but about 20% goes someplace new that no one knows.
So that's what that big lump under the carpet is.
Here's a hint: wherever it is going, it isn't being turned into babies' smiles by the fairy folk: its going somewhere and affecting some system. Hopefully its disappearing into some bottomless sink and not nudging some fragile, metastable equilibrium towards breakdown. Trouble is, as you say, no one knows.
It the biosphere was not self regulating enough to correct a 5% imbalance, it would have already gone unstable
Can I interest you in this loan? Only $1000 interest per month (variable). Sure you can afford it - you often buy things costing more than $1000 and you haven't gone broke yet! Or, go on, have an extra portion of pasta with every single meal! Its only a fraction of the calories of that gourmet meal you had at your 21st Birthday party, of that doughnut you had last week, and that didn't kill you!
Do you really not see the problem? That 5% is 5% on top of what the biosphere is known to cope with, and unlike volcanoes and climatic fluctuations which average out over time, that's 5% each and every year. Worse than that, its 5% and rising, with compound interest, every year.
Don't online dating sites use relational databases?
Indeed, I believe that there's a custom build of PostgerSQL used by the more... specialist agencies that includes the new "UNNATURAL JOIN" keyword, permits one-to-many "CROSS JOIN" queries and performs an automatic rollback before any self-join.
You are not helping your cause. There are CO2 sources, and CO2 sinks. Most of the CO2 generated is absorbed by the sinks.
...and if you add a new source of CO2 then, unless the capacity of the sinks increases, the overall level of CO2 in the atmosphere will rise and, because of the way in which CO2 molecules are reliably know to absorb radiation, more of the sun's heat will be trapped by the atmosphere. Do we know for sure that the "sinks" will self-regulate? Quickly enough to avoid major grief for us? No.
Human related CO2 generation is completely dwarfed by "natural" CO2 generation through decomposition and whatnot.
The CO2 released from decomposition is the same CO2 that the plant absorbed from the atmosphere yesterday (in geological terms). Its a zero-sum game. So that leaves sources of "new" CO2, such as volcanic activity - and we could be in trouble if that increased significantly, but that is out of our control.
However, the CO2 we release by burning fossil fuels represents millions of years of accumulation of CO2 from buried plant matter which has been locked out of the system for hundreds of millions of years - we're doing are level best to dig up and release every scrap we can find in a gelogical instant. The question is not whether it is proven that this will have a disastrous effect - that would be very difficult in such a complex dynamic system - but whether there is a distinct possibility of such an effect.
Even if there is a handy self regulatory system (which is, of course, plausible) it may work on a million-year timescale and not protect us from the short-term effects.
However, looking at the more recent global warming related threads, the posts moderated with 5's seem to be more and more in the "Open-minded but skeptical" camp regarding the "consensus" view.
Good. "Open-minded but skeptical" is a good attitude. Not to be confused with the "Dogmatic denial based on FUD, cherry-picking and straw men" view which the original post so nicely embodies.
If you had, you'd see that the errors only made it as far as their online, daily charts of ice coverage which are generated from live data which hasn't yet gone through their (non-real time) QA process.
Why is it that people that view the AGW hypothesis with skepticism often get tossed in with the Young Earthers, ID crowd, and other religious zealots?
Hang on. There's a distinction between "skepticism" and dogmatic rejection. Everybody should view the AGW hypothesis with rational skepticism.
That's not the same as the sort of spin typified by the summary above. Its not the same as rejecting the weight of evidence behind a hypothesis because it hasn't been "proven" (in the strict logical sense which almost never applies outside of pure mathematics), or because an unqualified pundit like Al Gore gets carried away with his powerpoint.
Anyway, the Young Earthers may not represent the entire AGW-skeptic movement, but they're a part of it who enjoy significant influence in the USA (hopefully diminished now).
Wow! You've got an Earth sized laboratory? How cool is that?! I always wondered what was being used for a control in these experiments.
No - I don't need an Earth-sized laboratory. What you need is some plausible theory as to how the energy levels of the electrons in a CO2 molecule at a given temperature and pressure could possibly be affected by the size of the container.
What cracks me up is that the GW skeptics all implicitly believe in the hippy-dippy "Gaia Hypothesis": i.e. despite the repeatable scientific evidence that CO2 increases the retention of solar energy in the lab, when its released into the atmosphere some magical self-regulatory mechanism will magically appear and prevent climate change. Unfortunately, the media pundits (on both sides) don't help by hyping up every random snowflake or forest fire as proof or refutation of GW.
In May, 2008 they went so far as to predict that the North Pole would be ice-free during the 2008 'melt season,'
Er, no, they said it was possible and later quote "a 59% chance of a new record minimum this year". How the media chose to report this is another matter... Oh yes, note the date: May 2008.
