The sharks seem to be circling each other: RIM, NTP, Visto, etc. Let them all sue each other out of existence, while the rest of us keep using our wireless E-mail based on standard protocols and standard servers.
Maybe it's time to overhaul our "general purpose" CPUs. While dedicating a processor to physics and graphics is sensible, there is little reason that processor should have an architecture different from the CPU that handles everything else--many of the features in a physics and graphics chip are useful for lots of other applications as well.
I guess you didn't notice that immune system problems are indeed common.
I didn't say they were "uncommon", I said that you were wrong to claim that the immune system is "unstable". If you have a hypersensitivity or a runny nose, you're not experiencing some random behavior by a normal immune system, you're experiencing either a defect or a pathogen.
No two people have the same risk. My risk may be higher or lower than yours. The government is not about to issue personalized risk assessments.
You don't need a personalized risk assessment--the risk of complications is so low for people with normal immune systems that there simply is no tradeoff--otherwise, a vaccine doesn't get approved. Furthermore, the risk for the complications that can occur is much higher for the actual disease than for the vaccine, and chances are you will get the disease if you don't get vaccinated.
You play at game theory, wanting yourself to benefit by maximizing the number of other people (not you) who vaccinate.
I have gotten all my childhood vaccinations, plus several vaccinations that have become available more recently. And I'm very much looking forward to several new vaccinations in the pipeline against common diseases--in each case, the vaccination handily beats not only the discomfort, but also the health risk from actually getting the disease.
If you think the benefit always exceeds the risk, one of these is true:
You left out the fourth possibility, the correct one: you are a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nut.
On the one hand, we have scores of medical experts looking at risks during the approval process, conducting one study after another, looking for side-effects and other problems, and writing report after report. On the other hand, we have you, making unsubstantiated assertions and providing no data at all.
Insects alone inject so many different proteins into you during your lifetime that if each exposure to a new protein carried a big risk, everybody would have immune system problems. In reality, malfunctions of the immune system tend to be due to specific defects, not some sort of general instability, as you claim.
A vaccine is only good if the benefit exceeds the risk.
Except when there are known medical reasons against vaccination, the benefit always exceeds the risk for childhood vaccinations. That's no accident, it's the result of a long approval process that looks at exactly this question in detail.
That's very observant of you because humans are indeed responsible for most of the death and destruction resulting from those natural events.
many infectious diseases due to human activity
on
Blaming The Bats
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· Score: 1
Many infectious diseases, in particular the more serious ones, are probably the result of human encroachment into new territory, as well as keeping domesticated animals in large numbers, since animals are the reservoir where new viruses, as well as some common epidemics, come from. Other behaviors that make the situation worse are overuse of antibiotics and widespread travel. Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions to these problems, since it would be impossible to give up these behaviors. Maybe we're lucky and medicine will find a solution before the next big epidemics.
Yes. That's because we are intelligent and have a choice; animals do not. It doesn't matter whether you approach this question from a philosophical or religious background: if shit happens on this planet, it is our fault.
Unfortunately, without a central database, they also can't issue you a copy of your card.
Sure they can. They can keep local databases with minimal biometric information, and only the originally issuing location re-issues your card. Or they can give you a backup card containing biometric identifiers and used only for reissuing the original card, only in person, and with other precautions. In fact, that's the way things already work and that's the way things should continue to work.
The only thing a national ID card should do (and needs to do) is to standardize the format of ID cards and improve the security of the ID number and the biometric identifiers. That would be a big win.
So, Shneier is right in that the things he opposes ought to be opposed. He is wrong, however, in implying that those things are intrinsically a part of a national ID system; they are not.
Video can be done well: it can challenge, stimulate, and communicate. Seeing the bloodshed in a war with your own eyes gives you a completely different perspective than reading dry, sterile words about it. The problem with video is not the medium, it's that in the past, it has only been available to people with deep pockets and matching views.
It's ironic to have you talk about "shallow and conformist" acts, because the dull reading list you give is about the shallowest and most conformist list imaginable. People should know those dusty tomes because they are part of our cultural heritage, but that anybody would fancy themselves a "revolutionary" because of it is laughable.
Because YouTube and Google are commercial sites that host the content with commercial motives in mind and with commercial constraints on their operations. They are free right now because those companies want to grab a big chunk of market share and prevent the kind of democratic, distributed infrastructure from appearing that Democracy player is intended to give you.
