I always wanted to register edu.edu and start a school to educate people on their education options. Meta-education is the perfect net.cause!
Yes, I realize it's taken. But that happened between this posting and your reading. Someone clearly just read my post and registered it to make millions off my idea. Luckily, I patented it first.
Is that a joke? I truly think it is (given your username and sig). But it got moderated up as "insightful", so I have to reply.
Surely there are more factors to this decision than launch cost and weight such as skills, experience, personality/team dynamics (yes, seriously). By your logic, the best thing to send up wouldn't be women and asians, but small monkeys. Or cats. Sea monkeys. Oh, wait, since we've made the jump from people to "lower" animals, send some tulips. Or some mold. Or perhaps a small piece of linoleum. Or air. Or vacuum! Oh, wait, it's already up there.:) Why send a rocket at all?
Sure, we have some prejudices in NASA and government agencies. Maybe even more than elsewhere. But I think we're moving in the right direction, and I don't think this is an example.
-Puk
p.s. If it was a joke, sorry about taking it seriously.;)
Is that a joke? I truly think it is (given your username and sig). But it got moderated up as "insightful", so I have to reply.
Surely there are more factors to this decision than launch cost and weight such as skills, experience, personality/team dynamics (yes, seriously). By your logic, the best thing to send up wouldn't be women and asians, but small monkeys. Or cats. Sea urchins. Oh, wait, since we've made the jump from people to "lower" animals, send some tulips. Or some mold. Or perhaps a small piece of linoleum. Or air. Or vacuum! Oh, wait, it's already up there.:) Why send a rocket at all?
Sure, we have some prejudices in NASA and government agencies. Maybe even more than elsewhere. But I think we're moving in the right direction, and I don't think this is an example.
-Puk
p.s. If it was a joke, sorry about taking it seriously.;)
I'd thought that Yahoo learned their lesson with all those French and German lawsuits about Nazi memorabilia. Now they're selling pornography?
<FLAME>
I thought they'd learned their lesson with that whole freedom thing! Now they're allowing some other thing on the net which doesn't fit in with my own personal morals and political agenda? How dare anyone not agree with me and choose to live their life in some other fashion?!
</FLAME>
This type of "what works in business and what people want is wrong, and freedom is good as long as it doesn't allow people to follow principles other than my own" attitue genuinely scares me.
Just a minor point -- kilogram is not a unit of weight, it's a unit of mass. Weight is a force, and is measured in Newtons (in SI) and so is dependent on gravity.
Interestingly, Webster's claims that a pound is "any of various units of mass and weight", which makes it ambiguous. It also defines it in terms of kilograms, making it a mass. OTOH, a common measure of pressure is pounds per square inch, implying that pounds measure force. I assume that 1 pound of mass weights 1 pound at 1 g.:)
Last March I traveled to Sri Lanka to visit the well-known futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke... During the three days I visited, Clarke was juggling a number of projects he was reviewing the galleys of his forthcoming novel (The Hammer of God, due this summer).
and
The Hammer of God by Arthur Charles Clarke, Paperback reprint edition, November 1994
This is a really great point, and I'm not contradicting it at all here.
Note that the scenario where the drug costs too much and people can't afford it until the patent runs out is still quite likely. However, this is going to happen no matter what, because, as the article points out, this is just a small part of the cancer-curing problem. Some pharmaceuticals company will have to shell out the dough and spend the time to create an actual drug to cure cancer, as well as go through clinical trials, FDA approval, etc. They are the ones who will cause this scenario, and its an open debate whether or not this is fair.
However, contributing to an academic effort to generate more public information about cancer does not benefit any particular pharmaceuticals company, and only brings the day when an affordable cure for cancer is available closer. So don't let this article stop you.
That's all very good and well, but you didn't address his point at all. He's talking about the scenario where this distributed project does find the cure now, and, since it is owned by a for-profit organization and gets patented, no one can afford to buy that cure (name-brand "Advil") until the patent runs out and any company can produce it ("Motrin IB", or any other generic "ibuprofin" product).
So it doesn't matter that it will be calculable by anyone within 20 years -- the people who did this first and found it first still have the rights to it, and plenty of people couldn't afford it in the meantime.
