The crucial difference -- one to which many pro-free-speech Republicans (i.e., folks who really ought to be Libertarians) often seem wilfully blind -- is that while both Democratic and Republican politicians try to score brownie points by attacking the entertainment industry, Democrats tend to appoint and approve liberal judges who keep the worst First Amendment abuses from becoming law. IOW, Lieberman et al are posturing , because they know they have the federal courts to keep them under control. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's better than the alternative -- "good hypocrisy beats evil sincerity," one might say.
... was recently taught at Metroplitan State College of Denver. I didn't have time to take it, unfortunately, but I'm well acquainted with the professor who taught it, and I'm sure she'd be glad to help you out. Her name is Dr. Judith Gurka and her e-mail is gurka(at)mscd(dot)edu. (Sorry for the spamtrap style, but you can parse it out.) Tell her I sent you.
As someone else pointed out, gcc is a great general-purpose compiler but it doesn't do a good job of optimizing for specialized instruction sets like the G4's AltiVec (or, for that matter, the Pentium's MMX). I'd go with a G4 and then get CodeWarrior; the folks who write CW have, for obvious reasons, more experience than anyone else in creating a compiler that can optimize G4 code than anyone else. (Er, I'm assuming CW for Linux is available for the PowerPC -- I'd be very surprised if it weren't. But I've been surprised before.) As a Mac guy, I can tell you that CW-compiled apps on a G4 absolutely scream. If that option is available, I think it's far and away the best.
My math dept. offers a degree in "Mathematics with Computer Science Emphasis" -- basically an Applied Math curriculum with a CS minor. IMO it turns out the best scientific and technical programmers; the math portion of the curriculum is very engineering-y (Numerical Analysis, PDE's, etc.) and the CS portion strikes a nice balance between theory and practice. Look for graduates of such programs and I think you'll find what you need. I think there are a fair number of them out there.
Remember, DARPA are the folks who came up with DARPANET, which begat the Internet, which begat the Web, which begat/. and many other wonderful things. Mindless paranoia just because the military is involved would mean turning our back on a whole lot of very cool things. And when it comes to biotech, it's not just cool; it may very well be the thing that saves your life somewhere down the line. (In a related vein, e.g., anyone who's been in a serious accident any time in the lastt few decades has the military to thank for their care, because the modern EMS system is the direct descendant of the military medevac system, which was first developed in its modern form in Korea and was perfected in Vietnam.) Yeah, it's perfectly reasonable about the government doing Eeevil Things with the knowledge -- but on the whole I'm a lot _more_ worried about cancer and diabetes and heart disease and AIDS and all the other killer diseases which may be cured with the knowledge this project creates.
Also, as a former military medic (and current biotech worker) I can tell you that the military is often _directly_ interested in doing good things for people, not just seeing spin-off benefits (e.g., the way the personal computer can trace its lineage directly back to NASA and the USAF.) The military population -- active duty, retirees, and family members -- constitutes a large, diverse patient population with health problems ranging from arthritis to (obviously) bullet wounds. DARPA, USUHS, and other military research institutions have a strong and legitimate interest in medical advances -- which will first help soldiers, and then their families, but which will inevitably propagate to civilian medicine as well.
Take a look at the small press, both traditional publishers like Meisha Merlin and Print-On-Demand (POD, not to be confused with subsidy or "pay as you go") like Wildside, and you may find what you're looking for. MM particularly seems to do a good job of pushing their authors -- they don't get quite the range of coverage that people who publish with, say, Tor do, but it's not bad.
That being said, I do think you should try the major publishers first. It's no fun gathering rejection slips (trust me, I've been there) but the rewards for a sale are enormous (I've been there too) and as for potential legal problems... well, try your best to negotiate any clauses (e-rights grabs especially) you find too objectionable, and if you can't strike a deal that satisfies you, you're under no obligation to sign the contract. You'd be surprised at how often publishers, even big ones, are willing to change things when authors, even first-timers, kick up a fuss. Often they write the worst possible language into a contract on the assumption that most authors will just go ahead and sign without plowing through the legalese, and sadly, they're often right.
