I agree that Slashdot reviews are generally positive, but I wouldn't place blame on Slashdot for that. In fact, I wouldn't blame anyone. Put yourself in the shoes of the reviewer. If you picked up a bad book, would you want to read all the way through it just to fully appreciate how bad it was? I certainly wouldn't. But I wouldn't want to submit a review of a book I hadn't read throughly. The causality of the issue lies more in that people don't want to review bad books than that Slashdot wants to promote ORA (which does publish many good books).
Secrecy, intellectual property rights, and long-term, large-scale projects do not marry well with open source public announcements. The essential nature of commercial software is anonymity. As commercial engineers, we don't plug our own names or reputations with the software that we sell. There's nothing in X-Designer or the manual sets to say who wrote it.
I think what this guy is talking about is in-house software written for companies, not commercially sold software. In-house engineers often don't want their name stuck on crap software that doesn't see the light of day. That way, once they leave, the company won't be able to try to drag them back into the project as "consultants".
How do you know they broke the law? Did you go check to make sure they didn't own a copy of the album that they were dl'ing clips of? IMO, if you own the album, you should be allowed to dl/rip the tracks. Of course, Napster has no way of determining ownership status of a track.
*Ahem*. Why would anyone who owned the music want to download it? It's 1) slower, 2) of inferior quality to a good CD rip, 3) and often cropped or corrupted. Don't delude yourself; the significant majority of Napster use is illegal, plain and simple.
Of course, that doesn't prove that any of the users which Metallica fingered were necessarily breaking the law. But I suspect the courts will place the burden of proof on the accused here. All the same, the industry would be much better off exploiting the opportunity of digital distribution rather than fighting it tooth and nail in court.
I haven't heard anyone proposing people be sent to jail for copyright infringment. I suspect the artists would much rather just be paid for their work by fines through civil litigation.
If ease of use was really the reason that Windows is so popular, then everyone would be using Macintoshes. In my (admittedly limited) experience, MacOS is much more user-friendly than Windows.
Sorry, MacOS is much more moron-friendly than Windows. That's not at all to say that Mac users are morons; just that Apple targets people who want their interface clean and simple. But keep in mind that "user-friendliness" almost necessarily comes at the price of reduced power for those who desire it. How many Mac apps can use a right mouse button? Two buttons may somehow confuse people with no computer experience, but it's an incredible boon to those of us who can use it. A CLI is incredibly powerful and often far more efficient than a GUI for certain tasks; Mac users don't have that option (barring 3rd party hacks).
(This was taken a bit out of context; I don't think the poster was trying to hold up MacOS as the perfect standard to aspire to.)
You don't see too many politicians sending spam saying "Vote for me".
Al Gore has been sending me email (through his "Southern Californians for Gore" list) for the past 6 months, despite following the unsubscribe directions five times. I don't even know how I got on the list. And yes, they do boil down to "Vote for me". The father of the internet doesn't have much respect for it.
Determining when machines have bettered us intellectually seems fairly simple; when machines start solving problems we haven't been able to, then we'll know we've been beat. This is already happening in very narrow fields... Kasparov, humanity's best offering in the chess world, fell to a machine. It's only a matter of time before machines can outhink us in every field we know of, and those the machines event themselves.
But I wonder how we will know when machines have outstripped us spiritually. If a computer "feels" an emotion we can't comprehend, how will we know? When a computer claims to feel something it can't describe to its creators, will we believe it, try to debug it, or destroy it? When a computer thinks it has found the meaning of life, what will we do if we can't understand?
A lot of people will care; those people who, unlike you, have absolutely no desire to run linux in their living room. The X-Box draws consumers because of its simplicity; you can just pop in a DVD and play it. No installation hassles, no DirectX to update, no compatibility difficulties. It draws developers because they only have to support one platform, which relieves a huge headache from development and support angles. As for having sub-PC specs, look at the modern consoles from the other companies. Console hardware is universally far from the cutting edge, because it doesn't have to be. Using chips from a few generations back allows these companies to sell their products at a price attainable for the average household. And extensive customizations to these chips allow them to commonly whip the piss out of competing PC games. Yes, you can get a "better" PC for a similar price, but there are still a lot of people who don't want one (or a second). John Q. Public isn't as "smart" or "informed" as you.
A patch has been available for at least two days. If I were you, I wouldn't rely on Slashdot FUD for patch info for Microsoft products. (It works both ways: you wouldn't look on microsoft.com for Linux kernel patches). MS released a security bulletin on 1/26 to people on the security bulletin mailing list. It takes weeks or months for patches to show up on the MS Update site, since they have to be formatted for the ActiveX installer, and even then they're usually saved for a service pack. See this article for specific bug info and patch availability.
