But these questions are being asked. And more importantly they are not being asked by 'global warming is a hoax' crowd because they don't believe that global warming even exists, despite the overwhelming scientific data that shows that it does.
If it is real, is it permanent and not just an earth/solar cycle?
According to NOAA and NASA data, the Earth's average surface temperature has increased by about 1.2 to 1.4F since 1900. The warmest global average temperatures on record have all occurred within the past 15 years, with the warmest two years being 1998 and 2005. Most of the warming in recent decades is likely the result of human activities.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)
If greenhouse gases continue to increase, climate models predict that the average temperature at the Earth's surface could increase from 2.5 to 10.4F above 1990 levels by the end of this century. Scientists are certain that human activities are changing the composition of the atmosphere, and that increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases will change the planet's climate.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done? (Even if the cause is greenhouse gases, it may make more sense to grow the necessary number of forests to absorb the gas as our gas output increases or find some other way to solidify/trap greenhouse gases.)
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).
So what stops you? Trusted sources. And when it's truster, one click is just the right amount of clicks for it to be safe.
By definition, there are no trusted sources on an untrusted network. As long as I'm on a network where I can fake being you, there is almost nothing anyone can do to verify with 100% certainty that you are really you.
Wrong. I said "Arbitrary files" not "any files". Go look up "isolated storage" - it allows a partially trusted app to read and write files, while ensuring that the only app that it is capable of messing with is itself. And what's so bad about remote servers? It works for gmail. This is yet more argument from ignorance.
Maybe. But when you have an OS where major parts of the GUI subsystem run in ring 0 with many, many bugs in that subsystem, making installation of a trojan or a worm or other malware a simple matter of exploiting those security bugs, I don't exactly get that 'warm and fuzzy' feeling about One-Click installs of applications from the Internet, an inherently untrustworthy network.
Yours isn't the only one. I'm a University of Phoenix grad, and they have a block on non-IE browsers on their student access site. Worse, one student I know of who goes there tells me that some classes have requirements to read DRMed eBooks with Adobe Reader, and of course, all though there is an Adobe Reader for her platform of choice (GNU/Linux), it doesn't support the DRM.
Fax machines did not collapse the USSR, but they made the change one that swung towards a form of Democracy instead of another totalitarian regime.
Hmmmm...so you think Russia has a form of Democracy and not a totalitarian regime, huh? You might want to pay a little closer attention to the newscasts... Have a look at this Google news search. There's more to Russia than meets the eye.
Like the printing press in the American Revolution.
While I don't doubt that printers and printing presses had a lot to do with the American Revolution (with things like Common Sense), movable type printing presses were anything but new in 1776. I would say that the invention of the printing press had more to do with European people seeking to colonize America than with the Revolution itself. The printing press was one of the things that sparked the Age of Enlightenment, and it was the Age of Enlightenment and the ideals that it brought that caused European peoples to seek the arduous journey across the Atlantic.
I mean, honestly - what does Vista do that XP doesn't? From a business standpoint, of course.
Better centralized management tools. Improved security model. Mostly, the changes affect infrastructure management as opposed to end-user experience. Oh, yeah, the big one: 64-bit support, which is not needed for typical office applications, but is an absolute must for companies moving their CAD workstations to Windows. CATIA V5, for example, fully supports the 64-bit Vista architecture right now.
There's always Gtk+ WebCore, which renders pages exactly like WebCore, the renderer used in Safari. The rendering engine works great, but the rest of the thing is somehwat unstable.
Just download a Linux distro, install it in VMWare or QEMU, and there you have it.
Again, you make the classic assumption that religions are all about dogma and are all similar to the dogmatic religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.
Not all religions are about shared belief. There are some religions (like, say, Zen Buddhism, some other Eastern philosophies/religions, deism, pantheism, or neopaganism) that are really religions of shared practice; belief or dogma or theology isn't all that important and many of these religions and philosophies have no cannon (scripture) and little or no common laws and practically nothing in the way of theology.
Now where, exactly, does your description fit into that?
...was basically that SCO has had 3+ years to show any evidence that they could come up with that IBM violated SCO's copyrights or patents by contributing code the Linux kernel. In that time, they haven't shown one single of code. They've whined and complained that IBM was being unfair and not giving them what they asked for, when in fact IBM did put up everything that was asked for. As Wells put it: "In the view of the court it is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put 'all evidence . . . on the table'"
So Magistrate Wells threw out half the case. Then SCO whined to Kimball, the judge of record in the case saying "Magistrate Wells is being unfair and thew out most of our case! Wha!" This is Kimball coming back saying, "Sorry, Wells was right. You don't have a leg to stand on."