If you're interested in extreme programming, you might want to read "Planning Extreme Programming", reviewed in this SlashDot article, oh, about 4 hours ago.
Actually, the topics are different, but I find it funny that they posted two articles using "extreme programming" to mean different things within a few hours of each other.
Actually, this was covered in a book I read (Wu's algorithm), and I'm 90% sure that book was written by good ole Michael Abrash. I even remember where I was sitting while I read that chapter.
You're right that this article isn't really a followup to the on OpenSSH, but I wouldn't say that it has "nothing to do with it". If the protocol is, and remains official and public from the IETF under the name "SSH", then this gives a lot of weight to OpenSSH if they choose to continue to use their own name. After all, it is an "open" implementation of the "SSH" protocol, which it derives from -- a public standard from the IETF.
The second part that you mention is also related to this issue, so we'll have to wait and see what they decide (and how it affects OpenSSH, if we care.)
Just out of curiosity, who are you disagreeing with? It looks like you agree with the original comment that the poster should be taking the time to use a spelling and/or grammar checker, or at least proofread his work.
Or are you disagreeing with his opinion about handhelds because he worded it poorly? That's silly, and I don't think it's what you're doing. I don't see the disagreement.
Well, regardless, maybe this will be my first (0; Offtopic) post. Whee.:)
Now, instead of getting hit because someone is having phonesex with their SO while driving, I'll get hit because they're watching LIVE STREAMING PORN from their car.
Next step: In-car virtual reality. My neck hurts already.
That's patently untrue. If there is a bug in the code, and a method of access, there may well be a way for people to affect the software without the keys. "Your use of the old, broken, sendmail source is fine, as long as no one has the password to your system." Danger.
I don't usually consider myself an open source zealot, although I'm generally in favor of it. However, it seems like this case could be used as a great argument for it -- or at least, an illustration of where it might be good or bad.
First of all, as has been mentioned, the article says the the source code, not the security codes, was stolen. If, however, the source code was open to public scrutiny, any holes which the thieves might make use of would more likely have been found by now. Since everyone could get the source, there would be no advantage to stealing it.
Mind you, there's a flip side to this. If the source code was open, it would be easier for Random Joe l33t, if he managed to find a security hole first, to break in -- since he didn't have to go through the trouble to steal the source in the first case. Which brings us back to square one -- security through obscurity.
This doesn't completely answer your question, but I found this quote in this article, linked from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, which was linked to above by some kind soul.
The Hubble Space Telescope reigns supreme for taking crisp photographs of faint objects, but ground-based optical interferometers can see, for the brightest stars, details 100 times finer than Hubble can.
I guess this means that hubble is better only at getting faint objects (which are, perhaps, nearly completely filtered out by our atmosphere, or at least enough to make interferometry ineffective. Meanwhile, bright objects gain enough resolution from these techniques to have surpassed what hubble has gained in super-atmospheric location.
Next step -- large-mirrored space-bound telescopes using interferometry techniques. If they don't cut NASA's budget too much.:)
Well, you may be right that it's not very new -- several groups have been working on similar things. However, the companies you mention are fiber optic companies -- a completely different animal.
Further, they do two different things. Global Crossing is building nation- and world-wide fiber optic networks, and selling services on them. Lucent is an equipment manufacturer and vendor for fiber optics technology.
Neither of them has anything (well, Lucent might be researching it, but not that I've heard) to do with free-space optics which is what this article is about -- shooting lasers through the air, instead of through fiber.
I'm confused. Did they update this story? You say:
their revenue would be up $739,000,000 over last year. And up $1,600,000,000 from 1998.
and you correct it. But to me the story says:
If they just took that generous offer, then... their revenue would only be down $111,000,000 from last year. And that would have been $750,000,000 more than they made in 1998.
Great. You just described mobile spy/surveillance equipment. Easy to infect interesting regions (your enemies' houses, lawns, neighborhoods) with. Now you just have a data collection problem. I wonder if government agencies already have these.
But it reminds me of the scene in The 5th Element where they're using a "bug-mounted bug" to monitor the president, and he smacks it with his shoe. I'll just have to start wearing bigger shoes.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry, this is just the paranoid in me saying "hi".
