That's what's missing. It's downright dishonest to present a report without citing sources and any financial connection. So long as that's out there, and the reader can make their own judgment, there isn't really a problem. Unless, of course, all reporting comes from the same source(s), but if they're cited, then at least that fact will be obvious.
That's also where EFF and the like are ahead of the corporate pack. Regardless of what you may think of their biases, they're up front about them, and up front about their sources. That's often a symptom of not being afraid if the truth comes out.
Hmm. I thought that program had been nixed. Looks like it never even hiccuped. I thought I remembered that sea lions had been used too. I guess the reason it bothers me so much that the military uses them for this is that I have a hard time believing the military is treating them like, say, seeing eye dogs. I figure the Navy thinks that if dolphins get blown up, it doesn't matter much. On the other hand, considering how much training must go into each animal, maybe the Navy cares more about them than some of the enlisted folks.
Trying to remote control sharks, judging by comments below. Still, given the simple nature of sharks' brains, I can see where that could be theoretically workable. As far as insects go, yes, there's some really bizarre stuff that goes on. "Alien" had nothing on some wasps. My favorite parasitism story is Wolbachia. Since the bacteria are passed to the next generation of insects through the eggs, the bacteria reprogram the host's reproductive system so that males either die, don't reproduce, or turn into functional females. Probably don't need to worry too much about the macho DoD playing around with that one.
Really. They were even training them to do various things. (Look for subs or something. I don't remember.) There was talk of training them to attach mines to enemy vessels. Then an outcry began--rightfully, as far as I'm concerned--that it was a Bad Thing to use such intelligent and simpatico animals for this. Now, I see, they've moved to sharks. No lobby supporting them, I'll bet, but the military also won't be able to train them to do much. Sharks are well below flounders in brain power.
Re:Most of this isn't new... Actually, it is.
on
New Mars Discoveries
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's a fairly old _idea_, but there have been all kinds of ideas. I follow the Mars news fairly closely, not super-closely, and this is the first time I've seen what amounts to proof of buried craters. That's why people are excited, I think. Not because nobody ever had the idea before.
Likewise with the layered deposits. Yes, those have been found before, but they were on a much smaller scale. These vast, flat, deposits really suggest ocean sedimentation over millions of years. (Suggest. Far from prove.) Coupled with the fact that the northern craters are buried under something, it's starting to look very probable that there was a long term ocean there. That means the current favorite theory of water on Mars--that it only existed for a few hundred million years--may need reworking.
And long(er) term water is significant because it makes life that much more likely. On Earth, there are bacteria everywhere with even the occasional molecule of water. But we've had liquid water for billions of years. If Mars only had it briefly, and we did not find life, we wouldn't know if life was rare in the universe, or if there just wasn't enough time on Mars. On the other hand, if Mars had long term water, and we did find life, we'll suddenly have actual data about how likely life is in the rest of the Universe. And in that case, it would be very likely. Maybe life is the rule, not the exception! That's what bacteria on Mars could tell us. Like the commenter said earlier: AWESOME.
Couldn't agree more. The reason word-of-mouth is such a powerful promotion is because it's assumed to be independent and uncompensated. Totally objective, in other words. Hiding the advertisement nature of it is exactly what truth in advertising laws are supposed to prevent. Just because it's a new medium doesn't make it less dishonest to lie.
Not that I'm actually a Buddhist, but I do seem to keep quoting them.... About ownership, I once heard the Dalai Lama quote a saying: "Those who have cows have care of cows." That's a lot more like your concept of ownership (and mine) than what I guess you could call the Fox News concept of it.
What I really meant with my imprecise language was that you can't do violence to people's sense of justice. Which is also a very imprecise way to put it, but what I mean is that basic feeling where if you've put a quart of ice cream in the freezer, it's _really_ annoying when your roommate eats it all. Communism let everyone eat everyone else's ice cream, so to speak. Nobody's going to stand for that over the long term.
On the other hand, if I'm reading Slashdot and 10,000 other people are reading it at the same time, nobody loses. That's the kind of thing that can't be owned, and people actually lose by it when somebody tries to lock it up. There can be the right to benefit from your work, certainly, but that's different from ownership.