Democracy player is an attempt at letting anybody host and distribute video without having YouTube or Google-like bandwidth at their disposal.
I'm sorry if you don't get why this might be important.
Maybe it will help if you think a little about IM services. The reason why we have AOL and MSN and all those other centralized commercial services that play poorly with FOSS, that are easy to listen in on, and that impose all sorts of restrictions is not technical, it's because those services managed to grab market share quickly, before a distributed IM infrastructure could take hold. If it hadn't been for that historical accident, IM would probably be more like E-mail today, with tens of thousands of interoperable hosts and open protocols.
People would like Internet video streaming to be more like E-mail services than like IM services: distributed and open.
Where does the reliability come from without a database to back it up? What's to keep someone from getting a card with my name and making transactions against it?
People probably will be able to get cards with your name and make transactions against it. That's because "your name" isn't a unique identifier and there are already many people that share names, and in some cases even all their names and even their birthday.
What they can't do is get another ID card with a numerical identifier on it that already exists on your card. That can be achieved without any central database.
Why is that useful? It's useful because services registered under that card can only be accessed by that card. So, if you give that card and id to your employer and to your health insurance company, they both use that id as a key in their records.
It's, in fact, the same way we are using SSN# and driver's license nubmers right now, only that it improves the security of the identification, eliminates duplications, and standardizes the format.
Why should I take special care to "check out the Postal Service?"
Because it's an example of high quality content you can get through this kind of system.
What exactly does this bring to the table? People who had or have an interest in the band probably saw the video in 2003 when it was released. It has NOTHING to do with the software being advertised.
It's an example of high quality content you can get through this kind of system.
I suggest you read the background at participatoryculture.org. Since you can't be bothered to follow the links, here are the relevant bits:
Our mission is to build an open and democratic television platform.
Television is the defining medium of our culture. There's now an opportunity to create a television culture that is fluid, diverse, exciting, and beautiful. Built by people working together.
The platform is open-source and built on open-standards. This matters because it keeps video flowing freely. When you lock people in to closed, proprietary services, you lose everything that makes the internet work.
Television is moving online. Will it be the same narrow, top-down cultural stagnation that we see on traditional television? All the major media and computer companies are clamoring to control video online. If they succeed it will be a disaster.
We don't have to spend years playing catch-up. Open-source and open- standards can lead this fight for the future of video online.
It's pretty sad when people invest a lot of work to counter commercialism, and even choose obvious and clear names ("Democracy player", "participatoryculture.org"), and people like you still don't get it and heap sarcasm on the project.
How clearly do you need to have things spelled out for you in order for you to absorb the information? Or have you watched so many Pepsi commercials that you have just switched off completely?
I fail to see your point. I have ended up with multiple identity cards (driver's licenses) in the US with different addresses under the current system (I invalidated all but one). So, this is an issue that exists under the current system as well, and introducing a national ID card system without a database doesn't make it any worse. Whether we would decide to address this issue as part of a move to a national ID card system is an orthogonal question. In fact, for many purposes, multiple identities are not a problem.
In fact, there doesn't have to be a single national ID; we might well have a national ID card for which multiple identities are easy to obtain, and another one that is guaranteed in some way to be issued only once per person. That's effectively the situation we already have, with driver's licenses and similar documents fulfilling the first function, and birth certificates and passports the latter.
Shneier starts with a bunch of wrong assumptions: he assumes that national ID cards are needed for fighting terrorism and he assumes that they require a central database. Both of those are bogus assumptions.
The purpose of national ID cards is so that you can identify yourself reliably to other people if the transaction requires it. National ID cards make it hard for people to impersonate you, and that's a good thing. They are much less useful in identifying people who don't want to be identified (e.g., terrorists).
National ID cards also don't require a centralized database. Such databases are often incorporated into national ID card proposals, but they are not an intrinsic part of a national ID card system and are probably a bad idea.
The fact is that the US already has a national ID card system in place, it just happens to be poorly designed and permits rampant identity theft. That ought to be fixed by creating an ID card system. If done correctly, everybody ends up with more protection against identity theft and with more control over their personal information than they now have.
You're making the erroneous assumption that the prohibition against using the social security number as a unique identifier is a prohibition against using any unique identifiers at all. In fact, it is not, and modern societies need reliable, unique identifiers for individuals.
