The article discusses how much of the software available today lacks safety checks on the DNA sequences that are produced.
That's really not much different than what we have with many programming langauges today. While most widely used C and C++ compilers today do offer numerous helpful compilation warnings, little is done to verify the safety of the emitted code. Many of the security problems we're dealing with today are due to buffer overflows, and other matters such as that.
It is often quite expensive to ensure software safety, be it when dealing with programming language compilers or DNA "compilers". Indeed, more study will be necessary to determine what a feasible trade off between the two is.
Does anyone know if they plan to release the source code? Indeed, it could prove to be a very useful resource to students studying bioinformatics, or other fields that combine biology and computer science.
That's not necessarily true. You could have a very good product, but still be second best to a competitor. If temporarily offering people rewards to use your service ends up harming your competitor, if not outright putting them out of business, then you could become the top of your field.
Thus you're not offering the reward because your product is shitty. Instead it's because you have an opportunity to make a potentially rewarding business move.
I voluntarily avoid using Microsoft products and services because I disagree with their business practices, thank you. Thus I will not try their search engine out for myself, lest they receive any ad revenue from my visit.
Existing search engines that have a similar scheme only allow you to win on your first ten searches per day, or something along those lines, in order to prevent automated searching abuses.
What is the minimum amount of money, or the minimum prize, that you would have to receive in order to use a search engine that may return suboptimal results?
For me, I don't know if any prize that is likely to be offered would be worth putting up with less than ideal search results.
I really hope that Google doesn't jump on this bandwagon. I'd much rather see them invest any prize money towards making their system better. $1 million isn't much to a company like Google, but that's still enough to pay a number of developers and researchers for even a year's worth of development and innovation.
What is the quality of MSN's search engine like? Does it rival that of Google?
Indeed, Microsoft does have the resources to create a very powerful product, but that is often not what is done, as shown by many of their past products.
Then again, I'll use whatever search engine returns the best results, regardless of what prizes they might be offering searchers. The prizes would have to be pretty significant for me to want to put up with what may be lower-quality searches.
If such a plan were to take hold, might we see a massive outcry from the manufacturers of DVDs?
Indeed, it is not unusual for an industry that is about to be obsoleted to put up a ruckus over the new and upcoming business models.
Now, they may not have enough clout to take any significant action in their favour. Some might suggest that it would be harmful to the economy if such an industry were to be put down. But alas, that is not a true statement to make. The decrease in demand for DVDs would be caused by a vast increase in demand for bandwidth and communication services. Thus again we may witness a costly method of production obsoleted by a far more efficient and effective method.
Assuming your statistic is correct, that is still 40% of American Internet users who do not have broadband. That's millions of people, you do realize. They're a significant portion of the market.
They're perhaps the best market to target, since the distribution costs are mainly put on them if they have to drive to their local video shoppe (and thus saving Apple/Blockbuster potentially hundreds of MB of bandwidth per video).
I know you're very well off, Mr. Randolph. From what I gather, you have made quite a fortune between your work in the computer industry and your investing. But not everyone is nearly as lucky as you are.
Not everyone lives in a house or tenement with cable Internet or DSL, for instance. Even in some suburbs cable is not available, and if you're in a rural area, it likely won't be available for decades. The same goes for DSL.
And while there are many people who do have such services available to them, but choose not to subscribe. Why pay a significant enough fee if you're only going to use it to obtain movies for your iPod every now and then?
For people in such a situation, being able to go to their nearest Blockbuster might be their only option, if not their preferred option.
I often hear about these so-called "media centres", and I must truly wonder what major benefit they bring. For the average person with a few dozen DVDs and music CDs, the cost would not appear to balance out the benefits one would reap.
It doesn't take long to switch a CD, and that may be completely unnecessary when using a multidisc player. Most people only find it useful to watch one DVD at a time, and again, the effort to change DVDs is minimal. With a length of cable on can even put the players right beside their chair for even easier access.
I would consider investing in a "media centre" once I knew what the benefit was. But I'm not about to go spend £1000 on something that'll only make it quicker to switch between my few DVDs and music CDs.
It seems that people don't recall when the average desktop system had only 32 MB of RAM. This was true even as late as 1999 and 2000.
Opera did a very good job managing resources, even back then. It got its reputation as a small, fast, capable browser back when desktop PCs were less powerful than handhelds today. That's one of the reasons it is so damn powerful on today's excessively capable machines.
I recently tried to run Seamonkey 1.0 on a 133 MHz Pentium system with 256 MB of RAM. It was a terrible experience. But Opera ran very well. In fact, it was difficult to tell the difference between that machine and some of the quad Opteron systems I've used in the past. Opera was just that much more responsive on older hardware.
