Mixed feeling
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While I am glad that we may have found the cure to HIV that kills millions every year, I wonder if the vaccine will be affordable to those unfortunate ones?
I got a feeling that only those wealthy people can afford to get fixed up, but most of them caught HIV due to their irresponsible action. Yet innocent victims who caught the disease, for instance by birth, may never see the light.
It seems like most medical findings are "open-source", that you can read about them in journals, but the actual cost to produce a medicine is usually very prohibitive.
Short answer is YES, almost everything needs a certain level of quality standards for widespread use. Even MS has its own quality standards:)
However, who is to set these standards and who is to govern them is another question.
I have a subtle feeling that Open Source = Freedom, that's probably why we see so many forks and distros because "I would have done this that way, and I could".
So what is to stop a "US Open Source Consortium" being officially launched tomorrow because another group of developers have different idea on Open Source's quality standards?
I remember when I was playing King Quest in 80's, when the king has to go to this wizard place to learn some magic. I had to resort to opening up the binary files and read some command lines to know what to do and what to pick up. I didn't have too much luck with Police Quest though, since it's more of an action-based game:)
So now with these decoded Mario64 packets, we know to wait for yoshi in the middle of kira spa, room 1?
Other than that, I don't know what is the use of these decoded packets.
The USB power cable is cool, if not for the fact that we already can buy USB-powered XMas tree, desk fan and whatnot.
I failed to see how this Bill, if passed, can help Verizon.
If the intention is to help poor residents to gain internet access as stated, the city may just offer the service for free, and makes up the costs from potential economic growth, maybe?
Otherwise, if this service is privatized, Verizon may face even more aggressive competition from the new WiFi operator, whose interest won't not be confined to just poorer neighborhoods and less densely populated ones.
What a timing! I'm recently thinking of moving from permanent employment to contract works, not that I don't enjoy my current income, but the inability to do something else in the quiet period (unlke Google which allows employees to work 1 day a week on their own hobby/project) is a killer. I'm a developer and all I want is to develop/create things, not sitting around waiting 3 months for PHB to approve a 8-week project.
I'm also thinking of my future income and lifestyle. Contractors seem to have more exposures to different industry/management styles, I hope to be more in-demand with such exposures, and through word-of-mouth, as long as you did good in the previous jobs, it shouldn't be too hard to find another contract. Your permanent employer probably wouldn't do word-of-mouth for you to many others.
And let's not be fooled into thinking you have a stable job by being "permanently" employed. You're only employed as permanently as the required notice period, 4 weeks maybe?
Is this considered grid computing (which enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources)? All processing seems to come from one source, more like lease-computing?
One of the articles mentioned "All the animators are independently funded to make their films.", but none mentioned the cost to use 1 unit (however it's calculated) of the processing power. How do animators justify the expenses to sponsors?
In a chicken farm, the owner doesn't really care if there's enough head room for the chicken, or whether they have enough exercise or eat healthy food. The owner only wants these chicken to grow fat, fast, so that he can put them out on the market as soon as possible.
What happens when one of the chicken complains about the living condition, maybe by mean of fasting-protest (so that it doesn't grow fat enough in time)? Well, the owner will just find another chicken to replace this naughty one, because there are so many more chicken hatched and ready to grow.
What if this bad chuck told 999 of his mates to do the same? Well, in a farm of 3,000, the owner will simply replace these 1,000 bad apples as long as the rest still grow fast enough, and the 1,000 replacement grow even faster to make up time.
What about the free range chicken? Well, they have found a good owner, who has a consumer market that demands free running healthy lean chicken. With that demand that the owner cannot ignore, he's set to exercise his chicken, offer plenty of land for them to run about and feed them only the approved corns.
From the article: "Consider this--not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for patent infringement, much less been found to infringe. On the contrary, proprietary software, like Windows, is sued and found guilty of patent infringement quite frequently."
While I am glad that OSS hasn't been suded yet, I think it's a bit immature to use this as a defence. First of all, you don't need to actually do anything wrong to be sued, and usually you're sued because you're making enough money that the plantiff might take a bite of it, or you have conflict of interest with the plantiff.
