There seem to be two schools of thought here. The folks who do searches, and are satisfied at what they get, and the folks who KNOW how searching works, and the breadth of information that exists, and KNOW that there's technically no way that all of that information is just plain not going to be included in any search.
It's unsettling to these "second school" people, because it's like looking for something in a library, knowing that you can't even go into 90% of the rooms of books and scrolls and papers.
Computers are supposed to be our security blanket that no information is out of our reach, or ever becomes lost. Unfortunately, this is "capital-R Reality", and even with the great equalizer of the internet, you just plain can't have it all. Steven Wright said, you can't have it all, where would you put it? The computer answers, digitize it, and put it online. All you need to do is build enough disk drives.
It IS a noble goal. And perhaps even realistic. But not with our current technology, and system of management (ad hoc/capitalist survival of the fittest standard) of that technology.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Wow. That and the Galileo quote I rate as the two most significant and important posts of this whole discussion. Too bad I blew all my moderation points on Monday slapping down First Post-ers.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Well, some people just aren't at the same point in their spiritual development. Some people aren't at ANY point in a spiritual development. Some people, it could be argued, are OVER-developed spiritually. This is where a large number of conflicts on a wide range of topics arises.
Point 3 rebuttal: africanized bees. That says nothing about how creating a new organism might affect the environment. Or maybe it does. Point 4 rebuttal: Mars is a pristine, untouched environment. There should be SOME thought of respect for that. Point 4! rebuttal: No rebuttal. You're exactly right.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Clearly Galileo had more of a problem with the church's interpretation of God's will, more than God Himself. I think a lot of today's devout Christians would agree. Even most of the whackos.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
um. dude. Read Genesis again. God TOLD us this stuff was all ours, and we could do whatever we wanted with it. In fact, His first three words to us were "You are free. . . " (pertaining to what we could and could not partake of in Eden, where we no longer are located).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"how many people have ever prayed to the Windows god?)"
Okay, offtopic, but I must relate this story. I had the case off, and I was dusting out the sockets to try to get this damn new ethernet card to be recognized by Windows. It's a tower, on the floor under my desk. So I flip the switch and watch the boot on the screen on top of the desk, and I realize - my God! I'm actually kneeling in worship to this fucking thing!!
I now make it a point to NEVER be on my knees in front of a computer again. Talk about breaking the first commandment!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"If God doesn't want us creating life, he'll find a good way to stop us, now won't he?"
Or He (being omnicient) would have told us not to do it. But, according to Christian doctrine (pick any three), we have a Free Will, to do as we choose. About the only Biblical guidance I can think of is the passage in Genesis that says something to the effect of, these are my creations, I give them to you, do with them whatever you wish. God's NOT going to step in and stop people from doing something. That would interfere with our Free Will, and He's already demonstrated that while we're here on Earth, WE make the choice. He's already provided us with a set of guidelines (some folks get ALL bent out of shape about those), and a nice little safety valve for when we DO step out of line: Grace. (another convenient thing to forget when you're picking up stones).
I think MOST religions CAN agree on who God is. Just not on how He speaks to us, who His favorites are, and what we need to do to please Him. Unfortunately, this appears to be one of those latter questions, which can get kind of sticky, and cause conflicts.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
trying to learn, and unlock the secrets of life is *not* playing God, unless you use it to create a race of slaves who are programmed to worship you and destroy all free-willed humans. I don't think anybody here is in danger of breaking the first commandment, unless they're missing church to work the lab on Sunday mornings. Then it's a fair bet that the God argument isn't relevant to those scientists anyways.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Creating "life" does not prove God's nonexistence.
The way I rationalize it, these are God's tinker-toys, and he left them laying around, and not only has he not specifically forbidden us to play with them, he has specifically TOLD us that we can do whatever we feel like with them. It's just when we start messing with HUMAN life, where we need to sit down and think. That definition isn't quite clear either, and that's going to be a REAL problem moving forward. But basically, it's tied to our generally universal cultural distaste for murder - or the taking of a human life. And to decide whether you're commiting that heinous crime, you need to define "human" and "life" - a sticky proposition at best. I wish humanity (whoever that is) the best of luck in that endeavor.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Being harsh about the "definition of life" is kind of silly.
