Don't forget, CEOs of tobbaco companies are evil. They committed perjury before congress and got off by paying a fine with someone else's money. How is that justice?
2. Plan and code has been changed to 'guess and check'
3. Companies want to see if somthing will be popular and generate revenue before they put money into making it work.
4. Another way of disclaiming liability.
5. Sounds 'techie.'
6. Peer pressure.
7. People want customers to help with debugging.
8. Change is constant. So is Beta testing.
9. Dotcom crash has scared people. Folks want to 'see the money' as soon as possible.
10. Companies realize that because of revisions to UCITA, enforcement of shrinkwrap liscenses, etc. that they're not going to be held liable for the problems that they cause, above the price a customer has paid for the product which is almost never enough to justify any kind of lawsuit in the first place.
Why do people make 'concept viruses?' Who does this? Is it a matter of hackers trying to warn others of what is possible? Is it about people trying to see for themselves what is possible without causing harm?
What if one of those small print lines in the user agreement said "I'll give half my salary to x company, in exchange for clicking through this link." There are limits to what can legally be enforced for good reason, and contracts have an implied notion of reasonability. You can't use fine print to rope people into horrid situations, nor should you be able to. A contract is an exchange, never a one sided surrender. And some rights are, and should be, inaliable.
The 'usually say the same thing' in contracts is called boilerplate, and it's a result of the current legal situation which demands a fair exchange for the contract to be enforcable. By standardizing contracts, you eliminate the waste of time associated with having to read 20 pages of text every time you need to sign somthing. Enforcing miniscule text changes in boilerplate might be appealing theoretically, but it'd be hell in the real world and make entering into agreements the mental equivalent of writing a graduate level thesis. This isn't reasonable or efficient.
True, ignorance of the law is not an adequate defense. But the presumption (true or not) is that the law is a fair contract between citizen and state, an equitable covenant between two parties. If that presumption of fairness doesn't apply to a contract, then those contracts shouldn't be binding. (The only possible exception is if it is made very clear that the signer gives informed consent to the unfair contract.)
Too many corporations abuse contracts quite severely, and it's only the fact that some clauses aren't binding that saves people from being raked through a living hell. For instance; you can't forefit your ability to earn a living using your job skills, when you sign a non-compete clause.
I agree, in the case of google, that users may be able to give informed consent and the gov's actions may be off base.
Companies aren't put under enough pressure to provide informed consent. They try and hide terms in pages of legalese. If credit card companies advertised the harsher parts of their terms with the same energy that they advertise the cards themselves, a lot of them wouldn't have customers.
While I agree with this in principle, too often I've had businesses try to hide really stupid or dangerous clauses deep down in the 50x plus pages of contract that they ask a person to click through. Add to this the notion of 'shrink wrap liscenses' where you have to agree to the terms AFTER you've bought the software product, and the stores won't let you return the program even though by law they're supposed to... Informed consent is one thing. Trying to hide the terms of an agreement is not right. One credit card tried to hide a $40 charge in the small print, and it was only because I was willing to read through reams of garbage legalese that I caught it. I could have missed it easily. I'm not stupid. I just don't have time to wear my lawer-in-training hat all frigging day. (Because I'm busy reading Slashdot) They were trying to hide it. That's just not right, but that's what companies do if you let them.
You mean as opposed to back when people belived in manifest destiny, women and blacks couldn't vote, genocide was being practiced against Native Americans, etc.
When Ghingis Khan rushed across Asia, are those known as the dark years of the Mongols?
History has some strange criteria as far as what's good and what's bad.
Perhaps it will just be remembered as the time during which the US spent all its money on millitary equipment, weakening the American economy. This eventually causes the gov. to raise taxes, at which time American Industry seeks a new home outside the industrial haven that was the United States.