Anyway, I should probably shut up because I'm not sure I'm making any more sense than before. I like your attitude. I wish everyone had it!
Been with Verizon for over four years, and they have never, not once, resolved a problem without me having to complain to my state's Attorney General's Dept. of Consumer Affairs. The AG writes, and then, magically, somebody actually deals with the problem. The quickest I got anything resolved with them was six months, and multiple phone calls, letters, and harangues. The slowest was a year, with even more multiple calls, letters, yada, yada, yada. I've had three billing problems in four years, and the last time, when it took a year, they owed me $300. To say these bastards suck is being too kind. Obviously, once my indentured phonitude is up, that's the last they'll see of me. After that, it's voip all the way.
I think we actually agree, even if we're using somewhat different words. Capitalism doesn't have to be a free-for-all, but very often in practice it's hard to distinguish from robbery with a fountain pen. "Exploiting a resource without much thought for how long it will last" is practically the definition of the tragedy of the commons. It takes regulation to prevent people from not caring or, worse, using a resource up as fast as possible to get the most benefit before somebody else gets some of it. (The environment, as a place to dump stuff, is a "resource" people don't care about in this context.)
I think the reason communism worked so poorly is not because of a problem with the principle of sharing itself, but because the communists tried to make people share stuff that they normally would not. Stuff like their houses, or the food in their kitchens. In some ways, it's the mirror image of the patent-the-alphabet problem we have now, where people are trying to own stuff that can't be owned.
Humans have spent millions of years sharing, and just a few thousand owning. Sharing is what got us, as a species, so rich that we could afford to lock up resources, whether it cost anyone anything for others to use them or not.
Owning can speed up the pace of innovation by several orders of magnitude, but it can also slow it down. You don't need DMCA, DRM, and other insane intellectual property rights to do that. The medieval guilds in Europe, for instance, also slowed down the pace of innovation by a couple of centuries, and they did it using trade secrecy rules that worked just as well (or badly, depending on your point of view).
But the important thing is that sharing and owning are NOT mutually exclusive. Buddha had it right: it's the balance that's important. Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to own the ones and the zeroes, but sharing everything absolutely equally doesn't work well outside of a monastery either. The balance point, for me, is where you have the most innovation that benefits the most people and allows compensation to flow to the creators, not everybody except the creators.
One thing that's always brought up about "sharing economies" is the tragedy of the commons. That's where resources held in common and owned by nobody get trashed because nobody takes care of them. Our current environmental problems fall into this category. But the thing to remember there is that sharing only becomes a tragedy when it's a free-for-all. In that case, sure, it's a rip-off for whoever is the biggest thug. We don't have to let that happen. If the commons is adequately regulated, it can be used by everyone AND retain all its value, like a well-run city park.
Moglen has articulated the value in the new / old way of sharing, and brought so many separate things into one vision, it's like looking into a prism and seeing glorious rainbows. Love it.
Strong second for geekcorps.org. They've done exactly what it sounds like you're wanting to do, and they've done it in parts of Africa. (Mali, I believe, for one. A very different environment and culture than Togo, but still.) Ethan Zuckerman is a card-carrying geek, was involved with geekcorps, and has dozens of really useful Africa- and IT-related links. On a tangential note, as someone who's lived in monsoonal, rainforest places, I'll bet the biggest problem won't be raising money, finding local talent, or anything like that. It'll be keeping the bugs away from those nice new bug-houses you've altruistically provided, and stopping the mold and algae from changing the color scheme on your machines.
That sounds like a good system. For what it's worth, my take on the whole issue of payment to artists for their work is that there's not enough of it. In my ideal world, downloads--or for that matter, via OCR, photocopies--would be tracked in some highly intelligent, incorruptible fashion, and then artists would be paid royalties based on that census. Like any census, it wouldn't track every single instance, but it would be a much better approximation than the nonsense we have now.
The money for distribution to artists would come from a fee attached to the sale of any hardware that makes it possible to download and store other people's work, including paper, I guess. The idea is that the payment would be so widely distributed, we'd hardly notice it. I'm not suggesting an extra dollar be tacked on to the price of every ream, which is probably what paper manufacturers would try to make out of it.