Wasn't it not long ago we read about SCO/MS Connection? It's pretty obvious now that the litigation is baseless, but this doesn't not stop corporates from taking it to the court.
Another example is FireFox, many claimed it's flawless, but the realistic others know that no software is bugless, but its OPEN status allows things to be fixed relatively quickly. So it would be unwise to claim that FireFox has fewer bugs and more secure because it hasn't been exploited yet.
So a better argument might be OSS, given it's open, any potential patent infringement will be digged out before it goes far.
However, this brings another question, can we safely assume that nothing incriminating is in the source? Patent itself is illusive enough, and how easy it is to find out about a particular patent, and then relate it to a certain class in the source?
To affectively effect the future of software tools, the obvious support must come from the developers, but the obvious support for developers are their sponsors.
At least three of the five points are almost directly targeting at the sponsors, i.e. PHB and friends.
They don't see(care) if a particular system/software/whatever is most powerful, flexible or easy to use, they're looking at things from the business point of view, e.g. which one brings more profit in the next xx years, and which tool they can easily pretend to understand.
So a tool that's business-"sense"-driven, transparent and offers lower TCO is likely to be more favorable.
Seeing that Google has been searching on 8 billion pages, these 30 million seems pretty insignificant in terms of volume, but I'm not so sure about the significance of the content, what did they write/read in 19th Century?
I wonder how many people will actually wait for Google/MSN to index them and search from there.
Wouldn't it be easier and less privacy-intruding if there's a blackbox in the car with GPS, which determines if the car has crossed a state line, and record mileage accordingly?
This way car owners can go to a fee-station any time to pay whatever tax whatever state wants to charge per mile travelled.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to get to. If you think that piece of shit in the toilet isn't worth $10, you shouldn't have paid for it, or eaten it without paying.
However, if you think $10 is fair price to buy the initial 10 minutes of juicy, tender chewy feeling in your mouth, then you should've paid for it, not eaten it for free and backed up your action by suggesting its final destination in the sewer.
I can't see anyone can get away with going into a movie theatre, watched a movie without paying and said "Hey, there were empty seats anyway, so what's the harm that I just went in and watch it for free? I didn't sit on the seat, and I even bought popcorn from your counter!"
Or jumped onto an empty bus for a ride without paying, and since it doesn't cost the bus company any more by carrying zero or one passenger, are we all entitled to free bus ride provided it's not full?
In certain area (intellectual property in particular), maybe it's more about if the receiver benefits from the service, not if the provider suffers any cost.
Selling entertainment is like selling perishable fruit, you need to do it while it's still fresh and desirable.
For example, I quite like Scissor Sisters' "Take Your Mama", so I paid for the CD and listened to it. But I must admit you can only listen to one song for so many times until you're sick of it. So now the enjoyment from this song is long gone, but I have already paid $20 for this now-known-as piece of plastic and song that I no longer enjoy.
I believe any potential "lost sales" are from people who, on one hand, don't want to pay for the music, but on the other, want to enjoy that particular music.
Will this be considered "Lost Sales" if someone told you: "Nah, this shitty movie is only worth watching it once, why would I pay for the DVD/Movie?".
This person could pay for the DVD/Movie and watch it once, or download it from the Internet and watch it once. Either way this person got one unit of enjoyment out of this, but it's not quite the same to capitalist.
It's nice to know there is a connection, but nothing out of the blue. Corporates are known to use lawsuit to 'retard' competitors, and there are enough memos from MS that suggested they don't really like Linux. How about FUDs and some creative TCO analysis? Those are equally damaging.
Wasn't it not long ago that we see Google 'embraces' Firefox by having www.google.com/firefox? And what came with this? People started suggesting that Google would of course support anything that kills IE since MS is now attacking Google's search market.
It's almost as exciting as a lobbyist who 'invested' $xxx million in a presidential campaign so that certain laws can be passed.
Once again, how people use a tool shouldn't affect the legitimacy of the said tool, but it's RIAA we're talking about here.
