It's been brought up a few times already, but I wanted to give one more plug to Bruce Perens' site (technocrat.net). Lately there have been a number of threads there discussing slashdot itself (like, "where's the code?").
You don't get to read stuff like this on slashdot itself, except in little bursts that are quickly labeled "off-topic".
When people discuss the potential for fraud in new computerized voting systems, they always seem to make the assumption that the current voting systems are perfect and free of fraud.
Suggesting that we may have an election fraud problem in the good old can't-happen-here-or-at-least-not-these-days USA is a quick way of getting yourself branded a conspiracy nut, but this strikes me as the "innocent until proven guilty" attitude taken to an insane extreme.
I actually think that there are a lot of urban areas in the US with all sorts of election problems. For example, in the last mayoral election in San Francisco, there were a number of disturbing articles about how it's not even possible to check whether the people registered to vote are real people (e.g. if you find a dozen people registered using the address of a bar, you can't dismiss them out of hand, that really may be the closest thing to a stable address that they've got).
And a few years back there was an election that smelled really bad in a number of ways (there's no disagreement that there was some fraud going on, the only question is whether there was enough to swing the election): San Francisco Stadium Election
``Votation.com makes elections more secure than existing election systems currently do,'' company Chief Executive Officer Joe Mohen said
And maybe that's the real reason that they've decided to "go slow".
The third session will describe ways in which collective intelligence can be improved with appropriate methodologies and information technology-based tools. The primary focus of the session will be on processes for concurrent development, integration, and application of knowledge (CoDIAK), and their relationship to a dynamic knowledge repository [...]
[...] an Open Hyper-document System will be described [...]
I have to say, this sounds like a man who really Gets It. There's a crying need for software that'll let people do things like this (and has been for decades). We keep dancing close to it, but somehow never quite get there.
Take slashdot as an example. Somone submits a story about software licenses. A bunch of us beat our heads together in public about the merits of the GPL, the BSD, and so on. Moderators work it over and make it easy to find the better written arguments. And then a day later, the information is effectively all dead, and we all get to go through the same scramble the next time software licenses come up.
Wouldn't it be better if we were working *toward* something here? Say if we were all trying to develop a document that summarizes the basic arguments, so we don't have to go through the same old stuff every time?
The trouble is that whenever anyone tries to perfect something like this, they run into some kind of difficulties. I tend to think of this as "The Curse of Xanadu" (now open sourced, but still apparently dead: www.udanax.com).
(And it doesn't bode well that he's using terms like "CoDIAK". Screwed up capitialization is is one of the marks of a doomed project.)
I have to say, having an ATM card with David Bowie's picture on it would be supercool (in a really stupid sort of way) but the question is *which* picture? Ziggy Stardust? The Thin White Duke? Major Tom? Having sex with Mick Jagger?
Ah, I see, it looks like they're doing a close-up of his mis-matched eyes: www.bowiebanc.com
I'm not saying create three or six new domains; probably the only way to solve this is to allow hundreds or thousands of new TLDs, which would not only make it impossible for any but the most ardent trademark borderline-pissers to go everywhere
Actually, this sounds like a really good thought. If every permutation of three letters was a valid TLD, then it might very well completely swamp that "let's register *all* of them" impulse.
Hopefully this incident will give ICANN a kick in the pants as far as moving on to the next phase. There need to be more TLDs, and there need to be rules that allow those TLDs to expand the domain name universe, not just give trademark-grabbers more TLDs to register theirs in.
Can you explain how this is supposed to work, though? If you create a bunch of additional top-level domains (let's say *.arts, *.firm, *.biz, *.dot, *.sucks) someone like Disney is going to want to register their trademarks in all those domains. Whether or not they're legally required to do so to protect their trademark, that's what they're going to want, just to make it easy for people to find them.
This seems like a classic case of techies missing the point: "Oh, running out of domains? Let's add more." But it isn't domainspace that's crowded, it's the trademark namespace...
On the other hand, some new TLDs would:
Help increase the number of domains available to small organizations that just don't care that much (yet) about protecting a name (e.g. scat.arts, and scat.com could be, respectively some jazz singers and a porn site without causing too much confusion).
Give organizations like InterNIC a way to soak the big boys for a little bit of cash for the sake of protecting their trademarks. Look at it like a progressive tax: Small orgs get to pay just *once*, but the big ones feel like they have to pay dozens of times.
