Hmm. On the one hand, I was thinking of a global society of all humanity.
On the other hand, if the nations of the world get together to prevent research in certain directions, then stupid little tinpot dictators and mad scientists will get together somewhere, and...do the research.
Interesting points. Your first and third are effectively two sides to the same coin.
PCs will soon become ubiquitous. I can forsee a time in the near future when they will be mandatory for school students, and if that happens, then the government (in places like the US, Europe, etc.) will be required to subsidise it for needy families. That's part of the guarantee of public education, which I believe is written into law in most of the western world.
As far as not understanding the technology, that's a grey area. Nobody outside of IT should need to know more about their computer than how to turn it on, use their apps, MAYBE install new ones (two clicks maximum), and MAYBE update the apps/OS (again, two clicks max). A computer should be as easy for the end user as that, and when that happens, the only 'second class' that will exist will be the people unwilling to learn. My opinion on that is boo-fucking-hoo. My father-in-law who had never dealt with a computer (i.e. a PC) in his life started teaching himself about them after his 70th birthday. He now has a network of two PCs and a laptop in the house, sharing a DSL connection.
HOWEVER, that's how it should work, and how it did work for him. Computers are not that easy. They're buggy, they have a shitty OS that crashes, the desktop GUI model is fundamentally at odds with the heirarchal file storage model, and when you throw shortcuts into the mix (let alone things like thumbnails!), you can mess people up quite a bit.
So in the short term, there will be a separate class of people who are missing access to various services. That's no big deal--there's also the class of people who don't/can't drive, and people who can't read. In fact, the comparison with people who can't read is quite apt, because in another decade, that's where computing will be in terms of its importance, and its universality.
Here's a question to toss back: Do computer and/or software manufacturers have a moral responsibility to make their product accessible to everyone, i.e. not make computers be for the 'elite' only?
Go read Bill Joy's article, "Why the future doesn't need us." Possibly the best discussion I've seen on the dangers of future (and present!) technology. Some points he brings up or alludes to:
- Should we, as a society, curtail research on particular branches of science? Human cloning is the obvious one, but researching superbugs and genetically hand-made viruses might have enormous benefits--at a cost of extreme risk.
- Where do we draw the line between human and (for lack of a better word) robot? Nanotech, implants, and genetic mods are all coming to meet at a common point, and that point is SOON!
Some other interesting technological dillemas come to mind. Should we sell or aid the development of technology to 'enemy' nations? How do we define enemies for this purpose? I happen to work for a company that's substantially responsible for getting much of the US military aircraft into the air--am I partly responsible for the use those aircraft are put to? The same question could be (and has been) asked of the Canadian CANDU nuclear reactors--safe, cheap, efficient, reliable, and the easiest way to produce weapons-grade material.
This last one is actually a dillema as old as the hills--dealing with the enemy--but technology is becoming an important factor because it's drawing the world together. (Not to mention the HUGE role technology plays in any conflict these days)
Other issues: Technology eats power, consumes resources, produces waste--do we have a moral responsiblilty to drive as much technological innovation as possible towards cleaning up some of our messes?
The media is now able to modify live broadcasts--how do we control that behaviour? Pasting over footage of billboards with the station's advertising is pretty reprehensible, but what about when they start adding nonexistent people to war scenes?
But the real question may boil down to this simple one: How does technology actually change any of our present moral or ethical states? Does technology actually change our ethics, and should it?
Microsoft spends $$$$$ on a search engine to compete with Google. It sucks, but it becomes the default for IE, the default for MSN customers, and the default for the new 'windows internet search' feature (which won't explicitly tie in the browser). 90% of the population will use this shitty search which is based on commercial presence, Google will close shop, and the web will become an even worse wasteland of ads and sales sites.
Microsoft seldom spends money to be the BEST, they spend money to be the BIGGEST.
It's all about the money...to stupid people. I'm not at all convinced that Google will sell. If it was making a buck, they could have done that years ago.
What's going on? Short-sightedness and corporate paranoia is going on. Oil companies would love to get their hands on this sort of technology...to bury it!
Cheap oil is bad for business. Oil that doesn't come out of the ground is bad for business. This isn't the rant of a paranoid conspiracy freak, it's how the oil industry is run. As long as there's enough oil to get through a CEO's minimum term, he won't let the company be diverted by such things as alternative sources.
Just a point here. While it's true that/. posted a link to an April Fools joke, the joke itself is GnomeMeeting's. The *BSD merger is the same thing.
So in its own way,/. isn't actually playing ANY April Fool's jokes--they're just going about their business as usual, and the rest of the world is providing the material.
