I'm strongly opposed to software patents, but this statement just makes no sense to me. Proofs are discovered. Algorithms are invented, surely?
His statement is philosophically supportable, if that's what you are asking. There are both theological and philosophical systems where ideas are considered to be something with an independent and real existence of their own; they exist independently of us.
I think the notion that ideas are either created or destroyed by individuals would be pretty well impossible under such a system (unless ideas are considered to be created by an omniscient supreme being). Similarly, a conjunction of several ideas (an algorithm, or even just a machine design) couldn't really be considered to be created by us, I think.
You can argue whether "creation" and "invention" of ideas is really the same thing, of course. And I think that's the key; I suspect that if you treat them the same, nothing could really be considered patentable. So at the end of the day, the notion of "invention" might be totally arbitrary.
What he did for him is a little cloudy but indications are he was one of Saddam's enforcers, in other words he either did wet work stamping out Saddam's enemies or arranged to have it done, especially in Britain and Europe.
No, no, bad joke pal! Next you'll be trying to tell us that Vladimir Putin was a KGB enforcer.
Its a common fact that people really don't care about strangers, but this shirade of caring when the opportunity arises makes me want to puke.
Maybe you're right. I definitely agree that people aren't kind to each other as often as they ought to be. At the same time, I'd like to think of this as a case of people being spurred on to do something they ought to always do, rather than ugly hypocrisy. Maybe we learn from stuff like this. Wishful thinking, I know.
Eventually, he did stop, and we'll see if Stewart is the bigger man when he has O'Reilly on his show.
Of course he will. Badmouthing people isn't very funny.
(and I don't think the perverse pleasure O'Reilly's fanboys get from his bullying style qualifies as "comedy," even though I'm sure they sometimes laugh...)
However (from the website), "The Darwin Awards honor those who improve our gene pool... by removing themselves from it." (www.darwinawards.com). I suppose it gets into whether you think 'being virtuous or smart' are improvements to the gene pool.
No. It just illustrates that Social Darwinism and human eugenics are sort of stupid ideas.
I think the Darwin Awards are really funny. On the other hand, I think the post I was responding to and my response were actually useful in highlighting one of the problems with social darwinism, which the Darwin Awards tacitly endorses. (without giving it any thought, I'm sure)
What goes on in our society doesn't follow any sort of evolutionary principle, and it's a mistake to think that it will lead to an improved gene pool or even an improved society, no matter what criteria you use for "improvement." The post I responded to was a good, albeit indirect, illustration of this. A whole lot of healthy, brave, smart people get killed off before they get a chance to reproduce.
Scaled Composite built SpaceShip One but the spacecraft is not owned by them, it is payed for and owned by American Mojave Aerospace Ventures, which is owned by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen.
And with the deal announced a day or two ago re: "Virgin Galactic" you can bet Paul Allen has seen a nice return on his investment. Or at least, the odds of such a return have improved dramatically.
It's not that we don't know how to create a binary api with padding structures out, and offering up new functions, it's the fact that because we have the source to all of our drivers, we do not have to.
This is really circular nonsense thinking.
1. Some people can't make binary drivers because there's no "binary api" (he meant ABI?), but... 2. We don't need a "binary api," we have the source to "all our drivers"
Well duh. You have the source to "all your drivers" because the vast majority of people who would like to distribute binary drivers have given up on Linux. Congratulations on that.
Incidentally, props to the Sun guy for having the balls to make his blog open to public comment. The Linux guy seems to have his setup as read-only. Loser.
Don't tell me to send in dumps and patches, mainline means "this does not NEED debugging and is safe to use", period
Of course, a mainline kernel won't give you a kernel dump, either...
Re:"Darwin Awards" editorial comment
on
NYT On Flying Cars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think I know what the editor was trying to say by commenting that several of these inventors have "achieved Darwin Awards" but... c'mon, it's the wrong usage of the term.
Far from removing the bad from the gene pool, the deaths of the people who've tried this and failed (well, *really* failed) have removed physicists who were inventive enough to try something new, were financially successful enough to purchase the needed equipment, and cared enough to try it. Maybe their *idea* achieved a Darwin Award but, people like these?
Being virtuous or smart are not necessarily survival traits.
Interesting. The thing that sort of sets those people apart from Tipper Gore is that Tipper Gore and her friends had a plan... though I guess I see your point. A couple of minor democratic players have recently had an interest in censorship. Odd coincidence that they should be a couple of the least liked, too, even by their own party. Go figure.
They should start a nonprofit or something, "Ugly People for Censorship."
