actualy, you probably wouldn't be able to do that with a cold fusion reactor ether, since the mettals used are so exspensive
Not necessarily so. Noble metals are used in catalytic converters (they clean up the exhaust) and some countries make these mandatory. And remember that also in ha-ha cold fusion they are only present as a catalyst so they don't get used up.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think I can answer that for you myself. The main technology draw as regards a GUT is the possibility of manipulating gravity as easily as we do electricity.
The achievability of this hinges on the value of the Grand Unification energy. This is the energy density at which the gravitational force becomes indistinguishable from the already-merged electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces. To be able to handle gravity like electricity we would need to be able to generate a similar energy density.
Some more recent theories suggest a fairly low grand unification energy (still fscking hot by human standards, but possibly achievable in the lab on a small scale). However, most theories still predict a grand unification energy of truly enormous proportion, very near the temperature range prevailing in the initial instants of the big bang.
If the latter is correct, then at least for the foreseeable future, we have very little hope of benefiting technologically from a GUT.
It's too late and I'm too tired to dig out my sources now but if someone else wants to supply the figures for the energies involved, that would be, er, "Grand"...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If, when DTV finally arrives, it should come in a form that makes it difficult to record off-air broadcasts or limits the number of playbacks...then I won't be having one in my house, that's all. It's a matter of principle. Who needs TV anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I thought I'd better add that (of course) shared memory controlled via mutexes ought to be the most efficient of all. Only problem is overflowing the queue at high data rates; you basically have to write your own pseudo-I/O routines to provide control over blocking vs. non-blocking etc.
I'm sure you already know all that, I just didn't want to appear stupid in public:o/
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's very interesting; I hadn't heard of your project before now. Multiprocess is a common and sensible approach in real-time systems (I've some experience writing high-volume stock tickers and the like). Tell me, are you using Berkeley sockets or named pipes? A colleague of mine who attempted something similar on NT4 found that named pipes provided *far* better performance in terms of throughput than the sockets library (almost an order of magnitude better).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I've seen *worse* one-man shows in London. And the interpretation is everything. Better that you film it and put the MPEG on the net though. You'd get top billing on Slashdot!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well, it was supposed to be all of those things, but instead it turned out to be the most diappointing movie of all time.
Who cares about whether it was a crappy movie? That's hardly relevant - after all, by that same measuring stick, the original trilogy was just about as crappy!
Hardly. Even the wost of the earlier films, Return of the Jedi, was many times better than TPM.
Wrong on two counts.
(i) Return of the Jedi wasn't the weakest film, The Empire Strikes Back was the weakest. ROTJ rocks.
(ii) The Phantom Menace didn't suck, Jar-Jar notwithstanding. In fact Jar-Jar wasn't even the most annoying thing in the film, it was the patronising arrogant boob version of Obi-Wan played by Ewan MacGregor.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I know you're an insider so I can only accept your answer with regard to GNOME. However the KDE folks aren't quite so politically motivated. Obviously they favour Linux but I expect they'd be prepared to go a little further to achieve multiplatform support since there's no ideological barrier to overcome.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
GNOME and KDE were designed with Linux and *BSD users in mind. Though they will work on solaris, irix, etc.... they were meant to make Linux and other x86/ppc *nix's like Linux and *BSD easy to use. Solaris users probably wouldn't use GNOME/KDE anyway.
Where's your evidence for this? I rather suspect both the GNOME and KDE developers would be overjoyed if their beloved desktops became popular on a range of different platforms. Linux as it is won't suit *all* purposes and even where it does there are more issues to consider tham personal preference (say for example, a company which develops and sells Solaris applications). But even in these cases people may still want to run KDE on their Solaris box,in order to get more functionality and a wide range of free applications.
It looks to me like you're guilty of the same overdone advocacy as the people you're criticizing.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
My point is that you either make a shared library...
Good.
...or a COM object...