Two caveats:
Never, ever, ever go through a self-publisher (subsidy publisher). As Mike Resnick says, in the writing universe money must always flow toward, and not away from, the author; if you have to pay the publisher one red cent to get your book on the shelves (or on Amazon) then that publisher isn't worth bothering with. In contrast, many perfectly respectable small presses don't pay you an advance up front, but they will pay you royalties. These guys are just fine, if that's the route you choose.
Know your rights. I strongly recommend Kirsch's Handbook of Publishing Law or a similar resource. Most publishers aren't inherently evil (despite the stories you may hear from drunk authors at SF cons) but the simple fact is that they're in business to make money, and the more of the revenue from any book they can keep, the happier they are... and the unhappier you are.
Keep at it, and good luck. I've been writing for about twelve years now, and my parents have been writing for about thirty, and despite all of us having been published several times we've still got day jobs, as do most of the writers we know... but not for a second have we ever seriously considered giving it up. It's worth it.
... of their rights and responsibilities. If employees sign NDA's and/or non-compete contracts, fine; then they're clearly bound not to go to the competition with what they know. But corporations which try to infer the existence of NDA's and non-compete contracts _where none actually exist_ are _evil_, and should be subject to severe antitrust penalties if they make any legal trouble for former employees at all.
Of course, we all know better than to expect any antitrust enforcement for the next four years, don't we?
This presupposes that object-oriented is the be-all and end-all of programming. Which it's not.
My college (which has a CS program I'm pretty happy with, all in all) teaches all the first- and second-year courses in Java now. When I went through, it was C++, which really meant "C with a bit of object stuff thrown in." Now, I've noticed that a lot of the newer students do have a kind of gut-level grasp of OO concepts and practices that I had to struggle to attain...
... but the fact is that the very first "real program" I wrote at my job was in C. Not C++, not Object C, damn sure not Java: straight C. And if I'd only been trained in Java at that point, I'd have been fucked. I've been in classes with people -- smart people, well-trained people -- who spend most of the semester trying to figure out what a pointer is, because Java hides those kinds of details; or it drives them nuts that they have to write this thing called "main" that's not in a class; or the concept of memory allocation and cleanup to prevent memory leaks is completely foreign. So they get to the junior level in CS and they think they know how to program, and they _do_, but there's a lot missing.
I like Java. I think it's a great language and I hope it continues to be used more widely. But neither Java itself nor OO programming in general is What Computer Science Is All About. There needs to be a mix of the high-level and low-level stuff. Evangelists for one or the other really annoy me.
Actually, the "bug-ridden C libraries" analogy is quite a good one.
Another good one is sensitivity to initial conditions in, e.g., differential equations -- what's often called "chaos." (Which is a perfectly good term, but it's been so bastardized by the pop-sci press that it makes me cringe.) Most of the equations used to model complex natural phenomena have enormous numbers of terms, and one of the reasons we can come up with even reasonably good models of incredibly complex phenomena is that the errors in the terms tend to cancel each other out over short time intervals. (Over long intervals, the equations inevitably blow up -- which is why, f'rinstance, short-range weather forecasting is quite good but long-range is still more art than science.) OTOH, equations with few terms blow up _faster_, i.e. start displaying chaotic behavior over shorter periods of time, because there aren't as many checks and balances.
The analogies to evolution should be obvious to all but the most deliberately obtuse.
>Voices from the Hellmouth Revisited: Part Ten
>
>There's your first clue.
[sigh] People who complain about how long this has gone on are spectacularly missing the point. It's still going on because it's _still important_. Bury your head in the sand if you want to, but the fact is that the horrors Katz writes about (writing better than 99 44/100 % of Slashdotters, I might add) are real and serious and have only become worse since Columbine. If you'd rather think only about something else -- for which I can't blame you, because this is unpleasant stuff to think about -- then try just skipping the articles.
... is to look at which countries people are trying to get into, and which ones they're trying to leave. The US still has people lined up around the figurative block trying to get in. Most other countries don't.