"...a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use."
Mozilla is a lot of things, including my primary browser across three platforms.
However whenever I point out the lack of "completeness" especially with regards to documentation and formalisation of a product, I'm reminded (usually quite gently, bless the developers) that mozilla isn't and never was intended to be a complete browser. I'm told it's intended as a code base, a core for others to use, but it's not supposed to be a feature-and-document-complete browser.
So while I admire the team greatly and use the code constantly, it's not really a product for average users.
Heh. Funny you should say it. I took that movie over to a girl's house for our first ever date. She said she liked weird movies and I took her at her word.
We're now coming up on our third wedding anniversary.:-)
OK, so it was nominated for a billion awards. More people have seen it than most of the movies in this list.
But how many have watched it...twice? Three times?
As popular as it was, I call it underrated because not enough people know how UTTERLY BRILLIANT it is! The massive 5% zooms, the monochromatic scenes (except for one item), the jokes that you don't realise were jokes until the next day, the mood, the characters, the...oh man, the everything. Having watched it about 10 times on DVD, I'm only BEGINNING to see the real detail that went into this work of art.
Ah, a very cool list, even if I don't agree with it all. Definitely all movies that you should watch, even if they're not all masterpieces. Blue Velvet for instance, is possibly better than Exotica but at the same time, not as intimate. Crying Game was far better than I had expected from the hype, but not as good as I had heard from some. ("the best movie ever!!!")
In the same vein as Exotica and Blue Velvet, make a point of watching "The Cook, the thief, his Wife, and her Lover." Also, make sure you see "Repo Man" and "A Boy and his Dog," two bizarre science fiction-y classics.
Pedro Almodovar's first really big movie, and one of his funniest still. Not quite as twisted as some (tie me up, tie me down; and Matador!) but hilarious!
OK, take Heavy Metal (the original). Then condense it to a single animation team, and have someone write a complete epic story, instead of short stories by different authors. Then double the wonderment and involvement. Wow!
OK, it's a completely off-the-wall fiction about A Scientist, A Model, and Her Husband-A Baseball Player. Odd. Wild. Fun. Quirky. And utterly engaging!
I've got the plain ol' Canadian VHS release, and wasn't aware that there might be any differences between it and...any others. What's been messed with?
Don Johnson in a no-budget cheesy science fiction romp, and...it worked!
The fact that it was based on Harlan Ellison's short story certainly helped, but when you consider that this is the movie Arthur C. Clarke once called "The only science fiction movie ever made," you know you're onto something good. And maaaaannnn is it good!
Heh. I saw a few, but they seem to be buried now, and I can't be bothered to dig that far to find silly people.
There are some people claiming massive prior art for this, and/or questioning the novelty of the patent based on the fact that it's no more than a bloody frequency counter! Those are both at least valid complaints, although not entirely correct from a patent point of view.
But that discussion is raging elsewhere in the threads.
Hmm. It's an obvious way to measure frequency of course--count it! However, it's a novel implementation, which brings up your next point:
"...applying something obvious in a novel context is increasingly being considered the same as actually inventing something novel..."
This is a very fine but extremely important distinction! Part of the problem is that I don't think the patent office actually recognises the distinction--most of us wouldn't, unless pressed on that specific question.
But at the same time, applying something obvious in a novel context implies that it's the novel application of the idea that's being patented. Is that valid? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Unfortunately, we can't say that this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, so we can't make clear-cut rules about it.
Ooh, I LOVE being called an ass-clown. It usually means I've iether pissed someone off, or they've missed my point entirely. Sometimes both.
I didn't say that overclocking would hurt their IP. I said that when they came up with a specific manner for stopping overclocking, then not patenting it would hurt their IP.
Let me repeat it again! WHATEVER YOU THINK OF INTEL FOR IMPLEMENTING THIS IDEA, WHAT THEY ARE PATENTING IS A VALID TECHNICAL TECHNIQUE, WORTHY OF A PATENT. What you want to do with your CPU has nothing WHATSOEVER to do with the validity of the patent.
Anti-consumer patent? I wouldn't agree, but it doesn't matter--they're entitled to come up with patents as anti-consumer as they want, as long as they're valid from a patent office perspective.
Absolutely correct. The people who are whining about the patent are the ones who whine about ALL patents. The ones who are whining about the implications of applying the patent have a valid point, but one that's likely to be trampled by the real reason behind the patent, which brings up the the third group: The people who are pointing out that this will prevent white-box resellers from illegally selling overclocked CPUs.
