Years ago when Memory Stick first came out Sony had magazine ads showing a Memory Stick being inserted into a slot in the back of a guy's head. Methinks they were telegraphing the state of affairs they really want. No DRM built into my skull thank you.
Tesla was basically a constant flood of ideas. His genius is that at least half of them were good ideas. His problem was that the other half were crap and even he couldn't tell the difference. That isn't really such a bad problem; his good ideas were so good that I overlook the crackpottery and will cheerfully praise him to the stars for his many valid contributions. What is a problem is that modern day crackpots seem to have appointed him their patron saint.
The patent office has not, however, tackled the more important issue of how companies use patents. Patenting a gene and releasing it into the public domain, as the National Institute of Health now usually does, harms no one. Some private companies, Incyte Genomics for example, have also earned reputations for allowing other companies to use their patents widely and cheaply, in no small part because money can often be made just as easily with lots of companies paying small fees to use a patent, instead of a few companies paying astronomical ones. But not everybody's sharing. Myriad Genetics, for example, used its patent over a gene that served as an indicator of breast cancer to stop research on it at the University of Pennsylvania. Two years ago, in another well-known case, the Miami Children's Hospital received a patent on a gene for the rare Canavan disease that it had identified in one of its patients, Jonathan Greenberg. Without informing Greenberg, the hospital set out to block free Canavan tests offered elsewhere.
Seems to me that these patents as currently employed have cost lives and caused needless pain and suffering. Furthermore, a sick child and his family were exploited by a hospital; this sort of reprehensible behavior seems to be common in patented genetic research.
This bit doesn't seem very defensible either:
"Major hepatitis C and HIV genes and various diabetes genes are all owned," Crichton, an M.D., tells us. "Researchers working on those diseases must worry about getting permission and paying high fees." During the SARS epidemic, he says, some researchers hesitated to study the virus because three groups claimed to own its genome. "It's OK to own a treatment or test for a disease, but no one should own a disease," he insists.
The problem here...and I checked...is that isolated genetic sequences can be patented as though they were just another unique chemical substance. Isolated or not, these sequences have existed for millions or even billions of years. These are facts not inventions. I believe my original thesis still has overwhelming merit: It is appropriate to patent particular and defined applications of genetic fact. It is no way appropriate to patent the sequences themselves. It is absolutely not appropriate to patent alternative uses of given sequences. You may as well patent Ohm's law.
If the scope of these patents and the conditions under which many of them are obtained is reformed then I might agree with you. As it stands, they are being employed to benefit the very few at the expense of multitudes. What's more, it seems that others have the funding and wherewithal to study these things according to the best scientific traditions if the lawyers would just get out of the way. It doesn't appear to me that these patents are truly protecting innovation and funding waves of future innovation. They are more like software patents. They are the legal equivalent of jackal vomit. Jackals vomit on what they can't eat so that others won't eat it either.
An 'assload' is the metric name for 'buttload', both of which are greater than or equal to 1 'shitload' or 'crapload', respectively. I know the whole Imperial/metric conversion thing is problematic at times, but you could've at least Googled this before asking such a silly question.
That is also the value of one green van made from marijuana resin.
Thank you for the clarifications but my point stands as well: much potentially life and money saving research doesn't get done because of these patents. And I would not be surprised if it turned out the value to be found in these IP mined areas outweighs the value of what lawyer slingers are doing.
I can see patenting particular applications of genetic research same as any other science but genes are facts damn it. What you are defending is no different than patenting the location of stars or subatomic particles. It is even more analogous to patenting traditional herbal remedies that have been used for thousands of years. Your incentivising patents are already impeding medical research that could save lives.
Why should genetic research have access to a type of patent that no other field of endeavor has? Until the gene patent, bare facts about nature could not be patented only applications of those facts. And that is a good thing too. I doubt science would have moved beyond 17th century levels if this sort of debilitating absurdity was permitted in other fields of research.
*I* won't be advocating any sort of violence but if MS is engaged in patent extortion then I'm VERY angry about it. This means MS sees me as someone to shake down rather than to make a customer. Right now, I merely dislike MS and their products. If my workplace were ever shaken down in this manner I would be an implacable enemy. If I MUST buy certain technologies then I will make a point of buying them from MS' competitors. Any FOSS solutions they don't put a shadow over will be used in preference even if MS' items are in any way "the right tool for the job".