Today, however, they say that they have been the victims of 'sensor drift' that led to an underestimation of Arctic ice extent by as much as 500,000 square kilometers.
And if you read TFA, the sensor drift started in January 2009, was spotted within a few weeks and only affected their daily images which are effectively "live" and hence haven't gone through QA.
So how exactly does an error which occurred in Jan/Feb 09, was almost immediately spotted and declared affect a (misreported) prediction made last May?
<irony>Meanwhile, I'm sure the little fairies are hard at work ensuring that the geological era's worth of sequestered CO2 we're in the process of releasing back into the atmosphere magically changes its physical properties. After all, it is made from special carbon that God put there in 4004BC for us to burn, unlike that nasty communist CO2 that exhibits the greenhouse effect in godless laboratories.</irony>
What percent of software installed on a typical Windows machine is written in interpreted language or compiled into "write-once-run-anywhere" bytecode?
Well, anything written using.Net/C# (and the current Visual Basic?), for a start. Google maps, most Webmail systems and similar. Ever heard of Slashdot, for example?
Software written in languages you mention is mostly server-side.
So? Its still written by developers.
And no, "most developers" aren't coding web apps.
Actually, "most" developers are probably maintaining in-house applications for the corporate sector, and a helluva lot of that will be Java, C#, Visual Basic, AJAX, SQL stored procedures (and probably more dBaseII than is comfortable to contemplate).
The need for raw speed is still critical (ever tried using Eclipse?
Yes - I like it - is there a problem? Which part of Eclipse (there's an awful lot of it) The last time I tried the visual editing stuff it was slow and buggy but going by the acronym thicket surrounding that I suspect that is gratuitous over-engineering rather than anything fundamental about Java.
That's the long-term outlook, but in the short term, most developers are working in an older mindset, using a definition of "portable" that includes C.
Only if your definition of "most developers" excludes anybody working primarily in AJAX, Flash/Flex, Java, Mono/.Net, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby or Z-Code - an increasingly large proportion (ok, maybe not Z-Code, but I wanted an A-Z).
Not that "real" developers will be going away anytime soon - somebody has to write the runtimes - but I don't think C would be my "tool of choice" for writing applications any more.
The end result for new/novel platforms would be that, rather than needing a critical mass of hundreds of applications to be ported, they'd just need half-a-dozen common runtimes.
As I said - chicken-and-egg. If there wasn't a single hardware architecture that accounted for 90% of the market then the argument for using a scripting or bytecode-based approach would be much stronger.
The problem is software being delivered as binaries.
I think that's chicken-and-egg: if you have a single, dominant, binary-compatible architecture then the most efficient way to distribute commercial software is as pre-compiled binaries.
Linux runs on so many architectures for the simple reason that many Linux developers take a pride in their work and actually care about interoperability: all that cross-platform support doesn't happen magically because its written in C! A substantial app will be riddled with "#ifdef IA32/#ifdef MIPS"-type, and if you compile from a tarball someone, somewhere has spent a lot of time preparing that.configure script.
Given the existence of a ubiquitous single platform with 90% of the market, there's no short-term commercial case for that sort of attention to detail (...maybe posterity will show that there's a long-term case, but since when did that amount to a hill of beans?)
Interestingly, though, most Linux distros have gone for binary packages as their main form of distribution...
My bet is, long term, "bare metal binary" software will naturally disappear in favour of scripting languages, JIT compilation and/or virtual machine bytecode. Compatibility will be determined by the API, not the hardware and, by definition, any software that still needs "raw hardware" performance will need to be hand-tailored for the hardware anyway.
The one disappointing thing here is that the court blames physicians for the public misconception. In reality, the blame lies more with the mass media, who turned the original claims into a massive health scare.
That and lack of public trust in politicians and (politically driven) scientists. You know, the ones who said that there was no evidence that feeding cows on dead sheep was a problem, then said that it was impossible for humans to catch BSE... or that running cars on grain alcohol was a good idea. How is the general public supposed to know what is scientific fact and what is schilling for big industry?
In the UK, the whole "vaccines causes autism" thing could probably have been made to go away if the Government had allowed parents to opt for the separate jabs rather than the combined one (which was the big bone of contention in the media), and left it to doctors to persuade parents that it was better to only stick one needle in little Johnny than three. Sure, there was no scientific justification for that - but it might have avoided a generation of unvaccinated kids and ensured that the media lost interest.
The consent is implied when the other person accesses your computer
Yes, but they didn't know they were accessing your computer. They thought they were accessing CNN. If they complain, they're going to complain to CNN, not you. The program they ran was branded "CNN" not "John Doe's PC".
