And yeah, I'm sure I'm going to be told I "don't get it" or some other platitude, but what people seem to forget here is that we all have our own views of life, and that these views are all valid in their own ways.
You're right. You don't get it.
But holding idealistic, head in the cloud views is just foolish - the only way you'll change the world is by looking at it and not some "manifesto" claiming to contain all the answers to the world's problems.
I took "manifesto" as tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps the authors hadn't counted on some people irrationally assuming that all manifestos claim "to contain all the answers, and somehow linking the word with those darn commies.
The "manifesto" seems to me to be about looking at the world, treating people as people, instead of continuing with the all-too-prevalent corporate "let's pretend" that usually treats both employees and customers as identical, interchangeable parts in a clockwork fantasy land.
But hey, I'm not gonna force anything on you. It's a more-or-less free society. But the conversation will continue, with or without you.
Actually, public transport is for people who realize that there's not much Fahrvergnügen to be had sitting in an overpriced metal box on a six-lane parking lot, sucking up carbon monoxide fumes.
Engineering innovations like fire didn't violate the current understandings of physics. They occurred in the absence of any theories of physics.
[shrug] It's still a counter-example to your rather odd claim that "new technology almost invariably comes only after the underlying physics has been well worked out." I mean, I thought you were joking at first.
Engineering innovations like fire were not elusive. They provided a glaring gaping hole in the current understanding of the world. More importantly, they were readily reproducible.
For obvious reasons, any "holes" that still exist are probably smaller, and it logically follows that it may be harder to tell whether a "hole" exists or not, whether something is reproducible or not.
There's a big difference between "we have an effect that violates our notion of the universe, so let's revise our notion" and "we want to find an effect that, while it violates our notion of the universe and while it hasn't yet been discovered, it would be really neat if we could find it".
That's true. And they think they may have the former.
I can't recall a single new technology that appeared like this. New technology almost invariably comes only after the underlying physics has been well worked out.
You mean like fire? Um, no, I guess not.
Actually, there are lots of advances that were effectively engineering advances first ("This happens when we do that. We don't know why yet, but we can certainly use the effect if we include a fudge factor to compensate for our ignorance of the details.") And then the physics eventually gets worked out.
I don't know whether this idea is silly or not. I don't understand gravity theory well enough to have a meaningful guess (and admitting that puts me ahead of most of you wags who think you do).
It sounds like -- from what little reaction has been quoted, FWIW -- at least some physicists think it's very very unlikely. Their guesses about this are better than mine by several orders of magnitude, but they could still be wrong. From the sounds of it, it seems like a lot of physicists would have to be wrong about a lot of things, which is not impossible, though it is unlikely.
The real question, I think, is how does one properly judge what resources (money, attention, &etc) should be allocated (and by whom) to what lines of inquiry? How does one do that in a way that achieves the most useful balance between safe, plodding lines of exploration and unlikely but potentially literally revolutionary lines of exploration? (And those things are not the simple dichotomy that they are often presented as.)
The legal and political strategies are interesting. MS would be wise to settle, because that way they could find some terms that are mutually acceptable. If they argue their side and then let the judge decide, they are likely to fare worse. But if they can stretch it out to appeal, then they may find a new administration at the Justice Dept. On the Justice Dept side, they know if they get a break-up it will be appealed, and they could be out in a year.
Anybody know which candidate(s) they have bribed, um, I mean contributed to for the 2000 elections?
(Anyone who thinks they aren't trying this as part of their game plan is extrordinarily naive. They already "lobbied" to have the DOJ's budget cut. Instead of playing by the rules, M$ is trying a more "cost-effective" solution -- gutting the umpires and/or buying their own.)
I really don't think anything has changed at MS. Despite their unbelievable disaster of a trial, I really think they assume the rest of the world is dummer than they are.
I get a laugh every time some M$ spokesdroid says that breaking up M$ would be "unacceptable" (and some bonehead journalist reports it as if it means something).
Picture instead an about-to-be convicted murderer making statements about what sentence would be "acceptable". Hello? You can try for a plea bargin, but if that doesn't work, your butt may be strapped into a specially wired chair whether that's "acceptable" to you or not.
The article goes to great pains to be clear that they aren't going open source. But also from the article, it sounds as though the "sources" -- probably Microsoft's Office of Media "Leaks" -- may not have been as careful about the distinction, in the hope that sloppy reporters would not have made it clear.