Do you hear that Mr. Chairman? This sort of behavior doesn't make an willing customer of me. If I have anything to say about it, you won't make an unwilling customer of me either. Either make something I want to buy or hurry up and die. In no case will I be forced to enrich you further.
The obvious and scary application for this is factoring public keys. If they can factor say 2048 bit keys in less than an hour then I'd say they have something.
Debian applies various patches to their kernels although in my experience, Debian provided kernels run well. Debian backports security and stability fixes and they aren't all that big on shoehorning functionality in; that may be difference. RedHat tries to make their kernels shiney and Debian just keeps them secure and running. If the Debian kernel isn't your cuppa, they make it not terribly difficult to build your own kernel source into a Debian package.
The planet's core is a giant RTG. Most heavy materials like iron, nickel, and the radioactive metals are in the core. The longer lived radioactives like U-238 continue to decay and heat the core to this day. Mind you, I'm talking about decay not chain-reaction fissioning. While "natural reactors" are possible that isn't what is happening here.
Which is fantastic, and one of the reasons why I preferred ME over 98 (yeah, I know...). It's so nice not needing a disc nearby every time you change/install/uninstall something.
It wasn't necessary to endure ME to get that feature. What I used to do (working from memory here), was to boot into DOS from CD, partition and format the drive and then create the following directory structure:
mkdir windows
mkdir system
mkdir cabs (this could be slightly wrong but the general procedure is how it went).
I would then copy the entire Win98 install CD to the cabs directory and start the install from there. A little ways into the install you got a scary question about installing into an existing Windows directory. I would just ignore and install anyway. The "existing Windows directory" was empty except for the contents of the install CD. That location with the cab files would be written into the registry in various places. The upshot is that a Win98 system installed that way did you wanted: You could make changes to the system without ever needing the CD. 98SE was polished and debugged compared to ME. I wouldn't wish that turd on my worst enemy.
No one does. It's just that they are hideously expensive to develop and twenty years on we still don't have all that much to show for it. Faced with an effective ABM system, one answer is to simply overwhelm it with massive numbers of real and decoy missiles. The sheer weight of missiles that the Soviets could throw at us made even developing an ABM system a fairly crazy thing to do. Someone like Kim Jong Il isn't going to have huge numbers of missiles for quite a long time. A fairly effective ABM system would make attacking such a nuclear state without nuclear retaliation to yourself seem at least plausible since the political reality is that even one of your cities getting nuked is unthinkable.
Thing is, I'd sure hate to see that system fail if it emboldened us enough to attack them...........
MAD became obsolete the moment an opponent showed up that didn't care whether they lived or died so long as you didn't survive. It was useful against the USSR and China, but not against anyone that we would not qualify as 'sane'.
These people who blow up themselves up in markets and crash airplanes are mostly sexually frustrated, indoctrinated young hotheads. The older ones writing the checks and ranting and raving in these madrassas can damn well be threatened. Anyone who has enough loot to develop or buy nukes doesn't want to die either. Those who would sell nukes are also accessible to threats. I think we are being faked out by the militant muslim world to some extent. If they can get us thinking of them as maddog bomb throwing lunatics who could do anything then they've more than half won already. Look how much milage they got out of that stupid cartoon. Incidentally, Old Yeller tells us what the correct answer is when faced with a mad dog.
All that said, I'm not some jingoistic idiot. We were incorrect to invade Iraq but we were correct to attack the Taliban. Notice the lengths Osama goes to stay alive or at least indeterminately dead? That hosebag doesn't want to die. I have no doubt that the Ayatollah of Iran has plenty of kamikazes just itching to man the planes but the leadership of that country doesn't want to die either.
The TPM is hardware. The BIOS or other firmware is software. The hardware will do whatever it is told to do if it is within it's capabilities. Is anyone using TPM force Windows usage now? Not as far as I know although many shenanigans are played on embedded devices. And some of THOSE were played with GPLed software first. No wonder the FSF is pissed. Is there any reason in principle why it couldn't? No. Would MS try it or any level duplicity up to that if they thought for a second that the worst that could happen is a regulatory slap on the wrist? Does a bear shit in the woods?