This is defensive ass-covering from a big, deep-pocketed company which would be an attractive target for legal trolls. Nobody is going to be bothered to start a $20-million class action suit against your webcam.
Imagine you didn't agree to these conditions. How do you expect CNN to deliver the service?
If you agree to the EULA, you agree that CNN can use your bandwidth, and that you will pay any costs.
Its a P2P service - so if you use it, you are sharing your bandwidth with other users. Or, top put it another way, CNN are using your bandwidth to deliver their material to their customers.
So if some joker leaves it running in his hotel room and gets charged $1 per megabyte, he shouldn't sue CNN. Sounds fair.
You may not collect any information about communication in the network of computers that are operating the Software or about the other users of the Software by monitoring, interdicting or intercepting any process of the Software.
So if I collected data about the other CNN customers who are sharing my bandwidth via the P2P service, their IP addresses, what they were watching, and when and published it, that would be OK, would it?
We take these things as read when we use P2P, but obviously some lawyer at CNN has done a bit of due dilligence and covered his arse in case some troll comes along and sues them.
The fuss about this is a bit like the scare stories photo-sharing sites requiring permission to reproduce/modify/sub license your photos: they need these permissions to run their service.
I for one, and this might just be my superstitious self, would be concerned about the prospect of my bodily fluids interacting with biological material that has been, so to speak, "immortalized."
Huh - slashdotters are so supernatural-minded.
What they actually do is get the surviving Beatles to re-form and compose a number 1 hit song about liver cells, hire a Nobel laureate to write a book about them and hang a picture of the donor liver in the Louvre.
Yeah, as a Linux user, it's nice not to have things so complicated. I only have to choose between Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, and-
...and with a big enough hard drive and a copy of Xen or Virtualbox, you can have them all without paying a penny (ok, scratch RedHat and Suse from that). Not that you'd need to, since they're all backed by huge repositories of packages and capable of doing pretty much anything that linux can do - not deliberately crippled to meet some artificial marketing-defined price point.
7 official versions of Ubuntu alone. You were saying..?
Well, lets see:
Ubuntu Server: the six flavors of Windows 7 in TFA don't include server editions: there will presumably be all the permutations of "Windows Home|[Small] Business|Enterprise [Premium] Server 201N" (or something) as well..
Ubuntu MID: The Ubuntu answer to Windows Mobile, which likewise is not counted among the Windows 7 flavours.
Netbook Remix: is a set of packages - unless you are an OEM working with Cannonical to bundle a custom Ubuntu release with a netbook. In the latter case, it says here that Microsoft will also have an OEM-only netbook version, which was not counted in TFA.
Xubuntu,Kubuntu: Use completely different desktop environments - which really has no equivalent in the Windows world ("Windows Home Basic" doesn't count - its the same UI with the fancy effects turned off).
Edbuntu is now just Ubuntu + a set of extra packages.
There's no lock-in: whatever flavour of Ubuntu you have, any workable permutation of all the features from all the other versions is but an apt-get away. Want to use Ubuntu Desktop as a server? Fine. Want to choose between Gnome, KDE, XFCE and Netbook Remix each time you log in? Install away.
Go to the Cannonical site and you'll have no doubt that what they are promoting is a simple choice between Ubuntu Desktop or Ubuntu Server. The others are alternatives produced in response to specific needs. What MS is doing is more like having 6 versions of their basic Desktop OS, which can't easily be converted or combined, aimed at artificial marketing-defined target groups.
If a line of reasoning leads to a paradox, then it means that one of the assumptions behind it is false. The question is, which one?
There are a number of huge, hard-to-prove assumptions behind Fermi's paradox, so why does everybody assume that just one of them - "intelligent aliens exist" - is the culprit?
Now, if they don't, that means that, as the only intelligent civilization to evolve, we're way, way out on a probabilistic limb: tricky to disprove but enough to have Occam sharpening his razor when faced with the other assumptions:
Practical interstellar space travel is possible: I'm not talking FTL here, just getting to the nearest star in less-than-geological time. We certainly haven't cracked it yet. Even SF authors who eschew hyperspace seem to resort to antimatter drives (or other unobtanium-fuelled solutions) for this now. Nor have we successfully frozen and thawed out a sentient being, yet (unless you just had a dose of salmonella from an inadequately-microwaved readymeal: see final paragraph).
Aliens would want to colonise the galaxy: A character in Diaspora by Greg Egan put it nicely: "that's what bacteria with spaceships would do". If you're running out of space on your planet, you don't just need interstellar travel, you need interstellar bulk carriers to make a difference. Condoms are cheaper.