Indeed. Sometimes I wish Opera would release the source code to their browser and rendering engine under the BSD license, just so that we could all see what a truly great piece of professionally developed software looks like.
Netscape's release of their source code did indeed take the world by storm. It has lead to innovation. But it was, truth be told, rather awful code. This has been admitted by those who developed it. So just think of what Opera could do. They'd be providing a far more solid code base, and it would be likely that many people would immediately switch over from Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Freedom has little to do with popular support. It's one of the few things in the world where there is no grey zone. Either you have freedom, or you do not. Even the censorship of a single word means that you are not truly free to say that word. Hence you do not have true freedom of expression, even if you can say every other word in existence.
I believe the point he is trying to make is that the CRTC still does regulate content, which is of course a form of censorship.
I recall hearing from Canadian relatives that the CRTC at one time failed to renew the license of a particular radio station because of "offensive" behavior of some of the station's jockeys.
I also remember hearing about how they approved Al Jazeera, but requested that instances of "hate speech" had to be edited out by broadcasters.
Between "hate speech" legislation (itself a very anti-democratic and anti-freedom of expression principle) and the CRTC, we see that the Canadian government does partake in the censorship of various media. The censorship is still prevalent, even if the Internet is not yet particularly affected.
Why stick to just focusing on the Internet, though? What makes what they are told by the mass media TV news broadcasts any more "truer" than what they might find on the Internet? Very little, if anything.
Instead of teaching them to "not trust" all the content they find on the Internet, perhaps you should teach them how they can differentiate poor quality information from high quality information. Teach them how to do basic fact checking between multiple sources, for instance. Teach them how to see where the interests lie; as in who is funding studies, who donates to politicians, and which corporations are owned by which other corporations.
If the emphasis were placed on teaching students how to effectively investigate and comprehend the world around them, then they wouldn't need to have to take "copyright courses". They'd be able to consider the reasons behind copyright legislation, how it has been affected by corporations over the years, and how it affects them today. At that point they'd be able to come up with their own ideas regarding it, and wouldn't have to resort to learning about the subject via such courses.
A course in ethics would be useless. Ethics are a very subjective thing. What you find unethical, a politician may find to be the most ethical thing. Of course, that is likely because his or her sense of ethics has been twisted by money and/or power.
The best thing to do is to keep people who are considered "unethical" by the general populace out of office. Now, that's far easier said than done. Many of the flawed systems of the Western world today promote those who are the most lacking when it comes to areas such as ethics and responsibility.
An education system depends on quality educators in order to function well. That almost goes without saying. The end result of ideas like this may result in the destruction of the system in which it is "infecting". That will hold especially true if those who would receive such funding end up avoiding California.
Much the same has reportedly been happening with Kansas. As the debate over intelligent design heats up, many talented educators (at all levels, be it university or high school) are now considering either leaving the state, or are not considering taking jobs there. That is by far one of the most harmful things which can happen to an educational system.
About a decade ago I got to know some of my relatives living in places like Poland and the Ukraine. Many of them grew up under the various communist regimes. This sounds an awful lot like what they had to go through at various levels of education. At least some of them were aware that it was nothing but indoctrination, and they went along with it because they had very little choice otherwise. But in their hearts they knew it was nothing but indoctrination, if not outright brainwashing. I would hope those in California would have a similar understanding of the situation they are in.
Keep in mind that laws have to have widespread public support in order to be truly effective and beneficial. Such legislation must deal with a problem that society in general finds to be in need of remedy. When you consider how many people actively engage in filesharing, it becomes quite clear that the vast segment of the populace does not consider such activities to be morally or ethically wrong, regardless of what the law might be.
Will this really work? Perhaps on a few individuals. As with many such compulsory "lessons", the students and teachers would go through with it. But they'd both know to disregard it. Thus it will have no effect but to waste time, money, and other resources.
Please don't take Java to be a good example of a garbage collected language. It unfortunately has given the technique a very bad name.
Look to languages such as Python, SML, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby and others for examples of garbage collection done right. Most of the popular implementations offer superb GC capabilities which offer better memory usage than that of the Java GC, all without the overhead of the Java collector.
While powerusers find setting options in that way to be ideal (I'm quite fond of it), it just isn't something you can tell a typical user to do. Many have a difficult time with normal, GUI-based software configuration. The about:config feature is basically forcing them into editing a textfile, and that just doesn't fly.
We hear so often about how Firefox is meant for the masses, because it is supposedly a suitable replacement for Internet Explorer. That won't hold true until it offers a friendlier interface for such obscure configuration.
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The article discusses how much of the software available today lacks safety checks on the DNA sequences that are produced.