After the Novell case, which seeks to prove, among other things, the disposition of the UNIX System V copyrights (which Novell claims to still own), there isn't likely to be hardly anything left of SCO v. IBM. Kimball was right to put Novell first the case might throw out SCO's intellectual property claims in regard to Unix altogether.
In the end, I fully expect IBM to eat SCO for lunch on the counterclaims, even after they dropped most of them except for the Lanham Act violations.
It might interest you to know that I don't belong to one of the major Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and that I'm also a (former) agnostic. The specifics of my religious/spiritual beliefs are outside the scope of this discussion.
But in any respect, your argument (and by extension, I'm assuming Harris' book) seems to be that religion only exists to explain the unexplained. Since there's nothing (or almost nothing) left unexplained, we don't need religion (or spirituality, I assume).
Except that there are things left unexplained, and there are events in people's lives that cannot be explained.
But that's even besides my main point. Religion exists not to explain the unexplained, but because it is human nature to ponder the mysteries of life. No matter how much science figures out, there are always mysteries, not all of which can be explained by science or that science would ever even try to understand. But that's even still besides my main point.
Also, religion != morality != ethics. Religion doesn't exist because we think we need to be nice to one another. And as much as religions are similar on some ethical and moral issues, they differ very greatly on others.
Ok, here's my main point (finally): Religion exists because people need to believe in something greather than themselves. That's it in a nutshell.
The previous version of Opera Mini worked fine on my Treo but this version crashes the phone repeatedly when I try to use it.Maybe this is an attempt to get people to upgrade to the new ($$$) Opera Mobile? The Treo 700p is one of the phones for which Opera Mobile has fancy new features for.
65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!
Read through the comments at the bottom. Seriously. These people really believe this stuff, and I've personally met people who, if you try to talk to them about almost anything scientific (like, oh say, 80,000-year-old human remains) will absolutely tell you "No, way! The Earth is only 6,000 years ago. It says so in the Bible!"
I'm not at all suggesting that people give up their religious convictions, but I am saying that some people need to stop confusing religion with science. They are separate disciplines and need to be separate. If you absolutely must believe that the choice is eaither A) God loves me and the Earth is only 6,000 years or B) there was a mass extinction event on the Earth 65 million years ago, so there can't be a God, then you are either seriously depraved or downright stupid.
The only thing it can do is give this persons boss a bad impression which may see him put last on any promotion shortlist and first on any planned redundancies as no doubt the RIAA would create the impression that this person is a full scale pirate (yarr).
The RIAA should fire their lawyers post haste. Seriously. While IANAL, it sounds like this guy easily has a defamation of character suit against the RIAA. What's more is that he doesn't need any serious resources to fight it. All he has to do is go find himself an ambulance chaser who will take the case on contingency since it's a deep pockets lawsuit that he's likely to win. Pain and suffering, loss of income or potential income...kaching!
It has been said before but when the public wants to censor give them graphic violence and sex in a biblical wrapper and they won't censor...
Sodom & Gomorrah Only on Xbox 360! Complete with homosexuality, rape, and brutalization! Will you survive the Wrath of God? Brought to you by Religious Right Software: Games With a Higher Purpose.
I think his point was that Microsoft could sue KDE and Gnome out of existence as an encore, thus making the BSDs and Solaris suffer. I'm not sure if he's right about that, but I think that's his point.
Maybe. But Microsoft wasn't too successful in their legal battles with Apple over the GUI either. Since OS X would be affected in a big way by any lawsuits against GNOME or KDE (because of the legal precedents they would set), we'd see Apple's lawyers jumping into the fray.
Look, at best Microsoft is about to set off a patent World War III, with every tech company on the planet suing each other.
Maybe not such a good idea for Microsoft, and I'm betting they never do anything for fear of nuking themselves out of existence.
Sure. All the developers of the Samba team are just going to pick up and move to another country. Right. Or maybe the Samba team will pick up developers from another country where patents are no big deal. It's not like they need all those senior developers like Tridge and Jeremy Allison, and Andrew Bartlett...nope. They can just come up with a new set of monkeys. After all programmers are interchangeable, right?
