Yes, Apple's strategy is a good one in principle: they are leaving the commodity software development up to open source and they are adding value to it with brand-specific software development.
The trouble with Apple is that they are probably drawing the line in the wrong place. Apple seems to seriously believe that there is value in Quartz and Cocoa and they are spending a lot of engineering effort on it. But, in reality, there are no graphics capabilities in Quartz that aren't present in modern X11 systems, and an Objective-C based toolkit is merely a burden these days. You could easily create a GUI that looked and felt just like Aqua on top of X11, and ran faster to boot.
That leaves me wondering: is Apple doing this deliberately? Maybe they do want to "own the platform" after all, not for technical reasons but for the same reasons as Microsoft and Sun: to control it and entangle their developers in proprietary APIs. Maybe Apple figured out that you don't have to be 100% proprietary in order to have a captive audience, 50% proprietary is enough. Or can they really be so confused that they think Quartz and Cocoa add value to the platform? And how "open source" are the open source components of OS X anyway--I don't mean legally, but I mean in terms of development--Darwin isn't exactly a hot, widely used open source project.
Altogether, it's unclear to me that Apple really has changed so much. They are, of course, under no obligation to use an open source desktop or open source toolkits, but as long as they don't, they are still delivering a proprietary system with all the consequences that that entails; in particular, if you develop for the Macintosh GUI, your software will not run on any other platform without a lot of porting efforts.
Tell it to smallpox. Or bubonic plague. There are many ways in which diseases can have this property. Many natural diseases infect multiple hosts. For example, if we are not the primary reservoir of disease, then there is not evolutionary disincentive for the disease to have a high mortality rate.
Yes, but if we are not the primary reservoir of the disease, then it probably doesn't spread that easily among humans. SARS and ebola are examples of this.
In any case, there is currently no known natural disease that would be capable of eradicating the majority of the population around the globe. Smallpox probably comes closest, but even it is "only" 30% fatal and we have known preventative measures.
On the other hand, there is evidence that such diseases can exist in principle and may have killed or nearly killed off entire species in the past (and then quickly disappeared themselves). Genetic engineering has the potential to create such diseases, diseases that are easier to spread than the common cold, far more deadly than smallpox, and have no vaccines available against them. Genetic engineering isn't the only thing that has the potential to do this--all sorts of other practices do as well. But just because there are other dangers doesn't mean we should be careless with genetic engineering.
And what's the harm of being careful? It doesn't take a lot of effort to destroy waste from biologial research.
[How do you think anthrax acquires antibiotics resistance? Most likely through gene transfer from some other organism.] Give me a break. It has been known for decades that microorganisms in pure cultures acquire antibiotic resistance when grown in the presence of antibiotics
The two statements aren't contradictory.
In any case, you brought up the artificial creation of antibiotics resistance as an example threat, not me. I think that threat is actually not the biggest worry when it comes to bioterrorism or accidents. While creating antibiotics resistant bacteria is not nice, it is not a huge threat--even if we didn't have antibiotics at all, we'd be back in the 19th century; medically unpleasant, but not incompatible with civilized life.
More importantly, you implicitly assume that the old techniques, selection, breeding, mutagenesis, etc., are "OK" and proven harmless because people have been using them for so long. But that's wrong. Our ability to perform screens, breeding, and mutagenesis has improved greatly over the last few decades, and those techniques may have become much more effective tools for the creation of dangerous organisms than in the past.
Furthermore, we already know that the association with domesticated animals and the creation of new kinds of plants has had serious medical and environmental consequences. Therefore, if anything, the last few thousand years of history should teach us to be much more careful in the future.
Transgenic technology is just a convenient shortcut to achieving the same kinds of results that people have been achieving since prehistoric times by selective breeding.
Yes, quite right: transgenic technology is a shortcut. It's a shortcut to let humans make things happen within a span of a few years that might otherwise take millions or even hundreds of millions of years to happen in the normal course of evolution, or even through directed breeding.
Now, we know that occasionally, entire species die out because some new organism arises. That might well happen to humans eventually. But it makes a huge difference to me and probably everybody else whether that happens to humans some time over the next few millions years or some time over the next three.
By analogy, we know that an asteroid might kill us at any time. By your argument, we shouldn't mind if some people decided hurling asteroids at earth for fun--after all, it wouldn't really matter, it would just be a shortcut to the same kind of result that would occur naturally eventually anyway, right?
into the environment to make a point he is not QUALIFIED to make. He doesn't have ANY CREDENTIALS. He's just a dangerous, no-good hippie. Damnit, this is not "art", this is a CRIME.
His point, and a point with which I tend to agree, is that nobody is qualified to determine whether releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment is dangerous.
In different words, if what this guy did upsets you, what Monsanto is doing should upset you as well. If you think that a bunch of Ph.D.'s at Monsanto know the effects of what they are releasing on the environment, based on the strength of their credentials, or that they have your best interests at heart, you are a fool.
As to whether it is art or not, that's for social scientists and art critics to decide. I think this work falls under what is generally considered "performance art", but you are free to disagree. However, just because something is "art" doesn't mean it can't also be a legal crime.