(I gather something like this is already being implemented in parts of Europe, except artists have to sign up and pay for it, which means the ones who need it most miss out.)
The neat thing about the system is that then, when people like somebody's work, everybody benefits. People can download freely and the artists gets all the royalties coming to him/her. Oh, wait, the publishers and RIAA and MPAA would be kind of left out in the cold. They'd have to actually earn their money by their skill at packaging the product. I wonder if that's why they haven't been calling me about what a brilliant idea this is?
Indeed. Why use RIAA's self-serving terminology? Consider the analogous situation in print media. You take a book out of the library. You read it. You return it. Royalties paid? None. Have you stolen something? Not in the wildest dreams of anyone except RIAA and their ilk. If downloads are for personal, temporary use, I don't see how they differ from checking a book out of the library. And I'd be willing to bet money that most songs have a pretty short shelf life on most people's ipods.
My specialty is evolutionary biology and molecular systematics. I have been amazed at the breadth of coverage in Wikipedia on obscure and general topics in my field. There isn't necessarily enough detail there to do more than get oriented, but what there is, is generally good enough to use it as a first-order reference. Sure, there are minor mistakes. When I looked up Ilex vomitoria, they didn't have the authority on the name exactly right. (So I fixed it.)
Don't forget that Wikipedia has been around for all of a few years, and already has entries for every topic under the sun, and most of those entries are informative. That is an absolutely mindboggling achievement. Nothing like it has ever been accomplished in encyclopedic work before. Sure, there are problems, especially in the growing problem of opinionated vandalism. But the good aspects of Wikipedia are an unleashing of human knowledge and energy on the order of the voyages of exploration or the invention of computers. We'll be the biggest fools in human history if we can't figure out how to foster that while suppressing the jerks.
That said, the weakest link in Wikipedia are entries on popular topics rather than specialist ones. The study may have been skewed, because by asking experts, the articles involved are likely to be more specialized. As an example of a popular morass, the entry on Jerusalem suffers from more heat than light. People can't even agree on the name, and there's no right answer. We're going to have to come up with methods of dealing with information that really is just a matter of opinion. Is the solution to have a perfectly objective panel of experts write the entry? That gets into deep philosophical issues of what, exactly, is objectivity. Is the solution to post entries from the three or four major branches of opinion and leave it up to the reader to get through them all? Both? Neither? Something else entirely?
As Anonymous Coward also says, all that variation in metabolisms may still go back to a single development of life on this planet. On the other hand, it may not. We don't know for a fact that some of the weirder metabolisms didn't originate independently. The DNA, cell membranes, etc., all share the same principles, but at this point we don't know if that's because they're related or whether it's because that's the only way life does evolve. We could be looking at three, four?, ten?, parallel and independent originations and never know it. If we find bacteria on other planets or moons, and they're equally similar, then we'll have a new issue: some people will say life was transported there from Earth and that accounts for the similarity. And it might. Unless off-Earth life is obviously different, we're going to have to figure out how to distinguish convergence from real relatedness. As I said, I, for one, wish they'd hurry up and give us that problem to solve!
Hard radiation to generate mutations can't be a limiting factor because it's not in short supply in the universe. Without Earth's magnetic blanket, we'd be getting so much, even without major galactic star formation, the trick would be staying alive rather than generating enough mutations to do anything interesting.
The probability of life arising is much more difficult to pin down. Right now, we have one data point: Earth. Kind of hard to extrapolate any sort of line from that. Invented probabilities, like those in the Drake equation or Sagan's discussions, may be plausible, but since they're not factual we can argue about them forever.
What we do know is that life arose on Earth very quickly after the initial heavy bombardment slowed down. Very quickly means a few hundred million years. That's fast enough to mean that life probably arose several times, each time getting wiped out in a new wave of bombardments, until the meteor strikes finally weren't big enough to liquefy the whole surface of Earth. Or until life was widespread enough that devastating half the Earth wasn't enough to kill it. Here again, we have no proof that repeated chemical evolution of life happened, but the speed with which it did happen, at least once, implies that it's not a particularly iffy process.
