You can imagine the ruckus that will occur when some human lucky enough to have some of those "patented" genes in their DNA strand decides to reproduce.
If you thought making backup copies of CDs has been a problem, wait until you want to use your good genes to create your own children, let alone use those genes for good effect in your own life.
I'm sure there'll be convenient payment plans available so we can pay the gene discoverers their fees, avoid court and so everyone will be happy as clams:).
Now that there is another trump suit over the right to free speech (I guess that "national security", "libel", "slander" and no "Fire! in a crowded theatre are additional reasons), I have to wonder whether there will be cases where free speech is suppressed for less than reasonable cause.
For example, the Co$ has maintained that certain of its documents are trade-secrets.
Corporations could shield a great deal of signficant information under the guise of trade-secrets, such as advice that Enron executives gave to VP Cheney concering energy policy (the US federal government has already dismissed attempts to release those conversation under the FoIA).
Judges pretty much try to interpret law. What this ruling indicates is the need for legislative review, debate, and possible modification of the law:
what are the real costs, benefits, and side effects of various IP protection laws and who do they effect?
If IP is taken to an extreme, there will be issues cropping up where information, as coded in genetic expressions, will become someone's intellectual property and "reading" it by overcoming some supposed obstacle would be a crime.
Linux is more secure because a lot of stuff is configurable.
Yes, but by who and for what purpose?
If a monopoly owned current Linux technology and was the only source of Linux systems, they could very well make Linux as insecure as Windows or as needlessly interwined between kernel and applications.
Likewise, Windows could be made much more secure, modular and interoperable with other vendors' products. But it's not.... not because Windows is inherently bad, but because of who is doing the configuring.
The oil was primarily used for the treatment of fever and intestinal worms.
. . .
Bergamot oil has a strong affinity for the urinary tract and is valuable in the treatment of cystitis and urethritis. It should be used in the bath or as a local wash at a 1% dilution.
In helping with mental and psychological states Bergamot is most valuable for its uplifting effects. For tension anxiety or depression bergamot should be used in a massage oil or in a dally bath.
. . .
antiseptic qualities of Bergamot make it ideal for the treatment of skin complaints such as acne, oily skin and all infections of the skin.
Bergamot is cooling in feverish conditions and has effective insect repellent properties.
Bergamot has an inhibiting effect on certain viruses in particular Herpes simplex 1 which causes cold sores. Bergamot will also allay the pain of shingles and ease chicken pox in small children.
A lot of individual users of open source might not be very interested in this, but in the grand scheme of things, it's very important.
As Linux and other FOSS becomes more widely known, whether or not companies and institutions choose to deploy it more widely depends critically on efforts like this.
While knowledgeable geeks can dismiss worms and viri to the land of Windows, people in charge of IT have been burned pretty badly by these over the years. Their suspicions of software have been tempered in the fire of what's been happening - before they deploy something new and better, they want to see more than anecdotal evidence about security, and having a process in place for security checking is an essential ingredient (much like the certifications that IBM and SuSE have recently obtained.).
Yes, a knowledgeable and thoroughly trained sysadmin ought to be able to secure his boxes and right from wrong. But CIO's feel better when their company's security is backed up by compliance with standards and processes and not just by a gut hunchy that their sysadmin is "rock solid".
There tends to be a lot built-in inertia and lag time in these kinds of rankings.
And, if you think about it a minute, what impresses deans and senior faculty the most is
How many research dollars per year per faculty member do these institutions bring in?
and, later on, at NSF and other funding agencies, when it comes time to evaluate whether some proposal gets funded, "Hmmm...looks like this guy comes from a good school. They wouldn't have hired him if he didn't know his shit."
Not that the big name schools aren't good (I've attended a couple), it's just that benchmarks are , as you say, pretty much subjective opinions.
For undergraduates, the Name probably means a fair amount since prospective employers often use Name perception to quickly evaluate candidates along with a GPA.
For graduate students looking for places to go, though, it's more advisable to look more closely at the individual faculty and at institutions that don't necessarily have a general purpose Name that impresses the masses.
