I find a lot of irony in what's going on right now, because the RIAA doesn't even realize what they're doing to their profit base. Remember four or five years ago when the music industry was in big trouble? The old folks had finally replaced their records with CD's and Alternative was dying a slow painful death, leaving the industry totally hanging with low low low profits. There was a big hubbub about electronic music being the savior of the industry (hence the coining of that sick term "electronica") but it never really happened.
Now profits are way up and the industry is fat and happy. Except for those MP3's! Well... what changed in the time from low profits to high profits? MP3's. Napster let people download all those songs the industry was pushing by the pop groups that are driving profits now. It wasn't MTV driving the industry so much anymore (or at least being the final word in what CDs to buy) but after people heard something on TRL they were able to download it and then go buy the album. This might all sound obvious to us, but it should be obvious to them too! All they have to do is take a look at their balance sheets from the past five years.
So what is it that the RIAA has decided to do with those monster profits? Go after Napster and its clones! Yeah, great businessmen they are! Shortsighted and so greedy they'll drop $5 to snatch one that fell.
Ok... here's how it works. The people who generally foot the bill in free software are the people writing it. The bill is the internet connection and hardware and whatnot. These are things that they'd be paying for anyway, so it's not really an additional cost. They also pay for it with their free time. Think of it as a hobby, which is really is for most free software developers. Granted, there are a ton of people getting paid to write free software, but most people do it in their free time because they enjoy it.
All of these possibilities you list are correct, but they're not reasons for writing the software so much as the people who do so. They do it because they enjoy it, or because they believe information should be free (no one believes in the philosophy that "The project team are the user"). Try running Linux or a BSD sometime and see that free stuff isn't so rare, and that by installing it yourself you make it even less rare.
Due to the experimental and unpredictable nature of this new technology, someone wants to outlaw it.
Get your facts straight. It's not unpredictable. We know that cloning will result in plenty of problematic fetuses, and we know that it can result in an individual with the exact same DNA as the donor. People want to outlaw it not because of the things that could happen, but because of the things that will happen. You are dealing with a bigger issue here than your typical tech. Read some stuff on bioethics and then say it's technophobia.
I seriously doubt it's possible at all actually. If anyone knew anything about developmental biology, then they would know how much cells influence each other during devlopment to get a functioning organ. You simply can't have a heart without the cells around it influencing it to differentiate in to the heart. And those cells can't influence the heart without influence from other cells. The "heart in a vat" idea is impossible, you need a body.
I am pro choice, but I'm not for the indiscriminate killing of fetuses. No one wants to abort their child really, and if you go in to cloning planning to abort 99% of the fetuses, then that's just plain wrong.
Your stem cell application isn't really critical. They've found that they can get stem cells from fat cells recently here at UCLA, and you can get them from aborted fetuses too. Stem cell research is not funded by the U.S. govt anyway (which is wrong). People seem to confuse stem cell research with cloning a lot. They are linked, but one isn't necessary for the other by any means. Stem cell research will have major benefits, but cloning most likely will not.
There is a moral difference because it comes down to choice, not in spite of it. You are choosing to create a "broken" clone.
This "broken" person will suffer or die, one or the other. 1 out of 50 at best right now will be healthy and not have to suffer in any abnormal way (aside from premature aging) but 49 out of 50 will be a "broken" person. Sure, if that's acceptable for machine prototypes and such, then why not for people?
You simply don't build people and allow for them to break. In natural childbirth, you're not making the choice to have 49 "broken" kids to have one healthy one, but in choosing to clone you will be doing just that. These clones are living people and they deserve every right to health that naturally born children get, and what you are proposing is that parents are allowed to break their kids. That is simply a crime, but with cloning that is what will happen. The choice to concieve a child is very very different than choosing to clone one.
I agree with you in that solutions are never found with ignorance, I don't think that the U.S. is really approaching this one from the point of ignorance. The idea to ban human cloning is really resting on the fact that you will get many many defective fetuses who will die on their own, have to be aborted or euthenized, or will live in pain. This is inhuman for a technology that won't really have that much payoff in the sense we're looking for. Why do you need to clone a human being? Organs? We can do better than what we're doing now, and we can do the research on animals to get it right first. The U.S. isn't harming itself by banning human cloning any more than it isn't hurting itself by banning torture.
