And when was this wonderful golden age when people knew right from wrong, again? Half a century ago, the age of Jim Crow and McCarthyism? A century ago, when the US was completing its genocide of the Indians? A century and a half, when a third of the country's economic system was built on slavery? Two centuries, when (as was true until fairly recently, in fact) orphans and the sick and old routinely starved to death?
By every meaningful standard, we live in an age which is more moral than any previous one. The only way this isn't the case is if you define poverty and misery as moral and wealth and happiness as immoral -- which many religions do, of course, but that's _their_ psychosis, not mine. "Mud to mud" is the most liberating, the most realistic, the most useful, and far and away the most moral worldview in human history.
Why are we paying all these long-haired engineers to study electronics? Mechanical calculating machines are capable of doing all the math we'll ever need.
I'll say it again: not one private manned space mission has ever been launched. I'm not saying that such missions won't be launched -- I think they will, and that eventually they'll be as routine as airliner takeoffs, and will be seen as the normal means of getting into space, and I hope that day comes quite soon. But right now, it's all vaporware.
"NASA has had much more success with unmanned missions than manned ones?" Depends on how you define "success," I guess... Personally, I see manned and unmanned missions as being different in kind as well as degree, and I don't think we can truly say we've become "successful" in space until we have large numbers of people up there, all the time.
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and even the Shuttle all accomplished their missions. Meanwhile, _no_ private company has had _any_ success with manned missions -- except of course for building them for the government, using that "about as far behind as possibly could be technology."
During WWII, um, we were, well, _at war_. The alternative to dead test pilots was even more dead combat pilots. We're not in anything like the same situation today.
I'm all for private space exploration, but I have to say that I'm a little tired of the conventional wisdom that private companies will do things faster, better, and cheaper (to coin a phrase) than NASA when the fact is that _not one_ private manned space mission has ever been launched. My Dad worked on Apollo and Skylab, and he's made the point quite persuasively that the reason NASA spends so much time and money on manned missions is that _that was the only way to make sure they got everything right_; it's unfortunate when an unmanned mission goes bad, but it's orders of magnitude worse when _people get killed_. And as recent events with unmanned missions have shown, faster and cheaper is not always better... Imagine what the impact on space exploration would have been if a manned Mars mission had suffered the same fate as the unmanned probes.
In general, I'm deeply skeptical of the current mania for privatization of government jobs. Schools, prisons, transportation... none of these have delivered the promised benefits. I'm fundamentally a believer in capitalism, but I think we as a society have to accept that there are some things government does better, some things private enterprise does better, and some things which are best done simultaneously by both. I strongly suspect that space exploration falls into this last category.
Having been an infantryman in the Army and both a medic and CSSO (computer systems security officer) in the Air Force, and being currently a software and Web developer, I have to say that anyone who thinks that military personnel are a bunch of idiots who will "stay as far away from computers as they can" is both extremely prejudiced and very ignorant of the military. Computers already defend your country. Military life is very physical, true, but dumb jocks don't cut it.
The real issue is that grunts are deeply and justifiably suspicious of expensive, high-tech equipment that is likely to fail under the filthy conditions that characterize a combat soldier's life in the field. The flashy stuff is great when it works. When it doesn't, it's worse than useless. And this system runs on Windows CE? Apparently the brass hasn't learned a damned thing from those hacker attacks, not to mention an entire missile cruiser suffering massive NT failure...
>Richard Feynman said rightly: For a sucessful >technology, reality must take precedence over >public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
While I certainly agree with the basic message of this post, I have to point out that (IIRC) Feynman died long before Microsoft became the highest market-cap company in the world... So it depends on your definition of "successful." If it's financial success you're after, well, nature can't be fooled, but customers sure can.
Yep. And it's a very old phenomenon: "Yankee Doodle" started as a derisive British song about American rubes who thought they were sophisticated. (Riding on a pony rather than a horse, thinking that a feather in the cap was enough to make one's outfit "macaroni," i.e. fashionable, etc.) Didn't take long at all for the colonists to adopt the song as an anthem.
I don't particularly mind being called a geek (I'm less favorably inclined toward "nerd," but hey, I _am_ reading Slashdot...) but I do have to say I wish that so many of my fellow techies wouldn't _act_ like the stereotypical computer geeks -- out of shape, socially awkward, mismatched clothes, etc. It doesn't really take all that much effort to beat the "popular kids" we all hated in high school at their own game while _still_ being smart and technically proficient.
Well, of course I don't actually want to kill M$, and nothing anyone will actually do _could_ kill them. Your proposed remedies are, in fact, much harsher than anything that's really likely to happen, though they sound good to me...
But what those remedies would do -- and what I hope a combination of DoJ action and private lawsuits _will_ do -- is kill M$ _as it exists now_, as this giant rampaging monster crushing the rest of the computer industry. I wish Gary Kildall were here to see it...
No one suit (not even the DoJ's) is likely to bring Microsothoth down, but enough of these attacks will nibble away at them until they're too weak to stand, and then it's all over... and that's a _good_ thing. I really don't care about the merits of Caldera's suit, pro or con, but MS is plain _evil_, and needs to be brought down by any and all means available.
As a (mostly) Netscape on Mac user, I face Web incompatibility issues fairly often, though not as often as Linux users. I'm also a Web developer (among other things) by trade, and my immediate reaction to sites that use Windows/Explorer-only plug-ins is to dismiss them as not worth my time. E-commerce sites that don't support other OS'es and browsers _will not make as much money_ as those that make their pages as compatible as possible; given the fiercely competitive nature of "e-tailing," expect them to go out of business in the long run. Problem solved.
I understand that this argument works better with techies than with non-techies, though. Education is the key, really. E.g., my wife, who is a literate user but who has no real programming skills, is often frustrated at the limitations of the Mac vs. the Windows world -- but she's also learned enough about Windows to know that she'll accept those limitations in return for the stability and ease of use the MacOS provides.
If Apple charged developers a licensing fee, pretty soon no one would be developing for Mac except, well, Apple. It boils down to economics: games for set-top boxes like Playstation et al sell so well (orders of magnitude more than _any_ application for _any_ desktop OS, last I heard) that it's worth it for developers to pay a licensing fee. I doubt that any desktop OS manufacturer, even M$, could get away with such a requirement; damn sure Apple couldn't.
Most drugs currently in use are derived from "natural" sources; most new drugs -- including ones which can fight resistant strains of bacteria and viruses which can eat the older, "natural" drugs for lunch -- are coming straight out of the lab rather than being refined from naturally-occurring molds and the like. Neither of facts should surprise anyone. It used to be easier to go looking at plants for new drugs; now that the mechanisms of disease are better understood, it's often -- but not always -- easier to create them in the lab. But once they're created, it's often more economical to use (usually bioengineered) organisms such as yeast and mold to grow them.
So what? "Natural" vs. "artifical" is a silly distinction here; penicillium mold may be perfectly "natural," but refining penicillin from it is not -- unless you take the rational view that _it is human nature_ to make useful items from available materials.
Honestly, I don't care where new drugs come from, as long as they're effective and safe. In my 9+ years in the medical field (8 as an Air Force medic, 1 and some months as a civilian med tech) I lost patient after patient to diseases with perfectly well understood _mechanisms_ for which we simply didn't have a cure yet. It was horrible. If we can create new drugs to cure those diseases, the source _does not matter_. What matters is the lives those drugs save.
... than with just about any other field in the world, technological or social. The amount of effort currently being applied to improvements in computers (hardware and software) when applied to more mature fields of human endeavor -- automotive engineering, agriculture, medicine, economics, literature, you name it -- will produce results at a slower rate for the very simple reason that most of the easy innovations have already been made.
As many other posters have pointed out, a great many smart people _are_ working hard in these other fields, and important changes are happening, but more slowly. Computer technology right now is where automotive technology was in 1910, or English literature was from about 1500-1800, or... well, you get the idea. It's absurd to expect the same any field to maintain dizzying pace of innovation it experiences when it's first coming into its own.
And yes, damn it, the Internet _does_ matter. Online communities such as Usenet, e-mail, and Web shopping, to name a few obvious examples, have made my life and the lives of many others richer, easier, and all around _better_ than they were before. Real, deep-rooted, long-lasting social and political changes are starting to take root around the world because for the first time in history people have fast, cheap, reliable communication that _cannot_ be controlled by any one government or social institution. The astounding growth of the economy in the US and many other countries over the last few years can be _directly_ traced to the explosion in the computer sector, which in turn is largely due to the Net. Etc., etc., etc.
The strange phenomenon of technophobic rants propagating via TCP/IP is, ironically, one of the best indicators of the Net's growing importance to modern intellectual life. Even Luddites know, deep down, that their opinions _only_ matter if they share them with other people -- and the best vehicle to do that is the Net they affect to despise.
Slashdot Mirror
And when was this wonderful golden age when people knew right from wrong, again? Half a century ago, the age of Jim Crow and McCarthyism? A century ago, when the US was completing its genocide of the Indians? A century and a half, when a third of the country's economic system was built on slavery? Two centuries, when (as was true until fairly recently, in fact) orphans and the sick and old routinely starved to death?