"Life", after all, is just a word. A word we humans like to use as a shortcut to describe a particular phenomenon. We can try to "define" it, and we should, but we should also be flexible with it to allow for all the variations we've observed, which aren't clearly life "as we know it". Matter's ability to organize and do stuff on it's own through chemical reactions has produced a stunning array of things, from prions, to viruses, to people, to Lord knows what we'll find under the ice on some Jovian moon, or in the Martian permafrost. Possibly even computer programs. Trying to hang a big yellow sign that says "LIFE" around the neck of a creature that has no head is doomed to failure. Reality is fluid. Human ideas help the human mind describe and grasp reality, but ultimately, reality existed before human ideas came around, and will not be bound by them.
Then again, that expirement did NOT create bacteria (I think he saw Cosmos when he was a little kid, and just doesn't remember the whole story accurately; I bought the book). After demonstrating the primordial soup expirement, they did speculate on how amino acids might have organized and reacted, and evolved, and eventually how they might have ended up inside cell membranes. Artificial cells have even been created by suspending lipid solutions around bubbles, and using chemicals to get the lipids to form spherical membranes, but those cells did not have nuclei, or genes, or endoplasmic reticuli, and never "lived" or divided or any of that neat stuff we like to call "life".
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Gee, did these geniuses think of a computer program that could monitor outdoor CCTVs for patterns of a person in distress, waving their arms or something?
Hey! Help! I've just been robbed!
But since it was done in an alley where the camera couldn't see, it won't trip the system, and you'll just be waving at a dumb camera, probably thinking your an exuberant teen coming out of the bars after a night out.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I know this is going to sound like pure flamage, but I can't help myself.
Let Sun take over Java. Let them keep it closed and proprietary. As far as I'm concerned, Sun really hasn't delivered on ANY of their promises for Java, and even the Microsoft lawsuit was really a slap in the face to folks who took it seriously (ie. it's something to keep pure, so we hadn't ought to compromise it, so Sun better have the cujones to make sure nobody else does).
I'd have to say that I'm convinced that 100% of Java's success has to do with media hype and people buying into ANY hope of being able to slip loose the Microsoft shackles. Hadn't delivered on THAT promise yet either, has it?
It's slow, it's buggy, it sure as hell isn't cross platform. So who really cares about Java anyway. Oh, poor Steve Jobs (chuckle - chuckle). All that effort that went into OS X to integrate Java into OpenStep/YellowBox/Cocoa, and now it's going to be MORE irrelevant than Objective-C. HA HA! Stupid sucker.
Okay, I'll go seek counselling - I really have to work on my corporate sarcasm problem. It was mommy's fault. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Agree on a standard whereby all IR headlights are polarized horizontally, and windshields polarized vertically. The reflected IR light will become depolarized, but direct IR light will still be polarized, and be filtered by oncoming cars' windshields.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
What's really funny, is marketing has stated that our company is to always always always be ALL CAPS. A fucking Unix software company, and these idiots say that we must always refer to our company name in ALL CAPS. Now, it's not so bad, looking at our logo, looks slick. We fucking mean business here. Dammmit. But in an email, you just lose all credibility with anyone technical. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Drop the "research" man. It's great for a startup, but eventually, business-types will look at you with scorn for your "leftist, academic" leanings, and will associate that with highly educated funny old men wearing a cardigan sweater, making $40 grand a year, when he could be making $200 grand in the private sector as a consultant.
However, Microsoft seems to have bridged that gap with it's "donations" to major universities. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
My G3 Beige 233 had to be returned because of the crappy VRAM socket clip broke when they installed the VRAM. They sent me a new (prolly refurbed) mobo, that the service center replaced. It had no sticker on the jumper block. I overclocked it and it's been humming along at 300 ever since. Word of caution - keep the case well ventilated. The stock cooling works fine, as long as you make sure a plentiful supply of cool air is available outside the case, to be drawn in. Once I took that simple measure, overheating/instability disappeard forever. It's been going great at 300 for over a year now. I'm faithful that it will survive long enough for the Rev 2 sawtooths to come out, so I can replace it.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Slashdot Mirror
There seem to be two schools of thought here. The folks who do searches, and are satisfied at what they get, and the folks who KNOW how searching works, and the breadth of information that exists, and KNOW that there's technically no way that all of that information is just plain not going to be included in any search.
It's unsettling to these "second school" people, because it's like looking for something in a library, knowing that you can't even go into 90% of the rooms of books and scrolls and papers.
Computers are supposed to be our security blanket that no information is out of our reach, or ever becomes lost. Unfortunately, this is "capital-R Reality", and even with the great equalizer of the internet, you just plain can't have it all. Steven Wright said, you can't have it all, where would you put it? The computer answers, digitize it, and put it online. All you need to do is build enough disk drives.