What do you suggest insurance companies, banks, etc. use instead? Your name? Many people would get royally screwed that way, as some John Smith withdraws some other John Smith's money. Or would you prefer if we just let modern commerce come to a halt? Or, perhaps, you prefer rampant identity theft instead?
Microsoft has proved conclusively that you can get big and stay big in a market without having the most advanced technology. I'm not even talking about XP-vs-UNIX, just DOS-vs-Macintosh was a pretty clear indication. So, what does it matter whether people are "underestimating" Microsoft search technology?
Microsoft may conquer this market through their usual business tricks. They will probably ensure that their search engine is the default used by any browser shipped on Windows. They'll change things back to their search engine on upgrades, and they'll change it for Opera and Firefox, too. They'll integrate it into MS Office. They'll probably attempt to break Google desktop search. They'll nearly give away space to advertisers, trying to cut off Google's revenue stream. And with all that, they may well succeed in killing Google. But let's not mince words: beyond minimal functionality, Microsoft's search engine technology has nothing to do with whether they succeed at killing Google or not.
It's because it's dual-licensed--if they started incorporating contributions from the community under the GPL, they couldn't license it commercially anymore. Qt may be under a free software license, but it's not a free software project.
The FSF and open source organizations tend to be fairly rational about that sort of thing: when companies change their behavior, they are treated accordingly. Apple used to be boycotted by many free software supporters because Apple tried to monopolize the GUI with their look-and-feel lawsuits. When that was over, the boycot was dropped. It wasn't even that Apple management saw the light--they probably didn't--they simply lost the case and that was it.
Why is $1800 considered a lot of money for a programmer?
Because it's about $1800 more than Cocoa+XCode, $1800 more than Gtk+ or wxWidgets, or $1000 more than.NET+VS-Enterprise. In other words, it's overpriced compared to the alternatives. Whether a company can in principle squeeze the money for paying for the overpriced product into the budget is not relevant.
"wahhhhhh, why does it cost $500 an hour to record in this studio?"
The proper question is "why does it cost $1500 an hour to record in this studio without a sound engineer, when it costs $500 to record in that other studio with a sound engineer included?". That's the question people are aking about Qt.
Slashdot Mirror
The sharks seem to be circling each other: RIM, NTP, Visto, etc. Let them all sue each other out of existence, while the rest of us keep using our wireless E-mail based on standard protocols and standard servers.
Maybe it's time to overhaul our "general purpose" CPUs. While dedicating a processor to physics and graphics is sensible, there is little reason that processor should have an architecture different from the CPU that handles everything else--many of the features in a physics and graphics chip are useful for lots of other applications as well.
I guess you didn't notice that immune system problems are indeed common.
I didn't say they were "uncommon", I said that you were wrong to claim that the immune system is "unstable". If you have a hypersensitivity or a runny nose, you're not experiencing some random behavior by a normal immune system, you're experiencing either a defect or a pathogen.
No two people have the same risk. My risk may be higher or lower than yours. The government is not about to issue personalized risk assessments.
You don't need a personalized risk assessment--the risk of complications is so low for people with normal immune systems that there simply is no tradeoff--otherwise, a vaccine doesn't get approved. Furthermore, the risk for the complications that can occur is much higher for the actual disease than for the vaccine, and chances are you will get the disease if you don't get vaccinated.
You play at game theory, wanting yourself to benefit by maximizing the number of other people (not you) who vaccinate.
I have gotten all my childhood vaccinations, plus several vaccinations that have become available more recently. And I'm very much looking forward to several new vaccinations in the pipeline against common diseases--in each case, the vaccination handily beats not only the discomfort, but also the health risk from actually getting the disease.
If you think the benefit always exceeds the risk, one of these is true:
You left out the fourth possibility, the correct one: you are a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nut.
On the one hand, we have scores of medical experts looking at risks during the approval process, conducting one study after another, looking for side-effects and other problems, and writing report after report. On the other hand, we have you, making unsubstantiated assertions and providing no data at all.
The immune system is an unstable beast.
Insects alone inject so many different proteins into you during your lifetime that if each exposure to a new protein carried a big risk, everybody would have immune system problems. In reality, malfunctions of the immune system tend to be due to specific defects, not some sort of general instability, as you claim.
A vaccine is only good if the benefit exceeds the risk.