Chances are this will be my first Score:0 post, but I just found it funny that you made a mistake (a perfectly understandable one, mind you), and then corrected yourself in a reply, and got modded up for both.:) Fun with slashdot.
First of all, I think that's a very good (related) point about buying the right to copy it.
This trend strikes me as bizarre. We've seen stories about this before -- if you remember http://slashdot.org/yro/00/12/20/1337235.shtml, about paying the tax on recordable media in Canada, this is just a logical extension.
What's strange and scary is that I see no boundary in site. Since when do you have to pay to compensate for crimes you _might_ be able to commit using a technology? Floppy disks have been around for piracy for _years_. I was copying games on floppies using my disk drive on my Apple 2 in the early- to mid-80s. Same goes for audio tapes. What's new that suddently requires a tax? Not copyrights. Not digital media.
Did you realize that you can use just about anything to commit a crime? Soon, the recording industry will be taxing my kitchen knives since I might use them to stab somebody and deprive the industry of the income from the victim's potential future purchases. Scary.
This strikes me as almost a deranged form of insurance. Companies are trying to compensate for their percieved loss due to piracy by spreading the cost over the legitimate as well as illegitimate users. However, unlike life insurance, it's obligatory insurance against a _deliberate_, _illegal_ act. This is undoubtably a poor analogy, but when you buy a can of spraypaint, do you have to pay the insurance on all the buildings on your block because you might use it to tag someone's garage? Undoubtably this paragraph is a flawed argument, and someone will hopefully respond to this and point out what I'm missing -- please do.
However, I can't see where this is going to end, and I don't like where it looks like it's heading.
Slashdot Mirror
I always wanted to register edu.edu and start a school to educate people on their education options. Meta-education is the perfect net.cause!
Yes, I realize it's taken. But that happened between this posting and your reading. Someone clearly just read my post and registered it to make millions off my idea. Luckily, I patented it first.
-Puk
Is that a joke? I truly think it is (given your username and sig). But it got moderated up as "insightful", so I have to reply.
:) Why send a rocket at all?
;)
Surely there are more factors to this decision than launch cost and weight such as skills, experience, personality/team dynamics (yes, seriously). By your logic, the best thing to send up wouldn't be women and asians, but small monkeys. Or cats. Sea monkeys. Oh, wait, since we've made the jump from people to "lower" animals, send some tulips. Or some mold. Or perhaps a small piece of linoleum. Or air. Or vacuum! Oh, wait, it's already up there.
Sure, we have some prejudices in NASA and government agencies. Maybe even more than elsewhere. But I think we're moving in the right direction, and I don't think this is an example.
-Puk
p.s. If it was a joke, sorry about taking it seriously.
Is that a joke? I truly think it is (given your username and sig). But it got moderated up as "insightful", so I have to reply.
:) Why send a rocket at all?
;)
Surely there are more factors to this decision than launch cost and weight such as skills, experience, personality/team dynamics (yes, seriously). By your logic, the best thing to send up wouldn't be women and asians, but small monkeys. Or cats. Sea urchins. Oh, wait, since we've made the jump from people to "lower" animals, send some tulips. Or some mold. Or perhaps a small piece of linoleum. Or air. Or vacuum! Oh, wait, it's already up there.
Sure, we have some prejudices in NASA and government agencies. Maybe even more than elsewhere. But I think we're moving in the right direction, and I don't think this is an example.
-Puk
p.s. If it was a joke, sorry about taking it seriously.
I'd thought that Yahoo learned their lesson with all those French and German lawsuits about Nazi memorabilia. Now they're selling pornography?
<FLAME>
I thought they'd learned their lesson with that whole freedom thing! Now they're allowing some other thing on the net which doesn't fit in with my own personal morals and political agenda? How dare anyone not agree with me and choose to live their life in some other fashion?!
</FLAME>
This type of "what works in business and what people want is wrong, and freedom is good as long as it doesn't allow people to follow principles other than my own" attitue genuinely scares me.
-Puk
I had my first credit card when I was 17 or so. Porn on!
-Puk
p.s. No, it's not that hard to get pr0n when you're underage, even without Yahoo.