Seriously? Who's really making money now? Porn. Who's going to be making money tomorrow? Porn. Who's got the kind of pageviews and such that advertisers would kill for? Porn. Who's going to have that paycheck for you next year too? Porn. It's pretty logical to me. Just because portions of society (portions which, I might add, aren't often of the same views as those who work in the tech industry) consider porn immoral doesn't mean it's not going to make a buck.
I think it's good news personally. You can read goatse.cx trolls while coding for a goatsex website. What could be better?
What a load of crap. We know quite a bit about how genes work, and if you bothered to read any papers about how we know how they work, then maybe you wouldn't spout this kind of garbage. We can test for what a gene does by various methods. One of the best is to experiment with "knockout mice", which have your favorite gene removed for your experimenting pleasure. If you destroy the gene and compare what the knockout does in comparison with the normal one, you can get a good idea as to what the gene does as its end product. That's just one of the many many ways biologists can use to figure out how a gene works. We can get to the point where we tell you exactly what regions of what proteins bind to what sequences that control your gene that codes for whatever it is you're interested in. So don't tell me we don't know how a gene works until you read some literature.
Whatever your political persuasion is, I think you ought to be really scared about the possibility of this. There's a good reason that the ethics committee from the Human Genome Project unanimously decided that insurance companies should not have access to this sort of information. You want to know who loses? Listen to the experts.
It's very much an "us versus them" relationship in this instance. Granted, not all companies are evil (most aren't at all) but their only responsibility is to make money, and there will be no qualms about letting you go, no matter how "good" they are, if it's going to save them some cash when the time is right. This isn't just for a few isolated instances, this is on a massive scale. That's where the problem lies.
You list a few decent ideas (I think the Mars one's pretty good), but I don't think you've got the real benefit of genetic testing yet. The idea is already being put in place with things like screening for Tay Sach's disease. You screen two partners and see what the probability is that they'll have a kid with the disease from their tests. Then you let them know so they can decide if they're going to have a kid. Or, if they do already have a child in the womb who's got some disease, they can choose to abort it if they feel it's the right decision. These are the more primitive versions which are in place right now.
The big one will come when gene therapy really gets going. We've already had SCID (Severe Combined Immuno-Deficiency) cured by gene therapy, and you can test for that in the womb and treat it. Because of this, there won't be another "Boy in the Bubble" (that was a SCID child). When we can cure other diseases like Sicle Cell Anemia, which is caused by a single point mutation, that's where genetic testing will have it's biggest benefit.
However, right now, we can't do a hell of a lot besides test. It's good for things like testing for parentage and DNA fingerprinting for crime scenes. This makes it hard, because if you test for something that there's no cure for, you don't even really want to tell the patient. However, it's illegal not to test for a disease that we can cure. So, genetic testing really is here, probably more than people realize. But the big one, therapy, is coming. It's treatment that makes genetic testing truly worthwhile.
First off, they're not actually testing for CTS, they're testing for the possibility that you can have CTS, if you've got the gene for it (I don't much about the gene, but I think the syndrome is caused by a point mutation from what I gather from a quick pub med search) that doesn't actually guarantee that you'll have it.
This, as a previous poster noted, is a major invasion of privacy. First off, the company is not only being given this one gene to test for, but the whole genome. And with the magic of PCR, they can test for anything they want and get basically anything they want from your genome, be it a heart condition, a bend towards alcoholism, or prostate cancer. The company has no right at all to this information simply because you're an employee. If you develop CTS, you develop it and then if you can't effectively do your job then it has to be dealt with. An employer does not, and should not, have the right to do genetic testing on its employees because it isn't worth the invasion of anyone's privacy just to save a buck.