So, if you don't have FTL and your species is not suitable for home freezing, you could build big slow generation ships, that take hundreds of years to reach the stars. Still tricky, and since such is ship is always going have strictly limited resources you still better pack those condoms.
Now, come to think about it, if you can build vast numbers of these wonderful self-sustaining colonies that can survive for centuries in the wasteland of interstellar space, and your people are prepared to spend their lives in them while practicing responsible family planning, what exactly was it you needed planets for? Raw materials? There's gigatonnes of those floating around your own solar system, and you had to learn everything there is to know about sustainability in order to build those generation ships. Perhaps its time for a staycation? Even if your star is beginning to look a bit iffy, the Oort cloud is probably safely out of range of anything short of a supernova.
Self-replicating robots: We can only hope that intelligences vast and cool and immesurably superior to ours have learned the Earth phrase "What could possibly go wrong?"
Hey Burt, I'm about to fit the interstellar space drive: have you tested the replication limiter yet? Burt? Burt! You're turning into grey goo, stop it!
We haven't met them: Well, ruling out the mice, dolphins, Atlanteans and the guys that live inside the hollow earth (look at the poles on Google Earth, guys - the holes are there!) there are other options.
I mean, the tentacle-room on economy class FTL is appalling, and by the time a generation ship eventually reaches its destination, odds are that your ungrateful great-great-grandchildren will either have regressed to savages who worship the engine, uploaded themselves to the ships computer or turned the ship's storeroom into an interdimensional corridor and emigrated to a parallel universe.
No, if despite all the hurdles, you want to send your DNA to the stars then the best thing is to do just that: send your DNA. Its light, it freezes well and the postage is cheaper. Pack it up in viruses and send it out there to influence the evolution of a million species. Next time you have the flu and sneeze, don't say "bless you", say "welcome to Earth".
Or, this is just Apple's attempt at filing a patent that is as broad as possible.
...because if they don't, some joker will probably come along and patent the specific idea of using a "multi touch" interface for video conferencing, and in N years time when Apple are just about to launch the new video iPhone, up will pop the troll...
Remember, a lot of these patents are just there for mutual assured destruction - if they're ever rolled out, only the cockroaches will survive (unless some bastard has patented their genome).
What would mandates inclusions to an EULA do to the GPL or BSD licenses.
Well, unless the law was a total ass it ought not to apply unless money or "other valuable considerations" change hands.
The wording from the UK trading standards law is "goods must meet the standards that any reasonable person would expect, taking into account the description, the price and all other relevant information"
OTOH if you're charging money for GPL/BSD software (other than optional donations) then why shouldn't you be subject to a proportionate level of liability for ensuring it does what it says on the tin?
...and, if a free software author was spectacularly negligent or dishonest then even the current disclaimers are not going to protect them.
Of course, the danger is that someone will let BigSoftCorp draft the law and that the "reasonable persons" will never have used a computer in their life.
Ob. Note: apart from the disclaimers (which ought to be redundant if there's no contract) the GPL and BSD licenses are not EULAs, anyway (and its a pity that certain projects present them as click-throughs).
Isn't the BBC almost entirely funded by taxing everyone in the UK with a TV? How is this any different?
Read TFA (particularly the second link). This money is not going into the pockets of struggling artists.
In contrast, the TV license fee really does pay for a number of high quality, ad free TV and radio channels (plus numerous comittees, well-paid executives and Jonathan Ross, but nothing's perfect...) I'm sure its technically correct to call it a tax, but (unlike taxes on fuel, booze and tobacco etc.) it is collected and distributed separately and doesn't just disappear into government coffers.
First the tech illiterates in the UK government want to extend broadband internet connections to every home, whether it makes sense or not
This isn't quite so daft in context: the UK used to have a nationalised phone company. Although this was privatized and became BT many moons ago they've subsequently enjoyed a semi-monopoly. Most ADSL broadband services, whatever the brand, are re-badged BT services - Its only fairly recently that some ADSL providers started installing their own equipment at exchanges.
One of the quid-pro-quos for this commercial advantage is that BT are obliged to provide (voice) connections to every household. Updating this to include data connections in some way is eminently sensible - at lesat in principle.
A pox on the 20 quid tax to fund a copyright enforcement quango, though.
Slashdot Mirror
but about 20% goes someplace new that no one knows.
So that's what that big lump under the carpet is.
Here's a hint: wherever it is going, it isn't being turned into babies' smiles by the fairy folk: its going somewhere and affecting some system. Hopefully its disappearing into some bottomless sink and not nudging some fragile, metastable equilibrium towards breakdown. Trouble is, as you say, no one knows.