It IS a noble goal. And perhaps even realistic. But not with our current technology, and system of management (ad hoc/capitalist survival of the fittest standard) of that technology.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Wow. That and the Galileo quote I rate as the two most significant and important posts of this whole discussion. Too bad I blew all my moderation points on Monday slapping down First Post-ers.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Well, some people just aren't at the same point in their spiritual development. Some people aren't at ANY point in a spiritual development. Some people, it could be argued, are OVER-developed spiritually. This is where a large number of conflicts on a wide range of topics arises.
Point 3 rebuttal: africanized bees. That says nothing about how creating a new organism might affect the environment. Or maybe it does.
Point 4 rebuttal: Mars is a pristine, untouched environment. There should be SOME thought of respect for that.
Point 4! rebuttal: No rebuttal. You're exactly right.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Clearly Galileo had more of a problem with the church's interpretation of God's will, more than God Himself. I think a lot of today's devout Christians would agree. Even most of the whackos.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
um. dude. Read Genesis again. God TOLD us this stuff was all ours, and we could do whatever we wanted with it. In fact, His first three words to us were "You are free. . . " (pertaining to what we could and could not partake of in Eden, where we no longer are located).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"how
many people have ever prayed to the Windows god?)"
Okay, offtopic, but I must relate this story. I had the case off, and I was dusting out the sockets to try to get this damn new ethernet card to be recognized by Windows. It's a tower, on the floor under my desk. So I flip the switch and watch the boot on the screen on top of the desk, and I realize - my God! I'm actually kneeling in worship to this fucking thing!!
I now make it a point to NEVER be on my knees in front of a computer again. Talk about breaking the first commandment!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
No matter WHAT the Pope says, they'll still have crazy lunatics outside the building protesting.
Crazy lunatics, by the way, are not a unique product of religion. Though religion DOES seem to attract quite a few of them.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"If God doesn't want us creating life, he'll find a good
way to stop us, now won't he?"
Or He (being omnicient) would have told us not to do it.
But, according to Christian doctrine (pick any three), we have a Free Will, to do as we choose. About the only Biblical guidance I can think of is the passage in Genesis that says something to the effect of, these are my creations, I give them to you, do with them whatever you wish.
God's NOT going to step in and stop people from doing something. That would interfere with our Free Will, and He's already demonstrated that while we're here on Earth, WE make the choice. He's already provided us with a set of guidelines (some folks get ALL bent out of shape about those), and a nice little safety valve for when we DO step out of line: Grace. (another convenient thing to forget when you're picking up stones).
I think MOST religions CAN agree on who God is. Just not on how He speaks to us, who His favorites are, and what we need to do to please Him. Unfortunately, this appears to be one of those latter questions, which can get kind of sticky, and cause conflicts.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Playing God?
trying to learn, and unlock the secrets of life is *not* playing God, unless you use it to create a race of slaves who are programmed to worship you and destroy all free-willed humans. I don't think anybody here is in danger of breaking the first commandment, unless they're missing church to work the lab on Sunday mornings. Then it's a fair bet that the God argument isn't relevant to those scientists anyways.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Creating "life" does not prove God's nonexistence.
The way I rationalize it, these are God's tinker-toys, and he left them laying around, and not only has he not specifically forbidden us to play with them, he has specifically TOLD us that we can do whatever we feel like with them. It's just when we start messing with HUMAN life, where we need to sit down and think. That definition isn't quite clear either, and that's going to be a REAL problem moving forward. But basically, it's tied to our generally universal cultural distaste for murder - or the taking of a human life. And to decide whether you're commiting that heinous crime, you need to define "human" and "life" - a sticky proposition at best. I wish humanity (whoever that is) the best of luck in that endeavor.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Being harsh about the "definition of life" is kind of silly.
"Life", after all, is just a word. A word we humans like to use as a shortcut to describe a particular phenomenon. We can try to "define" it, and we should, but we should also be flexible with it to allow for all the variations we've observed, which aren't clearly life "as we know it". Matter's ability to organize and do stuff on it's own through chemical reactions has produced a stunning array of things, from prions, to viruses, to people, to Lord knows what we'll find under the ice on some Jovian moon, or in the Martian permafrost. Possibly even computer programs. Trying to hang a big yellow sign that says "LIFE" around the neck of a creature that has no head is doomed to failure. Reality is fluid. Human ideas help the human mind describe and grasp reality, but ultimately, reality existed before human ideas came around, and will not be bound by them.