Not really a big deal, but you can't post an article to/. without SOME backlash!
OK, let's just get something out of the way. This is a good patent. It patents a specific method of achieving a technological end. It is directed, nonobvious, and something which would hurt their VALID intellectual property ownings to have given away to their competitors.
This is exactly the point of the patent office--to protect innovative technology. Intel has nothing to be ashamed of for patenting this, dammit.
Now if you don't LIKE the technology they've patented, then don't BUY it! If they put this on future CPUs, don't support them if you don't want. But DON'T WHINGE ABOUT THE PATENT BEING JUNK! It's not.
OK, they're small, light, low-power, low-emissions, and they SUCK to look at off-axis. They also suck for extensive motion or really high quality images.
LCDs are fine for moderate graphics, web browsing, and office apps. They're still not good enough for games, for CAD, or for multiple viewers.
You can now buy LCD TVs. They're expensive and they suck. Plasma is much nicer to watch, and the prices aren't that different anymore. If plasma _can_ come down in price, then I predict that LCD will dissappear from the TV market.
Does anyone know how plasma holds up to high resolution text? LCD may end up being a footnote.
We are currently at a cusp which endangers information storage like no other time in history.
We can still see paintings on cave walls and cuniform clay tablets that are thousands of years old. We have books that have outlasted entire empires. At the same time, we're having a hard time reading records that are merely a few decades old, and with the imminent passing of the CDROM format, that time limit is going to shrink.
This is bad. However, this is also temporary, and already starting to reverse itself.
Our new medium of storage is becoming the network. Human information is gradually moving towards a distributed and redundant storage model, which has one fantastic advantage: It isn't a format at all! At least not in the usual sense. A network is constantly being upgraded to the 'new thing,' in pieces. It will always be available, always current, and always readable.
Did I say always? OK, not always--who knows what's coming in the future. BUT, with the massive change in storage formats and density (from day to day, year to year); AND the incredible amount of information we're generating/storing, paper won't work anymore, and physical formats are too ephemeral.
So let's work on putting storage online. The information from 1950 to the present is ironically the most endangered, so we'll have to work at it.
Re:You are all seriously uninformed!
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Very true, but read this article. It will add a few clues to the pot:
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. On the one hand, I was thinking of a global society of all humanity.
On the other hand, if the nations of the world get together to prevent research in certain directions, then stupid little tinpot dictators and mad scientists will get together somewhere, and...do the research.
Interesting points. Your first and third are effectively two sides to the same coin.
PCs will soon become ubiquitous. I can forsee a time in the near future when they will be mandatory for school students, and if that happens, then the government (in places like the US, Europe, etc.) will be required to subsidise it for needy families. That's part of the guarantee of public education, which I believe is written into law in most of the western world.
As far as not understanding the technology, that's a grey area. Nobody outside of IT should need to know more about their computer than how to turn it on, use their apps, MAYBE install new ones (two clicks maximum), and MAYBE update the apps/OS (again, two clicks max). A computer should be as easy for the end user as that, and when that happens, the only 'second class' that will exist will be the people unwilling to learn. My opinion on that is boo-fucking-hoo. My father-in-law who had never dealt with a computer (i.e. a PC) in his life started teaching himself about them after his 70th birthday. He now has a network of two PCs and a laptop in the house, sharing a DSL connection.
HOWEVER, that's how it should work, and how it did work for him. Computers are not that easy. They're buggy, they have a shitty OS that crashes, the desktop GUI model is fundamentally at odds with the heirarchal file storage model, and when you throw shortcuts into the mix (let alone things like thumbnails!), you can mess people up quite a bit.
So in the short term, there will be a separate class of people who are missing access to various services. That's no big deal--there's also the class of people who don't/can't drive, and people who can't read. In fact, the comparison with people who can't read is quite apt, because in another decade, that's where computing will be in terms of its importance, and its universality.
Here's a question to toss back: Do computer and/or software manufacturers have a moral responsibility to make their product accessible to everyone, i.e. not make computers be for the 'elite' only?
Go read Bill Joy's article, "Why the future doesn't need us." Possibly the best discussion I've seen on the dangers of future (and present!) technology. Some points he brings up or alludes to:
- Should we, as a society, curtail research on particular branches of science? Human cloning is the obvious one, but researching superbugs and genetically hand-made viruses might have enormous benefits--at a cost of extreme risk.
- Where do we draw the line between human and (for lack of a better word) robot? Nanotech, implants, and genetic mods are all coming to meet at a common point, and that point is SOON!