What he is doing is KNOWINGLY releasing large amounts of dangerous organisms into the environment
There is no evidence that he has released anything dangerous. He may want you to think that he may have released something dangerous, but it seems implausible that he did or could.
the people are open-minded, reasonable and friendly and recognise the value of platform independence as a vehicle of freedom.
So, why, then, do they commit to using a proprietary platform owned and controled by a single company, Sun?
I think a more realistic assessment is that the people of Brasil haven't been through quite the same intellectual property headaches that the people of the US have been, so they are perhaps not quite as sensistive to the problems that Sun ownership of Java can potentially cause.
And hey, down there, OSS and Java play nice together
The problem with Java and OSS is that even the specifications for the Java environment are proprietary, that Sun does not permit independent reimplementations without their express approval (in the name of "compatibility"), and that once you look at Sun's source code, you are forever barred from participating in open source implementations (because Sun could claim them as derivative works).
See, the problem with OSS and Java is not the OSS side--OSS developers have gone out of their way to accomodate Sun around the world. Maybe Brasilian developers are more gullible and less critical than elsewhere, but the party who isn't playing nice is Sun. And, unless Sun has changed their licenses for Brasil (which I doubt), OSS and Java have the same problems in Brasil as everywhere else.
I guess Sun figured out pretty quickly that they couldn't pull the wool over people's eyes as easily when it comes to "open source" as when it came to "open standards" and their "community process" cop-out. With OSI and a well-defined set of criteria for what constitutes "open source", Sun would have had to produce something that was genuinely "open source" or faced a PR disaster.
And, of course, Sun is rightfully concerned about forking. Well, "forking" is really a euphemism for "losing control", since Sun knows that they minute they permit people to take Java and maintain it independently, Sun's version of Java will be history and the independent version will take over. Once Sun releases Java under a genuine open source license, there would still be only one version of Java, it would just not be Sun's.
Sun is a dying company and Java is the only thing that gives them any kind of credibility or presence. They are going to hold on to it like a starving dog to its bone.
Calling it a "technology" I suppose detracts from the fact that the lack of an executable bit in x86 page tables is a deficiency. You see, this "feature" has been around since, oh, the middle of the last century, and many processors other than x86 have supported it without even considering it worth mentioning.
These kinds of passwords based on visual recall have been tried before. People have tried constructing scenes, using collections of natural photographs, and lots of other visual cues. All of them rely on the fact that "a picture is worth more than a thousand words", meaning that it would be hard for you to describe pictures in sufficient detail to disclose your password. There was a genuine bonanza of those kinds of attempts to make visual passwords in the late 1990's and some web sites tried using them, but they turned out not to be very useful in the end.
Most regulations only apply to recipients of federal funds or to the food safety.
Well, this very case shows you otherwise. If it looks like it might be related to bioterrorism, the feds can and will step in.
Moreover, it seems rather doubtful that transgenic technology is all that important for creation of bioweapons, anyway.
First of all, since bioweapons research is not carried out publicly, nobody knows; the Soviets certainly tried.
Second, who said anything about people trying to create bioweapons specifically? Reputable molecular biology labs take precautions to prevent the release of genetically modified organisms or engineered DNA because nobody knows what the potential risks or environmental effects are in each case. And the risk isn't necessarily mass epidemics (although that is a possibility), the primary risk is environmental.
Why go to the trouble of trying to create a novel pathogen when there are so many natural ones to work with?
Because artificial pathogens can combine high mortality rate and high infectivity; natural pathogens don't generally have that combination because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous.
The most likely method of creating a bioterror weapon would be to grow a conventional pathogen such as anthrax in the presence of antibiotics to select resistant strains.
How do you think anthrax acquires antibiotics resistance? Most likely through gene transfer from some other organism. It's academic whether you want to call the resulting organism "transgenic" or not. And, from the point of view of the police, this would look the same anyway: lots of petri dishes and bacterial cultures.
Why is it that when Monsanto says they've tested the GM crops to be safe, they are disbelieved on general principles, but when some art professors say THEIR GM bacteria are safe, they must know absolutely what they are talking about?
I think he probably would freely admit that his release of organisms is not very professionally supervised or tested. His point is that he believes that neither is Monsanto's release of genetically modified organisms. And, whether or not he is right, that's something to think about: how do you know whether what Monsanto does is safe? His work is art and it is intended to stir this kind of controversy and debate, to make you think.
On the other hand, it is also perfectly reasonable for the police to investigate him when they find his wife dead surrounded by a bunch of petri dishes with bacterial cultures. If he did his homework, he will be able to prove that what he did was harmless and this will end with the grand jury. If not, he was merely a stupid artist, but that does not change whether the debate he was trying to stir up is valid and important.
which anyone who follows politics knows is code for "Marxist" in much the same way that "liberal" has been replaced with "progressive" in modern usage as the old terms become associated with failed policies, ruined economies and mass graves.
Or, for that matter, the way in which "fascist" has been replaced with "conservative values" or the way "anarchist" and "social Darwinism" have become replaced with "libertarian" in modern usage as the old terms become associated with failed policies, ruined economies and mass graves.