Phone and cable may be "natural monopolies" or they might not... we don't know because the government stepped in and handed them an exclusive franchise long before any kind of economic equilibrium was reached.
I went looking around for some info to confirm or deny my impression of the history of the Bell system. Turns out the situation was more complicated than that, at least according to Bruce Sterling's account in _the Hacker Crackdown_. AT&T originally had to fend off competitors with their patents, and then when the patents expired they used technical innovation to stay ahead, and *then* they embraced government regulation.
(Goddamn reality. Never stays where I put it.)
Anyway, some relevant quotations from Chairman Bruce:
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble. In 1907, it fell into the hands of the rather sinister J. P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron speculators who dominated Wall Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different turn. America might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned telephone companies. Many state politicians and local businessmen considered this an excellent solution.
But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph, or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm [...] Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized the technological edge once again [...] By controlling long distance -- the links between, over and above the smaller local phone companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip hand over them, and was soon devouring them right and left.
[...]
Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing to accommodate the U.S. government; in fact, he would forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become almost a wing of the American government, almost another Post Office -- though not quite. AT&T would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it would use the government's regulators as its own police, who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell system's profits and preeminence.
The full text of this book is available on-line in various places. Here's one: The Hacker Crackdown
Yes, I agree that this particular effort is Bruce Sterling at his worst, and I'm actually a big fan of Sterling's and have been for a long time. This manifesto has the fluffy, gushing quality of the recent work of Kevin Kelley in Wired, and that's really saying something.
It's a shame that this is the article that got submitted and used as a slashdot story. Consider instead, Bruce Sterling's take on "Pervasive Computing", as presented in a talk at IBM: Viridian Note 113 (some of these ideas were touched on in his last novel, _Distraction_).
I have to admit, I'm a bit uncomfortable with this whole Viridian project of Sterling's... for one thing, the idea that we're undergoing human-induced global warming, and that we've got to cut back on carbon output... that's a really mainstream idea, it's practically conventional wisdom at this point. Sterling is at his best when playing the outsider game, thinking strange thoughts that no one else has gotten to yet...
[0] If you're a libertarian, then please pause a moment before you flame me. I'm not saying that all libertarians are narrow-minded and rude; of course that's not true. I am saying that the fervor of some fundamentalist libertarians online often has a negative impact on the free exchange of political ideas, and that the large proportion of right-wing libertarians online makes pro-libertarian flame-fests a frequent occurrence.
And allow me to ask you to pause for a moment and think about what you're saying, because what you're calling a common occurance strikes me as being fairly rare. May I suggest that you're used to forums where opposing viewpoints are normally screened out in subtle ways, and when you're actually forced to confront a disagreement you feel like someone is unfairly "shouting you down"?
And by the way: "right-wing libertarian" is at least *supposed* to be something of an oxymoron (believe it or not, it's possible to be neither left nor right, which is how a lot of libertarians would classify themselves). Admittedly though, there are a lot of conservatives around who talk a libertarian line when convienient (e.g. when discussing the right to smoke tobacco, as opposed to marijuana), and maybe that's the kind of person you're talking about.
Personally, I think that there are indeed problems with slashdot as a discussion forum, but far worse than "frequent flame-fests" is the fact that any strongly stated opinion is at the risk of being pounded down as "flamebait", so there's a certain tendency toward blandness.
But far worse than that is simply the speed at which the discussion happens... anything over a day old is effectively dead (compared to usenet, where a discussion can go on for weeks, or months). How much effort are we supposed to put into writing, moderating and meta-moderating discussions that are just going to evaporate in a day?
Before the Bell monopoly was broken up by the US government, it was officially sanctioned by the US government. Phone and cable may be "natural monopolies" or they might not... we don't know because the government stepped in and handed them an exclusive franchise long before any kind of economic equilibrium was reached.
But he was arguing for "ownership of frequencies", with government backing of the property right. This actually isn't all that different from what the FCC is supposed to do, except that he's saying they should be out of the business of regulating content.
What I was alluding to was a more anarchist approach, let anyone broadcast anything, anywhere at any frequency, at any power, and yeah, a system like that would have the kind of problem you're talking about (I called it "arms races", i.e. he who can blast enough wattage at a given frequency could win that slot). It would be an interesting world... though I can't in all honesty say I'm sure it would be a better one.