Er, I think you must mean a CORBA object. COM object support is only implemented on Windows AFAIK, so implementing a COM object is as bad as writing the application directly to the GUI.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I knew I forgot something - I really meant to put Vernor Vinge on that list, too.
But if you really meant that there were some authors - Asimov and Heinlein - whose stuff you thought was great without any exceptions...then you actually liked those last Heinlein novels?
Surely even the greatest of authors may be responsible for one or two complete turkeys, though these tend to be forgotten.
I admit it's hard to find something particularly awful from Asimov but that's surely because (i) his output was so enormous that it's hard to find the room to remember the least good of his stories, and (ii) his writing seems fairly uniform in its mediocrity by today's standards.
I'll amend that insofar as to say that he did write some stuff which really sticks in my mind - the short story The Last Question and the novel The Gods Themselves. I also thought his later Robot and Foundation novels got better as the stories converged.
You know it only just occurred to me that The Last Question anticipated F J Tipler's Omega Point Theory by several decades.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
For example, I read Science Fiction but I haven't found any single author since Heinlein and Asimov that I'll buy and enjoy everything they produce.
I think this must be the result of a combination of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses and not knowing what to look at in the bookshop.
For starters, Asimov wrote great science fiction - real page turners - but in retrospect it was just traditional pulp. It lacked any kind of sophistication and didn't really demand much from the reader. Heinlein was truly the master in terms of story (eg. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag) but this reputation was won solely on the strength of his output back in the so-called Golden Age. As he aged, his stories and characterisations were increasingly saturated with self-indulgence, saccharine sentimental and sexual fantasies. The rot started to set in around the time of Stranger In a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love. By the time he wrote Number of the Beast his style was hardly recognisable and that book is about enough to make anybody puke. I didn't even bother reading Job at all.
The advent of "New Wave" sci-fi in the seventies meant lean times for those of us who liked good hard science fiction stories, with a traditional narrative structure (a beginning a middle and an end). NB I'm generalising so please don't flame me OK? The likes of Philip K Dick didn't appeal to everyone, some of these stories tended to be a bit too abstract for pulp fans.
But in the eighties and nineties Hard Science fiction enjoyed a resurgence. You may not like the bleak worlds portrayed by "cyberpunk" authors like William Gibson but science fiction has largely moved on from there by now. A lot of science fiction these days has a more optimistic tone.
There is no basis of fact in the suggestion that there is no more good Science Fiction being written any more. I'd particularly recommend you have another look at:
Orson Scott Card - not just Ender's Game, one of my favourites was a book called Hot Sleep, now out of print but re-written and re-released as The Worthing Saga
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars. A truly wonderful book describing the first colonisation of the red planet in stunning detail, it actually makes it believable.
Greg Bear - Eon and its sequel Eternity. Lovely, traditional hard Science Fiction.
Greg Egan - Diaspora. Beautiful story and characterisation. Was developed out of his short story Wang's Carpets which makes up one chapter of the book (the idea behind it will blow your mind, guaranteed).
Peter F Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction &c. Traditional Space opera at its best.
Stephen Baxter - Voyager and Titan. Totally credible very near future space exploration. Like K S Robinson he's researched NASA's stuff very thoroughly and it pays off. he also did The Time Ships, a fairly convincing sequel to HG Wells' The Time Machine authorised by Wells' estate.
Iain M Banks - all of the "Culture" novels, particularly Use of Weapons (although that particular book does play around with the narrative structure a bit, for a very good reason).
Michael Marshall Smith - Only Forward and Spares. Very unusual stories. A bit like Iain M Banks.
Ken Macleod - The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. Actually The Star Fraction wasn't released in the US because it goes on about leftist politics a lot. You can get it from amazon.co.uk if you're not boycotting Amazon.
