So I've always wondered how someone gets into gene research despite having a sibling who just received her PhD in a related field. What is odd is that we both went to a Catholic (K-8) school run by nuns, we both went to a local high school in literally the middle of nowhere and we both read works like The Panda's Thumb. But she went into research on genes and gene therapy while I went into software development and coding. So I've always wondered how much the United States' religious system actually inhibits our work in this field and other fields of science. Could you explain to me -- in your ideal world -- what would change in schools (at all levels) as a young mind develops that is distinctly different from the way it is now to better promote these options? Do you believe that the arcane and puritanical views of religious groups actually hinder us or that people who want to excel in these fields will find their way to it? Assuming you do believe this is a hindrance, how bad is it?
I constantly see your work referenced both by opponents and proponents and feel like they don't always fully understand the concepts. My personal favorite is when I find a proponent of your work taking the personification of the gene to a new level past its role as a mere didactic device -- sometimes expounding at length about what genes want and desire. So what is your favorite misunderstanding that may have ended up as a headline, news story or that you've found on the internet?
"We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts, or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account."
Not to imply that anything wrong was happening but isn't that the definition of money laundering?
Perhaps an individual experimenting with how effectively he can automatically clean BTC with temporary internet accounts being made for transactions leading back to a brand new account? But wouldn't the whole chain of ownership be shown on that final balance? What else could be the purpose of the mentioned exercise?
The researchers started by mining the history for data that identified when two or more addresses belonged to the same owner.
How is this done? I thought that BTC just needed an address and that was it. You could use throwaway accounts if you wanted to, right? From the wikipedia page on it:
Because transactions are broadcast to the entire network, they are inherently public. Unlike regular banking, which preserves customer privacy by keeping transaction records private, loose transactional privacy is accomplished in Bitcoin by using many unique addresses for every wallet, while at the same time publishing all transactions. As an example, if Alice sends 123.45 BTC to Bob, the network creates a public record that allows anyone to see that 123.45 has been sent from one address to another. However, unless Alice or Bob make their ownership of these addresses known, it is difficult for anyone else to connect the transaction with them. However, if someone connects an address to a user at any point they could follow back a series of transactions as each participant likely knows who paid them and may disclose that information on request or under duress.
Movement from a known to unknown account in an attempt to "launder" it maybe?
So what you're saying is that there is a limited resource which we cannot make more of that people are hording? And the more people horde it, the higher the deflation? And people watch their value rise in USD as this happens? And you're surprised?
Now I don’t begrudge chemistry, which has brought forth many of the great inventions of our time, from the pain killer I took an hour ago to the diet soda I’m sipping on now (I’m actually sipping on Scotch. In fact, my very own mother, who if I am lucky will never lay eyes on this article, is a chemist, and believes that chemistry is the most noble of human pursuits and doesn’t understand how I, a former philosophy major, was able to eke out a living.
And if you wouldn't have wasted your time on that public speaking course and instead used that opportunity cost to take a class in a Lisp language like Scheme you'd understand why your failure to close that left parenthesis is driving me bat shit insane right now.
What is the purpose of copyright? To allow a creator to profit from his or her creativity. What creativity in this case could possibly be profited from?
Fortunately, that's not for you or the United States legal system to decide. If you want to go insane and spend your entire life writing your book and then sell it for one hundred billion dollars per copy, you are more than free to do it. That is a personal freedom that cannot be taken away from an entrepreneur no matter how completely stupid it may sound.
Is the publisher actually going to lose money from a small portion of 40 year old book making it into the public domain?
Okay, we're starting to get somewhere. You say "forty years" because of this work. So what you're saying is that everything written over forty years ago is fair game and public domain? So I can make movies out of Sirens of Titan, A Clockwork Orange, To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dune, Catch-22, Stranger in a Strangeland, etc and not pay anyone a dime for those rights or royalties? Okay so where do you draw the line on copyright? Give us a proposed length and then we can start discussing this like adults instead of asking stupid vague rhetorical questions about a suicide prevention questionnaire.
I said no such thing, but you're free to put words in peoples mouths if it gives you a reason to argue over nothing on the internet.
You did effectively say that. You said that because this might save lives if it's public domain then this is an even worse case of copyright than, say, Dune because the suicide prevention sheet has life saving potential. And I take objection to that. You can't sit there and decided what is morally more copyrightable than anything else for the exact same reason I stated at the beginning of this post. Copyrighted material is very subjective content in that creativity and art can be whatever the hell a madman wants it to be. That's a personal freedom you enjoy in the United States.
I would however suggest that creating something that is intended to benefit the public health be allowed to benefit public health first, and be used as a mechanism for profit SECOND. But apparently I am to consider myself in the minority in that viewpoint.
So here's another example of you making this a special case. Because this copyrighted work is medically related and might benefit public health, it has some special status that a creative work outside of this domain does not. And that's just laughably insane.
But I must be some kind of dreamer to hope that small business be allowed to create jobs first, and protect the property of other companies in different industries second, right?
Dude, your rhetoric is top notch. What the hell does job creation have to do with this? What about job creation at Pearson and the other publishing houses? Are you a politician? We aren't talking about job creation, we're talking about publishing creative works. Did you know that if someone walked around with a pistol shooting people, it would create a lot of jobs? You'd need people around to take care of the wounded, people to fill out paper work, people to arrange funerals? It'd be an economic boon, just like a war! So should we allow it?
So, suggesting that a portion of a work that was written 40 years ago might be better in the public domain actually makes you afraid to write? Are you for real?
Now who's putting words in someone's mouth? Where did I say that? What I said was that you're giving special status to some creative works over others so if I'm a writer, I'll stay away from your realms where I have a moral obligation to give it away for free or have a shorter term length on it just because it might help people.
On the plus side, you keep saying "40 years" so what is it? What your suggested term length?
Sidenote: I found a copy of the questionnaire in the top 10 google results; and I think my score jumped a few points after reading yet another flawed defence of an indefensible theft of inherently communal property.
"Flawed defense?" What the hell are you talking about? I myself think that copyright term limit should be reduced down to something more like 40-50 years on future works (from date of publishing). Even if I succeeded in doing that it would make this particular work still copyrighted because when they published it the law was ridiculously lengthy. How is something you write "inherently communal property"? It's something you wrote! It's yours! It's your idea!