The lack of a second data point is why solar system exploration is so hugely important. Mars had a few hundred million years with liquid water. If there is evidence of fossil bacteria from that time, it'll mean there is life everywhere in the universe where there is water. I can't imagine anything more significant than that. And if exploration of, say, Europa, also turns up bacteria, well, then it'll be all over except the shouting. NASA, ESA, Japan, _everybody_ needs to hurry up and send those critical missions out there so that we have our answers, and this forum can sink it's teeth into them!
Go, Mark! All Microsoft is trying to do is split the community in ways that give it control. If they were actually trying to make it easier to use Linux, why not enter into a partnership with, say, Redhat? Making sure Microsoft doesn't succeed is going to require some unified vision, and if Mark can help point toward it, I say good for him!
The solution, as always!, seems to be to give people choices. People need different things at different times, so make it all available. (Except I didn't see telecommuting as one of the choices, but no doubt that'll come.) Sounds good to me. Now I just have to get my head around the fact that Microsoft actually had a good idea. ?? Nah. They must have stolen it from somebody, right?
Pluto hasn't changed one atom based on which category we put it in. How things are classified is a human activity, and matters only to us. Which also means that we can do whatever we damn well please here. We're just calling it something. We can decide what to call it. All definitions are an agreement to use a word for a given meaning, whether the word is Pluto or pancake.
Biologists have been having this type of problem a lot longer than astronomers: the problem where you can't figure out which species something belongs in, for instance. And we biologists have the solution. (But will the astronomers listen? No-o-o. Of course not.;-}) When new information comes in suggesting that something belongs in a new category, that something is renamed, EXCEPT when doing so would disrupt a name in wide usage. Then it can be conserved. In that case, only the scientists have to worry about where it "really" belongs, and everybody else can go about their business without a vocabulary list.
Conservation of names is an especially good idea in cases like Pluto, where the scientists themselves haven't entirely agreed yet. They could simply agree to conserve Pluto's definition as a planet, and then continue arguing about the exact definition, which, as the article says, never actually has to end in agreement. And that's because we're talking about a category here, a human construct, whose boundaries exist only in our heads. (I posted a bit more on this under What Pluto really is)
Even I know this stuff was around before 2005, and I'm so far away from it that, well, I have heard of voip. Interesting to read the unanimous bogglement of folks who know. Clearly, the USPTO is as stuffed as FEMA, Homeland "Security,"and the innards of voting machines. So now what? Anyone out there who knows enough about how USPTO should work to have ideas on how to fix this? I mean, sure, hire better people, but what's the most elegant, effective,/. way of doing that?
Exactly. That was my first thought. Windows look-and-feel itself was taken wholesale from the Mac which took it from Xerox Parc. And so on and on and on. What a jerk. (Ballmer, that is.)
GBrown is mainly whingeing, but there really is a Big Issue here. News is not entertainment, but nobody pays attention to it if it isn't, so it's turned into entertainment and stops being news.
Think about the differences. We don't see sober reports of the facts on the news very often. They're no fun. The problem is, news isn't (necessarily) fun. Sometimes nobody's a bad guy. Sometimes somebody did something right. There's no story in that either. So the more a news outlet depends on numbers of viewers, the bigger the entertainment aspect gets, and entertainment requires a villain(s), good guys (usually the viewers...), a story arc, and a satisfying ending. News requires the facts, ma'am, just the facts. With maybe some analysis thrown in to make our lives easier. News can be interesting, but the minute someone starts trying to make entertainment out of it, the problems begin.
So the Big Issue that needs to be explored is: how do we reliably distinguish news from entertainment? How do we make sure news is news? If that were solved, then GBrown might still complain, but at least we'd know it was all whinge and no substance.
That's what I'm waiting for. Fine the crap out of that anti-competitive monopoly, and then use the money to to help open source projects. Maybe funding programming. Maybe helping municipalities or businesses to switch over. (I can dream, can't I?)
Yeah. That was my first thought, too. I'm in Southern California, and the frame with my house in it is over two years old. I kind of like that as far as my street is concerned (reminds me of what was there before a bunch of new construction), but it does make Google Earth a blunt tool for tracking clearcutting. Unless they update the Amazon much more often?