Neal Stephenson - I'd better mention Snow Crash and The Diamond Age before I get drummed out of Slashdot...I'd probably have mentioned them anyway but it's a bit hard to be sure when you just know someone's waiting to jump down your throat:o/
NB. I don't mean this to be an exhaustive list of my favourite contemporary Science Fiction by any means. But if you read all the above I'm certain you'll find that more than a few of them will excite you, and make you want more.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
FLOOBADOOP! That should be preserved for posterity!
He was my favourite too. Here are some more Don Martin sound effects, from some Don Martin Sound Effect Stickers I got with an issue of Mad Magazine way back in about 1975 (they've stayed fresh in my mind all that time):
Sound of treading in a rather moist dog turd - GLITCH!
Sound of being hit in the face with a frying pan: PWANG!
Sound of a springy saw blade bent back then released to smack you in the face - FOINZAPP!
Sound of being poked in the eyeball with a lit cigarette - SIZAFITZ!
Sound of someone drilling into your forehead with a power drill - BZZOWNT!
Sound of being hit in the face by a large wet fish - SPLADAP!
Sound of being being poked in the eye by one of those thin metal rod-type towel rails that stick out from the wall - SHTOINK!
...and my all-time favourite:o)) Sound of an empty glass bottle bouncing off your head - DOONT!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Oh no we didn't. Some of us pretended to when we were in the 8th because it wasn't "cool" to find the same things funny. I'm sure most of those who took that attitude did eventually grow up. As for me: there are clever cartoonists and artistic cartoonists, but I *always* found Don Martin one of the very *funniest* cartoonists.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Right on, man. Unfortunately it's just the same here in the UK. Too much political correctness and not enough education, for fear of making life too hard for the little dears. Everything my kids (aged 4.5 and 6) have learned so far they learned here at home up to a year before the school got around to it.
Your description of modern schooling as 8-3 daycare is spot on. What's the fucking use of it at all? The schools aren't run for the parent or the children any more, they're run to satisfy the "teaching" staff's political agenda.
Yet another sign of the decline of Western civilisation.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You've obviously taken LSD today and are having a bad trip. I can assure you the visions you're having of dead animals are NOT REAL. I hope you manage to find medical assistance before you hurt yourself. Try dialling 911.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Good point, but my instincts are that you're wrong. Let me attempt to explain why.
For a commercial organisation to risk spending money on developing the software requires two things: a revenue model and a market.
With regard to revenue, IMO the banner advertising thing is just about played out by now. How many companies built on that model are actually making a profit? There are no millions to be made unless you count fraudulent IPOs, and SURELY that bubble must burst soon.
With regard to the market, Slashdot has a solid, loyal following that has been built up over some time. Most of us are diehard geeks with at least some traces of an anti-authority, anti-corporate streak. We also have a good nose for BS artists looking to fleece the world in a meaningless IPO. A commercial organisation who was clearly just in it for the money would simply not be guaranteed the same kind of support from the community that Slashdot has enjoyed.
Because of both of these factors, any company seeking to muscle in faces substantial risks to be weighed against the costs of developing and maintaining the software and otherwise launching and running the business. Remember, the reason Rob and Jeff sought a backer in the first place, was that running the site was costing them lot of time and money.
I'm pretty sure that the only way to emulate Slashdot's success is to employ a similar formula. It must be a 'hobby' site with no ostensible signs of cashing in at someone else's expense, the people doing it must possess a measure of 'coolness' and the owners must be credible supporters of the open source community.
To take business away from Slashdot it must also bring something new to the table, such as the new functionality I discussed.
IMHO, a profit-oriented business can't easily fulfil these requirements without facing a lot of risk. Only an enthusiast, doing it just for the crack, is likely to accept those risks and still look credible. But if the current version of Slash is released, the sofware barrier to entry is removed and almost anyone can enter the market with little outlay and thus little risk.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I've never even suggested that commercial organisations are in business to do R&D for the sake of it. If there are any, they are ignored for the purpose of this discussion.