Oh you found a copy of that questionnaire in the top 10 Google results? So that does what? Legitimizes this? When you watch the news and you see laws broken like tax evasion and they prosecute you think "Well, it's happening all over, anyone should be able to do it" and then you stop paying taxes? Because you google for tax evasion and see lots of cases of it?
The offending post was published in 2007, which is true, however the material (questionnaire) that was posted was 38 years old.
Astonishing but still within the copyright term length. Abhorrent? You bet. But I wouldn't go around attacking publishers and would instead focus on reducing the law that governs said term length.
Worse yet, the questionnaire was a suicide prevention questionnaire, so its existence in the public domain might actually save lives.
So what you're saying is that if I want to make money publishing my research, I should stay away from publishing suicide prevention materials since placing a copyright on that is morally reprehensible because if it's public domain it might actually save lives?
So a DMCA request pulled down millions of blogs because one page that was originally published nearly 4 decades ago supposedly has some copyright value to someone.
So I'd like to point out that from what I've read they were given 24 hour notice from their provider and they failed to remove the article from their cache (although they did remove it from their site). If you're running a site that costs $6,954.37 just in hosting service per month, I would hope you would be a little more competent about complying with DMCA requests. Do they not have anyone on staff who knows how to flush a Varnish cache? And in defense of the hosting company, it's not their job to pick through and block each individual page you host and play their own version of whackamole. It's terrible that so many educational resources went down but the incompetence is shared between the people who run that operation, the hosting provider, the dumbass politicians who gave us the DMCA and the citizens who don't complain to their representatives about it. If you don't like the law, change it. But what you're attacking are symptoms of this law and you should be railing against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Be prepared, people are going to want to know how you think we should balance the rights of the artists and authors who create material (and subsequently their income) and the benefit of the public from that material.
I'm telling you right now, the way you described how horrible this is makes me never want to produce any sort of writing that might be construed as beneficial to society because then I won't be paid for my work or I'll be a monster. If Pearson can't make money off these texts, goodbye Pearson. It's that simple. And yeah, that might be the future with self publishing on the rise but right now they have those texts under laws that are legitimate US Laws.
These times we live in, they're literally not far off from a lot of books I was encouraged to read in high school, but was told would never actually happen.
Did you know that many if not all of those books are copyrighted and those authors benefited from copyright? Also before you go around equivocating this to burning books in Fahrenheit 451 you should probably come up with an ideal middle ground between where we are now and everything is public domain. Hyperbole doesn't really help this debate.
“Open source is the only credible producer of software and now hardware that isn’t bound to a single company’s economic interest,”
Well, where is this open source hardware? Every time something comes up on Slashdot reported to be "open source hardware" there's a whole slew of comments about how it's not truly open source. Anything from "where are the schematics" all the way down to the verilog/VHDL compilers and place/route algorithms being closed source. I've seen a 3D printer but not much else that meets the most stringent requirements. So tell me, where is this seemingly mythical "open source hardware" that will now free me from a single company's economic interest?
Amazon taking charge of OMAP could leave rivals Barnes & Noble in a tricky situation
Also, I believe the BeagleBoard is the SoC OMAP3530... not to mention there's a bunch of Samsung products (since it was mentioned that they are "rising competition") that depend on the OMAP4xxx series like the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 2 and Galaxy Nexus... lot of BlackBerry devices on that list too. It's not just the Kindle Fire using OMAP4, there's a lot of current devices using OMAP3 & OMAP4.
What's going to happen to all these devices when Amazon decides it doesn't make open source hobby boards or cell phones and condenses these SoCs down to just Kindle-related focus? I guess it'd be stupid to throw away all that business but anybody know what would happen to these?
Trading our liberties for other imagined benefits will not end well. You cannot crack the door for this beast.
Well, being a reader of Slashdot, we're all familiar with that quote. I think more appropriate here is Franklin's "Apology for Printers" that contains many apt gems concerning this news including:
8. That if all Printers were determin'd not to print any thing till they were sure it would offend no body, there would be very little printed.
The first and foremost fear I have is a destruction or suppression of culture. I'm not saying "Innocence of Muslims" is a good film. Of course, I'm not saying "Manos Hands of Fate", "The Room" or "Birdemic" are spectacular films either -- but I own licensed copies of them. I also own several editions of James Joyce's "Ulysses", a book which was banned in many countries when it was written. I will tell you right now that we would be missing major cultural artifacts if those in power had succeeded at eradicating "Ulysses" and its author. Yes, I'm afraid of corrupt politicians, populations that cannot access knowledge, etc. But those are effects that UN officials won't immediately see. Effects that can be immediately felt are people who collect poorly scripted, acted and funded films will no longer have access to "Innocence of Muslims." No one's saying it's a good film -- then again what defines a "good film" is so subjective I wouldn't know a blockbuster if it hit me in the face.
Authors from Franklin to Bradbury knew this and everyone today should know this: you must resist 'trimming' (by anyone's definition of the word) culture to protect it and keep it intact lest every bit of it be an option on the chopping block for whatever fanatic that has the press as a mouthpiece each day.
"Terrorism is not just people who kill human bodies, but who kill human feelings as well. The makers of this film have terrorised 1.6 billion people."
Well, even by the post-9/11-everyone's-a-terrorist definitions, I don't see that but, very well, I'll play your game. Your redefinition of the word terrorist in the English language has killed my human feeling of respect for the English language. I have in my hand a piece of paper written in Crayola crayon that I believe to contain a 4,000 year old text defining English as a sacred language. You see I was drunk one night and I accidentally channeled Zoroaster who is like, way older than Muhammad. And you have killed that spirit inside me. Also, your call for censorship completely kills my internal spirit that there is hope for humanity -- one of the greatest of human feelings. As such you sir are a terrorist by your own definition of the word, enjoy your imminent self-incarceration.
"Organisations like Google are key players and have to take responsibility for civility. You can't just say it doesn't matter that it's freedom of speech. It's anarchy."
