Over the years there have been doomsday prophets, one after the other, but most have been wrong. I agree though that we are in for a rude shock if technology tightens enough so that we can't hack it and we can't share stuff anymore. As things stand currently, I think the movement against DRM is strong and healthy and I'm hopeful we'll manage to giver our grandkids a world that still cares and shares, hopefuly more than it does now.
Be prepared to fight the music mafia, worse than you have before. After all, you are presenting a very nasty precedent for them, that copyright on music actually expires and that people can and do make use of it without even asking them first.
I don't know about that. We're talking about sheet music and stuff that's been around for a LONG time, so it's not really different from what Project Gutenberg is doing - clearly public domain stuff.
But yes, it's outrageous what people think they can milk money out of. If it were possible, the recording industry would sue you for breathing.
This also has some scary big-brother implications....
Just on that point, think back to the 70's and early 80's before the public availability of condenser microphones and tiny FM (and AM) transmitters. Big Brother was as active as ever, spying as much as he could.
Big Brother will be using whatever technology is available (read: whatever is imaginable) to track and follow. If you can imagine someone tracking someone with a device that is always on (or can be switched on remotely), then there are no 'implications' but 'realities' to deal with here.
However, I RTFA, such as it is, but come away only with the belief that this is a further effort to make the OS look much more obscure and cryptic than any OS actually is.
I don't do much OS level programming at all, but I would say this diagram is very useful. If I just, for example, want to get a sketchy idea of how networking is arranged in the kernel and where to look for dependencies and so forth, then it's a good start.
It's not the best diagram I've ever seen but it's something that does make for a good page to have open during the planning stages of a project that integrates with the OS at multiple levels.
If anyone really learns much about the Linux OS from this thing I would be amazed.
If you click on an area it quickly takes you to relevant stuff to read. I think, spending a few hours with this, one could learn quite a lot about the system and get an idea from which end to tackle a problem. But of course it's no substitute for a book.
Animals have rights by virtue of their consciousness and ability to suffer.
Unfortunately that's true. I say unfortunately because both consciousness and ability to suffer are not easy to demonstrate.
There is no evidence that embryos have either of these traits.
That's also true. But actually I don't think we defined 'human rights' on this basis and so it's not really a good enough reason alone to allow deliberate destruction of embryos.
It is very hard to draw a line. This is my point, and whatever line is drawn will get moved. For all their annoyances, the old versions of current big religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) with their simplistic moral codes had it all worked out. Things were just simply wrong and it didn't matter how you dressed them up to look pretty, they were still wrong.
If we are going to go forward with these new areas of therapy and medical intervention, then we have to be big enough to stop being all nice about it and be open about our intentions. Let the public see us for what we are. Let there be no restrictions on this practice and let's stop pandering to moralistic types on the sidelines who don't want it in the first place and so don't have a place in telling us how to regulate it, since we've already gone down the road.
Not true... animals have some "rights" conferred to them...
These aren't animals. These are humans. I'm arguing that is is flawed (or at best hypocritical) reasoning to make 'absolute' lines in the sand about these things when we are busily erasing old lines. Ethics/morality is a broken concept if you do this.
Down syndrome is questionable in this category
Nature already selects for us without us having to make ethical choices. Nobody is forced to help anyone beyond the basic care that is afforded to any healthy person. Therefore if someone can survive to term, then at birth, with basic care, then that is where, until now, we have been drawing the line. How can we determine this at embryonic stage? Having medical expertise myself, I definitely would not be prepared to claim I have that kind of foresight.
Risk of homosexuality
Already by calling it 'risk' you are making a judgement. And it's all so arbitrary, really. Homosexuality was a serious psychiatric disorder once, now it is celebrated. And just because a disease is terrible now, it may not be in the future when we have treatments for it.
However, there's a fundamental error in making the sweeping statement "no line at all"
Not really, because, if you call a 'line' an absolute limit, there are no such limits when you are making attribute selections and actively ending lives on that basis. We can take it anywhere we want and start erasing people of any age with any trait we don't like (white coats on or black hoods on, you choose). Sure, emotionally it 'feels wrong' to say that, but logically there are no impediments. My argument is that society is changeable enough that emotional constraints are usually temporary. Doctors are no better than the next person and just because we can do things cleanly and tidily doesn't make it OK.
If you are going to do something with an embryo, you have crossed the line already and beyond that there aren't really any ethical questions, since it is already decided that the embryo has no intrinsic rights that need protecting. Any further regulation on the matter is just pandering to wine-and-cheese liberals.
I say we cap the legal fees at 50% of the final settlement - IE for each $5 'settlement' received they get $5. How did you manage to weave Microsoft's Internet Explorer into this mess?