Then again, that expirement did NOT create bacteria (I think he saw Cosmos when he was a little kid, and just doesn't remember the whole story accurately; I bought the book). After demonstrating the primordial soup expirement, they did speculate on how amino acids might have organized and reacted, and evolved, and eventually how they might have ended up inside cell membranes. Artificial cells have even been created by suspending lipid solutions around bubbles, and using chemicals to get the lipids to form spherical membranes, but those cells did not have nuclei, or genes, or endoplasmic reticuli, and never "lived" or divided or any of that neat stuff we like to call "life".
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Gee, did these geniuses think of a computer program that could monitor outdoor CCTVs for patterns of a person in distress, waving their arms or something?
Hey! Help! I've just been robbed!
But since it was done in an alley where the camera couldn't see, it won't trip the system, and you'll just be waving at a dumb camera, probably thinking your an exuberant teen coming out of the bars after a night out.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Gee, how about a computer program that monitors the cameras for signs of a human in distress, waving for help? Anybody think of that?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I know this is going to sound like pure flamage, but I can't help myself.
.
Let Sun take over Java. Let them keep it closed and proprietary. As far as I'm concerned, Sun really hasn't delivered on ANY of their promises for Java, and even the Microsoft lawsuit was really a slap in the face to folks who took it seriously (ie. it's something to keep pure, so we hadn't ought to compromise it, so Sun better have the cujones to make sure nobody else does).
I'd have to say that I'm convinced that 100% of Java's success has to do with media hype and people buying into ANY hope of being able to slip loose the Microsoft shackles. Hadn't delivered on THAT promise yet either, has it?
It's slow, it's buggy, it sure as hell isn't cross platform. So who really cares about Java anyway. Oh, poor Steve Jobs (chuckle - chuckle). All that effort that went into OS X to integrate Java into OpenStep/YellowBox/Cocoa, and now it's going to be MORE irrelevant than Objective-C. HA HA! Stupid sucker.
Okay, I'll go seek counselling - I really have to work on my corporate sarcasm problem. It was mommy's fault. .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Agree on a standard whereby all IR headlights are polarized horizontally, and windshields polarized vertically. The reflected IR light will become depolarized, but direct IR light will still be polarized, and be filtered by oncoming cars' windshields.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Heh, I'm definately a Christian, and that was definately funny!
Run you arab mongrels! Here come the Campus Christians!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
What's really funny, is marketing has stated that our company is to always always always be ALL CAPS. A fucking Unix software company, and these idiots say that we must always refer to our company name in ALL CAPS. Now, it's not so bad, looking at our logo, looks slick. We fucking mean business here. Dammmit. But in an email, you just lose all credibility with anyone technical. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Drop the "research" man. It's great for a startup, but eventually, business-types will look at you with scorn for your "leftist, academic" leanings, and will associate that with highly educated funny old men wearing a cardigan sweater, making $40 grand a year, when he could be making $200 grand in the private sector as a consultant.
.
However, Microsoft seems to have bridged that gap with it's "donations" to major universities. .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
As lame as I think Celeron, Pentium, and especially Itanium are, I do kind of like Xeon.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I never liked pentium, still don't like it, and itanium sounds like something out of Dexter's Laboratory. It will still sound stupid in 10 years.
To the person who came up with this name and got paid; way to go, you sure fucked Intel good and hard!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
London? You idiot! There's protesting going on in London too! Get out there (and lose your visa, of course!)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Maybe the WTO is what Lucas was alluding to as "The Trade Federation" in TPM. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
My G3 Beige 233 had to be returned because of the crappy VRAM socket clip broke when they installed the VRAM. They sent me a new (prolly refurbed) mobo, that the service center replaced. It had no sticker on the jumper block. I overclocked it and it's been humming along at 300 ever since. Word of caution - keep the case well ventilated. The stock cooling works fine, as long as you make sure a plentiful supply of cool air is available outside the case, to be drawn in. Once I took that simple measure, overheating/instability disappeard forever. It's been going great at 300 for over a year now. I'm faithful that it will survive long enough for the Rev 2 sawtooths to come out, so I can replace it.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Sorry, I'm not ready to get gassed and arrested to stand up for my right to download pr0n.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"...it is amazing what can happen when ...
mob mentality takes over.
Remember Tehran, 1980?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".