Well if Google doesnt bow to the Indian government they will lose money. The "dont be evil" mantra would seem to contradict this move.
Quite right. Which means, by extension, "don't be evil" and "IPO" are a bit at odds. Pulling out of India over this means lost shareholder revenue. Lost shareholder revenue means lawsuits. Lawsuits mean suffering...
So yeah, I would say "don't be evil" died a while ago.
Actually it reinforces the first ammendment in a way which the first ammendment does not need, and as such could be seen as weakening the first ammendment, yes.
The first ammendment states that noone can interfere with anyone calling Pluto anything they want, including a cartoon dog. If the state legislature decided that calling Pluto a Dwarf Planet violated the state constitution, that in turn would violate the US Constitution because as a New Mexico and a US Citizen, I would simultaneously be restricted from saying, "Pluto is a Dwarf Planet" (under NM law) and allowed to say it (under US law).
They are setting a precedent of slipperiness here. By defining Pluto in terms of what citizens are allowed to call it, they actually introduce the notion/thought/possible (mis)understanding of their state contitution that says citizens are only allowed to define objects in a way that the state legislature permits. The law is unnecessary in the same way that any anti-discrimination law (should be) unecessary -- non-discrimination is already protected as an interpretation of the consitution. The law, by leaving some groups out (e.g. hemaphroditic pagans), can actually weaken the original intent of the consitution, because the law introduces the idea that the consitution should not be interpretated to include those groups. Laws like this can provide a de facto interpretation of the intent of the constitution.
As a bizarre example, if I were to draft a contract in New Mexico now that had the words "Pluto, a dwarf planet," in it, and actually got someone to sign it, I could probably claim the contract void after the state legislator does their magic. So while a funny addition to the New Mexico lawbooks, the legislators should actually be extremely careful in how they write the law. In all honesty, they made the news and should probably just drop the law at this point, before they do something stupid (or waste hundreds of hours researching similar laws and avoiding the pitfalls that they made).
Or so a lawyer would argue, of which I am not one. Fortunately, hypothetical arguments are still protected in both the US and the sovereign state of California, so I'm okay...
This may be wrong, but I've always looked at load as the number of processes waiting for resources (usually disk, CPU, or network).
Yep, it's wrong. Load average is defined as the number of processes that are runnable. Processes waiting for resources (at least, resources made via system called, like trying to talk to disk, network, etc) are put on the WAIT queue and are not runnable. Thus, they do not contribute to load. Processes that have all the data they need and just need a cpu slice contribute to load.
I've also seen where load was reported as N/NCPUs and N regardless of the number of CPUs.
The first one is wrong. Out of curiosity, where did you see this?
Even if the real meaning is the average number of processes in the run queue, that does not tell you much.
Yay! You're getting it!
Thinking of it as the number of processes waiting for some piece of hardware seems more accurate.
Oh wait, you're not getting it:(. Thinking of load average in this way is very precisely incorrect.
To be precise, I would say "number of processes waiting for the CPU". Processes that are waiting for non-cpu hardware are placed in the WAIT queue (they aren't runnable) and do not contribute to the load. They will be placed back on the run queue once the data that they are waiting for is available (at that point, they will contribute to the load again). Going back to my other example, if a process is waiting for network data, or disk data, or [insert special whizbang hardware here] data, it will be in the WAIT state, and will not contribute to load. Instead, it will contribute to IOWAIT time. Hence the need for looking at more numbers than just load average.
Generally, processes that are just waiting for a cpu slice will do okay in a VM. CPUs are fast, and there isn't any competition for a virtual CPU slice (except from processes in the virtualized OS). The VM host will (probably) ensure that each guest OS gets a fair share of time. So CPU-intensive processes in a guest will run slower, but they will run predictably slower. Virtualizing processes that have a lot of I/O time are bad, because an I/O-bound process in a VM is really 'competing' for the resource with processes in *other* VMs. This competition is very difficult to quantify or predict, because we're not used to thinking of systems in this manner yet. Remember that these I/O-bound processes are not contributing to load average on their respective guest OS because they are on the guest OS wait queue while waiting for hardware. Hence my original argument that load averages are wholly inaccurate and it is a bad idea to rely on the measurement for deciding whether a system is virtualizable.
We took a system that according to our monitoring sat at essentially 0-1% used (load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.01) and put it on a virtual.
Load average is a bad way of looking at machine utilization. Load average is the average number of processes on the run queue over the last 1,5,15 minutes. Programs running exclusively I/O will be on the sleep queue while the kernel does i/o stuff, giving you a load average of near-zero even though your machine is busy scrambling for files on disk or waiting for network data. Likewise, a program that consists entirely of NOOPs will give you a load average of one (+1 per each additional instance) even if its nice value is all the way up and it is quite interruptable/is really putting zero strain on your system.
Before deciding that a machine is virtualizable, don't just look at load average. Run a real monitoring utility and look at iowait times, etc.
