Well, like I said, it's not that bad everywhere in the US -- just in the places where high-tech jobs are. Non-high-tech workers in such cities either work at jobs where they make good salaries -- lots of yuppies who barely know how to turn on a computer make a lot more money than I do -- or they live in Godawful cheap apartments and pray nothing bad happens month to month so they can make the rent. (Note than generally in American English usage, you own a "condo" but rent an "apartment.") There are plenty of decent places to live in the US where my salary alone would be enough to buy a nice big house for my wife and me, with money left over. Unfortunately, while there are some jobs to be had in those places, they're not programming jobs.
The relatively high population density and good public transportation have probably kept this situation from developing to the same degree in Europe. Although it sounds like to actually buy a house is as bad in Luxembourg as it is here, if not worse. I don't know, the American attitude toward having an actual, individual, free-standing, single-family house is probably kind of unusual in the world.
Quick answer: variations in the cost of living. The problem is that the cities in the US with the bulk of the tech jobs are, even now, well after the dot-bomb, horribly overpriced. Now, obviously, cost of living varies from place to place in Europe, too, but at least in England (don't know about the continent) the variations aren't quite as extreme. (Well, except for London and not-London, which is about as extreme a variation as you'll find within any one country...) So what might be a decent salary by overall US standards is jack shit in the cities where most of the IT jobs actually are.
I live in Denver, which is not by current high-tech American city standards a terribly expensive place to live -- and my wife and I live in a one-bedroom condo that is currently worth ~$150,000. If we buy a house, which we'd like to do soon, we're looking at a minimum of $200,000 to get something decent, and probably more than that. Figure out the numbers and you'll see why current US IT salaries for us grunts aren't astronomical at all.
I'll be out with it... I'm semi-religious, and I have not noticed god becoming distant at all. The base teachings of most religions (even mine) are vague enough that everything I know of that we have discovered as infalliable truth in science does not conflict with those teachings.
Oh, they're nice and vague now, because they have to be -- science, fighting uphill against religion every step of the way, has increased our knowledge of the universe enough that religion has had to retreat into platitudes. But every religion I know of has some very explicit (and contradictory with other religions' versions) things to say about how things got to be the way they are. That few people, even believers, take these origin myths seriously (and those who do, e.g. creationists, are rightly considered fools) is because science is better at explaining the world than religion is; it is not because religion does try. It does try, it just does a lousy job.
Um... there are a great many free-living bacterial species that get their food by feeding on... wait for it... other bacteria. No doubt any Martian bacteria would adapt to some degree to such a threat, but I kind of suspect that the crowded, critter-eat-critter environment of Earth has produced such viciously effective predators in all niches that any organisms that evolved in a less active biosphere wouldn't have a chance.
I used to keep pet rats. The reason I stopped was because they have very short lifespans; I got sick of getting attached to cute, smart, affectionate little balls of fuzz and having them die within a couple of years. They each have their own personalities and their own feelings just as much as dogs or cats do. And gram for gram, they're probably smarter than any other animal on the planet. Also, they're extremely clean.
Are wild rats vicious? Of course they are, but so are wild dogs and wild cats. Raised by loving owners, they're wonderful creatures. Now, whether you think more traditional domestic animals have any rights or not is a separate issue...
[sigh] The US is both a democracy and a republic. Republicanism is the method the Founders chose for democracy to operate. A good example of a republic without democracy is, oh, say, the People's Republic of China; a good example of a democracy without republicanism is, say, the United Kingdom. Where would you rather live?
To make the preliminary ballot, any work (literary or dramatic) needs to be nominated by at least ten active members of SFWA within a year of its release date. A lot of very good stuff is nominated by fewer than ten members and thus doesn't make the prelims. (Most of what I've nominated over the last few years made it to eight or nine nominations and then missed the cut by a vote or two... sigh.) Then what makes it from the prelim to the final ballot is determined by a vote of the membership, and of course the winner is determined from the final ballot by another organization-wide (active members only) vote. It's not a perfect system, but it works.
As a SFWAn (i.e., a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) I'll answer this:
SFWA, the organization which awards the Nebulas (and does lots of other stuff as well -- check out the Web site) is an organization for writers of both science fiction and fantasy, as the name implies. And yes, it was originally the Science Fiction Writers of America -- and then, briefly, SFFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, before we decided that changing a well-known acronym like SFWA (prounounced "sif-wa") was pointless, and held a vote to make the acronym SFWA regradless of what the actual name was -- and yes, the Nebulas have generally been dominated by science fiction at the expense of fantasy, but a) fantasy has gained a lot of ground over the last couple of decades, both critically and commercially, and it would be silly to ignore that, and b) the dramatic Nebulas (when we've awarded them -- we haven't always) have generally been a bit broader-based that the literary Nebulas, in recognition of the fact that Hollywood often turns out some really good SF/F while avoiding those labels for marketing reasons.