Our government needs to more clearly delineate what software can and cannot be patented in order to prevent more ridiculous patents. I'm more in the 'No Software Patents' camp, but I think there are exceptions, particularly for very specialized software in specific industries.
No software should be patentable.
Per the USPTO, "a patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office." The USPTO goes on further to say that there are three types of patents:
1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;
2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and
3) Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.
Now, technically the USPTO defines software to be patentable as a utility patent for a process. But software isn't really a process, is it? It's more than that. A software program is a particular implementation of a process. All LSI's patent seems to cover is another implementation of a doubly-linked list. I'll wager that there isn't a programmer reading slashdot right now that hasn't developed a program that used a doubly-linked list (yes, they're that common and they're that useful).
You could patent the process that particular program implements, sure. But these processes and algorithms that get created in the duration of a software project are not unique or novel at all. Software rests on what's been done before. Even if you did come up with some unique, it's very hard to say that what you created wouldn't be obvious to another programmer skilled in the trade. A doubly-linked list is just an extension of a singly-linked list. Linked lists aren't unique at all. In fact, the main memory on a computer is typically managed by the OS in a linked list.
The bottom line is that software, IMHO, shouldn't be patentable.
Well, I'm at least pretty sure the poster I was replying to is from the U.S. and was asking from a U.S. perspective. We Americans are so very ethnocentric, don't you know?
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the UK law is similar to the U.S. law in this regard. I did leave the part out about being subjected to the (more accurate) blood test in some U.S. states for purposes of simplicity, and I'm pretty sure its required in the U.K. if you refuse the breathalyser.
(It's important to remember that criminal law in the U.S. is based heavily on criminal law in the U.K., and while there are differences, there are more similarities than differences.)
Of course, news of a dip-stick test was released two days ago [sciencedaily.com]. I imagine cops might be given authority to draw blood at the scene of a crime and use standard testing kits installed in their cars. Scary? Yeah, kind of--although I think probably cause would have to be very very high for this kind of invasion of privacy. Any lawyers out there know what the law (local or federal) says about forced blood & UA analysis?
Well, I'm no lawyer, but the courts have ruled time and time again that roadside breathalyser tests are legal. The basic idea is that you don't have to consent to a breathalyser test; however, the police equally don't have to let you go if they suspect you'd fail it. Essentially you are within your Constitutional right to refuse one, but the police are also within their authority to arrest you on the spot (since they have probable cause) and you'll have to explain yourself to the judge, while the cop tells that judge his estimation of whether or not you were impaired at the time you refused the breathalyser.
I imagine that roadside "dip-sticking" and roadside fingerprinting would fall under the same category.
There is significant overhead associated with the use of TCP/IP.
Not to mention the hardware itself (NICs, routers, bridges, etc.) adds some not-insignificant overhead as well.
What rocks is the ability to reliably deliver 7.5 Gb/s AND do something useful with it.
Right. While any idiot can get 10 Gb/s link and get 7.5 Gb/s or more out of it, the real feat here was in doing something useful with it at the same time. Remember that in streaming video applications, there's typically a lot of dropped packets because the client has to actually do something with the video immediately. It may just buffer it, but the application that's doing the buffering is often busy doing other stuff as well, like, say decoding video and audio streams and actually piping all that data through to the I/O bus -- oh, and the NIC is usually sitting on that same I/O bus, so that makes things even worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I say 'graphics drivers'? No, I said the GUI subsystem.
Maybe you might want to know what parts of the GUI subsystem run in kernel mode, like, for instance, GDI and the window manager. These run in kernel mode.
Assuming these
Which, as well all know, has been highly effective in stopping phishing, right?
I seem to remember a particular phishing site that managed to present a proper SSL certificate reported right here on Slashdot...
- If it is real, is it permanent and not just an earth/solar cycle?
Source- If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)
Source- If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done? (Even if the cause is greenhouse gases, it may make more sense to grow the necessary number of forests to absorb the gas as our gas output increases or find some other way to solidify/trap greenhouse gases.)
- If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).
See these pages:By definition, there are no trusted sources on an untrusted network. As long as I'm on a network where I can fake being you, there is almost nothing anyone can do to verify with 100% certainty that you are really you.
Maybe. But when you have an OS where major parts of the GUI subsystem run in ring 0 with many, many bugs in that subsystem, making installation of a trojan or a worm or other malware a simple matter of exploiting those security bugs, I don't exactly get that 'warm and fuzzy' feeling about One-Click installs of applications from the Internet, an inherently untrustworthy network.
