Open-sourcing OS/2 is out of question legally for IBM, as OS/2 contracts with NCR and other companies specifically prohibit this.
They believe that keeping it closed-source will make their ATMs more secure but that's just wrong: Security by obscurity doesn't work, at least not in this way.
I don't think taking drugs is a good choice. Why don't you try changing your thoughts? Essentialy your brain is a graph with nodes and arcs, and if you change some of their patterns you could make suicidal thoughts go away. Not that I suggest it's easy, but why not try it? You can for example try to put some new ideas into your brain and see how it responds, then try to use these new ideas to filter out unwanted thoughts. For example you can start by reading some stuff on ataraxia. Also, problems in the brain can be caused or magnified by bad nutrition or lack of exercise. Don't jump into drugs without trying other cleaner methods, and if you feel you need some chemical to keep you stable why not visit a licensed professional doctor? I don't suggest that doctors know everything or that can help anyone, but what I say is that there are tons of more conventional and potentially safer solutions to try before jumping into mind-altering substances. You could also try reading some books on suicide, learn about what people who attempted it have done to themselves, and perhaps just seeing a few photos of people who attempted suicide may end up changing your mind as you probably wouldn't want to end up like them! And what makes you to believe that you are allowed to commit suicide and kill the many cells that from your body? Cells have a life just like you, and I see no justification in killing them just because a brain has some bad thoughts in it. But even if you have a rational reason for thinking about suicide, why not wait a few years before doing anything? Who knows, the future may be better, so it would probably be stupid to die now and fail to enjoy a better future! I'm not of course in any way a doctor or licensed to offer professional advice, but I just want to give some ideas etc that I hope could help. Before doing anything of course, always talk with a licensed professional.
The article writes about suicides at MIT, so perhaps this study would be of interest. It suggests students do prefer to commit suicide around the exam period.
The article claims the first person who committed suicide posted a suicide note on a blog and then watched the comments as he was going to die. This must really be one of the worst ways to spend one's last minutes: Watching stupid comments on your suicide note. Really sick.
The researchers forgot to mention the obvious applications of a 3D cellphone mouse on the new academic field of teledildonics. Too bad, they just lost a honorary PhD in Multidimensional Advanced Cellular Teledildonics. But other people will surely develop the new science quite soon. It won't be long until discussions such as this become increasingly common in university campuses and boring corporate meetings:
Beep! Beep! Beep!
A: Hey, is that your cellphone?
B: Opps, yeah...
Beep! Beep! Beep!
A: Won't you switch it off?
B: Oh, it's under my.... oh well, under my... er.. er! Wait a min I've to go to the bathroom!
C (on the phone): What's up darling?
B (in the bathroom, on the phone): Don't come again while I am on a meeting plz!!!
It takes two to evolve: environment and species. When the environment changes, the species adapt in a generally uniform way thanks to selection. No surprises, it's simple logic: if I remove all the water from the oceans, we will witness a massive migration of species from water to land, while species unable to develop legs, lungs, etc will die. You don't need to wait to see whether it will happen, because knowing all parameters to the problem you can guess with good probability the end result.
Those unable to understand evolution should write down a genetic algorithm and watch it run. If you change the fitness function or some other parameter, genes not fitting it will be removed from the population. It may take some time, but eventually it will happen. Sometimes I think that schools teaching evolution should do so by making kids understand how an evolution computer simulation works and then letting them change a few parameters and experiment while they learn (oh, and if recent papers suggesting the universe is simulated are true then we may very well be inside such a school simulation).