It's the exact same reason why your medical records are kept private. Do you really want your employer to know that you have a proto-oncogene that's just waiting to trigger brain cancer in you? "Sorry, your genome says you're a liability. Goodbye." Because this is where it'll go. They'll start with something "harmless" like CTS, and then it'll move on to large scale genomic testing. It's not that expensive to do now, and it'll only get cheaper and more and more invasive if we allow it. And then we're all fucked.
I did! I'm a subscriber because my family shares an account for AOL. We have for years. It's the customers who pay for the servers, not the company. Why shouldn't I be able to use the client of my choice with the servers that I helped pay for? It's not costing AOL a thing since they get their $20 bucks a month out of my pocket to fund those servers? Why shouldn't people with totally legit AOL accounts be allowed to hook in to the servers through jabber, the same way we can hook in to AOL through a normal ISP? They're blocking me of the rights that I pay for with my subscription, and I'm none too pleased about it, since the Linux AIM client is shit and the full AOL app is nonexistent.
SMAC is not network compatible because the Windows version uses DirectPlay for networking. Since DirectPlay is a Microsoft product and uses proprietary calls which Microsoft has not documented, there is currently no way for us (or for Mac users) to write a game with compatible calls.
This is pretty sad, I wanted to buy this game until I found out I couldn't play it against my friend on his PC. *sigh* I'll just have to grab some old games off EB World until Deus Ex is released.
Does anyone else find themes under X a little disconcerting? I'm pretty sick of the fact that I can't use any of the WindowMaker themes under my Gnome/Sawfish combo.
I'm planning on writing a library frontend to themes that would let any window manager and widget set use all themes by going through the library. There would be a universal theme format as well for eventual use that would be WM/Widget set unspecific. Any thoughts on the idea?
Yeah, that's very true, and the fact that apple has such control lets them do things that/.'ers (particularly trolls) only dream about.
Personally, I don't love X in the slightest, but I think that the fact that it's a workable system gives it a lot of clout. While I wish it had more of a tiered approach (there was some comment about the Networking built on top of the GUI, not vice-versa that I loved) I think that the libraries that are built on top of it should give everyone a real impressive reason to keep going with it. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't chuck X, just not run around screaming to throw it away before actually having something really good in it's place. I'm just waiting patiently for Berlin:-)
Yeah, I think it's the first on the choices. The fact that the Mac has UNIX under the hood and they managed to do the impossible by chucking X (an idea that I think has been blown way out of proportion.) For the first time, the Mac isn't just "the computer for the rest of us", but the computer also for the UNIX hacker in the rest of the rest of us.
I think rather than reduce the price to the consumer, it will just add to the game's budget (whether that will be development, marketing, or other is a whole other issue) but it may allow for better tech in games, especially in smaller dev houses that really don't have the budget to make the full game they want. I wouldn't mind testefully placed billboards if they enhance realism and allowed the developers to make a cooler game.
What kind of improvements do you think are the most important in order for linux to succeed further? Which of these areas is RedHat going to be active in?
I'm one of the ones who missed Hypercard, because when I got my first computer, my Mac IIvx (bless it's departed soul!) Hypercard wasn't bundled and I had to save for Code Warrior a few years later.
I'd thought about writing my own hypercard replacement and GPL it, but I realized that hypercard is dead and should be dead, because it's the web that took it's place. The web makes it so easy to author many of the basic apps that hypercard did, that why should we make a replacement? Granted, it can't do everything, but you pay with features and you get portability and internet support. No, let hypercard rest, just bundle the fucking dev tools and an iTool that will kick the shit out of Frontpage express:-)
They're there, but most of them are useless. A ton of stuff is done through netinfo, at least in terms of/etc. I personally hate netinfo, I know a lot of people like it, and I'm sure it's a wonderful system, but I just really really like having everything in a standard text file that you can script easily. There's a program (I forget the name) that will alter netinfo stuff for you, but nothing beats good ol' sed and the like;-) Netinfo's not really a kludge though, and the program they give you to do things manually is nifty and easy enough though.
One real problem it has that there's no X windows, so all my fun X programming stuff is a waste. The other problem is that there's no driver support at all for a lot of things. SCSI support is nowhere near what it should be. I have no backup yet (although I'm frantically trying to salvage an old box to run linux on and remotely backup to that one).