This is great for those concerned about protecting their anonymity. The Zero-Knowledge model is just about the best out there, working similarly to chained remailers. Provided Zero-Knowledge has actually implemented what they claim--and done it well--this is perhaps the best way to secure your right to free speech.
Hiring someone with expertise on a multi-platform application like Netscape was an excellent move. The only reason I don't use this is because the Zero-Knowledge client currently runs only on Win9x, with versions for other OSes to be released "real soon now". Hopefully, this should significantly jump-start those efforts, bringing anonymity to people who refuse to run an insecure OS.
The moderation system exists so that the CURRENT moderators can assign points, not just anybody who wants to. I can't think of any more abusive way to use the karma bonus point than to moderate vicariously through others. If a post deserves to be moderated up (and apparently somebody thought it did), it will be; your help isn't needed.
If you have a useful comment, don't put a dumb title like that on it.
Actually, no. Nucleic acids aren't all so different from peptides in the way they form chains. DNA exists perfectly well as a crystalized solid, and can rather easily be extracted, dried, and powdered. I did this in "high school biology". That aside, according to the Biotoy site, the compound here is actually a protein which they call NanoLight.
The "idiotic" rate at which biotech companies are applying for patents is hardly such; these companies are just defending their interests as best they can. Without legal guarantees of the exclusive rights to a product, there is hardly any incentive to pursue an incredibly expensive line of research (which will very likely yield no profitable results). Patent guessing is a delicate line to walk; precedents on what will be granted are constantly changing for various types of molecules. The best solution these companies have is to simply try to patent anything they can and then argue it later in court when it gets challenged. Otherwise, any me-too startup could, at relatively little expense compared to the original research effort, reverse engineer a product and significantly undersell the original manufacturer, thereby removing the incentive for anyone to do research at all. Since these corporations must [by law] protect their assets to the best of their ability, making the claims makes perfect sense. Restraint would do them, and their shareholders, no good.
The recent attempts to patent things like the entire human genome are admittedly dubious, and the companies attempting such things have little expectation that such claims will hold up. However, depending on the review clerk which happens to process your claim, what you can get away with in a patent application varies quite widely, often making the effort worth it (at least until the inevitable court challenge). The flipside is that what flies in one application sometimes won't in another, despite obvious correlations.
In the end, the best strategy is just to research what you think you can get a patent for, and then once you have something that somebody else hasn't before (whether or not it exists naturally), try to claim it and every possible derivative compound, process related to it, etc.
Translating emitted assembler into bytecode isn't a straightforward task in the least. I've written compilers both to asm and to bytecode, and you have to work pretty hard to get a JVM to take your class. There's a very specific set of capabilities within the JVM spec, and simulating things outside of that spec can get pretty hairy. Pointers, for instance, can't be simulated without basically writing a memory manager, essentially negating the purpose of the JVM altogether. Nested functions (like Pascal has), also require major kludges. The reason you can compile the very high-level languages you mentioned into a Java class is precisely that they're high-level and can be coerced fairly easily into the java spec.
If we fail to solve the problems down here, and they get worse, where will we go?
I perceive space research as an investment in the future in case we are left no choice but to abandon the world we are rapidly destroying. The knowledge gained by pursuing these programs (especially related to Mars and potentially colonization) may one day be invaluable, and prove to be what saves our species and civilization.
I've been trying to do this myself for some time; how do you go about synchronizing the audio output on the target machines without going to a proprietary solution like this?
I am greatly disturbed when companies attempt to record identifying information about me, including IP addresses (which can, with assistance from bullied ISPs, be traced back to the user). I make every effort in all my net-related activities to secure my privacy by dealing only with parties I trust and assuring that those won't improperly reveal who I am to parties whom I don't explicitly give that trust.
While most people aren't so concerned or careful about who knows who they are, the larger issue is that due to these concerns, many companies have begun collecting identifiable information without consent. Misrepresentation of a product's function is wrong and best and criminal at worst.
