Forget space aliens. Look at how the US, and many other, governments treat people from other countries. It's often hard to even travel between countries and moving or working in another country is an impossible pain. To get into the US and be able to get a decent job you have to go through hoops. And the worse the place you come from the less likely you'll be allowed to stay. It's nothing but government sponsored discrimination against people for something they are born with. I certainly didn't pick to be born in the US and am quite certain that other people don't choose to be born in 3rd world hell. Even reasonably well educated and non-criminal people have a hard time moving here. Lots of excuses are given why we need immigration laws but they all remind me of why we need slavery or why women can't work or homosexuals can't get married.
I'm also impressed by a politiician that bothers to learn the facts and admits when he doesn't yet know the facts about something. If only I had someone here with similar traits I'd be forced to actually start voting. I'm tempted to move just so I have someone worth voting for. Would Rep Boucher consider running for President?:)
Funny enough on my tv anyone old enough to know how to read can turn off v-chip support in 15 seconds. There is no password feature or any other way to keep someone from changing the rating or turning the option off. I just laughed to death when I saw the way it worked. The tv company gets to say their tv has vchip support and nobody is hurt by it's use. Any teenager could easily turn it off.:)
Interesting. Any idea if the format actually works (ie have you written any programs to work with the data?) as the docs and programs I've found before would manage to import some of the data but not most of it. If I find some spare time maybe I'll get around to making my tool to convert it to XML.:)
I've been running Red-Carpet on my RedHat box since it's release and have found it very useful. It still is having some troubles on my Mandrake box but I was told how to fix this and just haven't gotten to it yet. It'd be nice if this was handled by some installer as I doubt newbies (the target audience?) would like switching apckages in and out to make it work. Haven't had a chance to try it under SuSE yet but I will someday soon.:)
What'd be really useful to me is to have the format of the contact list and history open. I've asked several times and they'd send a nice little letter saying that in the next version the format would be open. Thus far I haven't noticed it having been documented anywhere. I have frickin 2000+ contacts and years of history I can't import into GnomeICU and it annoys the hell out of me. I could write a program to force it out of ICQ but that'd be a pain in the ass so I end up waiting for someone else to offer a handy lil ICQ->XML conversion tool I can use.:)
I'd have to say my experiences have been different. We've had repeated problems with IE not handling standard stuff in anything like a normal method and being forced to do frequent upgrades to fix these problems as quickly as possible as well as writing our code around the bugs. Stability has been somewhat of an issue in IE and Win2k also. Last week for example we had to completely reinstall Win2k Pro and all apps on a machine just to keep IE from crashing. These machines are brand new (from a good company) and have very clean installs of their software and run almost nothing besides Office 2000 and IE so they shouldn't have much to conflict with. Under any version of Windows I've tried IE has been fairly sucky.
We also run MacOS 9 which has an entirely different set of IE problems but usually does somewhat better.
Netscape is just as bad as IE and is full of bugs on Windows, MacOS, and on Linux. While it usually handles http/html stuff better than IE it has less conformance with newer standards and crashes more often.
Konqueror is okay for a very light yet somewhat usable browser and may turn into something nice but so far I don't see it even counting.
Opera is okay but doesn't seem worth the cost to me and I'm not going to look at ads.
Mozilla is a little tricky as you still have to find a good build but there is plenty of community support for making this easier and usually it isn't that hard to find a good one that is recent. It is fairly full featured, standard compliant, fast, and stable on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Even components such as Mail/News and the HTML Composser are shaping up really well. The fact that it is so cross-platform is also really good IMO. On the average day I work with Mozilla as my browser and mail program for around 10 hours and really beat the crap out of it and it rarely has any problem.
I don't care about 'sticking it' to anyone but I like software that doesn't suck and my experience has been that all software sucks and with commercial software you are stuck up a creek without a paddle. With open source I can either fix it myself or get online and get a fix often within minutes or hours. It isn't often closed source software has that good of turn around. I just wish I could find an open sourced bandwidth provider (whatever that would mean) cus companies are a pain to work with. "Ughh well we can have it done sometime a month after we promised." Of course some companies are better than others and so is some software.:)
One of the dangers of working for a publiclly traded company I'd say. When in doubt start your own company. It may be more work and more risks but you never get fired. Of course this only works if you can sell yourself and your product well.:)
If you really want to write amatuer erotica there are plenty of newsgroups for it. Or why not start your own site using the Slashcode for such stuff (starting a website costs about $.95 these days) and maybe you'll get visitors that actually are at your site looking for such stuff rather than geeks looking for techie stuff. If your going to post such stuff on Slashdot find a good anti-porn censorship discussion to attach it to and include some cyber babes (Aya from Parasite Eve and Quistis, Rinoa, and Selphie from FF8 strike my fancy).;>
I'd say there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle, either by products dying out or by legal action. Now that there has been a taste there will eventually be one or more working models. None is likely to have the instant dominant position Napster had (except possibly Microsoft's offering if they bind it into Windows) but that doesn't mean the concept will die. File-sharing is a simple concept and a very addictive concept so it's something with low market entry and lots of possible market share. That will drive companies to invest. Us geeks will invest jour time just to keep the companies from sealing us in and because we like to hack code. I myself was working w/ file-sharing concepts long before Napster existed and am sure I will be long after. The concept has no doubt been growing ever since the invention of email. As a species we like being able to communicate freely. That includes text messages, voice messages, movies, photos, music, games, etc. Therefore there is no way the idea of sharing these things will die out. They'll just get thought about some more and new better concepts will be tried over and over until we find the perfect one. Email, ftp, gopher, web, instant messaging, Napster, etc are all steps we've taken.