And the new "World Power" will remember this era as the time of their rising and will downplay Bush's actions in the same way that the success of American Industry after WWII is exalted, while people gloss over the fact that part of that boom was due to the fact that the other industrial nations had bombed their factories into rubble and the US had no real competition.
Sorry. If I knew, I'd include it. I've searched around. I think I found one attribution to a guy I'd never heard of, but I could never confirm it (i.e. find it somewhere else)
Well, sure, it is cynical. But consider the second line. Is everything that you remember a farce? Or do you say "we made that mistake before, we're not going to make it again."
I think your issues with the civil war are dead on accurate. Constitutional (and economic) issues figured heavily, but that isn't what the 'powers that be' typically talk about. Of course, everyone has their own views of history, and the quote would probably be more accurate if it said that history justified who should be in power, and not who is in power.
History contains an infinite amount of information, including material culture, domestic and millitary organization (and their relationships), history of epistomology, history of religion, etc. How do we decide what is 'historical?' How do we decide what is an 'important event.'
To say history is about facts is just too overwhelming, especially if we're talking about history as it's popularly understood. (i.e. history for Joe average, not Joe PhD) We have to select some facts over others. On what basis do we choose?
"History is a selective interpretation of events intended to justify those currently in power. Memory is the same thing on an individual scale. "
One of my favorite quotes.
What I'd like to see is better history simulation. Get a program that can take certain factors and use it to predict the outcome. After all, knowing math means we can predict the answers to math problems. Shouldn't knowing history mean the same thing? And isn't any school of thought's actual value as a study linked to the predictive value it creates? Or we could just be cynics and say that history is only useful for indoctrination and persuasion....
I heard that Saddam Hussein refused to use Linux and that's why the US invaded. One of those guys in Abu Ghraib with the black cloth over his head was actually Linus Torvalds. Haven't seen him around lately, have you?
Rather than saying people who don't do OSS lack beliefs it might be fair to say that they have different beliefs. You obviously underwent somthing akin to a conversion.
And I say that nonjudgementally. I like having OSS around just because it's one of the rare business models which seems capable of competing with a monopoly and forcing them to give a good product at a fair price "or else."
i.e. MS can't run OSS out of business or buy it out using quite the same tactics it has used with other companies.
If it were public controled, how could GM buy it out. I assume it was private.
I disagree with your analogy
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 1
In terms of production, the software code is more closely analagous to the schematics for a particualr car than the car itself. Cost of replication of the schematic is near zero, just as cost of publication of code is near zero. Of course, a company might still not want to release its code. There is such a thing as competition. The thing with software, it's both the instructions and the product.
Companies that spend money creating software for internal use are 'making it worth their while' when they sell their product. IBM makes money from its hardware, so it can fund linux and give it away without damage to its business model. Of course, a company still needs an incentive, such as outside coders fixing up its code or somthing similar, or it's not going to want to distribute the code, even at near zero cost.
Pixar probably doesn't want competition. Or do you see a different reason?
It's a rational comment that maybe the software could be released to the public. If a company makes software and keeps it internally because they don't want to be bothered with distribution, it's not like they're missing out of some profits by not distributing it.
Windows makes profit for public consumption. IBM just needs linux for private consumption so it doesn't hurt them to distribute it for free, especially when that distribution can influence people to improve the code.
Of course, Pixar probably doesn't like competition.
Would that work with current tech though? Wouldn't it just be easier to have two adjacent cameras filming the scene from 2 locations, and just have a player which uses these tracks to create images for your right and left eyes?
Yes, you watch all 3D movies in 4D (the fourth dimension being time). Technically, 2D movies are 3D pictures, just that they use time as the 3rd dimension instead of depth.
p.s. Everything is a signal of the apocalypse. We've been having them for 2000 years.
... this just proves my point. Public transit is reliable for industry because they're organized enough to see that it's so. I've tried riding rail across the country. My train was about 4 hours late because we had to pull over to let a freight train through. Freight gets precedence over people. Industry gets precedence over citizens.