Some other interesting technological dillemas come to mind. Should we sell or aid the development of technology to 'enemy' nations? How do we define enemies for this purpose? I happen to work for a company that's substantially responsible for getting much of the US military aircraft into the air--am I partly responsible for the use those aircraft are put to? The same question could be (and has been) asked of the Canadian CANDU nuclear reactors--safe, cheap, efficient, reliable, and the easiest way to produce weapons-grade material.
This last one is actually a dillema as old as the hills--dealing with the enemy--but technology is becoming an important factor because it's drawing the world together. (Not to mention the HUGE role technology plays in any conflict these days)
Other issues: Technology eats power, consumes resources, produces waste--do we have a moral responsiblilty to drive as much technological innovation as possible towards cleaning up some of our messes?
The media is now able to modify live broadcasts--how do we control that behaviour? Pasting over footage of billboards with the station's advertising is pretty reprehensible, but what about when they start adding nonexistent people to war scenes?
But the real question may boil down to this simple one: How does technology actually change any of our present moral or ethical states? Does technology actually change our ethics, and should it?
I don't see it.
Microsoft spends $$$$$ on a search engine to compete with Google. It sucks, but it becomes the default for IE, the default for MSN customers, and the default for the new 'windows internet search' feature (which won't explicitly tie in the browser). 90% of the population will use this shitty search which is based on commercial presence, Google will close shop, and the web will become an even worse wasteland of ads and sales sites.
Microsoft seldom spends money to be the BEST, they spend money to be the BIGGEST.
It's all about the money...to stupid people. I'm not at all convinced that Google will sell. If it was making a buck, they could have done that years ago.
What's going on? Short-sightedness and corporate paranoia is going on. Oil companies would love to get their hands on this sort of technology...to bury it!
Cheap oil is bad for business. Oil that doesn't come out of the ground is bad for business. This isn't the rant of a paranoid conspiracy freak, it's how the oil industry is run. As long as there's enough oil to get through a CEO's minimum term, he won't let the company be diverted by such things as alternative sources.
Sad but true.
Just a point here. While it's true that /. posted a link to an April Fools joke, the joke itself is GnomeMeeting's. The *BSD merger is the same thing.
/. isn't actually playing ANY April Fool's jokes--they're just going about their business as usual, and the rest of the world is providing the material.
So in its own way,
I'm thinking this might be the /. April fools joke--dupe the story over and over and over. The fact that Taco's posted it twice is suspicious.
All in all, not a bad joke.
"...a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use."
Mozilla is a lot of things, including my primary browser across three platforms.
However whenever I point out the lack of "completeness" especially with regards to documentation and formalisation of a product, I'm reminded (usually quite gently, bless the developers) that mozilla isn't and never was intended to be a complete browser. I'm told it's intended as a code base, a core for others to use, but it's not supposed to be a feature-and-document-complete browser.
So while I admire the team greatly and use the code constantly, it's not really a product for average users.
Heh. Funny you should say it. I took that movie over to a girl's house for our first ever date. She said she liked weird movies and I took her at her word.
:-)
We're now coming up on our third wedding anniversary.
OK, so it was nominated for a billion awards. More people have seen it than most of the movies in this list.
But how many have watched it...twice? Three times?
As popular as it was, I call it underrated because not enough people know how UTTERLY BRILLIANT it is! The massive 5% zooms, the monochromatic scenes (except for one item), the jokes that you don't realise were jokes until the next day, the mood, the characters, the...oh man, the everything. Having watched it about 10 times on DVD, I'm only BEGINNING to see the real detail that went into this work of art.
Ah, a very cool list, even if I don't agree with it all. Definitely all movies that you should watch, even if they're not all masterpieces. Blue Velvet for instance, is possibly better than Exotica but at the same time, not as intimate. Crying Game was far better than I had expected from the hype, but not as good as I had heard from some. ("the best movie ever!!!")
In the same vein as Exotica and Blue Velvet, make a point of watching "The Cook, the thief, his Wife, and her Lover." Also, make sure you see "Repo Man" and "A Boy and his Dog," two bizarre science fiction-y classics.
Pedro Almodovar's first really big movie, and one of his funniest still. Not quite as twisted as some (tie me up, tie me down; and Matador!) but hilarious!
OK, take Heavy Metal (the original). Then condense it to a single animation team, and have someone write a complete epic story, instead of short stories by different authors. Then double the wonderment and involvement. Wow!
OK, it's a completely off-the-wall fiction about A Scientist, A Model, and Her Husband-A Baseball Player. Odd. Wild. Fun. Quirky. And utterly engaging!
What? Cut scenes in the US? What did they change?
