I know of at least one place in the USA that won't allow floride in the water becasue they know it's part of a communist plot to take of the USA. Anyone been to Santa Cruz.
JungleBoy.
You, Me and MegaCorp Inc. all do it for profit.
on
Profiling A Nation
·
· Score: 4
This pertains to Americans, since I don't have much experience elsewhere.
Privacy has been dead for a long long time. We don't really care, though many of us still spout off about the degredation of privary. Any discussion or demands for privacy in this country are purely academic. The issue as killed and buried by Corporate America long ago. All America cares about is making a buck. This is not limited to Corporations. We are a capitalist nation, everything we do is, almost by definition, for profit. The US economy is raging right now. One indicator I use of the the US economy is the cars we drive. In the 90's, especially the late 90's, the car have gotten bigger and bigger, and they eat more and more gas. The same thing happened in the swinging post WWII economy. We don't care about privary either. Telemarketing companies buy and sell personal information between themselves and others. All in the name of profit. I use a piece of plastic for almost every purchase I make; allowing my bank to know what I spend and where. Grocery stores offer club cards; in exchange for good deals, you give up some privacy. They can keep track of your purchase history. Why do we trade our privacy for a buck? Because Americans, for the most part, do not value privacy. The economy is good, our personal profits are high, so we really don't give a damn as long as we can keep filling up the 42 gallon tank of your suburbans with $1.50 gasoline that craps up the air we breath.
If we really care about privacy, there needs to be cultural change in our view of the value of privacy. This won't happen until after our privacy is exploited to the point of hurting people. When the sale of personal information prevents people from getting jobs, inssurance, food, etc. we may start to value it more. But because our privacy was sold at aution years ago, it's going to be an uphill battle to get it back.
Frankly, I don't want it back now. I'm the first the admit that I'm a raging capitalist. I'm willing to sell my privacy for profit, I carry a grocery store club card. I don't care if online bookstore know what I purchase and read. It makes my life a little more comfortable.
Andrew -- ...Linux!
Organisms' Genomes are NOT Intelectual Property
on
New Patent Treaty
·
· Score: 2
I think it's clear that gene sequences extracted from organisms are not intelectual property. They are finings of nature. Either way, couldn't prior art be demonstrated simply by showing that some organism used the gene sequence before it was patented? How can a company patent genes for enzymes which our bodies have produced for thousands of years? These are clearly not creations of the mind, and thus not intelectual property.
Although, if a company does come up with a new and truly unique gene sequence, not found in nature, then it would be a creation of the mind. This would qualify as intelectual property, and could then be patented. I don't know of any cases of this yet. So far all genetic information comes from the genomes of organisms, we don't have a sophisticated enough understanding of genetic information systems to generate new and usedful genetic sequences.
He he.. I'm just waiting for this one, Maybe I should file and specify a molecular level mechanism.
"I'm sorry, your cells have divided several trillion times. at US$0.01 per use of our patent, you ow us US$10billion. Own, and think twice before having kids, meiosis costs extra. We just patented molecular-encoded data recombination."
I usually open a biology or chemistry text, and find a class of molecules or group of animals. I then map a chemical name, such as an amino acid, or a taxinomic name, such as the genus or species, to each of the accounts I have access to. I then basterdize the crap out of the name with mixed caps, and non-alphanumerics. I use a different groups of names for root passwords than I do for regular accounts. This way, no one knows where the heck I get my password, nor how I basterdize then.
I seem to be quite effective, and as a result I can quickly learn and remember chemical and taxinomic names and their spellings. Given the volume of chemical names and biological terms out there I don't see myself running out anytime soon.
All of our servers are named after celestial bodies or constellations. We have a server with a big disk array named hydra. There is a shell server named pandora. The only exception is the old frontpage server, it is an NT server named sphincter. If forced to bring up an exchange server, I think it should be named siphilis.
Not only is Corel in the Wrong for re-licensing linux and other gpl'ed programs. But They are going to lose the respect and interest of many pro-linux people. It seems apparent to me that the reason you license a piece of software is to distribute it. If they are using the software internally, as they claim, why would they need to licence the software to themselves? Because of this I've decided to NOT used corel linux. I will also advocate that other people NOT use it. Andrew -- ...Linux!
Think about it people. The space shuttle and the new space station have very small tightly controlled air spaces. Also, they are at VERY low pressure, like 4 or 5 psi compared to 14.7 psi at sea level on earth. If you go spraying CO2 or anything else into the vehicle you are going to rapidly alter the air quality: this is bad. I could see the use of a small compressor, but not compressed gas canisters. As for guidence, you only need 3 fans (one on each access) and a gyroscope control system. You could counter fan rotation with the gyro system and also use the gyros for pitch/yaw/roll manuvers. Andrew -- ...Linux!