You see, all parts of the political spectrum have been responsible for holocausts, mass murder, human rights violations, and other atrocities.
Seems to me like you and this guy are cut from the same cloth.
I think this is just a symptom of a more general problem - most people don't understand the biology of transgenic food, and ignorance breeds fear and suspicion. There's also the conflation of ideas between transgenic plants and bioterror organisms.
The "conflation" is justified: transgenic methods are one of the primary means of constructing bioterror organisms. Furthermore, even transgenic organisms harmless to human beings, have a significant potential for causing environmental harm (e.g., by creating herbicide-resistant weeds).
That is one of the reasons why any kind of experimentation with transgenic organisms is regulated. In particular, it is necessary to regulate tightly what gets released into the environment. Reputable labs working on improved food crops have to comply with those regulations, and so does everybody else.
it doesn't seem to me like anyone could have much of a case against him.
A lot of work in molecular biology is regulated, so even if he did not intend to create a dangerous organism, he may still have run afoul of health and safety regulations.
Microsoft would wave the licensing fee just to save face against Linux, but that would cripple PalmSource completely.
Yes, and so what? Why should Palm continue to make so much money on their software licenses? Competition and better production methods drive down prices in all markets. In the case of software, prices happen to be driven down to zero--nothing unusual about it. The only question is why it's taking so long.
And in the case of Palm in particular, it's not like the company is investing a lot of money in research--their rate of software innovation is glacial, and they are nearly invisible at scientific conferences. Microsoft makes a far bigger investment in research (both absolute and relative) than Palm.
A corpse in the kitchen with an unknown cause of death and a stack of bacterial cultures ought to be cause for concern for the police and ought to prompt a police investigation. Furthermore, determining whether some genetically engineered bacteria are dangerous or not is far from trivial, so it's not like one can just look at the situation and determine that it is harmless. So, no, I don't think police overreacted in this case. Take away the corpse, and maybe one could say that they overreacted. Even then, dangerous and harmless kinds of experiments are difficult to tell apart, and the question of why this work isn't happening in a lab, with proper documentation and notification, is still valid.
Your brain makes the right assumptions, the assumptions that have saved the butts of the thousands of generations of mammals that preceded you. There are some people who can't perceive certain kinds of visual illusions, and they suffer from brain damage and visual deficits.
Furthermore, those illusions are largely independent of the quality of the images that our eyes send to the brain; "better" eyes don't change the fact that the assumptions the brain makes about the world are good, life-saving assumptions.
But for the less detailed analysis the sensor here has very lousy resolution
That's incorrect. The human eye has extraordinarily high resolution, probably close to what is theoretically possible for an optical system of that size. However, it only gives you that resolution in the fovea.
That's probably because high resolution just isn't needed across the whole visual field, and if the eye were constructed to provide it across the entire visual field, our brains would have to be bigger than our bodies in order to process the information.
Also, the human eye is extraordinarily sensitive, allowing you to come close to perceiving individual photons.
It isn't a very good sensor at all. It is the processing that brings out the great detail and such.
The human eye is an extraordinary sensor. Quality does not just mean having the highest spec along a single dimension, it means making the right engineering tradeoffs. And the human eye does both.
You assume that when Sun says "open source", they mean "Open Source", as in the OSI definition.
I think Sun won't do that. They will either formally put an open source license on the code but keep control of the source through their numerous patents and the proprietary specifications, or they will simply pick a license that makes the source available put imposes restrictions on you that are incompatible with the OSI definition.
And the reason why Sun won't let go of Java is because they know that the instant they do that, they will lose control: I suspect so many people in the Java community are tired of Sun's "leadership" and poor technical decisions that an independent version of Java would take over instantly from Sun's version.
first because it means that no one will start up a competing "openjava", a venture that would almost certainly lead to incompatibilities,
Even though there are attempts at doing that, Sun's licenses prohibit it. If you have looked at Sun's source code or their Java specifications, any work you do on an "OpenJava" is a derivative work. So, the status quo is quite cozy for Sun: they really do not have to worry seriously about open competition because Sun has the legal means to squash such competition should it become a serious competitor.
second because, as the example of the death of xfree86 shows, too much central and absolute control over software by a small group will inevitably anger developers and users alike, leading them to search for an alternative.
You mean like the control Sun is exercising over Java? You see, that's what Sun really is afraid of when they talk about "forking": they are afraid that the developers and users they angered will pick another entity to take control of Java. You wouldn't end up with two incompatible versions of Java, you'd end up with only one, the one that doesn't come from Sun anymore.
Sun has been saying that they will "somehow open source Java" since 1996. Has it happened? No. They changed their mind.
Sun has also been saying that they will "somehow have Java standardized by a standard body" since 1996. Has it happened? No. They changed their mind.
Sun like Java being owned completely by them, and they won't change. What they will do is that they will fiddle with the Java source license a little an declare that it is now "open source", just like they created the "Java community process" and claim that it's an "open process".
That said, I hope java doesn't end up fragmented.