I was thinking more, "Arrrr, mateys, let's take the Solar Main!" Jolly Roger solar sails, charged-particle cutlasses, and of course wenches and rum...
Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Thanks for the kind words.:)
You know, I would really love it if I thought all my grandparents had at least another century of life to go. And, if they could be cured of the aches and pains of old age, I'll bet they would too. Day-to-day life may be depressing, but it's mostly better than the alternative.
I've had this argument about immortality, or even significant life extension, plenty of times before, and I've never understood it. "I don't want to live 200 years / 1000 years / a million years / forever," people say. "I'd get bored." To which my reply is, are you bored now, with decades? So bored that you really don't want to go on living? Then kill yourself now... or, if as is more likely, you're not bored with your threescore and ten, what makes you think you'll be bored with centuries or millennia?
Right off the top of my head, I can easily think up fulfilling, productive ways to spend at least a few thousand years of lifespan, especially if the people I care about will also have that time. And by my, say, 5000th birthday, I'll probably have figured out plenty more to do.
The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
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· Score: 4, Insightful
... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.
They mention a few examples already -- the $20 portable CD player, which is indeed a combination of a computer (albeit a very specialized one) and a laser, is a good example. The cool thing about CD players, and laptops, and cell phones, etc., is that not only are they all over the place, but also hardly anyone thinks of them as exotic. And, Future Shock to the contrary, they haven't come too fast for people to handle them. People have, in general, looked at them and said either, "Cool, I could use one of those," or, "I don't think I really need one right now" -- but hardly anyone is running around screaming about how cell phones have Fundamentally Altered Human Nature.
Now, I can easily imagine some intelligent, forward-thinking person from the pre-telephone, pre-radio era imagining something like a cell phone and saying, "In the future, people will be able to carry around small devices which will allow them to communicate instantaneously with each other over long distances. This will fundamentally redefine what it means to be human." And they'd have been right on the first point, of course... but very wrong on the second.
Bring on the cyborg eyes, the immortality pills, the nanotech assemblers. These technologies and many others may no doubt make a major difference in the way we live. But there will never be a point where, in our wired/bioengineered/nanotech world, we look back and say, "It's a different world now. We're not human any more." We'll just go on living our (hopefully very long) lives, the way we do with cars and TV's and electric lights now.
Because technology doesn't make us less human. It is a large component of what makes us human. Building things to make our lives better and easier has been a defining characteristic of human nature for the last hundred thousand years or so. Why should it be any different now?
... which in turn comes from carnival midways, of course.
Yes, yes, yes, there are other possible meanings. But in this context, it's utterly clear that "Midway" was meant to be "the turning point in the war against the Japanese." (See previous post talking about "Hiroshima" -- I'm not sure if that was a joke or not, but "not" wouldn't surprise me.) This is yet another example of Microsoft arrogance, this time on an international rather than national scale.
Don't count on it. The insanity of the War on (Some) Drugs has been putting huge numbers of innocent people ("innocent" in the sense of "not having harmed anyone except possibly themselves") in prison for a long time -- and it's getting worse, not better -- and although there does seem to be growing discontent with the current approach, we're a long way from seeing anything like "the grass-roots support to get these laws repealed."
Well, who knows, maybe this is the Big Crack in the Wintel monolith that we've all been waiting for. It will be ironic if AMD turns out to be Microsoft's best buddy and Intel ends up as the chipmaker of choice for Linux users, though... Of course, it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has suddenly parted company with an industry giant when it looked convenient for them.
It will crash either twice as fast or twice as hard, but not both. For crashes that are both twice as fast and twice as hard, you'll need the 128-bit version.;)
Well, okay, ignorance != stupidity. But the fact is that a lot of the "Accountants, Credit Managers, Sales Managers, Location Managers, etc." are aggressively ignorant about computers -- powerful tools, vital to their jobs, that they use every day -- and that amounts to stupidity. Instead of saying to their sysadmins, etc., "I don't know much about computer viruses, can you tell me how to protect myself?" they say, "I don't know and I don't want to know, but by the way, if we get hit with another virus outbreak, you're fired." This is roughly equivalent to telling your doctor, "Don't lecture me about smoking three packs a day and drinking a six-pack every night and eating at McDonald's all the time -- you're supposed to be the one keeping me healthy."