But a business will weigh the risks and potential rewards for any project. With the risk of patent lawsuits removed, and the knowledge that careful protection of one's trade secrets will still protect one's investment, the only new risk to a business contemplating the development of a new product is that of a competitor paying for their own research, taking the same risks and competing fairly in the same market. This happens all the time anyway; the proportion of cases where a patent prevents any entry to the same market is fairly small.
I see no indication that allowing companies to re-invent a particular technology - which is all this is about - would harm companies in any way. And since it would enable competition in those markets where one company *does* have a lock on a particular technology, the consumer would certainly benefit.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're kidding, surely. Five years is still way too long because by the time a software patent is five years old it's either irrelevant or someone else has already found a way around it. Software development advances much more quickly than most forms of invention. Quite likely this is because the limitations are in the hardware and as we all know, the hardware has been developing just as fast. Five years is too long for computer hardware technology patents too.
Lengths of patents *must* be brought into line with the development timescales of the technologies involved.
Five years still might as well be forever.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Naw, it *is* simple really. The only complication is that the words invent and discover are almost synonymous etymologically speaking (Latin word for "to discover" was "invenire", IIRC). But we use he words in different contexts today and patent law is based on the same interpretation.
Allow me to attempt a suitable pair of definitions to illustrate the difference (this is certainly how these words *should* be used IMHO):
A "discovery" is the invention of a fundamental truth that holds independently of invention, i.e. would exist anyway even if man did not (OK, you know what I mean by this and so does everybody else so DON'T start on about philosophy again). The courts are not about to entertain notions about trees falling silently in deserted forests).
An "invention" is the discovery of a process or mechanism that requires man for its construction and operation.
PS. FWIW I agree with you about the youngsters and their obsession with nihilism. Kids today, huh? Actually I have to admit I too read Sartre and Nietzche as an angst-ridden teenager...and thus it ever was, probably.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
...commercial funding for software research would be reduced, as the potential of making back the investment would be greatly diminished.
"Patently" untrue (ahem...)
Businesses will still need technologies to sell and to enhance their own efficiency. Do you imagine that in the absence of patents they'd all just close up shop? Would they bollocks. No, all that would happen is that instead of licensing other firms' technologies they'd either get them for free if they were out in the open (and I'm sure those able to do so would *not* be moaning about the loss of the patent system)...or else they'd happily re-invent what others have but are keeping secret.
Second, what research there was would largely result in work which would remain trade secrets, which impede progress as much as overbroad, overlong patents do.
I don't see any evidence for such a conclusion.
Under the current patent system, you are not allowed to reinvent and if the owner of the patent doesn't want to licence to you then you are stuffed. If we abandon the patents system then anyone is free to invent or re-invent whatever they want. Isn't that a more natural system for a free market economy?
The current patent system only preserves monopolies, it doesn't facilitate progress at all.
The only possible downside is the cost of reinvention. But in that case, who is the loser anyway? The company doing the reinventing only pays for its own R&D instead of stumping up royalties to the firm that could afford the most expensive lawyers. So the overall costs to such companies probably don't change much. But *even if* more money is being spent overall, then this money still isn't going into a black hole. It's being spent in the form of salaries to the scientists and engineers doing that R&D. IOW, the money is still circulating, but it's circulating through salaries to the extra R&D workers rather than through dividend payments to Acme Corp's stockholders. Do you have a problem with that?
In other words abandoning the patent system would result in no net effect upon the economy, but in the training and employment of more scientists and engineers, less idle rich parasite investors lounging around... and much less employment of Intellectual Property lawyers;o)
(As I wrote that I just had a beautiful vision of thousands of redundant IP lawyers begging for a job at Macdonalds.)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
actualy, you probably wouldn't be able to do that with a cold fusion reactor ether, since the mettals used are so exspensive
Not necessarily so. Noble metals are used in catalytic converters (they clean up the exhaust) and some countries make these mandatory. And remember that also in ha-ha cold fusion they are only present as a catalyst so they don't get used up.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think I can answer that for you myself. The main technology draw as regards a GUT is the possibility of manipulating gravity as easily as we do electricity.