You don't have to worry: Sun isn't going to give up control. They are going to keep Java proprietary, and they are not going to "open source" it in any sense anybody other than they themselves would recognize.
I also hope this isn't an instance of sun trying to save some of their technology from being destroyed as their ship goes down.
No, it isn't an instance of that. Sun doesn't care about "saving some of their technology". It's an instance of trying to appease critics as their ship goes down. But their ship is going down anyway, and when it does, as Sun keeps holding on to ownership of Java, Java will go down with them. Because, if Sun went out of business today, it's the creditors that end up owning Java and dictating what is going to happen with it. Nobody else would be able to make an independent implementation or take over. That's the price you pay for letting Sun ensure "compatibility".
Qt/Embedded is bigger and slower than a properly configured handheld X11 system (except in the world of Troll Tech marketing and their fans).
Keep in mind that X11 used to run fine on X terminals with 1M of memory or workstations with 4M of memory; Qt/Embedded wouldn't even start up on those. You can distribute an entire X11 server and a couple of clients in a few hundred kbytes (the X11 server that ships with handhelds.org is a bit larger, but it is still much smaller than what you run on your desk).
There are some handheld window systems (even some open source ones) that are more compact than X11, but it's not worth giving up compatibility and functionality to squeeze out a little extra space.
I think that's what is holding back adoption of flash based PCs. Screw the expense, if the thing can't have a drive failure, some industries will buy it.
No, what's holding them back is the expense and size. There is no way you can put enough flash into a PC to hold Windows and a decent set of applications.
Embedded PCs use flash drives all the time, with no problems.
Quite possibly in the near future manufacturers will market PDA's not only for office, and email use but for portable auido.
Manufacturers already have, for several years. That was one big selling point of Sony's Clie line. Sony even offers a digital VCR that can record television shows onto memory stick, for your viewing pleasure on your PDA.
If Sun were genuine about making Java "open source", in the usually accepted meaning of the term, Sun would first have to open up the Java specifications. And that would mean dropping compatibility requirements, publishing the Java specifications freely (right now, the Java specifications are owned by Sun and you have to agree to a restrictive license to even access them), and dedicating their patents required for implementing the specifications to the public domain.
Until they do all of that, it doesn't matter what they do with their source code because you will not be able to do those things that people expect to be able to do with open source software: modify it, improve it, remove useless bits, fork it, etc. In particular, the ability to fork software is an essential part of making something open source, and Sun has been unwavering about the fact that they do not want Java forked.
What you see with Sun now is the death throes of a once powerful company. When Sun still coughs up useful bits of code under a true open source license (like OpenOffice), let's use it. But let's not fall for their grab for industry control through Java anymore.
Re:Real-world examples of tangible benefits
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Mono Beta 2 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
You know how Gnome, KDE, and wxWindows each have their own object system hacks on top of C/C++? And how they are all different and incompatible with each other? Well, C# has a built-in standard for that functionality: a standard object system and a standard way of querying objects about what they are and what they can do. So, reflection is one important capability.
Another one is runtime safety. When you load a shared library into a C or C++ program and call one of its functions, anything can happen: it can corrupt arbitrary data structures in your program and you may not even know it. When you load code dynamically into C#, no matter how buggy it is, it cannot corrupt data that has not been passed to it (unsafe C# code behaves like C/C++, but dynamically loadable code should not be unsafe, and you can enforce that). So, concretely, when you load a plug-in into Gimp# or Apache# and the plugin crashes, you don't have to shut down the application. Runtime safety also prevents buffer overflows and other common security holes.
Yet another is sandboxing. Sandboxing means that you can restrict the operations of sections of code. That means that you can safely run untrusted code, not just potentially buggy code. As an ISP, for example, you can let your customers load modules into Apache# without having to worry about the module from one customer doing something to the module of another customer.
You already mentioned garbage collection.
Those are some of the major benefits of C# (and Java) over C/C++. And they make a big difference. Lack of runtime safety is responsible for most of the application crashes we experience; with runtime safety, applications still have unexpected bugs, but they can usually recover from them. Lack of sandboxing means that people come up with all sort of complex extension methods (e.g., CGI scripts) instead of having a simple, clean interface. Lack of reflection and standard object systems is one of the reasons that makes libraries so wildly incompatible. And, finally, lack of garbage collection is responsible for a huge amount of extra work during library development and for a lot of bugs in C/C++.
Re:Any news about the patent review?
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Mono Beta 2 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
The standards are royalty free, however the standards only cover the CLR (the VM/JIT) and C# the language, not the Framework (all the classes that do stuff).
That is misleading. The ECMA C# standard standardizes a significant part of the libraries, far more than, say, the libraries included in the C and C++ standards. All those classes are also available across platforms and all of them are royalty free as well. That means that you can write a lot of libraries (and probably even many applications) in completely standard ECMA C#.
In fact, saying that they are available "royalty free" suggests that someone may have a patent on this stuff but that they allow people to use it; but, so far, nobody has identified any valid patent on the language and libraries defined by ECMA C#. I believe Microsoft has merely stated that it is their intent that people can implement ECMA C# royalty free, but that does not imply that they actually have a valid patent on the ECMA C# standard.