We're using it for a lot of standard serving stuff. Low volume email serving (sendmail), webserver (apache), hopefully database soon (mysql), and the biggie is file serving with Apple File Services and Mac Manager. Mac manager is a wonderful program, and it's the only real reason that I can see to use OSX Server in its current form (i.e., non OSX v2) aside from Web Objects.
Slashdot Mirror
I find a lot of irony in what's going on right now, because the RIAA doesn't even realize what they're doing to their profit base. Remember four or five years ago when the music industry was in big trouble? The old folks had finally replaced their records with CD's and Alternative was dying a slow painful death, leaving the industry totally hanging with low low low profits. There was a big hubbub about electronic music being the savior of the industry (hence the coining of that sick term "electronica") but it never really happened.
Now profits are way up and the industry is fat and happy. Except for those MP3's! Well... what changed in the time from low profits to high profits? MP3's. Napster let people download all those songs the industry was pushing by the pop groups that are driving profits now. It wasn't MTV driving the industry so much anymore (or at least being the final word in what CDs to buy) but after people heard something on TRL they were able to download it and then go buy the album. This might all sound obvious to us, but it should be obvious to them too! All they have to do is take a look at their balance sheets from the past five years.
So what is it that the RIAA has decided to do with those monster profits? Go after Napster and its clones! Yeah, great businessmen they are! Shortsighted and so greedy they'll drop $5 to snatch one that fell.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Ok... here's how it works. The people who generally foot the bill in free software are the people writing it. The bill is the internet connection and hardware and whatnot. These are things that they'd be paying for anyway, so it's not really an additional cost. They also pay for it with their free time. Think of it as a hobby, which is really is for most free software developers. Granted, there are a ton of people getting paid to write free software, but most people do it in their free time because they enjoy it.
All of these possibilities you list are correct, but they're not reasons for writing the software so much as the people who do so. They do it because they enjoy it, or because they believe information should be free (no one believes in the philosophy that "The project team are the user"). Try running Linux or a BSD sometime and see that free stuff isn't so rare, and that by installing it yourself you make it even less rare.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I seriously doubt it's possible at all actually. If anyone knew anything about developmental biology, then they would know how much cells influence each other during devlopment to get a functioning organ. You simply can't have a heart without the cells around it influencing it to differentiate in to the heart. And those cells can't influence the heart without influence from other cells. The "heart in a vat" idea is impossible, you need a body.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I am pro choice, but I'm not for the indiscriminate killing of fetuses. No one wants to abort their child really, and if you go in to cloning planning to abort 99% of the fetuses, then that's just plain wrong.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Your stem cell application isn't really critical. They've found that they can get stem cells from fat cells recently here at UCLA, and you can get them from aborted fetuses too. Stem cell research is not funded by the U.S. govt anyway (which is wrong). People seem to confuse stem cell research with cloning a lot. They are linked, but one isn't necessary for the other by any means. Stem cell research will have major benefits, but cloning most likely will not.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
There is a moral difference because it comes down to choice, not in spite of it. You are choosing to create a "broken" clone.
This "broken" person will suffer or die, one or the other. 1 out of 50 at best right now will be healthy and not have to suffer in any abnormal way (aside from premature aging) but 49 out of 50 will be a "broken" person. Sure, if that's acceptable for machine prototypes and such, then why not for people?
You simply don't build people and allow for them to break. In natural childbirth, you're not making the choice to have 49 "broken" kids to have one healthy one, but in choosing to clone you will be doing just that. These clones are living people and they deserve every right to health that naturally born children get, and what you are proposing is that parents are allowed to break their kids. That is simply a crime, but with cloning that is what will happen. The choice to concieve a child is very very different than choosing to clone one.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I agree with you in that solutions are never found with ignorance, I don't think that the U.S. is really approaching this one from the point of ignorance. The idea to ban human cloning is really resting on the fact that you will get many many defective fetuses who will die on their own, have to be aborted or euthenized, or will live in pain. This is inhuman for a technology that won't really have that much payoff in the sense we're looking for. Why do you need to clone a human being? Organs? We can do better than what we're doing now, and we can do the research on animals to get it right first. The U.S. isn't harming itself by banning human cloning any more than it isn't hurting itself by banning torture.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I wouldn't say slashdot is like porn... more like whiny and obnoxious observation.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Seriously? Who's really making money now? Porn. Who's going to be making money tomorrow? Porn. Who's got the kind of pageviews and such that advertisers would kill for? Porn. Who's going to have that paycheck for you next year too? Porn. It's pretty logical to me. Just because portions of society (portions which, I might add, aren't often of the same views as those who work in the tech industry) consider porn immoral doesn't mean it's not going to make a buck.