Ahnald was already doing this in the 1970s. In his excellent movie _Hercules in New York_, he threw a lightning bolt in one scene. I believe he wasn't wearing a shirt. I also believe the lightning bolt was actually a grounding rod, bent into a jagged, vaguely lightning bolt shape. See, you have shirtless bodybuilder, lightning bolts, and grounding rods. Truly Ahnald was a man ahead of his time.
I work in government, and talk with RedHat and IBM all the time about linux. When the article summary touted "a few surprises," I thought, "RedHat and IBM aren't the biggest contributors?" Turns out there was no surprise, after all...they're the top attributable contributors. Is anyone else surprised by this?
I prefer my housemate's term for not-really-open source, and it is Available Source. The code is there, but there are some restrictions on how to use it (no commercial use, but free for education/personal use). We should probably all start using this term to describe restricted-use source code licenses.
Should, therefore, US women who dare to show some skin in magazines that are exported to the Middle East be dragged to some backward Islamic court to be stoned to death?
Allow me to suggest a double-standard.
In the case of Britney Spears: yes. In the case of Natalie Portman: no.
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.
This one seems a bit far-fetched. Academic research is explicitly allowed on patented genes. I'm allowed to tinker with the patented item in my home, so long as I don't aim to sell what I do, or otherwise compete with the patent-holder. Of course, if I do find some breakthrough, I can always contact the company (or other companies that licensed their patent) and work something out.
The thing to keep in mind is that patents only last 20 years (medicine patents only last 7). A rational company is not going to hold out for an astronomical amount of money to test for this gene or that just because it owns the patent. It may ask for an irrational amount if it's going broke and is hoping for a savior. Unfortunately Myriad has the public perception of being a bit irrational with its BRCA2 test (a gene that my girlfriend probably has; at least she's fortunate enough that she can extract her own DNA and get it sequenced, then do a little lithography to find out if she really does).
I'm going to go and defend Myriad a bit, though, and use numbers to do so. Not because I like them (I don't...it would be nice if my girlfriend could get a BRCA2 test done without fear of being caught). Still, I'm going to defend them, and in a far more convincing way.
Take a look at their 2006 financial report. Ignore the part about how much revenue they generated, because that's just shareholder BS. The point is this: they've been operating at a NET LOSS since 2002. It's right there in the brochure that they wrote. Page 18. Yep, $100 million in revenue. Oops, $159 million in research and marketing expenses. Yes, clearly they are a big greedy corporation that are charging too much for my girlfriend to get her BRCA2 test...they're not even turning a profit! If we got rid of patents, you could change their revenue to $0 and see that they would have lost ~$150 million last year. They'd have gone belly-up in 2002 and never would have even discovered BRCA2.
The skinny is, they spend WAY MORE doing research than they earn from patents (or anything else). The only reason they stay afloat is that they keep dumping stock on the public, and people keep buying it (page 23, "Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable investment securities increased $113.9 million or 100% from $113.8 million at June 30, 2005 to $227.7 million at June 30, 2006. This increase is primarily attributable to the public offering of $139.7 million (net proceeds) of our common stock in November 2005.")
Myriad's shareholders are kind of the unsung heroes of people at high risk of breast cancer -- maybe we can't have free BRCA2 tests tomorrow, but in a few years when the patents expire, even men will afford to get tested for it.
Not to be dripping with sarcasm, but again, clearly they're a big, greedy, corporation.
"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.
Look at what Crichton doesn't tell us. He uses the dreaded, "Some researchers hesitated," but won't say who, won't quote them, and won't say how much the holding companies wanted. Or who owns the diseases (let alone how much it cost those companies to do the sequencing on the diseases). He fails to back up his article with anything like numbers. Has he tried calling the companies? Have you? If so, what do they charge? I think if we did more research like Myriad's financials, we'd find that most genetics/pharma are in the same boat.
I still don't get how the life and money-saving research is going to get done without patents.
I'll ask for the same thing again: Show me a proposal that gives researchers the money they need to do to do meaningful research, without leveraging patents. I'll happily agree with you that patents are bad if a feasible alternative exists that provides a lower-cost product. Until then, I'm going to have to keep saying: Patents aren't perfect, but they're the best thing we've got.
I think you have a severe misunderstanding of what both a patent is, and also what a genetic patent is.
A patent covers the process of creating something. It does not cover the thing itself. A gene patents the process of creating an organism with a particular sequence. If such an organism already exists in nature, it cannot be patented (nature gets prior art). Gene patents cover essentially two cases: 1) where scientists give evolution a nudge in a particular direction that the organism probably would have gone in anyway, 2) where scientists push evolution in a direction that it probably would not have gone. 1 is kind of a grey area for patents, I admit. But the truth is, the patent lasts for 20 years...it will probably take natural selection longer than that to evolve the patented gene (for most macroorganisms).