Let me guess, you get to define the words "civility" and "anarchy"? Yeah, I get it, some parts of your religion are only compatible if there's one bearded male telling everyone else what to do. It's 2012, you better suppress that shit or you're gonna have a bad time.
> map applications that overlay data from multiple databases
Sounds blatantly obvious to someone skilled in the art...
Microsoft Engineer 1: Jesus, dude look at this, look at this idea I had! Microsoft Engineer 2: I don't get it, what am I looking at here, this C# code is light years beyond my comprehension. Microsoft Engineer 1: I know, right? But here, let me step you through it. You remember how we were pulling data from one database and displaying it? Microsoft Engineer 2: Yeah, that itself is, like, on par with the gods... Microsoft Engineer 1: Right right but it got me to thinking... what if -- and stay with me here -- what if we pulled map data from two different databases. Microsoft Engineer 2: No way dude, that's impossible. Look, we use one prepared statement here to get the data... what you're talking about would require something like... Microsoft Engineer 1: Two prepared statements? Microsoft Engineer 2: Oh. My. God. It could work... no, wait, even then we've only got one database connection in the code. That's it, from there you're stuck, you'd have to send both the prepared statements to the database... unless... wait, hold the phone... unless you had... Microsoft Engineer 1: Two database connections? Microsoft Engineer 2: *starts shaking his hands in the air excitedly* Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, this is going to be a game changer. We better tell Ballmer -- quick, get the patent officers on the phone, this is fuckin' huge!
Remember phone books? It used to be possible to match people with not only their phone number but their home address too.
Ah, yes! And let me tell you a story about that! I used to have a very common name. So common that according to the latest census there are 40,000 of me walking around the United States (first and last name). I have met myself (first, middle and last) four times and the second time I met myself I was 19 and he was 20 and he said to me: "Don't you ever let your name be published in the phone book" (as advice from one being raised in a major metropolis and I being raised in a very small town) and then went on to describe at length how, when he turned 18, he started receiving odd phone calls from credit card companies demanding he pay up tens of thousands of debt. After months of harassment, he finally got it all straightened out with one of the credit bureaus who then basically had to show the credit card companies that his records and the records of the real person they were looking for were completely different. The other odd thing was that the address the credit card companies had on file had the same exact abbreviations as his address in the phone book and the person had "moved" to that address right when my friend turned 18 and had his name put in the phone book.
Is it a common problem? Maybe not... but I'd just as well keep as much of my life private as possible... to avoid whatever creative scofflaw there might be out there.
Terry Kramer, the U.S. special envoy to the conference, said the US opposes proposals from some of the 'nondemocratic nations' that include tracking and monitoring content and user information, which 'makes it very easy for nations to monitor traffic.'"
This quote is so rife with arrogance that it makes me vomit, coming from a
government that does nothing but blatantly spend money and spy on it's people.
Well, maybe you should read this proposal by China Mobile to split up the internet via "DNS Extension." Aside from the obvious criticisms and assuming we just blindly said "yeah, sure, China, whatever you want" let me ask you this: Will the situation improve for US citizens? Will the situation get worse for Chinese citizens? I think you have to agree that the answers to those questions are no and yes. Whether or not the United States spies on its own citizens is nothing more than an ad hominem attack to ruin this discussion about putting control of the internet into the hands of other nations that do not have laws against spying on its own citizens and, in fact, are places where unannounced and confusing censorship seems to be the norm.
Open Governance to ensure engagement in our leadership and decision processes;
We have ensured that this is the most open governance possible. Why, as we speak, KDE death squads are being dispatched to move door to door to force you into a leadership and/or decision process for KDE. Should you fail or should said squads find Gnome in your household... well, let's just concentrate on the positives of the Manifesto. We here at KDE put the "FEST" in "Manifesto!"
Free Software to ensure the result of our work is available to all people;
We have recently employed Liam Neeson and a team of investigators working around the clock to tie names and individuals to credit cards and paypal accounts after turning over all our donation transactions to them. If you do not accept our software as free, you will be paid a visit by Liam Neeson who has, shall we say, developed a particularly forceful skill set in working at our returns department! Don't thank us, thank you for using KDE -- please we cannot emphasize this enough: it will be free or there will be blood.
Inclusivity to ensure that people of all origins are welcome to join us and participate;
In an effort to include everyone, we have actually started up cloning chambers with the DNA of Neanderthals. No origins, past or present, will be left un-KDE'd in our quest to excel in inclusivity past those dirty gnome users.
Innovation to ensure that new ideas constantly emerge to better serve people;
Ah yes, our innovation measures have become quite extreme. So extreme that you can feel them in the pit of your stomach. Not literally, of course -- the literal pit of innovation is behind our headquarters where we've trapped the world's leading scientists and patent lawyers while we spray them with a hose if they don't meet our patent quotas to out-innovate the gnome team!
Common Ownership to ensure that we stay united;
This one is simple! Any forks will be auspiciously repressed! Not repressed like emotional feelings but instead like tanks in Tienanmen Square. Of course, this is open source, you're free to fork whenever you want and we're free to ensure that everyone stays united. It's open source + united people = united open source people!
End-User Focus to ensure our work is useful to all people.
Is your Klan rally missing that flame? Is your Neo-Nazi newsletter not so neo? Is your jihad turning out to be a junker? Well, submit a feature request to KDE to ensure you can meet all of your needs with our software. We don't discriminate -- that is unless you want us to! *wink* *wink*
In all seriousness though, I know it doesn't mean this but am I the only person that imagines someone with crazy eyes smiling uncontrollably at you when you hear the word 'manifesto'?
A sign or two saying something like "PRIVATE PROPERTY NO DUMPING" might help, if you don't already have a sign like that which is being ignored.
Where do you live that it's okay to do this:
I have a cottage at the end of a long dirt road, no electricity nor internet, and recently some (insert expletive here) wads are using the area as a trash dump: countertops, sofas, metal scraps, tvs — all the stuff they don't want to pay to dump at the landfill.
Even if it is a dirt road, it's not your property and if you don't have permission to be leaving shit all over the place then you don't do it. Where do you live that you can just legally drive around and say "this looks good, I don't see any signs" and dump shit to rust and rot and look terrible? Am I the only person that is appalled by that?
