Wow, do you mean with ash I could use a Pentium III 780 instead of 866? Let's face it, given Moore's law, any speed improvement less than n vs. n^2 is more or less irrelevant.
[...]lately, every developer seems to be saying this, and it's really starting to add up.
Well, here I was considering complaining about my earlier post (this one's parent) being modded down "Offtopic" twice, because I don't know whether/. archives 0-rated posts, and I notice the post to which it responded, which used to be +5, has gotten down to a more reasonable level (+2), thanks in part to a couple of "Flamebait" moderations.
While I still think this side issue (of the appropriateness of calling cautions against government interference in the spam issue "anti-government hate-mongering") isn't entirely "Offtopic", I guess, all told, my post being only a couple of points lower than the parent post isn't an example of moderation run amok.
(After all, I did focus on just one phrase in an otherwise reasonable post. Had to get off my chest my annoyance at how widely the phrase "anti-government" is used to describe prescriptions that would likely increase government effectiveness at doing its actual job, while I was at it, but it's my own fault for picking a less-than-squarely-on-topic opportunity to rattle that gilded cage.)
But the real question is: if the government allowed a free market to flourish in air travel vis-a-vis security issues (personal and airline, but not, e.g., turning planes into missiles), would the general populace choose safety and security, e.g. via demonstrated record, over low price? My guess is, they'd tend to choose low price, since that appears to be exactly what they've done for the past 20 years or so.
The notion that much in the airline industry is driven by buyer preferences operating in a free market is silly: there are far too few sellers, the choices are far too limited, and the information a buyer has is far too limited. Buyers simply have no way of ascertaining that they get what they pay for when it comes to security (or even something as simple as legroom or service). If a buyer can't have some reasonable assurances that he gets something for the premium he pays, he might as well buy the cheapest ticket. That's the reason why you see a race to the bottom when it comes to service or security standards.
So, you're saying that buyers preferences can't influence the industry much, so buyers focus only on price, so the industry gets too widely and completely influenced to set low prices??? Hmm. That seems like widespread influence by the common man to me, especially when I ignore your attempt to narrow the issue as if air travel was the only option -- as if an airline had only other airlines with which to compete, and not trains, buses, automobiles, the Internet, Nintendo, and television as well.
For myself, I have had a "legroom issue" for a long time. I've actually chosen flights and flight conditions, as well as to not fly at all, based on what was feasible in terms of promises for legroom. And, hey, guess what, American Airlines, about a year ago, started promising more legroom in coach...and United (I think it is) now allows reserving seats in exit rows ahead of time, allowing me to be sure I'll have legroom!
But I guess that's just proof to you of my power, as one of "the rich and powerful", to influence industry.
My point here is that just because the rich and powerful in the West (and the USA in particular) happen to be for a thing does not mean the thing is bad in general, [...] So, argument by invoking the phrase "the rich and powerful" does not work, at least not for me[...]
I didn't make such an argument. It's just an observation that the people who drive corporate policy are wealthy individuals and people in position of power. If you let your emotional reactions to such phrases get in the way of an economic argument, well, what can one do?
Yes, people in positions of power -- like the shareholders, which constitute, on the whole, the majority of Americans. I mean, sure, one doesn't normally appoint to the Board of Directors of a company like American Airlines a group of people with little or no experience in business -- which excludes many non-rich people, but many wealthy, powerful ones as well.
But while those individuals may directly set the agenda for that company, they do so based on their perception of the agendas each and every potential consumer and partner has for that same company. Ultimately, you are the boss of American Airlines, in that you can decide, for yourself, whether to fly it based on whether you believe they provide sufficient safety, security, comfort, timeliness, etc. for the price they charge. Ditto for each other airline, every other mode of travel. You have plenty of choices, and there are hundreds of millions of people just like you making the same choices.
However "rich and powerful" CEO John Q. Esquire is, if he can't figure out how to best meet your collective demands in the competitive market, he won't be CEO for long.
Why you go off on a tangent about "emotional reactions" I don't understand, but I guess you ran out of arguments.
If you hold stock in a company through a mutual fund or a pension plan, you may be a "stockholder" in some sense, but there are few if any choices you can exercise or influence you can have on the companies whose stock you supposedly "hold". Most such stockholders don't usually even have the choice of divesting themselves of any particular stock easily. The people who set the agenda are the tiny fraction of wealthy, individual stockholders with sufficiently large holdings to be heard, portfolio managers, and the government who occasionally chimes in.
Yet, for the most part, corporations tend, on the whole, to have "agendas" set for them that reflect the desires of the public at large to be able to easily buy, at affordable prices, food, shelter, services, and so on.
Personally, I find your deemphasis of the importance of the common man's thoughtful consideration of how and when to invest funds in the market somewhat condescending, but, mostly, I find it mathematically unsupportable: it may be that someone making less than $100K is, as an individual, able to influence a given corporation only 1/100th as much as someone worth $10M, but, seeing as there's probably more than a hundred times as many people fitting the former description than the latter, I don't see how the latter end up completely in control.
And when I look at the fact that there are far more McDonald's restaurants around than Four Seasons; far more government programs that take money directly from the wealthy and give it directly to the poor than vice versa; and far more Targets and Wal-Marts than Neiman-Marcuses (or whereever us rich and powerful folk shop), it becomes even more difficult to understand just how the rich and powerful manage to control so much in our country, knowing their tastes and aspirations as I presumably do (being one of them, y'see).
So, I suggest you take your own advice and restrict yourself to "economic arguments", rather than presuming to speak either for us rich and powerful folk or to our ability to set the agenda for corporate America.
As Barry Goldwater said, "Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue... extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
Thanks. I think you're helping me make my point (and supporting the original poster).
Still, it's hard to tell, since I think it was I who introduced the word "extremism" in this thread, and I used it to describe someone calling what I considered to be a defense of liberty "anti-government hate-mongering".
So, if you meant to agree that our defense of liberty, in the sense of warning against excessive regulation by government, is wise, great.
If you were trying to rebut my use of the word "extremism", your use of the Goldwater quote was off the mark, since it justifies a specific form of extremism, but certainly not the form I was identifying.
I.e. Goldwater emphatically did not say "Extremism in defense of excessive government regulation is no vice", at least not in that quote!
Let me get this straight: you're saying the rich and powerful prefer spending $200 instead of $450 for a round-trip flight to Florida,
No, they are concerned with the value of their stock portfolio. Companies and stockholders believe, rightly or wrongly, that their profits and stocks go down when labor costs rise.
Okay, hmm, so you believe some 50% or more of the American public -- the percentage of stockholders -- constitute "the rich and powerful"?
And that the ordinary citizen prefers "security done right" if it means a much greater cost of living?
If the airline industry becomes more labor intensive, it creates more jobs even if air travel becomes somewhat less affordable. I think on the whole, that may be a tradeoff many people prefer. After all, even cheap airline tickets don't do you any good if you don't have a job. (The point at which price increases through additional labor costs result in a net loss of jobs depends on elasticity of demand for the particular product.)
This cut-throat race to cut costs on labor has led to poor service and poor security in many areas, as well as eliminated many good jobs. I would
like to see that trend reversed, even if it means somewhat more expensive airline tickets and other services.
Unemployed people fly all the time, and certainly prefer lower rates -- in fact, I suspect deregulation and competition has done more to enable poor people to visit family members frequently than to render them unemployed and/or poor in the first place.