It the biosphere was not self regulating enough to correct a 5% imbalance, it would have already gone unstable
Can I interest you in this loan? Only $1000 interest per month (variable). Sure you can afford it - you often buy things costing more than $1000 and you haven't gone broke yet! Or, go on, have an extra portion of pasta with every single meal! Its only a fraction of the calories of that gourmet meal you had at your 21st Birthday party, of that doughnut you had last week, and that didn't kill you!
Do you really not see the problem? That 5% is 5% on top of what the biosphere is known to cope with, and unlike volcanoes and climatic fluctuations which average out over time, that's 5% each and every year. Worse than that, its 5% and rising, with compound interest, every year.
Don't online dating sites use relational databases?
Indeed, I believe that there's a custom build of PostgerSQL used by the more... specialist agencies that includes the new "UNNATURAL JOIN" keyword, permits one-to-many "CROSS JOIN" queries and performs an automatic rollback before any self-join.
You are not helping your cause. There are CO2 sources, and CO2 sinks. Most of the CO2 generated is absorbed by the sinks.
...and if you add a new source of CO2 then, unless the capacity of the sinks increases, the overall level of CO2 in the atmosphere will rise and, because of the way in which CO2 molecules are reliably know to absorb radiation, more of the sun's heat will be trapped by the atmosphere. Do we know for sure that the "sinks" will self-regulate? Quickly enough to avoid major grief for us? No.
Human related CO2 generation is completely dwarfed by "natural" CO2 generation through decomposition and whatnot.
The CO2 released from decomposition is the same CO2 that the plant absorbed from the atmosphere yesterday (in geological terms). Its a zero-sum game. So that leaves sources of "new" CO2, such as volcanic activity - and we could be in trouble if that increased significantly, but that is out of our control.
However, the CO2 we release by burning fossil fuels represents millions of years of accumulation of CO2 from buried plant matter which has been locked out of the system for hundreds of millions of years - we're doing are level best to dig up and release every scrap we can find in a gelogical instant. The question is not whether it is proven that this will have a disastrous effect - that would be very difficult in such a complex dynamic system - but whether there is a distinct possibility of such an effect.
Even if there is a handy self regulatory system (which is, of course, plausible) it may work on a million-year timescale and not protect us from the short-term effects.
However, looking at the more recent global warming related threads, the posts moderated with 5's seem to be more and more in the "Open-minded but skeptical" camp regarding the "consensus" view.
Good. "Open-minded but skeptical" is a good attitude. Not to be confused with the "Dogmatic denial based on FUD, cherry-picking and straw men" view which the original post so nicely embodies.
I did not rtfa.
If you had, you'd see that the errors only made it as far as their online, daily charts of ice coverage which are generated from live data which hasn't yet gone through their (non-real time) QA process.
Why is it that people that view the AGW hypothesis with skepticism often get tossed in with the Young Earthers, ID crowd, and other religious zealots?
Hang on. There's a distinction between "skepticism" and dogmatic rejection. Everybody should view the AGW hypothesis with rational skepticism.
That's not the same as the sort of spin typified by the summary above. Its not the same as rejecting the weight of evidence behind a hypothesis because it hasn't been "proven" (in the strict logical sense which almost never applies outside of pure mathematics), or because an unqualified pundit like Al Gore gets carried away with his powerpoint.
Anyway, the Young Earthers may not represent the entire AGW-skeptic movement, but they're a part of it who enjoy significant influence in the USA (hopefully diminished now).
Wow! You've got an Earth sized laboratory? How cool is that?! I always wondered what was being used for a control in these experiments.
No - I don't need an Earth-sized laboratory. What you need is some plausible theory as to how the energy levels of the electrons in a CO2 molecule at a given temperature and pressure could possibly be affected by the size of the container.
What cracks me up is that the GW skeptics all implicitly believe in the hippy-dippy "Gaia Hypothesis": i.e. despite the repeatable scientific evidence that CO2 increases the retention of solar energy in the lab, when its released into the atmosphere some magical self-regulatory mechanism will magically appear and prevent climate change. Unfortunately, the media pundits (on both sides) don't help by hyping up every random snowflake or forest fire as proof or refutation of GW.
In May, 2008 they went so far as to predict that the North Pole would be ice-free during the 2008 'melt season,'
Er, no, they said it was possible and later quote "a 59% chance of a new record minimum this year". How the media chose to report this is another matter... Oh yes, note the date: May 2008.
Today, however, they say that they have been the victims of 'sensor drift' that led to an underestimation of Arctic ice extent by as much as 500,000 square kilometers.
And if you read TFA, the sensor drift started in January 2009, was spotted within a few weeks and only affected their daily images which are effectively "live" and hence haven't gone through QA.