BitTorrent is pretty concerned when more and more pirates are using it to illegally distribute software, not that BitTorrent is an illegal tool, but you just don't want the trouble of lawsuit, and not to mention you're not guaranteed innocence in court (if your bank account can last that long).
So personally, I don't think changing the "method" is going to help anything.
So with this kind of high-profile "financial report", are we going to see more spammers? Seriously speaking, my spam count hasn't dropped a bit since the elimination of these 10 million spams a day. It's like that terrorism saying: If you killed Bin Laden, two more will come out to replace him.
This Jeremy is reportedly earning $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead.
Imagine if you can work 1 year without getting caught, and wisely transfered your incomes to safe place, you are basically earning $1 million a year by sitting in the prison doing some workouts, or even get a law degree specialised in anti-spam. And you wonder why there are more spams everyday?
According to the article, company officials said operating expenses, like adding new employees and spending more on marketing efforts, are partly to blame for the quarterly loss (of $267,000 compared to a net profit of $9.62 million in the first nine months of this year = maybe $3mil difference).
It seems Opera is growing, and they are doing it by aggressively promoting their products, even goes as far as teaming up with IBM's ViaVoice to allow users execute commands by talking to their computers. These are licensed-features that free browsers will find it hard to justify paying for.
So maybe Opera is just investing 25% of its yearly profit into marketing, and hopes a better year. Even FireFox wants to advertise on NYTimes.
We shall be alarmed if they moved to a penthouse office and every employee drives a Ferrari.
Slashdot Mirror
While I am glad that we may have found the cure to HIV that kills millions every year, I wonder if the vaccine will be affordable to those unfortunate ones?
I got a feeling that only those wealthy people can afford to get fixed up, but most of them caught HIV due to their irresponsible action. Yet innocent victims who caught the disease, for instance by birth, may never see the light.
It seems like most medical findings are "open-source", that you can read about them in journals, but the actual cost to produce a medicine is usually very prohibitive.
The review recommends waiting for lower price and better features.
So when is the right time to buy if people take this kind of recommendation seriously?
Price will be lower than the lower price you saw yesterday, features will be better than the better features you thought that are already better.
This Michael should be the chief editor of Slashdot with unlimited mod points, or maybe not?
Short answer is YES, almost everything needs a certain level of quality standards for widespread use. Even MS has its own quality standards :)
However, who is to set these standards and who is to govern them is another question.
I have a subtle feeling that Open Source = Freedom, that's probably why we see so many forks and distros because "I would have done this that way, and I could".
So what is to stop a "US Open Source Consortium" being officially launched tomorrow because another group of developers have different idea on Open Source's quality standards?
Can Linus the most influential man gives a single, authoritative guideline?
Since both HD-DVD and blu-ray are using the same blue lasers, will this 'war' eventually turn out to be HD/BR-DVD similar to the DVD+/-R standards.
I remember when I was playing King Quest in 80's, when the king has to go to this wizard place to learn some magic. I had to resort to opening up the binary files and read some command lines to know what to do and what to pick up. I didn't have too much luck with Police Quest though, since it's more of an action-based game :)
So now with these decoded Mario64 packets, we know to wait for yoshi in the middle of kira spa, room 1?
Other than that, I don't know what is the use of these decoded packets.
The USB power cable is cool, if not for the fact that we already can buy USB-powered XMas tree, desk fan and whatnot.
Where's the news? I see four links in the summary and none of them points to the news about the sentence.
I failed to see how this Bill, if passed, can help Verizon.
If the intention is to help poor residents to gain internet access as stated, the city may just offer the service for free, and makes up the costs from potential economic growth, maybe?
Otherwise, if this service is privatized, Verizon may face even more aggressive competition from the new WiFi operator, whose interest won't not be confined to just poorer neighborhoods and less densely populated ones.
