Well, that's a ringing endorsement for a book if I've ever heard one;)
I feel the same about our progress being both wonderful and dangerous. I am reading Asimovs' robot novels right now, and in a forward he made a deeply profound observation. Let me google it for accuracy...
"Even as a youngster, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom."
I wonder if we are becoming as good at aquiring wisdom as we are knowledge...I'm an optimist, so I think so.
But what is truly the wiser stance, optimism or pessimism?
I would say optimism, because pessimism tastes terrible - and it's unwise to eat things that taste bad;)
Is it just me, or are humans getting better and better at science as time progresses?
I mean, it seems likely that this would be the case, naturally. Nonetheless, it still strikes me.
We predict dark matter exists, then we show it exists. It seems pretty much assured that we will even find out what it is made of. This discovery further cements this feeling in my mind.
We figure there is a chemical of inheritance, we find DNA. We know there is a genome, we sequence it.
Everything seems to be a big puzzle, and we seem to be getting faster and more accurate with putting these puzzles together.
I feel fully confident in speculating, for instance, that we will solve the gene therapy issues in mere years. That we will have household humanoid robots by 2020 for under $50,000US. That we will enhance ourselves dramatically genetically and technologically by the end of the century.
Has science always been this inexorable in it's progress?
I was thinking about copyrights the other day and how "stealing" is not the right word. When a car is stolen, it is not there anymore, when money is stolen is cannot be accessed anymore.
But when a file is "stolen" it is not taken away from the owner. It remains. How could a car be stolen if it's still in your driveway?
So I tried very hard to imagine a way that something could be stolen, while still leaving the original item intact and I realized that genes might be a good example.
For instance, let's imagine that someone copies your genetic pattern and clones another you. Sure, he's not you - has different memories and such - but still, isn't that YOUR dna?
What if he is used for medical experiments - wouldn't you feel more strongly about him than just a random person because he has "your" genes?
Just a thought experiment.
I am wholeheartedly opposed to DRM and in fact the current state of copyrights. Still, I find it useful to determine strong arguments for any opposing view.
After all, in my opinion any scientifically-minded and reasoning person's greatest joy should be derived from being proven wrong.
Really, should the technically saavy even worry about this stuff? It seems to me that simple economics are going to decide the winner here, and I am guessing that "free" is strongly in the lead to be that winner.
I asked my friend the other day if he was familiar with DRM. As you may guess, he was completely unaware of this term or any of the technologies involved.
Most people are unaware of these copy protection mechanisms. Once they become aware, either via education from friends or via restrictions of use then the dull roar of the techs will rise to the full gale of the consumers.
Still, don't take this as an excuse NOT to donate to the EFF: laws are harder to manipulate than corporate economic models.
This is welcome news. Let me tell you, virtualization has saved my ass many times, and growing (especially when it's windows).
Example: A system fails to come back up after update and gives me my favorite hal.dll error. Since the hardware abstraction layer is different for nearly every machine, simply grabbing the hal.dll from another machine is not possible.
Now there are several strategies to tackle this problem, for this instance however, because this was a virtual machine living with several other guest OSes which are all running on identical virtual hardware I simply ran a compare between the system32 drives of the borked windows and a working one - found several HUNDRED missing files (how did that happen, who knows), mounted the borked vmdk as the g: drive and copied the good files over to it.
unmounted and rebooted to fully operational status.
...to invoke Al Gore's inspiring leadership in leading us in our succession from the unjust and intolerant union from whence we sprang.
Mexico and Japan both join me in pleading, "Mr. Gore, Lead us to freedom! Lead us to that glorious future that only the great country of Mexiforniapan can offer!"
I agree, code replacement does seem to be the most reasonable way to resolve this issue. However I cannot help but feel that this would prematurely cause forking and general divergence from the original closed Java.
Additional features and improvements are no doubt going to occur as the result of opening up the code base, but I feel that compatibility should be at the forefront of any design decision when Java is involved.
After all, isn't the whole point of Java interoperability, and hardware agnosticism (generics and enforcement of general good design and coding practices aside)?
FTA:"Whatever the outcome, we will continue. If we are outlawed in Sweden we will continue elsewhere. There will be no downtime," said Andersson.
Ok, I'm just thinking here, but please bear with me. Lets imagine that thePirateBay does have to "continue elsewhere". And for the sake of argument, lets imagine that "elsewhere" is from a communications satellite.
I know this is ridiculous, but really - perhaps in 10 to 15 years launch costs will drop enough to allow private web servers to be launched. Again, just bear with me please.