Gene patents and chip design patents are roughly equivalent. gene patents cover the process of manipulating genes to create the desired traits in a living organism. logical circuit patents cover the process of manipulating logical gates to create the desired mathematical outcome of electricity. I could make the same analogy between gene patents and physical patents...physical patents cover the process of creating a device with some characteristics. In the case of logical circuits and mechanical objects, the course of R&D is actually a lot cheaper -- logic is well-understood and can be simulated without experiment. Most of the rules of physics are also well-understood and can be simulated. Genetic information needs to be tried and tested still, though, and thus is a lot more expensive to perform. All these patents are doing roughly the same thing, that is, patenting a process of doing something that manifests itself in a physical way.
My argument remains the same. If there's no money in doing genetic research, people will stop doing genetic research. How many people attain a college education at great expense to themselves so they can design chips that don't make them any money? I thought so:). If chip designs aren't covered by patent anymore, I'll just sit around and wait for intel to double the speed of DIV operations, and then I'll duplicate their results and undersell them because I don't have to pay researchers. Intel will go out of business and I'll have made a quick buck. But Intel won't be hiring chip designers anymore, and I won't be hiring chip designers...so who is going to design the new Core 3 CPU?
You could argue that gene patents could be offered at such lower cost, etc, but the problem is the same. The company that leeches the heavily-researched medicines will undersell the company that did the research, and everybody will lose.
If it weren't for all the money in this game, all these life-saving gene therapies and treatments would never have existed in the first place...same goes for whatever widget it is that you own (which is probably covered by a patent). Just remember, the patent will expire in a few years, after it pays for the researcher needed to develop it (and yes, sadly, the greedy CEO). After that, anybody will be allowed to duplicate the process in their basement.
So let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Where is the money in genetic research if we stop patenting genes? Genetic research is *expensive*. My girlfriend is a biotechnology student (yeah yeah). She spent about four years doing work with Arabadopsis plants, using a clone that has already been fully sequenced. It took her ~2 years of more or less full-time work to find the genes that control guard cell features -- not any particular feature, mind you, just enough that she could shoot a clone with a gene gun and have some pigment stick to where the gene gun discharge hit.
Now that she has the information, she'd like to work to increase guard cell size. It will probably take 10-20 man-years of research to achieve. Let's assume that each person earns $200k (inc. benefits...this is probably what your average 'real' genetic researcher costs). That's $2M to $4M of labor to create a line of Arabadopsis that has larger guard cells (which in turn allow it to digest more Co2). Now let's assume that genetic patents are thrown out. The first person that buys one of these plants can clone it and sell that clone due to the change in law. Total net gain from the lab is a negative two million dollars at least. If the lab is funded through tax dollars, great...except in the United States, we like to privatize everything (big government == bad).
Genetic research is very hit-or-miss. Even moreso than other areas of scientific research, experiments fail, they fail, and then they fail again. We know what we want to achieve, but we have no idea what portion of the genetic sequence requires modifying to bring that feature out. It really is a lot of luck to succeed. The number of salaries that need to be covered to decode genetic information is enormous. If companies or even private individuals can no longer hold patents on all the work, they're essentially spending hundreds of man-years of labor for information that anybody can (and will) repeat via simple and cheap cloning -- the worker won't see a dime.
If we're going to say that these patents are bad, I think we need to devise a better way to keep the research lucrative. Short of funding all genetic research via the government, there isn't much of a way to cover all the expenses associated with failed experiments (which account for a huge amount of gene experiments)...unless someone can think of a better way.
I doubt the actual message would be grammatically correct. Maybe the hypothetical Bush grammatical incorrectness combined with the Slashdot grammatical incorrectness and they cancelled out, conjugating all verbs properly. At least he mispelled 'redacted'.
Unfortunately, there are only 6.6 billion people on the planet, so eating them won't help too much.
The average person generates 900 grams of Co2 per day. Multiply by 6.6 billion and that's only ~6.5 million tons of Co2 directly attributable to people (discount cars, etc). The problem with only killing half of the population, as you suggest, is that it doesn't take cars off the road. A large chunk of people in odd-numbered addresses won't even own a car. It also means that the other half of the population (presumably randomly selected) will break into the odd numbered houses and take the cars parked in their garages.
What we need is a giant mallet on all freeway on/off ramps that plays whack-a-mole, destroying every other car. This would discourage people from driving at all, while halving the population of people that actually do drive. I'll bet we could build such a device for a lot less than 25 million, too...
In Linux I could bring in a library that was standard during a previous kernel
In linux you could do anything you wanted, including writing your own library wrapper and porting old drivers so that your archaic program that you refuse to rewrite would have the interface that it expects. It seems kind of silly to do all that work if you have the source to your program, of course...learning why the new way of doing things was deemed better enough to break software might be more in your interest.
My argument isn't about Linux at all, though.
My argument is: you can't do that in Windows, and you can't do that in the Mac OS, either (at least, the porting old drivers and mapping old system calls bits). Hence everybody is being pretty silly whining about API changes that they knew were coming, on an operating system where they knew APIs would change beyond their ability to write around in userspace with ease. These are closed-source operating systems...the decision to develop software on them yields the consequence of *having* to rewrite software to changes in the OS (versus linux and other open source OS', where you only *really should* rewrite your software when apis change). Instead of complaining about the big bad company changing things, a developer should either pay attention to changes before they happen (like in this case, where the changes were well-known in advance), or switch to an operating system where they can write their program once and focus the rest of their development on kludges to make that binary version work (like your linux example:)).
