trigger willingness to rule that the trademark has moved into the public domain. The courts don't just take into evidence the infringement cases that a holder won but all the cases the holder filed. The courts consider the mere filing of the suit as evidence of defense of the trademark regardless of the merits of the case. Accused infringers will defend themselves by pointing out all possible cases of infringement in which the holder did not sue. As a result the trademark holder files a blizzard of suits, many if not most without strong merit, merely to demonstrated to the courts that they vigorously defend their trademark.
This is definitely a case of "don't blame the player, blame the game."
The difference between a search engine and a filter is simple. The search engine returns hits based on occurrence of words in my search string only, Filters remove found items based on content. Suppose I had wanted to use Google to research rightwing blog postings about Islam. Thanks to Google's attempt to manipulate what I see after a search, I could not do so. Google will not show me pages based on content but rather on what viewpoint of the world they think I should see. Apparently, Google will let me see pages that are effusively positive about Islam but not those who are highly negative. I don't have any ethical problem with a private company doing that as long as they are up front about. A simple note at the top of a page saying they have filtered out some results because they didn't approve of the content would be fine. However, at this point Google advertises itself as content neutral search engine (except for adult content). I do pay for Google's services in that I view their ads. Their business model depends on me trusting their searches enough that I will use their service and view their ads as a result. I don't wish to be protected by Google from "hate speech" or any other information. Google should stop trying to engage in social engineering and instead strive to be the best search engine possible. They will do far more good in the long run.
There would seem to be an implicit contract between myself and Goggle that they do their best to find the information I am looking for and not that they are trying to manipulate me. I use Goggle and other search engines to find information not to be protected from it. When Google starts seeing itself in the business of deciding what sites I should or should not see based on their evaluation of the sites content, they become useless to me.
I worked in Applecare for 9 years and saw a lot of this attitude. Tech support specialist feel more knowledgeable than we actually are because we forget the enormous support given to us by our teammates and the support infrastructure of the company. It might be true that any particular high level support tech could leave the company and get highly paid for the knowledge they possess but that superior knowledge would grow stale in hurry. They would have an edge for 3-6 months but after that slip down the knowledge slope and end up just like everyone else.
Applecare techs can quickly solve problem that would take expensive consultants because they have an instant reservoir of high quality information at their fingertips. First, they have their teammates who are also specialist in area who can be tapped just by poking one's head over a cube wall. Second, they have the databases, training and testing labs provided by the company that lets them find answers quickly. Thirdly, they can escalate problems up the technical food chain until it hits the people who actually created the product in the first place.
All this support makes the individual feel super-knowledgeable but I saw a lot of people leave for consulting gigs who didn't make it for long because they under-estimated how important their support was.
Tech support isn't for everyone. Its not a high status job by any means no matter how well compensated. However, if you like rapid problem solving, have basic personal skills and can just remember that if everyone knew what you knew you wouldn't have job in the first place, it can be a good career.
So many people seem passionately convinced that our technology and the people who create and manage our technology are actively killing us that I really have to think that there is a big social or cultural driver for the belief. People just seem to assume that the cause of unexplained cancers are in the technological environment and they latch onto the first quasi-plausible source and blame that without considering, as in this case, that literally millions of other people are living and working in the same environment without encountering problems.
Years from now we may find that our contemporary fetish for blaming our technology for cancer was as valid and perhaps had the same sociological roots, as those in the past who blamed various ethnic minorities for plagues.
Gosh, aren't we told repeatedly that we already have climate models of sufficient accuracy that we can use them to make sweeping changes to our economy and infrastructure? Don't we already have a "scientific consensus" that we are all doomed? Why do we need more research just to tell us what we already know?
Actually it's trivial. Running code as root is marginally easier than actually logging in to the GUI as root, but neither are particularly difficult to do.
Not sure how you define trivial. The root user is disabled by default and can only be enabled by going into the network utility. The vast majority of users have no idea the root user even exist. The administrative user, which can su to root, is not the user default either. Even if someone is running as admin, they are presented with password request for every process launched. Most Macs spend most of their time running in standard user space making it hard to seize control of the machine remotely.
I would say that the biggest problem windows permissions is not the permissions model per se but rather the large number of legacy/poorly written apps that will not work under it. A lot of windows boxes are running exposed because their apps won't work any other way.
Golly, you would think the spooks would have thought of that. Oh, wait they did.
Most of the information that gets reclassified is probably innocuous and that is why it easy to select particular documents and poke fun at them. In order to hide something that got declassified but shouldn't have you would have to reclassify a bunch harmless stuff in order to disguise the significant material.
