"too much like astroturfing"
I think you misread the GP. It doesn't say "personal corporate blogs are astroturfing", but just that they are too much like it. They show artificial "grass roots" support from inside the company, so no, it's not the same thing, but it's not quite a misapplication of the term, either.
Even though artificial oxygen recycling is way more space-efficient than using plants to do it, machines break down. On the other hand, plants do require maintenance, and relying on a green system means you'd better not have a "potato famine" kind of failure.
I don't see the difference between radiation shielding for plants versus that for humans. Wouldn't the amount of shielding for plants be less-than-or-equal-to the amount needed to protect us? Couldn't you use the "greenhouse" itself as a shield for the rest of the space station? Keep it always between the sun and the rest of the station. That's one benefit of spinning it, gyroscopy.
The solar reflector is just there for aesthetics.
You could use a parabolic mirror (populated with some density of solar cells) to focus sunlight onto a smaller area, which would then bounce the light optically onto a dome at the center of the hub. You'd vary the efficiency of reflection for each bouncing surface in order to achieve filtration. Some combination of mirror diameter, reflective efficiency, and solar cell density would provide enough electrical power to provide the artificial light and also the reflected sunlight to mimic the sun seen from, say, San Diego or Oslo.
The point is to make it feel Earthy.
As far as human waste reclamation goes, yes there's a difference between grey water and black water. But there have been advances in sewage treatment over the last few years.
For instance, a multichamber tank about the size of a Camry, actively stirred and filled with the right mix of organisms and chemistry, can turn the sewage output of a single family home into potable water. If you're careful not to flush Really Bad Stuff, the sludge is nontoxic. A variant on that process could output brown water to feed to plants (or rather, the microbes in the dirt the plants are growing in) instead.
A space elevator unworkable, in my O. The problems of tethering, harmonic vibration, wind shear, icing, temperature variance, and eventual collisions with objects in space are too great to overcome. Plus, you still have the gravity well to escape every time you use it.
Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causality."
And the Internet as a whole is a terrific place for posting as fact misreadings of misinterpretations of things people don't say. (No, not you.)
The original paper, which was a study based on a few thousand people, was looking at extreme male-brainedness in autism. They picked out profession as an indicator of male-brainedness. The data for sex of the offspring was available only one year (1994) of the data they had.
They also selected the professions ad hoc. That is, they didn't test the wider profession for male-brainedness. They didn't directly test the individual people involved either, but just looked at their profession, race, and other data.
The question is: how many of the engineer types would have had more male children anyway? Are people who will naturally have more male children just more likely to choose engineering professions? I think you could draw that conclusion more easily, but still it's only one study using data from one year out of several they studied.
Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?
I think it's just a case of people using tools in ways their creators didn't envision. As Perl's Larry Wall says, that's the mark of a good tool.
Another way to look at it is that if you serve people, they become dependent on you. Google is trying to build its business by offering services and getting people hooked.
I, for one, welcome our new information infrastructure servant overlords.
You will quickly find that your current way of thinking is just... too difficult for you. You don't need to go to all that effort. Relax, and let them do the work.
If you feel you must stay informed, watch a little CNN or Fox News (one or the other, not both), so you don't have to constantly hear people disagreeing with one another.
Never again will you think that you can't trust your government.
I think... you are employing what is to me a very non-intutive definition of the word "hard." ... I get paid $$$ as a chemical engineer... is that my job is a little harder.
Your job would be "harder" for someone else than for you, yes, and that's why the job market works the way it does. I think you understand what GP was getting at, but I have a comment about it.
There is a sort of synergy between jobs and people who fill them. Work expands to fill the time of an underutilized person, and the number of employees expands to cover the work that is present. That's glossing greed, but eventually greedy employers and employees go away or are forced to accept the reality of their work needs.
Now, my job as consulting sysadmin and programmer is, for me, easy. I feel guilty submitting my invoices sometimes, since I know how simple what I had to do was for me to do. But at the same time, I know that my client couldn't have done the task themselves without learning a lot and altering the way they do business.