OS APIs change all the time. If I wrote an audio driver to work with the Linux 2.2 kernel, should I expect it to work in 2.4? Hardly! That's why Linux has the odd releases. I should try my driver under 2.3 and see if it still works. If not, I should learn what's changing in the kernel and port appropriately.
I've had developer releases of Vista coming through my office for the better part of a year. If Microsoft changed something at the last second (which they didn't) Apple would have a case (which they don't).
If anything, Microsoft changing the way its OS works is a great thing. There has been a lot of criticism in the security world because Microsoft has tried to be *too* backwards-compatible, to the point of ignoring security ideas in favor of still being able to run Edgar the Virus Hunter. Microsoft has been responsible in responding to security threats and changing The Way Things Work. To me (an Apple user and Apple lover) it looks like a decision-maker at Apple messed up, and figured that Vista wasn't going to be much different than XP. Oops.
This is neat, but it's not exciting. I've written a smartcard proxy service that could also be used for evil. It works by capturing the client certificate request from a tls handshake, and sends the signed response to the server (some older web apps don't know how to use pkcs#11 libraries, which is what this is used for..it strips the client cert request out of the handshake so the client is none the wiser). I could rewrite my proxy to sign all kinds of data with the smartcard once the user gives the proxy his/her PIN...I could logon to banking sites and transfer money to me, buy stuff, essentially anything that the computer could do, and not inform the user.
I think Bruce Schneier's paper said it best. Sure the card is trustworthy, but when you're using any kind of smartcard, the card isn't the trust boundary. The card plus the computer (or pinpad in this case) that you're using it on is your trusted device conglomerate.
I think the real demonstration of this attack is that pinpads have vulnerabilities. Even that isn't earth-shattering. So does everything else where physical access is granted.
Which isn't to say that it isn't newsworthy (people should definitely be careful where they stick their card), but it does feed into idea #4 on the six dumbest ideas in computer security.
Sadly, I'm being serious. I definitely don't like corporatespeak...it always feels so artificial and stifling. We're all human beings, and corporatespeak attempts to remove our humanness. It takes all of the personality out of what should be fundamentally interpersonal relationships, which is sad.
Equally sadly, corporatespeak works. I get the feeling it works mostly because of the points above (confusing the brain). I'm sure my idea has been influenced by something somewhere, but I'd like to think that it's my own idea. It makes people lose their focus when they have a genuine complaint. It provides layers of abstraction and places ideological walls in the relationship. It makes consumers instead of customers. There isn't as much money in a customer as there is in a mind-numbed consumer, but I think that dealing with a customer is a whole lot more fun. It's hard to find companies that think the same way, if ever they could be found.
I'm sorry for your inconvenience, but we've provided the service that you signed up for.
The word 'you' is used too much, as in the above sentence. I would recommend the following edit:
"Dear so-and-so, I am Such-and-such and am responsible for all decisions regarding Customer Service. At this time, we have followed our normal policy for free accounts. I would like to point out that we offered the opportunity to upgrade the account, which would have added the account to our backups and would have permitted a restoration. Unfortunately, we received no response in the 48 hours alloted per terms of the free account service agreement. As such, an automated process made room for other accounts by expuging the data. The process used makes the data unrecoverable. I am sorry for the inconvenience. Please provide comments that will help us improve our service for not only yourself, but also for our other valued customers. Sincerely, Such-and-such"
'You' is a very confrontational word. When in doubt, refer to the item at hand (e.g. 'the data' not 'your data', 'the account' not 'your account'). I especially like the sentence "The process used makes the data unrecoverable." You really have to unravel it to place meaning to it. "The process" oh, that was run by you guys, okay. 'the data'. oh, that was my account. Crap.
This sort of passivation makes eyes glaze over and also tricks our brains into not parsing the whole thing at a time. It's hard to associate bad guy A with doing bad thing B if both A and B are obscured behind intermediaries.
I add the last 'yourself' in there on the off-chance that the customer will come back. It doesn't hurt to leave the door open.
You can trust me, I work for the government (no, really, I do). Reid
How about if we shoot the patients in the 'real bullet' group in the eye, making it a single-blind experiment? I think that should satisfy the journal's expectations of accuracy in scientific reporting.
I also think that membership in a control group like this is okay. This isn't a placebo group (the blank bullet people are). I'm just there as a benchmark as 'average citizen exposed to neither blank bullets nor lead bullets'. I'm part of the baseline. I demonstrate whether or not the blank bullets have any effect on cancer rates. Because they might.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if Google doesnt bow to the Indian government they will lose money. The "dont be evil" mantra would seem to contradict this move.
Quite right. Which means, by extension, "don't be evil" and "IPO" are a bit at odds. Pulling out of India over this means lost shareholder revenue. Lost shareholder revenue means lawsuits. Lawsuits mean suffering...