In terms of everyday, personal freedom to do what you want to do, most of the First World democracies are pretty much about the same, IMO. I'm born and raised in the US, and served most of my adult life in uniform, and consider myself a patriotic American, but for professional reasons I may find myself living in Canada or Western Europe or Japan one of these days and that wouldn't break my heart. OTOH, there's not a job in the world that could lure me to, say, China.
We do have our problems, but we do still have the major advantage of living in a country where change is possible without bloody revolution. Bush turns my stomach and I'll be deeply sorry to see Clinton (who is no great friend of liberty himself) give him the keys to the White House... but I'd still much rather see that than tanks rolling through the streets of Washington.
"Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself. History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris, but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance and greed as well as well as creativity and enterprise."
I can't quite tell if he's being ironic or not, but if he's serious, he ought to consider for just a moment that every single person in the world, including Katz himself, is likely to profit one day from this research. Are biotech company executives greedy, evil, heartless bastards? Some of them, maybe. But it really doesn't matter -- once the technology is out there, sooner or later it will be as cheaply and universally available as penicillin.
And in fact, history does not teach us to beware of hubris. History teaches us that technological advances inevitably do more good than harm, that without the "hubris" of "Prometheuses" (Promethei?) and "Frankensteins" who envisioned every major technologicy in human history from fire to X-rays to microchips, the human race would still be living in stone-age savagery. This is what the Luddites' ideas would ultimately reduce us to, if followed to their logical conclusion. Me, I _like_ living in the modern world -- I'd much rather program for a living than have to chase hyenas away from a rotting carcass to get a meal, and I'd much rather take my children into a clean, brightly-lit clinic for immunizations than watch them die off one by one from some horrible disease I think is caused by evil spirits, and I'd much rather fly all over the world in a 747 than live and die within a day's walk of the same spot of ground.
So what does teach us to beware of hubris? Religion, literature, and these days, the movies. That's it. When people say "History says..." and go on to lecture about the eeevils of technology, they're not thinking of history -- they're thinking of the Bible, and _Frankenstein_, and movies like _The 6th Day_. And these may all be fine, entertaining stories, but as guides to how to live one's life, they all fall short of modern rationalism. Next time you get sick, are you going to go to your doctor and quite likely get medicines developed and produced by biotech companies, or are you going to as God or Mary Shelley or Arnold Schwarzenegger to save you?
Um... actually, that's Filemaker (Pro, Server, etc.) It really is a tremendously easy-to-use DBMS with a lot of built-in functionality. But it doesn't scale up all that well, as my company recently found out, which is why we're going to SQL. If you're only going to working over a LAN or you want your remote users to access only _very simple_ databases, FMPro is fine. But if you want something that works well on a wide variety of connections, you really have no choice but the heavy-duty stuff. And right now, I think that's an inherent limitation, The Way Things Are. Another few years of steadily increasing data transmission rates and bandwidth, and it may be different.
Net access was largely a middle- and upper-class thing a couple of years ago; now it's becoming a working-class thing as well. A couple more years (well, okay, maybe five) and Net connections will be as ubiquitous as telephones. And there are very few Americans, even the poorest, who don't have telephones right now...
"State officials have been in talks with computer makers IBM, Compaq, Gateway, and Dell."
Macs will be marginalized; the existence of OS'es such as Linux, BSD, and Be will simply be ignored. If they go with Dell, there will probably be some ani-AMD propaganda involved too.
Yawn. Almost as soon as the words "virtual community" were first uttered together, Luddites jumped in screaming that there's no such thing. Too bad for them if they don't get it.
As usual, they seem to be the sort of people who think that the way things are at the moment of their births is the way things ought to be forever and ever, amen. Enormous cities linked together by high-speed transportation of the sort that's only existed for about 0.1% of human history? Those are communities, sure. But much smaller, more intimate groups of people linked together electronically _can't_ be communities, because we didn't have such things when I was a child, so it's not real! It's _not_!
[glyph of Luddite holding his breath until he turns blue]
Oh, yeah, it was eWorld, not "Apple World." Bad fact-checking makes me even less inclined to listen to him than I otherwise would be...
Re:People are bad, mmkay?
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
"You cannot go against nature / Because when you do / That going against nature / Is part of nature too"
-- Love and Rockets
(I may be mangling that slightly, but I think it's still a great verse.)
Well, um, yeah... Actually, the first thing that occurred to me when I read this was that something useful may finally have come out of SDI ("Star Wars.") It was sure as hell never going to shoot down an incoming ICBM, much less the whole Soviet fleet of them, but if the research done on high-powered lasers allows us to to clear out some space junk, that's a good thing.
Right now you're a med student, so you can afford to be self-righteous.
Wait until you actually start taking care of patients -- patients who, in many cases, can be diagnosed with fearsome accuracy, who can be told exactly what's killing them, patients you can't cure because even though you know what the problem is, there's no solution. I suspect at that point, you'll decide that though the drug companies may be a bunch of greedy bastards, the end result of their products -- _making sick people well_ -- is important enough that anything anyone can do to speed the discovery process along is worth it.
"Having been said often" =/= "redundancy". I'd say the original post _is_ an insight, and obviously it's one NASA (along with many other large tech-heavy organizations, public and private) needs to hear. Over and over again, if necessary, because that's the only way they're going to get the point.
OTOH... Modern technological advances, including _but not limited to_ the explosion of computational power, have made faster, better, _and cheaper_ possible for many products. Computers, obviously, but also cars, telephones, houses, furniture, medical equipment, airplanes, clothing -- you name it. We live in an age of historically unparalleled plenty, where high-quality products are available to all but the most poverty-stricken. This is "faster, better, cheaper" in action.
So, why doesn't it work for NASA? With the current model, of incredibly expensive one-off missions, it can't. When complex machines are hand-crafted, it really is "pick two of three." The key, IMO, is therefore to start seeing spacecraft as _products_ rather than _items_. We need to pick designs that work well (the Shuttle is actually a good example, despite its well-publicized problems) and build them the way we do computers and telephones, or at least the way we build houses and airliners.
A spacecraft capable of carrying an unmanned payload into orbit, or even out into the solar system at large, need not be nearly as complex as a 747; even spacecraft capable of taking up humans and returning them safely to Earth need be only slightly more complex than that. We _could_ be turning out Shuttles or their descendants in assembly-line fashion, and if we were doing so, costs would drop even as speed and quality rose.
Turn space into a matter of logistics. _Then_ we'll have all three of the "faster, better, cheaper" triad. Not before.
Gee, as a Mac user, I sure am glad Apple was sensible enough to give up the ghost a few years back when it was obvious that Wintel PC's were going to utterly crush Macs out of existence! And what about that whacko Torvalds guy with his idea of an open-source desktop version of Unix, huh? What a crazy idea! Good thing he too bowed to the superior marketplace power of Microsoft and realized that nobody wants anything but Windows, Internet Explorer, and Word...
US education in math and science _now_ is mediocre -- not as awful as it's often made out to be, but not particularly great by the standards of the developed world, either. But during the "space race" days, it was the best in the world, by a huge margin. That was my point.
Screw education? Consider that the reason US education in math and science was #1 in the world for decades was largely the emphasis the government was putting on the space program, a priority which spilled over into education. Two whole generations of engineers and scientists came out of an educational system designed to "win the space race." In fact, math and science ed. has largely declined in proportion to NASA's budget. Coincidence?
Screw law enforcement? The spinoff technologies of the space program include really effective bullet-proof vests (which were a _joke_ before 1970 or so) which have saved the lives of countless cops.
Screw health care? Spinoff tech is even more apparent here. Practically every single piece of equipment in a modern hospital is literally "space age technology." If you or anyone you care about has ever had an MRI, CT, EKG, or even a lowly IV with a plastic line and a Teflon-coated catheter (trust me, this is important) you have NASA to thank for it.