All in all, though, I think you're saying that airlines, airports, and the industry as a whole should do security "right" rather than however it's convenient, with which I agree 100%, even though I guess I'm a member of "the rich and powerful" myself.;-)
But the real question is: if the government allowed a free market to flourish in air travel vis-a-vis security issues (personal and airline, but not, e.g., turning planes into missiles), would the general populace choose safety and security, e.g. via demonstrated record, over low price?
My guess is, they'd tend to choose low price, since that appears to be exactly what they've done for the past 20 years or so. Some airlines have better safety records than others, just as some car manufacturers do. Some of us prefer paying extra for a better-designed car and/or a better-run business "experience"; most people make their choices at different price points.
So, an even more interesting question is: should Americans who refuse to fly at prices inflated by security practices they personally feel are unnecessary be forced to choose other, less-safe, modes of travel, such as automobile, by government/industry fiat, or should they have the freedom to choose another airline, one that offers low rates by not pretending to offer high personal/airline security (maybe they'd allow passengers to keep their guns, for example)?
I don't believe this is even close to a rich-vs.-poor, politically-powerful-vs.-weak issue, considering its much more fundamental connection to the security-vs.-freedom and security-vs.-opportunity (generalized form of price or cost) issues.
Or, viewed from another angle, the reason you might assume the rich and powerful don't want so much regulation might be because, in this country, the rich and powerful get that way, generally, by best meeting the needs of the people of this country, who are, generally, free to choose between security and low price, quality and quantity, etc. on an individual, per-transaction basis.
Whereas, in nations with comparatively little individual freedom in these areas, you'd probably find their rich and powerful prefer lots of regulation, little choice among individuals, artificially high prices, excess security ("best" implemented by friends and relatives at high salaries), because that's how they got where they are.
My point here is that just because the rich and powerful in the West (and the USA in particular) happen to be for a thing does not mean the thing is bad in general, or even bad for the common man. That's a popular myth, one which is true on occasion at least, but which, as a general rule, does not stand up under close scrutiny.
So, argument by invoking the phrase "the rich and powerful" does not work, at least not for me -- in fact, it suggests to me that the person making that argument doesn't really believe in, or can't elucidate, other, more viable, arguments in favor of his position.
Hmm, so when someone expresses concern about civil liberties
Why should someone have the civil liberty[...]
I was referring to civil liberties in general, and that was the context in which they were being discussed.
I don't think any of us, involved in this somewhat-tangential thread, questions your civil rights to decide how resources you pay for (such as your Internet connection and email in-box) are to be used and to charge those who use it without permission (say, to send spam).
I'm mainly taking issue with the proposition that expressing concern about possible over-reaction by attempting to legislate away spam consitutes "anti-government hate-mongering".
In my opinion, such name-calling constitutes extremism, which is uncalled-for in this context.
No, but when they say the following, it is "anti-government hate mongering":
If they make more crap illegal then it'll be turned around and used against otherwise normal activity and pretty soon we'll have tons of law telling us what we can and can not do with the internet.
Read it. Any Internet-related law "will be...used against" non-spammers and "we'll have tons of law[sic] telling us what we can and can not do with the internet." The original poster stated it as fact.
Yet he's right. Nearly every law of substance has, at some time or another, been used against someone who wasn't the intended target of the legislation. He's warning against a slippery slope, and against human nature, not "hate-mongering", unless you find warnings against tyranny to be "hate-mongering" -- which I guess is the case here. (Consider such events as RICO laws being used to attack Operation Rescue, and the ADA being used by the Supreme Court as an excuse to rewrite the rules of golf, the right to free assembly notwithstanding. I can assure you, the authors of those pieces of legislation never intended such targeting.)
His premise was that the government, if it outlawed spam, would run amuck, destroying our civil liberties and passing an uncontrollable barrage of laws related to the Internet.
Perhaps you can get inside his head, but that's not quite what he wrote. What he wrote was correct -- that we should be aware of how laws designed to achieve a thing can have, in other words, unintended consequences, such as the possible (perhaps occasional) abuse of those laws, and that if we persist in not considering this possibility, continually asking government to protect us from even trivial impositions, the inevitable result will be a vast sea of incoherent, easily-abused legislation.
All of which has been proven true by the history of the USA, one of the most freedom-loving nations in history, yet also one that has a proven record of accumulating a vast sea of legislation and regulation, almost all of which was well-intentioned.
If you don't see that as an anti-government sentiment, you probably think of Timothy McVeigh as a patriot.
I'd say if you don't see what he and I worry about as being pro-individual-freedom as well as sensitive to all of recorded history and embodying common sense, and persist in seeing it as "anti-government hate-mongering", you probably think of Singapore as a paragon of governance.
Facts in linked article: federal and state governments (that is, several distinctly accountable organizations whose leaders are democratically elected), already charged with the responsibility of determining what sorts of government-created information sources (such as convenient collections of data on national infrastructure) should be made easy to access by the public, review said convience and access and recommend adjustments in response to the greatest loss of civilian life on US soil due to outside aggression in decades.
Reporter's blather in article, supported by quoting various hysterical people (or, probably, selecting only their most hysterical-sounding quotes): the usual assumptions that this is a mere first step in an inevitable long march designed to lock the American people into perpetual ignorance.
Relevant factoid: the Bush administration started by canning Clinton's last-minute imposition of higher restrictions on arsenic levels in water at the national level; claimed it needed time to carefully review the issue before codifying such an imposition; took tons of flak from Democrats and "greens" for "increasing levels of arsenic in our nation's water supply"; waited until after the 2001-09-11 attacks (about last week, I think) to quietly restore the Clinton restriction, with little fanfare or applause from Democrats/greens as far as I could see (especially compared with news coverage of the issue earlier this year).
Does this suggest the Bush administration is using the 09-11 attack to effect environmental protection under the cover of darkness? I think not; rather, I would hope that, after review, the decision turned out to be sound.
Implication: taking careful stock of sensitive information in public view and selectively having some copies of it, especially convenientally accessible copies, rendered inaccessible (e.g. take info off web, destroy a few CD-ROMs) until further review and/or security can be implemented seems not only wise, but consistent with other things this Administration has done, even if some of those things are out of step with the far-right, pro-business agenda with which its critics charge it.
/. posters: by and large, they assume this is just one of the last few steps until the 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 scenario, probably because they've neither read the books nor seen the movie(s?), and because they're unable to avoid generalizing to absurd levels from specific situations in response to the paranoia with which they've been indoctrinated.
Sad fact: this action is too-often compared with the DMCA, the SSSCA, copy protection, and so on, but the most important message we can send to our government today is, YES, you have a duty to carefully consider which public information should be conveniently accessible (and we'll help you make those sorts of decisions), but you should get the heck out of the business of allowing or sponsoring censorship solely to prop up failing business models being employed by corporate America.
The reason that's a "sad fact" is that the latter specific message is going to be swamped by the vastly-easier-to-flyswat general version that says "any form of censorship is evil", even when it amounts to merely making certain convenient collections of data less trivial to access remotely, even when it is clearly necessary, at least in the short term, for national-defense purposes.
Think about it folks: Jack Valenti is now being enlisted as a friend in defense of this nation against terrorists, to encourage the movie industry to support the war effort a la WWII, etc. As such, he (or, more precisely, his support of what amounts to legalized terror waged against those who share info on, e.g., how to view DVDs on "hacker OSes" like GNU/Linux) cannot simply be broad-brushed as "evil" when most Americans are more concerned about true terrorism than complete freedom to view DVDs.