Oh, and to make matters worse, the announcement they link to doesn't say what it is, either. Whee.
-Bitter Puk
In posts like this (X 1.0 released! X goes beta!), please mention what X (in this case, Bonobo) is.
Thanks.
-Puk
Just a minor point -- kilogram is not a unit of weight, it's a unit of mass. Weight is a force, and is measured in Newtons (in SI) and so is dependent on gravity.
:)
Interestingly, Webster's claims that a pound is "any of various units of mass and weight", which makes it ambiguous. It also defines it in terms of kilograms, making it a mass. OTOH, a common measure of pressure is pounds per square inch, implying that pounds measure force. I assume that 1 pound of mass weights 1 pound at 1 g.
-Puk
I'm slightly confused.
Last March I traveled to Sri Lanka to visit the well-known futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke... During the three days I visited, Clarke was juggling a number of projects he was reviewing the galleys of his forthcoming novel (The Hammer of God, due this summer).
and
The Hammer of God by Arthur Charles Clarke, Paperback reprint edition, November 1994
What am I missing?
-Puk
This is a really great point, and I'm not contradicting it at all here.
Note that the scenario where the drug costs too much and people can't afford it until the patent runs out is still quite likely. However, this is going to happen no matter what, because, as the article points out, this is just a small part of the cancer-curing problem. Some pharmaceuticals company will have to shell out the dough and spend the time to create an actual drug to cure cancer, as well as go through clinical trials, FDA approval, etc. They are the ones who will cause this scenario, and its an open debate whether or not this is fair.
However, contributing to an academic effort to generate more public information about cancer does not benefit any particular pharmaceuticals company, and only brings the day when an affordable cure for cancer is available closer. So don't let this article stop you.
-Puk
That's all very good and well, but you didn't address his point at all. He's talking about the scenario where this distributed project does find the cure now, and, since it is owned by a for-profit organization and gets patented, no one can afford to buy that cure (name-brand "Advil") until the patent runs out and any company can produce it ("Motrin IB", or any other generic "ibuprofin" product).
So it doesn't matter that it will be calculable by anyone within 20 years -- the people who did this first and found it first still have the rights to it, and plenty of people couldn't afford it in the meantime.
-Puk
If you're interested in extreme programming, you might want to read "Planning Extreme Programming", reviewed in this SlashDot article, oh, about 4 hours ago.
Actually, the topics are different, but I find it funny that they posted two articles using "extreme programming" to mean different things within a few hours of each other.
-Puk
Actually, this was covered in a book I read (Wu's algorithm), and I'm 90% sure that book was written by good ole Michael Abrash. I even remember where I was sitting while I read that chapter.
;)
-Puk
p.s. It wasn't a chair.
You're right that this article isn't really a followup to the on OpenSSH, but I wouldn't say that it has "nothing to do with it". If the protocol is, and remains official and public from the IETF under the name "SSH", then this gives a lot of weight to OpenSSH if they choose to continue to use their own name. After all, it is an "open" implementation of the "SSH" protocol, which it derives from -- a public standard from the IETF.
:)
The second part that you mention is also related to this issue, so we'll have to wait and see what they decide (and how it affects OpenSSH, if we care.)
And yes, they got their ln backwards.
-Puk
I respectfully disagree.
:)
Just out of curiosity, who are you disagreeing with? It looks like you agree with the original comment that the poster should be taking the time to use a spelling and/or grammar checker, or at least proofread his work.
Or are you disagreeing with his opinion about handhelds because he worded it poorly? That's silly, and I don't think it's what you're doing. I don't see the disagreement.
Well, regardless, maybe this will be my first (0; Offtopic) post. Whee.
-Puk
Now, instead of getting hit because someone is having phonesex with their SO while driving, I'll get hit because they're watching LIVE STREAMING PORN from their car.
Next step: In-car virtual reality. My neck hurts already.
-Puk
I love how that got moderated up as "Informative". Don't get me wrong, it's funny as hell. But I think they missed the joke. :)
-Puk
That's patently untrue. If there is a bug in the code, and a method of access, there may well be a way for people to affect the software without the keys. "Your use of the old, broken, sendmail source is fine, as long as no one has the password to your system." Danger.