Okay, okay, I misremembered. But from the National Archives site (thanks for the link):
During the debates on the adoption of the Constitution, its opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way to tyranny by the central government. Fresh in their minds was the memory of the British violation of civil rights before and during the Revolution. They demanded a "bill of rights" that would spell out the immunities of individual citizens. Several state conventions in their formal ratification of the Constitution asked for such amendments; others ratified the Constitution with the understanding that the amendments would be offered. Image of the Bill of Rights
On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States therefore proposed to the state legislatures 12 amendments to the Constitution that met arguments most frequently advanced against it. The first two proposed amendments, which concerned the number of constituents for each Representative and the compensation of Congressmen, were not ratified. Articles 3 to 12, however, ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.
So my point was that the Bill of Rights was a necessary condition for acceptance of the Constitution. This makes these ten amendments rather different, historically if not legally, from all the others.
Well... first off, I'm not sure how seriously to take anyone who talks about "ammendments" and "ammending" the Constitution anyway. But, that being said...
The ten amendments which make up the Bill of Rights are qualitatively different from the others. They were not added to the Constitution after it was in place, like all the others. They were part of the original document ratified by the existing States. And in fact, the order in which they appear was almost as contentious a subject of debate as what they actually say. It is no coincidence that they appear in the order they do.
Legally, of course, there's no difference -- by definition, any amendment, once in place, is part of the law of the land. But there is a moral and historical difference, and it's silly to deny it.
Re:"Where were you in '62?"
on
Byte Wars
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· Score: 2
Well, culturally, 1962 was still the Fifties. "The Sixties" didn't really get rolling (outside San Francisco, anyway) until 1965 or so.
... I've discovered by picking up used copies of their books. I'm more willing to risk $0.50 - $4.00 on a used book by someone I'm not familiar with than $7.00 - $25.00 on a new book by same. And when I discover someone whose work I really like this way, I go out and buy everything I can from them new -- because I know that's the best way to ensure they keep writing.
I'd also talk about the number of bands whose work I discovered via Napster, and whose CD's I then bought new, but that's a dead horse.
Yeah, tha line bothered me too. But then, the phrase "software engineering" bothers me, not because it's not meaningful, but because the way it's often used implies that engineering is all there is to writing good programs. In the strictest sense, engineering (of any kind) isn't about theory -- but science is, which is one reason why I like the phrase "computer science" a lot more than some people seem to. A true computer scientist should be a good engineer, but also more -- and when you want a system that really works, and will continue to work over the course of years, that's what you need.
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Well, like I said, it's not that bad everywhere in the US -- just in the places where high-tech jobs are. Non-high-tech workers in such cities either work at jobs where they make good salaries -- lots of yuppies who barely know how to turn on a computer make a lot more money than I do -- or they live in Godawful cheap apartments and pray nothing bad happens month to month so they can make the rent. (Note than generally in American English usage, you own a "condo" but rent an "apartment.") There are plenty of decent places to live in the US where my salary alone would be enough to buy a nice big house for my wife and me, with money left over. Unfortunately, while there are some jobs to be had in those places, they're not programming jobs.
The relatively high population density and good public transportation have probably kept this situation from developing to the same degree in Europe. Although it sounds like to actually buy a house is as bad in Luxembourg as it is here, if not worse. I don't know, the American attitude toward having an actual, individual, free-standing, single-family house is probably kind of unusual in the world.
Quick answer: variations in the cost of living. The problem is that the cities in the US with the bulk of the tech jobs are, even now, well after the dot-bomb, horribly overpriced. Now, obviously, cost of living varies from place to place in Europe, too, but at least in England (don't know about the continent) the variations aren't quite as extreme. (Well, except for London and not-London, which is about as extreme a variation as you'll find within any one country ...) So what might be a decent salary by overall US standards is jack shit in the cities where most of the IT jobs actually are.
I live in Denver, which is not by current high-tech American city standards a terribly expensive place to live -- and my wife and I live in a one-bedroom condo that is currently worth ~$150,000. If we buy a house, which we'd like to do soon, we're looking at a minimum of $200,000 to get something decent, and probably more than that. Figure out the numbers and you'll see why current US IT salaries for us grunts aren't astronomical at all.
Oh, they're nice and vague now, because they have to be -- science, fighting uphill against religion every step of the way, has increased our knowledge of the universe enough that religion has had to retreat into platitudes. But every religion I know of has some very explicit (and contradictory with other religions' versions) things to say about how things got to be the way they are. That few people, even believers, take these origin myths seriously (and those who do, e.g. creationists, are rightly considered fools) is because science is better at explaining the world than religion is; it is not because religion does try. It does try, it just does a lousy job.