So "we" have to be much more incisive in the way we simultaneously oppose arbitrary restrictions on the free flow of information among peers and yet support the choice of people to unite to form a common defense against external attack.
Knee-jerk ranting against practical national-defense measures, especially done just to make Bush and/or Republicans look bad, won't get the job done -- it'll actually make things worse (we'll lose more civil liberties, lose the war against global terrorism, or perhaps both).
(Note that if you really don't support any form of censorship, even defense, then go ahead and make that argument as you see fit. I happen to think most people who think all forms of censorship are equally evil haven't really thought the issues through carefully or at least considered which battles are worth fighting today. Even "extremists" like RMS and the FSF finally chose to "censor", or limit, access to their systems -- their information, if you will -- after some 20 years of being, practically, password-free. Even the purest possible spokesman against all forms of censorship might tend to lose his powers of persuasion after being taken out by a suitcase nuke! So please realize that freedoms and rights are abstract concepts, made practical by adhering to them as much as possible, and no further than that.)
Doing security right means that we will be paying more for electricity and air travel, and a consequent decrease in what people might count superficially as "standard of living", as you couldn't just dash down to Florida for a couple of hundred dollars. And the diminished profit margins and increased operating costs would be a painful blow to large investors. On the other hand, it would also result in an increase in low-skilled employment and it would preserve our rights to free access to information. To me, it's pretty clear which choice is preferable. It's also pretty clear to me what the rich and powerful prefer.
Let me get this straight: you're saying the rich and powerful prefer spending $200 instead of $450 for a round-trip flight to Florida, even if the lower price comes with a much better chance their penthouse apartments will be wiped out by a suitcase nuke?
And that the ordinary citizen prefers "security done right" if it means a much greater cost of living?
I'm sure you have a valid argument somewhere in there, but darned if I can find it.
The Bush administration saw the terrorist attack as a golden opportunity to push their radical, draconian policies that would otherwise never be allowed to see the light of day.
Yeah, that's the ticket. Bush, before 2001-09-11:
"If only there was some way to get detailed information on our nation's nuclear facilities out of public libraries, so I could push my far-right agenda and simultaneously enrich my friends in the oil industry...?"
After 09-11:
"Alright! That's just what I was waiting for! Let's declare war on the public library!"
Sheesh. Where do people like you get indoctrinated??
So, by this logic, the only terrorists left will be those who are patient, intelligent, and willing to take incredible risks. By circumventing the flow of information you won't make the terrorists go away, you know. Instead you'll make them smarter, more educated, make them plan more carefully, and make them REALLY commit to a task mentally and spiritually, becuase they will know the risks are great.
Let me get this straight, Mr. Logic Man.
You're saying you'd prefer that terrorists be able to do great damage to this country without having to be particularly smart, well-educated, capable of planning, or committed?
Or do you really believe setting the bar high is all that's needed to make terrorists better at doing their jobs??
Wow. Guess we need to get rid of all the locks on our doors -- we're just making all them criminals just too dang smart!
Okay, sarcasm aside, here's a clue: whether the particular proposal is a good idea, it is not illogical to adjust one's defensive posture so that the pool of attackers able to actually penetrate it becomes vastly smaller, consisting primarily of intelligent, committed people. In fact, that's probably about 95% of how successful defense works.
(Yes, there are cases where the opposite approach can work. In films and TV shows, an approach often shown is where a "hero" avoids direct attack by a very intelligent bad guy by generating, or finding, a less-bad mob of people and "hiding" in it, using the protection of the mob, usually an "amoral entity" in that context, from an enemy. It works because the hero prefers the risk of being in such a mob -- e.g. maybe there are a few pickpockets -- to the certainty of attack by the enemy. I don't see how that principle applies to this proposal: even RMS and the FSF finally gave up having no password on the Internet, and they weren't even risking death or dismemberment by leaving access entirely public. The approach works when the surrounding mob hampers enemy access more than it helps. I doubt the ability of any random web surfer to figure out just where to hit Hoover Dam with a missile would seriously hamper the ability of Saddam Hussein to actually do the deed, but, then, I'm not Mr. Logic Man.)
I hate spam, but I don't really think the government should be getting involved. They take enough liberties away from us. If they make more crap illegal then it'll be turned around and used against otherwise normal activity and pretty soon we'll have tons of law telling us what we can and can not do with the internet.
Drop the Republican anti-government hate mongering.
Hmm, so when someone expresses concern about civil liberties being slowly eliminated, that's "hate mongering"??
Wow, I'm sure your comrades from the old indoctrination camps are impressed.
(At least it's good to know that knee-jerk reaction to someone treading carefully around civil liberties identifies them as "Republican" for a change...though I suspect that has more to do with the choice of the phrase "hate mongering" than with the issue of "civil liberties".)
As far as the other adjective, "anti-government", is concerned, I find it interesting that when someone says government should be kept small, effective, and non-intrusive, they're "anti-government", but when someone tells a friend that they should lose excess fat, or should figure out what they most want to do in life and focus primarily on that, or should keep their noses out of other peoples' business, they're looking out for that friend's well-being rather than being "anti-friend". Hmm.
Something for those interested in/. moderation to think about: the post I'm replying to was scored at +5, Insightful, while the post he was trashing was at only +2, Informative (though that author's response to the "hate-mongering" post was at +3, Insightful).
Which does that suggest most about/. moderators:
They find posts expressing concern about over-regulation opening the door to eliminating civil liberties less worthy than those restating the legal status of various forms of spam and opining that e-mail spam should be illegal.
They love any post that starts off with a phrase like "Drop the Republican anti-government hate mongering", despite the fact that there's no evidence in the parent post of either Republicanism per se or hatred at all.
I'm guessing think it's about a 50/50 proposition....
only if you know that the number is prime. Otherwise, it is just a string of random information.
Right, which is why, as I think I said, the number is just a data point, or component, of a much larger message that attempts to introduce the concept of prime numbers via the initial series.
You seem interested enough in the topic to read up on it further -- you might find the way the ET-hunters have coded the broadcasts to be at least informative, if not inspiring...but whether we'll end up embarrassed at our feeble attempts to encode "universal primitives" for consumption by an alien civilization as a prelude to higher-level communication is a debate that will likely not be answered in the next few hundred years, if ever.
As far as these idea of simple concepts, I question whether these large prime numbers qualify. After all, how long did it take us to find this prime number? Why assume that an alien species (assuming prime numbers would interest them, which they well might) would even recognize such a huge string of digits as prime? Unless we appended it to a series of all primes (at least down to those more easily recognized), wouldn't they have to basically "reverse enginieer" the number to recognize it was a prime?
I'm not the best person to ask, since I haven't bothered reading the literature on how SETI et al actually communicate this stuff (beyond a/. article, I believe it was, that showed how they illustrated the concept using some primitive symbology, hoping an alien species would recognize the importance). I assume the new number is merely a data point plugged into a larger communication that attempts to identify, to ET, that it is a very large prime number.
But, my speculation is that those interested in communicating with ET assume that, given they're able to hear us, they share some basic mathematical principles that help decode universal constants and behaviors related to, e.g., radio astronomy; that those principles include some widely-shared fundamental theoretical underpinnings, such as prime numbers; and that, therefore, communications using examples of these principles in action are most likely to be interpreted as a measure of intelligence, compared to most of the other stuff we've considered sending (or have sent, e.g. Bach, Beatles, Elvis music;-).