The achievability of this hinges on the value of the Grand Unification energy. This is the energy density at which the gravitational force becomes indistinguishable from the already-merged electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces. To be able to handle gravity like electricity we would need to be able to generate a similar energy density.
Some more recent theories suggest a fairly low grand unification energy (still fscking hot by human standards, but possibly achievable in the lab on a small scale). However, most theories still predict a grand unification energy of truly enormous proportion, very near the temperature range prevailing in the initial instants of the big bang.
If the latter is correct, then at least for the foreseeable future, we have very little hope of benefiting technologically from a GUT.
It's too late and I'm too tired to dig out my sources now but if someone else wants to supply the figures for the energies involved, that would be, er, "Grand"...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If, when DTV finally arrives, it should come in a form that makes it difficult to record off-air broadcasts or limits the number of playbacks...then I won't be having one in my house, that's all. It's a matter of principle. Who needs TV anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I thought I'd better add that (of course) shared memory controlled via mutexes ought to be the most efficient of all. Only problem is overflowing the queue at high data rates; you basically have to write your own pseudo-I/O routines to provide control over blocking vs. non-blocking etc.
:o/
I'm sure you already know all that, I just didn't want to appear stupid in public
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's very interesting; I hadn't heard of your project before now. Multiprocess is a common and sensible approach in real-time systems (I've some experience writing high-volume stock tickers and the like). Tell me, are you using Berkeley sockets or named pipes? A colleague of mine who attempted something similar on NT4 found that named pipes provided *far* better performance in terms of throughput than the sockets library (almost an order of magnitude better).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I've seen *worse* one-man shows in London. And the interpretation is everything. Better that you film it and put the MPEG on the net though. You'd get top billing on Slashdot!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hilarious! And miles better than the ASCII-mation version.
Now go and do the *rest* of the film. I'm waiting...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well, it was supposed to be all of those things, but instead it turned out to be the most diappointing movie of all time.
Who cares about whether it was a crappy movie? That's hardly relevant - after all, by that same measuring stick, the original trilogy was just about as crappy!
Hardly. Even the wost of the earlier films, Return of the Jedi, was many times better than TPM.
Wrong on two counts.
(i) Return of the Jedi wasn't the weakest film, The Empire Strikes Back was the weakest. ROTJ rocks.
(ii) The Phantom Menace didn't suck, Jar-Jar notwithstanding. In fact Jar-Jar wasn't even the most annoying thing in the film, it was the patronising arrogant boob version of Obi-Wan played by Ewan MacGregor.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
What kind of twisted mentality could possibly mark up my post as INFORMATIVE???!?!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Nice flame, man!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hi Jonas.
I know you're an insider so I can only accept your answer with regard to GNOME. However the KDE folks aren't quite so politically motivated. Obviously they favour Linux but I expect they'd be prepared to go a little further to achieve multiplatform support since there's no ideological barrier to overcome.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Keep in mind though that not every program can be made to work in a commandline mode. Remember, no everyone runs ncurses on their system ;-)
Then it's not a compliant box. Curses support is a part of standard Unix, with or without X. You might as well say that not everyone runs stdlib.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
GNOME and KDE were designed with Linux and *BSD users in mind. Though they will work on solaris, irix, etc.... they were meant to make Linux and other x86/ppc *nix's like Linux and *BSD easy to use. Solaris users probably wouldn't use GNOME/KDE anyway.
Where's your evidence for this? I rather suspect both the GNOME and KDE developers would be overjoyed if their beloved desktops became popular on a range of different platforms. Linux as it is won't suit *all* purposes and even where it does there are more issues to consider tham personal preference (say for example, a company which develops and sells Solaris applications). But even in these cases people may still want to run KDE on their Solaris box,in order to get more functionality and a wide range of free applications.