I've lived in two states. I'm pretty sure you'd be fined and/or sued to high heaven if you were caught doing that on any property you do not own and pay taxes on -- even then TVs and metal scraps can permanently damage the environment if not properly disposed of.
Well, I sympathize because the sender (not the recipient) never agreed to this e-mail introspection in any sort of ToS or anything with Google. And I feel like someone should be free to stand up their own e-mail server and have complete freedom from ads at some expense to themselves and some work if they so desire. That choice should always be there and it rubs me just a bit the wrong way that you can't do that if everyone else is using Google. Now, that said, I think in the end the ruling should go down something like this: tough shit. You can configure your e-mail server not to hand off any e-mails to Google servers or servers that would then route it to Google Mail. You want to run your own server, you implement your own security and white lists/black lists. You're basically acknowledging that the receiving server you are submitting data can do what they please with it (barring current laws like the CANSPAM Act, or whatever Canada has). So I think this needs to be sorted out and it needs to be determined whether this data and data analysis by Google is innocuous or if it is truly sensitive enough to be identified as, say, personal data and credit card numbers submitted to a site for ordering products.
They're also free to start their own ad-supported free email system, and if it is better than gmail (snicker snort) then they will surely have the same opportunity.
That logic doesn't follow. If I find out that someone is doing something morally reprehensible (though not illegal) and want a court to look into the situation, it's certainly not my desire to go around being a douche bag like them and trying to be a bigger jerk than them. This instance isn't a user complaining, it's a non-user complaining of a company's practices that he feels affects him.
Wake me up when gmail suppresses the ads in the email in some way other than not showing images by default (which it always informs you it's done.)
Again, it only informs the user of the system, not a sender who may be sending e-mails that are then inspected by Google algorithms.
The lawsuit is on behalf of "all persons in the province of British Columbia who have sent e-mail to a Gmail account" and demands statutory damages for breach of copyright of $500 per e-mail that Google has used for ads. The lawsuit also seeks an injunction against Google's use of e-mails going forward. Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
$500 per e-mail used for ads? Am I the only person that finds that to be just a tad bit insane?
Wayne Plimmer of British Columbia has filed a class-action lawsuit against Google for using his e-mails for ads. Plimmer is not a Gmail user, but his concern is that Google is reading and using his e-mails to serve ads to Gmail readers too. Being a non-Gmail user, he never agreed to the terms of service, so the legality of what Google is doing seems murky.
Okay. I can see that but can you explain how $500 per e-mail for everyone in BC is just about right for how much damages this has caused you?
This isn't news, this is Bruce Upbin, Forbes Staff "reporting" on some random article by another journalist named Tristan Louis who lists his credentials as:
Tristan Louis is an Internet veteran, having worked in the Internet industry since 1993. Throughout the years, Mr. Louis has been known as the founder of Internet.com, a co-founder of Earthweb's developer.com, the interim CTO for Boo.com, and has held many other roles at start-ups during the first dotcom boom.
And this guy is commenting on why Apple should buy Nokia? Really? That's "news" to us? It's basically a list of half baked points. I know how this works, I've seen it in my uncle. He used to play sports in high school and when we watch a Vikings game he is just exasperated at how terrible the coaches are. Why, if he was in that game, he'd know exactly what plays to call and he could probably even be the quarterback and throw this football clear over them mountains.
The piece fails to explain why Apple shouldn't merely license Nokia's map services instead of kicking $10 billion out for it (oh, by the way, 10% of your total liquid assets is not a "drop in the bucket"). It fails to analyze many of the other assets of Nokia (oh, come on, like Apple would continue making Nokia's candy bar phones) and just assumes Apple would like to pay for all that stuff. It doesn't consider all the EU approvals that Apple would need and he ends this list with Apple doing "a double-reverse with a flip" which sounds a lot like the plays my uncle would call in a professional football game.
In short, build your own $100 billion dollar empire and then you can throw it away yourself. Until then, I don't think this shallow "analysis" of two phone makers was ever worth my time. It could at least be comprehensive and delve into the financials of the deal and possible repercussions (like yet another little guy dying and the market becoming more inbred with less options).
Google and Apple Spent More On Patents Than R&D Last Year
I was going to submit this story this morning but I didn't because I couldn't find the source of this Stanford analysis that is mentioned (though not cited) in the article. Could someone please give me a link to a news release or PDF or anything? I thought I had pretty good Google skills but found nothing. The thing that worries me is that this headline lead me to believe that all the court fees and lawsuits are costing more than R&D. However the article itself says:
In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.
So my first concern is that this is also about patent purchases so this could also be including that "per phone or per license" cost that you pay when you actually do license someone's patent legally and use the system as it was intended to work. Does anyone know if they're including this or just acquisitions of smaller companies that have patent portfolios as defense/attack mechanisms? Secondly, I'm concerned that we're only seeing public filings and these sums cannot reflect undisclosed terms for settling out of court and/or licenses that are not publicized.
Again, before people explode over this headline, I'd just like to get my hands on the data and verify that there is indeed a reason to explode over this. This isn't an apology for patents, this is just the most basic journalistic caution before I fly off the handle.
As a software developer, I have a coveted collection of books. A few of said tomes -- both fiction and non -- have fundamentally altered the course of my life. Assuming yours aren't just man pages and.txt files, what are they?
Despite your accomplishments and some of your public comments about the dire state of American politics, you remain a resident of the United States of America. Clearly you have the clout to live where you please, why do you continue to reside in the United States? Assuming your answer is simply "work", if there was one thing you could change in the United States what would it be and are you doing anything to move toward that accomplishment (aside from procreating and trying to help us out that way)?
In 2007 you made some rather polarizing remarks about C++. Coincidentally, Slashdot absolutely loves language wars and I seem to only find evidence that you use C based on the lack of malice and contempt I can find you publicizing on it. Do you find anything terrible about C? Conversely, do you have anything nice to say bout C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, Lisp, Prolog, Microsoft's languages or any other language you feel particularly vehement about at the moment?