As far as reverse-engineering primes, not being a sufficiently high-end mathematician, I'll only suggest that it's probably far easier to verify whether a given number is a prime than to find the next prime number in a sequence, since the former is a subset of the latter (or so I assume). If that's the case, getting into the magnitudes involved here surely indicates that a) we here on Earth are able to put in a given amount of work that b) is much greater than ET needs to verify that we did it correctly.
Relating two other snippets of yours, plus one of mine:
Surely, feeding two billion more people a day is would be a more significant achievment than this quest for large prime numbers, regardless of whether we could tell these hypothetical aliens about it.
In the meantime, I wonder if you consider the one hour spent daily by billions of people, like myself, in prayer and/or meditation is similarly "wasted" in that it could be used to eliminate hatred, poverty, disease, famine, and so on? Why or why not?
Only if it is time that you would otherwise spend addressing these things directly. But it's your time. If it inspires you to spend any amount of time addressing these problems that you would otherwise not, then it is time well spent.
It is my opinion that searching for primes and generally studying math problems, or doing music, or ice-skating (which I'm about to go do, or at least try to do;-), inspires many people just like praying inspires them, or others. For me, it all works, and often works together.
That's why we do these things: we're humans, we find a wide variety of things inspirational, and we are better at directing our own lives than directing each others'.
Nobody, including the original post, said that it *was* an important advancement.
From the original post:
"A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space."
Exactly, nobody claimed that it was an "important" advancement, merely that it might help illustrate the level of scientific advancement on our planet at a particular moment in time.
Look, there's simply nothing we can do, individually or collectively, to precisely show to another species how advanced our science is. (I'm using "how" in a quantitative sense.) Merely collecting a snapshot for ourselves of the state of scientific progress across the board is, to put it simply, impossible; forget about then trying to accurately and precisely communicate that snapshot to another species we know next to nothing about, other than that they're capable of picking up our broadcasts (and therefore have some technological prowess at least approximating where we were, as a species, about a century ago).
So, we pick some extremely simple concepts, like prime numbers, hoping they have some degree of universal interest, and communicate our best attempts at "hacking" them. (We hope that they don't end up thinking that's all we do with our time, but I'm sure alien intelligence wouldn't be so inadequate as to interpret a distant "hello" as indicating the sum total of human endeavour.)
If you can find a way to encode the fact that we manage to use our "advanced science" to feed some one or two billion people more than would be possible using traditional agrarian (or "organic farming" techniques) in a fashion that is persuasively as easy for an arbitrary, perhaps entirely imagined, alien intelligence to grok as the concept of prime numbers, I'm sure many in the ET community would be happy to hear from you. Ditto for the fact that we have probably one or two billion people who are able to not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from and, instead, are free to explore ways to help mankind as they see fit (whether by improving farming techniques or discovering new Marsenne primes), or that we've had nuclear weaponry for decades now and still have managed to not wipe ourselves out, etc. Those are all things aliens might find very interesting, but I would think they're far harder to communicate, in a species-neutral fashion, to intelligent and technologically capable life on a faraway planet.
In the meantime, I wonder if you consider the one hour spent daily by billions of people, like myself, in prayer and/or meditation is similarly "wasted" in that it could be used to eliminate hatred, poverty, disease, famine, and so on? Why or why not?
There is a difference between entertaining yourself and demonstrating the advance of science on our planet. Some endeavors might acheive both. As far as I can tell, this does neither.
Well, it certainly entertained me -- especially the silly posts saying "can't we do something oh-so-much-holier with all those resources???", like yours! Thanks!
;-)
Re:same reason we still run gasoline engines.....
on
Clockless Chips
·
· Score: 3, Funny
The last time I read about clockless computing, the chip stopped working[...]
That we devote this much co-operation, time and energy to the quest for prime numbers while hatred, poverty, disease and environmental destruction continue to plague our race is hardly an advertisement for our planet's advancement.
Yes, and we're all awaiting your proposal for how to use a bunch of idle PCs and bandwidth to wipe out hatred, poverty, disease, and environmental destruction.
Until you get back to us with that, stop complaining about how we entertain ourselves, okay?
No kidding. ET may be out there, listening to broadcasts of Mersenne primes, but they probably don't respond because "them earthlings don't talk no good".
I see little discussion here (and won't bother reading the original article, based on the discussion that is here) that clearly takes into account the fact that "payment" is really just a component of "negotiation".
Instead, what most of us "tech types" do here is discuss how or why micropayments won't work, using examples that touch on, without really getting into the nitty-gritty down-to-earth facts regarding, the issue of negotiation.
The payment models we have in the world today, those that work anyway, all reflect what is practical regarding negotiations between market entities (people plus corporate bodies).
Each such negotiation requires a significant effort be made consisting of distinct thought-processes ("minds", "brains", whatever) making private assessments regarding valuations -- of not only the items being explicitly negotiated over, but of various comparable items.
E.g. when you decide to make an offer on a new or used car, you exercise a vast amount of intelligence, or brainpower, to consider not only how valuable the car is in the overall market to you as a generic buyer, but how it stacks up vis-a-vis other choices you have regarding how to spend that money. Sure, maybe another model costs only $400 less, but you, and you alone, can consider that $400 in terms of how many CDs to buy to feed the stereo in it. Meanwhile, the seller is performing similar computations, so to speak.
And, for more effective negotiation, you're both likely thinking about how the other person is thinking, or valuing, their end of the deal. If you think the dealer is more desperate to sell than he lets on, you might be more willing to push for a lower price than you're actually willing to pay.
In most negotiations, it is generally foolish to start out by answering the (perhaps-implicit) question "what are you willing to pay for this thing I can sell you?", though, in specific situations, that can be appropriate (ditto for the corresponding question from the buyer).
Getting back to micropayments, all of those proposals seem to ignore, or hand-wave, the importance of this kind of negotiation process. And most of the valid objections to micropayment schemes come down to "but that scheme skips the negotiation process", without saying so in so many words.
So here's my suggestion. Instead of, or in addition to, criticizing micropayment schemes on the basis of detailed technical arguments, focus tightly on the negotiation issue, since that's where the rubber really meets the road. Pose questions such as this:
Isn't a micropayment ultimately the outcome of a "micronegotiation" between a buyer and seller?
What mechanisms exist in your scheme that support components of negotiations other than the mere exchange of a small amount of currency? What components are left out?
Doesn't your scheme essentially put a buyer of a product (e.g. a web-page viewing) in the position of having to trust technology to make negotiation-related decisions for him, beyond its present role of facilitating communications?
If you were totally blind and relied on a seeing-eye dog to help you navigate a city, would you also trust that dog to negotiate for you -- to decide for you whether and how much to pay for items such as groceries, clothing, an apartment, and so on? Or is there some other type of animal -- perhaps a chimpanzee -- that you would trust to perform this role for you, in situations where you found it inconvenient (or worse) to do so yourself?
To what extent has the kind of technology your micropayment scheme depends upon, overall, succeeded at mimicking thought-processes, social behavior, self-organization of individuals, etc. in the animal kingdom: has it reached the level of insects (ants, bees); of schools of fish; of amphibians and reptiles; of mammals; of primates?
Given the likely answers to the questions in the previous two points, why do you think people will be willing to trust technology less than beloved pets, considering how much "dumber" that technology is when it comes to socializing and interacting effectively with humans?