So yeah, I would say "don't be evil" died a while ago.
Actually it reinforces the first ammendment in a way which the first ammendment does not need, and as such could be seen as weakening the first ammendment, yes.
The first ammendment states that noone can interfere with anyone calling Pluto anything they want, including a cartoon dog. If the state legislature decided that calling Pluto a Dwarf Planet violated the state constitution, that in turn would violate the US Constitution because as a New Mexico and a US Citizen, I would simultaneously be restricted from saying, "Pluto is a Dwarf Planet" (under NM law) and allowed to say it (under US law).
They are setting a precedent of slipperiness here. By defining Pluto in terms of what citizens are allowed to call it, they actually introduce the notion/thought/possible (mis)understanding of their state contitution that says citizens are only allowed to define objects in a way that the state legislature permits. The law is unnecessary in the same way that any anti-discrimination law (should be) unecessary -- non-discrimination is already protected as an interpretation of the consitution. The law, by leaving some groups out (e.g. hemaphroditic pagans), can actually weaken the original intent of the consitution, because the law introduces the idea that the consitution should not be interpretated to include those groups. Laws like this can provide a de facto interpretation of the intent of the constitution.
As a bizarre example, if I were to draft a contract in New Mexico now that had the words "Pluto, a dwarf planet," in it, and actually got someone to sign it, I could probably claim the contract void after the state legislator does their magic. So while a funny addition to the New Mexico lawbooks, the legislators should actually be extremely careful in how they write the law. In all honesty, they made the news and should probably just drop the law at this point, before they do something stupid (or waste hundreds of hours researching similar laws and avoiding the pitfalls that they made).
Or so a lawyer would argue, of which I am not one. Fortunately, hypothetical arguments are still protected in both the US and the sovereign state of California, so I'm okay...
This may be wrong, but I've always looked at load as the number of processes waiting for resources (usually disk, CPU, or network).
:(. Thinking of load average in this way is very precisely incorrect.
Yep, it's wrong. Load average is defined as the number of processes that are runnable. Processes waiting for resources (at least, resources made via system called, like trying to talk to disk, network, etc) are put on the WAIT queue and are not runnable. Thus, they do not contribute to load. Processes that have all the data they need and just need a cpu slice contribute to load.
I've also seen where load was reported as N/NCPUs and N regardless of the number of CPUs.
The first one is wrong. Out of curiosity, where did you see this?
Even if the real meaning is the average number of processes in the run queue, that does not tell you much.
Yay! You're getting it!
Thinking of it as the number of processes waiting for some piece of hardware seems more accurate.
Oh wait, you're not getting it
To be precise, I would say "number of processes waiting for the CPU". Processes that are waiting for non-cpu hardware are placed in the WAIT queue (they aren't runnable) and do not contribute to the load. They will be placed back on the run queue once the data that they are waiting for is available (at that point, they will contribute to the load again). Going back to my other example, if a process is waiting for network data, or disk data, or [insert special whizbang hardware here] data, it will be in the WAIT state, and will not contribute to load. Instead, it will contribute to IOWAIT time. Hence the need for looking at more numbers than just load average.
Generally, processes that are just waiting for a cpu slice will do okay in a VM. CPUs are fast, and there isn't any competition for a virtual CPU slice (except from processes in the virtualized OS). The VM host will (probably) ensure that each guest OS gets a fair share of time. So CPU-intensive processes in a guest will run slower, but they will run predictably slower. Virtualizing processes that have a lot of I/O time are bad, because an I/O-bound process in a VM is really 'competing' for the resource with processes in *other* VMs. This competition is very difficult to quantify or predict, because we're not used to thinking of systems in this manner yet. Remember that these I/O-bound processes are not contributing to load average on their respective guest OS because they are on the guest OS wait queue while waiting for hardware. Hence my original argument that load averages are wholly inaccurate and it is a bad idea to rely on the measurement for deciding whether a system is virtualizable.
Reid
We took a system that according to our monitoring sat at essentially 0-1% used (load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.01) and put it on a virtual.
Load average is a bad way of looking at machine utilization. Load average is the average number of processes on the run queue over the last 1,5,15 minutes. Programs running exclusively I/O will be on the sleep queue while the kernel does i/o stuff, giving you a load average of near-zero even though your machine is busy scrambling for files on disk or waiting for network data. Likewise, a program that consists entirely of NOOPs will give you a load average of one (+1 per each additional instance) even if its nice value is all the way up and it is quite interruptable/is really putting zero strain on your system.
Before deciding that a machine is virtualizable, don't just look at load average. Run a real monitoring utility and look at iowait times, etc.
Reid
Ahnald was already doing this in the 1970s. In his excellent movie _Hercules in New York_, he threw a lightning bolt in one scene. I believe he wasn't wearing a shirt. I also believe the lightning bolt was actually a grounding rod, bent into a jagged, vaguely lightning bolt shape. See, you have shirtless bodybuilder, lightning bolts, and grounding rods. Truly Ahnald was a man ahead of his time.