-Puk
I don't usually consider myself an open source zealot, although I'm generally in favor of it. However, it seems like this case could be used as a great argument for it -- or at least, an illustration of where it might be good or bad.
First of all, as has been mentioned, the article says the the source code, not the security codes, was stolen. If, however, the source code was open to public scrutiny, any holes which the thieves might make use of would more likely have been found by now. Since everyone could get the source, there would be no advantage to stealing it.
Mind you, there's a flip side to this. If the source code was open, it would be easier for Random Joe l33t, if he managed to find a security hole first, to break in -- since he didn't have to go through the trouble to steal the source in the first case. Which brings us back to square one -- security through obscurity.
I don't have an answer to this -- just a thought.
-Puk
The Hubble Space Telescope reigns supreme for taking crisp photographs of faint objects, but ground-based optical interferometers can see, for the brightest stars, details 100 times finer than Hubble can.
I guess this means that hubble is better only at getting faint objects (which are, perhaps, nearly completely filtered out by our atmosphere, or at least enough to make interferometry ineffective. Meanwhile, bright objects gain enough resolution from these techniques to have surpassed what hubble has gained in super-atmospheric location.
Next step -- large-mirrored space-bound telescopes using interferometry techniques. If they don't cut NASA's budget too much. :)
-Puk
Well, you may be right that it's not very new -- several groups have been working on similar things. However, the companies you mention are fiber optic companies -- a completely different animal.
Further, they do two different things. Global Crossing is building nation- and world-wide fiber optic networks, and selling services on them. Lucent is an equipment manufacturer and vendor for fiber optics technology.
Neither of them has anything (well, Lucent might be researching it, but not that I've heard) to do with free-space optics which is what this article is about -- shooting lasers through the air, instead of through fiber.
-Puk
their revenue would be up $739,000,000 over last year. And up $1,600,000,000 from 1998.
and you correct it. But to me the story says:
If they just took that generous offer, then ... their revenue would only be down $111,000,000 from last year. And that would have been $750,000,000 more than they made in 1998.
What am I missing?
-Puk
Great. You just described mobile spy/surveillance equipment. Easy to infect interesting regions (your enemies' houses, lawns, neighborhoods) with. Now you just have a data collection problem. I wonder if government agencies already have these.
But it reminds me of the scene in The 5th Element where they're using a "bug-mounted bug" to monitor the president, and he smacks it with his shoe. I'll just have to start wearing bigger shoes.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry, this is just the paranoid in me saying "hi".
Chances are this will be my first Score:0 post, but I just found it funny that you made a mistake (a perfectly understandable one, mind you), and then corrected yourself in a reply, and got modded up for both. :) Fun with slashdot.
-Puk
First of all, I think that's a very good (related) point about buying the right to copy it.
This trend strikes me as bizarre. We've seen stories about this before -- if you remember http://slashdot.org/yro/00/12/20/1337235.shtml, about paying the tax on recordable media in Canada, this is just a logical extension.
What's strange and scary is that I see no boundary in site. Since when do you have to pay to compensate for crimes you _might_ be able to commit using a technology? Floppy disks have been around for piracy for _years_. I was copying games on floppies using my disk drive on my Apple 2 in the early- to mid-80s. Same goes for audio tapes. What's new that suddently requires a tax? Not copyrights. Not digital media.
Did you realize that you can use just about anything to commit a crime? Soon, the recording industry will be taxing my kitchen knives since I might use them to stab somebody and deprive the industry of the income from the victim's potential future purchases. Scary.
This strikes me as almost a deranged form of insurance. Companies are trying to compensate for their percieved loss due to piracy by spreading the cost over the legitimate as well as illegitimate users. However, unlike life insurance, it's obligatory insurance against a _deliberate_, _illegal_ act. This is undoubtably a poor analogy, but when you buy a can of spraypaint, do you have to pay the insurance on all the buildings on your block because you might use it to tag someone's garage? Undoubtably this paragraph is a flawed argument, and someone will hopefully respond to this and point out what I'm missing -- please do.
However, I can't see where this is going to end, and I don't like where it looks like it's heading.
-Puk