Most things that look like innovations from the outside look like the summation of increments from the inside. (As someone else pointed out re web browsers.)
"Innovative" is only an opposite of "incremental" if one looks at advances with a pop science frame of mind. Most -- all? -- increments involve innovation.
(And implying that anything without a currently existing application is by definition not innovative seems kinda short-sighted to me.)
It is simply a fact of life that handwritten letters on paper get taken much more seriously.
Yup. From what I hear, the usual rule of thumb is that the more effort a person makes to contact their congresscritter, the more seriously they're taken. (Up to a point, of course.) Email is so easy, it's practically pointless.
I don't have any examples to hand, but I have heard of companies using fleets(?) of PalmOS devices to collect transactions that are later processed on a central system. See Palm's web site, especially their Enterprise Solutions.
Tell me again why spamming warrants a longer jail term than some violent crime?
"... up to nine years...." IANAL, but it's my understanding that maximum penalties usually don't mean much -- they're useful for sound bites and little else. It's the minimum punishment (if any) that's important. I don't know the details here, but even if they're convicted, I bet they get a "community service" sentence that no one will care if they actually serve.
I'm certainly not saying that global warming isn't true. All that pollution must be doing something bad. I just get skeptical when the pressure is so great to come up with proof.
True. And where is most of that pressure coming from? Corporation and astroturf lobbying efforts doing their best to stick their fingers in everybody's ears and sing "La la la, we can't hear you!". It's understandable that people are trying to be heard over that.
(Astroturf lobbying: fake grass roots. "Citizen groups" that are fronts for corporate interests.)
If Connectix programmers are so good, maybe Apple should hire them to do an MacOS X emulator for x86 machines...
Eh? If if Apple wanted to run MacOS X on x86 boxes for some unlikely reason, they wouldn't need to emulate it. People have already tweaked the base of MacOS X -- Darwin -- to run on x86. It would be a matter of porting the rest of MacOS X, not emulating it.
A tree farm is not a forest, anymore than a field of wheat is a meadow. (Though US paper companies love it when they can treat what's left of actual forests in supposedly-protected national parks as if they were tree farms.)
Trees could be a renewable resource, but as the industry currently functions, they aren't.
Switching to hemp would be even better for lots of reasons, but given the hysterical War On (Some) Drugs, that probably won't happen real soon.
It may be incredibly dangerous to us as individuals and a species, and to civilization in general.... Relax.
Uh, right.
Hey, call me short-sighted and selfish, but while it's a little comforting to "know" that life will (probably) continue, I'd be a lot more comforted if folks were a little more concerned about whether human life will continue.
When we acquire the power to do something, how come we so rarely realize that we also have the power to not do it?
Ironic overinflated sense of self-importance
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Not a bit as far as I can tell from looking out my window.
There's a lot more to the world than what is visible from your window.
Re:A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical
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The Hacker Ethic
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· Score: 3
A central tenet of all systems of logic is that if one, and only one if necessary, contradictory counterexample is found then the theory is disproved. No ifs, ands, or buts.
A contradictory counter-example disproves a specific formulation of a theory. But often (usually?) a change can be made to the theory that takes the contradiction into account without significantly changing the basics of the theory.
Geez...it is hard for me to believe that advertising works on intelligent people. I don't buy anything without checking its value in terms of price, quality, and availability. My decision to buy one brand or another is based soley on those criteria.
I'm sure you like to think so. Perhaps you're even right. But encouraging you to believe that is a fairly common marketing approach.
Now I finally can reminisce by reading my old rec.arts.sf.written trolls and the beautiful flamewars that they caused (Heinlein fans tend to be a humorless bunch)
That's not funny!!!
[insert smiley here for the humor-impaired]
(Actually, the most humor-impaired people I know are people who love to start/encourage arguments for the "fun" (read: "cheap ego-gratification") of it. You know, the kind of people who only laugh at their own "jokes". Boooring.)
So its appropriate to start worrying about the 'grey ooze' now, correct??
None of the things mentioned in the article involve self-replication. The question of whether or not you should start worrying about "grey ooze" is unrelated to this article.
I'm not real impressed with the people who wrote the article, either. One preliminary study, a few doctors with anecdotal data, and suddenly "Growing numbers of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss".
Sloppy. Very sloppy.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that memory responds to how much it's used, and/or to "information overload", but this article makes a very poor case for it.
The tidal forces involved would kill everything anyway, so you don't need to worry if the project actually worked.
Possibly this was meant to be tongue in cheek, but...
No, the tidal forces would not kill everything anyway. It would be done gradually, with the asteroid making many many multiple passes over a long period of time.
Of course, the author also screws up by failing to note the most important thing to know about science fiction -- that as literature, most of it is abysmal.
I think that fact is way too obvious to be a serious omission. As Theodore Sturgeon pointed out, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."
(Yes, in the original quote it was "crud", not "crap".)