What a timing! I'm recently thinking of moving from permanent employment to contract works, not that I don't enjoy my current income, but the inability to do something else in the quiet period (unlke Google which allows employees to work 1 day a week on their own hobby/project) is a killer. I'm a developer and all I want is to develop/create things, not sitting around waiting 3 months for PHB to approve a 8-week project.
I'm also thinking of my future income and lifestyle. Contractors seem to have more exposures to different industry/management styles, I hope to be more in-demand with such exposures, and through word-of-mouth, as long as you did good in the previous jobs, it shouldn't be too hard to find another contract. Your permanent employer probably wouldn't do word-of-mouth for you to many others.
And let's not be fooled into thinking you have a stable job by being "permanently" employed. You're only employed as permanently as the required notice period, 4 weeks maybe?
Is this considered grid computing (which enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources)? All processing seems to come from one source, more like lease-computing?
One of the articles mentioned "All the animators are independently funded to make their films.", but none mentioned the cost to use 1 unit (however it's calculated) of the processing power. How do animators justify the expenses to sponsors?
Yes but security is only as good as its weakest link, in this case the daughther.
Not on my machines, man... The highest I'll go on my personal machines is 2k.
You meant lowest you would go?
Maybe site owners will start moving or demanding text-based ads (like Google's)?
In a chicken farm, the owner doesn't really care if there's enough head room for the chicken, or whether they have enough exercise or eat healthy food. The owner only wants these chicken to grow fat, fast, so that he can put them out on the market as soon as possible.
What happens when one of the chicken complains about the living condition, maybe by mean of fasting-protest (so that it doesn't grow fat enough in time)? Well, the owner will just find another chicken to replace this naughty one, because there are so many more chicken hatched and ready to grow.
What if this bad chuck told 999 of his mates to do the same? Well, in a farm of 3,000, the owner will simply replace these 1,000 bad apples as long as the rest still grow fast enough, and the 1,000 replacement grow even faster to make up time.
What about the free range chicken? Well, they have found a good owner, who has a consumer market that demands free running healthy lean chicken. With that demand that the owner cannot ignore, he's set to exercise his chicken, offer plenty of land for them to run about and feed them only the approved corns.
From the article: "Consider this--not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for patent infringement, much less been found to infringe. On the contrary, proprietary software, like Windows, is sued and found guilty of patent infringement quite frequently."
While I am glad that OSS hasn't been suded yet, I think it's a bit immature to use this as a defence. First of all, you don't need to actually do anything wrong to be sued, and usually you're sued because you're making enough money that the plantiff might take a bite of it, or you have conflict of interest with the plantiff.
Wasn't it not long ago we read about SCO/MS Connection? It's pretty obvious now that the litigation is baseless, but this doesn't not stop corporates from taking it to the court.
Another example is FireFox, many claimed it's flawless, but the realistic others know that no software is bugless, but its OPEN status allows things to be fixed relatively quickly. So it would be unwise to claim that FireFox has fewer bugs and more secure because it hasn't been exploited yet.
So a better argument might be OSS, given it's open, any potential patent infringement will be digged out before it goes far.
However, this brings another question, can we safely assume that nothing incriminating is in the source? Patent itself is illusive enough, and how easy it is to find out about a particular patent, and then relate it to a certain class in the source?
To affectively effect the future of software tools, the obvious support must come from the developers, but the obvious support for developers are their sponsors.
At least three of the five points are almost directly targeting at the sponsors, i.e. PHB and friends.
They don't see(care) if a particular system/software/whatever is most powerful, flexible or easy to use, they're looking at things from the business point of view, e.g. which one brings more profit in the next xx years, and which tool they can easily pretend to understand.
So a tool that's business-"sense"-driven, transparent and offers lower TCO is likely to be more favorable.
Seeing that Google has been searching on 8 billion pages, these 30 million seems pretty insignificant in terms of volume, but I'm not so sure about the significance of the content, what did they write/read in 19th Century?
I wonder how many people will actually wait for Google/MSN to index them and search from there.
Wouldn't it be easier and less privacy-intruding if there's a blackbox in the car with GPS, which determines if the car has crossed a state line, and record mileage accordingly?