I'm scared of any standard that they come up with for instant messaging. We need a viable open source intant messaging protocol NOW. Unlike AIM or ICQ it should be decentralized. I've spent a little time thinking about this, but I'm not a heavy programmer.
Everyone should have an IM address like or the same as their email address. Some sort of IM server should become a standard service like popd or imapd. You punch in someones IM address and it goes to your IM server. Your IM server then finds their IM server by piggy backing off the MX record in DNS, it would be better to have a unique record type. Their IM server says "yes they are online" and patches your IM client to their IM client. When both parties are online, a client to client connection could be established, if the requested party is not online then their IM server could store the message until they got online (ala ICQ). This would be a decentralized comodityized method that could be implimented on any platform. -- ...Linux!
We can thank our dear Father Bill Gates & Co. for this phenomenon. Micro$oft has instilled in the public a high level of tolerance and complacency for low quality computer products. If any other household appliance was made to the same level of quality as M$-Winders, that appliance would get a notoriously bad reputation and people would not buy it. Thanks to Bill having his hands on nearly the entire home computing market, he has been able to convince most people that poor reliability is just a fact of owning a pc. I thank Mr. Torvalds and the entire FSF every morning for giving me a quality alternative to M$. -- ...Linux!
What kind of crack do you smoke. All the Firewire stats I've seen report throughput in bits per second. SCSI stats are reported in Bytes per second. Ultra2 SCSI does 80 MegaBytes per second, Ultra3 SCSI does 160 MegaBytes per second. Firewire claims to support 800 Megabits per second, this is 100 MegaBytes per second, which is between Ultra2 and Ultra3. Also, I don't know if you can build a hardware raid array on the Firewire bus; at least I've never seen it done.
Andrew N. (I probably own Apple money for saying Firewire) -- ...Linux!
This is a wonderful result. Source code is a method of communication - of expression - and thus protected by the 1st ammendment. The compiled binary is a tool, serving simply a funtional purpose. My reading is that the source code can now be exported but binaries can't. If this holds, any company wanting to export strong crypto must do so in source form. And the source form must be readable and understandable by other people, in other words, it can't be obfuscated code. This is not only a big win for cryto and free speech, but also for OSS.
This is the coolest input method since the invention of the keyboard. It took no time to get used to and was nice and fast. Also the input area is tiny. Wow cool, I'll buy a palm when I can use this on it.
Hmmm... I thought that at some point Intel made it possible to do 36 bit memory addressing on the i686 processors. This would allow access to 8 GB of memory. Of course I could totaly be off my rocker.
I don't see bandwidth being limited by bits per second. To increase this measure of bandwidth all you need to do is build a more widely parallel system. The problem in the end comes down to how many seconds does it take 1 bit of data to get from point a to point b. You can shrink your fibers and parallel more of them, but your data won't go any faster. More will just travel at the same time. We have an absolute limit on the seconds per bit of a single pathway; the speed of light. The first person to get a single bit of data to travel faster than the speed of light will have found a real solution to the communication speed problem.
Think about playing quake with someone on mars. It doesn't matter what type of OC line is between you, it still takes light about 45 minutes (I think) to get from there to here.
Paralleling data communications is only benificial when the distance between the two communicating point is short enough to make the speed of light appear instantanious. -- ...Linux!
They sell the same speed/quality hardware and I think they are cheaper. Andrew -- ...Linux!
I've been telling people this for a while.
on
Windows ID
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't surprise me one bit. I always suspected M$ would do such a thing. Next thing you know they'll patent oxygen and respiration. You'll have to pay them an annual fee to breath.
"I've got to run some errands. I need to stop my the M$-Bank to get some M$-Money so I can go to the M$-Grocery Store and pick up some M$-Pork Chops." Joe Bob, 2003
Isn't this just a syn flood? Doesn't linux have syn cookies to avoid filling up the connection table? Yeah, I thought so. I guess this affects/other/ unices.
I know why they did this! If you're stuck in a room with these hinges on the door M$ will charge you big bucks to use the door to leave or you get charged to use the broken window!
Right now I wish someone made Toilet Paper with Bill Gates' face on it. Cause the dingleberries are calling.