When technology is claimed to be reaching levels worthy of trust for purposes of handling negotiations for humans, will it be developed using funding assuming a closed-source model or an open-source model? Which model is more likely to be trusted by humans -- one that is easily "trained" by its creators to pretend to act on behalf of human clients but really steers their business towards friends of the creators (a la Windows XP) or one that is easily examined to ensure that it is truly acting solely on behalf of its client, or owner (a la GNU/Linux)?
Further, I think any scheme that assumes some kind of universal, constant value (price) per some other arbitrary unit (such as a page view) is doomed to failure simply because, the latter being arbitrary based on the whims of communication wihle the former being arbitrary based on economic concerns, there's too much freedom in those two independent worlds to try to tie them together with a brick. It's like tying a ship to a pier with duct tape, expecting the pier to remain anchored to shore, the ship to remain in (tide-tossed) water and even leave port, and the duct tape, to nevertheless continue holding them together.
As another poster put it so well, proposals for economic reform based on "NEED" and "DESERVE" are, generally, doomed. A ship may "need" and "deserve" a safe place like a pier, which in turn may "need" and "deserve" a wonderful ship people can walk onto, but the two will part ways quite frequently, live in two very different worlds, and, regardless of what the duct tape "needs" and "deserves", it cannot change that fact.
My wife and I visited a health club in Austin, TX while on vacation there a few years ago (one of the best "pure" vacations we've ever taken, by the way; Austin's beautiful, we stayed on the northwest side of town in the beautiful hills, visited Ladybird Johnson's wildflower reserve in the southwest, etc.).
They had a two-person videogame setup that you played by riding exercise cycles. The cycles were, IIRC, recumbant-style, with integrated "consoles" for the hands, the ability to tilt left and right to control steering, and feedback so the system knew how hard you were pedaling. (I don't recall it being able to dynamically adjust the resistance, though maybe it did.)
Of the four games offered, three were basically scenic two-person "outings" -- you could pedal around a mountain (ski simulation maybe?), around an island (including going underwater), and the third might have been a road-race kind of thing. In all three, you saw your partner/opponent as they pedaled around in your monitor, they saw you in theirs, in animated fashion of course.
But my favorite was the fourth game, where you actually competed with each other in some sort of Aztec or Mayan-inspired game where you were driving little carts that could push and shoot a ball through a stone hole up in two of the four slanted rock walls.
With this game, you really did get a lot of exercise, because the faster you pedaled, the quicker you got to the ball. Beating your opponent to the ball meant you could usually "grab" it (by running into it, basically) and run with it until you lined up a good shot and fired using the console. But your opponent could knock you about and, I think, knock the ball off and retrieve it for herself.
Watching the 3D rendering of the arena, the ball bounce around, learning how the cycle-powered simulated cart responded, all that meant both of us, who had already done a pretty good workout, pedaled ourselves silly for about half an hour. (Oh, the system allows for an RPM or resistance handicap -- at the time, that helped my wife compete, since she couldn't pedal as fast as I.)
Then we both got too dog-tired to go on, and basically crashed the rest of the day.
Ever since, we've occasionally talked about how wonderful it would be to have a system like that in our house somewhere, though ideally with more choices of games.
Personally, I am more likely to exercise harder in competive situations than just to burn calories, and I think that's true of my wife as well. So a game like that is great.
Whether the pedaling system described here is good enough, I don't know, but the game we played was, at least for that one time!
And before you say "oh, he's just Microsoft bashing" keep this in mind: some of our customers run Arrowpoint/Cisco load balancers with Linux or Solaris servers, and these networks never die. In fact, the servers keep up so well that sometimes if there's an improperly configured load balancer, it will crash instead. (There's a per-port buffer size limitation that you have to stay inside of. Windows can't pump out data fast enough to blow it up, but Linux and Solaris both can.)
PCWeek &c. headline for your article:
INDUSTRY INSIDER ADMITS LINUX AND SOLARIS CRASH CISCO EQUIPMENT; WINDOWS NT LETS IT KEEP RUNNING
Slashdot Mirror
"Lately"? "Starting"??
While I still think this side issue (of the appropriateness of calling cautions against government interference in the spam issue "anti-government hate-mongering") isn't entirely "Offtopic", I guess, all told, my post being only a couple of points lower than the parent post isn't an example of moderation run amok.
(After all, I did focus on just one phrase in an otherwise reasonable post. Had to get off my chest my annoyance at how widely the phrase "anti-government" is used to describe prescriptions that would likely increase government effectiveness at doing its actual job, while I was at it, but it's my own fault for picking a less-than-squarely-on-topic opportunity to rattle that gilded cage.)
So, you're saying that buyers preferences can't influence the industry much, so buyers focus only on price, so the industry gets too widely and completely influenced to set low prices??? Hmm. That seems like widespread influence by the common man to me, especially when I ignore your attempt to narrow the issue as if air travel was the only option -- as if an airline had only other airlines with which to compete, and not trains, buses, automobiles, the Internet, Nintendo, and television as well.
For myself, I have had a "legroom issue" for a long time. I've actually chosen flights and flight conditions, as well as to not fly at all, based on what was feasible in terms of promises for legroom. And, hey, guess what, American Airlines, about a year ago, started promising more legroom in coach...and United (I think it is) now allows reserving seats in exit rows ahead of time, allowing me to be sure I'll have legroom!
But I guess that's just proof to you of my power, as one of "the rich and powerful", to influence industry.
Yes, people in positions of power -- like the shareholders, which constitute, on the whole, the majority of Americans. I mean, sure, one doesn't normally appoint to the Board of Directors of a company like American Airlines a group of people with little or no experience in business -- which excludes many non-rich people, but many wealthy, powerful ones as well.
But while those individuals may directly set the agenda for that company, they do so based on their perception of the agendas each and every potential consumer and partner has for that same company. Ultimately, you are the boss of American Airlines, in that you can decide, for yourself, whether to fly it based on whether you believe they provide sufficient safety, security, comfort, timeliness, etc. for the price they charge. Ditto for each other airline, every other mode of travel. You have plenty of choices, and there are hundreds of millions of people just like you making the same choices.
However "rich and powerful" CEO John Q. Esquire is, if he can't figure out how to best meet your collective demands in the competitive market, he won't be CEO for long.
Why you go off on a tangent about "emotional reactions" I don't understand, but I guess you ran out of arguments.
Yet, for the most part, corporations tend, on the whole, to have "agendas" set for them that reflect the desires of the public at large to be able to easily buy, at affordable prices, food, shelter, services, and so on.
Personally, I find your deemphasis of the importance of the common man's thoughtful consideration of how and when to invest funds in the market somewhat condescending, but, mostly, I find it mathematically unsupportable: it may be that someone making less than $100K is, as an individual, able to influence a given corporation only 1/100th as much as someone worth $10M, but, seeing as there's probably more than a hundred times as many people fitting the former description than the latter, I don't see how the latter end up completely in control.
And when I look at the fact that there are far more McDonald's restaurants around than Four Seasons; far more government programs that take money directly from the wealthy and give it directly to the poor than vice versa; and far more Targets and Wal-Marts than Neiman-Marcuses (or whereever us rich and powerful folk shop), it becomes even more difficult to understand just how the rich and powerful manage to control so much in our country, knowing their tastes and aspirations as I presumably do (being one of them, y'see).