Except when there are known medical reasons against vaccination, the benefit always exceeds the risk for childhood vaccinations. That's no accident, it's the result of a long approval process that looks at exactly this question in detail.
That's very observant of you because humans are indeed responsible for most of the death and destruction resulting from those natural events.
Many infectious diseases, in particular the more serious ones, are probably the result of human encroachment into new territory, as well as keeping domesticated animals in large numbers, since animals are the reservoir where new viruses, as well as some common epidemics, come from. Other behaviors that make the situation worse are overuse of antibiotics and widespread travel. Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions to these problems, since it would be impossible to give up these behaviors. Maybe we're lucky and medicine will find a solution before the next big epidemics.
Yes. That's because we are intelligent and have a choice; animals do not. It doesn't matter whether you approach this question from a philosophical or religious background: if shit happens on this planet, it is our fault.
Unfortunately, without a central database, they also can't issue you a copy of your card.
Sure they can. They can keep local databases with minimal biometric information, and only the originally issuing location re-issues your card. Or they can give you a backup card containing biometric identifiers and used only for reissuing the original card, only in person, and with other precautions. In fact, that's the way things already work and that's the way things should continue to work.
The only thing a national ID card should do (and needs to do) is to standardize the format of ID cards and improve the security of the ID number and the biometric identifiers. That would be a big win.
So, Shneier is right in that the things he opposes ought to be opposed. He is wrong, however, in implying that those things are intrinsically a part of a national ID system; they are not.
Video can be done well: it can challenge, stimulate, and communicate. Seeing the bloodshed in a war with your own eyes gives you a completely different perspective than reading dry, sterile words about it. The problem with video is not the medium, it's that in the past, it has only been available to people with deep pockets and matching views.
It's ironic to have you talk about "shallow and conformist" acts, because the dull reading list you give is about the shallowest and most conformist list imaginable. People should know those dusty tomes because they are part of our cultural heritage, but that anybody would fancy themselves a "revolutionary" because of it is laughable.
Isn't it just possible that, on the whole, Walmart's contribution to society has been good?
Well, maybe you can try to construct a convincing argument. Based on what I know about the company, I think it's been an overall negative to society.
Of course, the root cause of the problem is that we have laws that permit companies like that to operate the way they do.
Because YouTube and Google are commercial sites that host the content with commercial motives in mind and with commercial constraints on their operations. They are free right now because those companies want to grab a big chunk of market share and prevent the kind of democratic, distributed infrastructure from appearing that Democracy player is intended to give you.
Democracy player is an attempt at letting anybody host and distribute video without having YouTube or Google-like bandwidth at their disposal.
I'm sorry if you don't get why this might be important.
Maybe it will help if you think a little about IM services. The reason why we have AOL and MSN and all those other centralized commercial services that play poorly with FOSS, that are easy to listen in on, and that impose all sorts of restrictions is not technical, it's because those services managed to grab market share quickly, before a distributed IM infrastructure could take hold. If it hadn't been for that historical accident, IM would probably be more like E-mail today, with tens of thousands of interoperable hosts and open protocols.
People would like Internet video streaming to be more like E-mail services than like IM services: distributed and open.
Where does the reliability come from without a database to back it up? What's to keep someone from getting a card with my name and making transactions against it?
People probably will be able to get cards with your name and make transactions against it. That's because "your name" isn't a unique identifier and there are already many people that share names, and in some cases even all their names and even their birthday.
What they can't do is get another ID card with a numerical identifier on it that already exists on your card. That can be achieved without any central database.
Why is that useful? It's useful because services registered under that card can only be accessed by that card. So, if you give that card and id to your employer and to your health insurance company, they both use that id as a key in their records.
It's, in fact, the same way we are using SSN# and driver's license nubmers right now, only that it improves the security of the identification, eliminates duplications, and standardizes the format.
Why should I take special care to "check out the Postal Service?"
Because it's an example of high quality content you can get through this kind of system.
What exactly does this bring to the table? People who had or have an interest in the band probably saw the video in 2003 when it was released. It has NOTHING to do with the software being advertised.
It's an example of high quality content you can get through this kind of system.
It's pretty sad when people invest a lot of work to counter commercialism, and even choose obvious and clear names ("Democracy player", "participatoryculture.org"), and people like you still don't get it and heap sarcasm on the project.