Now I actually like some of the possibilities of a TPM chip provided I truly own the one in my computer. I like the idea of signing my own system binaries and config files and using hardware enforcement to improve the security of my own system. I very much dislike the abuse of the English language that is Trusted Computing. The owner of the hardware is precisely the one who isn't trusted. Just call me a nasty old pirate but I insist on owning my own property and for any use made of that property to reflect my interests first.
That is a gross distortion of the facts. There is no such "evil chip". The only thing you might be thinking of is the TPM, which is an open standard implemented by many vendors and in fact was supported by Linux before Windows. The TPM does not prevent you from running Linux. In its most "evil" usage, it simply prevents you from lying about the state of your machine. If you have to lie about what you're doing to convince people to give you their work, then that's your problem and possibly theirs, but it's certainly not the TPMs.
The TPM can certainly be used to accomplish this. TPM sign the bios and set the bios only to boot kernels and bootloaders with the appropriate signatures. After all, MS would never bully vendors and manufacturers into doing things their way to get OEM pricing. Past performance is a good predictor of future behaivor. MS is also specifying and encouraging vendors to obfuscate hardware as much as possible and encrypt buses. I don't believe for a second that their sole intent is to protect the xxAAs from the baaaaaaaaaaad pirates.
Pervasive DRM will also facilitate the re-writing of history. After all, access to that embarrassing video clip can always be revoked. There is also the problem of evil chips ensuring that the only software that Bill Gates approves of will run on your machine. These and other undesirable outcomes will be all too possible once government and industry shoves it down our throats. Being able to see the latest teen idol is in no way an acceptable tradeoff for these losses.
These days, I use Ubuntu for Desktop use but I still come at it like a Debian guy. When I got into Ubuntu, they were faster at getting desktop and multimedia candy than Debian unstable. Once Etch releases, I might even go back. Once I get my Ubuntu systems installed, I just use dpkg, apt-get, and checkinstall as though I were still a Debian user (incidentally I've been running Debian on servers for years. The impedance match for that remains spot-on). I'm largely unaware of Ubuntu specific management tools since I still use a home directory that goes back to my Debian days. I basically have been treating Ubuntu as a more current set of packages rather than something that has a different ideology than Debian. Hell, Debian Unstable oftentimes has some new toy I want; the desire for a current KDE got me into Ubuntu in the first place. I often rebuild Sid sources against my Ubuntu desktops then install. I'm reluctant to install Debian binary debs in my machine but I won't hesitate to rebuild their sources against it. Come to think of it, that may be the best policy. Ubuntu has a new desktop release every six months and those tend to be well polished. If I want to be even more current on some minor item then rebuild Debian's latest against it.
You can have your stable cake and eat the latest and greatest too. It just takes a little knowledge and effort. If you don't want to take the time for knowledge and effort just run Fedora's, Ubuntu's, or Mandriva's latest supported distro and wait. All good things will come to them eventually.
My experience with Mandrake a few years ago mirrored yours. Out of the box, things would be autodetected better than anything else and Just Work. Thing was, My Mandrake installs would rot faster than Windows 98. Updates never worked right and the online repositories would always be incomplete and flakey. Debian was a breath of fresh air. Harder to configure initially but I could stomp on my Debian boxes with heavy lead boots and I could never screw one up so badly that I couldn't get back in a healthy state easily.
My question is this: These days, how well do Mandriva systems do as time goes forward and you update and upgrade things? Should you decide to manually config things, will the GUI tools handle it seamlessly or barf obnoxiously?
Some kind of corner has been turned for the GNU/Linux desktop in 2006.
I light off cups (that is, go to http://localhost:631/ in FF), enter th IP address of the printer in the obvious place, and stuff works.
That ass Raymond not too long ago held up CUPS as example of things FOSS is doing wrong. I hate that sometimes. A lot of very talented people did hard and thankless work to make things work as well as possible and all some can do is bitch about what doesn't. I'm no fanboi. I know there things that could work better. But ESR's brand of "constructive criticism" is one we can well do without. You're right. With decent hardware, CUPS can work well and not be all that hard to deal with.