So, I suggest you take your own advice and restrict yourself to "economic arguments", rather than presuming to speak either for us rich and powerful folk or to our ability to set the agenda for corporate America.
Thanks. I think you're helping me make my point (and supporting the original poster).
Still, it's hard to tell, since I think it was I who introduced the word "extremism" in this thread, and I used it to describe someone calling what I considered to be a defense of liberty "anti-government hate-mongering".
So, if you meant to agree that our defense of liberty, in the sense of warning against excessive regulation by government, is wise, great.
If you were trying to rebut my use of the word "extremism", your use of the Goldwater quote was off the mark, since it justifies a specific form of extremism, but certainly not the form I was identifying.
I.e. Goldwater emphatically did not say "Extremism in defense of excessive government regulation is no vice", at least not in that quote!
Okay, hmm, so you believe some 50% or more of the American public -- the percentage of stockholders -- constitute "the rich and powerful"?
Unemployed people fly all the time, and certainly prefer lower rates -- in fact, I suspect deregulation and competition has done more to enable poor people to visit family members frequently than to render them unemployed and/or poor in the first place.
All in all, though, I think you're saying that airlines, airports, and the industry as a whole should do security "right" rather than however it's convenient, with which I agree 100%, even though I guess I'm a member of "the rich and powerful" myself. ;-)
But the real question is: if the government allowed a free market to flourish in air travel vis-a-vis security issues (personal and airline, but not, e.g., turning planes into missiles), would the general populace choose safety and security, e.g. via demonstrated record, over low price?
My guess is, they'd tend to choose low price, since that appears to be exactly what they've done for the past 20 years or so. Some airlines have better safety records than others, just as some car manufacturers do. Some of us prefer paying extra for a better-designed car and/or a better-run business "experience"; most people make their choices at different price points.
So, an even more interesting question is: should Americans who refuse to fly at prices inflated by security practices they personally feel are unnecessary be forced to choose other, less-safe, modes of travel, such as automobile, by government/industry fiat, or should they have the freedom to choose another airline, one that offers low rates by not pretending to offer high personal/airline security (maybe they'd allow passengers to keep their guns, for example)?
I don't believe this is even close to a rich-vs.-poor, politically-powerful-vs.-weak issue, considering its much more fundamental connection to the security-vs.-freedom and security-vs.-opportunity (generalized form of price or cost) issues.
Or, viewed from another angle, the reason you might assume the rich and powerful don't want so much regulation might be because, in this country, the rich and powerful get that way, generally, by best meeting the needs of the people of this country, who are, generally, free to choose between security and low price, quality and quantity, etc. on an individual, per-transaction basis.
Whereas, in nations with comparatively little individual freedom in these areas, you'd probably find their rich and powerful prefer lots of regulation, little choice among individuals, artificially high prices, excess security ("best" implemented by friends and relatives at high salaries), because that's how they got where they are.
My point here is that just because the rich and powerful in the West (and the USA in particular) happen to be for a thing does not mean the thing is bad in general, or even bad for the common man. That's a popular myth, one which is true on occasion at least, but which, as a general rule, does not stand up under close scrutiny.
So, argument by invoking the phrase "the rich and powerful" does not work, at least not for me -- in fact, it suggests to me that the person making that argument doesn't really believe in, or can't elucidate, other, more viable, arguments in favor of his position.
I was referring to civil liberties in general, and that was the context in which they were being discussed.
I don't think any of us, involved in this somewhat-tangential thread, questions your civil rights to decide how resources you pay for (such as your Internet connection and email in-box) are to be used and to charge those who use it without permission (say, to send spam).
I'm mainly taking issue with the proposition that expressing concern about possible over-reaction by attempting to legislate away spam consitutes "anti-government hate-mongering".
In my opinion, such name-calling constitutes extremism, which is uncalled-for in this context.
Yet he's right. Nearly every law of substance has, at some time or another, been used against someone who wasn't the intended target of the legislation. He's warning against a slippery slope, and against human nature, not "hate-mongering", unless you find warnings against tyranny to be "hate-mongering" -- which I guess is the case here. (Consider such events as RICO laws being used to attack Operation Rescue, and the ADA being used by the Supreme Court as an excuse to rewrite the rules of golf, the right to free assembly notwithstanding. I can assure you, the authors of those pieces of legislation never intended such targeting.)
Perhaps you can get inside his head, but that's not quite what he wrote. What he wrote was correct -- that we should be aware of how laws designed to achieve a thing can have, in other words, unintended consequences, such as the possible (perhaps occasional) abuse of those laws, and that if we persist in not considering this possibility, continually asking government to protect us from even trivial impositions, the inevitable result will be a vast sea of incoherent, easily-abused legislation.
All of which has been proven true by the history of the USA, one of the most freedom-loving nations in history, yet also one that has a proven record of accumulating a vast sea of legislation and regulation, almost all of which was well-intentioned.
I'd say if you don't see what he and I worry about as being pro-individual-freedom as well as sensitive to all of recorded history and embodying common sense, and persist in seeing it as "anti-government hate-mongering", you probably think of Singapore as a paragon of governance.
Reporter's blather in article, supported by quoting various hysterical people (or, probably, selecting only their most hysterical-sounding quotes): the usual assumptions that this is a mere first step in an inevitable long march designed to lock the American people into perpetual ignorance.
Relevant factoid: the Bush administration started by canning Clinton's last-minute imposition of higher restrictions on arsenic levels in water at the national level; claimed it needed time to carefully review the issue before codifying such an imposition; took tons of flak from Democrats and "greens" for "increasing levels of arsenic in our nation's water supply"; waited until after the 2001-09-11 attacks (about last week, I think) to quietly restore the Clinton restriction, with little fanfare or applause from Democrats/greens as far as I could see (especially compared with news coverage of the issue earlier this year).
Does this suggest the Bush administration is using the 09-11 attack to effect environmental protection under the cover of darkness? I think not; rather, I would hope that, after review, the decision turned out to be sound.
Implication: taking careful stock of sensitive information in public view and selectively having some copies of it, especially convenientally accessible copies, rendered inaccessible (e.g. take info off web, destroy a few CD-ROMs) until further review and/or security can be implemented seems not only wise, but consistent with other things this Administration has done, even if some of those things are out of step with the far-right, pro-business agenda with which its critics charge it.
Sad fact: this action is too-often compared with the DMCA, the SSSCA, copy protection, and so on, but the most important message we can send to our government today is, YES, you have a duty to carefully consider which public information should be conveniently accessible (and we'll help you make those sorts of decisions), but you should get the heck out of the business of allowing or sponsoring censorship solely to prop up failing business models being employed by corporate America.
The reason that's a "sad fact" is that the latter specific message is going to be swamped by the vastly-easier-to-flyswat general version that says "any form of censorship is evil", even when it amounts to merely making certain convenient collections of data less trivial to access remotely, even when it is clearly necessary, at least in the short term, for national-defense purposes.
Think about it folks: Jack Valenti is now being enlisted as a friend in defense of this nation against terrorists, to encourage the movie industry to support the war effort a la WWII, etc. As such, he (or, more precisely, his support of what amounts to legalized terror waged against those who share info on, e.g., how to view DVDs on "hacker OSes" like GNU/Linux) cannot simply be broad-brushed as "evil" when most Americans are more concerned about true terrorism than complete freedom to view DVDs.
So "we" have to be much more incisive in the way we simultaneously oppose arbitrary restrictions on the free flow of information among peers and yet support the choice of people to unite to form a common defense against external attack.