Well, at least they're not hooked on heroin or crack..something that has physical addiction and physical withdrawals... Well in the context of this discussion we could list neglect of children as something that could come to the attention of police.
At the back pages of our medical examination textbook, it says something like "never insult the vagina with the same finger with which you inspected the anus" and a footnote "better still, use gloves" and another footnote "even better still, change gloves!".
I always get a queasy feeling when I see this basic concept breached in porn - that chick could well be spending half of her pay on antibiotics and a hospital bed
Some things are more prone to cause addiciton than others. Video games are not just simple escapism, they are specifically designed to hit our reward centers in consistent ways.
These things are well on the way to being recognized as psychological/psychiatric disorders. They do cause significant social problems and that is, essentially, all that's needed to diagnose a behavioural disorder.
WoW is not bad, computers aren't bad, etc. But, as much as liberal ideals should be the norm, regulation has to be a part of game design and if gaming companies don't act responsibly (eg: somehow curtailing excessive use by individuals) then we'll see governments stepping in and ruining it for everyone.
That's funny, when I talked to our rep a few days ago and asked about having it installed on a laptop I was ordering, she informed me that it was an extra $50 "labor fee" to get XP preinstalled. I was referring to a promotion with some kind of coupon code etc. It's in the recycling trash now but, yeah, they offered the 'downgrade' for 'free'.
I suspect that "you can't go wrong going with Microsoft" is as true now as it ever was. People complaining about Vista are losers, our IT managers know everything and can handle it all.
Microsoft does some things well such as simple internal networks, and for many large-site applications they have the simplest and (probably) most cost-effective solution at the moment, especially with Windows XP. However it all depends on what a company is doing on its computers.
The network at my workplace (several thousand employees) is all Windows 2000 / XP. But it's a very rudimentary system. Communication between computers is only possible by email or through a big fat shared file system. The admins are too scared (or lazy) to open up anything else.
All people do on these computers is access web-based resources. For this, Windows is a STUPID choice because every few months the computers have to be re-done to cope with all the garbage the end-users are putting on their terminals.
They are going to Visterize everything too, with multi-million dollar hardware upgrades that are needed. But after all that, people are going to do what they always did - run Firefox-portable from their thumb-drive and ignore everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
It's particularly good that they're embracing Windows -- it worked for Firefox.
Yep, pretty soon I'll be installing Firefox to replace my Windows installation.
I truly hope I am wrong,I really do.
Over the years there have been doomsday prophets, one after the other, but most have been wrong. I agree though that we are in for a rude shock if technology tightens enough so that we can't hack it and we can't share stuff anymore. As things stand currently, I think the movement against DRM is strong and healthy and I'm hopeful we'll manage to giver our grandkids a world that still cares and shares, hopefuly more than it does now.
What creeps me out is that the topic of "Every breath you take" is simply and plainly stalking.
Now go and listen closely to 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' ;-)
Yeah, someone should go call the Police.
Be prepared to fight the music mafia, worse than you have before. After all, you are presenting a very nasty precedent for them, that copyright on music actually expires and that people can and do make use of it without even asking them first.
I don't know about that. We're talking about sheet music and stuff that's been around for a LONG time, so it's not really different from what Project Gutenberg is doing - clearly public domain stuff.
But yes, it's outrageous what people think they can milk money out of. If it were possible, the recording industry would sue you for breathing.
This also has some scary big-brother implications ....
Just on that point, think back to the 70's and early 80's before the public availability of condenser microphones and tiny FM (and AM) transmitters. Big Brother was as active as ever, spying as much as he could.
Big Brother will be using whatever technology is available (read: whatever is imaginable) to track and follow. If you can imagine someone tracking someone with a device that is always on (or can be switched on remotely), then there are no 'implications' but 'realities' to deal with here.
Elephants have been rather underrepresented in space recently.
Well the mass of male Americans has increased somewhat since the last moon mission. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
Nazis to become Pro-Jew post Hitler.
That's not as stupid as it sounds.
Microsoft will definitely open up.
Or close down. I know which I'd prefer.
However, I RTFA, such as it is, but come away only with the belief that this is a further effort to make the OS look much more obscure and cryptic than any OS actually is.
I don't do much OS level programming at all, but I would say this diagram is very useful. If I just, for example, want to get a sketchy idea of how networking is arranged in the kernel and where to look for dependencies and so forth, then it's a good start.
It's not the best diagram I've ever seen but it's something that does make for a good page to have open during the planning stages of a project that integrates with the OS at multiple levels.
If anyone really learns much about the Linux OS from this thing I would be amazed.