Let us further imagine that after launch thePirateBay relinquishes control of this orbiting tracker to the community at large, such that it's owned by no one, but maintained by many.
Who would then be prosecuted? By which countries laws?
It's sad to me that this story has so few comments. Outer space just holds less and less allure to the populace as time moves forward. Why is that? Especially as we are just starting to get some of the really sci-fi 21st century stuff going. is the 21st century to be the last century of space exploration?
It's the same with aviation in general, interest has been declining steadily. in 1980 there were 800,000 pilots in the US, now, just about 400,000.
I do believe that we are losing our exploratory drive; we are becoming more decadent?...nah. We're just exploring other things. Genetics and robotics, both will help us get up there I hope.
Well, you know what? Space is hard, and far. Maybe we just aren't ready for the journey yet.
hopefully someday at least our robots will be - they're already doing a bang-up job.
Still, it seems like the uni is going overboard on the punishment.
I agree with your post, save this line. I'm starting to sound like an old man, but examples must be made.
As you allude to, he may indeed not truly have intended to go to Cisco with this vulnerability - how much further would he go if not caught? He knew of 6 other methods apparently.
At any rate, I'm starting to sound reactionary so I'll cut it there.
Nonetheless, it seems that a computer science major would have the resources available to try out his vulnerability theories on a test environment.
When the lock is broken on the girls showers, you should probably not wait until summer to tell someone: though who could really blame you for delay?!
this means the hating of Vista is stronger then the hating of previos OSs.
Good, Maybe MS will take a hint....
Soooo, you are saying MS should release yet another OS immediately? Ah, I see. That way everyone will hate the new one even more than they now hate Vista!
Even though it was unplanned, I still wonder if perhaps ID has unwittingly uncovered a powerful and affordable PR tool that would work to a development house's advantage in general.
I mean, it certainly seems a powerful gesture, releasing a free game. But as for affordable, I wonder what the net loss was for ID and Activision.
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
It's interesting - I can see your point. But if you replace "SL" with "Website" in your above statements, you can easily see how the attitude might change in a few years.
After all, at first I imagine many companies failed to see the relevance of a corporate website. They may never have imagined hiring someone specifically for managing it: let alone an entire staff for some.
The future hasn't happened yet. This makes it very hard to talk about what happens in it.
Does anyone remember Wolfenstein Enemy Territory? This is a fully functioning game that ID software released for free - completely! I'm not going to search, but since I know that ID often (always?) releases the source for their games and engines after a certain period of time why not then other software companies?
ID is still in business because they continue to innovate and make new games. By offering the sources for free and even entire games, ID has created a reputation that is very favorable in the eyes of their consumers. This can only be good for Linden Labs' rep, and it very well may simply be a preliminary move indicating that they have something in the works: probably a Third Life or something like that.
60 seconds seems enough time for a friendly to move into the enemy position, or vice versa. The problem here isn't just a delay in information, but the potential for misinformation.
Still, your point is valid - it's not like it suddenly takes the soldier 60 seconds longer to shoot his rifle. I side with another poster, squad leaders and sergeants perhaps should have this, but perhaps not every grunt.
TurboDarwinism(tm)! Has that slashdot username been taken yet!?
So, I love this argument that nothing is truly unnatural. I subscribe to this notion wholeheartedly.
Just because humanity's technology is destructive does not automatically make it unnatural. After all, we are not yet the most destructive organisms to have lived on this Earth.
As organisms which cause species' extinction go, we are something of a distant second (at least). We need look no further than the ancient cyanobacteria for inspiration on how to really give the environment a swift kick to the head! Our piddly attempts at wrecking the environment are sophomoric at best;)
When all is said and done I firmly believe that there is nothing supernatural about the universe. Thus, there is nothing which can exist which is unnatural.
A space station is no more unnatural than a beehive...but it's a lot cooler!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's a ringing endorsement for a book if I've ever heard one
I feel the same about our progress being both wonderful and dangerous. I am reading Asimovs' robot novels right now, and in a forward he made a deeply profound observation. Let me google it for accuracy...
"Even as a youngster, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom."
I wonder if we are becoming as good at aquiring wisdom as we are knowledge...I'm an optimist, so I think so.
But what is truly the wiser stance, optimism or pessimism?
I would say optimism, because pessimism tastes terrible - and it's unwise to eat things that taste bad
Well...the robots will be really hot though, right?
Like, blonde, tall, mildly psychotic, accompanied by an incessant, single-note piano part accompanied orchestral strings..
I can deal with sexy extermination...in fact, let's call it sextermination!
I'm down.
Is it just me, or are humans getting better and better at science as time progresses?
I mean, it seems likely that this would be the case, naturally. Nonetheless, it still strikes me.
We predict dark matter exists, then we show it exists. It seems pretty much assured that we will even find out what it is made of. This discovery further cements this feeling in my mind.
We figure there is a chemical of inheritance, we find DNA. We know there is a genome, we sequence it.
Everything seems to be a big puzzle, and we seem to be getting faster and more accurate with putting these puzzles together.
I feel fully confident in speculating, for instance, that we will solve the gene therapy issues in mere years. That we will have household humanoid robots by 2020 for under $50,000US. That we will enhance ourselves dramatically genetically and technologically by the end of the century.
Has science always been this inexorable in it's progress?
I was thinking about copyrights the other day and how "stealing" is not the right word. When a car is stolen, it is not there anymore, when money is stolen is cannot be accessed anymore.
But when a file is "stolen" it is not taken away from the owner. It remains. How could a car be stolen if it's still in your driveway?
So I tried very hard to imagine a way that something could be stolen, while still leaving the original item intact and I realized that genes might be a good example.
For instance, let's imagine that someone copies your genetic pattern and clones another you. Sure, he's not you - has different memories and such - but still, isn't that YOUR dna?
What if he is used for medical experiments - wouldn't you feel more strongly about him than just a random person because he has "your" genes?
Just a thought experiment.
I am wholeheartedly opposed to DRM and in fact the current state of copyrights. Still, I find it useful to determine strong arguments for any opposing view.
After all, in my opinion any scientifically-minded and reasoning person's greatest joy should be derived from being proven wrong.
Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.
Really, should the technically saavy even worry about this stuff? It seems to me that simple economics are going to decide the winner here, and I am guessing that "free" is strongly in the lead to be that winner.
I asked my friend the other day if he was familiar with DRM. As you may guess, he was completely unaware of this term or any of the technologies involved.
Most people are unaware of these copy protection mechanisms. Once they become aware, either via education from friends or via restrictions of use then the dull roar of the techs will rise to the full gale of the consumers.
Still, don't take this as an excuse NOT to donate to the EFF: laws are harder to manipulate than corporate economic models.
This is welcome news. Let me tell you, virtualization has saved my ass many times, and growing (especially when it's windows).
Example: A system fails to come back up after update and gives me my favorite hal.dll error. Since the hardware abstraction layer is different for nearly every machine, simply grabbing the hal.dll from another machine is not possible.
Now there are several strategies to tackle this problem, for this instance however, because this was a virtual machine living with several other guest OSes which are all running on identical virtual hardware I simply ran a compare between the system32 drives of the borked windows and a working one - found several HUNDRED missing files (how did that happen, who knows), mounted the borked vmdk as the g: drive and copied the good files over to it.
unmounted and rebooted to fully operational status.
Hmm, obviously someone doesn't like sushi-burritos...actually, that's not too surprising.
...to invoke Al Gore's inspiring leadership in leading us in our succession from the unjust and intolerant union from whence we sprang.
Mexico and Japan both join me in pleading, "Mr. Gore, Lead us to freedom! Lead us to that glorious future that only the great country of Mexiforniapan can offer!"
I agree, code replacement does seem to be the most reasonable way to resolve this issue. However I cannot help but feel that this would prematurely cause forking and general divergence from the original closed Java.
Additional features and improvements are no doubt going to occur as the result of opening up the code base, but I feel that compatibility should be at the forefront of any design decision when Java is involved.
After all, isn't the whole point of Java interoperability, and hardware agnosticism (generics and enforcement of general good design and coding practices aside)?
I wonder.
Let's say that eventually (or inevitably) we are going to be able to alter our genes with gene therapy.
Alter out genes to the point that we get a perfect genetic score card. Heck, offer social services that promulgate genetic repair.
Profiling would become less of an issue if you can change the profile, would it not?
This litigation seems prudent, but the balance between law and technological advancement needs to be watched carefully.
That's what I wanted to hear!
Military action because of Britney Spears songs and Porno?
NO way...right?.. I mean, no way that could happen...RIGHT?!?
Somebody tell me what I want to hear!!!
FTA:"Whatever the outcome, we will continue. If we are outlawed in Sweden we will continue elsewhere. There will be no downtime," said Andersson.
Ok, I'm just thinking here, but please bear with me. Lets imagine that thePirateBay does have to "continue elsewhere". And for the sake of argument, lets imagine that "elsewhere" is from a communications satellite.
I know this is ridiculous, but really - perhaps in 10 to 15 years launch costs will drop enough to allow private web servers to be launched. Again, just bear with me please.
Let us further imagine that after launch thePirateBay relinquishes control of this orbiting tracker to the community at large, such that it's owned by no one, but maintained by many.
Who would then be prosecuted? By which countries laws?
It's sad to me that this story has so few comments. Outer space just holds less and less allure to the populace as time moves forward. Why is that? Especially as we are just starting to get some of the really sci-fi 21st century stuff going. is the 21st century to be the last century of space exploration?
It's the same with aviation in general, interest has been declining steadily. in 1980 there were 800,000 pilots in the US, now, just about 400,000.
I do believe that we are losing our exploratory drive; we are becoming more decadent?...nah. We're just exploring other things. Genetics and robotics, both will help us get up there I hope.
Well, you know what? Space is hard, and far. Maybe we just aren't ready for the journey yet.
hopefully someday at least our robots will be - they're already doing a bang-up job.
I agree with your post, save this line. I'm starting to sound like an old man, but examples must be made.
As you allude to, he may indeed not truly have intended to go to Cisco with this vulnerability - how much further would he go if not caught? He knew of 6 other methods apparently.
At any rate, I'm starting to sound reactionary so I'll cut it there.
Nonetheless, it seems that a computer science major would have the resources available to try out his vulnerability theories on a test environment.
When the lock is broken on the girls showers, you should probably not wait until summer to tell someone: though who could really blame you for delay?!
We can bring democracy to them - works every time!
All wars are the result of ignorance.
Only knowledge can cure ignorance.
Knowledge is attained through exploration.
Soooo, you are saying MS should release yet another OS immediately? Ah, I see. That way everyone will hate the new one even more than they now hate Vista!
Brilliant!
Theoretically, what can a website offer which a Virtual Reality can not also offer?
Ah, I was unaware of that.
Even though it was unplanned, I still wonder if perhaps ID has unwittingly uncovered a powerful and affordable PR tool that would work to a development house's advantage in general.
I mean, it certainly seems a powerful gesture, releasing a free game. But as for affordable, I wonder what the net loss was for ID and Activision.
These billions of dollars in legal fees seems to me all the more reason for Microsoft to release a commercial Linux distro.
*ducks and runs full speed from the pitchforks and torches*
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
It's interesting - I can see your point. But if you replace "SL" with "Website" in your above statements, you can easily see how the attitude might change in a few years.
After all, at first I imagine many companies failed to see the relevance of a corporate website. They may never have imagined hiring someone specifically for managing it: let alone an entire staff for some.
The future hasn't happened yet. This makes it very hard to talk about what happens in it.
What's their angle?
What is free software's angle?
Does anyone remember Wolfenstein Enemy Territory? This is a fully functioning game that ID software released for free - completely! I'm not going to search, but since I know that ID often (always?) releases the source for their games and engines after a certain period of time why not then other software companies?
ID is still in business because they continue to innovate and make new games. By offering the sources for free and even entire games, ID has created a reputation that is very favorable in the eyes of their consumers. This can only be good for Linden Labs' rep, and it very well may simply be a preliminary move indicating that they have something in the works: probably a Third Life or something like that.
60 seconds seems enough time for a friendly to move into the enemy position, or vice versa. The problem here isn't just a delay in information, but the potential for misinformation.
Still, your point is valid - it's not like it suddenly takes the soldier 60 seconds longer to shoot his rifle. I side with another poster, squad leaders and sergeants perhaps should have this, but perhaps not every grunt.
TurboDarwinism(tm)! Has that slashdot username been taken yet!?
;)
So, I love this argument that nothing is truly unnatural. I subscribe to this notion wholeheartedly.
Just because humanity's technology is destructive does not automatically make it unnatural. After all, we are not yet the most destructive organisms to have lived on this Earth.
As organisms which cause species' extinction go, we are something of a distant second (at least). We need look no further than the ancient cyanobacteria for inspiration on how to really give the environment a swift kick to the head! Our piddly attempts at wrecking the environment are sophomoric at best
When all is said and done I firmly believe that there is nothing supernatural about the universe. Thus, there is nothing which can exist which is unnatural.
A space station is no more unnatural than a beehive...but it's a lot cooler!