I spent two frickin' hours cleaning and protecting my sister's and niece's XP laptops over xmas. Pain in the ass, but at least they're running clean and happy now. This is after I said I'd never help them because they made the mistake of buying XP laptops instead of a Macs. What can you do?
It's called tough love. Let your relations pay a couple hundred to Geek Squad rather than just bailing them out and maybe they'll take you more seriously next time.
Slashdot Mirror
Better that than Microsoft's "Secure Visual Path" built into your fucking head.
Years ago when Memory Stick first came out Sony had magazine ads showing a Memory Stick being inserted into a slot in the back of a guy's head. Methinks they were telegraphing the state of affairs they really want. No DRM built into my skull thank you.
Tesla was basically a constant flood of ideas. His genius is that at least half of them were good ideas. His problem was that the other half were crap and even he couldn't tell the difference. That isn't really such a bad problem; his good ideas were so good that I overlook the crackpottery and will cheerfully praise him to the stars for his many valid contributions. What is a problem is that modern day crackpots seem to have appointed him their patron saint.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/01
Seems to me that these patents as currently employed have cost lives and caused needless pain and suffering. Furthermore, a sick child and his family were exploited by a hospital; this sort of reprehensible behavior seems to be common in patented genetic research.
This bit doesn't seem very defensible either:
The problem here...and I checked...is that isolated genetic sequences can be patented as though they were just another unique chemical substance. Isolated or not, these sequences have existed for millions or even billions of years. These are facts not inventions. I believe my original thesis still has overwhelming merit: It is appropriate to patent particular and defined applications of genetic fact. It is no way appropriate to patent the sequences themselves. It is absolutely not appropriate to patent alternative uses of given sequences. You may as well patent Ohm's law.
If the scope of these patents and the conditions under which many of them are obtained is reformed then I might agree with you. As it stands, they are being employed to benefit the very few at the expense of multitudes. What's more, it seems that others have the funding and wherewithal to study these things according to the best scientific traditions if the lawyers would just get out of the way. It doesn't appear to me that these patents are truly protecting innovation and funding waves of future innovation. They are more like software patents. They are the legal equivalent of jackal vomit. Jackals vomit on what they can't eat so that others won't eat it either.
Actually, that was from "Up In Smoke".
An 'assload' is the metric name for 'buttload', both of which are greater than or equal to 1 'shitload' or 'crapload', respectively. I know the whole Imperial/metric conversion thing is problematic at times, but you could've at least Googled this before asking such a silly question.
That is also the value of one green van made from marijuana resin.
Thank you for the clarifications but my point stands as well: much potentially life and money saving research doesn't get done because of these patents. And I would not be surprised if it turned out the value to be found in these IP mined areas outweighs the value of what lawyer slingers are doing.
The Andromeda Strain - The results of space exploration go amuck and could kill us all.
The Terminal Man - Radical application of electronics to neurosurgery causes patient to go on psychotic killing spree.
I can see patenting particular applications of genetic research same as any other science but genes are facts damn it. What you are defending is no different than patenting the location of stars or subatomic particles. It is even more analogous to patenting traditional herbal remedies that have been used for thousands of years. Your incentivising patents are already impeding medical research that could save lives.
Why should genetic research have access to a type of patent that no other field of endeavor has? Until the gene patent, bare facts about nature could not be patented only applications of those facts. And that is a good thing too. I doubt science would have moved beyond 17th century levels if this sort of debilitating absurdity was permitted in other fields of research.
*I* won't be advocating any sort of violence but if MS is engaged in patent extortion then I'm VERY angry about it. This means MS sees me as someone to shake down rather than to make a customer. Right now, I merely dislike MS and their products. If my workplace were ever shaken down in this manner I would be an implacable enemy. If I MUST buy certain technologies then I will make a point of buying them from MS' competitors. Any FOSS solutions they don't put a shadow over will be used in preference even if MS' items are in any way "the right tool for the job".
Do you hear that Mr. Chairman? This sort of behavior doesn't make an willing customer of me. If I have anything to say about it, you won't make an unwilling customer of me either. Either make something I want to buy or hurry up and die. In no case will I be forced to enrich you further.