So how exactly does an error which occurred in Jan/Feb 09, was almost immediately spotted and declared affect a (misreported) prediction made last May?
<irony>Meanwhile, I'm sure the little fairies are hard at work ensuring that the geological era's worth of sequestered CO2 we're in the process of releasing back into the atmosphere magically changes its physical properties. After all, it is made from special carbon that God put there in 4004BC for us to burn, unlike that nasty communist CO2 that exhibits the greenhouse effect in godless laboratories.</irony>
What percent of software installed on a typical Windows machine is written in interpreted language or compiled into "write-once-run-anywhere" bytecode?
Well, anything written using .Net/C# (and the current Visual Basic?), for a start. Google maps, most Webmail systems and similar. Ever heard of Slashdot, for example?
Software written in languages you mention is mostly server-side.
So? Its still written by developers.
And no, "most developers" aren't coding web apps.
Actually, "most" developers are probably maintaining in-house applications for the corporate sector, and a helluva lot of that will be Java, C#, Visual Basic, AJAX, SQL stored procedures (and probably more dBaseII than is comfortable to contemplate).
The need for raw speed is still critical (ever tried using Eclipse?
Yes - I like it - is there a problem? Which part of Eclipse (there's an awful lot of it) The last time I tried the visual editing stuff it was slow and buggy but going by the acronym thicket surrounding that I suspect that is gratuitous over-engineering rather than anything fundamental about Java.
That's the long-term outlook, but in the short term, most developers are working in an older mindset, using a definition of "portable" that includes C.
Only if your definition of "most developers" excludes anybody working primarily in AJAX, Flash/Flex, Java, Mono/.Net, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby or Z-Code - an increasingly large proportion (ok, maybe not Z-Code, but I wanted an A-Z).
Not that "real" developers will be going away anytime soon - somebody has to write the runtimes - but I don't think C would be my "tool of choice" for writing applications any more.
The end result for new/novel platforms would be that, rather than needing a critical mass of hundreds of applications to be ported, they'd just need half-a-dozen common runtimes.
As I said - chicken-and-egg. If there wasn't a single hardware architecture that accounted for 90% of the market then the argument for using a scripting or bytecode-based approach would be much stronger.
The problem is software being delivered as binaries.
I think that's chicken-and-egg: if you have a single, dominant, binary-compatible architecture then the most efficient way to distribute commercial software is as pre-compiled binaries.
Linux runs on so many architectures for the simple reason that many Linux developers take a pride in their work and actually care about interoperability: all that cross-platform support doesn't happen magically because its written in C! A substantial app will be riddled with "#ifdef IA32/#ifdef MIPS"-type, and if you compile from a tarball someone, somewhere has spent a lot of time preparing that .configure script.
Given the existence of a ubiquitous single platform with 90% of the market, there's no short-term commercial case for that sort of attention to detail (...maybe posterity will show that there's a long-term case, but since when did that amount to a hill of beans?)
Interestingly, though, most Linux distros have gone for binary packages as their main form of distribution...
My bet is, long term, "bare metal binary" software will naturally disappear in favour of scripting languages, JIT compilation and/or virtual machine bytecode. Compatibility will be determined by the API, not the hardware and, by definition, any software that still needs "raw hardware" performance will need to be hand-tailored for the hardware anyway.
The one disappointing thing here is that the court blames physicians for the public misconception. In reality, the blame lies more with the mass media, who turned the original claims into a massive health scare.
That and lack of public trust in politicians and (politically driven) scientists. You know, the ones who said that there was no evidence that feeding cows on dead sheep was a problem, then said that it was impossible for humans to catch BSE... or that running cars on grain alcohol was a good idea. How is the general public supposed to know what is scientific fact and what is schilling for big industry?
In the UK, the whole "vaccines causes autism" thing could probably have been made to go away if the Government had allowed parents to opt for the separate jabs rather than the combined one (which was the big bone of contention in the media), and left it to doctors to persuade parents that it was better to only stick one needle in little Johnny than three. Sure, there was no scientific justification for that - but it might have avoided a generation of unvaccinated kids and ensured that the media lost interest.
The consent is implied when the other person accesses your computer
Yes, but they didn't know they were accessing your computer. They thought they were accessing CNN. If they complain, they're going to complain to CNN, not you. The program they ran was branded "CNN" not "John Doe's PC".
This is defensive ass-covering from a big, deep-pocketed company which would be an attractive target for legal trolls. Nobody is going to be bothered to start a $20-million class action suit against your webcam.
Imagine you didn't agree to these conditions. How do you expect CNN to deliver the service?