If you click on an area it quickly takes you to relevant stuff to read. I think, spending a few hours with this, one could learn quite a lot about the system and get an idea from which end to tackle a problem. But of course it's no substitute for a book.
The conservatives have 3 sections
Liberals have wine and cheese types (middle position) who want whatever feels good as long as nobody criticizes them.
Animals have rights by virtue of their consciousness and ability to suffer.
Unfortunately that's true. I say unfortunately because both consciousness and ability to suffer are not easy to demonstrate.
There is no evidence that embryos have either of these traits.
That's also true. But actually I don't think we defined 'human rights' on this basis and so it's not really a good enough reason alone to allow deliberate destruction of embryos.
It is very hard to draw a line. This is my point, and whatever line is drawn will get moved. For all their annoyances, the old versions of current big religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) with their simplistic moral codes had it all worked out. Things were just simply wrong and it didn't matter how you dressed them up to look pretty, they were still wrong.
If we are going to go forward with these new areas of therapy and medical intervention, then we have to be big enough to stop being all nice about it and be open about our intentions. Let the public see us for what we are. Let there be no restrictions on this practice and let's stop pandering to moralistic types on the sidelines who don't want it in the first place and so don't have a place in telling us how to regulate it, since we've already gone down the road.
Conservative christians want to ban this.
Sure, I never said they wanted to regulate it. There's a big difference.
Not true... animals have some "rights" conferred to them...
These aren't animals. These are humans. I'm arguing that is is flawed (or at best hypocritical) reasoning to make 'absolute' lines in the sand about these things when we are busily erasing old lines. Ethics/morality is a broken concept if you do this.
Down syndrome is questionable in this category
Nature already selects for us without us having to make ethical choices. Nobody is forced to help anyone beyond the basic care that is afforded to any healthy person. Therefore if someone can survive to term, then at birth, with basic care, then that is where, until now, we have been drawing the line. How can we determine this at embryonic stage? Having medical expertise myself, I definitely would not be prepared to claim I have that kind of foresight.
Risk of homosexuality
Already by calling it 'risk' you are making a judgement. And it's all so arbitrary, really. Homosexuality was a serious psychiatric disorder once, now it is celebrated. And just because a disease is terrible now, it may not be in the future when we have treatments for it.
However, there's a fundamental error in making the sweeping statement "no line at all"
Not really, because, if you call a 'line' an absolute limit, there are no such limits when you are making attribute selections and actively ending lives on that basis. We can take it anywhere we want and start erasing people of any age with any trait we don't like (white coats on or black hoods on, you choose). Sure, emotionally it 'feels wrong' to say that, but logically there are no impediments. My argument is that society is changeable enough that emotional constraints are usually temporary. Doctors are no better than the next person and just because we can do things cleanly and tidily doesn't make it OK.
S Cuio nin mellon!
If you are going to do something with an embryo, you have crossed the line already and beyond that there aren't really any ethical questions, since it is already decided that the embryo has no intrinsic rights that need protecting. Any further regulation on the matter is just pandering to wine-and-cheese liberals.
I'm surprised they don't have roving death squads.
I think those are reserved for treacherous staff of said organizations.
At the back pages of our medical examination textbook, it says something like "never insult the vagina with the same finger with which you inspected the anus" and a footnote "better still, use gloves" and another footnote "even better still, change gloves!".
I always get a queasy feeling when I see this basic concept breached in porn - that chick could well be spending half of her pay on antibiotics and a hospital bed
These things are well on the way to being recognized as psychological/psychiatric disorders. They do cause significant social problems and that is, essentially, all that's needed to diagnose a behavioural disorder.
WoW is not bad, computers aren't bad, etc. But, as much as liberal ideals should be the norm, regulation has to be a part of game design and if gaming companies don't act responsibly (eg: somehow curtailing excessive use by individuals) then we'll see governments stepping in and ruining it for everyone.
Microsoft does some things well such as simple internal networks, and for many large-site applications they have the simplest and (probably) most cost-effective solution at the moment, especially with Windows XP. However it all depends on what a company is doing on its computers.
The network at my workplace (several thousand employees) is all Windows 2000 / XP. But it's a very rudimentary system. Communication between computers is only possible by email or through a big fat shared file system. The admins are too scared (or lazy) to open up anything else.
All people do on these computers is access web-based resources. For this, Windows is a STUPID choice because every few months the computers have to be re-done to cope with all the garbage the end-users are putting on their terminals.
They are going to Visterize everything too, with multi-million dollar hardware upgrades that are needed. But after all that, people are going to do what they always did - run Firefox-portable from their thumb-drive and ignore everything else.