By every meaningful standard, we live in an age which is more moral than any previous one. The only way this isn't the case is if you define poverty and misery as moral and wealth and happiness as immoral -- which many religions do, of course, but that's _their_ psychosis, not mine. "Mud to mud" is the most liberating, the most realistic, the most useful, and far and away the most moral worldview in human history.
Why are we paying all these long-haired engineers to study electronics? Mechanical calculating machines are capable of doing all the math we'll ever need.
(Etc.)
I'll say it again: not one private manned space mission has ever been launched. I'm not saying that such missions won't be launched -- I think they will, and that eventually they'll be as routine as airliner takeoffs, and will be seen as the normal means of getting into space, and I hope that day comes quite soon. But right now, it's all vaporware.
... Personally, I see manned and unmanned missions as being different in kind as well as degree, and I don't think we can truly say we've become "successful" in space until we have large numbers of people up there, all the time.
"NASA has had much more success with unmanned missions than manned ones?" Depends on how you define "success," I guess
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and even the Shuttle all accomplished their missions. Meanwhile, _no_ private company has had _any_ success with manned missions -- except of course for building them for the government, using that "about as far behind as possibly could be technology."
During WWII, um, we were, well, _at war_. The alternative to dead test pilots was even more dead combat pilots. We're not in anything like the same situation today.
I'm all for private space exploration, but I have to say that I'm a little tired of the conventional wisdom that private companies will do things faster, better, and cheaper (to coin a phrase) than NASA when the fact is that _not one_ private manned space mission has ever been launched. My Dad worked on Apollo and Skylab, and he's made the point quite persuasively that the reason NASA spends so much time and money on manned missions is that _that was the only way to make sure they got everything right_; it's unfortunate when an unmanned mission goes bad, but it's orders of magnitude worse when _people get killed_. And as recent events with unmanned missions have shown, faster and cheaper is not always better ... Imagine what the impact on space exploration would have been if a manned Mars mission had suffered the same fate as the unmanned probes.
... none of these have delivered the promised benefits. I'm fundamentally a believer in capitalism, but I think we as a society have to accept that there are some things government does better, some things private enterprise does better, and some things which are best done simultaneously by both. I strongly suspect that space exploration falls into this last category.
In general, I'm deeply skeptical of the current mania for privatization of government jobs. Schools, prisons, transportation
Having been an infantryman in the Army and both a medic and CSSO (computer systems security officer) in the Air Force, and being currently a software and Web developer, I have to say that anyone who thinks that military personnel are a bunch of idiots who will "stay as far away from computers as they can" is both extremely prejudiced and very ignorant of the military. Computers already defend your country. Military life is very physical, true, but dumb jocks don't cut it.
...
The real issue is that grunts are deeply and justifiably suspicious of expensive, high-tech equipment that is likely to fail under the filthy conditions that characterize a combat soldier's life in the field. The flashy stuff is great when it works. When it doesn't, it's worse than useless. And this system runs on Windows CE? Apparently the brass hasn't learned a damned thing from those hacker attacks, not to mention an entire missile cruiser suffering massive NT failure
>Richard Feynman said rightly: For a sucessful
... So it depends on your definition of "successful." If it's financial success you're after, well, nature can't be fooled, but customers sure can.
>technology, reality must take precedence over
>public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
While I certainly agree with the basic message of this post, I have to point out that (IIRC) Feynman died long before Microsoft became the highest market-cap company in the world
Yep. And it's a very old phenomenon: "Yankee Doodle" started as a derisive British song about American rubes who thought they were sophisticated. (Riding on a pony rather than a horse, thinking that a feather in the cap was enough to make one's outfit "macaroni," i.e. fashionable, etc.) Didn't take long at all for the colonists to adopt the song as an anthem.
...) but I do have to say I wish that so many of my fellow techies wouldn't _act_ like the stereotypical computer geeks -- out of shape, socially awkward, mismatched clothes, etc. It doesn't really take all that much effort to beat the "popular kids" we all hated in high school at their own game while _still_ being smart and technically proficient.
I don't particularly mind being called a geek (I'm less favorably inclined toward "nerd," but hey, I _am_ reading Slashdot
Well, of course I don't actually want to kill M$, and nothing anyone will actually do _could_ kill them. Your proposed remedies are, in fact, much harsher than anything that's really likely to happen, though they sound good to me ...
...
But what those remedies would do -- and what I hope a combination of DoJ action and private lawsuits _will_ do -- is kill M$ _as it exists now_, as this giant rampaging monster crushing the rest of the computer industry. I wish Gary Kildall were here to see it
and loose the piranhas of war.