Damn/if/ these things are real I want one now! Or at $50 a pop I'd grab several and have myself a nifty 100TB's of space to toy with. And I was happy w/ a mere 50GB. Well not really, I keep having to add new drives, but 50GB drives for less than $200 sounded good. Waiting is hard!:)
However I agree that a lot of people, including Slashdotters, seem to think anything that isn't out now is vaporware and anything that isn't likely to be out in less than two years is sci fi. Maybe it'd be nice if having an idea made it suddenly materialize but unfortunately a lot of it takes work and that takes time. That doesn't mean the idea is vapor, just that it isn't ready to slap in plastic bubble paper and post mark to every Sam, Dick, and Mary that knows how to order from AmazonSucksAwayMyCash.com.
Obviously you are unable to take past and current trends and see likely places they will go. How exactly they work out is of course up in the air until it's happened but it's far better to start looking at the possibilities now. If you noticed my timeline was 'maybe in our lifetime' so that is in 80+ years.
Eventually nanotech will work. It is obvious that our bodies, among other things, are natural occuring nano-machines and that there is a large amount of interest in miniturizing and new fabrication techniques. Eventually that will lead to practical nanotechnology.
As the Net (includes the Internet and all future Internet technologies which are not yet named because they don't even exist yet) advances bandwidth will grow as well as improving of our concepts of what forms of communication are possible. Eventually P2P will be king as everyone will want to be able to share what they have directly making the client-server Internet just a subset of P2P.
I think it's fairly obvious that these P2P functional object fabbing will eventually become popular and that'll drive the above technologies to higher quality and lower prices creating that nice little positive spiral.
Of course every new technological jump shakes our world view but I do think you'd have to admit that the sort of jump that destorys our economical model and even our concepts of what is reality is a shattering thing. Probably an event such as that has never happened in the entire history of the human race. Stopping it is probably impossible so we better damn well get ready.
Sure it sounds sci fi'ish (doesn't everything? hell some days I open the news and am shocked they have already managed something that should be in Star Trek) but none of it is against the laws of science and for the most part it's all just based on many small changes happening. If you don't understand the issues enough to understand what the likely converging technologies will be that's fine but it doesn't stop others of us from thinking about it and talking about it.
It so happens that I actually think Gibson has a very poor understanding of technology and it's usually reflected in his books. I do enjoy some of his works but I much prefer Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson, both of which auctually do a lot of research and have a good idea of what they are talking about. I hear more of this when listening to friends of different sciences talk than from sci fi.
Maybe you should hang out in the field more and get some expossure to some working researchers before you stamp stuff as drivel. If you want to find it funny though that is fine. Anyone with grammar as poor as mine deserves to be laughed at now and then.:)
Most of our machines run Linux so does are automaticlly virus free. We also use MacOS and Windows which we keep updated with the latest virus scanners. Given that these updates are available for free online and can be automated the cost isn't much. Due to some problems with our old software working under Windows 2000 we've had to switch to Outlook for mail and I feel that may increase our problems but so far it's been nothing big. I'm considering setting up virus scanning at the mail server level (runs Linux) to take care of that problem but that takes very little effort. I'd say viruses cost maybe $100 in upkeep and monitoring a year.
Glad to see someone who isn't a sci fi lighter seems to get it. Maybe they can get this into the minds of future CEO's and politicians now so that they'll have accepted it and be ready to work with it by the time it becomes reality. There is no stopping it. By the time we reach home nanotech our entire idea of what divides information from objects will be tested. When anybody can own anything for virtually nothing then what is the point of money? Take it one step further where medical technology has embraced nanotech and we've learned to replace ALL parts of the body. That essentially makes US software. Then what stops us from transfering ourselves physically over the Net, living both in the physical world and the Net, redesigning our bodies, etc? Then imagine we hook the Net/P2P thing into the very root of what we consider our bodies so that we could transfer control of atoms to other hosts over the Net, trade ideas in raw data formats, etc. It all quickly gets very complicated and shatters our world view. This isn't that far away. It might even happen during some of our lifetimes. How will a society who still believes in copyright laws and such handle that they themselves may end up software owned by someone? It all sounds very post-cyberpunk and post-modern.:)
I'd also add that views or what is right and wrong change. Right now looking at xyz type of content may seem immoral but ten years from now may seem very normal. This happens all the time and can be easily noticed by checking out how music, movies, television commercials, etc have changed in the past couple decades. What will be the effect when we have a technological block in place that is now keeping us from viewing what was once considered immoral but is now perfectly okay? What if a generation of children not allowed to view copyrighted works online grows up and abolishes copyright laws as a solution. Will we have to pay these companies, tech consultants, etc to go back through and modify these programs and their rule books? This sounds like a useless tax on our society. Could we ever be sure to totally reverse the effects? The only winners sounds like the companies that sell the software.