It's not like Microsoft has never done this sort of thing before. The only surprise is how many reporters still don't read MS PR carefully enough.
Funny how Carl Sagan is remembered for that phrase -- when it was actually part of an act that Johnny Carson (?) came up with to make fun of Sagan. I gather hearing the phrase -- especially hearing it falsely attributed to him -- got really tedious to Sagan, though he eventually learned to laugh it off, and even used it to title his last(?) book.
Wouldn't any microbes from earth that made it onto the spacecraft by now have been killed by cosmic radiation? The craft has been in space for several years now. Even the most hardy microbes should have perished by now?
We don't know. That's the point.
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
We don't know. That's the point. There is no basis (yet) on which to judge those odds. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in a WAG whether they admit it or not.
Why take any chance? Though it's functioned way beyond it's expected time, the craft is nearing the end of its usefulness. It's time to clean up after ourselves. For a change.
Promises were not made to be broken to a large corporation, they were never intended to be kept in the first place. I think anyone who even gives this the time of day until they are actually using their cable network on another ISP is setting themselves up for a fall.
And even that won't mean squat. They who giveth access can taketh access away, once the Feds are otherwise occupied. Any competitor with functioning brain cells should laugh at this, and be busy trying to figure out a way to provide access that doesn't rely on AOL/TW.
Are there really significant numbers people out there who can't see through stuff like this, or is it just such a part of corp culture that they can't not produce BS like this?
I started to read your post, but I realized that I'd heard the same thing so often that there was no point to finishing it. Hopefully I'll be exposed to some great new concept in someone else's post...
will i be able to do a wireless network from my laptop to my server at home, and still be able to roam around the city while at work? or will this be more of a wireless LAN application?
The latter, only more so. If I understand it correctly, Bluetooth is meant as an standard of inexpensively and wirelessly interconnecting proximate electronic devices on an a more-or-less ad hoc (and possibly sometimes automatic) basis -- not just PCs, but also mobile phones, PDAs, etc. See the web site, especially the FAQ.
These estimates are very much back-of-the-envelope, but does anybody see anything fundamentally wrong with them?
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning, but I think I see a few issues.
1) Few people so far have always-on data streams.
2) Practically nobody has always-on voice streams.
3) There's no need to do deep analysis on everything. Assuming that this system exists in some form, there's no doubt some sort of funneling effect. 99.9etc percent can be safely ignored after a quick keyword skim. The stuff taken off the top can be skimmed a little more slowly, as a first-pass context check. The cream of that can be skimmed still more carefully. And so on.
4) Other forms of intelligence -- and results from the system itself -- can be used to focus the "attention" of the system more efficiently.
5) I'm not sure using a "number of workstations" yardstick is meaningful for the kind of analysis they may be doing. (Specific-purpose hardware could give them a big edge.)
Bill the Cat and IHateEverybody are both correct, but they miss a point. The lack of flash does not mean that the OS cannot be upgraded! The first Palms didn't have flash, and yes, Virginia, there are upgrades available for them. You just install them like any other piece of software and you're golden.
True, you probably wouldn't want to do this for anything other than patches or minor enhancements, but like it was pointed out, most major OS changes ain't gonna do squat without new hardware anyway.
When I had a Palm with flash, it was kinda nice 'cause I could put non-OS software into flash, saving space and making hard resets slightly less annoying. But I don't miss having it in my Visor. Hawkins made the right choice.
Cool, maybe, but IMO not worth the extra bucks. An "enhanced color calculator"? BFD. When they can sell it for less than $250US (with a Springboard slot), then they'll have something. Until then, I'll be quite happy with my Visor.
This might win over a few losers who might otherwise fall for WinCE devices, though.
...the military applications of a 24-hour cell seem nil. Especially in extensive operations, where troops won't be returning to any sort of centralized base for several days.
Think again. For electronic applications, carrying sufficient fuel would be easier than carrying sufficient batteries. For powering vehicles, the potential bennies are even greater: not only are fuel cells more efficient than ICEs -- implying a greater range per unit of fuel -- but they run cleaner, cooler, and much quieter making them potentially less detectable.
Anyway, if you check out the background on the DCHT website, you'll see that this particular flavor of fuel cell came out of Los Alamos National Laboratory. I'd say that the US military is probably aware of the potential.