Ahnald, you've come a long way...baby.
I work in government, and talk with RedHat and IBM all the time about linux. When the article summary touted "a few surprises," I thought, "RedHat and IBM aren't the biggest contributors?" Turns out there was no surprise, after all...they're the top attributable contributors. Is anyone else surprised by this?
I prefer my housemate's term for not-really-open source, and it is Available Source. The code is there, but there are some restrictions on how to use it (no commercial use, but free for education/personal use). We should probably all start using this term to describe restricted-use source code licenses.
Don't mention your UID as a basis for any statement on /. unless it's lower than 100000. Ever.
Hear, hear. I made it just under the wire...
Should, therefore, US women who dare to show some skin in magazines that are exported to the Middle East be dragged to some backward Islamic court to be stoned to death?
Allow me to suggest a double-standard.
In the case of Britney Spears: yes.
In the case of Natalie Portman: no.
Reid
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. Or some such.
Everyone does this
Replies with seventeen beats
Moderate them well
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.
This one seems a bit far-fetched. Academic research is explicitly allowed on patented genes. I'm allowed to tinker with the patented item in my home, so long as I don't aim to sell what I do, or otherwise compete with the patent-holder. Of course, if I do find some breakthrough, I can always contact the company (or other companies that licensed their patent) and work something out.
The thing to keep in mind is that patents only last 20 years (medicine patents only last 7). A rational company is not going to hold out for an astronomical amount of money to test for this gene or that just because it owns the patent. It may ask for an irrational amount if it's going broke and is hoping for a savior. Unfortunately Myriad has the public perception of being a bit irrational with its BRCA2 test (a gene that my girlfriend probably has; at least she's fortunate enough that she can extract her own DNA and get it sequenced, then do a little lithography to find out if she really does).
I'm going to go and defend Myriad a bit, though, and use numbers to do so. Not because I like them (I don't...it would be nice if my girlfriend could get a BRCA2 test done without fear of being caught). Still, I'm going to defend them, and in a far more convincing way.
Take a look at their 2006 financial report. Ignore the part about how much revenue they generated, because that's just shareholder BS. The point is this: they've been operating at a NET LOSS since 2002. It's right there in the brochure that they wrote. Page 18. Yep, $100 million in revenue. Oops, $159 million in research and marketing expenses. Yes, clearly they are a big greedy corporation that are charging too much for my girlfriend to get her BRCA2 test...they're not even turning a profit! If we got rid of patents, you could change their revenue to $0 and see that they would have lost ~$150 million last year. They'd have gone belly-up in 2002 and never would have even discovered BRCA2.
The skinny is, they spend WAY MORE doing research than they earn from patents (or anything else). The only reason they stay afloat is that they keep dumping stock on the public, and people keep buying it (page 23, "Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable investment securities increased $113.9 million or 100% from $113.8 million at June 30, 2005 to $227.7 million at June 30, 2006. This increase is primarily attributable to the public offering of $139.7 million (net proceeds) of our common stock in November 2005.")
Myriad's shareholders are kind of the unsung heroes of people at high risk of breast cancer -- maybe we can't have free BRCA2 tests tomorrow, but in a few years when the patents expire, even men will afford to get tested for it.
Not to be dripping with sarcasm, but again, clearly they're a big, greedy, corporation.
"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.
Look at what Crichton doesn't tell us. He uses the dreaded, "Some researchers hesitated," but won't say who, won't quote them, and won't say how much the holding companies wanted. Or who owns the diseases (let alone how much it cost those companies to do the sequencing on the diseases). He fails to back up his article with anything like numbers. Has he tried calling the companies? Have you? If so, what do they charge? I think if we did more research like Myriad's financials, we'd find that most genetics/pharma are in the same boat.
Gen
I still don't get how the life and money-saving research is going to get done without patents.
I'll ask for the same thing again: Show me a proposal that gives researchers the money they need to do to do meaningful research, without leveraging patents. I'll happily agree with you that patents are bad if a feasible alternative exists that provides a lower-cost product. Until then, I'm going to have to keep saying: Patents aren't perfect, but they're the best thing we've got.
I think you have a severe misunderstanding of what both a patent is, and also what a genetic patent is.
:). If chip designs aren't covered by patent anymore, I'll just sit around and wait for intel to double the speed of DIV operations, and then I'll duplicate their results and undersell them because I don't have to pay researchers. Intel will go out of business and I'll have made a quick buck. But Intel won't be hiring chip designers anymore, and I won't be hiring chip designers...so who is going to design the new Core 3 CPU?
A patent covers the process of creating something. It does not cover the thing itself. A gene patents the process of creating an organism with a particular sequence. If such an organism already exists in nature, it cannot be patented (nature gets prior art). Gene patents cover essentially two cases: 1) where scientists give evolution a nudge in a particular direction that the organism probably would have gone in anyway, 2) where scientists push evolution in a direction that it probably would not have gone. 1 is kind of a grey area for patents, I admit. But the truth is, the patent lasts for 20 years...it will probably take natural selection longer than that to evolve the patented gene (for most macroorganisms).