There is something repulsive about a company whose value derives from the free contributions of thousands of people turning that value into profit for a few people. There oughta be a law. There probably isn't. And if there is, it's probably on the wrong side.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what's missing. It's downright dishonest to present a report without citing sources and any financial connection. So long as that's out there, and the reader can make their own judgment, there isn't really a problem. Unless, of course, all reporting comes from the same source(s), but if they're cited, then at least that fact will be obvious.
That's also where EFF and the like are ahead of the corporate pack. Regardless of what you may think of their biases, they're up front about them, and up front about their sources. That's often a symptom of not being afraid if the truth comes out.
Hmm. I thought that program had been nixed. Looks like it never even hiccuped. I thought I remembered that sea lions had been used too. I guess the reason it bothers me so much that the military uses them for this is that I have a hard time believing the military is treating them like, say, seeing eye dogs. I figure the Navy thinks that if dolphins get blown up, it doesn't matter much. On the other hand, considering how much training must go into each animal, maybe the Navy cares more about them than some of the enlisted folks.
Trying to remote control sharks, judging by comments below. Still, given the simple nature of sharks' brains, I can see where that could be theoretically workable. As far as insects go, yes, there's some really bizarre stuff that goes on. "Alien" had nothing on some wasps. My favorite parasitism story is Wolbachia. Since the bacteria are passed to the next generation of insects through the eggs, the bacteria reprogram the host's reproductive system so that males either die, don't reproduce, or turn into functional females. Probably don't need to worry too much about the macho DoD playing around with that one.
Really. They were even training them to do various things. (Look for subs or something. I don't remember.) There was talk of training them to attach mines to enemy vessels. Then an outcry began--rightfully, as far as I'm concerned--that it was a Bad Thing to use such intelligent and simpatico animals for this. Now, I see, they've moved to sharks. No lobby supporting them, I'll bet, but the military also won't be able to train them to do much. Sharks are well below flounders in brain power.
It's a fairly old _idea_, but there have been all kinds of ideas. I follow the Mars news fairly closely, not super-closely, and this is the first time I've seen what amounts to proof of buried craters. That's why people are excited, I think. Not because nobody ever had the idea before.
Likewise with the layered deposits. Yes, those have been found before, but they were on a much smaller scale. These vast, flat, deposits really suggest ocean sedimentation over millions of years. (Suggest. Far from prove.) Coupled with the fact that the northern craters are buried under something, it's starting to look very probable that there was a long term ocean there. That means the current favorite theory of water on Mars--that it only existed for a few hundred million years--may need reworking.
And long(er) term water is significant because it makes life that much more likely. On Earth, there are bacteria everywhere with even the occasional molecule of water. But we've had liquid water for billions of years. If Mars only had it briefly, and we did not find life, we wouldn't know if life was rare in the universe, or if there just wasn't enough time on Mars. On the other hand, if Mars had long term water, and we did find life, we'll suddenly have actual data about how likely life is in the rest of the Universe. And in that case, it would be very likely. Maybe life is the rule, not the exception! That's what bacteria on Mars could tell us. Like the commenter said earlier: AWESOME.
Couldn't agree more. The reason word-of-mouth is such a powerful promotion is because it's assumed to be independent and uncompensated. Totally objective, in other words. Hiding the advertisement nature of it is exactly what truth in advertising laws are supposed to prevent. Just because it's a new medium doesn't make it less dishonest to lie.
Not that I'm actually a Buddhist, but I do seem to keep quoting them.... About ownership, I once heard the Dalai Lama quote a saying: "Those who have cows have care of cows." That's a lot more like your concept of ownership (and mine) than what I guess you could call the Fox News concept of it.
What I really meant with my imprecise language was that you can't do violence to people's sense of justice. Which is also a very imprecise way to put it, but what I mean is that basic feeling where if you've put a quart of ice cream in the freezer, it's _really_ annoying when your roommate eats it all. Communism let everyone eat everyone else's ice cream, so to speak. Nobody's going to stand for that over the long term.
On the other hand, if I'm reading Slashdot and 10,000 other people are reading it at the same time, nobody loses. That's the kind of thing that can't be owned, and people actually lose by it when somebody tries to lock it up. There can be the right to benefit from your work, certainly, but that's different from ownership.
Anyway, I should probably shut up because I'm not sure I'm making any more sense than before. I like your attitude. I wish everyone had it!