The FBI releases some tools to detect DOS Daemons, so what do we do? *Paranoia ON* Some idiot reporter says that its the fault of Linux and that it could never happen with Windows, so what do we do? *Distrust of Microsoft ON*
[grin] And then a few plants and dupes ridicule the "paranoia", neatly drawing attention away from the conspirators. Ha! Caught you!
I think it would be much more entertaining and thought-provoking if Rob, Katz, and the others jumped into the forums and broke down the barriers between author and poster. In my mind they're the same thing... or ought to be.
Well, yeah, but. I think I'd just as soon that Katz not jump into the forums. Nothing against him, mind you, just the hordes of lamoids whose IQs seem to drop (and testosterone levels soar) everytime they read something by him.
It's like some sort of weird Pavlovian response. ("Hey, Katz wrote something! Bark! Bark! Bark!") Their posts would be pretty distracting.
Slashdot Mirror
But down at the bottom, under the "gee, we all hate spam" rhetoric, the real reason MsgTo.com exists ... is as a conduit for targetted marketing.
I'd be more impressed if there was an option to pay cash for the service, instead of handing over my eyeballs. Ad-supported services are not "free".
Silicon is forever. I mean, who would want to hang out with babes on beaches made of anything else?
AP story: "Reed Apologizes for Bush Work"
You're right. You don't get it.
But holding idealistic, head in the cloud views is just foolish - the only way you'll change the world is by looking at it and not some "manifesto" claiming to contain all the answers to the world's problems.
I took "manifesto" as tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps the authors hadn't counted on some people irrationally assuming that all manifestos claim "to contain all the answers, and somehow linking the word with those darn commies.
The "manifesto" seems to me to be about looking at the world, treating people as people, instead of continuing with the all-too-prevalent corporate "let's pretend" that usually treats both employees and customers as identical, interchangeable parts in a clockwork fantasy land.
But hey, I'm not gonna force anything on you. It's a more-or-less free society. But the conversation will continue, with or without you.
But hey, YKIOK.
[shrug] It's still a counter-example to your rather odd claim that "new technology almost invariably comes only after the underlying physics has been well worked out." I mean, I thought you were joking at first.
Engineering innovations like fire were not elusive. They provided a glaring gaping hole in the current understanding of the world. More importantly, they were readily reproducible.
For obvious reasons, any "holes" that still exist are probably smaller, and it logically follows that it may be harder to tell whether a "hole" exists or not, whether something is reproducible or not.
There's a big difference between "we have an effect that violates our notion of the universe, so let's revise our notion" and "we want to find an effect that, while it violates our notion of the universe and while it hasn't yet been discovered, it would be really neat if we could find it".
That's true. And they think they may have the former.
You mean like fire? Um, no, I guess not.
Actually, there are lots of advances that were effectively engineering advances first ("This happens when we do that. We don't know why yet, but we can certainly use the effect if we include a fudge factor to compensate for our ignorance of the details.") And then the physics eventually gets worked out.
I don't know whether this idea is silly or not. I don't understand gravity theory well enough to have a meaningful guess (and admitting that puts me ahead of most of you wags who think you do).
It sounds like -- from what little reaction has been quoted, FWIW -- at least some physicists think it's very very unlikely. Their guesses about this are better than mine by several orders of magnitude, but they could still be wrong. From the sounds of it, it seems like a lot of physicists would have to be wrong about a lot of things, which is not impossible, though it is unlikely.
The real question, I think, is how does one properly judge what resources (money, attention, &etc) should be allocated (and by whom) to what lines of inquiry? How does one do that in a way that achieves the most useful balance between safe, plodding lines of exploration and unlikely but potentially literally revolutionary lines of exploration? (And those things are not the simple dichotomy that they are often presented as.)
Anybody know which candidate(s) they have bribed, um, I mean contributed to for the 2000 elections?
(Anyone who thinks they aren't trying this as part of their game plan is extrordinarily naive. They already "lobbied" to have the DOJ's budget cut. Instead of playing by the rules, M$ is trying a more "cost-effective" solution -- gutting the umpires and/or buying their own.)
I get a laugh every time some M$ spokesdroid says that breaking up M$ would be "unacceptable" (and some bonehead journalist reports it as if it means something).
Picture instead an about-to-be convicted murderer making statements about what sentence would be "acceptable". Hello? You can try for a plea bargin, but if that doesn't work, your butt may be strapped into a specially wired chair whether that's "acceptable" to you or not.
It's actually by Larry Niven. It's in his collection All the Myriad Ways and more recently in his N-Space collection.