Initially I thought this was really bad news. And it is bad news that the OpenOffice 1.* series isn't making it to OS X.
But it might reflect honest difficulties in porting to a whole different windowing system that may be too clunky to retrofit onto the OOo 1.* codebase.
Now if Apple were to put a few engineers into accelerating the OOo 2.0 release schedule, things might look better.
If I know my Mac users, they'll be pressuring for better free fonts, too, which hobbles the practical effectiveness of current OpenOffice deployments (I've heard Ximian rolls their own OOo with licensed fonts from Agfa that look nice).
The author did a very nice job on Practical C Programming.
But Steve O. shouldn't have let himself be conned into writing the Practical C++ Programming, though. His C bias weighs too heavily and the first edition spent all kinds of time talking about wonderful linked lists with structs just like the C book did.
If you want to learn C++, my suggestions are:
C++ Distilled by Pohl
Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
The C++ Standard Library by Josuttis
some other are also good, and of course no guru should be without one of Stroustrup's tomes.
Not that there haven't been many signs already that SCO has lost touch with reality, but adding in the "it's all a conspiracy by IBM" really indicates that the paranoia has gone into high gear.
[It's akin to Hillary's claims of a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get Bill. There certainly was (and is) a "vast right wing" that delighted in hating Bill Clinton; but that doesn't make it a "conspiracy".]
Consumers don't use all the fancy features that engineers spend time putting into the product and, according to some long-ago tirade about the computer illiteracy of the modern public, the majority of VCR's flash 12:00 because people won't be bothered to figure out how to navigate the menus to set the clock after the last power outage, or even since the unit was plugged in.
Considering the many demands on my time, I don't blame people for actively avoiding learning about how to configure yet another appliance (or software application) that ought to simply do its job.
In the case of tobacco, users were following proper directions concerning use - lighting up, inhaling, etc. - see billboards, old TV commercials for examples - so there is more liability there.
If tobacco companies had included instructions that the cigarettes were to be placed unlit in your ears and not your mouth and inhaled while lit, then they might have had a better chance of escaping from the product liability consequences they're currently facing.
run our unencrypted VPN tunnels through a firewall
But that would seem to diminish the VPN experience of "being there", the same as the inside of the firewall, where all kinds of ports are used for all kinds of useful (and, yes, insecure) things.
If you make VPN users sit on the other side of their a special VPN firewall, won't they get the same experience as being on the wrong side of the existing firewall?
How do I effectively quarantine those VPN users of the network while simultaneously not making their experience as brutally unfeatureful as being on the other side of our regular firewall?
firewall did just fine in blocking the virus, until somebody got their Windows laptop infected at home and brought it to work, behind the firewall.
I think this is the repeated Story of My Life in corporate IT the past couple of weeks.
The variant in our case was that the laptop dialed||VPN'd in.
There's going to be some serious rethinking about security policies because of this.
[Yes, the patches for the vulnerability were out there several weeks before the exploit, but no one trusts MS patches to not break something else, not unless they've been thoroughly tested in the local corporate setup, hence the delay in proper patching, hence the epidemic.]
Gotta re-evaluate several issues:
Can't trust users to be sanitary.
Can we afford dual laptops, one with sanitary protection?
Can trust exploits will keep coming.
Can trust MS to release patches, but of variable quality on variable schedule.
Can trust local testing and deployment will cost us bucks.
Make a note to bring this list to the table next round of MS License negotiation, to the next budget request for IT, and to create heavy cluestick with which to whack users.
There has to be a concentration on the demand side of the equation.
Clients of the spammers need to feel it in the pocketbook for a solution to really work.
Unfortunately, a 98% effective boycott of the spamhaus clients by recipients of spam won't do much, considering that response rates are less than 1% already. Rather than attack the spammers directly, the clients should be made to pay big time if they've employed a spammer for advertising.
I don't trust Michael Powell. After caving in to media interests and allowing further consolidation in the face of absolutely zero public support for such measures (and widespread opposition once the results of his hearings became known), his current position on spammers seems to be an attempt to position future policy to insure that there is no possible anonymity on the Internet. I dislike that solution to that problem because whistleblowers, politic dissidents in repressive regimes, etc. would be silenced alongside the despicable spammers.