Gene patents and chip design patents are roughly equivalent. gene patents cover the process of manipulating genes to create the desired traits in a living organism. logical circuit patents cover the process of manipulating logical gates to create the desired mathematical outcome of electricity. I could make the same analogy between gene patents and physical patents...physical patents cover the process of creating a device with some characteristics. In the case of logical circuits and mechanical objects, the course of R&D is actually a lot cheaper -- logic is well-understood and can be simulated without experiment. Most of the rules of physics are also well-understood and can be simulated. Genetic information needs to be tried and tested still, though, and thus is a lot more expensive to perform. All these patents are doing roughly the same thing, that is, patenting a process of doing something that manifests itself in a physical way.
My argument remains the same. If there's no money in doing genetic research, people will stop doing genetic research. How many people attain a college education at great expense to themselves so they can design chips that don't make them any money? I thought so
You could argue that gene patents could be offered at such lower cost, etc, but the problem is the same. The company that leeches the heavily-researched medicines will undersell the company that did the research, and everybody will lose.
If it weren't for all the money in this game, all these life-saving gene therapies and treatments would never have existed in the first place...same goes for whatever widget it is that you own (which is probably covered by a patent). Just remember, the patent will expire in a few years, after it pays for the researcher needed to develop it (and yes, sadly, the greedy CEO). After that, anybody will be allowed to duplicate the process in their basement.
Reid
So let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Where is the money in genetic research if we stop patenting genes? Genetic research is *expensive*. My girlfriend is a biotechnology student (yeah yeah). She spent about four years doing work with Arabadopsis plants, using a clone that has already been fully sequenced. It took her ~2 years of more or less full-time work to find the genes that control guard cell features -- not any particular feature, mind you, just enough that she could shoot a clone with a gene gun and have some pigment stick to where the gene gun discharge hit.
Now that she has the information, she'd like to work to increase guard cell size. It will probably take 10-20 man-years of research to achieve. Let's assume that each person earns $200k (inc. benefits...this is probably what your average 'real' genetic researcher costs). That's $2M to $4M of labor to create a line of Arabadopsis that has larger guard cells (which in turn allow it to digest more Co2). Now let's assume that genetic patents are thrown out. The first person that buys one of these plants can clone it and sell that clone due to the change in law. Total net gain from the lab is a negative two million dollars at least. If the lab is funded through tax dollars, great...except in the United States, we like to privatize everything (big government == bad).
Genetic research is very hit-or-miss. Even moreso than other areas of scientific research, experiments fail, they fail, and then they fail again. We know what we want to achieve, but we have no idea what portion of the genetic sequence requires modifying to bring that feature out. It really is a lot of luck to succeed. The number of salaries that need to be covered to decode genetic information is enormous. If companies or even private individuals can no longer hold patents on all the work, they're essentially spending hundreds of man-years of labor for information that anybody can (and will) repeat via simple and cheap cloning -- the worker won't see a dime.
If we're going to say that these patents are bad, I think we need to devise a better way to keep the research lucrative. Short of funding all genetic research via the government, there isn't much of a way to cover all the expenses associated with failed experiments (which account for a huge amount of gene experiments)...unless someone can think of a better way.
I doubt the actual message would be grammatically correct. Maybe the hypothetical Bush grammatical incorrectness combined with the Slashdot grammatical incorrectness and they cancelled out, conjugating all verbs properly. At least he mispelled 'redacted'.
Reid
Unfortunately, there are only 6.6 billion people on the planet, so eating them won't help too much.
The average person generates 900 grams of Co2 per day. Multiply by 6.6 billion and that's only ~6.5 million tons of Co2 directly attributable to people (discount cars, etc). The problem with only killing half of the population, as you suggest, is that it doesn't take cars off the road. A large chunk of people in odd-numbered addresses won't even own a car. It also means that the other half of the population (presumably randomly selected) will break into the odd numbered houses and take the cars parked in their garages.
What we need is a giant mallet on all freeway on/off ramps that plays whack-a-mole, destroying every other car. This would discourage people from driving at all, while halving the population of people that actually do drive. I'll bet we could build such a device for a lot less than 25 million, too...
In Linux I could bring in a library that was standard during a previous kernel
:)).
In linux you could do anything you wanted, including writing your own library wrapper and porting old drivers so that your archaic program that you refuse to rewrite would have the interface that it expects. It seems kind of silly to do all that work if you have the source to your program, of course...learning why the new way of doing things was deemed better enough to break software might be more in your interest.
My argument isn't about Linux at all, though.