Um ... there are a great many free-living bacterial species that get their food by feeding on ... wait for it ... other bacteria. No doubt any Martian bacteria would adapt to some degree to such a threat, but I kind of suspect that the crowded, critter-eat-critter environment of Earth has produced such viciously effective predators in all niches that any organisms that evolved in a less active biosphere wouldn't have a chance.
I used to keep pet rats. The reason I stopped was because they have very short lifespans; I got sick of getting attached to cute, smart, affectionate little balls of fuzz and having them die within a couple of years. They each have their own personalities and their own feelings just as much as dogs or cats do. And gram for gram, they're probably smarter than any other animal on the planet. Also, they're extremely clean.
...
Are wild rats vicious? Of course they are, but so are wild dogs and wild cats. Raised by loving owners, they're wonderful creatures. Now, whether you think more traditional domestic animals have any rights or not is a separate issue
[sigh] The US is both a democracy and a republic. Republicanism is the method the Founders chose for democracy to operate. A good example of a republic without democracy is, oh, say, the People's Republic of China; a good example of a democracy without republicanism is, say, the United Kingdom. Where would you rather live?
To make the preliminary ballot, any work (literary or dramatic) needs to be nominated by at least ten active members of SFWA within a year of its release date. A lot of very good stuff is nominated by fewer than ten members and thus doesn't make the prelims. (Most of what I've nominated over the last few years made it to eight or nine nominations and then missed the cut by a vote or two ... sigh.) Then what makes it from the prelim to the final ballot is determined by a vote of the membership, and of course the winner is determined from the final ballot by another organization-wide (active members only) vote. It's not a perfect system, but it works.
As a SFWAn (i.e., a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) I'll answer this:
SFWA, the organization which awards the Nebulas (and does lots of other stuff as well -- check out the Web site) is an organization for writers of both science fiction and fantasy, as the name implies. And yes, it was originally the Science Fiction Writers of America -- and then, briefly, SFFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, before we decided that changing a well-known acronym like SFWA (prounounced "sif-wa") was pointless, and held a vote to make the acronym SFWA regradless of what the actual name was -- and yes, the Nebulas have generally been dominated by science fiction at the expense of fantasy, but a) fantasy has gained a lot of ground over the last couple of decades, both critically and commercially, and it would be silly to ignore that, and b) the dramatic Nebulas (when we've awarded them -- we haven't always) have generally been a bit broader-based that the literary Nebulas, in recognition of the fact that Hollywood often turns out some really good SF/F while avoiding those labels for marketing reasons.
I was thinking more, "Arrrr, mateys, let's take the Solar Main!" Jolly Roger solar sails, charged-particle cutlasses, and of course wenches and rum ...
Thanks for the kind words. :)
... or, if as is more likely, you're not bored with your threescore and ten, what makes you think you'll be bored with centuries or millennia?
You know, I would really love it if I thought all my grandparents had at least another century of life to go. And, if they could be cured of the aches and pains of old age, I'll bet they would too. Day-to-day life may be depressing, but it's mostly better than the alternative.
I've had this argument about immortality, or even significant life extension, plenty of times before, and I've never understood it. "I don't want to live 200 years / 1000 years / a million years / forever," people say. "I'd get bored." To which my reply is, are you bored now, with decades? So bored that you really don't want to go on living? Then kill yourself now
Right off the top of my head, I can easily think up fulfilling, productive ways to spend at least a few thousand years of lifespan, especially if the people I care about will also have that time. And by my, say, 5000th birthday, I'll probably have figured out plenty more to do.
... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.
... but very wrong on the second.
They mention a few examples already -- the $20 portable CD player, which is indeed a combination of a computer (albeit a very specialized one) and a laser, is a good example. The cool thing about CD players, and laptops, and cell phones, etc., is that not only are they all over the place, but also hardly anyone thinks of them as exotic. And, Future Shock to the contrary, they haven't come too fast for people to handle them. People have, in general, looked at them and said either, "Cool, I could use one of those," or, "I don't think I really need one right now" -- but hardly anyone is running around screaming about how cell phones have Fundamentally Altered Human Nature.