Evolution is not linear, when I say 'causation' I just mean that speciation comes from adaptation to environment rather than from someone high in the sky playing with tiny creatures on a blue planet. It should be clear to anyone reading Darwin's book that evolution does not cause old species to die (I read the book while a teenager). He got the idea while at Galapagos islands and islands are very good environments to understand the evolutionary processes because it's there that groups are isolated and are under environmental pressure. The pressure of the environment leads to speciation because small groups of individuals find innovative ways to adapt so that they can get a higher share of the available food or escape predators etc. Species die only when they are totally unable to use their environment for their survival. For example: if the oxygen gets lost from our planet probably all species breathing it will die except anaerobic bacteria and those species that can adapt to another breathing pattern. If, however, only 1% of the available oxygen gets lost, then the most species will be able to still live, and the most sensitive of them will probably adapt to become new species. It is the sudden change in environment that causes the death of species. If the change is gradual and smooth, new species arise while old species need not die. Furthermore the environment may be different among continents, so for example in one continent the conditions may be favourable for a new species while in another continent it could be an old species which has the evlutionary advantage.
English is an evolving language not limited by clueless academicians or governments who believe that they can prescribe how language should be used. The people who use the language get to define it.
Virtually any new business problem can be researched, overviewed, found in a highly rated book that describes the topic, one-click on Amazon with over night shipping, and read through the chapter that details how to do what you need to do.
You probably have never been in a scientific consultancy company.
If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal
Wrong logic. It assumes everyone who discovers something wants to publish it, and that everyone who wants to publish thinks that journals is a good place to do it.
Did Perelman send his stuff to a peer reviewed journal? I see no reason why anyone who discovers something new should send their papers to unethical closed subscription-only journals. Open-access journals would be acceptable. But again, for me, just placing the paper on my homepage would be enough, or just archiving to some free academic community (like the one I am currently trying to bootstrap).
But even if one thinks that journals are good places to publish, it does not mean that they will want to publish their discoveries. Mathematicians working for secret intelligence do discover new knowledge which is classified and doesn't get out of the intelligence community for decades (it has happened). And there are people who may do research in their own time and dislike talking to anyone about their findings or just don't care.
The primary problem is that many students are faced with a "please pay $$$ to read this article" by journal publishers. And Athens access requires a password and who wants to remember passwords. I don't think it's so much a problem of preferring uninformed webpages over papers, but preferring freely accessible knowledge over closed knowledge, and most papers being in subscription journals or password-protected sites. Young people are just not accustomed to the whole idea of restricted information. They inherently believe and rightly so that information must flow freely.
a law preventing discounting the price of a book more than 5% off of the publisher's recommended price
What an anticapitalistic law. Suppose there is a small independent bookshop and the owner once made the mistake to carry some books from a publisher listing them at $5000 apiece. After they remain unsold for a decade, the owner finally decides to get rid of them to make some space for new books, and not wanting to throw them away for nothing they decide to sell them at a more reasonable $50 apiece. Bingo, the bookshop owner is now a criminal. A criminal for trying to offer some potentially useful product to society at a reasonable price.
Was that really his own homepage, and was he its only webmaster? What is going to happen to his homepage now that its webmaster is dead? Will it just disappear like its webmaster after the server is left unpaid or unmaintained?
Just as we keep books published by dead poets and other authors, perhaps we (the Internet community) should have a way to preserve webpages of dead people. This is going to be of much more importance as more and more people get creative on the Internet (this is not to say that I agree with the ramblings of his homepage, I speak generally) rather than publishing paperbooks.
I really wonder whether a mentally unstable chessmaster would want to cause their death at the age of 64, as the chessboard has 64 squares... Could it have been just a coincidence?
But the jump from a new breed of dog to man evolving from a single-celled organism is just a bit too much for me, given any time frame
For me, I see no big difference between humans and any other species. An average human is ot much smarter than a monkey (similar language and communication processes etc), has the similar sociality to dogs (group forming, leaders...), and technology similar to that of an ant (an ant nest is not much different than a skyscraper). Not looking into any evolution evidence, for me it is logical to conclude based purely on observation that all these lifeforms somehow are related, most probably by causation (one leads to another).
A young tree does not need its parent to grow. Parent tree may take resources that the young tree could use if both are near each other. In an environment with scarce resources, it may make some evolutionary sense for the parent tree to die after flowering. Not that I like this idea, though.
Metered is bad because it introduces bandwidth into the accounting sheet. It also links probably faulty meters with your pocket, and trust me this is a bad thing.