Knee-jerk ranting against practical national-defense measures, especially done just to make Bush and/or Republicans look bad, won't get the job done -- it'll actually make things worse (we'll lose more civil liberties, lose the war against global terrorism, or perhaps both).
(Note that if you really don't support any form of censorship, even defense, then go ahead and make that argument as you see fit. I happen to think most people who think all forms of censorship are equally evil haven't really thought the issues through carefully or at least considered which battles are worth fighting today. Even "extremists" like RMS and the FSF finally chose to "censor", or limit, access to their systems -- their information, if you will -- after some 20 years of being, practically, password-free. Even the purest possible spokesman against all forms of censorship might tend to lose his powers of persuasion after being taken out by a suitcase nuke! So please realize that freedoms and rights are abstract concepts, made practical by adhering to them as much as possible, and no further than that.)
Let me get this straight: you're saying the rich and powerful prefer spending $200 instead of $450 for a round-trip flight to Florida, even if the lower price comes with a much better chance their penthouse apartments will be wiped out by a suitcase nuke?
And that the ordinary citizen prefers "security done right" if it means a much greater cost of living?
I'm sure you have a valid argument somewhere in there, but darned if I can find it.
Yeah, that's the ticket. Bush, before 2001-09-11:
After 09-11:
Sheesh. Where do people like you get indoctrinated??
Let me get this straight, Mr. Logic Man.
You're saying you'd prefer that terrorists be able to do great damage to this country without having to be particularly smart, well-educated, capable of planning, or committed?
Or do you really believe setting the bar high is all that's needed to make terrorists better at doing their jobs??
Wow. Guess we need to get rid of all the locks on our doors -- we're just making all them criminals just too dang smart!
Okay, sarcasm aside, here's a clue: whether the particular proposal is a good idea, it is not illogical to adjust one's defensive posture so that the pool of attackers able to actually penetrate it becomes vastly smaller, consisting primarily of intelligent, committed people. In fact, that's probably about 95% of how successful defense works.
(Yes, there are cases where the opposite approach can work. In films and TV shows, an approach often shown is where a "hero" avoids direct attack by a very intelligent bad guy by generating, or finding, a less-bad mob of people and "hiding" in it, using the protection of the mob, usually an "amoral entity" in that context, from an enemy. It works because the hero prefers the risk of being in such a mob -- e.g. maybe there are a few pickpockets -- to the certainty of attack by the enemy. I don't see how that principle applies to this proposal: even RMS and the FSF finally gave up having no password on the Internet, and they weren't even risking death or dismemberment by leaving access entirely public. The approach works when the surrounding mob hampers enemy access more than it helps. I doubt the ability of any random web surfer to figure out just where to hit Hoover Dam with a missile would seriously hamper the ability of Saddam Hussein to actually do the deed, but, then, I'm not Mr. Logic Man.)
That's all it costs??
Man, I've been paying way too much for that privilege!
Hmm, so when someone expresses concern about civil liberties being slowly eliminated, that's "hate mongering"??
Wow, I'm sure your comrades from the old indoctrination camps are impressed.
(At least it's good to know that knee-jerk reaction to someone treading carefully around civil liberties identifies them as "Republican" for a change...though I suspect that has more to do with the choice of the phrase "hate mongering" than with the issue of "civil liberties".)
As far as the other adjective, "anti-government", is concerned, I find it interesting that when someone says government should be kept small, effective, and non-intrusive, they're "anti-government", but when someone tells a friend that they should lose excess fat, or should figure out what they most want to do in life and focus primarily on that, or should keep their noses out of other peoples' business, they're looking out for that friend's well-being rather than being "anti-friend". Hmm.
Something for those interested in /. moderation to think about: the post I'm replying to was scored at +5, Insightful, while the post he was trashing was at only +2, Informative (though that author's response to the "hate-mongering" post was at +3, Insightful).
Which does that suggest most about /. moderators:
They find posts expressing concern about over-regulation opening the door to eliminating civil liberties less worthy than those restating the legal status of various forms of spam and opining that e-mail spam should be illegal.
They love any post that starts off with a phrase like "Drop the Republican anti-government hate mongering", despite the fact that there's no evidence in the parent post of either Republicanism per se or hatred at all.
I'm guessing think it's about a 50/50 proposition....
Like invoking a script written in Perl?
Since they don't get pregnant, don't get PMS, and never ask "does this halo make my butt look big?"
Right, which is why, as I think I said, the number is just a data point, or component, of a much larger message that attempts to introduce the concept of prime numbers via the initial series.
You seem interested enough in the topic to read up on it further -- you might find the way the ET-hunters have coded the broadcasts to be at least informative, if not inspiring...but whether we'll end up embarrassed at our feeble attempts to encode "universal primitives" for consumption by an alien civilization as a prelude to higher-level communication is a debate that will likely not be answered in the next few hundred years, if ever.
I'm not the best person to ask, since I haven't bothered reading the literature on how SETI et al actually communicate this stuff (beyond a /. article, I believe it was, that showed how they illustrated the concept using some primitive symbology, hoping an alien species would recognize the importance). I assume the new number is merely a data point plugged into a larger communication that attempts to identify, to ET, that it is a very large prime number.
But, my speculation is that those interested in communicating with ET assume that, given they're able to hear us, they share some basic mathematical principles that help decode universal constants and behaviors related to, e.g., radio astronomy; that those principles include some widely-shared fundamental theoretical underpinnings, such as prime numbers; and that, therefore, communications using examples of these principles in action are most likely to be interpreted as a measure of intelligence, compared to most of the other stuff we've considered sending (or have sent, e.g. Bach, Beatles, Elvis music ;-).
As far as reverse-engineering primes, not being a sufficiently high-end mathematician, I'll only suggest that it's probably far easier to verify whether a given number is a prime than to find the next prime number in a sequence, since the former is a subset of the latter (or so I assume). If that's the case, getting into the magnitudes involved here surely indicates that a) we here on Earth are able to put in a given amount of work that b) is much greater than ET needs to verify that we did it correctly.
Relating two other snippets of yours, plus one of mine:
It is my opinion that searching for primes and generally studying math problems, or doing music, or ice-skating (which I'm about to go do, or at least try to do ;-), inspires many people just like praying inspires them, or others. For me, it all works, and often works together.
That's why we do these things: we're humans, we find a wide variety of things inspirational, and we are better at directing our own lives than directing each others'.
Exactly, nobody claimed that it was an "important" advancement, merely that it might help illustrate the level of scientific advancement on our planet at a particular moment in time.
Look, there's simply nothing we can do, individually or collectively, to precisely show to another species how advanced our science is. (I'm using "how" in a quantitative sense.) Merely collecting a snapshot for ourselves of the state of scientific progress across the board is, to put it simply, impossible; forget about then trying to accurately and precisely communicate that snapshot to another species we know next to nothing about, other than that they're capable of picking up our broadcasts (and therefore have some technological prowess at least approximating where we were, as a species, about a century ago).
So, we pick some extremely simple concepts, like prime numbers, hoping they have some degree of universal interest, and communicate our best attempts at "hacking" them. (We hope that they don't end up thinking that's all we do with our time, but I'm sure alien intelligence wouldn't be so inadequate as to interpret a distant "hello" as indicating the sum total of human endeavour.)