Nor could I have done their job without the same or greater learning curve. And you can't teach a dog to play the violin (even though someone taught teach this one algebra, it seems).
>guru?!?! > >In which parallel dimension have you been >shopping and how do I get there?
Yeah, right.
Recently, I had a bundle of CD blanks or something to buy, and took them to the electronics counter. The 18-year-old wunderkind behind the counter, next to the cash register, was talking to her boyfriend (or a prospect, anyway).
I asked to purchase the item. "I can't do that, you'll have to go up front", she said, and continued with her conversation about what someone went and then somebody else was like.
Thanks for standing next to the cash register, anyway.
Netflix should figure out a way to use Wal-Mart as a local cache. For the hottest releases, you don't have to wait for the thing to be delivered (or even downloaded and burned >-). You hand the Wal-Mart electronics guru your Netflix card, and they put your name in the computer.
There's got to be a way to make that work more cheaply than mailing each one.
>Hunter-gatherer societies have laws but no concept of property.
That's overgeneralizing a tad, isn't it? All hunter-gatherer societies are not the same.
And of those that are communal, how many of them honor personal property in some way? Whose spear is whose, whose headband goes on whose head, and so on. Which string of beads does #1 wife wear?
People don't wake up one day and realize they have rules, then invent a thing called "property" because they want to make some more rules. No, a tradition develops about who gets to say what is done with some thing, and that tradition gets codified. The reality of property is there, and the law about it is made recognizing the situation that already exists.
Does it mean I have release my password per GPL and anyone is allowed to modify and distribute it for free?
That's a common misconception. We have no problem with people making money from your password. It's the attempt by some to restrict freedom and keep your password all to themselves that we are against.
We would support, for instance:
sending your password out on a tape and charging $100 for the tape.
charging you $100 for your use of the computer resources on which your password is stored
charging you $100 for the support of your password
charging you $100 for this response
Your password wants to be Free. We urge you to set aside the bondage in which your password is held and join with us for a better community.
The corporation's responsibility is working in the best interest of their shareholders - everything short of breaking the law in order to turn a profit for those who own stock. If that means suing a company just to stay relevant, so be it.
The problem with that is not "morality" (whatever that means for a business), but efficiency and effectiveness. Efficacy. Viability.
A company should exist to provide the best products it can to as many customers as it can. In the long run, that will provide the most return for shareholders. Be customer driven, not shareholder driven, and you will have both.
Trying to run the company to please the shareholders is like driving a car down the highway looking back in the rear view mirror. You may stay on the road, but be careful when passing, and those toll booths are really tough.
A business is only bound to stoop to whatever depths their bylaws and SEC filings say. When Google puts in their paperwork that they won't be evil (and they spell out what they mean), it allows them to make decisions based on morality and ethics as they define them. Prospective stock buyers are informed, and can't demand that Google be anything else.
Not that Google is the standard - I'm just using that as an example. It's possible to run a company within guidelines of good citizenship. Most executives would rather just take the money, it seems.
>Property is an artificial construct of law. >Intellectual property doubly so.
The law itself is an artificial construct. Saying a particular set of laws is an artificial construct is a tautology.
A doubled tautology is reduntantly uninsightful.
But the real key to why you're so totally wrong is that you think the law came first. Property came first, and the law followed.
Calling property "artificial" using the pseudonym "CommunistTroll" suggests that you think the concept of property is illegitimate. Property is how we reward one another for good behavior.
Without property there would be nothing to work for; there would be no gifts to give, no security in life, no nest for the little missus.
Without property, the tragedy of the commons would be the universal state of being. The weakest would have nothing, while the strongest had everything they wanted to have.
Without intellectual property there would be no authors, no artists, no musicians or filmmakers. They would still be there, creating their art for its own sake, but no one else would know. The world would be an illiterate, grey, dull, dreamless place, except in the strongholds of the most powerful, who would take the non-property of the weak and keep it for themselves.