This is one of those reoccurring news stories that pops up every 3-5 years and the stories always feature a particular supposedly innocuous document that got classified which the supposed knowledgeable critics point to as evidence that the classifications are silly. Yet outside of the broad context, individual documents mean nothing. No one without the context can say whether the classification was justified or not.
Another reason that innocuous documents might get classified is to hide the significance of other documents. If something important got declassified by mistake, you couldn't just reclassify that document without alerting a watcher that it contained something important so you would reclassify it in a batch of other meaningless documents.
Virtually nobody in the general public understands how intelligence collecting works or how classification schemes are intended to thwart them. Hollywood and novels have conditioned us to think of vital information as being a small discrete units, say a single document, that must be protected. In truth, this is a mere plot device to create what Hitchcock called a "McGuffin", some single thing the characters can run around trying to obtain in order to drive the story. People believe that only a small amount of the "McGuffin" information honestly needs to be kept secret and that the rest is just dishonesty.
However, real-world intelligence does not come in discrete units but rather it arises from an analysis of broad patterns. It comes from data mining. Many separate and seemingly innocuous pieces of information are stitched together to create a picture of something hidden. The reason that the military (or even corporations) "over-classify" is to prevent the data mining of otherwise trivial items. The 1947 balloon program sounds historic and trivial but that program fit into a budget and organization somewhere and that effected the form of other, perhaps more interesting and relevant, programs.
Only someone from the inside, with a broad picture of how all the pieces fit together, could possibly judge whether the classification of any particular piece of information is justified or not. Anyone else is doing so based on ignorant hubris.
We know with absolute certainty that heavily bred domestic plants contain novel genes because we can sequence their genomes. Even without looking so closely we have long known they have changed significantly because many crop plants will no longer interbreed with their wild ancestors or cousins. It is quite clear that we have been generating unknown and untested genes and scattering them into the environment for over a century now.
"Remember all dogs of different breeds are in the same species..." Dogs are now classified as a ring-species because you cannot successfully breed all breeds of dogs to all others even though you can breed through intermediates. Just a factoid. That's why I'm saying it's in the same gene pool.. That is where you are wrong. Creating new genes though intentional mutation alters the gene pool. That is rather my entire point. We have been generating new genes at a fantastic rate over the past century. For the most part, we have no idea what the individual genes are, what they do, how many occur in each new breed, or how many migrate to species. If this were a new process that came about in the last decade, people would be terrified of it but since it evolved gradually over time and we have lived with it for decades, no one cares.
People access risk based largely on familiarity. Randomly mutated food crops are old and familiar so people accept them. GM food crops are new and unfamiliar so people fear them. Some people have figured out they can exploit that fear for their own political, social and economic benefit. End of story.
"The issue with these weeds is that they don't grow convieniently on the borders and in the hedgerows, they grow in the midst of the crops." Which makes them just like all other pest plants. Something you know if you had spent as much time on tractors as I have.
"Now the weeds are impervious to the herbicides that might have been used to rid the crop of them."
Which happens completely naturally. In fact, we are on about our fourth generation of herbicides right now. Even if we eschew the use of all genetic engineering, pest plants will rapidly acquire resistance. In fact, we don't even know if the observed resistance in the article is in any way related to the GM crops. Even if GM'd genes did jump to the pest plants it would simply require the development of new herbicides. If this happens a lot, the economic incentive to use GM'd crops will disappear. Its a self limiting problem.
"Further, these are genetically modified (that's what GM stands for) crops."
As are all our modern crop plants. See my previous post for the gory details.
"The countryside looks cute, but up close is a complex battle ground where a stupid mistake can lead to decades of problems." Yes, but there is no reason to believe that GM crops poise any specific risk for the reasons I outlined above. GM crops let us solve real problems that help real people right now. Why should let people and the environment suffer in order to avoid vague improbable future problems?
No, words mean things, especially words carefully chosen by the jerks in marketing. In this case, the word "super" is used to create the appearance of a dire threat were none exist. Fear sells as well as sex and in politics even better.
"Are killer bees and ants as annoying as the regular honey bees?"
No, but killer bees are what you get when humans DON'T meddle. Killer bees are descended from undomesticated wild bees introduced into Brazil in the 1960's.Prior to then, all honey bees were descended from old world domesticated bees. Killer bees displace honeybees in warmer climes because the honeybees have been selectively bred by humans to produce honey at the expense of their own numbers. When confronted by wild bees without the human imposed overhead they fold like a house of cards.
Almost all invasive species are transplanted wild species. Domesticated species must expend so much energy meeting human needs that they cannot compete with wild species.
"wouldn't it be probabilistically more likely that one some grabbed that section of the inserted gene and passed it onto the weed species?"
No, because resistance occurs naturally. Like I said above, herbicide resistant weeds evolved long before genetic engineering. It's one factor that keeps herbicide companies in business. Naturally evolved resistance is the first thing you must eliminate is you wish to make the argument that the resistance is artificial.
"Before the genes were always in the population gene pool...Plus, as I said before radiation and mutagenic chemicals were not used to create completely new DNA. It was to overcome sterility in the cross bred plants."
Sorry but this is completely wrong. The entire point of using mutation is to produce novel genes. Simply swapping around existing genes will only get you so far. Given contemporary sequencing technology it is trivial to show that heavily bred domesticated plants possess genes that their wild ancestors do not. "Trying to get a good gene out of random radiation or mutagenic chemicals would be like getting a bunch of monkeys together in typewriters and looking for a Victorian play to come out."
Great, now you're (probably accidentally) channeling creationist. How do think organism evolve in the first place? A human has many more genes than a single cell organism where did those genes come from?
I don't say this to be insulting but you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how genetics and natural and artificial selection works. Novel genes arise from natural mutation. Genes hop species lines all the time especially in plants and single cell organism. Retrovirus and some bacteria carry genes between multicellular species on a routine basis. We are merely using these same phenomenon in a directed fashion.
"The modern genetic engineering isn't precision stuff."
No, it is precision stuff. The techniques we used previously were haphazard and blind. Before we had no idea what we were doing to plants and animals. Now we do.
"What I see it as is Russian Roulette but 1 bullet in a 10,000 chamber gun. What if it fires?
Because the other 9,999 we get a positive benefit. We are using genetic engineering to address real problems. Why should we suffer real harm here and now merely to fend of sci-fi fears? Have you considered that agriculture is the single most environmentally destructive human activity? Have you considered that the most destructive factor of agriculture is the sheer room that it takes to grow crops? Have you considered that our only hope of raising standards of living for world's poor without totally wrecking the environment is to grow more food in less space? Have you considered that GM crops let us do precisely that?
Sacrificing real people and real ecosystems for the sake of vague improbable dangers is immoral and self-defeating in the long run.
To repeat myself, the "super" weeds are no more harmful than non-super weeds. They cannot perform the plant equivalent of running faster than a speeding bullet, leaping over tall buildings or wearing tights and cape. In fact, if you ran an "all-organic" farm that used no herbicides whatsoever, the "super" weeds would be exactly as annoying as non-super weeds. Opponents of the use of herbicides should be thrilled at this development since it will help destroy the economic advantage that herbicide using farms have over organic farms.
"In other words since they didn't have funds to do the gene-sequencing proof, so their arguement is invalid."
I didn't say the argument was invalid. I said it was a supposition. Since all weeds acquire resistance to all herbicides over time by natural evolution, you must first eliminate these natural causes before you can claim that the resistance is artificial. Sequencing a genome for a known gene is actually quite inexpensive so I am suspicious that they don't appear to have done so. Of course, this could just be a result of the Guardian's poor science reporting.
"Herbicide resistant crop plants using radiation and mutagenic chemicals?"
This is plant breeding 101. Plant breeders select from all available variations for the characteristics they seek. To increase the pool of variation they intentionally mutate the genome of test populations using mutagens. Since around 1910, Bis (2-chloroethyl) sulfide or Mustard gas, and related chemicals have been routinely used to increase the pool of variation. After WWII, radiation was used to the same ends.
Virtually, every plant you have ever eaten in your entire life has been through at least one generation of random mutation. Practically, you have consumed thousands of unknown randomly mutated genes. It is a matter of some amusement to me that so many people are terrified at the prospect of GM plants, which have specific and well defined alterations, but who calmly accept plants created with pre-GM methods that contains hundreds if not thousands of completely unexamined and untested genes.
"I think it's the weeds getting the "super" genes and spreading rapidly"
Well again, the only genes that the "super"-weeds can acquire from GM crop plants is herbicide resistance. Once they spread out from the fields where herbicides are used they lose any selective advantage and must compete on equal terms with the non-super weeds. So, without the presence of the herbicides, the weeds are not super, they are Clark Kent weeds.
"The concern I think is more of the GM plants' genes getting out in the wild and causing havoc in other ecosystems;"
Just to repeat, without the presence of the herbicide, the GM plants lose their selective advantage, so, no herbicide, no going wild. Looking at the problem more broadly, we have been altering crop plants for literally centuries. In the last century, we have artificially created genes through accelerated mutation, yet in all that time we have never seen a case of either runaway domestics plants or harmful gene transfer to a pest or neutral species.The explanation for this is simple: We alter crop plants to serve our ends. The genes we create in doing so puts the plants at a competitive disadvantage. This puts the plants at a competitive disadvantage outside of the protected domestic environs. The same disadvantage will accrue to any other species that picks up the domestic genes.
My, what a stinging refutation. Consider me spanked.
(1) There is nothing "super" about the weeds, they have merely acquired resistance to herbicides. They don't grow faster or crowd out crops more aggressively than their non-resistant cousins. It just as stupid as calling anti-biotic resistant microbes "super" germs. "Super" is a term meant to imply something new and unusually powerful and deadly. Every weed growing in every crop area in the developed world is largely immune to pesticides that entered widespread use over 30 years years ago. Are they "super" weeds as well?
(2) The article presents no evidence that the acquired resistance is in fact the result of cross-pollination and not natural evolution. In fact the artical says that:
"The new plants were dubbed superweeds because they proved resistant to three herbicides while the crops they were growing among had been genetically engineered to be resistant to only one."
This strongly suggest that the resistance is naturally acquired. It also doesn't seem that anyone took the elemental step of sequencing the pest-plants to see if they are actually using the same genes as the engineered crop plants. Unless someone can show that weeds contain engineered genes this article is nothing but hysterical supposition.
(3) We have been breeding herbicide resistant crop plants using radiation and mutagenic chemicals for over a century. Where is the evidence that gene transfer has occurred using the older technology? After all, nature doesn't care where the genes came from only whether they benefit the species they jump to. If acquiring herbicide resistance from crop plants was a major problem we would have seen it long ago.
(4) The supposition that crop plants will spread quickly through the wild is garbage gainsaid by centuries if not millennia or practical experience. We force crop plants to divert resources from their own survival in order to produce the plant products we need. As a result, they cannot survive in competition with natural plants that do not have the artificial overhead. If not protected from natural competition they are quickly wiped out.
Opponents of GM crops also neglect to mention that if genes jump across species as fast as they claim then the problem will be economically self-limiting. The GM crops are only used because allow the easy killing of associate pest-plants. If the pest plants acquire resistance rapidly then the GM plants lose all their economic advantage. No one will use them because they will offer no benefits for their increased cost.
Not on the scale I am talking about. Nifty though they may be, we will be very lucky to get 20% of our energy from "alternative" sources in the next 25 years. The amount of attention paid to them is not warranted by their likely payoffs. Worse, the attention lavished on these technologies creates the impression in the non-technical general populace that "alternative" sources of energy can produce the lion's share of our future energy needs.
Take solar power. Solar power is very useful in some circumstances but there is not a a single factory anywhere in the world powered by solar. Yet there are politically significant numbers of people who sincerely believe that we can easily and quickly replace all our coal, natural gas and nuclear power generation with solar power. Such people use their political power to actively block the technologies that can actual provide the power.
Biodiesel is just another in a long line proposed new energy sources that will never scale to point of true usefulness. I came of age during the "Energy Crisis" of '78-85 and I have see more of these boutique energy sources come and go than I can count.
Its the same pattern every time. Its the same pattern every time: Super-intellegent, (usually young) techies turning out nifty projects in their garages and grad schools, ernest politicians voting money for demo projects, special interest grubby for subisdies, much media fan fare and then nothing. I remember when bio-methane and ethanol were going to save the world to.
Biofuels will always be like solar power, useful in a handful of unique environments but largely irrelevant otherwise. The real harm done by the fads is that they distract people from the real choices that much be made. Replacing a few coal and natural gas powered power plants with a nuke would reduce CO2 emissions more than all the biodiesel that will ever be produced.
People need to stop fuzting and get serious.
Most the information under discussion is not information about people per se but rather information about transactions. Since a transaction takes two at least two entities it is an open question as to who owns the information about the transaction.
If I sell you something, do I have rights to the information that I sold you something? Why should either side of the transaction have to "forget" that the transaction ever took place? If the information about the transaction is itself valuable, why shouldn't either side be able to sell it?
I think the presumption that all information that includes data about a individual is the property of the individual is highly simplistic.
Instead of looking to product liability as a model for software responsibility perhaps we should consider using the malpractice model that is used in medicine, accounting, law and other professions.
The legal standard for malpractice isn't that something bad happened, you can't sue a doctor just because he didn't cure you, but whether the professional followed the standard practices of their field. Applied to software, the concept would mean that customers couldn't sue because the software had faults but because the design and implementation choices reflected bad practices.
I would note that many of the factors that make Windows such a security nightmare are the results of design decisions that were heavily criticized at the time they were made. Had Microsoft followed better practices, the billions in losses to Window's security faults would not have occurred.
The real question is whether software development has matured as an industry to the point where we can start talking about it having actual standards. As more and more of our lives becomes dependent on software the general public will begin to demand accountability in some form. We should all start thinking about this.