My argument is: you can't do that in Windows, and you can't do that in the Mac OS, either (at least, the porting old drivers and mapping old system calls bits). Hence everybody is being pretty silly whining about API changes that they knew were coming, on an operating system where they knew APIs would change beyond their ability to write around in userspace with ease. These are closed-source operating systems...the decision to develop software on them yields the consequence of *having* to rewrite software to changes in the OS (versus linux and other open source OS', where you only *really should* rewrite your software when apis change). Instead of complaining about the big bad company changing things, a developer should either pay attention to changes before they happen (like in this case, where the changes were well-known in advance), or switch to an operating system where they can write their program once and focus the rest of their development on kludges to make that binary version work (like your linux example
OS APIs change all the time. If I wrote an audio driver to work with the Linux 2.2 kernel, should I expect it to work in 2.4? Hardly! That's why Linux has the odd releases. I should try my driver under 2.3 and see if it still works. If not, I should learn what's changing in the kernel and port appropriately.
I've had developer releases of Vista coming through my office for the better part of a year. If Microsoft changed something at the last second (which they didn't) Apple would have a case (which they don't).
If anything, Microsoft changing the way its OS works is a great thing. There has been a lot of criticism in the security world because Microsoft has tried to be *too* backwards-compatible, to the point of ignoring security ideas in favor of still being able to run Edgar the Virus Hunter. Microsoft has been responsible in responding to security threats and changing The Way Things Work. To me (an Apple user and Apple lover) it looks like a decision-maker at Apple messed up, and figured that Vista wasn't going to be much different than XP. Oops.
This is neat, but it's not exciting. I've written a smartcard proxy service that could also be used for evil. It works by capturing the client certificate request from a tls handshake, and sends the signed response to the server (some older web apps don't know how to use pkcs#11 libraries, which is what this is used for..it strips the client cert request out of the handshake so the client is none the wiser). I could rewrite my proxy to sign all kinds of data with the smartcard once the user gives the proxy his/her PIN...I could logon to banking sites and transfer money to me, buy stuff, essentially anything that the computer could do, and not inform the user.
I think Bruce Schneier's paper said it best. Sure the card is trustworthy, but when you're using any kind of smartcard, the card isn't the trust boundary. The card plus the computer (or pinpad in this case) that you're using it on is your trusted device conglomerate.
I think the real demonstration of this attack is that pinpads have vulnerabilities. Even that isn't earth-shattering. So does everything else where physical access is granted.
Which isn't to say that it isn't newsworthy (people should definitely be careful where they stick their card), but it does feed into idea #4 on the six dumbest ideas in computer security.
Sadly, I'm being serious. I definitely don't like corporatespeak...it always feels so artificial and stifling. We're all human beings, and corporatespeak attempts to remove our humanness. It takes all of the personality out of what should be fundamentally interpersonal relationships, which is sad.
Equally sadly, corporatespeak works. I get the feeling it works mostly because of the points above (confusing the brain). I'm sure my idea has been influenced by something somewhere, but I'd like to think that it's my own idea. It makes people lose their focus when they have a genuine complaint. It provides layers of abstraction and places ideological walls in the relationship. It makes consumers instead of customers. There isn't as much money in a customer as there is in a mind-numbed consumer, but I think that dealing with a customer is a whole lot more fun. It's hard to find companies that think the same way, if ever they could be found.
Reid
I'm sorry for your inconvenience, but we've provided the service that you signed up for.
The word 'you' is used too much, as in the above sentence. I would recommend the following edit:
"Dear so-and-so, I am Such-and-such and am responsible for all decisions regarding Customer Service. At this time, we have followed our normal policy for free accounts. I would like to point out that we offered the opportunity to upgrade the account, which would have added the account to our backups and would have permitted a restoration. Unfortunately, we received no response in the 48 hours alloted per terms of the free account service agreement. As such, an automated process made room for other accounts by expuging the data. The process used makes the data unrecoverable. I am sorry for the inconvenience. Please provide comments that will help us improve our service for not only yourself, but also for our other valued customers. Sincerely, Such-and-such"
'You' is a very confrontational word. When in doubt, refer to the item at hand (e.g. 'the data' not 'your data', 'the account' not 'your account'). I especially like the sentence "The process used makes the data unrecoverable." You really have to unravel it to place meaning to it. "The process" oh, that was run by you guys, okay. 'the data'. oh, that was my account. Crap.
This sort of passivation makes eyes glaze over and also tricks our brains into not parsing the whole thing at a time. It's hard to associate bad guy A with doing bad thing B if both A and B are obscured behind intermediaries.
I add the last 'yourself' in there on the off-chance that the customer will come back. It doesn't hurt to leave the door open.
You can trust me, I work for the government (no, really, I do).
Reid
No, really, they'll use snakes to make oil. Get it? Got it? Good.
I guess they were victims of the 'analog divide.'
Yes yes.
How about if we shoot the patients in the 'real bullet' group in the eye, making it a single-blind experiment? I think that should satisfy the journal's expectations of accuracy in scientific reporting.
I also think that membership in a control group like this is okay. This isn't a placebo group (the blank bullet people are). I'm just there as a benchmark as 'average citizen exposed to neither blank bullets nor lead bullets'. I'm part of the baseline. I demonstrate whether or not the blank bullets have any effect on cancer rates. Because they might.
Reid