It looks to me like you're guilty of the same overdone advocacy as the people you're criticizing.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
My point is that you either make a shared library...
...or a COM object...
Good.
Er, I think you must mean a CORBA object. COM object support is only implemented on Windows AFAIK, so implementing a COM object is as bad as writing the application directly to the GUI.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Flenser, eh?
I knew I forgot something - I really meant to put Vernor Vinge on that list, too.
But if you really meant that there were some authors - Asimov and Heinlein - whose stuff you thought was great without any exceptions...then you actually liked those last Heinlein novels?
Surely even the greatest of authors may be responsible for one or two complete turkeys, though these tend to be forgotten.
I admit it's hard to find something particularly awful from Asimov but that's surely because (i) his output was so enormous that it's hard to find the room to remember the least good of his stories, and (ii) his writing seems fairly uniform in its mediocrity by today's standards.
I'll amend that insofar as to say that he did write some stuff which really sticks in my mind - the short story The Last Question and the novel The Gods Themselves. I also thought his later Robot and Foundation novels got better as the stories converged.
You know it only just occurred to me that The Last Question anticipated F J Tipler's Omega Point Theory by several decades.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
For example, I read Science Fiction but I haven't found any single author since Heinlein and Asimov that I'll buy and enjoy everything they produce.
:o/
I think this must be the result of a combination of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses and not knowing what to look at in the bookshop.
For starters, Asimov wrote great science fiction - real page turners - but in retrospect it was just traditional pulp. It lacked any kind of sophistication and didn't really demand much from the reader. Heinlein was truly the master in terms of story (eg. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag) but this reputation was won solely on the strength of his output back in the so-called Golden Age. As he aged, his stories and characterisations were increasingly saturated with self-indulgence, saccharine sentimental and sexual fantasies. The rot started to set in around the time of Stranger In a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love. By the time he wrote Number of the Beast his style was hardly recognisable and that book is about enough to make anybody puke. I didn't even bother reading Job at all.
The advent of "New Wave" sci-fi in the seventies meant lean times for those of us who liked good hard science fiction stories, with a traditional narrative structure (a beginning a middle and an end). NB I'm generalising so please don't flame me OK? The likes of Philip K Dick didn't appeal to everyone, some of these stories tended to be a bit too abstract for pulp fans.
But in the eighties and nineties Hard Science fiction enjoyed a resurgence. You may not like the bleak worlds portrayed by "cyberpunk" authors like William Gibson but science fiction has largely moved on from there by now. A lot of science fiction these days has a more optimistic tone.
There is no basis of fact in the suggestion that there is no more good Science Fiction being written any more. I'd particularly recommend you have another look at:
Orson Scott Card - not just Ender's Game, one of my favourites was a book called Hot Sleep, now out of print but re-written and re-released as The Worthing Saga
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars. A truly wonderful book describing the first colonisation of the red planet in stunning detail, it actually makes it believable.
Greg Bear - Eon and its sequel Eternity. Lovely, traditional hard Science Fiction.
Greg Egan - Diaspora. Beautiful story and characterisation. Was developed out of his short story Wang's Carpets which makes up one chapter of the book (the idea behind it will blow your mind, guaranteed).
Peter F Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction &c. Traditional Space opera at its best.
Stephen Baxter - Voyager and Titan. Totally credible very near future space exploration. Like K S Robinson he's researched NASA's stuff very thoroughly and it pays off. he also did The Time Ships, a fairly convincing sequel to HG Wells' The Time Machine authorised by Wells' estate.
Iain M Banks - all of the "Culture" novels, particularly Use of Weapons (although that particular book does play around with the narrative structure a bit, for a very good reason).
Michael Marshall Smith - Only Forward and Spares. Very unusual stories. A bit like Iain M Banks.