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Yes, Apple's strategy is a good one in principle: they are leaving the commodity software development up to open source and they are adding value to it with brand-specific software development.
The trouble with Apple is that they are probably drawing the line in the wrong place. Apple seems to seriously believe that there is value in Quartz and Cocoa and they are spending a lot of engineering effort on it. But, in reality, there are no graphics capabilities in Quartz that aren't present in modern X11 systems, and an Objective-C based toolkit is merely a burden these days. You could easily create a GUI that looked and felt just like Aqua on top of X11, and ran faster to boot.
That leaves me wondering: is Apple doing this deliberately? Maybe they do want to "own the platform" after all, not for technical reasons but for the same reasons as Microsoft and Sun: to control it and entangle their developers in proprietary APIs. Maybe Apple figured out that you don't have to be 100% proprietary in order to have a captive audience, 50% proprietary is enough. Or can they really be so confused that they think Quartz and Cocoa add value to the platform? And how "open source" are the open source components of OS X anyway--I don't mean legally, but I mean in terms of development--Darwin isn't exactly a hot, widely used open source project.
Altogether, it's unclear to me that Apple really has changed so much. They are, of course, under no obligation to use an open source desktop or open source toolkits, but as long as they don't, they are still delivering a proprietary system with all the consequences that that entails; in particular, if you develop for the Macintosh GUI, your software will not run on any other platform without a lot of porting efforts.
Tell it to smallpox. Or bubonic plague. There are many ways in which diseases can have this property. Many natural diseases infect multiple hosts. For example, if we are not the primary reservoir of disease, then there is not evolutionary disincentive for the disease to have a high mortality rate.
Yes, but if we are not the primary reservoir of the disease, then it probably doesn't spread that easily among humans. SARS and ebola are examples of this.
In any case, there is currently no known natural disease that would be capable of eradicating the majority of the population around the globe. Smallpox probably comes closest, but even it is "only" 30% fatal and we have known preventative measures.
On the other hand, there is evidence that such diseases can exist in principle and may have killed or nearly killed off entire species in the past (and then quickly disappeared themselves). Genetic engineering has the potential to create such diseases, diseases that are easier to spread than the common cold, far more deadly than smallpox, and have no vaccines available against them. Genetic engineering isn't the only thing that has the potential to do this--all sorts of other practices do as well. But just because there are other dangers doesn't mean we should be careless with genetic engineering.
And what's the harm of being careful? It doesn't take a lot of effort to destroy waste from biologial research.
[How do you think anthrax acquires antibiotics resistance? Most likely through gene transfer from some other organism.] Give me a break. It has been known for decades that microorganisms in pure cultures acquire antibiotic resistance when grown in the presence of antibiotics
The two statements aren't contradictory.
In any case, you brought up the artificial creation of antibiotics resistance as an example threat, not me. I think that threat is actually not the biggest worry when it comes to bioterrorism or accidents. While creating antibiotics resistant bacteria is not nice, it is not a huge threat--even if we didn't have antibiotics at all, we'd be back in the 19th century; medically unpleasant, but not incompatible with civilized life.
More importantly, you implicitly assume that the old techniques, selection, breeding, mutagenesis, etc., are "OK" and proven harmless because people have been using them for so long. But that's wrong. Our ability to perform screens, breeding, and mutagenesis has improved greatly over the last few decades, and those techniques may have become much more effective tools for the creation of dangerous organisms than in the past.
Furthermore, we already know that the association with domesticated animals and the creation of new kinds of plants has had serious medical and environmental consequences. Therefore, if anything, the last few thousand years of history should teach us to be much more careful in the future.
Transgenic technology is just a convenient shortcut to achieving the same kinds of results that people have been achieving since prehistoric times by selective breeding.
Yes, quite right: transgenic technology is a shortcut. It's a shortcut to let humans make things happen within a span of a few years that might otherwise take millions or even hundreds of millions of years to happen in the normal course of evolution, or even through directed breeding.
Now, we know that occasionally, entire species die out because some new organism arises. That might well happen to humans eventually. But it makes a huge difference to me and probably everybody else whether that happens to humans some time over the next few millions years or some time over the next three.
By analogy, we know that an asteroid might kill us at any time. By your argument, we shouldn't mind if some people decided hurling asteroids at earth for fun--after all, it wouldn't really matter, it would just be a shortcut to the same kind of result that would occur naturally eventually anyway, right?
into the environment to make a point he is not QUALIFIED to make. He doesn't have ANY CREDENTIALS. He's just a dangerous, no-good hippie. Damnit, this is not "art", this is a CRIME.
His point, and a point with which I tend to agree, is that nobody is qualified to determine whether releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment is dangerous.
In different words, if what this guy did upsets you, what Monsanto is doing should upset you as well. If you think that a bunch of Ph.D.'s at Monsanto know the effects of what they are releasing on the environment, based on the strength of their credentials, or that they have your best interests at heart, you are a fool.