The information that Q3A transmits is, obviously, harmless. But how hard would it have been for Carmack to come clean with this fact in the beginning? The secrecy is what bothers me, not this particular violation of privacy. If I am given fair warning about what a product or service will tell the world about me, I can evaluate whether I want to use that product and choose to use it or not. I am especially bothered that Carmack, who usually seems to have a clue, wouldn't anticipate the discovery of and negative reaction to this "feature". I, along with most people, fully support his desire to make id's products better by researching end users' hardware. But being underhanded about it with simply foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that Slashdot reviews are generally positive, but I wouldn't place blame on Slashdot for that. In fact, I wouldn't blame anyone. Put yourself in the shoes of the reviewer. If you picked up a bad book, would you want to read all the way through it just to fully appreciate how bad it was? I certainly wouldn't. But I wouldn't want to submit a review of a book I hadn't read throughly. The causality of the issue lies more in that people don't want to review bad books than that Slashdot wants to promote ORA (which does publish many good books).
I think what this guy is talking about is in-house software written for companies, not commercially sold software. In-house engineers often don't want their name stuck on crap software that doesn't see the light of day. That way, once they leave, the company won't be able to try to drag them back into the project as "consultants".
*Ahem*. Why would anyone who owned the music want to download it? It's 1) slower, 2) of inferior quality to a good CD rip, 3) and often cropped or corrupted. Don't delude yourself; the significant majority of Napster use is illegal, plain and simple.
Of course, that doesn't prove that any of the users which Metallica fingered were necessarily breaking the law. But I suspect the courts will place the burden of proof on the accused here. All the same, the industry would be much better off exploiting the opportunity of digital distribution rather than fighting it tooth and nail in court.
I haven't heard anyone proposing people be sent to jail for copyright infringment. I suspect the artists would much rather just be paid for their work by fines through civil litigation.
Don't get caught!
Sorry, MacOS is much more moron-friendly than Windows. That's not at all to say that Mac users are morons; just that Apple targets people who want their interface clean and simple. But keep in mind that "user-friendliness" almost necessarily comes at the price of reduced power for those who desire it. How many Mac apps can use a right mouse button? Two buttons may somehow confuse people with no computer experience, but it's an incredible boon to those of us who can use it. A CLI is incredibly powerful and often far more efficient than a GUI for certain tasks; Mac users don't have that option (barring 3rd party hacks).
(This was taken a bit out of context; I don't think the poster was trying to hold up MacOS as the perfect standard to aspire to.)
Al Gore has been sending me email (through his "Southern Californians for Gore" list) for the past 6 months, despite following the unsubscribe directions five times. I don't even know how I got on the list. And yes, they do boil down to "Vote for me". The father of the internet doesn't have much respect for it.
Determining when machines have bettered us intellectually seems fairly simple; when machines start solving problems we haven't been able to, then we'll know we've been beat. This is already happening in very narrow fields... Kasparov, humanity's best offering in the chess world, fell to a machine. It's only a matter of time before machines can outhink us in every field we know of, and those the machines event themselves.
But I wonder how we will know when machines have outstripped us spiritually. If a computer "feels" an emotion we can't comprehend, how will we know? When a computer claims to feel something it can't describe to its creators, will we believe it, try to debug it, or destroy it? When a computer thinks it has found the meaning of life, what will we do if we can't understand?
A lot of people will care; those people who, unlike you, have absolutely no desire to run linux in their living room. The X-Box draws consumers because of its simplicity; you can just pop in a DVD and play it. No installation hassles, no DirectX to update, no compatibility difficulties. It draws developers because they only have to support one platform, which relieves a huge headache from development and support angles. As for having sub-PC specs, look at the modern consoles from the other companies. Console hardware is universally far from the cutting edge, because it doesn't have to be. Using chips from a few generations back allows these companies to sell their products at a price attainable for the average household. And extensive customizations to these chips allow them to commonly whip the piss out of competing PC games. Yes, you can get a "better" PC for a similar price, but there are still a lot of people who don't want one (or a second). John Q. Public isn't as "smart" or "informed" as you.
A patch has been available for at least two days. If I were you, I wouldn't rely on Slashdot FUD for patch info for Microsoft products. (It works both ways: you wouldn't look on microsoft.com for Linux kernel patches). MS released a security bulletin on 1/26 to people on the security bulletin mailing list. It takes weeks or months for patches to show up on the MS Update site, since they have to be formatted for the ActiveX installer, and even then they're usually saved for a service pack. See this article for specific bug info and patch availability.
They justify it by having a market capitalization of $524 billion. Sounds to me like their strategy works, like it or not.
This is great for those concerned about protecting their anonymity. The Zero-Knowledge model is just about the best out there, working similarly to chained remailers. Provided Zero-Knowledge has actually implemented what they claim--and done it well--this is perhaps the best way to secure your right to free speech.