The fact is that the space program has improved the lives of nearly everyone on Earth in countless ways. It will continue to do so... if we give it the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
The crucial difference -- one to which many pro-free-speech Republicans (i.e., folks who really ought to be Libertarians) often seem wilfully blind -- is that while both Democratic and Republican politicians try to score brownie points by attacking the entertainment industry, Democrats tend to appoint and approve liberal judges who keep the worst First Amendment abuses from becoming law. IOW, Lieberman et al are posturing , because they know they have the federal courts to keep them under control. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's better than the alternative -- "good hypocrisy beats evil sincerity," one might say.
> Microsoft Certified Developer dot edu?
Hah hah hah.
Metropolitan State College of Denver.
... was recently taught at Metroplitan State College of Denver. I didn't have time to take it, unfortunately, but I'm well acquainted with the professor who taught it, and I'm sure she'd be glad to help you out. Her name is Dr. Judith Gurka and her e-mail is gurka(at)mscd(dot)edu. (Sorry for the spamtrap style, but you can parse it out.) Tell her I sent you.
As someone else pointed out, gcc is a great general-purpose compiler but it doesn't do a good job of optimizing for specialized instruction sets like the G4's AltiVec (or, for that matter, the Pentium's MMX). I'd go with a G4 and then get CodeWarrior; the folks who write CW have, for obvious reasons, more experience than anyone else in creating a compiler that can optimize G4 code than anyone else. (Er, I'm assuming CW for Linux is available for the PowerPC -- I'd be very surprised if it weren't. But I've been surprised before.) As a Mac guy, I can tell you that CW-compiled apps on a G4 absolutely scream. If that option is available, I think it's far and away the best.
My math dept. offers a degree in "Mathematics with Computer Science Emphasis" -- basically an Applied Math curriculum with a CS minor. IMO it turns out the best scientific and technical programmers; the math portion of the curriculum is very engineering-y (Numerical Analysis, PDE's, etc.) and the CS portion strikes a nice balance between theory and practice. Look for graduates of such programs and I think you'll find what you need. I think there are a fair number of them out there.
Remember, DARPA are the folks who came up with DARPANET, which begat the Internet, which begat the Web, which begat /. and many other wonderful things. Mindless paranoia just because the military is involved would mean turning our back on a whole lot of very cool things. And when it comes to biotech, it's not just cool; it may very well be the thing that saves your life somewhere down the line. (In a related vein, e.g., anyone who's been in a serious accident any time in the lastt few decades has the military to thank for their care, because the modern EMS system is the direct descendant of the military medevac system, which was first developed in its modern form in Korea and was perfected in Vietnam.) Yeah, it's perfectly reasonable about the government doing Eeevil Things with the knowledge -- but on the whole I'm a lot _more_ worried about cancer and diabetes and heart disease and AIDS and all the other killer diseases which may be cured with the knowledge this project creates.
Also, as a former military medic (and current biotech worker) I can tell you that the military is often _directly_ interested in doing good things for people, not just seeing spin-off benefits (e.g., the way the personal computer can trace its lineage directly back to NASA and the USAF.) The military population -- active duty, retirees, and family members -- constitutes a large, diverse patient population with health problems ranging from arthritis to (obviously) bullet wounds. DARPA, USUHS, and other military research institutions have a strong and legitimate interest in medical advances -- which will first help soldiers, and then their families, but which will inevitably propagate to civilian medicine as well.
Take a look at the small press, both traditional publishers like Meisha Merlin and Print-On-Demand (POD, not to be confused with subsidy or "pay as you go") like Wildside, and you may find what you're looking for. MM particularly seems to do a good job of pushing their authors -- they don't get quite the range of coverage that people who publish with, say, Tor do, but it's not bad.
That being said, I do think you should try the major publishers first. It's no fun gathering rejection slips (trust me, I've been there) but the rewards for a sale are enormous (I've been there too) and as for potential legal problems ... well, try your best to negotiate any clauses (e-rights grabs especially) you find too objectionable, and if you can't strike a deal that satisfies you, you're under no obligation to sign the contract. You'd be surprised at how often publishers, even big ones, are willing to change things when authors, even first-timers, kick up a fuss. Often they write the worst possible language into a contract on the assumption that most authors will just go ahead and sign without plowing through the legalese, and sadly, they're often right.
Two caveats:
Never, ever, ever go through a self-publisher (subsidy publisher). As Mike Resnick says, in the writing universe money must always flow toward, and not away from, the author; if you have to pay the publisher one red cent to get your book on the shelves (or on Amazon) then that publisher isn't worth bothering with. In contrast, many perfectly respectable small presses don't pay you an advance up front, but they will pay you royalties. These guys are just fine, if that's the route you choose.
Know your rights. I strongly recommend Kirsch's Handbook of Publishing Law or a similar resource. Most publishers aren't inherently evil (despite the stories you may hear from drunk authors at SF cons) but the simple fact is that they're in business to make money, and the more of the revenue from any book they can keep, the happier they are ... and the unhappier you are.
Keep at it, and good luck. I've been writing for about twelve years now, and my parents have been writing for about thirty, and despite all of us having been published several times we've still got day jobs, as do most of the writers we know ... but not for a second have we ever seriously considered giving it up. It's worth it.
... of their rights and responsibilities. If employees sign NDA's and/or non-compete contracts, fine; then they're clearly bound not to go to the competition with what they know. But corporations which try to infer the existence of NDA's and non-compete contracts _where none actually exist_ are _evil_, and should be subject to severe antitrust penalties if they make any legal trouble for former employees at all.
Of course, we all know better than to expect any antitrust enforcement for the next four years, don't we?
This presupposes that object-oriented is the be-all and end-all of programming. Which it's not.
...
My college (which has a CS program I'm pretty happy with, all in all) teaches all the first- and second-year courses in Java now. When I went through, it was C++, which really meant "C with a bit of object stuff thrown in." Now, I've noticed that a lot of the newer students do have a kind of gut-level grasp of OO concepts and practices that I had to struggle to attain
... but the fact is that the very first "real program" I wrote at my job was in C. Not C++, not Object C, damn sure not Java: straight C. And if I'd only been trained in Java at that point, I'd have been fucked. I've been in classes with people -- smart people, well-trained people -- who spend most of the semester trying to figure out what a pointer is, because Java hides those kinds of details; or it drives them nuts that they have to write this thing called "main" that's not in a class; or the concept of memory allocation and cleanup to prevent memory leaks is completely foreign. So they get to the junior level in CS and they think they know how to program, and they _do_, but there's a lot missing.
I like Java. I think it's a great language and I hope it continues to be used more widely. But neither Java itself nor OO programming in general is What Computer Science Is All About. There needs to be a mix of the high-level and low-level stuff. Evangelists for one or the other really annoy me.
Once more, I'm pleasantly amazed by the collective knowledge of the /. groupmind.
Actually, the "bug-ridden C libraries" analogy is quite a good one.
Another good one is sensitivity to initial conditions in, e.g., differential equations -- what's often called "chaos." (Which is a perfectly good term, but it's been so bastardized by the pop-sci press that it makes me cringe.) Most of the equations used to model complex natural phenomena have enormous numbers of terms, and one of the reasons we can come up with even reasonably good models of incredibly complex phenomena is that the errors in the terms tend to cancel each other out over short time intervals. (Over long intervals, the equations inevitably blow up -- which is why, f'rinstance, short-range weather forecasting is quite good but long-range is still more art than science.) OTOH, equations with few terms blow up _faster_, i.e. start displaying chaotic behavior over shorter periods of time, because there aren't as many checks and balances.
The analogies to evolution should be obvious to all but the most deliberately obtuse.
>Voices from the Hellmouth Revisited: Part Ten
>
>There's your first clue.
[sigh] People who complain about how long this has gone on are spectacularly missing the point. It's still going on because it's _still important_. Bury your head in the sand if you want to, but the fact is that the horrors Katz writes about (writing better than 99 44/100 % of Slashdotters, I might add) are real and serious and have only become worse since Columbine. If you'd rather think only about something else -- for which I can't blame you, because this is unpleasant stuff to think about -- then try just skipping the articles.
... is to look at which countries people are trying to get into, and which ones they're trying to leave. The US still has people lined up around the figurative block trying to get in. Most other countries don't.