The need to protect our persons from one another and the concept of property underpin law. So rather than property being an artificial construct of the law, the law is a formalization of the reality of property.
Intellectual property is merely an extension to the beautiful, grand, and clever what the brutish, quick, and powerful already enjoy.
Now I have to read the book, instead of the review teaching me everything I needed
Just kidding. I'm a fan of the "Exam Cram" series, since I think that if the industry is going to judge me on my credentials, instead of my ability, then I should be allowed to get my credentials based on my test-taking savvy instead of relying on my actual (awesome) skill.
But the real benefit of the Exam Cram format is that by asking me questions, they show me the areas in which I'm less versed. Hitting those areas leads to others and by the time I get back to the questions they're easily answered.
My first reaction was to cry "Protecionism!". After thinking about it a little, I see another angle.
The Chinese government is taking a prudent step to protect itself from software it doesn't control.
If Microsoft, or Mandriva, or some Canadian firm sold the Chinese some warez and attached a spyware applet, stealing vital Chinese national secrets, what could they do about it?
If it's a Chinese firm, I'll leave to your imagination the kinds of things they could do.
Another twist is that if a Chinese company wants to grab some FOSS and sell it (as part of a contract or whatever) to the Chinese government, while the software might not be Chinese in origin the company would be.
Protectionism hurts everyone, but mostly the country that puts up the barriers. The Chinese might not believe that, but IMO it doesn't matter in this case because economics is not the motivation.
(This thing is more the size of an American football than a PDA). Now I can do all the usual PDA stuff, plus:
keep my Unix environment with me all the time
log in remotely and use it as a port scanner
run GCC onboard, so theoretically any program can be ported to the football
keep my documentation, utilities, and usual configuration files with me and access them with a web browser (web server running on the PDA)
(But the biggest thing is:)
it will never be orphaned
Even if PalmOne were to go belly up, a Linux-based machine will always be maintainable. It might be hard, but I'll never be forced to buy a new one because the OS on old one is no longer supported.
Tomato plants as a group are very interesting. Did you know that if you put a hole in a 5-gallon bucket, with a tomato plant upside-down in the bottom, fill it with dirt, and hang the bucket from the handle, the tomato will happily grow down?
I'll bet with only a tiny "g" to keep them untangled that there are many creeper plants that would do very well in space.
Software is a complex beast. They probably have as many people working on security as the codebase can handle.
That's not my point at all. Their mindset is all wrong. They're driven by features, because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that features are what sell. Since their focus is on generating revenue with features, and not by improving their product as a whole, you get this patchwork system of add-ons and "security features".
Consider the "firewall" feature in Windows 2K/XP. You can enable or disable TCP/IP traffic in lots of ways, most of which are annoying to the user. They had to put that there because spambots and spyware abuse the network. But because so many legit applications need to use the network, the user ends up granting access to everything anyway.
Instead of layering the "security feature" into the network stack, they should have done the harder job of plugging the holes that allow the spyware and spambots to install themselves in the first place. But plugging the holes would have meant disabling features (such as opening email attachments with a click), so it couldn't be done.
What the Linux community needs right now is a good leader. Someone to make everyone realize that the community is the one that is in charge of the direction of things and help them to focus their efforts.
We need a leader to tell everyone we don't need a leader?
No, we don't. Why bother putting the weight of a world-wide movement onto one individual, when the thing is doing fine on its own?
I'm reminded of a story from the Book of Judges (in the Bible). Israel had been more-or-less confined to the hill country by the Philistines because they kept failing to listen to their judges, who were sort of like Linus, ESR, RMS, et al. It was a meritocracy of sorts. Israel clamored for a king, though, so they could be like the other nations. Through Samuel, they were told the king would take away their freedoms and tax them for his own purposes, but they insisted. They ended up with King Saul, a megalomaniac of, er, biblical proportions.
Slashdot Mirror
"too much like astroturfing" I think you misread the GP. It doesn't say "personal corporate blogs are astroturfing", but just that they are too much like it. They show artificial "grass roots" support from inside the company, so no, it's not the same thing, but it's not quite a misapplication of the term, either.