Slashdot Mirror
So I've always wondered how someone gets into gene research despite having a sibling who just received her PhD in a related field. What is odd is that we both went to a Catholic (K-8) school run by nuns, we both went to a local high school in literally the middle of nowhere and we both read works like The Panda's Thumb. But she went into research on genes and gene therapy while I went into software development and coding. So I've always wondered how much the United States' religious system actually inhibits our work in this field and other fields of science. Could you explain to me -- in your ideal world -- what would change in schools (at all levels) as a young mind develops that is distinctly different from the way it is now to better promote these options? Do you believe that the arcane and puritanical views of religious groups actually hinder us or that people who want to excel in these fields will find their way to it? Assuming you do believe this is a hindrance, how bad is it?
I constantly see your work referenced both by opponents and proponents and feel like they don't always fully understand the concepts. My personal favorite is when I find a proponent of your work taking the personification of the gene to a new level past its role as a mere didactic device -- sometimes expounding at length about what genes want and desire. So what is your favorite misunderstanding that may have ended up as a headline, news story or that you've found on the internet?
"We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts, or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account."
Not to imply that anything wrong was happening but isn't that the definition of money laundering?
Perhaps an individual experimenting with how effectively he can automatically clean BTC with temporary internet accounts being made for transactions leading back to a brand new account? But wouldn't the whole chain of ownership be shown on that final balance? What else could be the purpose of the mentioned exercise?
The researchers started by mining the history for data that identified when two or more addresses belonged to the same owner.
How is this done? I thought that BTC just needed an address and that was it. You could use throwaway accounts if you wanted to, right? From the wikipedia page on it:
Because transactions are broadcast to the entire network, they are inherently public. Unlike regular banking, which preserves customer privacy by keeping transaction records private, loose transactional privacy is accomplished in Bitcoin by using many unique addresses for every wallet, while at the same time publishing all transactions. As an example, if Alice sends 123.45 BTC to Bob, the network creates a public record that allows anyone to see that 123.45 has been sent from one address to another. However, unless Alice or Bob make their ownership of these addresses known, it is difficult for anyone else to connect the transaction with them. However, if someone connects an address to a user at any point they could follow back a series of transactions as each participant likely knows who paid them and may disclose that information on request or under duress.
Movement from a known to unknown account in an attempt to "launder" it maybe?
So what you're saying is that there is a limited resource which we cannot make more of that people are hording? And the more people horde it, the higher the deflation? And people watch their value rise in USD as this happens? And you're surprised?
What motive is there to spend your BTC? Isn't this how deflationary spirals occur? Wasn't this an effect of The Great Depression and lead to FDR implementing a pump-priming strategy?
Could someone explain how they would escape that spiral? I'm not an economist so I don't know if there are other routes of which I'm unaware.
Now I don’t begrudge chemistry, which has brought forth many of the great inventions of our time, from the pain killer I took an hour ago to the diet soda I’m sipping on now (I’m actually sipping on Scotch. In fact, my very own mother, who if I am lucky will never lay eyes on this article, is a chemist, and believes that chemistry is the most noble of human pursuits and doesn’t understand how I, a former philosophy major, was able to eke out a living.
And if you wouldn't have wasted your time on that public speaking course and instead used that opportunity cost to take a class in a Lisp language like Scheme you'd understand why your failure to close that left parenthesis is driving me bat shit insane right now.
What is the purpose of copyright? To allow a creator to profit from his or her creativity. What creativity in this case could possibly be profited from?
Fortunately, that's not for you or the United States legal system to decide. If you want to go insane and spend your entire life writing your book and then sell it for one hundred billion dollars per copy, you are more than free to do it. That is a personal freedom that cannot be taken away from an entrepreneur no matter how completely stupid it may sound.
Is the publisher actually going to lose money from a small portion of 40 year old book making it into the public domain?
Okay, we're starting to get somewhere. You say "forty years" because of this work. So what you're saying is that everything written over forty years ago is fair game and public domain? So I can make movies out of Sirens of Titan, A Clockwork Orange, To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dune, Catch-22, Stranger in a Strangeland, etc and not pay anyone a dime for those rights or royalties? Okay so where do you draw the line on copyright? Give us a proposed length and then we can start discussing this like adults instead of asking stupid vague rhetorical questions about a suicide prevention questionnaire.
I said no such thing, but you're free to put words in peoples mouths if it gives you a reason to argue over nothing on the internet.
You did effectively say that. You said that because this might save lives if it's public domain then this is an even worse case of copyright than, say, Dune because the suicide prevention sheet has life saving potential. And I take objection to that. You can't sit there and decided what is morally more copyrightable than anything else for the exact same reason I stated at the beginning of this post. Copyrighted material is very subjective content in that creativity and art can be whatever the hell a madman wants it to be. That's a personal freedom you enjoy in the United States.
I would however suggest that creating something that is intended to benefit the public health be allowed to benefit public health first, and be used as a mechanism for profit SECOND. But apparently I am to consider myself in the minority in that viewpoint.
So here's another example of you making this a special case. Because this copyrighted work is medically related and might benefit public health, it has some special status that a creative work outside of this domain does not. And that's just laughably insane.
But I must be some kind of dreamer to hope that small business be allowed to create jobs first, and protect the property of other companies in different industries second, right?
Dude, your rhetoric is top notch. What the hell does job creation have to do with this? What about job creation at Pearson and the other publishing houses? Are you a politician? We aren't talking about job creation, we're talking about publishing creative works. Did you know that if someone walked around with a pistol shooting people, it would create a lot of jobs? You'd need people around to take care of the wounded, people to fill out paper work, people to arrange funerals? It'd be an economic boon, just like a war! So should we allow it?
So, suggesting that a portion of a work that was written 40 years ago might be better in the public domain actually makes you afraid to write? Are you for real?
Now who's putting words in someone's mouth? Where did I say that? What I said was that you're giving special status to some creative works over others so if I'm a writer, I'll stay away from your realms where I have a moral obligation to give it away for free or have a shorter term length on it just because it might help people.
On the plus side, you keep saying "40 years" so what is it? What your suggested term length?
Sidenote: I found a copy of the questionnaire in the top 10 google results; and I think my score jumped a few points after reading yet another flawed defence of an indefensible theft of inherently communal property.
"Flawed defense?" What the hell are you talking about? I myself think that copyright term limit should be reduced down to something more like 40-50 years on future works (from date of publishing). Even if I succeeded in doing that it would make this particular work still copyrighted because when they published it the law was ridiculously lengthy. How is something you write "inherently communal property"? It's something you wrote! It's yours! It's your idea!
Oh you found a copy of that questionnaire in the top 10 Google results? So that does what? Legitimizes this? When you watch the news and you see laws broken like tax evasion and they prosecute you think "Well, it's happening all over, anyone should be able to do it" and then you stop paying taxes? Because you google for tax evasion and see lots of cases of it?
The offending post was published in 2007, which is true, however the material (questionnaire) that was posted was 38 years old.
Astonishing but still within the copyright term length. Abhorrent? You bet. But I wouldn't go around attacking publishers and would instead focus on reducing the law that governs said term length.
Worse yet, the questionnaire was a suicide prevention questionnaire, so its existence in the public domain might actually save lives.
So what you're saying is that if I want to make money publishing my research, I should stay away from publishing suicide prevention materials since placing a copyright on that is morally reprehensible because if it's public domain it might actually save lives?
So a DMCA request pulled down millions of blogs because one page that was originally published nearly 4 decades ago supposedly has some copyright value to someone.
So I'd like to point out that from what I've read they were given 24 hour notice from their provider and they failed to remove the article from their cache (although they did remove it from their site). If you're running a site that costs $6,954.37 just in hosting service per month, I would hope you would be a little more competent about complying with DMCA requests. Do they not have anyone on staff who knows how to flush a Varnish cache? And in defense of the hosting company, it's not their job to pick through and block each individual page you host and play their own version of whackamole. It's terrible that so many educational resources went down but the incompetence is shared between the people who run that operation, the hosting provider, the dumbass politicians who gave us the DMCA and the citizens who don't complain to their representatives about it. If you don't like the law, change it. But what you're attacking are symptoms of this law and you should be railing against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Be prepared, people are going to want to know how you think we should balance the rights of the artists and authors who create material (and subsequently their income) and the benefit of the public from that material.
I'm telling you right now, the way you described how horrible this is makes me never want to produce any sort of writing that might be construed as beneficial to society because then I won't be paid for my work or I'll be a monster. If Pearson can't make money off these texts, goodbye Pearson. It's that simple. And yeah, that might be the future with self publishing on the rise but right now they have those texts under laws that are legitimate US Laws.
These times we live in, they're literally not far off from a lot of books I was encouraged to read in high school, but was told would never actually happen.
Did you know that many if not all of those books are copyrighted and those authors benefited from copyright? Also before you go around equivocating this to burning books in Fahrenheit 451 you should probably come up with an ideal middle ground between where we are now and everything is public domain. Hyperbole doesn't really help this debate.
“Open source is the only credible producer of software and now hardware that isn’t bound to a single company’s economic interest,”
Well, where is this open source hardware? Every time something comes up on Slashdot reported to be "open source hardware" there's a whole slew of comments about how it's not truly open source. Anything from "where are the schematics" all the way down to the verilog/VHDL compilers and place/route algorithms being closed source. I've seen a 3D printer but not much else that meets the most stringent requirements. So tell me, where is this seemingly mythical "open source hardware" that will now free me from a single company's economic interest?
Amazon taking charge of OMAP could leave rivals Barnes & Noble in a tricky situation
Also, I believe the BeagleBoard is the SoC OMAP3530 ... not to mention there's a bunch of Samsung products (since it was mentioned that they are "rising competition") that depend on the OMAP4xxx series like the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 2 and Galaxy Nexus ... lot of BlackBerry devices on that list too. It's not just the Kindle Fire using OMAP4, there's a lot of current devices using OMAP3 & OMAP4.
What's going to happen to all these devices when Amazon decides it doesn't make open source hobby boards or cell phones and condenses these SoCs down to just Kindle-related focus? I guess it'd be stupid to throw away all that business but anybody know what would happen to these?
Trading our liberties for other imagined benefits will not end well. You cannot crack the door for this beast.
Well, being a reader of Slashdot, we're all familiar with that quote. I think more appropriate here is Franklin's "Apology for Printers" that contains many apt gems concerning this news including:
8. That if all Printers were determin'd not to print any thing till they were sure it would offend no body, there would be very little printed.
The first and foremost fear I have is a destruction or suppression of culture. I'm not saying "Innocence of Muslims" is a good film. Of course, I'm not saying "Manos Hands of Fate", "The Room" or "Birdemic" are spectacular films either -- but I own licensed copies of them. I also own several editions of James Joyce's "Ulysses", a book which was banned in many countries when it was written. I will tell you right now that we would be missing major cultural artifacts if those in power had succeeded at eradicating "Ulysses" and its author. Yes, I'm afraid of corrupt politicians, populations that cannot access knowledge, etc. But those are effects that UN officials won't immediately see. Effects that can be immediately felt are people who collect poorly scripted, acted and funded films will no longer have access to "Innocence of Muslims." No one's saying it's a good film -- then again what defines a "good film" is so subjective I wouldn't know a blockbuster if it hit me in the face.
Authors from Franklin to Bradbury knew this and everyone today should know this: you must resist 'trimming' (by anyone's definition of the word) culture to protect it and keep it intact lest every bit of it be an option on the chopping block for whatever fanatic that has the press as a mouthpiece each day.
"Terrorism is not just people who kill human bodies, but who kill human feelings as well. The makers of this film have terrorised 1.6 billion people."
Well, even by the post-9/11-everyone's-a-terrorist definitions, I don't see that but, very well, I'll play your game. Your redefinition of the word terrorist in the English language has killed my human feeling of respect for the English language. I have in my hand a piece of paper written in Crayola crayon that I believe to contain a 4,000 year old text defining English as a sacred language. You see I was drunk one night and I accidentally channeled Zoroaster who is like, way older than Muhammad. And you have killed that spirit inside me. Also, your call for censorship completely kills my internal spirit that there is hope for humanity -- one of the greatest of human feelings. As such you sir are a terrorist by your own definition of the word, enjoy your imminent self-incarceration.
"Organisations like Google are key players and have to take responsibility for civility. You can't just say it doesn't matter that it's freedom of speech. It's anarchy."
Let me guess, you get to define the words "civility" and "anarchy"? Yeah, I get it, some parts of your religion are only compatible if there's one bearded male telling everyone else what to do. It's 2012, you better suppress that shit or you're gonna have a bad time.
> map applications that overlay data from multiple databases
Sounds blatantly obvious to someone skilled in the art...
Microsoft Engineer 1: Jesus, dude look at this, look at this idea I had! ... ... what if -- and stay with me here -- what if we pulled map data from two different databases. ... what you're talking about would require something like ... ... no, wait, even then we've only got one database connection in the code. That's it, from there you're stuck, you'd have to send both the prepared statements to the database ... unless ... wait, hold the phone ... unless you had ...
Microsoft Engineer 2: I don't get it, what am I looking at here, this C# code is light years beyond my comprehension.
Microsoft Engineer 1: I know, right? But here, let me step you through it. You remember how we were pulling data from one database and displaying it?
Microsoft Engineer 2: Yeah, that itself is, like, on par with the gods
Microsoft Engineer 1: Right right but it got me to thinking
Microsoft Engineer 2: No way dude, that's impossible. Look, we use one prepared statement here to get the data
Microsoft Engineer 1: Two prepared statements?
Microsoft Engineer 2: Oh. My. God. It could work
Microsoft Engineer 1: Two database connections?
Microsoft Engineer 2: *starts shaking his hands in the air excitedly* Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, this is going to be a game changer. We better tell Ballmer -- quick, get the patent officers on the phone, this is fuckin' huge!
Remember phone books? It used to be possible to match people with not only their phone number but their home address too.
Ah, yes! And let me tell you a story about that! I used to have a very common name. So common that according to the latest census there are 40,000 of me walking around the United States (first and last name). I have met myself (first, middle and last) four times and the second time I met myself I was 19 and he was 20 and he said to me: "Don't you ever let your name be published in the phone book" (as advice from one being raised in a major metropolis and I being raised in a very small town) and then went on to describe at length how, when he turned 18, he started receiving odd phone calls from credit card companies demanding he pay up tens of thousands of debt. After months of harassment, he finally got it all straightened out with one of the credit bureaus who then basically had to show the credit card companies that his records and the records of the real person they were looking for were completely different. The other odd thing was that the address the credit card companies had on file had the same exact abbreviations as his address in the phone book and the person had "moved" to that address right when my friend turned 18 and had his name put in the phone book.
... but I'd just as well keep as much of my life private as possible ... to avoid whatever creative scofflaw there might be out there.
Is it a common problem? Maybe not
Terry Kramer, the U.S. special envoy to the conference, said the US opposes proposals from some of the 'nondemocratic nations' that include tracking and monitoring content and user information, which 'makes it very easy for nations to monitor traffic.'"
This quote is so rife with arrogance that it makes me vomit, coming from a government that does nothing but blatantly spend money and spy on it's people.
Well, maybe you should read this proposal by China Mobile to split up the internet via "DNS Extension." Aside from the obvious criticisms and assuming we just blindly said "yeah, sure, China, whatever you want" let me ask you this: Will the situation improve for US citizens? Will the situation get worse for Chinese citizens? I think you have to agree that the answers to those questions are no and yes. Whether or not the United States spies on its own citizens is nothing more than an ad hominem attack to ruin this discussion about putting control of the internet into the hands of other nations that do not have laws against spying on its own citizens and, in fact, are places where unannounced and confusing censorship seems to be the norm.
Open Governance to ensure engagement in our leadership and decision processes;
We have ensured that this is the most open governance possible. Why, as we speak, KDE death squads are being dispatched to move door to door to force you into a leadership and/or decision process for KDE. Should you fail or should said squads find Gnome in your household ... well, let's just concentrate on the positives of the Manifesto. We here at KDE put the "FEST" in "Manifesto!"
Free Software to ensure the result of our work is available to all people;
We have recently employed Liam Neeson and a team of investigators working around the clock to tie names and individuals to credit cards and paypal accounts after turning over all our donation transactions to them. If you do not accept our software as free, you will be paid a visit by Liam Neeson who has, shall we say, developed a particularly forceful skill set in working at our returns department! Don't thank us, thank you for using KDE -- please we cannot emphasize this enough: it will be free or there will be blood.
Inclusivity to ensure that people of all origins are welcome to join us and participate;
In an effort to include everyone, we have actually started up cloning chambers with the DNA of Neanderthals. No origins, past or present, will be left un-KDE'd in our quest to excel in inclusivity past those dirty gnome users.
Innovation to ensure that new ideas constantly emerge to better serve people;
Ah yes, our innovation measures have become quite extreme. So extreme that you can feel them in the pit of your stomach. Not literally, of course -- the literal pit of innovation is behind our headquarters where we've trapped the world's leading scientists and patent lawyers while we spray them with a hose if they don't meet our patent quotas to out-innovate the gnome team!
Common Ownership to ensure that we stay united;
This one is simple! Any forks will be auspiciously repressed! Not repressed like emotional feelings but instead like tanks in Tienanmen Square. Of course, this is open source, you're free to fork whenever you want and we're free to ensure that everyone stays united. It's open source + united people = united open source people!
End-User Focus to ensure our work is useful to all people.
Is your Klan rally missing that flame? Is your Neo-Nazi newsletter not so neo? Is your jihad turning out to be a junker? Well, submit a feature request to KDE to ensure you can meet all of your needs with our software. We don't discriminate -- that is unless you want us to! *wink* *wink*
In all seriousness though, I know it doesn't mean this but am I the only person that imagines someone with crazy eyes smiling uncontrollably at you when you hear the word 'manifesto'?
A sign or two saying something like "PRIVATE PROPERTY NO DUMPING" might help, if you don't already have a sign like that which is being ignored.
Where do you live that it's okay to do this:
I have a cottage at the end of a long dirt road, no electricity nor internet, and recently some (insert expletive here) wads are using the area as a trash dump: countertops, sofas, metal scraps, tvs — all the stuff they don't want to pay to dump at the landfill.
Even if it is a dirt road, it's not your property and if you don't have permission to be leaving shit all over the place then you don't do it. Where do you live that you can just legally drive around and say "this looks good, I don't see any signs" and dump shit to rust and rot and look terrible? Am I the only person that is appalled by that?
I've lived in two states. I'm pretty sure you'd be fined and/or sued to high heaven if you were caught doing that on any property you do not own and pay taxes on -- even then TVs and metal scraps can permanently damage the environment if not properly disposed of.
Why should they be entitled to anything?
Well, I sympathize because the sender (not the recipient) never agreed to this e-mail introspection in any sort of ToS or anything with Google. And I feel like someone should be free to stand up their own e-mail server and have complete freedom from ads at some expense to themselves and some work if they so desire. That choice should always be there and it rubs me just a bit the wrong way that you can't do that if everyone else is using Google. Now, that said, I think in the end the ruling should go down something like this: tough shit. You can configure your e-mail server not to hand off any e-mails to Google servers or servers that would then route it to Google Mail. You want to run your own server, you implement your own security and white lists/black lists. You're basically acknowledging that the receiving server you are submitting data can do what they please with it (barring current laws like the CANSPAM Act, or whatever Canada has). So I think this needs to be sorted out and it needs to be determined whether this data and data analysis by Google is innocuous or if it is truly sensitive enough to be identified as, say, personal data and credit card numbers submitted to a site for ordering products.
They're also free to start their own ad-supported free email system, and if it is better than gmail (snicker snort) then they will surely have the same opportunity.
That logic doesn't follow. If I find out that someone is doing something morally reprehensible (though not illegal) and want a court to look into the situation, it's certainly not my desire to go around being a douche bag like them and trying to be a bigger jerk than them. This instance isn't a user complaining, it's a non-user complaining of a company's practices that he feels affects him.
Wake me up when gmail suppresses the ads in the email in some way other than not showing images by default (which it always informs you it's done.)
Again, it only informs the user of the system, not a sender who may be sending e-mails that are then inspected by Google algorithms.
The lawsuit is on behalf of "all persons in the province of British Columbia who have sent e-mail to a Gmail account" and demands statutory damages for breach of copyright of $500 per e-mail that Google has used for ads. The lawsuit also seeks an injunction against Google's use of e-mails going forward. Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
$500 per e-mail used for ads? Am I the only person that finds that to be just a tad bit insane?
Wayne Plimmer of British Columbia has filed a class-action lawsuit against Google for using his e-mails for ads. Plimmer is not a Gmail user, but his concern is that Google is reading and using his e-mails to serve ads to Gmail readers too. Being a non-Gmail user, he never agreed to the terms of service, so the legality of what Google is doing seems murky.
Okay. I can see that but can you explain how $500 per e-mail for everyone in BC is just about right for how much damages this has caused you?
Tristan Louis is an Internet veteran, having worked in the Internet industry since 1993. Throughout the years, Mr. Louis has been known as the founder of Internet.com, a co-founder of Earthweb's developer.com, the interim CTO for Boo.com, and has held many other roles at start-ups during the first dotcom boom.
And this guy is commenting on why Apple should buy Nokia? Really? That's "news" to us? It's basically a list of half baked points. I know how this works, I've seen it in my uncle. He used to play sports in high school and when we watch a Vikings game he is just exasperated at how terrible the coaches are. Why, if he was in that game, he'd know exactly what plays to call and he could probably even be the quarterback and throw this football clear over them mountains.
The piece fails to explain why Apple shouldn't merely license Nokia's map services instead of kicking $10 billion out for it (oh, by the way, 10% of your total liquid assets is not a "drop in the bucket"). It fails to analyze many of the other assets of Nokia (oh, come on, like Apple would continue making Nokia's candy bar phones) and just assumes Apple would like to pay for all that stuff. It doesn't consider all the EU approvals that Apple would need and he ends this list with Apple doing "a double-reverse with a flip" which sounds a lot like the plays my uncle would call in a professional football game.
In short, build your own $100 billion dollar empire and then you can throw it away yourself. Until then, I don't think this shallow "analysis" of two phone makers was ever worth my time. It could at least be comprehensive and delve into the financials of the deal and possible repercussions (like yet another little guy dying and the market becoming more inbred with less options).
Google and Apple Spent More On Patents Than R&D Last Year
I was going to submit this story this morning but I didn't because I couldn't find the source of this Stanford analysis that is mentioned (though not cited) in the article. Could someone please give me a link to a news release or PDF or anything? I thought I had pretty good Google skills but found nothing. The thing that worries me is that this headline lead me to believe that all the court fees and lawsuits are costing more than R&D. However the article itself says:
In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.
So my first concern is that this is also about patent purchases so this could also be including that "per phone or per license" cost that you pay when you actually do license someone's patent legally and use the system as it was intended to work. Does anyone know if they're including this or just acquisitions of smaller companies that have patent portfolios as defense/attack mechanisms? Secondly, I'm concerned that we're only seeing public filings and these sums cannot reflect undisclosed terms for settling out of court and/or licenses that are not publicized.
Again, before people explode over this headline, I'd just like to get my hands on the data and verify that there is indeed a reason to explode over this. This isn't an apology for patents, this is just the most basic journalistic caution before I fly off the handle.
Describe the end of the Linux kernel. Symbolically and/or literally, your choice.
As a software developer, I have a coveted collection of books. A few of said tomes -- both fiction and non -- have fundamentally altered the course of my life. Assuming yours aren't just man pages and .txt files, what are they?
Despite your accomplishments and some of your public comments about the dire state of American politics, you remain a resident of the United States of America. Clearly you have the clout to live where you please, why do you continue to reside in the United States? Assuming your answer is simply "work", if there was one thing you could change in the United States what would it be and are you doing anything to move toward that accomplishment (aside from procreating and trying to help us out that way)?
In 2007 you made some rather polarizing remarks about C++. Coincidentally, Slashdot absolutely loves language wars and I seem to only find evidence that you use C based on the lack of malice and contempt I can find you publicizing on it. Do you find anything terrible about C? Conversely, do you have anything nice to say bout C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, Lisp, Prolog, Microsoft's languages or any other language you feel particularly vehement about at the moment?