Yours isn't the only one. I'm a University of Phoenix grad, and they have a block on non-IE browsers on their student access site. Worse, one student I know of who goes there tells me that some classes have requirements to read DRMed eBooks with Adobe Reader, and of course, all though there is an Adobe Reader for her platform of choice (GNU/Linux), it doesn't support the DRM.
Hmmmm...so you think Russia has a form of Democracy and not a totalitarian regime, huh? You might want to pay a little closer attention to the newscasts... Have a look at this Google news search. There's more to Russia than meets the eye.
While I don't doubt that printers and printing presses had a lot to do with the American Revolution (with things like Common Sense), movable type printing presses were anything but new in 1776. I would say that the invention of the printing press had more to do with European people seeking to colonize America than with the Revolution itself. The printing press was one of the things that sparked the Age of Enlightenment, and it was the Age of Enlightenment and the ideals that it brought that caused European peoples to seek the arduous journey across the Atlantic.
Better centralized management tools. Improved security model. Mostly, the changes affect infrastructure management as opposed to end-user experience. Oh, yeah, the big one: 64-bit support, which is not needed for typical office applications, but is an absolute must for companies moving their CAD workstations to Windows. CATIA V5, for example, fully supports the 64-bit Vista architecture right now.
There's always Gtk+ WebCore, which renders pages exactly like WebCore, the renderer used in Safari. The rendering engine works great, but the rest of the thing is somehwat unstable.
Just download a Linux distro, install it in VMWare or QEMU, and there you have it.
Again, you make the classic assumption that religions are all about dogma and are all similar to the dogmatic religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.
Not all religions are about shared belief. There are some religions (like, say, Zen Buddhism, some other Eastern philosophies/religions, deism, pantheism, or neopaganism) that are really religions of shared practice; belief or dogma or theology isn't all that important and many of these religions and philosophies have no cannon (scripture) and little or no common laws and practically nothing in the way of theology.
Now where, exactly, does your description fit into that?
...was basically that SCO has had 3+ years to show any evidence that they could come up with that IBM violated SCO's copyrights or patents by contributing code the Linux kernel. In that time, they haven't shown one single of code. They've whined and complained that IBM was being unfair and not giving them what they asked for, when in fact IBM did put up everything that was asked for. As Wells put it: "In the view of the court it is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put 'all evidence . . . on the table'"
So Magistrate Wells threw out half the case. Then SCO whined to Kimball, the judge of record in the case saying "Magistrate Wells is being unfair and thew out most of our case! Wha!" This is Kimball coming back saying, "Sorry, Wells was right. You don't have a leg to stand on."
After the Novell case, which seeks to prove, among other things, the disposition of the UNIX System V copyrights (which Novell claims to still own), there isn't likely to be hardly anything left of SCO v. IBM. Kimball was right to put Novell first the case might throw out SCO's intellectual property claims in regard to Unix altogether.
In the end, I fully expect IBM to eat SCO for lunch on the counterclaims, even after they dropped most of them except for the Lanham Act violations.
It might interest you to know that I don't belong to one of the major Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and that I'm also a (former) agnostic. The specifics of my religious/spiritual beliefs are outside the scope of this discussion.
But in any respect, your argument (and by extension, I'm assuming Harris' book) seems to be that religion only exists to explain the unexplained. Since there's nothing (or almost nothing) left unexplained, we don't need religion (or spirituality, I assume).
Except that there are things left unexplained, and there are events in people's lives that cannot be explained.
But that's even besides my main point. Religion exists not to explain the unexplained, but because it is human nature to ponder the mysteries of life. No matter how much science figures out, there are always mysteries, not all of which can be explained by science or that science would ever even try to understand. But that's even still besides my main point.
Also, religion != morality != ethics. Religion doesn't exist because we think we need to be nice to one another. And as much as religions are similar on some ethical and moral issues, they differ very greatly on others.
Ok, here's my main point (finally): Religion exists because people need to believe in something greather than themselves. That's it in a nutshell.
The previous version of Opera Mini worked fine on my Treo but this version crashes the phone repeatedly when I try to use it.Maybe this is an attempt to get people to upgrade to the new ($$$) Opera Mobile? The Treo 700p is one of the phones for which Opera Mobile has fancy new features for.
Read through the comments at the bottom. Seriously. These people really believe this stuff, and I've personally met people who, if you try to talk to them about almost anything scientific (like, oh say, 80,000-year-old human remains) will absolutely tell you "No, way! The Earth is only 6,000 years ago. It says so in the Bible!"