You might think that you don't care if people are blocked into your moral view for the forseeable future despite popular opinion at the time but keep in mind the blade swings both ways. What if next year right after you get this law in place the popular opinion is very different from yours and the rules the software is given are not at all what you'd hoped for but rather quite different.
For example suddenly you find you can't access your childs homepage on their school site because the reading list includes thumbnails of the books your child has read. What happens if your church web site is suddenly blocked because you have a background image or song clip (innocently) taken from someone elses Bible site? If these sites are blocked by software rules it may be hard to get them unblocked even if you adjust the sites to fit the current laws. Do you really want to risk such problems or impose such problems on other people?
Whenever I hear such arguments I compare myself to my sister. We obviously have the same genetic simularities (same parents) and grew up in similar enviroments (we shared a house) but I was the first child and my parents were far less restrictive with me than with my sister (they went religious about the time my sister was born but not so much as to try to change the direction they were raising me).
I was exposed to 'real life' from the time I was a baby. Able to go where I wanted when I wanted for the most part, able to watch anything I wanted, listen to any time of music I wanted, use the Internet as I wanted, and play any type of games I wanted. My sister on the other hand was kept on a protective leash so as to not be exposed to supposedly harmful things such as violence, bad language, nudity/sex, drugs and all that stuff. She has never been able to go places without asking permission, couldn't watch movies above PG/P3-13, was forbidden from dating, couldn't listen to music that my parents didn't like and couldn't play video games more violent than Commander Keen (hey I love that game but y'know there are other good games).
Today I am fairly well rounded. I've never been on drugs or smoked. I'm comfortable traveling to places I've never been and trying new things and have lived in several places. I've got a pretty good job and am working on improving my situation as I go. In other words I'm pretty normal and IMO happier and more confident than the average person.
My sister has never managed to live on her on, go to school, get a job, etc. She's always afraid of everything and is pretty guliable. Overall she's depressed and uncertain of any direction for her life. She is easily pulled into weird and extreme cultish religious groups (anything that outwardly differs from the religous structure she was raised under). She is very effected by peer pressure and does almost anything her friends or the media make her think is required of her.
Maybe this is an unusual case but I don't think so. Most my friends that are similar in personality to myself were raised under similar conditions. I'm not saying encourage your kids to beat the dog and watch pornos all day but I think expossure to real life help build a sense of how the world really is and a personal sense of place and morals. I certainly will raise all my children under a trust system and let them all have a lot of freedom.
I am for the idea of ratings but they should be by content types and not left to comittees to decide upon. I like the life-like violence, cartoonish violence, nudity, etc ratings much better than G, PG, PG13, R, MA, etc stuff that is just tacked on psuedo-randomly. This gives parents an idea of what is really in the movie/music/game/etc before they buy the product. After they buy the product they should carefully review it before giving it to their child and make their choice with care. The government, corporations, and parent/religious/etc groups should not make these dicissions for us. A lot of fine art has been lost for all time because of censorship based on someone elses morals. I really don't like to see that happen and I doubt anyone else does either. It just sort of happens as things get left on the editing room floor as each group takes their shots at it.
I'd argue that ratings have shreaded the availability of quality medita that is outside the mass-appeal norm. How many bad films add just a little bad language or nudity to get bumped up to an R rating to get more attention from their target market? How many movies have to clip out things that add to the plot but are deemed upfit because they say 'fuck' rather than 'darn' one to many times or show a nipple for 2 minutes rather than 5 seconds? Instead to see things of that nature we tend to have to get foriegn films, skinimax crap, film festival stuff etc. The rules are completely nutty and based on moving ideals of the moral norm. I for one don't like living to the lowest common denominator of society.
Hrm that was long and spammy but hopefully made some sense without offending anyone.:)
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
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I'd agree that most conditions unions at one point protected workers against are now covered by other protections. We do owe a LOT to the people who helped make things as good as they are these days and in some lines of work I can where unions might still be useful.