... but I'd still much rather see that than tanks rolling through the streets of Washington.
In terms of everyday, personal freedom to do what you want to do, most of the First World democracies are pretty much about the same, IMO. I'm born and raised in the US, and served most of my adult life in uniform, and consider myself a patriotic American, but for professional reasons I may find myself living in Canada or Western Europe or Japan one of these days and that wouldn't break my heart. OTOH, there's not a job in the world that could lure me to, say, China.
We do have our problems, but we do still have the major advantage of living in a country where change is possible without bloody revolution. Bush turns my stomach and I'll be deeply sorry to see Clinton (who is no great friend of liberty himself) give him the keys to the White House
Katz writes:
..." and go on to lecture about the eeevils of technology, they're not thinking of history -- they're thinking of the Bible, and _Frankenstein_, and movies like _The 6th Day_. And these may all be fine, entertaining stories, but as guides to how to live one's life, they all fall short of modern rationalism. Next time you get sick, are you going to go to your doctor and quite likely get medicines developed and produced by biotech companies, or are you going to as God or Mary Shelley or Arnold Schwarzenegger to save you?
"Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself. History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris, but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance and greed as well as well as creativity and enterprise."
I can't quite tell if he's being ironic or not, but if he's serious, he ought to consider for just a moment that every single person in the world, including Katz himself, is likely to profit one day from this research. Are biotech company executives greedy, evil, heartless bastards? Some of them, maybe. But it really doesn't matter -- once the technology is out there, sooner or later it will be as cheaply and universally available as penicillin.
And in fact, history does not teach us to beware of hubris. History teaches us that technological advances inevitably do more good than harm, that without the "hubris" of "Prometheuses" (Promethei?) and "Frankensteins" who envisioned every major technologicy in human history from fire to X-rays to microchips, the human race would still be living in stone-age savagery. This is what the Luddites' ideas would ultimately reduce us to, if followed to their logical conclusion. Me, I _like_ living in the modern world -- I'd much rather program for a living than have to chase hyenas away from a rotting carcass to get a meal, and I'd much rather take my children into a clean, brightly-lit clinic for immunizations than watch them die off one by one from some horrible disease I think is caused by evil spirits, and I'd much rather fly all over the world in a 747 than live and die within a day's walk of the same spot of ground.
So what does teach us to beware of hubris? Religion, literature, and these days, the movies. That's it. When people say "History says
Um ... actually, that's Filemaker (Pro, Server, etc.) It really is a tremendously easy-to-use DBMS with a lot of built-in functionality. But it doesn't scale up all that well, as my company recently found out, which is why we're going to SQL. If you're only going to working over a LAN or you want your remote users to access only _very simple_ databases, FMPro is fine. But if you want something that works well on a wide variety of connections, you really have no choice but the heavy-duty stuff. And right now, I think that's an inherent limitation, The Way Things Are. Another few years of steadily increasing data transmission rates and bandwidth, and it may be different.
Net access was largely a middle- and upper-class thing a couple of years ago; now it's becoming a working-class thing as well. A couple more years (well, okay, maybe five) and Net connections will be as ubiquitous as telephones. And there are very few Americans, even the poorest, who don't have telephones right now ...
This line from the article says a lot:
"State officials have been in talks with computer makers IBM, Compaq, Gateway, and Dell."
Macs will be marginalized; the existence of OS'es such as Linux, BSD, and Be will simply be ignored. If they go with Dell, there will probably be some ani-AMD propaganda involved too.
Yawn. Almost as soon as the words "virtual community" were first uttered together, Luddites jumped in screaming that there's no such thing. Too bad for them if they don't get it.
...
As usual, they seem to be the sort of people who think that the way things are at the moment of their births is the way things ought to be forever and ever, amen. Enormous cities linked together by high-speed transportation of the sort that's only existed for about 0.1% of human history? Those are communities, sure. But much smaller, more intimate groups of people linked together electronically _can't_ be communities, because we didn't have such things when I was a child, so it's not real! It's _not_!
[glyph of Luddite holding his breath until he turns blue]
Oh, yeah, it was eWorld, not "Apple World." Bad fact-checking makes me even less inclined to listen to him than I otherwise would be
"You cannot go against nature / Because when you do / That going against nature / Is part of nature too" -- Love and Rockets (I may be mangling that slightly, but I think it's still a great verse.)
Well, um, yeah ... Actually, the first thing that occurred to me when I read this was that something useful may finally have come out of SDI ("Star Wars.") It was sure as hell never going to shoot down an incoming ICBM, much less the whole Soviet fleet of them, but if the research done on high-powered lasers allows us to to clear out some space junk, that's a good thing.
Right now you're a med student, so you can afford to be self-righteous.
Wait until you actually start taking care of patients -- patients who, in many cases, can be diagnosed with fearsome accuracy, who can be told exactly what's killing them, patients you can't cure because even though you know what the problem is, there's no solution. I suspect at that point, you'll decide that though the drug companies may be a bunch of greedy bastards, the end result of their products -- _making sick people well_ -- is important enough that anything anyone can do to speed the discovery process along is worth it.
Trust me on this. I've been there.
"Having been said often" =/= "redundancy". I'd say the original post _is_ an insight, and obviously it's one NASA (along with many other large tech-heavy organizations, public and private) needs to hear. Over and over again, if necessary, because that's the only way they're going to get the point.
... Modern technological advances, including _but not limited to_ the explosion of computational power, have made faster, better, _and cheaper_ possible for many products. Computers, obviously, but also cars, telephones, houses, furniture, medical equipment, airplanes, clothing -- you name it. We live in an age of historically unparalleled plenty, where high-quality products are available to all but the most poverty-stricken. This is "faster, better, cheaper" in action.
OTOH
So, why doesn't it work for NASA? With the current model, of incredibly expensive one-off missions, it can't. When complex machines are hand-crafted, it really is "pick two of three." The key, IMO, is therefore to start seeing spacecraft as _products_ rather than _items_. We need to pick designs that work well (the Shuttle is actually a good example, despite its well-publicized problems) and build them the way we do computers and telephones, or at least the way we build houses and airliners.
A spacecraft capable of carrying an unmanned payload into orbit, or even out into the solar system at large, need not be nearly as complex as a 747; even spacecraft capable of taking up humans and returning them safely to Earth need be only slightly more complex than that. We _could_ be turning out Shuttles or their descendants in assembly-line fashion, and if we were doing so, costs would drop even as speed and quality rose.
Turn space into a matter of logistics. _Then_ we'll have all three of the "faster, better, cheaper" triad. Not before.
Gee, as a Mac user, I sure am glad Apple was sensible enough to give up the ghost a few years back when it was obvious that Wintel PC's were going to utterly crush Macs out of existence! And what about that whacko Torvalds guy with his idea of an open-source desktop version of Unix, huh? What a crazy idea! Good thing he too bowed to the superior marketplace power of Microsoft and realized that nobody wants anything but Windows, Internet Explorer, and Word ...
US education in math and science _now_ is mediocre -- not as awful as it's often made out to be, but not particularly great by the standards of the developed world, either. But during the "space race" days, it was the best in the world, by a huge margin. That was my point.
[sigh]
... if we give it the chance.
Screw education? Consider that the reason US education in math and science was #1 in the world for decades was largely the emphasis the government was putting on the space program, a priority which spilled over into education. Two whole generations of engineers and scientists came out of an educational system designed to "win the space race." In fact, math and science ed. has largely declined in proportion to NASA's budget. Coincidence?
Screw law enforcement? The spinoff technologies of the space program include really effective bullet-proof vests (which were a _joke_ before 1970 or so) which have saved the lives of countless cops.
Screw health care? Spinoff tech is even more apparent here. Practically every single piece of equipment in a modern hospital is literally "space age technology." If you or anyone you care about has ever had an MRI, CT, EKG, or even a lowly IV with a plastic line and a Teflon-coated catheter (trust me, this is important) you have NASA to thank for it.
The fact is that the space program has improved the lives of nearly everyone on Earth in countless ways. It will continue to do so