Linux is great, it runs fast even on old hardware. Efficency and low overhead are 2 thing that characterize linux during. Let's put linux on a slightly older machine, like this:
Pentium 150 32MB Ram 2MB VRAM 2GB Hard Drive.
This computer will get the job done, and be nice and responsive. Now, lets load gnome onto it. But we know that X in general is a memory hog, so let's bump the ram up to 128MB which should be plenty. Let's also run it as a decent resolution, for this we need a better video card, let's go with an older 4MB card; say a Number Nine GXE64 Pro. Not a bad little card. Ok, now linux runs great. Start gnome... HOLY F**K*NG S**T, I can actually see it drawing the menus on the screen for gnome panel. AAARRRGGGHHH, I just tried to resize the gmc window. It should start responding again in 5 seconds or so.
Gnome is the most inefficent desktop environment I've ever used, Lose95/98/NT are WWAAAYYY faster on this hardware. M$ forces hardware upgrades by bogging down your machine. Gnome does the same, but to a more insulting degree. I'm not going to upgrade just so I can have GTK+ Themes. I guess this is what happens when all the programers testing gnome on their octuple processor 8000 gigahertz workstations with 4 terabytes of ram dont' test it on older hardware.
Linux make a great server, because it can use hardware considered out of date by NT people. Linux may be free, but if you want a workstation it's going to cost you a testicle in hardware upgrade fees.
While not the fastest thing around, KDE is at least responsive, functional, and productive. I've used it since the 1.0beta1 days on the above hardware. It's very productive for programming, graphics manipulation, and data processing & vizualization. Gnome loses lots of points and people because they can't afford to upgrade to be productive on it. In that regards Gnome is NOT free for most people. In fact it's even for expensive than Window 9* or NT. I'll upgrade someday, after I finish school, get a job, sell my first 2 children. Then I'll try gnome again, until then I'll use something free and productive.
Slashdot Mirror
I know of at least one place in the USA that won't allow floride in the water becasue they know it's part of a communist plot to take of the USA. Anyone been to Santa Cruz.
JungleBoy.
This pertains to Americans, since I don't have much experience elsewhere.
...Linux!
Privacy has been dead for a long long time. We don't really care, though many of us still spout off about the degredation of privary. Any discussion or demands for privacy in this country are purely academic. The issue as killed and buried by Corporate America long ago. All America cares about is making a buck. This is not limited to Corporations. We are a capitalist nation, everything we do is, almost by definition, for profit. The US economy is raging right now. One indicator I use of the the US economy is the cars we drive. In the 90's, especially the late 90's, the car have gotten bigger and bigger, and they eat more and more gas. The same thing happened in the swinging post WWII economy. We don't care about privary either. Telemarketing companies buy and sell personal information between themselves and others. All in the name of profit. I use a piece of plastic for almost every purchase I make; allowing my bank to know what I spend and where. Grocery stores offer club cards; in exchange for good deals, you give up some privacy. They can keep track of your purchase history. Why do we trade our privacy for a buck? Because Americans, for the most part, do not value privacy. The economy is good, our personal profits are high, so we really don't give a damn as long as we can keep filling up the 42 gallon tank of your suburbans with $1.50 gasoline that craps up the air we breath.
If we really care about privacy, there needs to be cultural change in our view of the value of privacy. This won't happen until after our privacy is exploited to the point of hurting people. When the sale of personal information prevents people from getting jobs, inssurance, food, etc. we may start to value it more. But because our privacy was sold at aution years ago, it's going to be an uphill battle to get it back.
Frankly, I don't want it back now. I'm the first the admit that I'm a raging capitalist. I'm willing to sell my privacy for profit, I carry a grocery store club card. I don't care if online bookstore know what I purchase and read. It makes my life a little more comfortable.
Andrew
--
I think it's clear that gene sequences extracted from organisms are not intelectual property. They are finings of nature. Either way, couldn't prior art be demonstrated simply by showing that some organism used the gene sequence before it was patented? How can a company patent genes for enzymes which our bodies have produced for thousands of years? These are clearly not creations of the mind, and thus not intelectual property.
...Linux!
Although, if a company does come up with a new and truly unique gene sequence, not found in nature, then it would be a creation of the mind. This would qualify as intelectual property, and could then be patented. I don't know of any cases of this yet. So far all genetic information comes from the genomes of organisms, we don't have a sophisticated enough understanding of genetic information systems to generate new and usedful genetic sequences.
Andrew N.
--
He he.. I'm just waiting for this one, Maybe I should file and specify a molecular level mechanism.
...Linux!
"I'm sorry, your cells have divided several trillion times. at US$0.01 per use of our patent, you ow us US$10billion. Own, and think twice before having kids, meiosis costs extra. We just patented molecular-encoded data recombination."
Andrew N.
--
I usually open a biology or chemistry text, and find a class of molecules or group of animals. I then map a chemical name, such as an amino acid, or a taxinomic name, such as the genus or species, to each of the accounts I have access to. I then basterdize the crap out of the name with mixed caps, and non-alphanumerics. I use a different groups of names for root passwords than I do for regular accounts. This way, no one knows where the heck I get my password, nor how I basterdize then.
...Linux!
I seem to be quite effective, and as a result I can quickly learn and remember chemical and taxinomic names and their spellings. Given the volume of chemical names and biological terms out there I don't see myself running out anytime soon.
what Fun!
--
All of our servers are named after celestial bodies or constellations. We have a server with a big disk array named hydra. There is a shell server named pandora. The only exception is the old frontpage server, it is an NT server named sphincter. If forced to bring up an exchange server, I think it should be named siphilis.
...Linux!
Andrew N.
--
Not only is Corel in the Wrong for re-licensing linux and other gpl'ed programs. But They are going to lose the respect and interest of many pro-linux people. It seems apparent to me that the reason you license a piece of software is to distribute it. If they are using the software internally, as they claim, why would they need to licence the software to themselves? Because of this I've decided to NOT used corel linux. I will also advocate that other people NOT use it. Andrew
...Linux!
--
Think about it people. The space shuttle and the new space station have very small tightly controlled air spaces. Also, they are at VERY low pressure, like 4 or 5 psi compared to 14.7 psi at sea level on earth. If you go spraying CO2 or anything else into the vehicle you are going to rapidly alter the air quality: this is bad. I could see the use of a small compressor, but not compressed gas canisters. As for guidence, you only need 3 fans (one on each access) and a gyroscope control system. You could counter fan rotation with the gyro system and also use the gyros for pitch/yaw/roll manuvers. Andrew
...Linux!
--
I'm scared of any standard that they come up with for instant messaging. We need a viable open source intant messaging protocol NOW. Unlike AIM or ICQ it should be decentralized. I've spent a little time thinking about this, but I'm not a heavy programmer.
...Linux!
Everyone should have an IM address like or the same as their email address. Some sort of IM server should become a standard service like popd or imapd. You punch in someones IM address and it goes to your IM server. Your IM server then finds their IM server by piggy backing off the MX record in DNS, it would be better to have a unique record type. Their IM server says "yes they are online" and patches your IM client to their IM client. When both parties are online, a client to client connection could be established, if the requested party is not online then their IM server could store the message until they got online (ala ICQ). This would be a decentralized comodityized method that could be implimented on any platform.
--
We can thank our dear Father Bill Gates & Co. for this phenomenon. Micro$oft has instilled in the public a high level of tolerance and complacency for low quality computer products. If any other household appliance was made to the same level of quality as M$-Winders, that appliance would get a notoriously bad reputation and people would not buy it. Thanks to Bill having his hands on nearly the entire home computing market, he has been able to convince most people that poor reliability is just a fact of owning a pc. I thank Mr. Torvalds and the entire FSF every morning for giving me a quality alternative to M$.
...Linux!
--
An organism can adapt to a changing environment via phenotypic plasticity. No genotypic change takes place, this is quite common.
...Linux!
--
Could you give me a link to a RAIDED Firewire array? I've never seen one and don't think they exist.
...Linux!
--
What kind of crack do you smoke. All the Firewire stats I've seen report throughput in bits per second. SCSI stats are reported in Bytes per second. Ultra2 SCSI does 80 MegaBytes per second, Ultra3 SCSI does 160 MegaBytes per second. Firewire claims to support 800 Megabits per second, this is 100 MegaBytes per second, which is between Ultra2 and Ultra3. Also, I don't know if you can build a hardware raid array on the Firewire bus; at least I've never seen it done.
...Linux!
Andrew N.
(I probably own Apple money for saying Firewire)
--
This is a wonderful result. Source code is a method of communication - of expression - and thus protected by the 1st ammendment. The compiled binary is a tool, serving simply a funtional purpose. My reading is that the source code can now be exported but binaries can't. If this holds, any company wanting to export strong crypto must do so in source form. And the source form must be readable and understandable by other people, in other words, it can't be obfuscated code. This is not only a big win for cryto and free speech, but also for OSS.
...Linux!