It's not like Microsoft has never done this sort of thing before. The only surprise is how many reporters still don't read MS PR carefully enough.
Funny how Carl Sagan is remembered for that phrase -- when it was actually part of an act that Johnny Carson (?) came up with to make fun of Sagan. I gather hearing the phrase -- especially hearing it falsely attributed to him -- got really tedious to Sagan, though he eventually learned to laugh it off, and even used it to title his last(?) book.
We don't know. That's the point.
Even if microbes did make it through space and survice an impact what is the chances that any alien life would be compatible with ours?
We don't know. That's the point. There is no basis (yet) on which to judge those odds. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in a WAG whether they admit it or not.
Why take any chance? Though it's functioned way beyond it's expected time, the craft is nearing the end of its usefulness. It's time to clean up after ourselves. For a change.
Seriously, this makes sense. Once they've squeezed the last bit of use out of it, why not?
Nice to see someone thinking a little ahead for once.
(ObRef: "All these worlds are yours-- except Europa. Attempt no landings there.")
And even that won't mean squat. They who giveth access can taketh access away, once the Feds are otherwise occupied. Any competitor with functioning brain cells should laugh at this, and be busy trying to figure out a way to provide access that doesn't rely on AOL/TW.
Are there really significant numbers people out there who can't see through stuff like this, or is it just such a part of corp culture that they can't not produce BS like this?
I started to read your post, but I realized that I'd heard the same thing so often that there was no point to finishing it. Hopefully I'll be exposed to some great new concept in someone else's post ...
The latter, only more so. If I understand it correctly, Bluetooth is meant as an standard of inexpensively and wirelessly interconnecting proximate electronic devices on an a more-or-less ad hoc (and possibly sometimes automatic) basis -- not just PCs, but also mobile phones, PDAs, etc. See the web site, especially the FAQ.
Why do you ask? I mean, does it matter whether you're the only person who gives a damn?
By asking the question, you demonstrate an interest in a question that is similar to the question she asks.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning, but I think I see a few issues.
1) Few people so far have always-on data streams.
2) Practically nobody has always-on voice streams.
3) There's no need to do deep analysis on everything. Assuming that this system exists in some form, there's no doubt some sort of funneling effect. 99.9etc percent can be safely ignored after a quick keyword skim. The stuff taken off the top can be skimmed a little more slowly, as a first-pass context check. The cream of that can be skimmed still more carefully. And so on.
4) Other forms of intelligence -- and results from the system itself -- can be used to focus the "attention" of the system more efficiently.
5) I'm not sure using a "number of workstations" yardstick is meaningful for the kind of analysis they may be doing. (Specific-purpose hardware could give them a big edge.)
True, you probably wouldn't want to do this for anything other than patches or minor enhancements, but like it was pointed out, most major OS changes ain't gonna do squat without new hardware anyway.
When I had a Palm with flash, it was kinda nice 'cause I could put non-OS software into flash, saving space and making hard resets slightly less annoying. But I don't miss having it in my Visor. Hawkins made the right choice.
Cool, maybe, but IMO not worth the extra bucks. An "enhanced color calculator"? BFD. When they can sell it for less than $250US (with a Springboard slot), then they'll have something. Until then, I'll be quite happy with my Visor.
This might win over a few losers who might otherwise fall for WinCE devices, though.
... on exhibition dates, prints for purchase, etc, available here. Not cheap. Note: a slow site even without the slashdot effect.
Think again. For electronic applications, carrying sufficient fuel would be easier than carrying sufficient batteries. For powering vehicles, the potential bennies are even greater: not only are fuel cells more efficient than ICEs -- implying a greater range per unit of fuel -- but they run cleaner, cooler, and much quieter making them potentially less detectable.
Anyway, if you check out the background on the DCHT website, you'll see that this particular flavor of fuel cell came out of Los Alamos National Laboratory. I'd say that the US military is probably aware of the potential.
[grin] And then a few plants and dupes ridicule the "paranoia", neatly drawing attention away from the conspirators. Ha! Caught you!
Well, yeah, but. I think I'd just as soon that Katz not jump into the forums. Nothing against him, mind you, just the hordes of lamoids whose IQs seem to drop (and testosterone levels soar) everytime they read something by him.
It's like some sort of weird Pavlovian response. ("Hey, Katz wrote something! Bark! Bark! Bark!") Their posts would be pretty distracting.