... and that's a _good_ thing. I really don't care about the merits of Caldera's suit, pro or con, but MS is plain _evil_, and needs to be brought down by any and all means available.
No one suit (not even the DoJ's) is likely to bring Microsothoth down, but enough of these attacks will nibble away at them until they're too weak to stand, and then it's all over
As a (mostly) Netscape on Mac user, I face Web incompatibility issues fairly often, though not as often as Linux users. I'm also a Web developer (among other things) by trade, and my immediate reaction to sites that use Windows/Explorer-only plug-ins is to dismiss them as not worth my time. E-commerce sites that don't support other OS'es and browsers _will not make as much money_ as those that make their pages as compatible as possible; given the fiercely competitive nature of "e-tailing," expect them to go out of business in the long run. Problem solved.
I understand that this argument works better with techies than with non-techies, though. Education is the key, really. E.g., my wife, who is a literate user but who has no real programming skills, is often frustrated at the limitations of the Mac vs. the Windows world -- but she's also learned enough about Windows to know that she'll accept those limitations in return for the stability and ease of use the MacOS provides.
If Apple charged developers a licensing fee, pretty soon no one would be developing for Mac except, well, Apple. It boils down to economics: games for set-top boxes like Playstation et al sell so well (orders of magnitude more than _any_ application for _any_ desktop OS, last I heard) that it's worth it for developers to pay a licensing fee. I doubt that any desktop OS manufacturer, even M$, could get away with such a requirement; damn sure Apple couldn't.
Most drugs currently in use are derived from "natural" sources; most new drugs -- including ones which can fight resistant strains of bacteria and viruses which can eat the older, "natural" drugs for lunch -- are coming straight out of the lab rather than being refined from naturally-occurring molds and the like. Neither of facts should surprise anyone. It used to be easier to go looking at plants for new drugs; now that the mechanisms of disease are better understood, it's often -- but not always -- easier to create them in the lab. But once they're created, it's often more economical to use (usually bioengineered) organisms such as yeast and mold to grow them.
So what? "Natural" vs. "artifical" is a silly distinction here; penicillium mold may be perfectly "natural," but refining penicillin from it is not -- unless you take the rational view that _it is human nature_ to make useful items from available materials.
Honestly, I don't care where new drugs come from, as long as they're effective and safe. In my 9+ years in the medical field (8 as an Air Force medic, 1 and some months as a civilian med tech) I lost patient after patient to diseases with perfectly well understood _mechanisms_ for which we simply didn't have a cure yet. It was horrible. If we can create new drugs to cure those diseases, the source _does not matter_. What matters is the lives those drugs save.
... than with just about any other field in the world, technological or social. The amount of effort currently being applied to improvements in computers (hardware and software) when applied to more mature fields of human endeavor -- automotive engineering, agriculture, medicine, economics, literature, you name it -- will produce results at a slower rate for the very simple reason that most of the easy innovations have already been made.
... well, you get the idea. It's absurd to expect the same any field to maintain dizzying pace of innovation it experiences when it's first coming into its own.
As many other posters have pointed out, a great many smart people _are_ working hard in these other fields, and important changes are happening, but more slowly. Computer technology right now is where automotive technology was in 1910, or English literature was from about 1500-1800, or
And yes, damn it, the Internet _does_ matter. Online communities such as Usenet, e-mail, and Web shopping, to name a few obvious examples, have made my life and the lives of many others richer, easier, and all around _better_ than they were before. Real, deep-rooted, long-lasting social and political changes are starting to take root around the world because for the first time in history people have fast, cheap, reliable communication that _cannot_ be controlled by any one government or social institution. The astounding growth of the economy in the US and many other countries over the last few years can be _directly_ traced to the explosion in the computer sector, which in turn is largely due to the Net. Etc., etc., etc.
The strange phenomenon of technophobic rants propagating via TCP/IP is, ironically, one of the best indicators of the Net's growing importance to modern intellectual life. Even Luddites know, deep down, that their opinions _only_ matter if they share them with other people -- and the best vehicle to do that is the Net they affect to despise.
Oh, okay ...
if (student_clothes == Abercrombie){
student_status = okay;
return;
}
if (student_clothes == black){
student_status = violent;
etc.
That takes care of the problem; Abercrombie returns "okay" regardless of color. Thanks for the bug report. [1/2 g]
Oh, I can guess at the algorithms:
...
if (student_clothes == black)
student_status = violent;
if (student_clothes == Abercrombie)
student_status = okay;
etc.