Ken Macleod - The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. Actually The Star Fraction wasn't released in the US because it goes on about leftist politics a lot. You can get it from amazon.co.uk if you're not boycotting Amazon.
Neal Stephenson - I'd better mention Snow Crash and The Diamond Age before I get drummed out of Slashdot...I'd probably have mentioned them anyway but it's a bit hard to be sure when you just know someone's waiting to jump down your throat
NB. I don't mean this to be an exhaustive list of my favourite contemporary Science Fiction by any means. But if you read all the above I'm certain you'll find that more than a few of them will excite you, and make you want more.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
FLOOBADOOP! That should be preserved for posterity!
:o)) Sound of an empty glass bottle bouncing off your head - DOONT!
He was my favourite too. Here are some more Don Martin sound effects, from some Don Martin Sound Effect Stickers I got with an issue of Mad Magazine way back in about 1975 (they've stayed fresh in my mind all that time):
Sound of treading in a rather moist dog turd - GLITCH!
Sound of being hit in the face with a frying pan: PWANG!
Sound of a springy saw blade bent back then released to smack you in the face - FOINZAPP!
Sound of being poked in the eyeball with a lit cigarette - SIZAFITZ!
Sound of someone drilling into your forehead with a power drill - BZZOWNT!
Sound of being hit in the face by a large wet fish - SPLADAP!
Sound of being being poked in the eye by one of those thin metal rod-type towel rails that stick out from the wall - SHTOINK!
...and my all-time favourite
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Oh no we didn't. Some of us pretended to when we were in the 8th because it wasn't "cool" to find the same things funny. I'm sure most of those who took that attitude did eventually grow up. As for me: there are clever cartoonists and artistic cartoonists, but I *always* found Don Martin one of the very *funniest* cartoonists.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Right on, man. Unfortunately it's just the same here in the UK. Too much political correctness and not enough education, for fear of making life too hard for the little dears. Everything my kids (aged 4.5 and 6) have learned so far they learned here at home up to a year before the school got around to it.
Your description of modern schooling as 8-3 daycare is spot on. What's the fucking use of it at all? The schools aren't run for the parent or the children any more, they're run to satisfy the "teaching" staff's political agenda.
Yet another sign of the decline of Western civilisation.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You've obviously taken LSD today and are having a bad trip. I can assure you the visions you're having of dead animals are NOT REAL. I hope you manage to find medical assistance before you hurt yourself. Try dialling 911.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Good point, but my instincts are that you're wrong. Let me attempt to explain why.
For a commercial organisation to risk spending money on developing the software requires two things: a revenue model and a market.
With regard to revenue, IMO the banner advertising thing is just about played out by now. How many companies built on that model are actually making a profit? There are no millions to be made unless you count fraudulent IPOs, and SURELY that bubble must burst soon.
With regard to the market, Slashdot has a solid, loyal following that has been built up over some time. Most of us are diehard geeks with at least some traces of an anti-authority, anti-corporate streak. We also have a good nose for BS artists looking to fleece the world in a meaningless IPO.
A commercial organisation who was clearly just in it for the money would simply not be guaranteed the same kind of support from the community that Slashdot has enjoyed.
Because of both of these factors, any company seeking to muscle in faces substantial risks to be weighed against the costs of developing and maintaining the software and otherwise launching and running the business. Remember, the reason Rob and Jeff sought a backer in the first place, was that running the site was costing them lot of time and money.
I'm pretty sure that the only way to emulate Slashdot's success is to employ a similar formula. It must be a 'hobby' site with no ostensible signs of cashing in at someone else's expense, the people doing it must possess a measure of 'coolness' and the owners must be credible supporters of the open source community.
To take business away from Slashdot it must also bring something new to the table, such as the new functionality I discussed.
IMHO, a profit-oriented business can't easily fulfil these requirements without facing a lot of risk. Only an enthusiast, doing it just for the crack, is likely to accept those risks and still look credible. But if the current version of Slash is released, the sofware barrier to entry is removed and almost anyone can enter the market with little outlay and thus little risk.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I've never even suggested that commercial organisations are in business to do R&D for the sake of it. If there are any, they are ignored for the purpose of this discussion.