I think it's good news personally. You can read goatse.cx trolls while coding for a goatsex website. What could be better?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
What a load of crap. We know quite a bit about how genes work, and if you bothered to read any papers about how we know how they work, then maybe you wouldn't spout this kind of garbage. We can test for what a gene does by various methods. One of the best is to experiment with "knockout mice", which have your favorite gene removed for your experimenting pleasure. If you destroy the gene and compare what the knockout does in comparison with the normal one, you can get a good idea as to what the gene does as its end product. That's just one of the many many ways biologists can use to figure out how a gene works. We can get to the point where we tell you exactly what regions of what proteins bind to what sequences that control your gene that codes for whatever it is you're interested in. So don't tell me we don't know how a gene works until you read some literature.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Whatever your political persuasion is, I think you ought to be really scared about the possibility of this. There's a good reason that the ethics committee from the Human Genome Project unanimously decided that insurance companies should not have access to this sort of information. You want to know who loses? Listen to the experts.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It's very much an "us versus them" relationship in this instance. Granted, not all companies are evil (most aren't at all) but their only responsibility is to make money, and there will be no qualms about letting you go, no matter how "good" they are, if it's going to save them some cash when the time is right. This isn't just for a few isolated instances, this is on a massive scale. That's where the problem lies.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You list a few decent ideas (I think the Mars one's pretty good), but I don't think you've got the real benefit of genetic testing yet. The idea is already being put in place with things like screening for Tay Sach's disease. You screen two partners and see what the probability is that they'll have a kid with the disease from their tests. Then you let them know so they can decide if they're going to have a kid. Or, if they do already have a child in the womb who's got some disease, they can choose to abort it if they feel it's the right decision. These are the more primitive versions which are in place right now.
The big one will come when gene therapy really gets going. We've already had SCID (Severe Combined Immuno-Deficiency) cured by gene therapy, and you can test for that in the womb and treat it. Because of this, there won't be another "Boy in the Bubble" (that was a SCID child). When we can cure other diseases like Sicle Cell Anemia, which is caused by a single point mutation, that's where genetic testing will have it's biggest benefit.
However, right now, we can't do a hell of a lot besides test. It's good for things like testing for parentage and DNA fingerprinting for crime scenes. This makes it hard, because if you test for something that there's no cure for, you don't even really want to tell the patient. However, it's illegal not to test for a disease that we can cure. So, genetic testing really is here, probably more than people realize. But the big one, therapy, is coming. It's treatment that makes genetic testing truly worthwhile.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
First off, they're not actually testing for CTS, they're testing for the possibility that you can have CTS, if you've got the gene for it (I don't much about the gene, but I think the syndrome is caused by a point mutation from what I gather from a quick pub med search) that doesn't actually guarantee that you'll have it.
This, as a previous poster noted, is a major invasion of privacy. First off, the company is not only being given this one gene to test for, but the whole genome. And with the magic of PCR, they can test for anything they want and get basically anything they want from your genome, be it a heart condition, a bend towards alcoholism, or prostate cancer. The company has no right at all to this information simply because you're an employee. If you develop CTS, you develop it and then if you can't effectively do your job then it has to be dealt with. An employer does not, and should not, have the right to do genetic testing on its employees because it isn't worth the invasion of anyone's privacy just to save a buck.
It's the exact same reason why your medical records are kept private. Do you really want your employer to know that you have a proto-oncogene that's just waiting to trigger brain cancer in you? "Sorry, your genome says you're a liability. Goodbye." Because this is where it'll go. They'll start with something "harmless" like CTS, and then it'll move on to large scale genomic testing. It's not that expensive to do now, and it'll only get cheaper and more and more invasive if we allow it. And then we're all fucked.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I did! I'm a subscriber because my family shares an account for AOL. We have for years. It's the customers who pay for the servers, not the company. Why shouldn't I be able to use the client of my choice with the servers that I helped pay for? It's not costing AOL a thing since they get their $20 bucks a month out of my pocket to fund those servers? Why shouldn't people with totally legit AOL accounts be allowed to hook in to the servers through jabber, the same way we can hook in to AOL through a normal ISP? They're blocking me of the rights that I pay for with my subscription, and I'm none too pleased about it, since the Linux AIM client is shit and the full AOL app is nonexistent.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Does anyone else find themes under X a little disconcerting? I'm pretty sick of the fact that I can't use any of the WindowMaker themes under my Gnome/Sawfish combo.
I'm planning on writing a library frontend to themes that would let any window manager and widget set use all themes by going through the library. There would be a universal theme format as well for eventual use that would be WM/Widget set unspecific. Any thoughts on the idea?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Yeah, that's very true, and the fact that apple has such control lets them do things that /.'ers (particularly trolls) only dream about.
:-)
Personally, I don't love X in the slightest, but I think that the fact that it's a workable system gives it a lot of clout. While I wish it had more of a tiered approach (there was some comment about the Networking built on top of the GUI, not vice-versa that I loved) I think that the libraries that are built on top of it should give everyone a real impressive reason to keep going with it. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't chuck X, just not run around screaming to throw it away before actually having something really good in it's place. I'm just waiting patiently for Berlin
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Yeah, I think it's the first on the choices. The fact that the Mac has UNIX under the hood and they managed to do the impossible by chucking X (an idea that I think has been blown way out of proportion.) For the first time, the Mac isn't just "the computer for the rest of us", but the computer also for the UNIX hacker in the rest of the rest of us.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think rather than reduce the price to the consumer, it will just add to the game's budget (whether that will be development, marketing, or other is a whole other issue) but it may allow for better tech in games, especially in smaller dev houses that really don't have the budget to make the full game they want. I wouldn't mind testefully placed billboards if they enhance realism and allowed the developers to make a cooler game.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
What kind of improvements do you think are the most important in order for linux to succeed further? Which of these areas is RedHat going to be active in?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I'm one of the ones who missed Hypercard, because when I got my first computer, my Mac IIvx (bless it's departed soul!) Hypercard wasn't bundled and I had to save for Code Warrior a few years later.
:-)
I'd thought about writing my own hypercard replacement and GPL it, but I realized that hypercard is dead and should be dead, because it's the web that took it's place. The web makes it so easy to author many of the basic apps that hypercard did, that why should we make a replacement? Granted, it can't do everything, but you pay with features and you get portability and internet support. No, let hypercard rest, just bundle the fucking dev tools and an iTool that will kick the shit out of Frontpage express
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
They're there, but most of them are useless. A ton of stuff is done through netinfo, at least in terms of /etc. I personally hate netinfo, I know a lot of people like it, and I'm sure it's a wonderful system, but I just really really like having everything in a standard text file that you can script easily. There's a program (I forget the name) that will alter netinfo stuff for you, but nothing beats good ol' sed and the like ;-) Netinfo's not really a kludge though, and the program they give you to do things manually is nifty and easy enough though.
One real problem it has that there's no X windows, so all my fun X programming stuff is a waste. The other problem is that there's no driver support at all for a lot of things. SCSI support is nowhere near what it should be. I have no backup yet (although I'm frantically trying to salvage an old box to run linux on and remotely backup to that one).
We're using it for a lot of standard serving stuff. Low volume email serving (sendmail), webserver (apache), hopefully database soon (mysql), and the biggie is file serving with Apple File Services and Mac Manager. Mac manager is a wonderful program, and it's the only real reason that I can see to use OSX Server in its current form (i.e., non OSX v2) aside from Web Objects.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."