The obvious and scary application for this is factoring public keys. If they can factor say 2048 bit keys in less than an hour then I'd say they have something.
Debian applies various patches to their kernels although in my experience, Debian provided kernels run well. Debian backports security and stability fixes and they aren't all that big on shoehorning functionality in; that may be difference. RedHat tries to make their kernels shiney and Debian just keeps them secure and running. If the Debian kernel isn't your cuppa, they make it not terribly difficult to build your own kernel source into a Debian package.
The planet's core is a giant RTG. Most heavy materials like iron, nickel, and the radioactive metals are in the core. The longer lived radioactives like U-238 continue to decay and heat the core to this day. Mind you, I'm talking about decay not chain-reaction fissioning. While "natural reactors" are possible that isn't what is happening here.
http://www.bash.org/?111338
Which is fantastic, and one of the reasons why I preferred ME over 98 (yeah, I know...). It's so nice not needing a disc nearby every time you change/install/uninstall something.
It wasn't necessary to endure ME to get that feature. What I used to do (working from memory here), was to boot into DOS from CD, partition and format the drive and then create the following directory structure:mkdir windows
mkdir system
mkdir cabs (this could be slightly wrong but the general procedure is how it went).
I would then copy the entire Win98 install CD to the cabs directory and start the install from there. A little ways into the install you got a scary question about installing into an existing Windows directory. I would just ignore and install anyway. The "existing Windows directory" was empty except for the contents of the install CD. That location with the cab files would be written into the registry in various places. The upshot is that a Win98 system installed that way did you wanted: You could make changes to the system without ever needing the CD. 98SE was polished and debugged compared to ME. I wouldn't wish that turd on my worst enemy.
Who says they can't?
No one does. It's just that they are hideously expensive to develop and twenty years on we still don't have all that much to show for it. Faced with an effective ABM system, one answer is to simply overwhelm it with massive numbers of real and decoy missiles. The sheer weight of missiles that the Soviets could throw at us made even developing an ABM system a fairly crazy thing to do. Someone like Kim Jong Il isn't going to have huge numbers of missiles for quite a long time. A fairly effective ABM system would make attacking such a nuclear state without nuclear retaliation to yourself seem at least plausible since the political reality is that even one of your cities getting nuked is unthinkable.Thing is, I'd sure hate to see that system fail if it emboldened us enough to attack them...........
MAD became obsolete the moment an opponent showed up that didn't care whether they lived or died so long as you didn't survive. It was useful against the USSR and China, but not against anyone that we would not qualify as 'sane'.
These people who blow up themselves up in markets and crash airplanes are mostly sexually frustrated, indoctrinated young hotheads. The older ones writing the checks and ranting and raving in these madrassas can damn well be threatened. Anyone who has enough loot to develop or buy nukes doesn't want to die either. Those who would sell nukes are also accessible to threats. I think we are being faked out by the militant muslim world to some extent. If they can get us thinking of them as maddog bomb throwing lunatics who could do anything then they've more than half won already. Look how much milage they got out of that stupid cartoon. Incidentally, Old Yeller tells us what the correct answer is when faced with a mad dog.All that said, I'm not some jingoistic idiot. We were incorrect to invade Iraq but we were correct to attack the Taliban. Notice the lengths Osama goes to stay alive or at least indeterminately dead? That hosebag doesn't want to die. I have no doubt that the Ayatollah of Iran has plenty of kamikazes just itching to man the planes but the leadership of that country doesn't want to die either.
The TPM is hardware. The BIOS or other firmware is software. The hardware will do whatever it is told to do if it is within it's capabilities. Is anyone using TPM force Windows usage now? Not as far as I know although many shenanigans are played on embedded devices. And some of THOSE were played with GPLed software first. No wonder the FSF is pissed. Is there any reason in principle why it couldn't? No. Would MS try it or any level duplicity up to that if they thought for a second that the worst that could happen is a regulatory slap on the wrist? Does a bear shit in the woods?
Now I actually like some of the possibilities of a TPM chip provided I truly own the one in my computer. I like the idea of signing my own system binaries and config files and using hardware enforcement to improve the security of my own system. I very much dislike the abuse of the English language that is Trusted Computing. The owner of the hardware is precisely the one who isn't trusted. Just call me a nasty old pirate but I insist on owning my own property and for any use made of that property to reflect my interests first.