How clearly do you need to have things spelled out for you in order for you to absorb the information? Or have you watched so many Pepsi commercials that you have just switched off completely?
I fail to see your point. I have ended up with multiple identity cards (driver's licenses) in the US with different addresses under the current system (I invalidated all but one). So, this is an issue that exists under the current system as well, and introducing a national ID card system without a database doesn't make it any worse. Whether we would decide to address this issue as part of a move to a national ID card system is an orthogonal question. In fact, for many purposes, multiple identities are not a problem.
In fact, there doesn't have to be a single national ID; we might well have a national ID card for which multiple identities are easy to obtain, and another one that is guaranteed in some way to be issued only once per person. That's effectively the situation we already have, with driver's licenses and similar documents fulfilling the first function, and birth certificates and passports the latter.
Shneier starts with a bunch of wrong assumptions: he assumes that national ID cards are needed for fighting terrorism and he assumes that they require a central database. Both of those are bogus assumptions.
The purpose of national ID cards is so that you can identify yourself reliably to other people if the transaction requires it. National ID cards make it hard for people to impersonate you, and that's a good thing. They are much less useful in identifying people who don't want to be identified (e.g., terrorists).
National ID cards also don't require a centralized database. Such databases are often incorporated into national ID card proposals, but they are not an intrinsic part of a national ID card system and are probably a bad idea.
The fact is that the US already has a national ID card system in place, it just happens to be poorly designed and permits rampant identity theft. That ought to be fixed by creating an ID card system. If done correctly, everybody ends up with more protection against identity theft and with more control over their personal information than they now have.
Other nations have much less of a problem with illegal workers or identity theft.
You're making the erroneous assumption that the prohibition against using the social security number as a unique identifier is a prohibition against using any unique identifiers at all. In fact, it is not, and modern societies need reliable, unique identifiers for individuals.
What do you suggest insurance companies, banks, etc. use instead? Your name? Many people would get royally screwed that way, as some John Smith withdraws some other John Smith's money. Or would you prefer if we just let modern commerce come to a halt? Or, perhaps, you prefer rampant identity theft instead?
Microsoft has proved conclusively that you can get big and stay big in a market without having the most advanced technology. I'm not even talking about XP-vs-UNIX, just DOS-vs-Macintosh was a pretty clear indication. So, what does it matter whether people are "underestimating" Microsoft search technology?
Microsoft may conquer this market through their usual business tricks. They will probably ensure that their search engine is the default used by any browser shipped on Windows. They'll change things back to their search engine on upgrades, and they'll change it for Opera and Firefox, too. They'll integrate it into MS Office. They'll probably attempt to break Google desktop search. They'll nearly give away space to advertisers, trying to cut off Google's revenue stream. And with all that, they may well succeed in killing Google. But let's not mince words: beyond minimal functionality, Microsoft's search engine technology has nothing to do with whether they succeed at killing Google or not.
It's because it's dual-licensed--if they started incorporating contributions from the community under the GPL, they couldn't license it commercially anymore. Qt may be under a free software license, but it's not a free software project.
The FSF and open source organizations tend to be fairly rational about that sort of thing: when companies change their behavior, they are treated accordingly. Apple used to be boycotted by many free software supporters because Apple tried to monopolize the GUI with their look-and-feel lawsuits. When that was over, the boycot was dropped. It wasn't even that Apple management saw the light--they probably didn't--they simply lost the case and that was it.
That's easy: just don't use projects with licenses you don't understand.
Generally, if it isn't covered by GPL, LGPL, X11, BSD, or Artistic, I don't use it.
Why is $1800 considered a lot of money for a programmer?
.NET+VS-Enterprise. In other words, it's overpriced compared to the alternatives. Whether a company can in principle squeeze the money for paying for the overpriced product into the budget is not relevant.
Because it's about $1800 more than Cocoa+XCode, $1800 more than Gtk+ or wxWidgets, or $1000 more than
"wahhhhhh, why does it cost $500 an hour to record in this studio?"
The proper question is "why does it cost $1500 an hour to record in this studio without a sound engineer, when it costs $500 to record in that other studio with a sound engineer included?". That's the question people are aking about Qt.
or you "Contribute to the Open Source community by placing your application under an Open Source license (e.g. the GPL).
Actually, I want to contribute to Qt under the GPL, but Troll Tech won't let me.
Let's hope he does for Qt what he did for BeOS.