Unmetered is also a problem because many times it is used as marketing speak for "come into our network and if we don't like you we will kick you out" and the acceptable use is never mathematically defined.
Both of the above introduce human complexities, and there is nothing more unpredictable than human behaviour. You never know when your server may get slashdotted. You never know what your home ISP considers acceptable (they won't tell you because they want to be able to oversell).
There is only one way to remove such complexities and this is to have unmetered service with speed adjustments.
So for example, for a server you get a 100 Mbps unmetered pipe but if you use way too much you get capped to 10 Mbps. You still have service, just a bit slower. For home ISPs you have fast ADSL but if you use way too much you get capped to 64k or 128k. You still have service (way too slow, but you can still ssh and email). Of course these adjustments should be on a per-month basis, and there should be appropriate plans for those who constantly use too much and need the highest speed.
Nobody silences anybody. Any religious figure is free to write a scientific paper, publish it on Nature, and mathematically prove the existence of a Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever.
Managers have an Oracle bias even in small shops
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 1
Even though MySQL can be obtained for free, I have seen many small companies using heavyweight Oracle under Java for no particular reason, just because a clueless PHB thinks that since big companies use Oracle then it must be the best. Hopefully the fact that MySQL and Java are now under the same umbrella will help the greater adoption of open source and free software in the database world.
I was playing with C64. That's where I learnt my first BASIC as well. How old was I? I think I was 3 or 4 or 5 years or something like that. At the peak of my C64 mania I had 3 or 4 C64 machines if I remember well, both brown and white. I still have and occasionally operate one of my brown C64 (yes real hardware, not emulation) with the 1541 floppy drive! And yes it still works great after so many years.
The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats
People must know what they eat.
But the fact that FDA didn't deem it necessary doesn't mean that consumers cannot use the free market to implement voluntary labelling. In fact law is not the only way to implement social rules.
Just organise in consumer societies or coordinate your actions with blogs and wikis and announce your collective decision not to buy food unless it has a label "This food contains cloned parts" or "This food is free of cloned parts". If no food qualifies in the local market buy from overseas, don't buy at all, or buy in very small quantities. If providers don't cooperate, find a few richer members within your community then start a food business or cooperative and make detailed labelling your competitive advantage. You could also form a not-for-profit NGO with the goal of certifying that what labels companies put correspond to reality. Keep a list of companies that cooperate and a blacklist, then buy only from providers who maintain your standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares what's better. People want to use what they love.
They believe that keeping it closed-source will make their ATMs more secure but that's just wrong: Security by obscurity doesn't work, at least not in this way.
Liberating OS/2 would allow osdevs to fix security holes that elite crackers probably already know about
Oh yeah, just like Windows 97 which became 98
I don't think taking drugs is a good choice. Why don't you try changing your thoughts? Essentialy your brain is a graph with nodes and arcs, and if you change some of their patterns you could make suicidal thoughts go away. Not that I suggest it's easy, but why not try it? You can for example try to put some new ideas into your brain and see how it responds, then try to use these new ideas to filter out unwanted thoughts. For example you can start by reading some stuff on ataraxia. Also, problems in the brain can be caused or magnified by bad nutrition or lack of exercise. Don't jump into drugs without trying other cleaner methods, and if you feel you need some chemical to keep you stable why not visit a licensed professional doctor? I don't suggest that doctors know everything or that can help anyone, but what I say is that there are tons of more conventional and potentially safer solutions to try before jumping into mind-altering substances. You could also try reading some books on suicide, learn about what people who attempted it have done to themselves, and perhaps just seeing a few photos of people who attempted suicide may end up changing your mind as you probably wouldn't want to end up like them! And what makes you to believe that you are allowed to commit suicide and kill the many cells that from your body? Cells have a life just like you, and I see no justification in killing them just because a brain has some bad thoughts in it. But even if you have a rational reason for thinking about suicide, why not wait a few years before doing anything? Who knows, the future may be better, so it would probably be stupid to die now and fail to enjoy a better future! I'm not of course in any way a doctor or licensed to offer professional advice, but I just want to give some ideas etc that I hope could help. Before doing anything of course, always talk with a licensed professional.