Hiring someone with expertise on a multi-platform application like Netscape was an excellent move. The only reason I don't use this is because the Zero-Knowledge client currently runs only on Win9x, with versions for other OSes to be released "real soon now". Hopefully, this should significantly jump-start those efforts, bringing anonymity to people who refuse to run an insecure OS.
The moderation system exists so that the CURRENT moderators can assign points, not just anybody who wants to. I can't think of any more abusive way to use the karma bonus point than to moderate vicariously through others. If a post deserves to be moderated up (and apparently somebody thought it did), it will be; your help isn't needed.
If you have a useful comment, don't put a dumb title like that on it.
Actually, no. Nucleic acids aren't all so different from peptides in the way they form chains. DNA exists perfectly well as a crystalized solid, and can rather easily be extracted, dried, and powdered. I did this in "high school biology". That aside, according to the Biotoy site, the compound here is actually a protein which they call NanoLight.
The "idiotic" rate at which biotech companies are applying for patents is hardly such; these companies are just defending their interests as best they can. Without legal guarantees of the exclusive rights to a product, there is hardly any incentive to pursue an incredibly expensive line of research (which will very likely yield no profitable results). Patent guessing is a delicate line to walk; precedents on what will be granted are constantly changing for various types of molecules. The best solution these companies have is to simply try to patent anything they can and then argue it later in court when it gets challenged. Otherwise, any me-too startup could, at relatively little expense compared to the original research effort, reverse engineer a product and significantly undersell the original manufacturer, thereby removing the incentive for anyone to do research at all. Since these corporations must [by law] protect their assets to the best of their ability, making the claims makes perfect sense. Restraint would do them, and their shareholders, no good.
The recent attempts to patent things like the entire human genome are admittedly dubious, and the companies attempting such things have little expectation that such claims will hold up. However, depending on the review clerk which happens to process your claim, what you can get away with in a patent application varies quite widely, often making the effort worth it (at least until the inevitable court challenge). The flipside is that what flies in one application sometimes won't in another, despite obvious correlations.
In the end, the best strategy is just to research what you think you can get a patent for, and then once you have something that somebody else hasn't before (whether or not it exists naturally), try to claim it and every possible derivative compound, process related to it, etc.
Translating emitted assembler into bytecode isn't a straightforward task in the least. I've written compilers both to asm and to bytecode, and you have to work pretty hard to get a JVM to take your class. There's a very specific set of capabilities within the JVM spec, and simulating things outside of that spec can get pretty hairy. Pointers, for instance, can't be simulated without basically writing a memory manager, essentially negating the purpose of the JVM altogether. Nested functions (like Pascal has), also require major kludges. The reason you can compile the very high-level languages you mentioned into a Java class is precisely that they're high-level and can be coerced fairly easily into the java spec.
A better article is at http://www.cnn.com/1999/ SHOWBIZ/Music/12/03/stevie.wonder/.
"Now normally a Stevie Wonder story probably wouldn't make it on Slashdot..."
;-).
Anything about The Who, on the other hand, would be immediately posted without hesitation
If we fail to solve the problems down here, and they get worse, where will we go?
I perceive space research as an investment in the future in case we are left no choice but to abandon the world we are rapidly destroying. The knowledge gained by pursuing these programs (especially related to Mars and potentially colonization) may one day be invaluable, and prove to be what saves our species and civilization.
I've been trying to do this myself for some time; how do you go about synchronizing the audio output on the target machines without going to a proprietary solution like this?
I am greatly disturbed when companies attempt to record identifying information about me, including IP addresses (which can, with assistance from bullied ISPs, be traced back to the user). I make every effort in all my net-related activities to secure my privacy by dealing only with parties I trust and assuring that those won't improperly reveal who I am to parties whom I don't explicitly give that trust.
While most people aren't so concerned or careful about who knows who they are, the larger issue is that due to these concerns, many companies have begun collecting identifiable information without consent. Misrepresentation of a product's function is wrong and best and criminal at worst.
The information that Q3A transmits is, obviously, harmless. But how hard would it have been for Carmack to come clean with this fact in the beginning? The secrecy is what bothers me, not this particular violation of privacy. If I am given fair warning about what a product or service will tell the world about me, I can evaluate whether I want to use that product and choose to use it or not. I am especially bothered that Carmack, who usually seems to have a clue, wouldn't anticipate the discovery of and negative reaction to this "feature". I, along with most people, fully support his desire to make id's products better by researching end users' hardware. But being underhanded about it with simply foolish.