The ohio trolley system was actually a model of efficiency when it was in use. Some systems actually do work well. Of course, where I am (Chicago) public transit is a private company getting government subsidies whenever it can't pay bills, so we get the worst of both worlds. It can't be forced out of business through the 'free market' and we can't vote it out, either.
While I don't know of any "proof" that Aluminum causes Alzheimers other than it was often found in the brains of people who have the disease, Aluminum ions are toxic and this is well documented.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cm d= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1515068 1 Arch Toxicol. 2004 May 19 [Epub ahead of print]
Mitochondrial viability and apoptosis induced by aluminum, mercuric mercury and methylmercury in cell lines of neural origin.
Toimela T, Tahti H.
Medical School, Cell Research Center, University of Tampere, 33014 University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.
Mercury and aluminum are considered to be neurotoxic metals, and they are often connected with the onset of neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, mercuric mercury, methylmercury and aluminum were studied in three different cell lines of neural origin. To evaluate the effects, mitochondrial cytotoxicity and apoptosis induced by the metals were measured after various incubation times. SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma, U 373MG glioblastoma, and RPE D407 retinal pigment epithelial cells were subcultured to appropriate cell culture plates and 0.01-1,000 micro M concentrations of methylmercury, mercuric and aluminum chloride were added into the growth medium. In the assay measuring the mitochondrial dehydrogenase activity, WST-1, the cultures were exposed for 15 min, 24 or 48 h before measurement. Cells were allowed to recover from the exposure in part of the study. Apoptosis induced by the metals was measured after 6-, 24- and 48-h exposure times with the determination of activated caspase 3 enzyme. Mitochondrial assays showed a clear dose-response and exposure time-response to the metals. The most toxic was methylmercury (EC50 ~0.8 micro M, 48 h), and the most sensitive cell line was the neuroblastoma cell line SH-SY5Y. Furthermore, there was marked mitochondrial activation, especially in connection with aluminum and methylmercury at low concentrations. This activation may be important during the initiation of cellular processes. All the metals tested induced apoptosis, but with a different time-course and cell-line specificity. In microscopic photographs, glioblastoma cells formed fibrillary tangles, and neuroblastoma cells settled along the fibrilles in cocultures of glial and neuronal cell lines during aluminum exposure. The study emphasized the toxicity of methylmercury to neural cells and showed that aluminum alters various cellular activities.
Antioxidants prevent aluminum-induced toxicity in cultured hepatocytes.
Abreo K, Sella M, Alvarez-Hernandez X, Jain S.
Department of Medicine, Louisiana State University Medical School, Shreveport, LA, USA.
Cellular Al accumulation has been shown to alter iron metabolism and induce peroxidative injury. Therefore antioxidants could potentially reduce or prevent peroxidative injury in Al-loaded cells. To test this hypothesis we assessed the effect of the antioxidants N-acetyl cysteine (NAC), catalase, superoxide dismutase (SOD), and tetramethylpiperidine 1-oxyl (TEMPO) in abrogating Al-associated cell toxicity and melonyldialdehyde (MDA) accumulation in mouse hepatocytes. Mouse hepatocytes (MH) were grown in media containing the minimum toxic concentration of Al (100 microg/L as Al-transferrin). All antioxidants protected MH from injury as assessed by cell growth and enzyme leakage into media. The antioxidants did not affect Al uptake by MH, protect MH from lipid peroxidation or decrease the reactive iron content of MH. Although antioxidants protected Al loaded MH from injury the mechanisms of this effect are unknown.
Aluminium-induced changes in hemato-biochemical parameters, lipid peroxidation and enzyme activities of male rabbits: protect
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget, CEOs of tobbaco companies are evil. They committed perjury before congress and got off by paying a fine with someone else's money. How is that justice?
I'd like to see the university countersue for fraud.
People are stooopid.
Now, if this guy won, THAT would be news.
1. Microsoft has made shit the industry standard.
2. Plan and code has been changed to 'guess and check'
3. Companies want to see if somthing will be popular and generate revenue before they put money into making it work.
4. Another way of disclaiming liability.
5. Sounds 'techie.'
6. Peer pressure.
7. People want customers to help with debugging.
8. Change is constant. So is Beta testing.
9. Dotcom crash has scared people. Folks want to 'see the money' as soon as possible.
10. Companies realize that because of revisions to UCITA, enforcement of shrinkwrap liscenses, etc. that they're not going to be held liable for the problems that they cause, above the price a customer has paid for the product which is almost never enough to justify any kind of lawsuit in the first place.
Whoever modded parent 'informative' should be slapped. Repeatedly.
Why do people make 'concept viruses?'
Who does this? Is it a matter of hackers trying to warn others of what is possible? Is it about people trying to see for themselves what is possible without causing harm?
It doesn't matter what you think any more
What if one of those small print lines in the user agreement said "I'll give half my salary to x company, in exchange for clicking through this link." There are limits to what can legally be enforced for good reason, and contracts have an implied notion of reasonability. You can't use fine print to rope people into horrid situations, nor should you be able to. A contract is an exchange, never a one sided surrender. And some rights are, and should be, inaliable.
The 'usually say the same thing' in contracts is called boilerplate, and it's a result of the current legal situation which demands a fair exchange for the contract to be enforcable. By standardizing contracts, you eliminate the waste of time associated with having to read 20 pages of text every time you need to sign somthing.
Enforcing miniscule text changes in boilerplate might be appealing theoretically, but it'd be hell in the real world and make entering into agreements the mental equivalent of writing a graduate level thesis. This isn't reasonable or efficient.
True, ignorance of the law is not an adequate defense. But the presumption (true or not) is that the law is a fair contract between citizen and state, an equitable covenant between two parties. If that presumption of fairness doesn't apply to a contract, then those contracts shouldn't be binding. (The only possible exception is if it is made very clear that the signer gives informed consent to the unfair contract.)
Too many corporations abuse contracts quite severely, and it's only the fact that some clauses aren't binding that saves people from being raked through a living hell. For instance; you can't forefit your ability to earn a living using your job skills, when you sign a non-compete clause.
I agree, in the case of google, that users may be able to give informed consent and the gov's actions may be off base.
Companies aren't put under enough pressure to provide informed consent. They try and hide terms in pages of legalese. If credit card companies advertised the harsher parts of their terms with the same energy that they advertise the cards themselves, a lot of them wouldn't have customers.
While I agree with this in principle, too often I've had businesses try to hide really stupid or dangerous clauses deep down in the 50x plus pages of contract that they ask a person to click through. Add to this the notion of 'shrink wrap liscenses' where you have to agree to the terms AFTER you've bought the software product, and the stores won't let you return the program even though by law they're supposed to... Informed consent is one thing. Trying to hide the terms of an agreement is not right. One credit card tried to hide a $40 charge in the small print, and it was only because I was willing to read through reams of garbage legalese that I caught it. I could have missed it easily. I'm not stupid. I just don't have time to wear my lawer-in-training hat all frigging day. (Because I'm busy reading Slashdot) They were trying to hide it. That's just not right, but that's what companies do if you let them.
You mean as opposed to back when people belived in manifest destiny, women and blacks couldn't vote, genocide was being practiced against Native Americans, etc.
When Ghingis Khan rushed across Asia, are those known as the dark years of the Mongols?
History has some strange criteria as far as what's good and what's bad.
Perhaps it will just be remembered as the time during which the US spent all its money on millitary equipment, weakening the American economy. This eventually causes the gov. to raise taxes, at which time American Industry seeks a new home outside the industrial haven that was the United States.