However in tech work I refuse to pay any stupid fees to a union that may or may not work to my best interest. I am smart enough to make my own demands to my employee and if they don't meet my demands to my satisfaction I'm sure I can find someone else who will. Every day I increase my knowledge and experience which increases my value and career options. If I get to a point where my worth isn't clear enough to my employer for them to keep me happy and I can't find a better job elsewhere then to me that is a clear indication that I need to get myself in gear and find out what I'm doing wrong. Laziness is my own fault.
Rather than have a union I'd be interested in seeing not for profit groups take hold to help techies train and find jobs as well as helping people from other backgrounds revamp their careers by adding techie skills. Possibly a workers union for foreign workers at US tech companies would be useful as I've seen them exploited sometimes due to the fact they have a lot fewer options to jump to someone elses train if desired.
I guess IF the unions were available on an opt-in basis only then I'd be cool with it. If I was forced to join to work in the tech industry I'd be rather pissed and probably spend a great amount of time trying to waste the resources of the union and otherwise poisoning it.
So feed them g'damnit! :)
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Well open a charitable organization that I'd trust not to spend half the money given to them on internal affairs and fund raising and give them a web site and I'd donate. Better yet educate the poor buggers at the same time your feeding them in something useful like programming (PC's are easier to make available than industrial machines and the tech market would no doubt have plenty of room for people bringing $$$ into a previously poor areas making them tech consumers.. and Internet is fairly cheap to spread.. ) so they can then afford to buy food for their family. I don't go for charities that only feed people or teach them stuff that'll let them work a job where they make $2/week. Give them jobs that pay them US$100,000 a year and then we won't have to worry about them anymore. Bill Gates should feed and M$ educate them. Then he'd have a couple billion new people to force Windows upo and earn all his money back over and over again.:)
Is 'The console formally known as XBox' to awkard? Really though doesn't anyone at Microsoft check trademarks before giving press releases with a product name. That'd seem to be standard business practice but they never seem to bother. If Microsoft really wanted to dent the console market they'd target a new audience that doesn't usually go for consoles. I suggest they partner w/ MTV to create M$TV Interactive and then sell Britney Spears and Backstreet Boy labeled games, diaries, chat tools, etc that teenage girls would flock to. Slap in a portable MP3/PDA/wireless-chat/game unit that can dock and get the jump on the digital content battle. They could totally side step Sony and grab a mostly ignored market (people who haven't just shelled out $500 for a PS2 and extras).
That implies an upfront fee. Both because there are no karma points to begin with and because people have to develop their ability to properly communicate their ideas. I'm for lowering the entry level to getting more people online and not raising the bar.
This is hardly pathetic. To start off this will no doubt drive the creation of even better opensourced circuit development and similation software. The better such software is the less the hardware costs required to develop and debug such designs. Secondly a lot of various new techniques are opening up that would allow fabrication to be much cheaper and more likely to occur at home.
Sure open source hardware may take a while to get going as the curve to get into it is higher in both dollars and education but there have already been stabs at such things for years and it's succeeded in some lesser hardware hacking areas pretty well. Just remember if it wasn't for the home hackers we might not have PC's at all. A lot of people never thought the PC could take off for similar reasons but it seems to be doing okay. They didn't think Linux could take off but again it seems to have made a place for itself.
I disagree. It'd limit stupid posts to the people with extra cash to throw around while also limiting useful posts from those who don't have the extra cash. Tip jars are just the newest stupid money making gimmick on the Net and even worse than advertising banners. If Slashdot or any other site I use starts using these Tip Jars I for one would stop using the sites. However if they put a 'donations' link in an obvious place I might donate to keep them running from time to time. If the sites I like start adding to many lame features then I can always open my own similar site w/out said lame features and let the users decide which they like better. I think most users will gravitate to free as long as the quality isn't shit and we've all seen that most the really good sites on the Net are free I'm sure. How many of us bother with sites that even ask for online registration to view articles?
As I became a computer geek I went from remembering books worth of information in my head to keeping a rough draft of many many more types of information in my head along with knowledge of how to find the details when needed. So it may seem I remember fewer things but really it is just a memory management technique. For me I can't completely work when you take away the Net because it's became a part of my mind. Eventually I suppose enough people will evolve around the Net that it'll have a direct hack to the Net directly into the human body. Every step closer takes us that way. Mainframe to desktop to laptop to PDA etc. It gives intelligent people great flexibility to be able to only remember what they must and to store the details somewhere else. Anyone can be reasonably expert in anything if they learn how to look up the information on demand and understand how it goes together.
I'd agree with that. These 'mirror cells' aren't that big a surprise. Computer scientists and all the others interested in such things got the idea that such a system might be how things worked (in part) long ago. The fact that other scientists went out and did a study and figured out that this one theory is at least very close to correct is quite interesting. With each level you peel away you reveal thousands of new questions. That is why science can be so addicting. Once you discover a things real beauty you'll just want more and more and you'll get it if you try.