The article writes about suicides at MIT, so perhaps this study would be of interest. It suggests students do prefer to commit suicide around the exam period.
The article claims the first person who committed suicide posted a suicide note on a blog and then watched the comments as he was going to die. This must really be one of the worst ways to spend one's last minutes: Watching stupid comments on your suicide note. Really sick.
The researchers forgot to mention the obvious applications of a 3D cellphone mouse on the new academic field of teledildonics. Too bad, they just lost a honorary PhD in Multidimensional Advanced Cellular Teledildonics. But other people will surely develop the new science quite soon. It won't be long until discussions such as this become increasingly common in university campuses and boring corporate meetings:
With a normal mouse you may get RSI, but with a cellphone mouse you may get cancer from radiation too. How good!
It takes two to evolve: environment and species. When the environment changes, the species adapt in a generally uniform way thanks to selection. No surprises, it's simple logic: if I remove all the water from the oceans, we will witness a massive migration of species from water to land, while species unable to develop legs, lungs, etc will die. You don't need to wait to see whether it will happen, because knowing all parameters to the problem you can guess with good probability the end result.
Those unable to understand evolution should write down a genetic algorithm and watch it run. If you change the fitness function or some other parameter, genes not fitting it will be removed from the population. It may take some time, but eventually it will happen. Sometimes I think that schools teaching evolution should do so by making kids understand how an evolution computer simulation works and then letting them change a few parameters and experiment while they learn (oh, and if recent papers suggesting the universe is simulated are true then we may very well be inside such a school simulation).
Evolution is not linear, when I say 'causation' I just mean that speciation comes from adaptation to environment rather than from someone high in the sky playing with tiny creatures on a blue planet. It should be clear to anyone reading Darwin's book that evolution does not cause old species to die (I read the book while a teenager). He got the idea while at Galapagos islands and islands are very good environments to understand the evolutionary processes because it's there that groups are isolated and are under environmental pressure. The pressure of the environment leads to speciation because small groups of individuals find innovative ways to adapt so that they can get a higher share of the available food or escape predators etc. Species die only when they are totally unable to use their environment for their survival. For example: if the oxygen gets lost from our planet probably all species breathing it will die except anaerobic bacteria and those species that can adapt to another breathing pattern. If, however, only 1% of the available oxygen gets lost, then the most species will be able to still live, and the most sensitive of them will probably adapt to become new species. It is the sudden change in environment that causes the death of species. If the change is gradual and smooth, new species arise while old species need not die. Furthermore the environment may be different among continents, so for example in one continent the conditions may be favourable for a new species while in another continent it could be an old species which has the evlutionary advantage.
English is an evolving language not limited by clueless academicians or governments who believe that they can prescribe how language should be used. The people who use the language get to define it.
You probably have never been in a scientific consultancy company.
Wrong logic. It assumes everyone who discovers something wants to publish it, and that everyone who wants to publish thinks that journals is a good place to do it.
Did Perelman send his stuff to a peer reviewed journal? I see no reason why anyone who discovers something new should send their papers to unethical closed subscription-only journals. Open-access journals would be acceptable. But again, for me, just placing the paper on my homepage would be enough, or just archiving to some free academic community (like the one I am currently trying to bootstrap).
But even if one thinks that journals are good places to publish, it does not mean that they will want to publish their discoveries. Mathematicians working for secret intelligence do discover new knowledge which is classified and doesn't get out of the intelligence community for decades (it has happened). And there are people who may do research in their own time and dislike talking to anyone about their findings or just don't care.
The primary problem is that many students are faced with a "please pay $$$ to read this article" by journal publishers. And Athens access requires a password and who wants to remember passwords. I don't think it's so much a problem of preferring uninformed webpages over papers, but preferring freely accessible knowledge over closed knowledge, and most papers being in subscription journals or password-protected sites. Young people are just not accustomed to the whole idea of restricted information. They inherently believe and rightly so that information must flow freely.