I disagree. In the US as well as other countries, the market is always free due to basic economic principles. If the gov'ment or the evil corporations (THEM, inc.) interfere too much with our consumerism, another entity such as (un)organized crime or free-thinking anarchists step in to provide an alternative.
[laugh] By this reasoning, the late USSR had a free market economy. That's a hell of a stretch.
Really? Cool, where do you live? How does it work?
Where I live -- the USA -- the market is mostly controlled. With minor exceptions, what's not regulated by the government is manipulated by the corporations. (Often they work these things out together, and then tell the rest of us what's allowed and what's not.) There's some talk about a free market here, but despite lots of lip service the idea's never really gotten anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
? He was following Kepler (and others). And he was innovative. Some increments are innovative. Some innovations are incremental.
"Innovative" is only an opposite of "incremental" if one looks at advances with a pop science frame of mind. Most -- all? -- increments involve innovation.
(And implying that anything without a currently existing application is by definition not innovative seems kinda short-sighted to me.)
Yup. From what I hear, the usual rule of thumb is that the more effort a person makes to contact their congresscritter, the more seriously they're taken. (Up to a point, of course.) Email is so easy, it's practically pointless.
I don't have any examples to hand, but I have heard of companies using fleets(?) of PalmOS devices to collect transactions that are later processed on a central system. See Palm's web site, especially their Enterprise Solutions.
"... up to nine years ...." IANAL, but it's my understanding that maximum penalties usually don't mean much -- they're useful for sound bites and little else. It's the minimum punishment (if any) that's important. I don't know the details here, but even if they're convicted, I bet they get a "community service" sentence that no one will care if they actually serve.
True. And where is most of that pressure coming from? Corporation and astroturf lobbying efforts doing their best to stick their fingers in everybody's ears and sing "La la la, we can't hear you!". It's understandable that people are trying to be heard over that.
(Astroturf lobbying: fake grass roots. "Citizen groups" that are fronts for corporate interests.)
Eh? If if Apple wanted to run MacOS X on x86 boxes for some unlikely reason, they wouldn't need to emulate it. People have already tweaked the base of MacOS X -- Darwin -- to run on x86. It would be a matter of porting the rest of MacOS X, not emulating it.
Trees could be a renewable resource, but as the industry currently functions, they aren't.
Switching to hemp would be even better for lots of reasons, but given the hysterical War On (Some) Drugs, that probably won't happen real soon.
Uh, right.
Hey, call me short-sighted and selfish, but while it's a little comforting to "know" that life will (probably) continue, I'd be a lot more comforted if folks were a little more concerned about whether human life will continue.
When we acquire the power to do something, how come we so rarely realize that we also have the power to not do it?
There's a lot more to the world than what is visible from your window.
A contradictory counter-example disproves a specific formulation of a theory. But often (usually?) a change can be made to the theory that takes the contradiction into account without significantly changing the basics of the theory.
I'm sure you like to think so. Perhaps you're even right. But encouraging you to believe that is a fairly common marketing approach.
Eh? Making up the rules as you go along is better known as innovation. Lots of businesses manage to thrive on it.
Correlation is not causation.
Other countries with some of the highest standards of living somehow manage to do it without granting corporations legal personhood.
I think it's rather ironic that some of the people who are loudest supporters of "personal responsibility" don't want that applied to corporate VIPs.
You think you got it bad? I never did get my TI calculator to run DR-DOS. Damn, I dunno why I ever bought the stupid thing.
It's a joint operation. Lots of other folks involved, too. See their mission page.
In fact, it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.
How are you defining "deep space craft"? The Soviets sent missions to Mars and Venus (and the Comet Halley).
That's not funny!!!
[insert smiley here for the humor-impaired]
(Actually, the most humor-impaired people I know are people who love to start/encourage arguments for the "fun" (read: "cheap ego-gratification") of it. You know, the kind of people who only laugh at their own "jokes". Boooring.)
None of the things mentioned in the article involve self-replication. The question of whether or not you should start worrying about "grey ooze" is unrelated to this article.
And remember what they say: "practice makes perfect".
How gauche.
Sloppy. Very sloppy.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that memory responds to how much it's used, and/or to "information overload", but this article makes a very poor case for it.
Possibly this was meant to be tongue in cheek, but ...
No, the tidal forces would not kill everything anyway. It would be done gradually, with the asteroid making many many multiple passes over a long period of time.
I think that fact is way too obvious to be a serious omission. As Theodore Sturgeon pointed out, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."
(Yes, in the original quote it was "crud", not "crap".)
[laugh] By this reasoning, the late USSR had a free market economy. That's a hell of a stretch.
Really? Cool, where do you live? How does it work?
Where I live -- the USA -- the market is mostly controlled. With minor exceptions, what's not regulated by the government is manipulated by the corporations. (Often they work these things out together, and then tell the rest of us what's allowed and what's not.) There's some talk about a free market here, but despite lots of lip service the idea's never really gotten anywhere.