Been with Verizon for over four years, and they have never, not once, resolved a problem without me having to complain to my state's Attorney General's Dept. of Consumer Affairs. The AG writes, and then, magically, somebody actually deals with the problem. The quickest I got anything resolved with them was six months, and multiple phone calls, letters, and harangues. The slowest was a year, with even more multiple calls, letters, yada, yada, yada. I've had three billing problems in four years, and the last time, when it took a year, they owed me $300. To say these bastards suck is being too kind. Obviously, once my indentured phonitude is up, that's the last they'll see of me. After that, it's voip all the way.
I think we actually agree, even if we're using somewhat different words. Capitalism doesn't have to be a free-for-all, but very often in practice it's hard to distinguish from robbery with a fountain pen. "Exploiting a resource without much thought for how long it will last" is practically the definition of the tragedy of the commons. It takes regulation to prevent people from not caring or, worse, using a resource up as fast as possible to get the most benefit before somebody else gets some of it. (The environment, as a place to dump stuff, is a "resource" people don't care about in this context.)
I think the reason communism worked so poorly is not because of a problem with the principle of sharing itself, but because the communists tried to make people share stuff that they normally would not. Stuff like their houses, or the food in their kitchens. In some ways, it's the mirror image of the patent-the-alphabet problem we have now, where people are trying to own stuff that can't be owned.
Humans have spent millions of years sharing, and just a few thousand owning. Sharing is what got us, as a species, so rich that we could afford to lock up resources, whether it cost anyone anything for others to use them or not.
Owning can speed up the pace of innovation by several orders of magnitude, but it can also slow it down. You don't need DMCA, DRM, and other insane intellectual property rights to do that. The medieval guilds in Europe, for instance, also slowed down the pace of innovation by a couple of centuries, and they did it using trade secrecy rules that worked just as well (or badly, depending on your point of view).
But the important thing is that sharing and owning are NOT mutually exclusive. Buddha had it right: it's the balance that's important. Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to own the ones and the zeroes, but sharing everything absolutely equally doesn't work well outside of a monastery either. The balance point, for me, is where you have the most innovation that benefits the most people and allows compensation to flow to the creators, not everybody except the creators.
One thing that's always brought up about "sharing economies" is the tragedy of the commons. That's where resources held in common and owned by nobody get trashed because nobody takes care of them. Our current environmental problems fall into this category. But the thing to remember there is that sharing only becomes a tragedy when it's a free-for-all. In that case, sure, it's a rip-off for whoever is the biggest thug. We don't have to let that happen. If the commons is adequately regulated, it can be used by everyone AND retain all its value, like a well-run city park.
Moglen has articulated the value in the new / old way of sharing, and brought so many separate things into one vision, it's like looking into a prism and seeing glorious rainbows. Love it.
Strong second for geekcorps.org. They've done exactly what it sounds like you're wanting to do, and they've done it in parts of Africa. (Mali, I believe, for one. A very different environment and culture than Togo, but still.) Ethan Zuckerman is a card-carrying geek, was involved with geekcorps, and has dozens of really useful Africa- and IT-related links. On a tangential note, as someone who's lived in monsoonal, rainforest places, I'll bet the biggest problem won't be raising money, finding local talent, or anything like that. It'll be keeping the bugs away from those nice new bug-houses you've altruistically provided, and stopping the mold and algae from changing the color scheme on your machines.
That sounds like a good system. For what it's worth, my take on the whole issue of payment to artists for their work is that there's not enough of it. In my ideal world, downloads--or for that matter, via OCR, photocopies--would be tracked in some highly intelligent, incorruptible fashion, and then artists would be paid royalties based on that census. Like any census, it wouldn't track every single instance, but it would be a much better approximation than the nonsense we have now.
The money for distribution to artists would come from a fee attached to the sale of any hardware that makes it possible to download and store other people's work, including paper, I guess. The idea is that the payment would be so widely distributed, we'd hardly notice it. I'm not suggesting an extra dollar be tacked on to the price of every ream, which is probably what paper manufacturers would try to make out of it.
(I gather something like this is already being implemented in parts of Europe, except artists have to sign up and pay for it, which means the ones who need it most miss out.)