If you agree to the EULA, you agree that CNN can use your bandwidth, and that you will pay any costs.
Its a P2P service - so if you use it, you are sharing your bandwidth with other users. Or, top put it another way, CNN are using your bandwidth to deliver their material to their customers.
So if some joker leaves it running in his hotel room and gets charged $1 per megabyte, he shouldn't sue CNN. Sounds fair.
You may not collect any information about communication in the network of computers that are operating the Software or about the other users of the Software by monitoring, interdicting or intercepting any process of the Software.
So if I collected data about the other CNN customers who are sharing my bandwidth via the P2P service, their IP addresses, what they were watching, and when and published it, that would be OK, would it?
We take these things as read when we use P2P, but obviously some lawyer at CNN has done a bit of due dilligence and covered his arse in case some troll comes along and sues them.
The fuss about this is a bit like the scare stories photo-sharing sites requiring permission to reproduce/modify/sub license your photos: they need these permissions to run their service.
I for one, and this might just be my superstitious self, would be concerned about the prospect of my bodily fluids interacting with biological material that has been, so to speak, "immortalized."
Huh - slashdotters are so supernatural-minded.
What they actually do is get the surviving Beatles to re-form and compose a number 1 hit song about liver cells, hire a Nobel laureate to write a book about them and hang a picture of the donor liver in the Louvre.
It goes something like this:
1 version (see OS X): PASS
2-3 versions (Home/Business/Pro): PASS
Pick'n'Mix (Many permutations, tailored by OEMs or power users - bit like Linux): PASS
[3 < N < Many] versions aimed at artificial price points rather than user needs: FAIL
(And remember, those 6 versions don't include server editions)
Yeah, as a Linux user, it's nice not to have things so complicated. I only have to choose between Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, and-
...and with a big enough hard drive and a copy of Xen or Virtualbox, you can have them all without paying a penny (ok, scratch RedHat and Suse from that). Not that you'd need to, since they're all backed by huge repositories of packages and capable of doing pretty much anything that linux can do - not deliberately crippled to meet some artificial marketing-defined price point.
7 official versions of Ubuntu alone. You were saying..?
Well, lets see:
Ubuntu Server: the six flavors of Windows 7 in TFA don't include server editions: there will presumably be all the permutations of "Windows Home|[Small] Business|Enterprise [Premium] Server 201N" (or something) as well..
Ubuntu MID: The Ubuntu answer to Windows Mobile, which likewise is not counted among the Windows 7 flavours.
Netbook Remix: is a set of packages - unless you are an OEM working with Cannonical to bundle a custom Ubuntu release with a netbook. In the latter case, it says here that Microsoft will also have an OEM-only netbook version, which was not counted in TFA.
Xubuntu,Kubuntu: Use completely different desktop environments - which really has no equivalent in the Windows world ("Windows Home Basic" doesn't count - its the same UI with the fancy effects turned off).
Edbuntu is now just Ubuntu + a set of extra packages.
There's no lock-in: whatever flavour of Ubuntu you have, any workable permutation of all the features from all the other versions is but an apt-get away. Want to use Ubuntu Desktop as a server? Fine. Want to choose between Gnome, KDE, XFCE and Netbook Remix each time you log in? Install away.
Go to the Cannonical site and you'll have no doubt that what they are promoting is a simple choice between Ubuntu Desktop or Ubuntu Server. The others are alternatives produced in response to specific needs. What MS is doing is more like having 6 versions of their basic Desktop OS, which can't easily be converted or combined, aimed at artificial marketing-defined target groups.
Some might say "We are them".
Yeah, but I was kinda trying to support the notion that there might be intelligent life in the galaxy... :-)
If a line of reasoning leads to a paradox, then it means that one of the assumptions behind it is false. The question is, which one?
There are a number of huge, hard-to-prove assumptions behind Fermi's paradox, so why does everybody assume that just one of them - "intelligent aliens exist" - is the culprit?
Now, if they don't, that means that, as the only intelligent civilization to evolve, we're way, way out on a probabilistic limb: tricky to disprove but enough to have Occam sharpening his razor when faced with the other assumptions:
Practical interstellar space travel is possible: I'm not talking FTL here, just getting to the nearest star in less-than-geological time. We certainly haven't cracked it yet. Even SF authors who eschew hyperspace seem to resort to antimatter drives (or other unobtanium-fuelled solutions) for this now. Nor have we successfully frozen and thawed out a sentient being, yet (unless you just had a dose of salmonella from an inadequately-microwaved readymeal: see final paragraph).