Andrew
--
This is the coolest input method since the invention of the keyboard. It took no time to get used to and was nice and fast. Also the input area is tiny. Wow cool, I'll buy a palm when I can use this on it.
...Linux!
Andrew
--
Hmmm... I thought that at some point Intel made it possible to do 36 bit memory addressing on the i686 processors. This would allow access to 8 GB of memory. Of course I could totaly be off my rocker.
...Linux!
Andrew
--
According to NASA the distance between earth and mars is:r sfact.html
...Linux!
from: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/ma
Minimum (10^6 km) 54.5
Maximum (10^6 km) 401.3
So if we take the speed of light to be
3.0 x 10^8 m/s
It takes at least 3 minutes and at most 22.3 minutes, depending on the time of the year.
It's not 45 minutes, but the latency still sucks.
--
I don't see bandwidth being limited by bits per second. To increase this measure of bandwidth all you need to do is build a more widely parallel system. The problem in the end comes down to how many seconds does it take 1 bit of data to get from point a to point b. You can shrink your fibers and parallel more of them, but your data won't go any faster. More will just travel at the same time. We have an absolute limit on the seconds per bit of a single pathway; the speed of light. The first person to get a single bit of data to travel faster than the speed of light will have found a real solution to the communication speed problem.
...Linux!
Think about playing quake with someone on mars. It doesn't matter what type of OC line is between you, it still takes light about 45 minutes (I think) to get from there to here.
Paralleling data communications is only benificial when the distance between the two communicating point is short enough to make the speed of light appear instantanious.
--
They sell the same speed/quality hardware and I think they are cheaper.
...Linux!
Andrew
--
It doesn't surprise me one bit. I always suspected M$ would do such a thing. Next thing you know they'll patent oxygen and respiration. You'll have to pay them an annual fee to breath.
...Linux!
"I've got to run some errands. I need to stop my the M$-Bank to get some M$-Money so I can go to the M$-Grocery Store and pick up some M$-Pork Chops."
Joe Bob, 2003
I think it's about time someone bomb Redmond.
Andrew
--
yeah, what the subject says.
...Linux!
--
Isn't this just a syn flood? Doesn't linux have syn cookies to avoid filling up the connection table? Yeah, I thought so. I guess this affects /other/ unices.
...Linux!
Andrew
--
I know why they did this! If you're stuck in a room with these hinges on the door M$ will charge you big bucks to use the door to leave or you get charged to use the broken window!
Right now I wish someone made Toilet Paper with Bill Gates' face on it. Cause the dingleberries are calling.
How about a P150 with 128MB Ram and a 12MB Voodoo2? QuakeII 3.20 is still quick on it.
Andrew
Time to add my fuel to the fire.
Linux is great, it runs fast even on old hardware. Efficency and low overhead are 2 thing that characterize linux during. Let's put linux on a slightly older machine, like this:
Pentium 150
32MB Ram
2MB VRAM
2GB Hard Drive.
This computer will get the job done, and be nice and responsive. Now, lets load gnome onto it. But we know that X in general is a memory hog, so let's bump the ram up to 128MB which should be plenty. Let's also run it as a decent resolution, for this we need a better video card, let's go with an older 4MB card; say a Number Nine GXE64 Pro. Not a bad little card. Ok, now linux runs great. Start gnome... HOLY F**K*NG S**T, I can actually see it drawing the menus on the screen for gnome panel. AAARRRGGGHHH, I just tried to resize the gmc window. It should start responding again in 5 seconds or so.
Gnome is the most inefficent desktop environment I've ever used, Lose95/98/NT are WWAAAYYY faster on this hardware. M$ forces hardware upgrades by bogging down your machine. Gnome does the same, but to a more insulting degree. I'm not going to upgrade just so I can have GTK+ Themes. I guess this is what happens when all the programers testing gnome on their octuple processor 8000 gigahertz workstations with 4 terabytes of ram dont' test it on older hardware.
Linux make a great server, because it can use hardware considered out of date by NT people. Linux may be free, but if you want a workstation it's going to cost you a testicle in hardware upgrade fees.
While not the fastest thing around, KDE is at least responsive, functional, and productive. I've used it since the 1.0beta1 days on the above hardware. It's very productive for programming, graphics manipulation, and data processing & vizualization. Gnome loses lots of points and people because they can't afford to upgrade to be productive on it. In that regards Gnome is NOT free for most people. In fact it's even for expensive than Window 9* or NT. I'll upgrade someday, after I finish school, get a job, sell my first 2 children. Then I'll try gnome again, until then I'll use something free and productive.
Andrew