The neat thing about the system is that then, when people like somebody's work, everybody benefits. People can download freely and the artists gets all the royalties coming to him/her. Oh, wait, the publishers and RIAA and MPAA would be kind of left out in the cold. They'd have to actually earn their money by their skill at packaging the product. I wonder if that's why they haven't been calling me about what a brilliant idea this is?
Indeed. Why use RIAA's self-serving terminology? Consider the analogous situation in print media. You take a book out of the library. You read it. You return it. Royalties paid? None. Have you stolen something? Not in the wildest dreams of anyone except RIAA and their ilk. If downloads are for personal, temporary use, I don't see how they differ from checking a book out of the library. And I'd be willing to bet money that most songs have a pretty short shelf life on most people's ipods.
My specialty is evolutionary biology and molecular systematics. I have been amazed at the breadth of coverage in Wikipedia on obscure and general topics in my field. There isn't necessarily enough detail there to do more than get oriented, but what there is, is generally good enough to use it as a first-order reference. Sure, there are minor mistakes. When I looked up Ilex vomitoria, they didn't have the authority on the name exactly right. (So I fixed it.)
Don't forget that Wikipedia has been around for all of a few years, and already has entries for every topic under the sun, and most of those entries are informative. That is an absolutely mindboggling achievement. Nothing like it has ever been accomplished in encyclopedic work before. Sure, there are problems, especially in the growing problem of opinionated vandalism. But the good aspects of Wikipedia are an unleashing of human knowledge and energy on the order of the voyages of exploration or the invention of computers. We'll be the biggest fools in human history if we can't figure out how to foster that while suppressing the jerks.
That said, the weakest link in Wikipedia are entries on popular topics rather than specialist ones. The study may have been skewed, because by asking experts, the articles involved are likely to be more specialized. As an example of a popular morass, the entry on Jerusalem suffers from more heat than light. People can't even agree on the name, and there's no right answer. We're going to have to come up with methods of dealing with information that really is just a matter of opinion. Is the solution to have a perfectly objective panel of experts write the entry? That gets into deep philosophical issues of what, exactly, is objectivity. Is the solution to post entries from the three or four major branches of opinion and leave it up to the reader to get through them all? Both? Neither? Something else entirely?
As Anonymous Coward also says, all that variation in metabolisms may still go back to a single development of life on this planet. On the other hand, it may not. We don't know for a fact that some of the weirder metabolisms didn't originate independently. The DNA, cell membranes, etc., all share the same principles, but at this point we don't know if that's because they're related or whether it's because that's the only way life does evolve. We could be looking at three, four?, ten?, parallel and independent originations and never know it. If we find bacteria on other planets or moons, and they're equally similar, then we'll have a new issue: some people will say life was transported there from Earth and that accounts for the similarity. And it might. Unless off-Earth life is obviously different, we're going to have to figure out how to distinguish convergence from real relatedness. As I said, I, for one, wish they'd hurry up and give us that problem to solve!
Hard radiation to generate mutations can't be a limiting factor because it's not in short supply in the universe. Without Earth's magnetic blanket, we'd be getting so much, even without major galactic star formation, the trick would be staying alive rather than generating enough mutations to do anything interesting.
The probability of life arising is much more difficult to pin down. Right now, we have one data point: Earth. Kind of hard to extrapolate any sort of line from that. Invented probabilities, like those in the Drake equation or Sagan's discussions, may be plausible, but since they're not factual we can argue about them forever.
What we do know is that life arose on Earth very quickly after the initial heavy bombardment slowed down. Very quickly means a few hundred million years. That's fast enough to mean that life probably arose several times, each time getting wiped out in a new wave of bombardments, until the meteor strikes finally weren't big enough to liquefy the whole surface of Earth. Or until life was widespread enough that devastating half the Earth wasn't enough to kill it. Here again, we have no proof that repeated chemical evolution of life happened, but the speed with which it did happen, at least once, implies that it's not a particularly iffy process.
The lack of a second data point is why solar system exploration is so hugely important. Mars had a few hundred million years with liquid water. If there is evidence of fossil bacteria from that time, it'll mean there is life everywhere in the universe where there is water. I can't imagine anything more significant than that. And if exploration of, say, Europa, also turns up bacteria, well, then it'll be all over except the shouting. NASA, ESA, Japan, _everybody_ needs to hurry up and send those critical missions out there so that we have our answers, and this forum can sink it's teeth into them!
Go, Mark! All Microsoft is trying to do is split the community in ways that give it control. If they were actually trying to make it easier to use Linux, why not enter into a partnership with, say, Redhat? Making sure Microsoft doesn't succeed is going to require some unified vision, and if Mark can help point toward it, I say good for him!
The solution, as always!, seems to be to give people choices. People need different things at different times, so make it all available. (Except I didn't see telecommuting as one of the choices, but no doubt that'll come.) Sounds good to me. Now I just have to get my head around the fact that Microsoft actually had a good idea. ?? Nah. They must have stolen it from somebody, right?
Pluto hasn't changed one atom based on which category we put it in. How things are classified is a human activity, and matters only to us. Which also means that we can do whatever we damn well please here. We're just calling it something. We can decide what to call it. All definitions are an agreement to use a word for a given meaning, whether the word is Pluto or pancake.
Biologists have been having this type of problem a lot longer than astronomers: the problem where you can't figure out which species something belongs in, for instance. And we biologists have the solution. (But will the astronomers listen? No-o-o. Of course not. ;-}) When new information comes in suggesting that something belongs in a new category, that something is renamed, EXCEPT when doing so would disrupt a name in wide usage. Then it can be conserved. In that case, only the scientists have to worry about where it "really" belongs, and everybody else can go about their business without a vocabulary list.
Conservation of names is an especially good idea in cases like Pluto, where the scientists themselves haven't entirely agreed yet. They could simply agree to conserve Pluto's definition as a planet, and then continue arguing about the exact definition, which, as the article says, never actually has to end in agreement. And that's because we're talking about a category here, a human construct, whose boundaries exist only in our heads. (I posted a bit more on this under What Pluto really is)
Even I know this stuff was around before 2005, and I'm so far away from it that, well, I have heard of voip. Interesting to read the unanimous bogglement of folks who know. Clearly, the USPTO is as stuffed as FEMA, Homeland "Security,"and the innards of voting machines. So now what? Anyone out there who knows enough about how USPTO should work to have ideas on how to fix this? I mean, sure, hire better people, but what's the most elegant, effective, /. way of doing that?
Exactly. That was my first thought. Windows look-and-feel itself was taken wholesale from the Mac which took it from Xerox Parc. And so on and on and on. What a jerk. (Ballmer, that is.)
GBrown is mainly whingeing, but there really is a Big Issue here. News is not entertainment, but nobody pays attention to it if it isn't, so it's turned into entertainment and stops being news.
Think about the differences. We don't see sober reports of the facts on the news very often. They're no fun. The problem is, news isn't (necessarily) fun. Sometimes nobody's a bad guy. Sometimes somebody did something right. There's no story in that either. So the more a news outlet depends on numbers of viewers, the bigger the entertainment aspect gets, and entertainment requires a villain(s), good guys (usually the viewers...), a story arc, and a satisfying ending. News requires the facts, ma'am, just the facts. With maybe some analysis thrown in to make our lives easier. News can be interesting, but the minute someone starts trying to make entertainment out of it, the problems begin.
So the Big Issue that needs to be explored is: how do we reliably distinguish news from entertainment? How do we make sure news is news? If that were solved, then GBrown might still complain, but at least we'd know it was all whinge and no substance.
That's what I'm waiting for. Fine the crap out of that anti-competitive monopoly, and then use the money to to help open source projects. Maybe funding programming. Maybe helping municipalities or businesses to switch over. (I can dream, can't I?)
Yeah. That was my first thought, too. I'm in Southern California, and the frame with my house in it is over two years old. I kind of like that as far as my street is concerned (reminds me of what was there before a bunch of new construction), but it does make Google Earth a blunt tool for tracking clearcutting. Unless they update the Amazon much more often?
There is something repulsive about a company whose value derives from the free contributions of thousands of people turning that value into profit for a few people. There oughta be a law. There probably isn't. And if there is, it's probably on the wrong side.