I always thought the v chip sounded like a silly and expensive waste of money, rather than a threat to liberty. I didn't study it very thoroughly though.
Democrats are also notoriously pro-censorship (its for the children).
Really? The recent FCC hubub re:Janet Jackson seems to come from the republican side.
I think your statement would have been a lot more valid back in the day, when the democrats were strong in the south, since the south seems to be the source of all things censorship (okay, MOST). With the GOP being both very southern and very Christian lately, I imagine most censorship is going to come from that side.
I'm trying to think of some post-Tipper Gore-era democrats who were strongly pro-censorship and I can't.
this guy's well thought our responses are a clear indication of WHY he will not be invited to the debates. George Kerry, and John Bush wouldn't have a clue how to respond to thoughtful answers.
Are you kidding? Kerry and Bush could spend about 10 minutes of prep time before the debates memorizing the worst-case scenarios for this candidate's views. That's about all it would take.
Sort of an interesting comparison. O'Reilly brings important guests on his show and behaves like a windbag, interrupting them and not allowing anyone he disagrees with to get their point across. Springer brings useless guests on his show and lets them do what ridiculous people will inevitably do, with little moderation.
One could go back and watch their actual performances, since they've both done the news. Failing that, I sort of suspect Springer was better at it.
There is a parable about finding the truth, which says (super short version), ask a friend, then ask an enemy. You get both sides of the story, and you can figure out roughly what happened.
Which is a fallacy of course. Garbage in, garbage out. You might learn something about the people who relay the story, I suppose.
I think the founding fathers were overly optimistic in this respect: I doubt they would have believed that a news station with such a viscious and pronounced bias could gather the market share it has.
Nonsense. The proportion of highly inflammatory editorial or opinion writing to "news" reporting was much, much higher during the revolutionary period than it is now. Having a very large group of reporters around the country, around the world, dedicated to just reporting on what they see with no "bias" would have seemed quite alien to them.
Okay, I agree that the notion of a single, large corporation cranking out news, biased or unbiased, would have probably seemed equally alien to them.
If you build any house less than 2000 SQ. FT. these days you wouldn't find a buyer.
That's certainly not true in California, land of the tiny houses. Which is a happy coincidence since that's one place where this kind of conservation might have some popular interest, too.
They know what needs to change, and there is a plan to get from here to there over the next year, including a new in-house white-box security testing team. In the mean time, we are standing around with our pants down.
The thing that keeps me awake nights is: What happens if some disgruntled ex-employee (there are two floating around out there) decides to seek vengeance against us by targetting us in an extortion scheme?
The only "quick fix" in that scenario is to implement some kind of screening of incoming HTTP requests at the edge of the network, or perhaps on the web servers, to catch malformed requests. Definitely not a perfect solution, but still, it might save you until things are fixed.
1) CPU speed: The CPU in a Sparc IPX is slow. We're talking a MicroSPARC at 40MHz. Even running basic applications in a shell, it feels like slogging through mud.
Then there's something wrong. Either you're running a poorly supported framebuffer, or you're running Linux. Neither one is going to give you very good results on that hardware.
That's my experience, anyway. Solaris 9 runs much faster than Linux, and a bit faster than OpenBSD, on my 70MHz Sparc 5. But adding a wacky framebuffer will hose shell responsiveness more than anything.
Slashdot Mirror
His statement is philosophically supportable, if that's what you are asking. There are both theological and philosophical systems where ideas are considered to be something with an independent and real existence of their own; they exist independently of us.
I think the notion that ideas are either created or destroyed by individuals would be pretty well impossible under such a system (unless ideas are considered to be created by an omniscient supreme being). Similarly, a conjunction of several ideas (an algorithm, or even just a machine design) couldn't really be considered to be created by us, I think.
You can argue whether "creation" and "invention" of ideas is really the same thing, of course. And I think that's the key; I suspect that if you treat them the same, nothing could really be considered patentable. So at the end of the day, the notion of "invention" might be totally arbitrary.
I dunno.
No, no, bad joke pal! Next you'll be trying to tell us that Vladimir Putin was a KGB enforcer.
Oh, wait...
Maybe you're right. I definitely agree that people aren't kind to each other as often as they ought to be. At the same time, I'd like to think of this as a case of people being spurred on to do something they ought to always do, rather than ugly hypocrisy. Maybe we learn from stuff like this. Wishful thinking, I know.
Of course he will. Badmouthing people isn't very funny.