As to whether it is art or not, that's for social scientists and art critics to decide. I think this work falls under what is generally considered "performance art", but you are free to disagree. However, just because something is "art" doesn't mean it can't also be a legal crime.
What he is doing is KNOWINGLY releasing large amounts of dangerous organisms into the environment
There is no evidence that he has released anything dangerous. He may want you to think that he may have released something dangerous, but it seems implausible that he did or could.
the people are open-minded, reasonable and friendly and recognise the value of platform independence as a vehicle of freedom.
So, why, then, do they commit to using a proprietary platform owned and controled by a single company, Sun?
I think a more realistic assessment is that the people of Brasil haven't been through quite the same intellectual property headaches that the people of the US have been, so they are perhaps not quite as sensistive to the problems that Sun ownership of Java can potentially cause.
And hey, down there, OSS and Java play nice together
The problem with Java and OSS is that even the specifications for the Java environment are proprietary, that Sun does not permit independent reimplementations without their express approval (in the name of "compatibility"), and that once you look at Sun's source code, you are forever barred from participating in open source implementations (because Sun could claim them as derivative works).
See, the problem with OSS and Java is not the OSS side--OSS developers have gone out of their way to accomodate Sun around the world. Maybe Brasilian developers are more gullible and less critical than elsewhere, but the party who isn't playing nice is Sun. And, unless Sun has changed their licenses for Brasil (which I doubt), OSS and Java have the same problems in Brasil as everywhere else.
I guess Sun figured out pretty quickly that they couldn't pull the wool over people's eyes as easily when it comes to "open source" as when it came to "open standards" and their "community process" cop-out. With OSI and a well-defined set of criteria for what constitutes "open source", Sun would have had to produce something that was genuinely "open source" or faced a PR disaster.
And, of course, Sun is rightfully concerned about forking. Well, "forking" is really a euphemism for "losing control", since Sun knows that they minute they permit people to take Java and maintain it independently, Sun's version of Java will be history and the independent version will take over. Once Sun releases Java under a genuine open source license, there would still be only one version of Java, it would just not be Sun's.
Sun is a dying company and Java is the only thing that gives them any kind of credibility or presence. They are going to hold on to it like a starving dog to its bone.
Calling it a "technology" I suppose detracts from the fact that the lack of an executable bit in x86 page tables is a deficiency. You see, this "feature" has been around since, oh, the middle of the last century, and many processors other than x86 have supported it without even considering it worth mentioning.
These kinds of passwords based on visual recall have been tried before. People have tried constructing scenes, using collections of natural photographs, and lots of other visual cues. All of them rely on the fact that "a picture is worth more than a thousand words", meaning that it would be hard for you to describe pictures in sufficient detail to disclose your password. There was a genuine bonanza of those kinds of attempts to make visual passwords in the late 1990's and some web sites tried using them, but they turned out not to be very useful in the end.
Most regulations only apply to recipients of federal funds or to the food safety.
Well, this very case shows you otherwise. If it looks like it might be related to bioterrorism, the feds can and will step in.
Moreover, it seems rather doubtful that transgenic technology is all that important for creation of bioweapons, anyway.
First of all, since bioweapons research is not carried out publicly, nobody knows; the Soviets certainly tried.
Second, who said anything about people trying to create bioweapons specifically? Reputable molecular biology labs take precautions to prevent the release of genetically modified organisms or engineered DNA because nobody knows what the potential risks or environmental effects are in each case. And the risk isn't necessarily mass epidemics (although that is a possibility), the primary risk is environmental.
Why go to the trouble of trying to create a novel pathogen when there are so many natural ones to work with?
Because artificial pathogens can combine high mortality rate and high infectivity; natural pathogens don't generally have that combination because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous.
The most likely method of creating a bioterror weapon would be to grow a conventional pathogen such as anthrax in the presence of antibiotics to select resistant strains.
How do you think anthrax acquires antibiotics resistance? Most likely through gene transfer from some other organism. It's academic whether you want to call the resulting organism "transgenic" or not. And, from the point of view of the police, this would look the same anyway: lots of petri dishes and bacterial cultures.
Why is it that when Monsanto says they've tested the GM crops to be safe, they are disbelieved on general principles, but when some art professors say THEIR GM bacteria are safe, they must know absolutely what they are talking about?
I think he probably would freely admit that his release of organisms is not very professionally supervised or tested. His point is that he believes that neither is Monsanto's release of genetically modified organisms. And, whether or not he is right, that's something to think about: how do you know whether what Monsanto does is safe?
His work is art and it is intended to stir this kind of controversy and debate, to make you think.
On the other hand, it is also perfectly reasonable for the police
to investigate him when they find his wife dead surrounded by
a bunch of petri dishes with bacterial cultures. If he did his homework, he will be able to prove that what he did was harmless and this will end with the grand jury. If not, he was merely a stupid artist, but that does not change whether the debate he was trying to stir up is valid and important.
which anyone who follows politics knows is code for "Marxist" in much the same way that "liberal" has been replaced with "progressive" in modern usage as the old terms become associated with failed policies, ruined economies and mass graves.