I'd probably say it's more like someone discovering how operator overloading works and think it's responsible for the multithreading.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Forget space aliens. Look at how the US, and many other, governments treat people from other countries. It's often hard to even travel between countries and moving or working in another country is an impossible pain. To get into the US and be able to get a decent job you have to go through hoops. And the worse the place you come from the less likely you'll be allowed to stay. It's nothing but government sponsored discrimination against people for something they are born with. I certainly didn't pick to be born in the US and am quite certain that other people don't choose to be born in 3rd world hell. Even reasonably well educated and non-criminal people have a hard time moving here. Lots of excuses are given why we need immigration laws but they all remind me of why we need slavery or why women can't work or homosexuals can't get married.
I'm also impressed by a politiician that bothers to learn the facts and admits when he doesn't yet know the facts about something. If only I had someone here with similar traits I'd be forced to actually start voting. I'm tempted to move just so I have someone worth voting for. Would Rep Boucher consider running for President? :)
Funny enough on my tv anyone old enough to know how to read can turn off v-chip support in 15 seconds. There is no password feature or any other way to keep someone from changing the rating or turning the option off. I just laughed to death when I saw the way it worked. The tv company gets to say their tv has vchip support and nobody is hurt by it's use. Any teenager could easily turn it off. :)
Interesting. Any idea if the format actually works (ie have you written any programs to work with the data?) as the docs and programs I've found before would manage to import some of the data but not most of it. If I find some spare time maybe I'll get around to making my tool to convert it to XML. :)
I've been running Red-Carpet on my RedHat box since it's release and have found it very useful. It still is having some troubles on my Mandrake box but I was told how to fix this and just haven't gotten to it yet. It'd be nice if this was handled by some installer as I doubt newbies (the target audience?) would like switching apckages in and out to make it work. Haven't had a chance to try it under SuSE yet but I will someday soon. :)
What'd be really useful to me is to have the format of the contact list and history open. I've asked several times and they'd send a nice little letter saying that in the next version the format would be open. Thus far I haven't noticed it having been documented anywhere. I have frickin 2000+ contacts and years of history I can't import into GnomeICU and it annoys the hell out of me. I could write a program to force it out of ICQ but that'd be a pain in the ass so I end up waiting for someone else to offer a handy lil ICQ->XML conversion tool I can use. :)
I'd have to say my experiences have been different. We've had repeated problems with IE not handling standard stuff in anything like a normal method and being forced to do frequent upgrades to fix these problems as quickly as possible as well as writing our code around the bugs. Stability has been somewhat of an issue in IE and Win2k also. Last week for example we had to completely reinstall Win2k Pro and all apps on a machine just to keep IE from crashing. These machines are brand new (from a good company) and have very clean installs of their software and run almost nothing besides Office 2000 and IE so they shouldn't have much to conflict with. Under any version of Windows I've tried IE has been fairly sucky.
:)
We also run MacOS 9 which has an entirely different set of IE problems but usually does somewhat better.
Netscape is just as bad as IE and is full of bugs on Windows, MacOS, and on Linux. While it usually handles http/html stuff better than IE it has less conformance with newer standards and crashes more often.
Konqueror is okay for a very light yet somewhat usable browser and may turn into something nice but so far I don't see it even counting.
Opera is okay but doesn't seem worth the cost to me and I'm not going to look at ads.
Mozilla is a little tricky as you still have to find a good build but there is plenty of community support for making this easier and usually it isn't that hard to find a good one that is recent. It is fairly full featured, standard compliant, fast, and stable on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Even components such as Mail/News and the HTML Composser are shaping up really well. The fact that it is so cross-platform is also really good IMO. On the average day I work with Mozilla as my browser and mail program for around 10 hours and really beat the crap out of it and it rarely has any problem.
I don't care about 'sticking it' to anyone but I like software that doesn't suck and my experience has been that all software sucks and with commercial software you are stuck up a creek without a paddle. With open source I can either fix it myself or get online and get a fix often within minutes or hours. It isn't often closed source software has that good of turn around. I just wish I could find an open sourced bandwidth provider (whatever that would mean) cus companies are a pain to work with. "Ughh well we can have it done sometime a month after we promised." Of course some companies are better than others and so is some software.
One of the dangers of working for a publiclly traded company I'd say. When in doubt start your own company. It may be more work and more risks but you never get fired. Of course this only works if you can sell yourself and your product well. :)
If you really want to write amatuer erotica there are plenty of newsgroups for it. Or why not start your own site using the Slashcode for such stuff (starting a website costs about $.95 these days) and maybe you'll get visitors that actually are at your site looking for such stuff rather than geeks looking for techie stuff. If your going to post such stuff on Slashdot find a good anti-porn censorship discussion to attach it to and include some cyber babes (Aya from Parasite Eve and Quistis, Rinoa, and Selphie from FF8 strike my fancy). ;>
Return Rant:
I'd say there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle, either by products dying out or by legal action. Now that there has been a taste there will eventually be one or more working models. None is likely to have the instant dominant position Napster had (except possibly Microsoft's offering if they bind it into Windows) but that doesn't mean the concept will die. File-sharing is a simple concept and a very addictive concept so it's something with low market entry and lots of possible market share. That will drive companies to invest. Us geeks will invest jour time just to keep the companies from sealing us in and because we like to hack code. I myself was working w/ file-sharing concepts long before Napster existed and am sure I will be long after. The concept has no doubt been growing ever since the invention of email. As a species we like being able to communicate freely. That includes text messages, voice messages, movies, photos, music, games, etc. Therefore there is no way the idea of sharing these things will die out. They'll just get thought about some more and new better concepts will be tried over and over until we find the perfect one. Email, ftp, gopher, web, instant messaging, Napster, etc are all steps we've taken.
Damn /if/ these things are real I want one now! Or at $50 a pop I'd grab several and have myself a nifty 100TB's of space to toy with. And I was happy w/ a mere 50GB. Well not really, I keep having to add new drives, but 50GB drives for less than $200 sounded good. Waiting is hard! :)
However I agree that a lot of people, including Slashdotters, seem to think anything that isn't out now is vaporware and anything that isn't likely to be out in less than two years is sci fi. Maybe it'd be nice if having an idea made it suddenly materialize but unfortunately a lot of it takes work and that takes time. That doesn't mean the idea is vapor, just that it isn't ready to slap in plastic bubble paper and post mark to every Sam, Dick, and Mary that knows how to order from AmazonSucksAwayMyCash.com.
Obviously you are unable to take past and current trends and see likely places they will go. How exactly they work out is of course up in the air until it's happened but it's far better to start looking at the possibilities now. If you noticed my timeline was 'maybe in our lifetime' so that is in 80+ years.
:)
Eventually nanotech will work. It is obvious that our bodies, among other things, are natural occuring nano-machines and that there is a large amount of interest in miniturizing and new fabrication techniques. Eventually that will lead to practical nanotechnology.
As the Net (includes the Internet and all future Internet technologies which are not yet named because they don't even exist yet) advances bandwidth will grow as well as improving of our concepts of what forms of communication are possible. Eventually P2P will be king as everyone will want to be able to share what they have directly making the client-server Internet just a subset of P2P.
I think it's fairly obvious that these P2P functional object fabbing will eventually become popular and that'll drive the above technologies to higher quality and lower prices creating that nice little positive spiral.
Of course every new technological jump shakes our world view but I do think you'd have to admit that the sort of jump that destorys our economical model and even our concepts of what is reality is a shattering thing. Probably an event such as that has never happened in the entire history of the human race. Stopping it is probably impossible so we better damn well get ready.
Sure it sounds sci fi'ish (doesn't everything? hell some days I open the news and am shocked they have already managed something that should be in Star Trek) but none of it is against the laws of science and for the most part it's all just based on many small changes happening. If you don't understand the issues enough to understand what the likely converging technologies will be that's fine but it doesn't stop others of us from thinking about it and talking about it.
It so happens that I actually think Gibson has a very poor understanding of technology and it's usually reflected in his books. I do enjoy some of his works but I much prefer Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson, both of which auctually do a lot of research and have a good idea of what they are talking about. I hear more of this when listening to friends of different sciences talk than from sci fi.
Maybe you should hang out in the field more and get some expossure to some working researchers before you stamp stuff as drivel. If you want to find it funny though that is fine. Anyone with grammar as poor as mine deserves to be laughed at now and then.
Most of our machines run Linux so does are automaticlly virus free. We also use MacOS and Windows which we keep updated with the latest virus scanners. Given that these updates are available for free online and can be automated the cost isn't much. Due to some problems with our old software working under Windows 2000 we've had to switch to Outlook for mail and I feel that may increase our problems but so far it's been nothing big. I'm considering setting up virus scanning at the mail server level (runs Linux) to take care of that problem but that takes very little effort. I'd say viruses cost maybe $100 in upkeep and monitoring a year.
Glad to see someone who isn't a sci fi lighter seems to get it. Maybe they can get this into the minds of future CEO's and politicians now so that they'll have accepted it and be ready to work with it by the time it becomes reality. There is no stopping it. By the time we reach home nanotech our entire idea of what divides information from objects will be tested. When anybody can own anything for virtually nothing then what is the point of money? Take it one step further where medical technology has embraced nanotech and we've learned to replace ALL parts of the body. That essentially makes US software. Then what stops us from transfering ourselves physically over the Net, living both in the physical world and the Net, redesigning our bodies, etc? Then imagine we hook the Net/P2P thing into the very root of what we consider our bodies so that we could transfer control of atoms to other hosts over the Net, trade ideas in raw data formats, etc. It all quickly gets very complicated and shatters our world view. This isn't that far away. It might even happen during some of our lifetimes. How will a society who still believes in copyright laws and such handle that they themselves may end up software owned by someone? It all sounds very post-cyberpunk and post-modern. :)
I'd also add that views or what is right and wrong change. Right now looking at xyz type of content may seem immoral but ten years from now may seem very normal. This happens all the time and can be easily noticed by checking out how music, movies, television commercials, etc have changed in the past couple decades. What will be the effect when we have a technological block in place that is now keeping us from viewing what was once considered immoral but is now perfectly okay? What if a generation of children not allowed to view copyrighted works online grows up and abolishes copyright laws as a solution. Will we have to pay these companies, tech consultants, etc to go back through and modify these programs and their rule books? This sounds like a useless tax on our society. Could we ever be sure to totally reverse the effects? The only winners sounds like the companies that sell the software.
You might think that you don't care if people are blocked into your moral view for the forseeable future despite popular opinion at the time but keep in mind the blade swings both ways. What if next year right after you get this law in place the popular opinion is very different from yours and the rules the software is given are not at all what you'd hoped for but rather quite different.
For example suddenly you find you can't access your childs homepage on their school site because the reading list includes thumbnails of the books your child has read. What happens if your church web site is suddenly blocked because you have a background image or song clip (innocently) taken from someone elses Bible site? If these sites are blocked by software rules it may be hard to get them unblocked even if you adjust the sites to fit the current laws. Do you really want to risk such problems or impose such problems on other people?
Whenever I hear such arguments I compare myself to my sister. We obviously have the same genetic simularities (same parents) and grew up in similar enviroments (we shared a house) but I was the first child and my parents were far less restrictive with me than with my sister (they went religious about the time my sister was born but not so much as to try to change the direction they were raising me).
:)
I was exposed to 'real life' from the time I was a baby. Able to go where I wanted when I wanted for the most part, able to watch anything I wanted, listen to any time of music I wanted, use the Internet as I wanted, and play any type of games I wanted. My sister on the other hand was kept on a protective leash so as to not be exposed to supposedly harmful things such as violence, bad language, nudity/sex, drugs and all that stuff. She has never been able to go places without asking permission, couldn't watch movies above PG/P3-13, was forbidden from dating, couldn't listen to music that my parents didn't like and couldn't play video games more violent than Commander Keen (hey I love that game but y'know there are other good games).
Today I am fairly well rounded. I've never been on drugs or smoked. I'm comfortable traveling to places I've never been and trying new things and have lived in several places. I've got a pretty good job and am working on improving my situation as I go. In other words I'm pretty normal and IMO happier and more confident than the average person.
My sister has never managed to live on her on, go to school, get a job, etc. She's always afraid of everything and is pretty guliable. Overall she's depressed and uncertain of any direction for her life. She is easily pulled into weird and extreme cultish religious groups (anything that outwardly differs from the religous structure she was raised under). She is very effected by peer pressure and does almost anything her friends or the media make her think is required of her.
Maybe this is an unusual case but I don't think so. Most my friends that are similar in personality to myself were raised under similar conditions. I'm not saying encourage your kids to beat the dog and watch pornos all day but I think expossure to real life help build a sense of how the world really is and a personal sense of place and morals. I certainly will raise all my children under a trust system and let them all have a lot of freedom.
I am for the idea of ratings but they should be by content types and not left to comittees to decide upon. I like the life-like violence, cartoonish violence, nudity, etc ratings much better than G, PG, PG13, R, MA, etc stuff that is just tacked on psuedo-randomly. This gives parents an idea of what is really in the movie/music/game/etc before they buy the product. After they buy the product they should carefully review it before giving it to their child and make their choice with care. The government, corporations, and parent/religious/etc groups should not make these dicissions for us. A lot of fine art has been lost for all time because of censorship based on someone elses morals. I really don't like to see that happen and I doubt anyone else does either. It just sort of happens as things get left on the editing room floor as each group takes their shots at it.
I'd argue that ratings have shreaded the availability of quality medita that is outside the mass-appeal norm. How many bad films add just a little bad language or nudity to get bumped up to an R rating to get more attention from their target market? How many movies have to clip out things that add to the plot but are deemed upfit because they say 'fuck' rather than 'darn' one to many times or show a nipple for 2 minutes rather than 5 seconds? Instead to see things of that nature we tend to have to get foriegn films, skinimax crap, film festival stuff etc. The rules are completely nutty and based on moving ideals of the moral norm. I for one don't like living to the lowest common denominator of society.
Hrm that was long and spammy but hopefully made some sense without offending anyone.
I'd agree that most conditions unions at one point protected workers against are now covered by other protections. We do owe a LOT to the people who helped make things as good as they are these days and in some lines of work I can where unions might still be useful.
However in tech work I refuse to pay any stupid fees to a union that may or may not work to my best interest. I am smart enough to make my own demands to my employee and if they don't meet my demands to my satisfaction I'm sure I can find someone else who will. Every day I increase my knowledge and experience which increases my value and career options. If I get to a point where my worth isn't clear enough to my employer for them to keep me happy and I can't find a better job elsewhere then to me that is a clear indication that I need to get myself in gear and find out what I'm doing wrong. Laziness is my own fault.
Rather than have a union I'd be interested in seeing not for profit groups take hold to help techies train and find jobs as well as helping people from other backgrounds revamp their careers by adding techie skills. Possibly a workers union for foreign workers at US tech companies would be useful as I've seen them exploited sometimes due to the fact they have a lot fewer options to jump to someone elses train if desired.
I guess IF the unions were available on an opt-in basis only then I'd be cool with it. If I was forced to join to work in the tech industry I'd be rather pissed and probably spend a great amount of time trying to waste the resources of the union and otherwise poisoning it.
Well open a charitable organization that I'd trust not to spend half the money given to them on internal affairs and fund raising and give them a web site and I'd donate. Better yet educate the poor buggers at the same time your feeding them in something useful like programming (PC's are easier to make available than industrial machines and the tech market would no doubt have plenty of room for people bringing $$$ into a previously poor areas making them tech consumers.. and Internet is fairly cheap to spread.. ) so they can then afford to buy food for their family. I don't go for charities that only feed people or teach them stuff that'll let them work a job where they make $2/week. Give them jobs that pay them US$100,000 a year and then we won't have to worry about them anymore. Bill Gates should feed and M$ educate them. Then he'd have a couple billion new people to force Windows upo and earn all his money back over and over again. :)
Is 'The console formally known as XBox' to awkard? Really though doesn't anyone at Microsoft check trademarks before giving press releases with a product name. That'd seem to be standard business practice but they never seem to bother. If Microsoft really wanted to dent the console market they'd target a new audience that doesn't usually go for consoles. I suggest they partner w/ MTV to create M$TV Interactive and then sell Britney Spears and Backstreet Boy labeled games, diaries, chat tools, etc that teenage girls would flock to. Slap in a portable MP3/PDA/wireless-chat/game unit that can dock and get the jump on the digital content battle. They could totally side step Sony and grab a mostly ignored market (people who haven't just shelled out $500 for a PS2 and extras).
That implies an upfront fee. Both because there are no karma points to begin with and because people have to develop their ability to properly communicate their ideas. I'm for lowering the entry level to getting more people online and not raising the bar.
This is hardly pathetic. To start off this will no doubt drive the creation of even better opensourced circuit development and similation software. The better such software is the less the hardware costs required to develop and debug such designs. Secondly a lot of various new techniques are opening up that would allow fabrication to be much cheaper and more likely to occur at home.
Sure open source hardware may take a while to get going as the curve to get into it is higher in both dollars and education but there have already been stabs at such things for years and it's succeeded in some lesser hardware hacking areas pretty well. Just remember if it wasn't for the home hackers we might not have PC's at all. A lot of people never thought the PC could take off for similar reasons but it seems to be doing okay. They didn't think Linux could take off but again it seems to have made a place for itself.
I disagree. It'd limit stupid posts to the people with extra cash to throw around while also limiting useful posts from those who don't have the extra cash. Tip jars are just the newest stupid money making gimmick on the Net and even worse than advertising banners. If Slashdot or any other site I use starts using these Tip Jars I for one would stop using the sites. However if they put a 'donations' link in an obvious place I might donate to keep them running from time to time. If the sites I like start adding to many lame features then I can always open my own similar site w/out said lame features and let the users decide which they like better. I think most users will gravitate to free as long as the quality isn't shit and we've all seen that most the really good sites on the Net are free I'm sure. How many of us bother with sites that even ask for online registration to view articles?
As I became a computer geek I went from remembering books worth of information in my head to keeping a rough draft of many many more types of information in my head along with knowledge of how to find the details when needed. So it may seem I remember fewer things but really it is just a memory management technique. For me I can't completely work when you take away the Net because it's became a part of my mind. Eventually I suppose enough people will evolve around the Net that it'll have a direct hack to the Net directly into the human body. Every step closer takes us that way. Mainframe to desktop to laptop to PDA etc. It gives intelligent people great flexibility to be able to only remember what they must and to store the details somewhere else. Anyone can be reasonably expert in anything if they learn how to look up the information on demand and understand how it goes together.
I'd agree with that. These 'mirror cells' aren't that big a surprise. Computer scientists and all the others interested in such things got the idea that such a system might be how things worked (in part) long ago. The fact that other scientists went out and did a study and figured out that this one theory is at least very close to correct is quite interesting. With each level you peel away you reveal thousands of new questions. That is why science can be so addicting. Once you discover a things real beauty you'll just want more and more and you'll get it if you try.
:)
I'd probably say it's more like someone discovering how operator overloading works and think it's responsible for the multithreading.
Could you make this thing act as a Hylafax server and add extra modems? Mmmmmm.