That is a gross distortion of the facts. There is no such "evil chip". The only thing you might be thinking of is the TPM, which is an open standard implemented by many vendors and in fact was supported by Linux before Windows. The TPM does not prevent you from running Linux. In its most "evil" usage, it simply prevents you from lying about the state of your machine. If you have to lie about what you're doing to convince people to give you their work, then that's your problem and possibly theirs, but it's certainly not the TPMs.
The TPM can certainly be used to accomplish this. TPM sign the bios and set the bios only to boot kernels and bootloaders with the appropriate signatures. After all, MS would never bully vendors and manufacturers into doing things their way to get OEM pricing. Past performance is a good predictor of future behaivor. MS is also specifying and encouraging vendors to obfuscate hardware as much as possible and encrypt buses. I don't believe for a second that their sole intent is to protect the xxAAs from the baaaaaaaaaaad pirates.Pervasive DRM will also facilitate the re-writing of history. After all, access to that embarrassing video clip can always be revoked. There is also the problem of evil chips ensuring that the only software that Bill Gates approves of will run on your machine. These and other undesirable outcomes will be all too possible once government and industry shoves it down our throats. Being able to see the latest teen idol is in no way an acceptable tradeoff for these losses.
These days, I use Ubuntu for Desktop use but I still come at it like a Debian guy. When I got into Ubuntu, they were faster at getting desktop and multimedia candy than Debian unstable. Once Etch releases, I might even go back. Once I get my Ubuntu systems installed, I just use dpkg, apt-get, and checkinstall as though I were still a Debian user (incidentally I've been running Debian on servers for years. The impedance match for that remains spot-on). I'm largely unaware of Ubuntu specific management tools since I still use a home directory that goes back to my Debian days. I basically have been treating Ubuntu as a more current set of packages rather than something that has a different ideology than Debian. Hell, Debian Unstable oftentimes has some new toy I want; the desire for a current KDE got me into Ubuntu in the first place. I often rebuild Sid sources against my Ubuntu desktops then install. I'm reluctant to install Debian binary debs in my machine but I won't hesitate to rebuild their sources against it. Come to think of it, that may be the best policy. Ubuntu has a new desktop release every six months and those tend to be well polished. If I want to be even more current on some minor item then rebuild Debian's latest against it.
You can have your stable cake and eat the latest and greatest too. It just takes a little knowledge and effort. If you don't want to take the time for knowledge and effort just run Fedora's, Ubuntu's, or Mandriva's latest supported distro and wait. All good things will come to them eventually.
My experience with Mandrake a few years ago mirrored yours. Out of the box, things would be autodetected better than anything else and Just Work. Thing was, My Mandrake installs would rot faster than Windows 98. Updates never worked right and the online repositories would always be incomplete and flakey. Debian was a breath of fresh air. Harder to configure initially but I could stomp on my Debian boxes with heavy lead boots and I could never screw one up so badly that I couldn't get back in a healthy state easily.
My question is this: These days, how well do Mandriva systems do as time goes forward and you update and upgrade things? Should you decide to manually config things, will the GUI tools handle it seamlessly or barf obnoxiously?
Some kind of corner has been turned for the GNU/Linux desktop in 2006. I light off cups (that is, go to http://localhost:631/ in FF), enter th IP address of the printer in the obvious place, and stuff works.
That ass Raymond not too long ago held up CUPS as example of things FOSS is doing wrong. I hate that sometimes. A lot of very talented people did hard and thankless work to make things work as well as possible and all some can do is bitch about what doesn't. I'm no fanboi. I know there things that could work better. But ESR's brand of "constructive criticism" is one we can well do without. You're right. With decent hardware, CUPS can work well and not be all that hard to deal with.I spent two frickin' hours cleaning and protecting my sister's and niece's XP laptops over xmas. Pain in the ass, but at least they're running clean and happy now. This is after I said I'd never help them because they made the mistake of buying XP laptops instead of a Macs. What can you do?
It's called tough love. Let your relations pay a couple hundred to Geek Squad rather than just bailing them out and maybe they'll take you more seriously next time.