Aliens would want to colonise the galaxy: A character in Diaspora by Greg Egan put it nicely: "that's what bacteria with spaceships would do". If you're running out of space on your planet, you don't just need interstellar travel, you need interstellar bulk carriers to make a difference. Condoms are cheaper.
So, if you don't have FTL and your species is not suitable for home freezing, you could build big slow generation ships, that take hundreds of years to reach the stars. Still tricky, and since such is ship is always going have strictly limited resources you still better pack those condoms.
Now, come to think about it, if you can build vast numbers of these wonderful self-sustaining colonies that can survive for centuries in the wasteland of interstellar space, and your people are prepared to spend their lives in them while practicing responsible family planning, what exactly was it you needed planets for? Raw materials? There's gigatonnes of those floating around your own solar system, and you had to learn everything there is to know about sustainability in order to build those generation ships. Perhaps its time for a staycation? Even if your star is beginning to look a bit iffy, the Oort cloud is probably safely out of range of anything short of a supernova.
Self-replicating robots: We can only hope that intelligences vast and cool and immesurably superior to ours have learned the Earth phrase "What could possibly go wrong?"
Hey Burt, I'm about to fit the interstellar space drive: have you tested the replication limiter yet? Burt? Burt! You're turning into grey goo, stop it!
We haven't met them: Well, ruling out the mice, dolphins, Atlanteans and the guys that live inside the hollow earth (look at the poles on Google Earth, guys - the holes are there!) there are other options.
I mean, the tentacle-room on economy class FTL is appalling, and by the time a generation ship eventually reaches its destination, odds are that your ungrateful great-great-grandchildren will either have regressed to savages who worship the engine, uploaded themselves to the ships computer or turned the ship's storeroom into an interdimensional corridor and emigrated to a parallel universe.
No, if despite all the hurdles, you want to send your DNA to the stars then the best thing is to do just that: send your DNA. Its light, it freezes well and the postage is cheaper. Pack it up in viruses and send it out there to influence the evolution of a million species. Next time you have the flu and sneeze, don't say "bless you", say "welcome to Earth".
Or, this is just Apple's attempt at filing a patent that is as broad as possible.
...because if they don't, some joker will probably come along and patent the specific idea of using a "multi touch" interface for video conferencing, and in N years time when Apple are just about to launch the new video iPhone, up will pop the troll...
Remember, a lot of these patents are just there for mutual assured destruction - if they're ever rolled out, only the cockroaches will survive (unless some bastard has patented their genome).
What would mandates inclusions to an EULA do to the GPL or BSD licenses.
Well, unless the law was a total ass it ought not to apply unless money or "other valuable considerations" change hands.
The wording from the UK trading standards law is "goods must meet the standards that any reasonable person would expect, taking into account the description, the price and all other relevant information"
OTOH if you're charging money for GPL/BSD software (other than optional donations) then why shouldn't you be subject to a proportionate level of liability for ensuring it does what it says on the tin?
...and, if a free software author was spectacularly negligent or dishonest then even the current disclaimers are not going to protect them.
Of course, the danger is that someone will let BigSoftCorp draft the law and that the "reasonable persons" will never have used a computer in their life.
Ob. Note: apart from the disclaimers (which ought to be redundant if there's no contract) the GPL and BSD licenses are not EULAs, anyway (and its a pity that certain projects present them as click-throughs).
Other than the Times articles, I just can't find where this idea of a broadband tax is coming from
True. I think the Times article pre-empted the publication of the interim report, so it may have been based on leaks of a draft or the full version.
The report also references another government consultation from which it could have come.
Or (stunned silence) the Times may have got it wrong...
Isn't the BBC almost entirely funded by taxing everyone in the UK with a TV? How is this any different?
Read TFA (particularly the second link). This money is not going into the pockets of struggling artists.
In contrast, the TV license fee really does pay for a number of high quality, ad free TV and radio channels (plus numerous comittees, well-paid executives and Jonathan Ross, but nothing's perfect...) I'm sure its technically correct to call it a tax, but (unlike taxes on fuel, booze and tobacco etc.) it is collected and distributed separately and doesn't just disappear into government coffers.
First the tech illiterates in the UK government want to extend broadband internet connections to every home, whether it makes sense or not
This isn't quite so daft in context: the UK used to have a nationalised phone company. Although this was privatized and became BT many moons ago they've subsequently enjoyed a semi-monopoly. Most ADSL broadband services, whatever the brand, are re-badged BT services - Its only fairly recently that some ADSL providers started installing their own equipment at exchanges.
One of the quid-pro-quos for this commercial advantage is that BT are obliged to provide (voice) connections to every household. Updating this to include data connections in some way is eminently sensible - at lesat in principle.
A pox on the 20 quid tax to fund a copyright enforcement quango, though.