Or, for that matter, the way in which "fascist" has been replaced with "conservative values" or the way "anarchist" and "social Darwinism" have become replaced with "libertarian" in modern usage as the old terms become associated with failed policies, ruined economies and mass graves.
You see, all parts of the political spectrum have been responsible for holocausts, mass murder, human rights violations, and other atrocities.
Seems to me like you and this guy are cut from the same cloth.
I think this is just a symptom of a more general problem - most people don't understand the biology of transgenic food, and ignorance breeds fear and suspicion. There's also the conflation of ideas between transgenic plants and bioterror organisms.
The "conflation" is justified: transgenic methods are one of the primary means of constructing bioterror organisms. Furthermore, even transgenic organisms harmless to human beings, have a significant potential for causing environmental harm (e.g., by creating herbicide-resistant weeds).
That is one of the reasons why any kind of experimentation with transgenic organisms is regulated. In particular, it is necessary to regulate tightly what gets released into the environment. Reputable labs working on improved food crops have to comply with those regulations, and so does everybody else.
it doesn't seem to me like anyone could have much of a case against him.
A lot of work in molecular biology is regulated, so even if he did not intend to create a dangerous organism, he may still have run afoul of health and safety regulations.
Microsoft would wave the licensing fee just to save face against Linux, but that would cripple PalmSource completely.
Yes, and so what? Why should Palm continue to make so much money on their software licenses? Competition and better production methods drive down prices in all markets. In the case of software, prices happen to be driven down to zero--nothing unusual about it. The only question is why it's taking so long.
And in the case of Palm in particular, it's not like the company is investing a lot of money in research--their rate of software innovation is glacial, and they are nearly invisible at scientific conferences. Microsoft makes a far bigger investment in research (both absolute and relative) than Palm.
A corpse in the kitchen with an unknown cause of death and a stack of bacterial cultures ought to be cause for concern for the police and ought to prompt a police investigation. Furthermore, determining whether some genetically engineered bacteria are dangerous or not is far from trivial, so it's not like one can just look at the situation and determine that it is harmless. So, no, I don't think police overreacted in this case. Take away the corpse, and maybe one could say that they overreacted. Even then, dangerous and harmless kinds of experiments are difficult to tell apart, and the question of why this work isn't happening in a lab, with proper documentation and notification, is still valid.
Your brain makes the right assumptions, the assumptions that have saved the butts of the thousands of generations of mammals that preceded you. There are some people who can't perceive certain kinds of visual illusions, and they suffer from brain damage and visual deficits.
Furthermore, those illusions are largely independent of the quality of the images that our eyes send to the brain; "better" eyes don't change the fact that the assumptions the brain makes about the world are good, life-saving assumptions.
But for the less detailed analysis the sensor here has very lousy resolution
That's incorrect. The human eye has extraordinarily high resolution, probably close to what is theoretically possible for an optical system of that size. However, it only gives you that resolution in the fovea.
That's probably because high resolution just isn't needed across the whole visual field, and if the eye were constructed to provide it across the entire visual field, our brains would have to be bigger than our bodies in order to process the information.
Also, the human eye is extraordinarily sensitive, allowing you to come close to perceiving individual photons.
It isn't a very good sensor at all. It is the processing that brings out the great detail and such.
The human eye is an extraordinary sensor. Quality does not just mean having the highest spec along a single dimension, it means making the right engineering tradeoffs. And the human eye does both.
You assume that when Sun says "open source", they mean "Open Source", as in the OSI definition.
I think Sun won't do that. They will either formally put an open source license on the code but keep control of the source through their numerous patents and the proprietary specifications, or they will simply pick a license that makes the source available put imposes restrictions on you that are incompatible with the OSI definition.
And the reason why Sun won't let go of Java is because they know that the instant they do that, they will lose control: I suspect so many people in the Java community are tired of Sun's "leadership" and poor technical decisions that an independent version of Java would take over instantly from Sun's version.
first because it means that no one will start up a competing "openjava", a venture that would almost certainly lead to incompatibilities,
Even though there are attempts at doing that, Sun's licenses prohibit it. If you have looked at Sun's source code or their Java specifications, any work you do on an "OpenJava" is a derivative work. So, the status quo is quite cozy for Sun: they really do not have to worry seriously about open competition because Sun has the legal means to squash such competition should it become a serious competitor.
second because, as the example of the death of xfree86 shows, too much central and absolute control over software by a small group will inevitably anger developers and users alike, leading them to search for an alternative.
You mean like the control Sun is exercising over Java? You see, that's what Sun really is afraid of when they talk about "forking": they are afraid that the developers and users they angered will pick another entity to take control of Java. You wouldn't end up with two incompatible versions of Java, you'd end up with only one, the one that doesn't come from Sun anymore.
Sun has been saying that they will "somehow open source Java" since 1996. Has it happened? No. They changed their mind.
Sun has also been saying that they will "somehow have Java standardized by a standard body" since 1996. Has it happened? No. They changed their mind.
Sun like Java being owned completely by them, and they won't change. What they will do is that they will fiddle with the Java source license a little an declare that it is now "open source", just like they created the "Java community process" and claim that it's an "open process".