That's really not much different than what we have with many programming langauges today. While most widely used C and C++ compilers today do offer numerous helpful compilation warnings, little is done to verify the safety of the emitted code. Many of the security problems we're dealing with today are due to buffer overflows, and other matters such as that.
It is often quite expensive to ensure software safety, be it when dealing with programming language compilers or DNA "compilers". Indeed, more study will be necessary to determine what a feasible trade off between the two is.
Does anyone know if they plan to release the source code? Indeed, it could prove to be a very useful resource to students studying bioinformatics, or other fields that combine biology and computer science.
That's not necessarily true. You could have a very good product, but still be second best to a competitor. If temporarily offering people rewards to use your service ends up harming your competitor, if not outright putting them out of business, then you could become the top of your field.
Thus you're not offering the reward because your product is shitty. Instead it's because you have an opportunity to make a potentially rewarding business move.
I voluntarily avoid using Microsoft products and services because I disagree with their business practices, thank you. Thus I will not try their search engine out for myself, lest they receive any ad revenue from my visit.
But if such a method ends up putting your competitor out of business, and you're already second best, you quickly rise to the top.
Existing search engines that have a similar scheme only allow you to win on your first ten searches per day, or something along those lines, in order to prevent automated searching abuses.
What is the minimum amount of money, or the minimum prize, that you would have to receive in order to use a search engine that may return suboptimal results?
For me, I don't know if any prize that is likely to be offered would be worth putting up with less than ideal search results.
I really hope that Google doesn't jump on this bandwagon. I'd much rather see them invest any prize money towards making their system better. $1 million isn't much to a company like Google, but that's still enough to pay a number of developers and researchers for even a year's worth of development and innovation.
What is the quality of MSN's search engine like? Does it rival that of Google?
Indeed, Microsoft does have the resources to create a very powerful product, but that is often not what is done, as shown by many of their past products.
Then again, I'll use whatever search engine returns the best results, regardless of what prizes they might be offering searchers. The prizes would have to be pretty significant for me to want to put up with what may be lower-quality searches.
If such a plan were to take hold, might we see a massive outcry from the manufacturers of DVDs?
Indeed, it is not unusual for an industry that is about to be obsoleted to put up a ruckus over the new and upcoming business models.
Now, they may not have enough clout to take any significant action in their favour. Some might suggest that it would be harmful to the economy if such an industry were to be put down. But alas, that is not a true statement to make. The decrease in demand for DVDs would be caused by a vast increase in demand for bandwidth and communication services. Thus again we may witness a costly method of production obsoleted by a far more efficient and effective method.
Assuming your statistic is correct, that is still 40% of American Internet users who do not have broadband. That's millions of people, you do realize. They're a significant portion of the market.
They're perhaps the best market to target, since the distribution costs are mainly put on them if they have to drive to their local video shoppe (and thus saving Apple/Blockbuster potentially hundreds of MB of bandwidth per video).
I know you're very well off, Mr. Randolph. From what I gather, you have made quite a fortune between your work in the computer industry and your investing. But not everyone is nearly as lucky as you are.
Not everyone lives in a house or tenement with cable Internet or DSL, for instance. Even in some suburbs cable is not available, and if you're in a rural area, it likely won't be available for decades. The same goes for DSL.
And while there are many people who do have such services available to them, but choose not to subscribe. Why pay a significant enough fee if you're only going to use it to obtain movies for your iPod every now and then?
For people in such a situation, being able to go to their nearest Blockbuster might be their only option, if not their preferred option.
I often hear about these so-called "media centres", and I must truly wonder what major benefit they bring. For the average person with a few dozen DVDs and music CDs, the cost would not appear to balance out the benefits one would reap.
It doesn't take long to switch a CD, and that may be completely unnecessary when using a multidisc player. Most people only find it useful to watch one DVD at a time, and again, the effort to change DVDs is minimal. With a length of cable on can even put the players right beside their chair for even easier access.
I would consider investing in a "media centre" once I knew what the benefit was. But I'm not about to go spend £1000 on something that'll only make it quicker to switch between my few DVDs and music CDs.
It seems that people don't recall when the average desktop system had only 32 MB of RAM. This was true even as late as 1999 and 2000.
Opera did a very good job managing resources, even back then. It got its reputation as a small, fast, capable browser back when desktop PCs were less powerful than handhelds today. That's one of the reasons it is so damn powerful on today's excessively capable machines.
I recently tried to run Seamonkey 1.0 on a 133 MHz Pentium system with 256 MB of RAM. It was a terrible experience. But Opera ran very well. In fact, it was difficult to tell the difference between that machine and some of the quad Opteron systems I've used in the past. Opera was just that much more responsive on older hardware.