What an anticapitalistic law. Suppose there is a small independent bookshop and the owner once made the mistake to carry some books from a publisher listing them at $5000 apiece. After they remain unsold for a decade, the owner finally decides to get rid of them to make some space for new books, and not wanting to throw them away for nothing they decide to sell them at a more reasonable $50 apiece. Bingo, the bookshop owner is now a criminal. A criminal for trying to offer some potentially useful product to society at a reasonable price.
Was that really his own homepage, and was he its only webmaster? What is going to happen to his homepage now that its webmaster is dead? Will it just disappear like its webmaster after the server is left unpaid or unmaintained?
Just as we keep books published by dead poets and other authors, perhaps we (the Internet community) should have a way to preserve webpages of dead people. This is going to be of much more importance as more and more people get creative on the Internet (this is not to say that I agree with the ramblings of his homepage, I speak generally) rather than publishing paperbooks.
I really wonder whether a mentally unstable chessmaster would want to cause their death at the age of 64, as the chessboard has 64 squares... Could it have been just a coincidence?
For me, I see no big difference between humans and any other species. An average human is ot much smarter than a monkey (similar language and communication processes etc), has the similar sociality to dogs (group forming, leaders...), and technology similar to that of an ant (an ant nest is not much different than a skyscraper). Not looking into any evolution evidence, for me it is logical to conclude based purely on observation that all these lifeforms somehow are related, most probably by causation (one leads to another).
A young tree does not need its parent to grow. Parent tree may take resources that the young tree could use if both are near each other. In an environment with scarce resources, it may make some evolutionary sense for the parent tree to die after flowering. Not that I like this idea, though.
Metered is bad because it introduces bandwidth into the accounting sheet. It also links probably faulty meters with your pocket, and trust me this is a bad thing.
Unmetered is also a problem because many times it is used as marketing speak for "come into our network and if we don't like you we will kick you out" and the acceptable use is never mathematically defined.
Both of the above introduce human complexities, and there is nothing more unpredictable than human behaviour. You never know when your server may get slashdotted. You never know what your home ISP considers acceptable (they won't tell you because they want to be able to oversell).
There is only one way to remove such complexities and this is to have unmetered service with speed adjustments.
So for example, for a server you get a 100 Mbps unmetered pipe but if you use way too much you get capped to 10 Mbps. You still have service, just a bit slower. For home ISPs you have fast ADSL but if you use way too much you get capped to 64k or 128k. You still have service (way too slow, but you can still ssh and email). Of course these adjustments should be on a per-month basis, and there should be appropriate plans for those who constantly use too much and need the highest speed.
Nobody silences anybody. Any religious figure is free to write a scientific paper, publish it on Nature, and mathematically prove the existence of a Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever.
Even though MySQL can be obtained for free, I have seen many small companies using heavyweight Oracle under Java for no particular reason, just because a clueless PHB thinks that since big companies use Oracle then it must be the best. Hopefully the fact that MySQL and Java are now under the same umbrella will help the greater adoption of open source and free software in the database world.
I was playing with C64. That's where I learnt my first BASIC as well. How old was I? I think I was 3 or 4 or 5 years or something like that. At the peak of my C64 mania I had 3 or 4 C64 machines if I remember well, both brown and white. I still have and occasionally operate one of my brown C64 (yes real hardware, not emulation) with the 1541 floppy drive! And yes it still works great after so many years.
People must know what they eat.
But the fact that FDA didn't deem it necessary doesn't mean that consumers cannot use the free market to implement voluntary labelling. In fact law is not the only way to implement social rules.
Just organise in consumer societies or coordinate your actions with blogs and wikis and announce your collective decision not to buy food unless it has a label "This food contains cloned parts" or "This food is free of cloned parts". If no food qualifies in the local market buy from overseas, don't buy at all, or buy in very small quantities. If providers don't cooperate, find a few richer members within your community then start a food business or cooperative and make detailed labelling your competitive advantage. You could also form a not-for-profit NGO with the goal of certifying that what labels companies put correspond to reality. Keep a list of companies that cooperate and a blacklist, then buy only from providers who maintain your standards.