I'm not at all suggesting that people give up their religious convictions, but I am saying that some people need to stop confusing religion with science. They are separate disciplines and need to be separate. If you absolutely must believe that the choice is eaither A) God loves me and the Earth is only 6,000 years or B) there was a mass extinction event on the Earth 65 million years ago, so there can't be a God, then you are either seriously depraved or downright stupid.
The RIAA should fire their lawyers post haste. Seriously. While IANAL, it sounds like this guy easily has a defamation of character suit against the RIAA. What's more is that he doesn't need any serious resources to fight it. All he has to do is go find himself an ambulance chaser who will take the case on contingency since it's a deep pockets lawsuit that he's likely to win. Pain and suffering, loss of income or potential income...kaching!
Maybe. But Microsoft wasn't too successful in their legal battles with Apple over the GUI either. Since OS X would be affected in a big way by any lawsuits against GNOME or KDE (because of the legal precedents they would set), we'd see Apple's lawyers jumping into the fray.
Look, at best Microsoft is about to set off a patent World War III, with every tech company on the planet suing each other.
Maybe not such a good idea for Microsoft, and I'm betting they never do anything for fear of nuking themselves out of existence.
Well, then we'll all get to watch Eben Moglen eat Microsoft's lawyers for lunch since SFU contains some gcc code.
Sure. All the developers of the Samba team are just going to pick up and move to another country. Right. Or maybe the Samba team will pick up developers from another country where patents are no big deal. It's not like they need all those senior developers like Tridge and Jeremy Allison, and Andrew Bartlett...nope. They can just come up with a new set of monkeys. After all programmers are interchangeable, right?
No software should be patentable.
Per the USPTO, "a patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office." The USPTO goes on further to say that there are three types of patents:
Now, technically the USPTO defines software to be patentable as a utility patent for a process. But software isn't really a process, is it? It's more than that. A software program is a particular implementation of a process. All LSI's patent seems to cover is another implementation of a doubly-linked list. I'll wager that there isn't a programmer reading slashdot right now that hasn't developed a program that used a doubly-linked list (yes, they're that common and they're that useful).
You could patent the process that particular program implements, sure. But these processes and algorithms that get created in the duration of a software project are not unique or novel at all. Software rests on what's been done before. Even if you did come up with some unique, it's very hard to say that what you created wouldn't be obvious to another programmer skilled in the trade. A doubly-linked list is just an extension of a singly-linked list. Linked lists aren't unique at all. In fact, the main memory on a computer is typically managed by the OS in a linked list.
The bottom line is that software, IMHO, shouldn't be patentable.
Well, I'm at least pretty sure the poster I was replying to is from the U.S. and was asking from a U.S. perspective. We Americans are so very ethnocentric, don't you know?
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the UK law is similar to the U.S. law in this regard. I did leave the part out about being subjected to the (more accurate) blood test in some U.S. states for purposes of simplicity, and I'm pretty sure its required in the U.K. if you refuse the breathalyser.
(It's important to remember that criminal law in the U.S. is based heavily on criminal law in the U.K., and while there are differences, there are more similarities than differences.)
Well, I'm no lawyer, but the courts have ruled time and time again that roadside breathalyser tests are legal. The basic idea is that you don't have to consent to a breathalyser test; however, the police equally don't have to let you go if they suspect you'd fail it. Essentially you are within your Constitutional right to refuse one, but the police are also within their authority to arrest you on the spot (since they have probable cause) and you'll have to explain yourself to the judge, while the cop tells that judge his estimation of whether or not you were impaired at the time you refused the breathalyser.
I imagine that roadside "dip-sticking" and roadside fingerprinting would fall under the same category.
Hey! I am a prokaryote, you insensitive clod!
Not to mention the hardware itself (NICs, routers, bridges, etc.) adds some not-insignificant overhead as well.
Right. While any idiot can get 10 Gb/s link and get 7.5 Gb/s or more out of it, the real feat here was in doing something useful with it at the same time. Remember that in streaming video applications, there's typically a lot of dropped packets because the client has to actually do something with the video immediately. It may just buffer it, but the application that's doing the buffering is often busy doing other stuff as well, like, say decoding video and audio streams and actually piping all that data through to the I/O bus -- oh, and the NIC is usually sitting on that same I/O bus, so that makes things even worse.