Indeed. Sometimes I wish Opera would release the source code to their browser and rendering engine under the BSD license, just so that we could all see what a truly great piece of professionally developed software looks like.
Netscape's release of their source code did indeed take the world by storm. It has lead to innovation. But it was, truth be told, rather awful code. This has been admitted by those who developed it. So just think of what Opera could do. They'd be providing a far more solid code base, and it would be likely that many people would immediately switch over from Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Freedom has little to do with popular support. It's one of the few things in the world where there is no grey zone. Either you have freedom, or you do not. Even the censorship of a single word means that you are not truly free to say that word. Hence you do not have true freedom of expression, even if you can say every other word in existence.
I believe the point he is trying to make is that the CRTC still does regulate content, which is of course a form of censorship.
I recall hearing from Canadian relatives that the CRTC at one time failed to renew the license of a particular radio station because of "offensive" behavior of some of the station's jockeys.
I also remember hearing about how they approved Al Jazeera, but requested that instances of "hate speech" had to be edited out by broadcasters.
Between "hate speech" legislation (itself a very anti-democratic and anti-freedom of expression principle) and the CRTC, we see that the Canadian government does partake in the censorship of various media. The censorship is still prevalent, even if the Internet is not yet particularly affected.
Why stick to just focusing on the Internet, though? What makes what they are told by the mass media TV news broadcasts any more "truer" than what they might find on the Internet? Very little, if anything.
Instead of teaching them to "not trust" all the content they find on the Internet, perhaps you should teach them how they can differentiate poor quality information from high quality information. Teach them how to do basic fact checking between multiple sources, for instance. Teach them how to see where the interests lie; as in who is funding studies, who donates to politicians, and which corporations are owned by which other corporations.
If the emphasis were placed on teaching students how to effectively investigate and comprehend the world around them, then they wouldn't need to have to take "copyright courses". They'd be able to consider the reasons behind copyright legislation, how it has been affected by corporations over the years, and how it affects them today. At that point they'd be able to come up with their own ideas regarding it, and wouldn't have to resort to learning about the subject via such courses.
A course in ethics would be useless. Ethics are a very subjective thing. What you find unethical, a politician may find to be the most ethical thing. Of course, that is likely because his or her sense of ethics has been twisted by money and/or power.
The best thing to do is to keep people who are considered "unethical" by the general populace out of office. Now, that's far easier said than done. Many of the flawed systems of the Western world today promote those who are the most lacking when it comes to areas such as ethics and responsibility.
An education system depends on quality educators in order to function well. That almost goes without saying. The end result of ideas like this may result in the destruction of the system in which it is "infecting". That will hold especially true if those who would receive such funding end up avoiding California.
Much the same has reportedly been happening with Kansas. As the debate over intelligent design heats up, many talented educators (at all levels, be it university or high school) are now considering either leaving the state, or are not considering taking jobs there. That is by far one of the most harmful things which can happen to an educational system.
About a decade ago I got to know some of my relatives living in places like Poland and the Ukraine. Many of them grew up under the various communist regimes. This sounds an awful lot like what they had to go through at various levels of education. At least some of them were aware that it was nothing but indoctrination, and they went along with it because they had very little choice otherwise. But in their hearts they knew it was nothing but indoctrination, if not outright brainwashing. I would hope those in California would have a similar understanding of the situation they are in.
Keep in mind that laws have to have widespread public support in order to be truly effective and beneficial. Such legislation must deal with a problem that society in general finds to be in need of remedy. When you consider how many people actively engage in filesharing, it becomes quite clear that the vast segment of the populace does not consider such activities to be morally or ethically wrong, regardless of what the law might be.
Will this really work? Perhaps on a few individuals. As with many such compulsory "lessons", the students and teachers would go through with it. But they'd both know to disregard it. Thus it will have no effect but to waste time, money, and other resources.
Please don't take Java to be a good example of a garbage collected language. It unfortunately has given the technique a very bad name.
Look to languages such as Python, SML, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby and others for examples of garbage collection done right. Most of the popular implementations offer superb GC capabilities which offer better memory usage than that of the Java GC, all without the overhead of the Java collector.
While powerusers find setting options in that way to be ideal (I'm quite fond of it), it just isn't something you can tell a typical user to do. Many have a difficult time with normal, GUI-based software configuration. The about:config feature is basically forcing them into editing a textfile, and that just doesn't fly.
We hear so often about how Firefox is meant for the masses, because it is supposedly a suitable replacement for Internet Explorer. That won't hold true until it offers a friendlier interface for such obscure configuration.