(and I don't think the perverse pleasure O'Reilly's fanboys get from his bullying style qualifies as "comedy," even though I'm sure they sometimes laugh...)
No. It just illustrates that Social Darwinism and human eugenics are sort of stupid ideas.
I think the Darwin Awards are really funny. On the other hand, I think the post I was responding to and my response were actually useful in highlighting one of the problems with social darwinism, which the Darwin Awards tacitly endorses. (without giving it any thought, I'm sure)
What goes on in our society doesn't follow any sort of evolutionary principle, and it's a mistake to think that it will lead to an improved gene pool or even an improved society, no matter what criteria you use for "improvement." The post I responded to was a good, albeit indirect, illustration of this. A whole lot of healthy, brave, smart people get killed off before they get a chance to reproduce.
Blah blah blah, I could go on and on...
Yes.
I thought the seventies were the bush years.
And with the deal announced a day or two ago re: "Virgin Galactic" you can bet Paul Allen has seen a nice return on his investment. Or at least, the odds of such a return have improved dramatically.
This is really circular nonsense thinking.
1. Some people can't make binary drivers because there's no "binary api" (he meant ABI?), but...
2. We don't need a "binary api," we have the source to "all our drivers"
Well duh. You have the source to "all your drivers" because the vast majority of people who would like to distribute binary drivers have given up on Linux. Congratulations on that.
Incidentally, props to the Sun guy for having the balls to make his blog open to public comment. The Linux guy seems to have his setup as read-only. Loser.
Of course, a mainline kernel won't give you a kernel dump, either...
Being virtuous or smart are not necessarily survival traits.
Nitpick: Gasoline is carcinogenic.
I'm sorry, you don't get to use witticisms like "RTFM" while defending something something as fundamentally idiotic as:
The mind shudders at what the less "simple" ways of doing it must look like.
Interesting. The thing that sort of sets those people apart from Tipper Gore is that Tipper Gore and her friends had a plan... though I guess I see your point. A couple of minor democratic players have recently had an interest in censorship. Odd coincidence that they should be a couple of the least liked, too, even by their own party. Go figure.
They should start a nonprofit or something, "Ugly People for Censorship."
I always thought the v chip sounded like a silly and expensive waste of money, rather than a threat to liberty. I didn't study it very thoroughly though.
Really? The recent FCC hubub re:Janet Jackson seems to come from the republican side.
I think your statement would have been a lot more valid back in the day, when the democrats were strong in the south, since the south seems to be the source of all things censorship (okay, MOST). With the GOP being both very southern and very Christian lately, I imagine most censorship is going to come from that side.
I'm trying to think of some post-Tipper Gore-era democrats who were strongly pro-censorship and I can't.
If I were POTUS I'd never leave the house!
After the current "tort reform" ideas are passed into law, they certainly will be.
Are you kidding? Kerry and Bush could spend about 10 minutes of prep time before the debates memorizing the worst-case scenarios for this candidate's views. That's about all it would take.
And prepare to have whatever you report dismissed as "biased reporting."
Sort of an interesting comparison. O'Reilly brings important guests on his show and behaves like a windbag, interrupting them and not allowing anyone he disagrees with to get their point across. Springer brings useless guests on his show and lets them do what ridiculous people will inevitably do, with little moderation.
One could go back and watch their actual performances, since they've both done the news. Failing that, I sort of suspect Springer was better at it.
Which is a fallacy of course. Garbage in, garbage out. You might learn something about the people who relay the story, I suppose.
Watch Rashomon.
Nonsense. The proportion of highly inflammatory editorial or opinion writing to "news" reporting was much, much higher during the revolutionary period than it is now. Having a very large group of reporters around the country, around the world, dedicated to just reporting on what they see with no "bias" would have seemed quite alien to them.
Okay, I agree that the notion of a single, large corporation cranking out news, biased or unbiased, would have probably seemed equally alien to them.
That's certainly not true in California, land of the tiny houses. Which is a happy coincidence since that's one place where this kind of conservation might have some popular interest, too.
The only "quick fix" in that scenario is to implement some kind of screening of incoming HTTP requests at the edge of the network, or perhaps on the web servers, to catch malformed requests. Definitely not a perfect solution, but still, it might save you until things are fixed.
Then there's something wrong. Either you're running a poorly supported framebuffer, or you're running Linux. Neither one is going to give you very good results on that hardware.
That's my experience, anyway. Solaris 9 runs much faster than Linux, and a bit faster than OpenBSD, on my 70MHz Sparc 5. But adding a wacky framebuffer will hose shell responsiveness more than anything.