If you can find a way to encode the fact that we manage to use our "advanced science" to feed some one or two billion people more than would be possible using traditional agrarian (or "organic farming" techniques) in a fashion that is persuasively as easy for an arbitrary, perhaps entirely imagined, alien intelligence to grok as the concept of prime numbers, I'm sure many in the ET community would be happy to hear from you. Ditto for the fact that we have probably one or two billion people who are able to not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from and, instead, are free to explore ways to help mankind as they see fit (whether by improving farming techniques or discovering new Marsenne primes), or that we've had nuclear weaponry for decades now and still have managed to not wipe ourselves out, etc. Those are all things aliens might find very interesting, but I would think they're far harder to communicate, in a species-neutral fashion, to intelligent and technologically capable life on a faraway planet.
In the meantime, I wonder if you consider the one hour spent daily by billions of people, like myself, in prayer and/or meditation is similarly "wasted" in that it could be used to eliminate hatred, poverty, disease, famine, and so on? Why or why not?
Well, it certainly entertained me -- especially the silly posts saying "can't we do something oh-so-much-holier with all those resources???", like yours! Thanks!
Then stop reading about it, silly!
Yes, and we're all awaiting your proposal for how to use a bunch of idle PCs and bandwidth to wipe out hatred, poverty, disease, and environmental destruction.
Until you get back to us with that, stop complaining about how we entertain ourselves, okay?
Instead, what most of us "tech types" do here is discuss how or why micropayments won't work, using examples that touch on, without really getting into the nitty-gritty down-to-earth facts regarding, the issue of negotiation.
The payment models we have in the world today, those that work anyway, all reflect what is practical regarding negotiations between market entities (people plus corporate bodies).
Each such negotiation requires a significant effort be made consisting of distinct thought-processes ("minds", "brains", whatever) making private assessments regarding valuations -- of not only the items being explicitly negotiated over, but of various comparable items.
E.g. when you decide to make an offer on a new or used car, you exercise a vast amount of intelligence, or brainpower, to consider not only how valuable the car is in the overall market to you as a generic buyer, but how it stacks up vis-a-vis other choices you have regarding how to spend that money. Sure, maybe another model costs only $400 less, but you, and you alone, can consider that $400 in terms of how many CDs to buy to feed the stereo in it. Meanwhile, the seller is performing similar computations, so to speak.
And, for more effective negotiation, you're both likely thinking about how the other person is thinking, or valuing, their end of the deal. If you think the dealer is more desperate to sell than he lets on, you might be more willing to push for a lower price than you're actually willing to pay.
In most negotiations, it is generally foolish to start out by answering the (perhaps-implicit) question "what are you willing to pay for this thing I can sell you?", though, in specific situations, that can be appropriate (ditto for the corresponding question from the buyer).
Getting back to micropayments, all of those proposals seem to ignore, or hand-wave, the importance of this kind of negotiation process. And most of the valid objections to micropayment schemes come down to "but that scheme skips the negotiation process", without saying so in so many words.
So here's my suggestion. Instead of, or in addition to, criticizing micropayment schemes on the basis of detailed technical arguments, focus tightly on the negotiation issue, since that's where the rubber really meets the road. Pose questions such as this:
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Further, I think any scheme that assumes some kind of universal, constant value (price) per some other arbitrary unit (such as a page view) is doomed to failure simply because, the latter being arbitrary based on the whims of communication wihle the former being arbitrary based on economic concerns, there's too much freedom in those two independent worlds to try to tie them together with a brick. It's like tying a ship to a pier with duct tape, expecting the pier to remain anchored to shore, the ship to remain in (tide-tossed) water and even leave port, and the duct tape, to nevertheless continue holding them together.Isn't a micropayment ultimately the outcome of a "micronegotiation" between a buyer and seller?
What mechanisms exist in your scheme that support components of negotiations other than the mere exchange of a small amount of currency? What components are left out?
Doesn't your scheme essentially put a buyer of a product (e.g. a web-page viewing) in the position of having to trust technology to make negotiation-related decisions for him, beyond its present role of facilitating communications?
If you were totally blind and relied on a seeing-eye dog to help you navigate a city, would you also trust that dog to negotiate for you -- to decide for you whether and how much to pay for items such as groceries, clothing, an apartment, and so on? Or is there some other type of animal -- perhaps a chimpanzee -- that you would trust to perform this role for you, in situations where you found it inconvenient (or worse) to do so yourself?
To what extent has the kind of technology your micropayment scheme depends upon, overall, succeeded at mimicking thought-processes, social behavior, self-organization of individuals, etc. in the animal kingdom: has it reached the level of insects (ants, bees); of schools of fish; of amphibians and reptiles; of mammals; of primates?
Given the likely answers to the questions in the previous two points, why do you think people will be willing to trust technology less than beloved pets, considering how much "dumber" that technology is when it comes to socializing and interacting effectively with humans?
When technology is claimed to be reaching levels worthy of trust for purposes of handling negotiations for humans, will it be developed using funding assuming a closed-source model or an open-source model? Which model is more likely to be trusted by humans -- one that is easily "trained" by its creators to pretend to act on behalf of human clients but really steers their business towards friends of the creators (a la Windows XP) or one that is easily examined to ensure that it is truly acting solely on behalf of its client, or owner (a la GNU/Linux)?
As another poster put it so well, proposals for economic reform based on "NEED" and "DESERVE" are, generally, doomed. A ship may "need" and "deserve" a safe place like a pier, which in turn may "need" and "deserve" a wonderful ship people can walk onto, but the two will part ways quite frequently, live in two very different worlds, and, regardless of what the duct tape "needs" and "deserves", it cannot change that fact.
They had a two-person videogame setup that you played by riding exercise cycles. The cycles were, IIRC, recumbant-style, with integrated "consoles" for the hands, the ability to tilt left and right to control steering, and feedback so the system knew how hard you were pedaling. (I don't recall it being able to dynamically adjust the resistance, though maybe it did.)
Of the four games offered, three were basically scenic two-person "outings" -- you could pedal around a mountain (ski simulation maybe?), around an island (including going underwater), and the third might have been a road-race kind of thing. In all three, you saw your partner/opponent as they pedaled around in your monitor, they saw you in theirs, in animated fashion of course.
But my favorite was the fourth game, where you actually competed with each other in some sort of Aztec or Mayan-inspired game where you were driving little carts that could push and shoot a ball through a stone hole up in two of the four slanted rock walls.
With this game, you really did get a lot of exercise, because the faster you pedaled, the quicker you got to the ball. Beating your opponent to the ball meant you could usually "grab" it (by running into it, basically) and run with it until you lined up a good shot and fired using the console. But your opponent could knock you about and, I think, knock the ball off and retrieve it for herself.
Watching the 3D rendering of the arena, the ball bounce around, learning how the cycle-powered simulated cart responded, all that meant both of us, who had already done a pretty good workout, pedaled ourselves silly for about half an hour. (Oh, the system allows for an RPM or resistance handicap -- at the time, that helped my wife compete, since she couldn't pedal as fast as I.)
Then we both got too dog-tired to go on, and basically crashed the rest of the day.
Ever since, we've occasionally talked about how wonderful it would be to have a system like that in our house somewhere, though ideally with more choices of games.
Personally, I am more likely to exercise harder in competive situations than just to burn calories, and I think that's true of my wife as well. So a game like that is great.
Whether the pedaling system described here is good enough, I don't know, but the game we played was, at least for that one time!
PCWeek &c. headline for your article: