Leeches are used in some wound treatment techniques, yes. But they're not used to treat systemic diseases, which is what they were generally used for way back when. There is such a thing as therapeutic phlebotomy, but it's very rare; in my entire ten-year medical career, I saw all of two (2) patients who were receiving it. To assume that bloodletting was used because "they recognized that something worked" is to give the medicine of the day -- superstitious, dogmatic, and based almost entirely on religion -- way too much credit, IMO.
Alcohol, yeah -- but again, the idea of "raising the constitution" with red wine specifically was based on the superstitious association of red wine with blood, not on any observation of cause and effect. There actually is a lot of folk medicine that is based on cause and effect (willow bark tea, say) but it was traditionally practiced by local healers, not doctors. The blood'n'wine medicine that was the standard of care from the Middle Ages through the early 19th c. was essentially useless.
How many modern Luddites, who are terrified of modern biomedical research, do you know who refuse blood transfusions, x-rays, antibiotics, or painkillers? And yet all of these advances -- in fact, just about every advance in medical history -- met with the same kind of hysterical resistance. Luddism is an inherently hypocritical philosophy, which embraces the technology its followers see as normal (roughly speaking, anything that was around when they were children) while decrying anything invented past an arbitrary cutoff point.
This applies even to extremists such as the Amish, actually. Amish society is plenty high-tech; it's just the tech of (roughly) the mid-18th c.
One of these days, we're going to look at ourselves, our families, our friends and neighbors, and realize that all of us have various synthetic bits (almost said "metal bits," but there's no guarantee that metals will be the materials of choice -- and anyway, "metal bits" brings something else entirely to mind) and other bits that are genetically engineered, and that we're all living longer, happier, healthier lives as a result -- and it won't seem extraordinary; it will be just the way it is. And the current "bioethics" debates will seem precisely as meaningful as arguments over whether 'tis best to lower a patient's level of bodily humours by bleeding, or raise them by fortifying him with red wine.
I'm sure by then the Luddites will have found something else to bitch about, though.
Google for "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" to find out what people who know far more about the interactions between the DoD and the CIA than you ever will are saying about this matter. Short version: everything I said is true, and if you were paying attention to reality instead of lapping up everything Fox News beams into your brain, you'd know this.
I'm guessing that the parent post got marked "flamebait" because it's a vicious satire of the intelligence, personality, and decision-making style of the people currently running the US government. But guess what? It's also dead-on accurate. This is pretty much a true-to-life portrayal of how Rumsfeld at al. have dealt with the intelligence community since 9/11, if not before.
Sometimes, pointing out the foibles of those in power isn't just flamebait. Sometimes, it's called telling the truth.
Well, my point was that, despite these early obstacles -- obstacles largely created by politics and resistance to change, not by technical limitations -- automobiles eventually did replace the horse and buggy. Imagine how much longer it would have taken for automobiles to take over if the manufacturers had concentrated on, say, designing better red warning flags (IMO the rough equivalent of trying to make Linux interoperate well with Windows) instead of improving performance and reliability. Eventually, despite all the politics, the technically superior system won out.
Honestly, I don't see this as a joke. Linux, or any OS, should be evaluated by how well it does on its own merits. Complaining that it doesn't work well with Windows is like... oh, say, evaluating an early automobile and complaining that there's no place to hitch up a horse. The question should be "Is the new technology inherently superior enough to what we've got now to justify changing?", not, "How well does the new technology mimic what we've got now?" And if the answer to the first question is "Yes" -- well, then, tell the carriage makers they're going to have to find a new job.
I now expect to get inundated with responses telling me that I don't understand the real world, that companies have too much invested in their Windows infrastructure to just switch everything over to Linux on a whim, etc. To which I say: bullshit. Lots of people had a great deal invested in the horse-and-carriage infrastructure. Changing over to automobiles required throwing away a lot of existing technology. But the overall benefit was well worth it.
IMO, it's a political issue, not a technical one. Any DRM system, whether it operates at the level of the file, the disk, or the whole OS, is hackable. But the difference between then and now is that software manufactures weren't getting Congress to pass laws that made it likely you'd spend more time in prison for cracking copy protection than you would for committing murder. Now that the entertainment industry is trying to do just that -- and, in large part succeeding -- the software industry's 80's experiences may just not be that relevant.
This is nanotechnology; biotech vs. nanotech is to some degree an artificial distinction. Bacteria are nanomachines (well, okay, micromachines; viruses are nanomachines) that are already very good at what they do, and can me made to do what we want them to do, in many cases, with just a few tweaks. I think it's a red herring to imagine that useful nanotech will consist solely, or even mostly, of entirely new machines built up atom-by-atom to resemble the machines we use in the macroscopic world. Life has already produced mechanisms that work very well on a small scale; as we learn more about how to manipulate it, we will learn more about how to adapt biological mechanisms to our uses.
Pretty much all of the above, I think. Remember the Chinese gov't has its own official distro -- Red Flag Linux -- and presumably that's what this monster will be running. Linux scales well, they can tweak it to do what they want, and they know the code's secure because they can look at all of it; what's not to like? And they don't have to worry about licensing fees, of course.*
*It's easy to be cynical about the degree to which US IP laws apply (or don't) in other countries, particularly in Communist ones, but the fact is that China is very interested in keeping good trade relations with the US.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. We tend to think of organisms that live in environments inimical to human life -- deserts, the deep ocean, polar regions, etc. -- as "tougher" than those that live in environments we consider pleasant. But of course they're not; they're all equally tough for their own environment. A tropical flower is just as tough as a desert cactus -- put that flower in the desert, and of course it will die; put that cactus in the tropics, same thing.
That being said, there are of course risks of contamination in both directions, and sterilization and containment procedures should be established. But the odds of a carefully collected organism escaping from a lab and wreaking ecological havoc are much lower than the risks of Something Bad being brought back in the cargo hold of a commercial vessel, ages hence when we (hopefully) have active interplanetary trade -- which I believe is how the majority of invader species cross oceans back here on good ol' Earth.
I was at Ft. Benning. I don't remember calling those close-in targets "Fast Freddie," but we definitely had them on the range. If the game is missing them, that's a major omission. I suppose it's possible that they don't have them any more (Basic was longer ago for me than I like to think about) but if so, I think that's a mistake. Learning how to snap-shoot at close-in targets is an important skill, especially for urban guerilla warfare... gee, I wonder when that situation might come up...
"if SCO are trying to extort money from Linux customers by making them think they have to pay SCO as well as Linux"
Nobody has to pay "Linux". There is no Linux compay as you imply. Linux is written by volunteers and distributed for free under the GPL.
Read what I wrote, please: "pay SCO as well as Linux and Linux service vendors." That's shorthand for "Linux vendors and Linux service vendors." It's like saying, oh, "Car and car parts dealers." Not that hard to figure out. Sheesh.
True enough, but then, it's fractal -- each place is actually a bunch of places, again with its own culture.
I was born in Texas, grew up in Colorado, joined to Army and went to Georgia, transferred to the AF and went back to Texas, then to Nebraska, then to East Anglia (UK), then to Qatar, then to North Dakota, then got out and came back to Colorado.
Houston, TX, where I was born, is not Wichita Falls, TX, where I went to tech school. Omaha, NE, where I was stationed, is not the same as the little farming towns that make up most of the state. Rural Cambridgshire, where I was stationed, is not London. Qatar, which is fairly liberal as Gulf states go, is not Saudi Arabia is not Kuwait. Denver, the place I know best, is not Boulder is not Pueblo is not Ft. Collins is not Colorado Springs. Capitol Hill, the Denver neighborhood where I live, is not Globeville, where I work, is not downtown is not Brentwood is not Park Hill is not Federal Heights is not...
You get the idea. Any geographical area can be broken down into smaller and smaller units, each with its own distinct culture. And yet it's also reasonable to group these units into larger ones, which do have their own culture: Cap Hill, Denver, Colorado, the US, the English-speaking world.
Funny, I learned it as BRASS -- Breathe, Relax, Aim, Slack, Squeeze. The "Slack" step is taking up the slack in the trigger, which is pretty significant on those crappy old M16's they give you in Basic...
... if this is the point where Big Blue is going to stop basically ignoring SCO and start going after them with guns blazing.
I mean, if SCO are trying to extort money from Linux customers by making them think they have to pay SCO as well as Linux and Linux service vendors (including, of course, IBM) then that's cutting directly into those vendors' business. It goes beyond FUD into a direct financial attack. Seems to me -- just guessing here -- that given how much IBM makes from the Linux aspects of its biz, they might get very upset.
Of course, Red Hat, SuSE, et al would also have reason to get upset, and at this point they could probably wipe SCO out themselves if they put their minds to it; but it's always nice to have IBM on your side...
Heh. Well, one could argue that there's English English, but also Scottish English, Welsh English, and Northern Irish English -- all of which sound somewhat different, but do share a common spelling. Thus "British English".
And as well as American English, there's Australian English and Indian English, which I've heard is becoming the dominant form throughout southern Asia. Given the sheer numbers, that may be what most people think of as "English" eventually.
Only if their opponents make it a campaign issue, and they probably won't. I'm afraid this is seen as too much of a "geek issue" to get much play, even if given the sheer numbers it goes well beyond that.
This is the way it is with a lot of issues. The sexy stuff -- "homeland security," anyone? -- gets all the press, and it's on that basis that campaigns are waged and won. Stuff that has a much bigger effect on most people's lives, the arcana of economic policy (which is basically what this is, even though it's extending into the criminal realm) is just too complex for a thirty-second commercial or five-second sound bite. Civil rights are sexy, but people have to be really woken up to do anything about them; don't expect to see the Martin Luther King of file sharing any time soon.
Give this non-native English speaker a break will ye?;-) Try to write the Dutch word for defense, I bet you need to look it up;-)
Actually, if you're Dutch, then you probably learned British English in school, in which "defence" is the proper spelling. Don't worry about it. The inconsistencies between British and American spelling are part of a carefully orchestrated trans-Atlantic conspiracy.
Make your language the dominant language throughout the world.
Come up with two very similar but subtly different versions to confuse the hell out of everyone else.
The worst and third worst terrorist attacks in recent American history were carried out by radical Islamic fundamentalists, yes. The second and fourth worst... well, I don't think Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph had spent much time listening to the imams. Pretty much all fundamentalism is bad, mmmkay?
That's actually the original "in Soviet Russia" joke, from long before Yaakov Smirnoff made it a tiresome catchphrase. It was something that cynical Russians used to say: "Under capitalism, the Party tells us, man oppresses man. Under communism, it's the other way around."
The Mac WordPerfect of the same era (3.0 from WP Corp., then versions 3.1 and 3.5 from Novell) was also excellent. Probably the best word processor I've ever used, on any platform. Now that I use OS X all the time, I do appreciate enough OS X-only features that I don't drop back into Classic very often just to use itt -- but damn I wish Corel hadn't stopped development on the Mac version. Not having a native version of WP is the only way in which OS X is still Not There Yet for me.
What bugs the hell out of me is that all the current werps being developed, on any platform, all seem to be devoted to aping M$ Word. Word sucks, which means that any attempt to imitate it will also suck. It didn't beat WP because it was better; it beat WP because of the massive Microsoft PR machine, like... well, just about every M$ product. Please, someone bring back the idea of a word processor that just works!
Honestly, I'm not sure if that's what it means or not. Certainly that's what it looks like -- "Thanks for all the hard work, guys, but we've sold our souls to Bill, so here's some cash, and good luck" -- but there is IMO a real possibility that AOL will keep funding the project for some time to come. It was a seven-year deal they signed with M$; and seven years may be a long time in Internet years, but it's not forever. (Seven years ago, IIRC, was when the browser war between Netscape and IE was really heating up. We may be long past that time, but clearly people still remember it, and lessons learned.) AOL knows perfectly well that it's in their best interest to continue having an IE alternative, especially since M$ announced just days after they signed the deal that they were folding IE completely into the OS. I'll be very surprised if AOL cuts the Mozilla Foundation loose completely.
Academics are outraged, if they're paying attention. But I'll bet every single literature professor in the country could donate his or her entire net worth to the cause of getting reasonable copyright laws passed, and the total amount of money raised still wouldn't equal Disney's lobbying budget.
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Leeches are used in some wound treatment techniques, yes. But they're not used to treat systemic diseases, which is what they were generally used for way back when. There is such a thing as therapeutic phlebotomy, but it's very rare; in my entire ten-year medical career, I saw all of two (2) patients who were receiving it. To assume that bloodletting was used because "they recognized that something worked" is to give the medicine of the day -- superstitious, dogmatic, and based almost entirely on religion -- way too much credit, IMO.
Alcohol, yeah -- but again, the idea of "raising the constitution" with red wine specifically was based on the superstitious association of red wine with blood, not on any observation of cause and effect. There actually is a lot of folk medicine that is based on cause and effect (willow bark tea, say) but it was traditionally practiced by local healers, not doctors. The blood'n'wine medicine that was the standard of care from the Middle Ages through the early 19th c. was essentially useless.
Yep, exactly.
How many modern Luddites, who are terrified of modern biomedical research, do you know who refuse blood transfusions, x-rays, antibiotics, or painkillers? And yet all of these advances -- in fact, just about every advance in medical history -- met with the same kind of hysterical resistance. Luddism is an inherently hypocritical philosophy, which embraces the technology its followers see as normal (roughly speaking, anything that was around when they were children) while decrying anything invented past an arbitrary cutoff point.
This applies even to extremists such as the Amish, actually. Amish society is plenty high-tech; it's just the tech of (roughly) the mid-18th c.
Damn right.
One of these days, we're going to look at ourselves, our families, our friends and neighbors, and realize that all of us have various synthetic bits (almost said "metal bits," but there's no guarantee that metals will be the materials of choice -- and anyway, "metal bits" brings something else entirely to mind) and other bits that are genetically engineered, and that we're all living longer, happier, healthier lives as a result -- and it won't seem extraordinary; it will be just the way it is. And the current "bioethics" debates will seem precisely as meaningful as arguments over whether 'tis best to lower a patient's level of bodily humours by bleeding, or raise them by fortifying him with red wine.
I'm sure by then the Luddites will have found something else to bitch about, though.
Google for "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" to find out what people who know far more about the interactions between the DoD and the CIA than you ever will are saying about this matter. Short version: everything I said is true, and if you were paying attention to reality instead of lapping up everything Fox News beams into your brain, you'd know this.
I'm guessing that the parent post got marked "flamebait" because it's a vicious satire of the intelligence, personality, and decision-making style of the people currently running the US government. But guess what? It's also dead-on accurate. This is pretty much a true-to-life portrayal of how Rumsfeld at al. have dealt with the intelligence community since 9/11, if not before.
Sometimes, pointing out the foibles of those in power isn't just flamebait. Sometimes, it's called telling the truth.
Well, my point was that, despite these early obstacles -- obstacles largely created by politics and resistance to change, not by technical limitations -- automobiles eventually did replace the horse and buggy. Imagine how much longer it would have taken for automobiles to take over if the manufacturers had concentrated on, say, designing better red warning flags (IMO the rough equivalent of trying to make Linux interoperate well with Windows) instead of improving performance and reliability. Eventually, despite all the politics, the technically superior system won out.
Honestly, I don't see this as a joke. Linux, or any OS, should be evaluated by how well it does on its own merits. Complaining that it doesn't work well with Windows is like ... oh, say, evaluating an early automobile and complaining that there's no place to hitch up a horse. The question should be "Is the new technology inherently superior enough to what we've got now to justify changing?", not, "How well does the new technology mimic what we've got now?" And if the answer to the first question is "Yes" -- well, then, tell the carriage makers they're going to have to find a new job.
I now expect to get inundated with responses telling me that I don't understand the real world, that companies have too much invested in their Windows infrastructure to just switch everything over to Linux on a whim, etc. To which I say: bullshit. Lots of people had a great deal invested in the horse-and-carriage infrastructure. Changing over to automobiles required throwing away a lot of existing technology. But the overall benefit was well worth it.
IMO, it's a political issue, not a technical one. Any DRM system, whether it operates at the level of the file, the disk, or the whole OS, is hackable. But the difference between then and now is that software manufactures weren't getting Congress to pass laws that made it likely you'd spend more time in prison for cracking copy protection than you would for committing murder. Now that the entertainment industry is trying to do just that -- and, in large part succeeding -- the software industry's 80's experiences may just not be that relevant.
This is nanotechnology; biotech vs. nanotech is to some degree an artificial distinction. Bacteria are nanomachines (well, okay, micromachines; viruses are nanomachines) that are already very good at what they do, and can me made to do what we want them to do, in many cases, with just a few tweaks. I think it's a red herring to imagine that useful nanotech will consist solely, or even mostly, of entirely new machines built up atom-by-atom to resemble the machines we use in the macroscopic world. Life has already produced mechanisms that work very well on a small scale; as we learn more about how to manipulate it, we will learn more about how to adapt biological mechanisms to our uses.
Pretty much all of the above, I think. Remember the Chinese gov't has its own official distro -- Red Flag Linux -- and presumably that's what this monster will be running. Linux scales well, they can tweak it to do what they want, and they know the code's secure because they can look at all of it; what's not to like? And they don't have to worry about licensing fees, of course.*
*It's easy to be cynical about the degree to which US IP laws apply (or don't) in other countries, particularly in Communist ones, but the fact is that China is very interested in keeping good trade relations with the US.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. We tend to think of organisms that live in environments inimical to human life -- deserts, the deep ocean, polar regions, etc. -- as "tougher" than those that live in environments we consider pleasant. But of course they're not; they're all equally tough for their own environment. A tropical flower is just as tough as a desert cactus -- put that flower in the desert, and of course it will die; put that cactus in the tropics, same thing.
That being said, there are of course risks of contamination in both directions, and sterilization and containment procedures should be established. But the odds of a carefully collected organism escaping from a lab and wreaking ecological havoc are much lower than the risks of Something Bad being brought back in the cargo hold of a commercial vessel, ages hence when we (hopefully) have active interplanetary trade -- which I believe is how the majority of invader species cross oceans back here on good ol' Earth.
I was at Ft. Benning. I don't remember calling those close-in targets "Fast Freddie," but we definitely had them on the range. If the game is missing them, that's a major omission. I suppose it's possible that they don't have them any more (Basic was longer ago for me than I like to think about) but if so, I think that's a mistake. Learning how to snap-shoot at close-in targets is an important skill, especially for urban guerilla warfare ... gee, I wonder when that situation might come up ...
True enough, but then, it's fractal -- each place is actually a bunch of places, again with its own culture.
...
I was born in Texas, grew up in Colorado, joined to Army and went to Georgia, transferred to the AF and went back to Texas, then to Nebraska, then to East Anglia (UK), then to Qatar, then to North Dakota, then got out and came back to Colorado.
Houston, TX, where I was born, is not Wichita Falls, TX, where I went to tech school. Omaha, NE, where I was stationed, is not the same as the little farming towns that make up most of the state. Rural Cambridgshire, where I was stationed, is not London. Qatar, which is fairly liberal as Gulf states go, is not Saudi Arabia is not Kuwait. Denver, the place I know best, is not Boulder is not Pueblo is not Ft. Collins is not Colorado Springs. Capitol Hill, the Denver neighborhood where I live, is not Globeville, where I work, is not downtown is not Brentwood is not Park Hill is not Federal Heights is not
You get the idea. Any geographical area can be broken down into smaller and smaller units, each with its own distinct culture. And yet it's also reasonable to group these units into larger ones, which do have their own culture: Cap Hill, Denver, Colorado, the US, the English-speaking world.
[shrug] I'm a veteran, and a Mac user. I know at least two others. Take that FWIW.
Funny, I learned it as BRASS -- Breathe, Relax, Aim, Slack, Squeeze. The "Slack" step is taking up the slack in the trigger, which is pretty significant on those crappy old M16's they give you in Basic ...