I've got the plain ol' Canadian VHS release, and wasn't aware that there might be any differences between it and...any others. What's been messed with?
Don Johnson in a no-budget cheesy science fiction romp, and...it worked!
The fact that it was based on Harlan Ellison's short story certainly helped, but when you consider that this is the movie Arthur C. Clarke once called "The only science fiction movie ever made," you know you're onto something good. And maaaaannnn is it good!
Heh. I saw a few, but they seem to be buried now, and I can't be bothered to dig that far to find silly people.
There are some people claiming massive prior art for this, and/or questioning the novelty of the patent based on the fact that it's no more than a bloody frequency counter! Those are both at least valid complaints, although not entirely correct from a patent point of view.
But that discussion is raging elsewhere in the threads.
Hmm. It's an obvious way to measure frequency of course--count it! However, it's a novel implementation, which brings up your next point:
"...applying something obvious in a novel context is increasingly being considered the same as actually inventing something novel..."
This is a very fine but extremely important distinction! Part of the problem is that I don't think the patent office actually recognises the distinction--most of us wouldn't, unless pressed on that specific question.
But at the same time, applying something obvious in a novel context implies that it's the novel application of the idea that's being patented. Is that valid? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Unfortunately, we can't say that this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, so we can't make clear-cut rules about it.
Ooh, I LOVE being called an ass-clown. It usually means I've iether pissed someone off, or they've missed my point entirely. Sometimes both.
I didn't say that overclocking would hurt their IP. I said that when they came up with a specific manner for stopping overclocking, then not patenting it would hurt their IP.
Let me repeat it again! WHATEVER YOU THINK OF INTEL FOR IMPLEMENTING THIS IDEA, WHAT THEY ARE PATENTING IS A VALID TECHNICAL TECHNIQUE, WORTHY OF A PATENT. What you want to do with your CPU has nothing WHATSOEVER to do with the validity of the patent.
Anti-consumer patent? I wouldn't agree, but it doesn't matter--they're entitled to come up with patents as anti-consumer as they want, as long as they're valid from a patent office perspective.
Absolutely correct. The people who are whining about the patent are the ones who whine about ALL patents. The ones who are whining about the implications of applying the patent have a valid point, but one that's likely to be trampled by the real reason behind the patent, which brings up the the third group: The people who are pointing out that this will prevent white-box resellers from illegally selling overclocked CPUs.
/. without SOME backlash!
Not really a big deal, but you can't post an article to
OK, let's just get something out of the way. This is a good patent. It patents a specific method of achieving a technological end. It is directed, nonobvious, and something which would hurt their VALID intellectual property ownings to have given away to their competitors.
This is exactly the point of the patent office--to protect innovative technology. Intel has nothing to be ashamed of for patenting this, dammit.
Now if you don't LIKE the technology they've patented, then don't BUY it! If they put this on future CPUs, don't support them if you don't want. But DON'T WHINGE ABOUT THE PATENT BEING JUNK! It's not.
OK, they're small, light, low-power, low-emissions, and they SUCK to look at off-axis. They also suck for extensive motion or really high quality images.
LCDs are fine for moderate graphics, web browsing, and office apps. They're still not good enough for games, for CAD, or for multiple viewers.
You can now buy LCD TVs. They're expensive and they suck. Plasma is much nicer to watch, and the prices aren't that different anymore. If plasma _can_ come down in price, then I predict that LCD will dissappear from the TV market.
Does anyone know how plasma holds up to high resolution text? LCD may end up being a footnote.
We are currently at a cusp which endangers information storage like no other time in history.
We can still see paintings on cave walls and cuniform clay tablets that are thousands of years old. We have books that have outlasted entire empires. At the same time, we're having a hard time reading records that are merely a few decades old, and with the imminent passing of the CDROM format, that time limit is going to shrink.
This is bad. However, this is also temporary, and already starting to reverse itself.
Our new medium of storage is becoming the network. Human information is gradually moving towards a distributed and redundant storage model, which has one fantastic advantage: It isn't a format at all! At least not in the usual sense. A network is constantly being upgraded to the 'new thing,' in pieces. It will always be available, always current, and always readable.
Did I say always? OK, not always--who knows what's coming in the future. BUT, with the massive change in storage formats and density (from day to day, year to year); AND the incredible amount of information we're generating/storing, paper won't work anymore, and physical formats are too ephemeral.
So let's work on putting storage online. The information from 1950 to the present is ironically the most endangered, so we'll have to work at it.
Very true, but read this article. It will add a few clues to the pot:
Who's really behind Bush