And the new "World Power" will remember this era as the time of their rising and will downplay Bush's actions in the same way that the success of American Industry after WWII is exalted, while people gloss over the fact that part of that boom was due to the fact that the other industrial nations had bombed their factories into rubble and the US had no real competition.
Lol. Well, not lately, unfortunatly.
Sorry. If I knew, I'd include it. I've searched around. I think I found one attribution to a guy I'd never heard of, but I could never confirm it (i.e. find it somewhere else)
Well, sure, it is cynical. But consider the second line. Is everything that you remember a farce? Or do you say "we made that mistake before, we're not going to make it again."
I think your issues with the civil war are dead on accurate. Constitutional (and economic) issues figured heavily, but that isn't what the 'powers that be' typically talk about.
Of course, everyone has their own views of history, and the quote would probably be more accurate if it said that history justified who should be in power, and not who is in power.
History contains an infinite amount of information, including material culture, domestic and millitary organization (and their relationships), history of epistomology, history of religion, etc. How do we decide what is 'historical?' How do we decide what is an 'important event.'
To say history is about facts is just too overwhelming, especially if we're talking about history as it's popularly understood. (i.e. history for Joe average, not Joe PhD) We have to select some facts over others. On what basis do we choose?
"History is a selective interpretation of events intended to justify those currently in power.
Memory is the same thing on an individual scale. "
One of my favorite quotes.
What I'd like to see is better history simulation. Get a program that can take certain factors and use it to predict the outcome. After all, knowing math means we can predict the answers to math problems. Shouldn't knowing history mean the same thing? And isn't any school of thought's actual value as a study linked to the predictive value it creates? Or we could just be cynics and say that history is only useful for indoctrination and persuasion....
My diet is healthy as heck. I haven't had soda in years. My sleep schedule is still fucked to hell.
I heard that Saddam Hussein refused to use Linux and that's why the US invaded. One of those guys in Abu Ghraib with the black cloth over his head was actually Linus Torvalds. Haven't seen him around lately, have you?
Rather than saying people who don't do OSS lack beliefs it might be fair to say that they have different beliefs. You obviously underwent somthing akin to a conversion.
And I say that nonjudgementally. I like having OSS around just because it's one of the rare business models which seems capable of competing with a monopoly and forcing them to give a good product at a fair price "or else."
i.e. MS can't run OSS out of business or buy it out using quite the same tactics it has used with other companies.
If it were public controled, how could GM buy it out. I assume it was private.
In terms of production, the software code is more closely analagous to the schematics for a particualr car than the car itself. Cost of replication of the schematic is near zero, just as cost of publication of code is near zero. Of course, a company might still not want to release its code. There is such a thing as competition. The thing with software, it's both the instructions and the product.
Companies that spend money creating software for internal use are 'making it worth their while' when they sell their product. IBM makes money from its hardware, so it can fund linux and give it away without damage to its business model. Of course, a company still needs an incentive, such as outside coders fixing up its code or somthing similar, or it's not going to want to distribute the code, even at near zero cost.
Pixar probably doesn't want competition. Or do you see a different reason?
It's a rational comment that maybe the software could be released to the public. If a company makes software and keeps it internally because they don't want to be bothered with distribution, it's not like they're missing out of some profits by not distributing it.
Windows makes profit for public consumption. IBM just needs linux for private consumption so it doesn't hurt them to distribute it for free, especially when that distribution can influence people to improve the code.
Of course, Pixar probably doesn't like competition.
Would that work with current tech though? Wouldn't it just be easier to have two adjacent cameras filming the scene from 2 locations, and just have a player which uses these tracks to create images for your right and left eyes?
Yes, you watch all 3D movies in 4D (the fourth dimension being time).
Technically, 2D movies are 3D pictures, just that they use time as the 3rd dimension instead of depth.
p.s. Everything is a signal of the apocalypse. We've been having them for 2000 years.
... this just proves my point. Public transit is reliable for industry because they're organized enough to see that it's so. I've tried riding rail across the country. My train was about 4 hours late because we had to pull over to let a freight train through. Freight gets precedence over people. Industry gets precedence over citizens.
The ohio trolley system was actually a model of efficiency when it was in use. Some systems actually do work well. Of course, where I am (Chicago) public transit is a private company getting government subsidies whenever it can't pay bills, so we get the worst of both worlds. It can't be forced out of business through the 'free market' and we can't vote it out, either.
While I don't know of any "proof" that Aluminum causes Alzheimers other than it was often found in the brains of people who have the disease, Aluminum ions are toxic and this is well documented.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cm d= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1515068 1
Arch Toxicol. 2004 May 19 [Epub ahead of print]
Mitochondrial viability and apoptosis induced by aluminum, mercuric mercury and methylmercury in cell lines of neural origin.
Toimela T, Tahti H.
Medical School, Cell Research Center, University of Tampere, 33014 University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.
Mercury and aluminum are considered to be neurotoxic metals, and they are often connected with the onset of neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, mercuric mercury, methylmercury and aluminum were studied in three different cell lines of neural origin. To evaluate the effects, mitochondrial cytotoxicity and apoptosis induced by the metals were measured after various incubation times. SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma, U 373MG glioblastoma, and RPE D407 retinal pigment epithelial cells were subcultured to appropriate cell culture plates and 0.01-1,000 micro M concentrations of methylmercury, mercuric and aluminum chloride were added into the growth medium. In the assay measuring the mitochondrial dehydrogenase activity, WST-1, the cultures were exposed for 15 min, 24 or 48 h before measurement. Cells were allowed to recover from the exposure in part of the study. Apoptosis induced by the metals was measured after 6-, 24- and 48-h exposure times with the determination of activated caspase 3 enzyme. Mitochondrial assays showed a clear dose-response and exposure time-response to the metals. The most toxic was methylmercury (EC50 ~0.8 micro M, 48 h), and the most sensitive cell line was the neuroblastoma cell line SH-SY5Y. Furthermore, there was marked mitochondrial activation, especially in connection with aluminum and methylmercury at low concentrations. This activation may be important during the initiation of cellular processes. All the metals tested induced apoptosis, but with a different time-course and cell-line specificity. In microscopic photographs, glioblastoma cells formed fibrillary tangles, and neuroblastoma cells settled along the fibrilles in cocultures of glial and neuronal cell lines during aluminum exposure. The study emphasized the toxicity of methylmercury to neural cells and showed that aluminum alters various cellular activities.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cm d= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1514982 4
J Inorg Biochem. 2004 Jun;98(6):1129-34. Related Articles, Links
Antioxidants prevent aluminum-induced toxicity in cultured hepatocytes.
Abreo K, Sella M, Alvarez-Hernandez X, Jain S.
Department of Medicine, Louisiana State University Medical School, Shreveport, LA, USA.
Cellular Al accumulation has been shown to alter iron metabolism and induce peroxidative injury. Therefore antioxidants could potentially reduce or prevent peroxidative injury in Al-loaded cells. To test this hypothesis we assessed the effect of the antioxidants N-acetyl cysteine (NAC), catalase, superoxide dismutase (SOD), and tetramethylpiperidine 1-oxyl (TEMPO) in abrogating Al-associated cell toxicity and melonyldialdehyde (MDA) accumulation in mouse hepatocytes. Mouse hepatocytes (MH) were grown in media containing the minimum toxic concentration of Al (100 microg/L as Al-transferrin). All antioxidants protected MH from injury as assessed by cell growth and enzyme leakage into media. The antioxidants did not affect Al uptake by MH, protect MH from lipid peroxidation or decrease the reactive iron content of MH. Although antioxidants protected Al loaded MH from injury the mechanisms of this effect are unknown.
Aluminium-induced changes in hemato-biochemical parameters, lipid peroxidation and enzyme activities of male rabbits: protect