Now, I can easily imagine some intelligent, forward-thinking person from the pre-telephone, pre-radio era imagining something like a cell phone and saying, "In the future, people will be able to carry around small devices which will allow them to communicate instantaneously with each other over long distances. This will fundamentally redefine what it means to be human." And they'd have been right on the first point, of course
Bring on the cyborg eyes, the immortality pills, the nanotech assemblers. These technologies and many others may no doubt make a major difference in the way we live. But there will never be a point where, in our wired/bioengineered/nanotech world, we look back and say, "It's a different world now. We're not human any more." We'll just go on living our (hopefully very long) lives, the way we do with cars and TV's and electric lights now.
Because technology doesn't make us less human. It is a large component of what makes us human. Building things to make our lives better and easier has been a defining characteristic of human nature for the last hundred thousand years or so. Why should it be any different now?
... which in turn comes from carnival midways, of course.
Yes, yes, yes, there are other possible meanings. But in this context, it's utterly clear that "Midway" was meant to be "the turning point in the war against the Japanese." (See previous post talking about "Hiroshima" -- I'm not sure if that was a joke or not, but "not" wouldn't surprise me.) This is yet another example of Microsoft arrogance, this time on an international rather than national scale.
Don't count on it. The insanity of the War on (Some) Drugs has been putting huge numbers of innocent people ("innocent" in the sense of "not having harmed anyone except possibly themselves") in prison for a long time -- and it's getting worse, not better -- and although there does seem to be growing discontent with the current approach, we're a long way from seeing anything like "the grass-roots support to get these laws repealed."
Well, who knows, maybe this is the Big Crack in the Wintel monolith that we've all been waiting for. It will be ironic if AMD turns out to be Microsoft's best buddy and Intel ends up as the chipmaker of choice for Linux users, though ... Of course, it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has suddenly parted company with an industry giant when it looked convenient for them.
It will crash either twice as fast or twice as hard, but not both. For crashes that are both twice as fast and twice as hard, you'll need the 128-bit version. ;)
LOL! Well, yeah, that would be one solution, I suppose ...
Well, okay, ignorance != stupidity. But the fact is that a lot of the "Accountants, Credit Managers, Sales Managers, Location Managers, etc." are aggressively ignorant about computers -- powerful tools, vital to their jobs, that they use every day -- and that amounts to stupidity. Instead of saying to their sysadmins, etc., "I don't know much about computer viruses, can you tell me how to protect myself?" they say, "I don't know and I don't want to know, but by the way, if we get hit with another virus outbreak, you're fired." This is roughly equivalent to telling your doctor, "Don't lecture me about smoking three packs a day and drinking a six-pack every night and eating at McDonald's all the time -- you're supposed to be the one keeping me healthy."
So my point was that the Bill of Rights was a necessary condition for acceptance of the Constitution. This makes these ten amendments rather different, historically if not legally, from all the others.
Well ... first off, I'm not sure how seriously to take anyone who talks about "ammendments" and "ammending" the Constitution anyway. But, that being said ...
The ten amendments which make up the Bill of Rights are qualitatively different from the others. They were not added to the Constitution after it was in place, like all the others. They were part of the original document ratified by the existing States. And in fact, the order in which they appear was almost as contentious a subject of debate as what they actually say. It is no coincidence that they appear in the order they do.
Legally, of course, there's no difference -- by definition, any amendment, once in place, is part of the law of the land. But there is a moral and historical difference, and it's silly to deny it.
Well, culturally, 1962 was still the Fifties. "The Sixties" didn't really get rolling (outside San Francisco, anyway) until 1965 or so.
... I've discovered by picking up used copies of their books. I'm more willing to risk $0.50 - $4.00 on a used book by someone I'm not familiar with than $7.00 - $25.00 on a new book by same. And when I discover someone whose work I really like this way, I go out and buy everything I can from them new -- because I know that's the best way to ensure they keep writing.
I'd also talk about the number of bands whose work I discovered via Napster, and whose CD's I then bought new, but that's a dead horse.
She's still a civilian. NASA isn't (officially) part of the military.
... but as someone who now works in biotech, I suppose this sort of thing represents job security ...
Early in the article, it says:
But then in the next paragraph, it says:
So which is it -- are they going to be trading "executives", or "experts"? Because you can't have it both ways ...
Yeah, tha line bothered me too. But then, the phrase "software engineering" bothers me, not because it's not meaningful, but because the way it's often used implies that engineering is all there is to writing good programs. In the strictest sense, engineering (of any kind) isn't about theory -- but science is, which is one reason why I like the phrase "computer science" a lot more than some people seem to. A true computer scientist should be a good engineer, but also more -- and when you want a system that really works, and will continue to work over the course of years, that's what you need.