But a business will weigh the risks and potential rewards for any project. With the risk of patent lawsuits removed, and the knowledge that careful protection of one's trade secrets will still protect one's investment, the only new risk to a business contemplating the development of a new product is that of a competitor paying for their own research, taking the same risks and competing fairly in the same market. This happens all the time anyway; the proportion of cases where a patent prevents any entry to the same market is fairly small.
I see no indication that allowing companies to re-invent a particular technology - which is all this is about - would harm companies in any way. And since it would enable competition in those markets where one company *does* have a lock on a particular technology, the consumer would certainly benefit.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're kidding, surely. Five years is still way too long because by the time a software patent is five years old it's either irrelevant or someone else has already found a way around it. Software development advances much more quickly than most forms of invention. Quite likely this is because the limitations are in the hardware and as we all know, the hardware has been developing just as fast. Five years is too long for computer hardware technology patents too.
Lengths of patents *must* be brought into line with the development timescales of the technologies involved.
Five years still might as well be forever.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Naw, it *is* simple really. The only complication is that the words invent and discover are almost synonymous etymologically speaking (Latin word for "to discover" was "invenire", IIRC). But we use he words in different contexts today and patent law is based on the same interpretation.
Allow me to attempt a suitable pair of definitions to illustrate the difference (this is certainly how these words *should* be used IMHO):
A "discovery" is the invention of a fundamental truth that holds independently of invention, i.e. would exist anyway even if man did not (OK, you know what I mean by this and so does everybody else so DON'T start on about philosophy again). The courts are not about to entertain notions about trees falling silently in deserted forests).
An "invention" is the discovery of a process or mechanism that requires man for its construction and operation.
PS. FWIW I agree with you about the youngsters and their obsession with nihilism. Kids today, huh? Actually I have to admit I too read Sartre and Nietzche as an angst-ridden teenager...and thus it ever was, probably.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
...commercial funding for software research
;o)
would be reduced, as the potential of making back the investment would be greatly diminished.
"Patently" untrue (ahem...)
Businesses will still need technologies to sell and to enhance their own efficiency. Do you imagine that in the absence of patents they'd all just close up shop? Would they bollocks. No, all that would happen is that instead of licensing other firms' technologies they'd either get them for free if they were out in the open (and I'm sure those able to do so would *not* be moaning about the loss of the patent system)...or else they'd happily re-invent what others have but are keeping secret.
Second, what research there was would largely result in work which would remain trade secrets, which impede progress as much as overbroad, overlong patents do.
I don't see any evidence for such a conclusion.
Under the current patent system, you are not allowed to reinvent and if the owner of the patent doesn't want to licence to you then you are stuffed. If we abandon the patents system then anyone is free to invent or re-invent whatever they want. Isn't that a more natural system for a free market economy?
The current patent system only preserves monopolies, it doesn't facilitate progress at all.
The only possible downside is the cost of reinvention. But in that case, who is the loser anyway? The company doing the reinventing only pays for its own R&D instead of stumping up royalties to the firm that could afford the most expensive lawyers. So the overall costs to such companies probably don't change much. But *even if* more money is being spent overall, then this money still isn't going into a black hole. It's being spent in the form of salaries to the scientists and engineers doing that R&D. IOW, the money is still circulating, but it's circulating through salaries to the extra R&D workers rather than through dividend payments to Acme Corp's stockholders. Do you have a problem with that?
In other words abandoning the patent system would result in no net effect upon the economy, but in the training and employment of more scientists and engineers, less idle rich parasite investors lounging around... and much less employment of Intellectual Property lawyers
(As I wrote that I just had a beautiful vision of thousands of redundant IP lawyers begging for a job at Macdonalds.)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction