Well, if technology advances enough so that we can extend lifespan, perhaps it will also advance so that we can have greater control over reproduction.
My wife is on birth control pills. We are concerned about the long-term effects it may have on her health, as well as the fact that as she ages, there is a decline in fertility, along with an increase in the risk of birth defects.
If those risks were eliminated, and we could wait until she was 60 to have children, we would be able to put off. As it stands, if we're to have children at all, we should do it while she is in her early thirties, if not sooner.
If people were able to have children later, then their children would have children later, and so forth. The population growth problem would be reduced.
Furthermore, many pregnancies are "accidents". If children were made infertile (in a reversible manner), teen pregnancy would be eliminated. While that might result in a corresponding increase in the spread of STD's (which medicine might be able to deal with), there are all sorts of benefits that can be had.
As I have matured, I have found that I have developed greater wisdom than I had before. I know I'll be in my 50's before I have developed the finesse that is necessary for some situations.
Imagine if you had people with many decades of practical experience who were also energetic and very healthy. Society would continue to benefit from their experience for a much longer time. People sometimes think of the elderly as being a burden or drain on society, because their health fades, limiting their "usefulness". Imagine if the elderly had the health of 30 year olds, could continue to contribute massively to society, and even had the time in their lives to have more than one 40-year career.
And wouldn't you like to be 60 years old and retired and still have "your whole life ahead of you"? You could go back to college and do something entirely new. And although you won't be QUITE as mentally agile as you were when you were thirty, the medical technology necessary to keep you alive for 300 years would likely make you mentally fit for most of that lifespan.
On the other hand:
It is often the case that certain social, cultural, or scientific advancements are made only when the those who held to the old ideas had died off. That is to say, it took a generation for the transition to be made.
Relativity, Quantum Electrodynamics, Evolutionary Theory, voting for women and minorities, acceptance of homosexuals, many things that we now consider to be basic civil rights, etc. All of these things required that one (or more) generation pass on so that the next generation, unencumbered by preconceived notions, could continue to advance.
Since we are young, we are ingrained with certain ideas that we find difficult to let go of later in life. I'm only 29, and yet I am finding it difficult to unlearn many habits I learned from my family which I now disagree with. Certain things are hard to change, even when we want them to.
Furthermore, the wisdom one learns earlier in one's life may apply to things about the world which have since changed. For instance, a person who did well in business in the 1950's may fail miserably trying to apply the same ideas to business in the 21st century. Sometimes, it's hard to change your entire way of thinking.
Worst case, we could have people who are 200+ years old holding back scientific and cultural improvements, because they don't like the new ideas of the younger people. If 50% of your population is over 150, then you'll have a lot of political pressure to maintain ideas and norms which are 150 years out of date.
All this being said, I personally would like to live as long as possible. Why? Because I hate the idea of not knowing what happens after I'm gone. I wouldn't care as much how long I live if I could learn what society and technology will be like 1 million years from now. I'm incredibly curious.
Something that we need more of in the Free Software community is cohesion. We need to work together and support each other if we're going to improve technology for everyone and beat down predators like Microsoft. SCO is getting Red Hat and SuSE to work together, despite the fact that they are competitors. Everyone is rallying together against SCO. The common enemy makes us united. If that feeling of unity continues past the point where we have beaten SCO, the world will be better.
What school? I went to the University of South Florida, not exactly known for its shining CS grads. And ROTC is something you can get into in most universities.
I don't understand your complaint. My main point is that, metaphoically speaking, having a gun to your head is a powerful motivator. Eventually, you just get used to pushing yourself to focus.
And that was my experience. Being made to concentrate all day, every day taught me discipline. Have you gotten full-time jobs over the summer?
The only thing that did it for me was working in the industry for a few years. Getting a job, being required to work for 8 hours solid, and being given many responsibilities are what have taught me how to sit down and focus.
I'm not sure what experience, besides perhaps ROTC, you might be able to put yourself through to help you to learn the necessary discipline and focus. Have you considered consulting Buddhists? Seriously!
Re:How could this story be believed?
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Today, with the technology we have, it might actually be possible. In cities around the world, cameras snap pictures of speeders' license plates, and they are automatically mailed speeding tickets. More information could be monitored by numerous distributed computer systems. It's all certainly POSSIBLE.
But that doesn't mean it's actually happening.
Besides, it would take as many people as are being monitored to monitor the data in order to intelligently get anything useful out of the morass of raw data. So, while it certainly could be processed to some extent and stored, it couldn't be used for a whole lot.
It's over. The our world is collapsing around us. The open source dream is dead. SCO has stolen our future, so we may as well take leave of this place. If we eat the jello, maybe the mother ship will come and take us away.
The slashdot article makes RMS look like a crackpot. He may be, but the detail is that he's not saying "replace BitKeeper! replace BitKeeper!". He's saying "if Larry McVoy (CEO of BitKeeper) threatens to change the protocol every 6 months, thereby making it hard for free software to be compatible with it, then BitKeeper needs to be replaced." This is a reasonable thing to say. RMS is only saying to replace BitKeeper if the developers become unfriendly to the free software community.
There is nothing in the article which suggests that Windows is a requirement. It just says that you can access it from any Windows box with internet access. That means that Windows is sufficient, but it doesn't say it's necessary.
What they're trying to address in the article is that since most people use Windows, then most people are going to want to know that they can access it from their home computers.
It's like telling people they can get somewhere in a Ford. That doesn't mean they can't get there in a Chevy or a Nissan.
Since I got married, I've gotten smarter, but that may have something to do with the fact that my wife is is probably smarter than I am and has a law degree.:)
Where I work, we do a Q&D solution for trade shows, etc., but when it inevitably doesn't do everything marketing and/or the customers want, we use that time to do it properly. Eventually, we do end up with some good designs. I'm also fortunate enough to have an employer who believes me when I tell them "this is how much time I need", although that often pisses them off because it's always much longer than they'd assumed before they asked me.
Compared to what you can get in a Walmart PC, isn't the Xbox kindof unimpressive technology? I mean, what are you going to do with Linux on Xbox anyhow? Certainly not cluster computing -- the Walmart PC would be cheaper and faster. Graphics? Buy the Walmart PC and add a Radeon -- then you'll have faster graphics than the Xbox.
What could you possibly get from running Linux on Xbox that you can't from the cheaper, faster Walmart PC?
All we have to do is find all the email addresses of pro-spam legislators and sign them up for every source of spam we can find. That'll change their minds quickly.
All of the things you mention are advantages to the consumer. The disadvantage is that the do-not-call list will help the PHONE COMPANIES. (By making consumers avoid them less)
The only drawback here is that the list will improve business for phone companies. Since land lines will become less of an annoyance to people, they'll start using them again (I switched to cellular a long time ago). I hate all phone companies. Monopolies are evil.
Keep in mind that water ice would have a FAR greater hydrogen density than hydrogen gas. I don't know enough to do the math, but hydrogen gas is probably off the table.
If you only publish it, someone will patent it anyhow. I personally came up against a patent for which I also found prior art, but I can't afford to fight it, and the EFF ignored me when I tried to talk to them about it.
Two Linux distros and Windows doesn't exactly constitute a good sampling of "Enterprise" operating systems. I'd have thought they'd pick one Linux, Windows, and say, Solaris. Or HPUX or AIX or SOME other OS that's been used heavily on servers. Hell, even VMS and OS/390 would qualify.
But I didn't read the article. Yeah, I know. Flame me. I'm sure they have their reasons for such a small sampling.
It's amazing how much flaming the author received for his analysis. People were calling him all sorts of names simply for pointing out that Apple's benchmarks were not fair. I think it's important to keep companies honest.
But as is often said, the CPU processing speed isn't the main selling point of a Mac. They've been behind for quite some time now, but people are still buying them. This is a great advancement, bringing Macs up to speeds relatively comparable to that of the rest of the market. The 970 is a new chip, and IBM needs time to ramp up the clock speed. P4's didn't get to 3.2ghz in one day.
I'm going from memory here, so please excuse any errors I make.
The fundamental principle that makes PCI-Express work is not a new idea. In the not-too-distant past, this same idea, called "Differential Signaling" has been employed in such ubiquitous technologies as USB and DVI, in addition to the recently developed S-ATA.
One of the biggest problems with transmitting any signal is NOISE. This can be dealt with a number of ways: increase voltage swing, shorten transmission lines, reduce bit rate. Of course, those all go counter to what we WANT.
Differential signaling uses two wires (rather than just one), in addition to a ground signal to transmit a single serial data stream. It's called 'differential' because each of the two signal lines switches in antiphase to the other. Among its various advantages:
It reduces the effect of interference -- both signals experience the same noise, eliminating the effect.
It reduces the effects of ground bounce (ground level for sender and receiver are different due to the effects of output drivers drawing current) -- the ground is only a DC return path, while the signal is decoded entirely based on the difference between the two signal lines.
If a differential pair is made into properly shielded coax, it's possible to maintain good signal integrity over a long distance.
Parallel transmissions have to be throttled back because differences in wire length have to be dealt with. The more wires you have, the harder it is to ensure some very important things: All wires are the same length, all output drivers have the same response, all chip logic has the same delay, all output registers are clocked at the same point in the clock tree, all input buffers have the same response, etc. With only two signals to deal with, it's much easier to make sure all of these factors are under control; in fact, many ASICs and FPGAs have special "differential I/O buffers" which are designed specifically to deal with all of the above issues.
There are other advantages, but you get the idea. The effect of being able to clean up so much signal noise and eliminate the need to keep in sync with other signals makes it possible to dramatically increase bitrate. In fact, the result has been that differential serial communication has been able to surpass parallel in bit-rate and will continue to surpass it further.
Why this brilliant technology is only so recently becoming popular is that it has only now become cost-effective to produce transistors which switch fast enough to make the advantages of serial surpass the advantages of parallel. Before now, it would have been necessary to use expensive Gallium Arsenide transistors, eliminating the advantages. Transistors in chips are now so much faster than wires that it's not only faster but also cheaper to switch a few signals really fast than to try to keep several signals in sync (and noise-free).
I think we may have reached the point where the clock period is shorter than the wire delay for DS. That is, one bit hasn't traversed the wire all the way from the transmitter to the receiver before the next bit starts coming out of the transmittor.
It's an interesting technological cycle we observe here. Back when every transistor and every wire was expensive, it made sense to transmit serially, because it saved transistors. As transistors and wires became cheaper, it made sense to go parallel for more speed. Now that transistors are getting so fast and bit rates are bumping up against signal/noise limits, it makes sense once again to return to serial.
The next step is to go back to parallel, but this time, it's multiple independent differential pairs which carry data packets which are reassembled and reordered at the receiver.
Oh, and let's not forget about fiber-optics.:)
Try adding that to CFS and see what you get...
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
Not only do I have ADD (not diagnosed, but I was in school before the ADD generation), but I also have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Talk about BRAIN FOG. Thinking clearly and focusing are like pulling teeth sometimes.
Naturally, I've tried all sorts of things, but in the end, I found that only brief courses of certain drugs are helpful. In the long run, what has helped me the most is cleaning up my diet, not eating any more junk food, not taking any unnecessary chemicals, drinking LOTS more water, and EXERCISING REGULARLY. (I'm still having trouble kicking caffine completely.) Although some of the drugs may make me "feel better", they don't help my mental clarity; they just make me restless, so I can handle social situations better, but not concentrating on work.
And the other thing that has helped me a lot is a huge dose of self-discipline. Yeah, I have the urge to get up and wander around when I have work to do -- I let myself do that to some extent, but I push myself to focus. There are SOME things I can focus on intently, because they're REALLY interesting, and so I cope by framing what I have to do in those terms. That often requires a lot of ingenuity.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if technology advances enough so that we can extend lifespan, perhaps it will also advance so that we can have greater control over reproduction.
My wife is on birth control pills. We are concerned about the long-term effects it may have on her health, as well as the fact that as she ages, there is a decline in fertility, along with an increase in the risk of birth defects.
If those risks were eliminated, and we could wait until she was 60 to have children, we would be able to put off. As it stands, if we're to have children at all, we should do it while she is in her early thirties, if not sooner.
If people were able to have children later, then their children would have children later, and so forth. The population growth problem would be reduced.
Furthermore, many pregnancies are "accidents". If children were made infertile (in a reversible manner), teen pregnancy would be eliminated. While that might result in a corresponding increase in the spread of STD's (which medicine might be able to deal with), there are all sorts of benefits that can be had.
As I have matured, I have found that I have developed greater wisdom than I had before. I know I'll be in my 50's before I have developed the finesse that is necessary for some situations.
Imagine if you had people with many decades of practical experience who were also energetic and very healthy. Society would continue to benefit from their experience for a much longer time. People sometimes think of the elderly as being a burden or drain on society, because their health fades, limiting their "usefulness". Imagine if the elderly had the health of 30 year olds, could continue to contribute massively to society, and even had the time in their lives to have more than one 40-year career.
And wouldn't you like to be 60 years old and retired and still have "your whole life ahead of you"? You could go back to college and do something entirely new. And although you won't be QUITE as mentally agile as you were when you were thirty, the medical technology necessary to keep you alive for 300 years would likely make you mentally fit for most of that lifespan.
On the other hand:
It is often the case that certain social, cultural, or scientific advancements are made only when the those who held to the old ideas had died off. That is to say, it took a generation for the transition to be made.
Relativity, Quantum Electrodynamics, Evolutionary Theory, voting for women and minorities, acceptance of homosexuals, many things that we now consider to be basic civil rights, etc. All of these things required that one (or more) generation pass on so that the next generation, unencumbered by preconceived notions, could continue to advance.
Since we are young, we are ingrained with certain ideas that we find difficult to let go of later in life. I'm only 29, and yet I am finding it difficult to unlearn many habits I learned from my family which I now disagree with. Certain things are hard to change, even when we want them to.
Furthermore, the wisdom one learns earlier in one's life may apply to things about the world which have since changed. For instance, a person who did well in business in the 1950's may fail miserably trying to apply the same ideas to business in the 21st century. Sometimes, it's hard to change your entire way of thinking.
Worst case, we could have people who are 200+ years old holding back scientific and cultural improvements, because they don't like the new ideas of the younger people. If 50% of your population is over 150, then you'll have a lot of political pressure to maintain ideas and norms which are 150 years out of date.
All this being said, I personally would like to live as long as possible. Why? Because I hate the idea of not knowing what happens after I'm gone. I wouldn't care as much how long I live if I could learn what society and technology will be like 1 million years from now. I'm incredibly curious.
Something that we need more of in the Free Software community is cohesion. We need to work together and support each other if we're going to improve technology for everyone and beat down predators like Microsoft. SCO is getting Red Hat and SuSE to work together, despite the fact that they are competitors. Everyone is rallying together against SCO. The common enemy makes us united. If that feeling of unity continues past the point where we have beaten SCO, the world will be better.
So, basically, if the RIAA wants proof that you have illegal material on your hard drive, they have to violate the law. LOL.
What school? I went to the University of South Florida, not exactly known for its shining CS grads. And ROTC is something you can get into in most universities.
I don't understand your complaint. My main point is that, metaphoically speaking, having a gun to your head is a powerful motivator. Eventually, you just get used to pushing yourself to focus.
And that was my experience. Being made to concentrate all day, every day taught me discipline. Have you gotten full-time jobs over the summer?
The only thing that did it for me was working in the industry for a few years. Getting a job, being required to work for 8 hours solid, and being given many responsibilities are what have taught me how to sit down and focus.
I'm not sure what experience, besides perhaps ROTC, you might be able to put yourself through to help you to learn the necessary discipline and focus. Have you considered consulting Buddhists? Seriously!
Today, with the technology we have, it might actually be possible. In cities around the world, cameras snap pictures of speeders' license plates, and they are automatically mailed speeding tickets. More information could be monitored by numerous distributed computer systems. It's all certainly POSSIBLE.
But that doesn't mean it's actually happening.
Besides, it would take as many people as are being monitored to monitor the data in order to intelligently get anything useful out of the morass of raw data. So, while it certainly could be processed to some extent and stored, it couldn't be used for a whole lot.
It's over. The our world is collapsing around us. The open source dream is dead. SCO has stolen our future, so we may as well take leave of this place. If we eat the jello, maybe the mother ship will come and take us away.
The slashdot article makes RMS look like a crackpot. He may be, but the detail is that he's not saying "replace BitKeeper! replace BitKeeper!". He's saying "if Larry McVoy (CEO of BitKeeper) threatens to change the protocol every 6 months, thereby making it hard for free software to be compatible with it, then BitKeeper needs to be replaced." This is a reasonable thing to say. RMS is only saying to replace BitKeeper if the developers become unfriendly to the free software community.
There is nothing in the article which suggests that Windows is a requirement. It just says that you can access it from any Windows box with internet access. That means that Windows is sufficient, but it doesn't say it's necessary .
What they're trying to address in the article is that since most people use Windows, then most people are going to want to know that they can access it from their home computers.
It's like telling people they can get somewhere in a Ford. That doesn't mean they can't get there in a Chevy or a Nissan.
Since I got married, I've gotten smarter, but that may have something to do with the fact that my wife is is probably smarter than I am and has a law degree. :)
Where I work, we do a Q&D solution for trade shows, etc., but when it inevitably doesn't do everything marketing and/or the customers want, we use that time to do it properly. Eventually, we do end up with some good designs. I'm also fortunate enough to have an employer who believes me when I tell them "this is how much time I need", although that often pisses them off because it's always much longer than they'd assumed before they asked me.
SLASHDOT!!!!!!
If I have to go a day without reading Slashdot, I go onto convulsions.
Compared to what you can get in a Walmart PC, isn't the Xbox kindof unimpressive technology? I mean, what are you going to do with Linux on Xbox anyhow? Certainly not cluster computing -- the Walmart PC would be cheaper and faster. Graphics? Buy the Walmart PC and add a Radeon -- then you'll have faster graphics than the Xbox.
What could you possibly get from running Linux on Xbox that you can't from the cheaper, faster Walmart PC?
All we have to do is find all the email addresses of pro-spam legislators and sign them up for every source of spam we can find. That'll change their minds quickly.
The competition in the "cellular" realm is better because you can choose your provider. With land-lines, you are stuck with whoever owns your area.
I like to do coding and web development, and it's a really convenient platform for that sort of thing.
All of the things you mention are advantages to the consumer. The disadvantage is that the do-not-call list will help the PHONE COMPANIES. (By making consumers avoid them less)
I do not want to help phone companies!
The only drawback here is that the list will improve business for phone companies. Since land lines will become less of an annoyance to people, they'll start using them again (I switched to cellular a long time ago). I hate all phone companies. Monopolies are evil.
Keep in mind that water ice would have a FAR greater hydrogen density than hydrogen gas. I don't know enough to do the math, but hydrogen gas is probably off the table.
(I know the original comment was a joke.)
If you only publish it, someone will patent it anyhow. I personally came up against a patent for which I also found prior art, but I can't afford to fight it, and the EFF ignored me when I tried to talk to them about it.
Two Linux distros and Windows doesn't exactly constitute a good sampling of "Enterprise" operating systems. I'd have thought they'd pick one Linux, Windows, and say, Solaris. Or HPUX or AIX or SOME other OS that's been used heavily on servers. Hell, even VMS and OS/390 would qualify.
But I didn't read the article. Yeah, I know. Flame me. I'm sure they have their reasons for such a small sampling.
It's amazing how much flaming the author received for his analysis. People were calling him all sorts of names simply for pointing out that Apple's benchmarks were not fair. I think it's important to keep companies honest.
But as is often said, the CPU processing speed isn't the main selling point of a Mac. They've been behind for quite some time now, but people are still buying them. This is a great advancement, bringing Macs up to speeds relatively comparable to that of the rest of the market. The 970 is a new chip, and IBM needs time to ramp up the clock speed. P4's didn't get to 3.2ghz in one day.
I'm going from memory here, so please excuse any errors I make.
:)
The fundamental principle that makes PCI-Express work is not a new idea. In the not-too-distant past, this same idea, called "Differential Signaling" has been employed in such ubiquitous technologies as USB and DVI, in addition to the recently developed S-ATA.
One of the biggest problems with transmitting any signal is NOISE. This can be dealt with a number of ways: increase voltage swing, shorten transmission lines, reduce bit rate. Of course, those all go counter to what we WANT.
Differential signaling uses two wires (rather than just one), in addition to a ground signal to transmit a single serial data stream. It's called 'differential' because each of the two signal lines switches in antiphase to the other. Among its various advantages:
It reduces the effect of interference -- both signals experience the same noise, eliminating the effect.
It reduces the effects of ground bounce (ground level for sender and receiver are different due to the effects of output drivers drawing current) -- the ground is only a DC return path, while the signal is decoded entirely based on the difference between the two signal lines.
If a differential pair is made into properly shielded coax, it's possible to maintain good signal integrity over a long distance.
Parallel transmissions have to be throttled back because differences in wire length have to be dealt with. The more wires you have, the harder it is to ensure some very important things: All wires are the same length, all output drivers have the same response, all chip logic has the same delay, all output registers are clocked at the same point in the clock tree, all input buffers have the same response, etc. With only two signals to deal with, it's much easier to make sure all of these factors are under control; in fact, many ASICs and FPGAs have special "differential I/O buffers" which are designed specifically to deal with all of the above issues.
There are other advantages, but you get the idea. The effect of being able to clean up so much signal noise and eliminate the need to keep in sync with other signals makes it possible to dramatically increase bitrate. In fact, the result has been that differential serial communication has been able to surpass parallel in bit-rate and will continue to surpass it further.
Why this brilliant technology is only so recently becoming popular is that it has only now become cost-effective to produce transistors which switch fast enough to make the advantages of serial surpass the advantages of parallel. Before now, it would have been necessary to use expensive Gallium Arsenide transistors, eliminating the advantages. Transistors in chips are now so much faster than wires that it's not only faster but also cheaper to switch a few signals really fast than to try to keep several signals in sync (and noise-free).
I think we may have reached the point where the clock period is shorter than the wire delay for DS. That is, one bit hasn't traversed the wire all the way from the transmitter to the receiver before the next bit starts coming out of the transmittor.
It's an interesting technological cycle we observe here. Back when every transistor and every wire was expensive, it made sense to transmit serially, because it saved transistors. As transistors and wires became cheaper, it made sense to go parallel for more speed. Now that transistors are getting so fast and bit rates are bumping up against signal/noise limits, it makes sense once again to return to serial.
The next step is to go back to parallel, but this time, it's multiple independent differential pairs which carry data packets which are reassembled and reordered at the receiver.
Oh, and let's not forget about fiber-optics.
Not only do I have ADD (not diagnosed, but I was in school before the ADD generation), but I also have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Talk about BRAIN FOG. Thinking clearly and focusing are like pulling teeth sometimes.
Naturally, I've tried all sorts of things, but in the end, I found that only brief courses of certain drugs are helpful. In the long run, what has helped me the most is cleaning up my diet, not eating any more junk food, not taking any unnecessary chemicals, drinking LOTS more water, and EXERCISING REGULARLY. (I'm still having trouble kicking caffine completely.) Although some of the drugs may make me "feel better", they don't help my mental clarity; they just make me restless, so I can handle social situations better, but not concentrating on work.
And the other thing that has helped me a lot is a huge dose of self-discipline. Yeah, I have the urge to get up and wander around when I have work to do -- I let myself do that to some extent, but I push myself to focus. There are SOME things I can focus on intently, because they're REALLY interesting, and so I cope by framing what I have to do in those terms. That often requires a lot of ingenuity.