That said, I hope java doesn't end up fragmented.
You don't have to worry: Sun isn't going to give up control. They are going to keep Java proprietary, and they are not going to "open source" it in any sense anybody other than they themselves would recognize.
I also hope this isn't an instance of sun trying to save some of their technology from being destroyed as their ship goes down.
No, it isn't an instance of that. Sun doesn't care about "saving some of their technology". It's an instance of trying to appease critics as their ship goes down. But their ship is going down anyway, and when it does, as Sun keeps holding on to ownership of Java, Java will go down with them. Because, if Sun went out of business today, it's the creditors that end up owning Java and dictating what is going to happen with it. Nobody else would be able to make an independent implementation or take over. That's the price you pay for letting Sun ensure "compatibility".
Qt/Embedded is bigger and slower than a properly configured handheld X11 system (except in the world of Troll Tech marketing and their fans).
Keep in mind that X11 used to run fine on X terminals with 1M of memory or workstations with 4M of memory; Qt/Embedded wouldn't even start up on those. You can distribute an entire X11 server and a couple of clients in a few hundred kbytes (the X11 server that ships with handhelds.org is a bit larger, but it is still much smaller than what you run on your desk).
There are some handheld window systems (even some open source ones) that are more compact than X11, but it's not worth giving up compatibility and functionality to squeeze out a little extra space.
I think that's what is holding back adoption of flash based PCs. Screw the expense, if the thing can't have a drive failure, some industries will buy it.
No, what's holding them back is the expense and size. There is no way you can put enough flash into a PC to hold Windows and a decent set of applications.
Embedded PCs use flash drives all the time, with no problems.
Quite possibly in the near future manufacturers will market PDA's not only for office, and email use but for portable auido.
Manufacturers already have, for several years. That was one big selling point of Sony's Clie line. Sony even offers a digital VCR that can record television shows onto memory stick, for your viewing pleasure on your PDA.
If Sun were genuine about making Java "open source", in the usually accepted meaning of the term, Sun would first have to open up the Java specifications. And that would mean dropping compatibility requirements, publishing the Java specifications freely (right now, the Java specifications are owned by Sun and you have to agree to a restrictive license to even access them), and dedicating their patents required for implementing the specifications to the public domain.
Until they do all of that, it doesn't matter what they do with their source code because you will not be able to do those things that people expect to be able to do with open source software: modify it, improve it, remove useless bits, fork it, etc. In particular, the ability to fork software is an essential part of making something open source, and Sun has been unwavering about the fact that they do not want Java forked.
What you see with Sun now is the death throes of a once powerful company. When Sun still coughs up useful bits of code under a true open source license (like OpenOffice), let's use it. But let's not fall for their grab for industry control through Java anymore.
You know how Gnome, KDE, and wxWindows each have their own object system hacks on top of C/C++? And how they are all different and incompatible with each other? Well, C# has a built-in standard for that functionality: a standard object system and a standard way of querying objects about what they are and what they can do. So, reflection is one important capability.
Another one is runtime safety. When you load a shared library into a C or C++ program and call one of its functions, anything can happen: it can corrupt arbitrary data structures in your program and you may not even know it. When you load code dynamically into C#, no matter how buggy it is, it cannot corrupt data that has not been passed to it (unsafe C# code behaves like C/C++, but dynamically loadable code should not be unsafe, and you can enforce that). So, concretely, when you load a plug-in into Gimp# or Apache# and the plugin crashes, you don't have to shut down the application. Runtime safety also prevents buffer overflows and other common security holes.
Yet another is sandboxing. Sandboxing means that you can restrict the operations of sections of code. That means that you can safely run untrusted code, not just potentially buggy code. As an ISP, for example, you can let your customers load modules into Apache# without having to worry about the module from one customer doing something to the module of another customer.
You already mentioned garbage collection.
Those are some of the major benefits of C# (and Java) over C/C++. And they make a big difference. Lack of runtime safety is responsible for most of the application crashes we experience; with runtime safety, applications still have unexpected bugs, but they can usually recover from them. Lack of sandboxing means that people come up with all sort of complex extension methods (e.g., CGI scripts) instead of having a simple, clean interface. Lack of reflection and standard object systems is one of the reasons that makes libraries so wildly incompatible. And, finally, lack of garbage collection is responsible for a huge amount of extra work during library development and for a lot of bugs in C/C++.
The standards are royalty free, however the standards only cover the CLR (the VM/JIT) and C# the language, not the Framework (all the classes that do stuff).
That is misleading. The ECMA C# standard standardizes a significant part of the libraries, far more than, say, the libraries included in the C and C++ standards. All those classes are also available across platforms and all of them are royalty free as well. That means that you can write a lot of libraries (and probably even many applications) in completely standard ECMA C#.
In fact, saying that they are available "royalty free" suggests that someone may have a patent on this stuff but that they allow people to use it; but, so far, nobody has identified any valid patent on the language and libraries defined by ECMA C#. I believe Microsoft has merely stated that it is their intent that people can implement ECMA C# royalty free, but that does not imply that they actually have a valid patent on the ECMA C# standard.