BTW, along the same lines of supply and demand, there's a recent article about current and former law enforcement officials that want a different approach to the "war on drugs" than what's been not working for the last number of decades.
From what I understand, gas-fired turbines are the choice for new power plants because, compared to coal, for instance, they're a lot cleaner (which everyone likes) and secondly, they can be turned off and on much more quickly than a coal plant, which the electric utilities like for handling load spikes during hot summer afternoons, for example.
The downside has been that the price of natural gas is not as low as it once was before the wonders of gas-fired electric generation were "discovered".
That's indicative of where the business survival strategy is colliding with technical reality.
The more that these add-ons such as IE are bundled into Windows, the greater becomes the overall complexity of "Windows" and the more difficult it is to keep free of vulnerabilities.
If Windows didn't have so damn many extra doodads, it would have a much better showing in the security arena than it does.
But if it didn't add on the extra doodads, customers might figure there's no reason to upgrade/buy to the next release.
I've always been impressed with how much Alan Cox does for the Linux kernel.
He's technically very sharp and handles an incredible amount of incoming patches, very professionally.
For his talents, he ought to be paid handsomely, but for a number of years he's simply been a trusted chief lieutenant in charge of operations for the Linux kernel. Linus gets his mug on the magazines, while Alan Cox is pretty much known only in the geek community.
I hope Alan's MBA brings him the money he deserves. However, Linux kernel development will hiccough a bit more without him releasing all these 2.6.x-ac? kernels.
Slashdot Mirror
You can imagine the ruckus that will occur when some human lucky enough to have some of those "patented" genes in their DNA strand decides to reproduce.
If you thought making backup copies of CDs has been a problem, wait until you want to use your good genes to create your own children, let alone use those genes for good effect in your own life.
I'm sure there'll be convenient payment plans available so we can pay the gene discoverers their fees, avoid court and so everyone will be happy as clams:).
Now that there is another trump suit over the right to free speech (I guess that "national security", "libel", "slander" and no "Fire! in a crowded theatre are additional reasons), I have to wonder whether there will be cases where free speech is suppressed for less than reasonable cause.
For example, the Co$ has maintained that certain of its documents are trade-secrets.
Corporations could shield a great deal of signficant information under the guise of trade-secrets, such as advice that Enron executives gave to VP Cheney concering energy policy (the US federal government has already dismissed attempts to release those conversation under the FoIA).
Judges pretty much try to interpret law. What this ruling indicates is the need for legislative review, debate, and possible modification of the law:
If IP is taken to an extreme, there will be issues cropping up where information, as coded in genetic expressions, will become someone's intellectual property and "reading" it by overcoming some supposed obstacle would be a crime.
What does Sun have in Mad Hatter that Novell (nee Ximian) doesn't have in their desktop offering?
I'm assuming that they hope to compete in that desktop niche, where now Red Hat and SuSE also have targeted.
Competition is good; may the best distribution win.
Linux is more secure because a lot of stuff is configurable.
Yes, but by who and for what purpose?
If a monopoly owned current Linux technology and was the only source of Linux systems, they could very well make Linux as insecure as Windows or as needlessly interwined between kernel and applications.
Likewise, Windows could be made much more secure, modular and interoperable with other vendors' products. But it's not.... not because Windows is inherently bad, but because of who is doing the configuring.
I love that tea, so I just had to find out what the hell "oil of bergamot" was.
Quoting from this site,
some jerkoff with my real email address has just gotten themselves infected
I feel your pain.
That's why I never give my real email address to anyone.
A lot of individual users of open source might not be very interested in this, but in the grand scheme of things, it's very important.
As Linux and other FOSS becomes more widely known, whether or not companies and institutions choose to deploy it more widely depends critically on efforts like this.
While knowledgeable geeks can dismiss worms and viri to the land of Windows, people in charge of IT have been burned pretty badly by these over the years. Their suspicions of software have been tempered in the fire of what's been happening - before they deploy something new and better, they want to see more than anecdotal evidence about security, and having a process in place for security checking is an essential ingredient (much like the certifications that IBM and SuSE have recently obtained.).
Yes, a knowledgeable and thoroughly trained sysadmin ought to be able to secure his boxes and right from wrong. But CIO's feel better when their company's security is backed up by compliance with standards and processes and not just by a gut hunchy that their sysadmin is "rock solid".
judgments of deans and senior faculty
There tends to be a lot built-in inertia and lag time in these kinds of rankings.
And, if you think about it a minute, what impresses deans and senior faculty the most is
and, later on, at NSF and other funding agencies, when it comes time to evaluate whether some proposal gets funded, "Hmmm...looks like this guy comes from a good school. They wouldn't have hired him if he didn't know his shit."
Not that the big name schools aren't good (I've attended a couple), it's just that benchmarks are , as you say, pretty much subjective opinions.
For undergraduates, the Name probably means a fair amount since prospective employers often use Name perception to quickly evaluate candidates along with a GPA.
For graduate students looking for places to go, though, it's more advisable to look more closely at the individual faculty and at institutions that don't necessarily have a general purpose Name that impresses the masses.
Somehow, I suspect the computer science department of a Big-10 university can handle
I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of /. readers at the CS Departments of Big 10 universities.
Their local LANs sure as hell better be able to handle /. traffic from curious local on-lookers located on campus.
Initially I thought this was really bad news. And it is bad news that the OpenOffice 1.* series isn't making it to OS X.
But it might reflect honest difficulties in porting to a whole different windowing system that may be too clunky to retrofit onto the OOo 1.* codebase.
Now if Apple were to put a few engineers into accelerating the OOo 2.0 release schedule, things might look better.
If I know my Mac users, they'll be pressuring for better free fonts, too, which hobbles the practical effectiveness of current OpenOffice deployments (I've heard Ximian rolls their own OOo with licensed fonts from Agfa that look nice).
The author did a very nice job on Practical C Programming.
But Steve O. shouldn't have let himself be conned into writing the Practical C++ Programming, though. His C bias weighs too heavily and the first edition spent all kinds of time talking about wonderful linked lists with structs just like the C book did.
If you want to learn C++, my suggestions are:
- C++ Distilled by Pohl
- Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
- More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
- The C++ Standard Library by Josuttis
some other are also good, and of course no guru should be without one of Stroustrup's tomes.Don't anyone tell the porn industry about powered exoskeletons and bionic nurses.
[Sorry, now you've imagined that future, too.]
Not that there haven't been many signs already that SCO has lost touch with reality, but adding in the "it's all a conspiracy by IBM" really indicates that the paranoia has gone into high gear.
[It's akin to Hillary's claims of a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get Bill. There certainly was (and is) a "vast right wing" that delighted in hating Bill Clinton; but that doesn't make it a "conspiracy".]
I know almost no French, but I notice something sinister going on here.
If you spell the project name backwards you get
which is, almost, "very you X".Maybe they want to distinguish themselves from the XFree86 project that they perceive as "very us X".
like they use VCR's
Exactly. It's more like how they don't use VCRs.
Consumers don't use all the fancy features that engineers spend time putting into the product and, according to some long-ago tirade about the computer illiteracy of the modern public, the majority of VCR's flash 12:00 because people won't be bothered to figure out how to navigate the menus to set the clock after the last power outage, or even since the unit was plugged in.
Considering the many demands on my time, I don't blame people for actively avoiding learning about how to configure yet another appliance (or software application) that ought to simply do its job.
Unless its tobacco.
In the case of tobacco, users were following proper directions concerning use - lighting up, inhaling, etc. - see billboards, old TV commercials for examples - so there is more liability there.
If tobacco companies had included instructions that the cigarettes were to be placed unlit in your ears and not your mouth and inhaled while lit, then they might have had a better chance of escaping from the product liability consequences they're currently facing.
run our unencrypted VPN tunnels through a firewall
But that would seem to diminish the VPN experience of "being there", the same as the inside of the firewall, where all kinds of ports are used for all kinds of useful (and, yes, insecure) things.
If you make VPN users sit on the other side of their a special VPN firewall, won't they get the same experience as being on the wrong side of the existing firewall?
How do I effectively quarantine those VPN users of the network while simultaneously not making their experience as brutally unfeatureful as being on the other side of our regular firewall?
firewall did just fine in blocking the virus, until somebody got their Windows laptop infected at home and brought it to work, behind the firewall.
I think this is the repeated Story of My Life in corporate IT the past couple of weeks.
The variant in our case was that the laptop dialed||VPN'd in.
There's going to be some serious rethinking about security policies because of this.
[Yes, the patches for the vulnerability were out there several weeks before the exploit, but no one trusts MS patches to not break something else, not unless they've been thoroughly tested in the local corporate setup, hence the delay in proper patching, hence the epidemic.]
Gotta re-evaluate several issues:
- Can't trust users to be sanitary.
- Can we afford dual laptops, one with sanitary protection?
- Can trust exploits will keep coming.
- Can trust MS to release patches, but of variable quality on variable schedule.
- Can trust local testing and deployment will cost us bucks.
Make a note to bring this list to the table next round of MS License negotiation, to the next budget request for IT, and to create heavy cluestick with which to whack users.excessive concentration on the supply side.
You're quite right.
There has to be a concentration on the demand side of the equation.
Clients of the spammers need to feel it in the pocketbook for a solution to really work.
Unfortunately, a 98% effective boycott of the spamhaus clients by recipients of spam won't do much, considering that response rates are less than 1% already. Rather than attack the spammers directly, the clients should be made to pay big time if they've employed a spammer for advertising.
I don't trust Michael Powell. After caving in to media interests and allowing further consolidation in the face of absolutely zero public support for such measures (and widespread opposition once the results of his hearings became known), his current position on spammers seems to be an attempt to position future policy to insure that there is no possible anonymity on the Internet. I dislike that solution to that problem because whistleblowers, politic dissidents in repressive regimes, etc. would be silenced alongside the despicable spammers.
BTW, along the same lines of supply and demand, there's a recent article about current and former law enforcement officials that want a different approach to the "war on drugs" than what's been not working for the last number of decades.
Microsoft does not force you to upgrade
Damn right.
It will be those damn lusers in Marketing sending me attachments from the new Office 2003 making my life miserable that will force me to upgrade.
I feel like putting one of `em out of their misery right this minute.
From what I understand, gas-fired turbines are the choice for new power plants because, compared to coal, for instance, they're a lot cleaner (which everyone likes) and secondly, they can be turned off and on much more quickly than a coal plant, which the electric utilities like for handling load spikes during hot summer afternoons, for example.
The downside has been that the price of natural gas is not as low as it once was before the wonders of gas-fired electric generation were "discovered".
may ultimately have to fragment their identities
Been there, done that.
On comp.os.*.advocacy I'm {5-11}of12.
That's indicative of where the business survival strategy is colliding with technical reality.
The more that these add-ons such as IE are bundled into Windows, the greater becomes the overall complexity of "Windows" and the more difficult it is to keep free of vulnerabilities.
If Windows didn't have so damn many extra doodads, it would have a much better showing in the security arena than it does.
But if it didn't add on the extra doodads, customers might figure there's no reason to upgrade/buy to the next release.
I've always been impressed with how much Alan Cox does for the Linux kernel.
He's technically very sharp and handles an incredible amount of incoming patches, very professionally.
For his talents, he ought to be paid handsomely, but for a number of years he's simply been a trusted chief lieutenant in charge of operations for the Linux kernel. Linus gets his mug on the magazines, while Alan Cox is pretty much known only in the geek community.
I hope Alan's MBA brings him the money he deserves. However, Linux kernel development will hiccough a bit more without him releasing all these 2.6.x-ac? kernels.
Yes, that's the secret.
Of course, I've seen someone write their own directions on those seat cover dispensers.
A couple years ago, someone (not a fan I guess) wrote