This way car owners can go to a fee-station any time to pay whatever tax whatever state wants to charge per mile travelled.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to get to. If you think that piece of shit in the toilet isn't worth $10, you shouldn't have paid for it, or eaten it without paying.
However, if you think $10 is fair price to buy the initial 10 minutes of juicy, tender chewy feeling in your mouth, then you should've paid for it, not eaten it for free and backed up your action by suggesting its final destination in the sewer.
I can't see anyone can get away with going into a movie theatre, watched a movie without paying and said "Hey, there were empty seats anyway, so what's the harm that I just went in and watch it for free? I didn't sit on the seat, and I even bought popcorn from your counter!"
Or jumped onto an empty bus for a ride without paying, and since it doesn't cost the bus company any more by carrying zero or one passenger, are we all entitled to free bus ride provided it's not full?
In certain area (intellectual property in particular), maybe it's more about if the receiver benefits from the service, not if the provider suffers any cost.
Selling entertainment is like selling perishable fruit, you need to do it while it's still fresh and desirable.
For example, I quite like Scissor Sisters' "Take Your Mama", so I paid for the CD and listened to it. But I must admit you can only listen to one song for so many times until you're sick of it. So now the enjoyment from this song is long gone, but I have already paid $20 for this now-known-as piece of plastic and song that I no longer enjoy.
I believe any potential "lost sales" are from people who, on one hand, don't want to pay for the music, but on the other, want to enjoy that particular music.
Will this be considered "Lost Sales" if someone told you:
"Nah, this shitty movie is only worth watching it once, why would I pay for the DVD/Movie?".
This person could pay for the DVD/Movie and watch it once, or download it from the Internet and watch it once. Either way this person got one unit of enjoyment out of this, but it's not quite the same to capitalist.
It's nice to know there is a connection, but nothing out of the blue. Corporates are known to use lawsuit to 'retard' competitors, and there are enough memos from MS that suggested they don't really like Linux. How about FUDs and some creative TCO analysis? Those are equally damaging.
Wasn't it not long ago that we see Google 'embraces' Firefox by having www.google.com/firefox? And what came with this? People started suggesting that Google would of course support anything that kills IE since MS is now attacking Google's search market.
It's almost as exciting as a lobbyist who 'invested' $xxx million in a presidential campaign so that certain laws can be passed.
I hope it doesn't bring down GAIM.
Once again, how people use a tool shouldn't affect the legitimacy of the said tool, but it's RIAA we're talking about here.
BitTorrent is pretty concerned when more and more pirates are using it to illegally distribute software, not that BitTorrent is an illegal tool, but you just don't want the trouble of lawsuit, and not to mention you're not guaranteed innocence in court (if your bank account can last that long).
So personally, I don't think changing the "method" is going to help anything.
So with this kind of high-profile "financial report", are we going to see more spammers? Seriously speaking, my spam count hasn't dropped a bit since the elimination of these 10 million spams a day. It's like that terrorism saying: If you killed Bin Laden, two more will come out to replace him.
This Jeremy is reportedly earning $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead.
Imagine if you can work 1 year without getting caught, and wisely transfered your incomes to safe place, you are basically earning $1 million a year by sitting in the prison doing some workouts, or even get a law degree specialised in anti-spam. And you wonder why there are more spams everyday?
According to the article, company officials said operating expenses, like adding new employees and spending more on marketing efforts, are partly to blame for the quarterly loss (of $267,000 compared to a net profit of $9.62 million in the first nine months of this year = maybe $3mil difference).
It seems Opera is growing, and they are doing it by aggressively promoting their products, even goes as far as teaming up with IBM's ViaVoice to allow users execute commands by talking to their computers. These are licensed-features that free browsers will find it hard to justify paying for.
So maybe Opera is just investing 25% of its yearly profit into marketing, and hopes a better year. Even FireFox wants to advertise on NYTimes.
We shall be alarmed if they moved to a penthouse office and every employee drives a Ferrari.
Another victim not reading the Do-Not-Slashdot ACT 1996
Coral link here.