... if this is the point where Big Blue is going to stop basically ignoring SCO and start going after them with guns blazing.
...
I mean, if SCO are trying to extort money from Linux customers by making them think they have to pay SCO as well as Linux and Linux service vendors (including, of course, IBM) then that's cutting directly into those vendors' business. It goes beyond FUD into a direct financial attack. Seems to me -- just guessing here -- that given how much IBM makes from the Linux aspects of its biz, they might get very upset.
Of course, Red Hat, SuSE, et al would also have reason to get upset, and at this point they could probably wipe SCO out themselves if they put their minds to it; but it's always nice to have IBM on your side
Heh. Well, one could argue that there's English English, but also Scottish English, Welsh English, and Northern Irish English -- all of which sound somewhat different, but do share a common spelling. Thus "British English".
And as well as American English, there's Australian English and Indian English, which I've heard is becoming the dominant form throughout southern Asia. Given the sheer numbers, that may be what most people think of as "English" eventually.
Only if their opponents make it a campaign issue, and they probably won't. I'm afraid this is seen as too much of a "geek issue" to get much play, even if given the sheer numbers it goes well beyond that.
This is the way it is with a lot of issues. The sexy stuff -- "homeland security," anyone? -- gets all the press, and it's on that basis that campaigns are waged and won. Stuff that has a much bigger effect on most people's lives, the arcana of economic policy (which is basically what this is, even though it's extending into the criminal realm) is just too complex for a thirty-second commercial or five-second sound bite. Civil rights are sexy, but people have to be really woken up to do anything about them; don't expect to see the Martin Luther King of file sharing any time soon.
Actually, if you're Dutch, then you probably learned British English in school, in which "defence" is the proper spelling. Don't worry about it. The inconsistencies between British and American spelling are part of a carefully orchestrated trans-Atlantic conspiracy.
Trust me. ;)
The worst and third worst terrorist attacks in recent American history were carried out by radical Islamic fundamentalists, yes. The second and fourth worst ... well, I don't think Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph had spent much time listening to the imams. Pretty much all fundamentalism is bad, mmmkay?
That's actually the original "in Soviet Russia" joke, from long before Yaakov Smirnoff made it a tiresome catchphrase. It was something that cynical Russians used to say: "Under capitalism, the Party tells us, man oppresses man. Under communism, it's the other way around."
The Mac WordPerfect of the same era (3.0 from WP Corp., then versions 3.1 and 3.5 from Novell) was also excellent. Probably the best word processor I've ever used, on any platform. Now that I use OS X all the time, I do appreciate enough OS X-only features that I don't drop back into Classic very often just to use itt -- but damn I wish Corel hadn't stopped development on the Mac version. Not having a native version of WP is the only way in which OS X is still Not There Yet for me.
... well, just about every M$ product. Please, someone bring back the idea of a word processor that just works!
What bugs the hell out of me is that all the current werps being developed, on any platform, all seem to be devoted to aping M$ Word. Word sucks, which means that any attempt to imitate it will also suck. It didn't beat WP because it was better; it beat WP because of the massive Microsoft PR machine, like
Honestly, I'm not sure if that's what it means or not. Certainly that's what it looks like -- "Thanks for all the hard work, guys, but we've sold our souls to Bill, so here's some cash, and good luck" -- but there is IMO a real possibility that AOL will keep funding the project for some time to come. It was a seven-year deal they signed with M$; and seven years may be a long time in Internet years, but it's not forever. (Seven years ago, IIRC, was when the browser war between Netscape and IE was really heating up. We may be long past that time, but clearly people still remember it, and lessons learned.) AOL knows perfectly well that it's in their best interest to continue having an IE alternative, especially since M$ announced just days after they signed the deal that they were folding IE completely into the OS. I'll be very surprised if AOL cuts the Mozilla Foundation loose completely.
Academics are outraged, if they're paying attention. But I'll bet every single literature professor in the country could donate his or her entire net worth to the cause of getting reasonable copyright laws passed, and the total amount of money raised still wouldn't equal Disney's lobbying budget.