... if the drive it's in starts to make a certain clicking sound.
Very informative.
Even though artificial oxygen recycling is way more space-efficient than using plants to do it, machines break down. On the other hand, plants do require maintenance, and relying on a green system means you'd better not have a "potato famine" kind of failure.
I don't see the difference between radiation shielding for plants versus that for humans. Wouldn't the amount of shielding for plants be less-than-or-equal-to the amount needed to protect us? Couldn't you use the "greenhouse" itself as a shield for the rest of the space station? Keep it always between the sun and the rest of the station. That's one benefit of spinning it, gyroscopy.
The solar reflector is just there for aesthetics.
You could use a parabolic mirror (populated with some density of solar cells) to focus sunlight onto a smaller area, which would then bounce the light optically onto a dome at the center of the hub. You'd vary the efficiency of reflection for each bouncing surface in order to achieve filtration. Some combination of mirror diameter, reflective efficiency, and solar cell density would provide enough electrical power to provide the artificial light and also the reflected sunlight to mimic the sun seen from, say, San Diego or Oslo.
The point is to make it feel Earthy.
As far as human waste reclamation goes, yes there's a difference between grey water and black water. But there have been advances in sewage treatment over the last few years.
For instance, a multichamber tank about the size of a Camry, actively stirred and filled with the right mix of organisms and chemistry, can turn the sewage output of a single family home into potable water. If you're careful not to flush Really Bad Stuff, the sludge is nontoxic. A variant on that process could output brown water to feed to plants (or rather, the microbes in the dirt the plants are growing in) instead.
A space elevator unworkable, in my O. The problems of tethering, harmonic vibration, wind shear, icing, temperature variance, and eventual collisions with objects in space are too great to overcome. Plus, you still have the gravity well to escape every time you use it.
Oh well, thanks for the info.
I lost my mom when in my early 20's, and my dad a few years ago.
Every once in a while, I wish I could ask them what to do about this or that, what they did when such and such happened, and so forth.
Sort of a Jor'El/Kal'El thing, though I usually don't need to save planets and such.
And when a spouse of 50 years dies, the other would like to talk to them.
It's no way to cheat death, but it is a way for those around you to avoid dealing with the fact that you're gone.
And the Internet as a whole is a terrific place for posting as fact misreadings of misinterpretations of things people don't say. (No, not you.)
The original paper, which was a study based on a few thousand people, was looking at extreme male-brainedness in autism. They picked out profession as an indicator of male-brainedness. The data for sex of the offspring was available only one year (1994) of the data they had.
They also selected the professions ad hoc. That is, they didn't test the wider profession for male-brainedness. They didn't directly test the individual people involved either, but just looked at their profession, race, and other data.
The question is: how many of the engineer types would have had more male children anyway? Are people who will naturally have more male children just more likely to choose engineering professions? I think you could draw that conclusion more easily, but still it's only one study using data from one year out of several they studied.
Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?
I think it's just a case of people using tools in ways their creators didn't envision. As Perl's Larry Wall says, that's the mark of a good tool.
Another way to look at it is that if you serve people, they become dependent on you. Google is trying to build its business by offering services and getting people hooked.
I, for one, welcome our new information infrastructure servant overlords.
Why would those parts wear out all at ... oh .
You obviously suffer from poor technique.
You are obviously jaded by your exposure to what you perceive as reality. I recommend that you pick up a copy of Bill Clinton's autobiography or simply read the White House press briefing site for a while.
You will quickly find that your current way of thinking is just ... too difficult for you. You don't need to go to all that effort. Relax, and let them do the work.
If you feel you must stay informed, watch a little CNN or Fox News (one or the other, not both), so you don't have to constantly hear people disagreeing with one another.
Never again will you think that you can't trust your government.
I think ... you are employing what is to me a very non-intutive definition of the word "hard." ... is that my job is a little harder.
... I get paid $$$ as a chemical engineer
Your job would be "harder" for someone else than for you, yes, and that's why the job market works the way it does. I think you understand what GP was getting at, but I have a comment about it.
There is a sort of synergy between jobs and people who fill them. Work expands to fill the time of an underutilized person, and the number of employees expands to cover the work that is present. That's glossing greed, but eventually greedy employers and employees go away or are forced to accept the reality of their work needs.
Now, my job as consulting sysadmin and programmer is, for me, easy. I feel guilty submitting my invoices sometimes, since I know how simple what I had to do was for me to do. But at the same time, I know that my client couldn't have done the task themselves without learning a lot and altering the way they do business.
Nor could I have done their job without the same or greater learning curve. And you can't teach a dog to play the violin (even though someone taught teach this one algebra, it seems).
>guru?!?!
>
>In which parallel dimension have you been
>shopping and how do I get there?
Yeah, right.
Recently, I had a bundle of CD blanks or something to buy, and took them to the electronics counter. The 18-year-old wunderkind behind the counter, next to the cash register, was talking to her boyfriend (or a prospect, anyway).
I asked to purchase the item. "I can't do that, you'll have to go up front", she said, and continued with her conversation about what someone went and then somebody else was like.
Thanks for standing next to the cash register, anyway.
Wow, hooray for Netflix, I guess.
Netflix should figure out a way to use Wal-Mart as a local cache. For the hottest releases, you don't have to wait for the thing to be delivered (or even downloaded and burned >-). You hand the Wal-Mart electronics guru your Netflix card, and they put your name in the computer.
There's got to be a way to make that work more cheaply than mailing each one.
>Gnomic Troll?
Yeah, or GNU+Troll.
>Hunter-gatherer societies have laws but no concept of property.
That's overgeneralizing a tad, isn't it? All hunter-gatherer societies are not the same.
And of those that are communal, how many of them honor personal property in some way? Whose spear is whose, whose headband goes on whose head, and so on. Which string of beads does #1 wife wear?
People don't wake up one day and realize they have rules, then invent a thing called "property" because they want to make some more rules. No, a tradition develops about who gets to say what is done with some thing, and that tradition gets codified. The reality of property is there, and the law about it is made recognizing the situation that already exists.
If they didn't include the first two, they wouldn't need the last two.
Buhdum-PISH. Thanks, I'll be here all week - and tip the waitress, they pay her less than me.That's a common misconception. We have no problem with people making money from your password. It's the attempt by some to restrict freedom and keep your password all to themselves that we are against.
We would support, for instance:
Your password wants to be Free. We urge you to set aside the bondage in which your password is held and join with us for a better community.
[Gnoll mode: OFF]The problem with that is not "morality" (whatever that means for a business), but efficiency and effectiveness. Efficacy. Viability.
A company should exist to provide the best products it can to as many customers as it can. In the long run, that will provide the most return for shareholders. Be customer driven, not shareholder driven, and you will have both.
Trying to run the company to please the shareholders is like driving a car down the highway looking back in the rear view mirror. You may stay on the road, but be careful when passing, and those toll booths are really tough.
A business is only bound to stoop to whatever depths their bylaws and SEC filings say. When Google puts in their paperwork that they won't be evil (and they spell out what they mean), it allows them to make decisions based on morality and ethics as they define them. Prospective stock buyers are informed, and can't demand that Google be anything else.
Not that Google is the standard - I'm just using that as an example. It's possible to run a company within guidelines of good citizenship. Most executives would rather just take the money, it seems.
>Property is an artificial construct of law.
>Intellectual property doubly so.
The law itself is an artificial construct. Saying a particular set of laws is an artificial construct is a tautology.
A doubled tautology is reduntantly uninsightful.
But the real key to why you're so totally wrong is that you think the law came first. Property came first, and the law followed.
Calling property "artificial" using the pseudonym "CommunistTroll" suggests that you think the concept of property is illegitimate. Property is how we reward one another for good behavior.
Without property there would be nothing to work for; there would be no gifts to give, no security in life, no nest for the little missus.
Without property, the tragedy of the commons would be the universal state of being. The weakest would have nothing, while the strongest had everything they wanted to have.
Without intellectual property there would be no authors, no artists, no musicians or filmmakers. They would still be there, creating their art for its own sake, but no one else would know. The world would be an illiterate, grey, dull, dreamless place, except in the strongholds of the most powerful, who would take the non-property of the weak and keep it for themselves.
The need to protect our persons from one another and the concept of property underpin law. So rather than property being an artificial construct of the law, the law is a formalization of the reality of property.
Intellectual property is merely an extension to the beautiful, grand, and clever what the brutish, quick, and powerful already enjoy.
Just kidding. I'm a fan of the "Exam Cram" series, since I think that if the industry is going to judge me on my credentials, instead of my ability, then I should be allowed to get my credentials based on my test-taking savvy instead of relying on my actual (awesome) skill.
But the real benefit of the Exam Cram format is that by asking me questions, they show me the areas in which I'm less versed. Hitting those areas leads to others and by the time I get back to the questions they're easily answered.
My first reaction was to cry "Protecionism!". After thinking about it a little, I see another angle. The Chinese government is taking a prudent step to protect itself from software it doesn't control.
If Microsoft, or Mandriva, or some Canadian firm sold the Chinese some warez and attached a spyware applet, stealing vital Chinese national secrets, what could they do about it?
If it's a Chinese firm, I'll leave to your imagination the kinds of things they could do.
Another twist is that if a Chinese company wants to grab some FOSS and sell it (as part of a contract or whatever) to the Chinese government, while the software might not be Chinese in origin the company would be.
Protectionism hurts everyone, but mostly the country that puts up the barriers. The Chinese might not believe that, but IMO it doesn't matter in this case because economics is not the motivation.
Man, what a waste of my time the parent post was. Thanks, Slashdot. I guess I should RFTA next time.
(But the biggest thing is:)
Even if PalmOne were to go belly up, a Linux-based machine will always be maintainable. It might be hard, but I'll never be forced to buy a new one because the OS on old one is no longer supported.
>Aunt Mabel's fault
No, it's the fault of short-sighted executives who care what their stock price is from day to day.
Make good stuff and your stock price will do fine.
Companies that are shareholder-driven are doomed to fail both their shareholders and their customers.
Companies that are customer-driven will delight both customer and shareholder.
Tomato plants as a group are very interesting. Did you know that if you put a hole in a 5-gallon bucket, with a tomato plant upside-down in the bottom, fill it with dirt, and hang the bucket from the handle, the tomato will happily grow down?
I'll bet with only a tiny "g" to keep them untangled that there are many creeper plants that would do very well in space.
That's not my point at all. Their mindset is all wrong. They're driven by features, because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that features are what sell. Since their focus is on generating revenue with features, and not by improving their product as a whole, you get this patchwork system of add-ons and "security features".
Consider the "firewall" feature in Windows 2K/XP. You can enable or disable TCP/IP traffic in lots of ways, most of which are annoying to the user. They had to put that there because spambots and spyware abuse the network. But because so many legit applications need to use the network, the user ends up granting access to everything anyway.
Instead of layering the "security feature" into the network stack, they should have done the harder job of plugging the holes that allow the spyware and spambots to install themselves in the first place. But plugging the holes would have meant disabling features (such as opening email attachments with a click), so it couldn't be done.
We need a leader to tell everyone we don't need a leader?
No, we don't. Why bother putting the weight of a world-wide movement onto one individual, when the thing is doing fine on its own?
I'm reminded of a story from the Book of Judges (in the Bible). Israel had been more-or-less confined to the hill country by the Philistines because they kept failing to listen to their judges, who were sort of like Linus, ESR, RMS, et al. It was a meritocracy of sorts. Israel clamored for a king, though, so they could be like the other nations. Through Samuel, they were told the king would take away their freedoms and tax them for his own purposes, but they insisted. They ended up with King Saul, a megalomaniac of, er, biblical proportions.