(One possiblity is that with the FCC preventing entry of new stations between the old ones on the dial, there's been no incentive to improve radio tuner sensitivity. Could it be that without a standard spacing between frequencies, we'd have a dozen times the number of stations, and really good tuners to pick them out of the chaos?)
Anyway, radical changes in the way the FCC regulates the airwaves are not going to be easy to bring about. I think the real hope is for new technology to get around the FCC (e.g. the development of celluar internet radio), but there's a real danger that the FCC will always be able to scramble after new tech, and claim it as part of their domain.
I don't know what to make of this piece of news one way or another, but I second the point that the FCC is extremely important to nearly every realm of the technical world.
The original rational of the FCC was that the bandwidth of radio communications was limited, so you needed this government agency to regulate who owned what frequency and what power (and hence range) they were allowed to have. I'm not sure I agree with this, but at least you can make a case for it (the alternative would involve some pretty chaotic "arms races" with the deepest pockets buying the heaviest signal and stomping on anyone else).
But somehow or other they got from this to a justification for government censorship of the airwaves (restrictions on "sexual or excretory" language, no direct calls to action, noncoms can't mention ticket prices, and so on). This rules are pretty vauge in their details and that seems to be intentional: you don't get shutdown for violating them, but they might be used as a pretext for shutting you down, if it was politically expedient (e.g. there was a college station whose frequency was turned over to a religious group during the Reagan years).
But okay, say that you buy that it's appropriate for the FCC to regulate *broadcast* technology, possibly including speech. How do you justify that the FCC got involved with regulating Cable Television? And now how do you justify that they're getting involved with regulating the Internet? Anything that vaugely involves "communication" seems to fall under the FCCs domain (I expect marriage counsellors will be next).
Anyway, these guys scare me. You're talking about a federal bureaucracy that's in the business of routinely regulating speech, with barely a squeak of anyone shouting "First Ammendment".
There are some reports filtering in on the redhat-talk mailing list about PCs with older BIOSes that are refusing to boot now.
Don't assume that everything is okay on your box until after you've rebooted. If you wanted to be really paranoid, you'd first check the website of the company that made your mother board, download any BIOS upgrades, and install them before reboothing.
(Me, I upgraded my BIOS about a year ago, so I'll probably just cross my fingers....)
Yes, I'm also starting to get annoyed with the "Oh well, it was just a lot of hype" attitude.
This illustrates a real problem in the software world, if you *really* need to know that something is going to work, it takes a tremendous effort to get there, and you're never really 100% sure you've got it right.
This problem isn't going to go away, even if the Y2K (and the 2038?) problems are declared dead issues.
(Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)
But now that Bt is continuously present in whole fields of Monsanto potatoes, the insects in those field will be continuously exposed to Bt. Therefore it is only a matter of time before they develop "resistance" and become immune to Bt's toxic effects.
Yeah, I've heard about this problem, and it sounds like they may have a point on this one.
In general though, I do think people react with excessive hysteria to the idea of biologically engineered foods. I don't trust most of the alarms that I hear sounded about these things, in part because I know how badly the technophobes have exaggerated in the past (nuclear power for me is the canonical example: it's the issue on which the left forever lost my trust as a source of information).
It *would* be nice to have a good way of evaluating technical-public policy questions, but we aren't anywhere near it yet. If you haven't read anything like this yet, you might want to look at Eric Drexler on "Science Courts"/"Fact Forums".
I know that you think that people who question this are just "old-fashioned" or crazy but really I think it is good to educate yourself in the opposition's view.
No, I don't think you're "old-fashioned", I think that the anti-tech attitude is really pretty modern. If anything I'm being "retro" in this thread.
And as for understanding the opposition: Sure, I do what I can. Time is always the problem, no?
I can't even conceive of the mindset that causes everyone I talk to from NYC to complain that cleaning up the city is somehow a bad thing. If they were complaining about methods, I could see their point, and would probably agree. But these people are upset about the result, which I just don't understand.
Well, Giuliani's methods certainly leave much to be desired, but there are other complaints: (1) the definition of dirt, e.g. one man's eccentric artistic freak is another Giuliani's trash (2) having a bunch of bums/addicts/whores/etc hanging around on the streets is an advantage because it helps to scare away the people that I'd rather not have hanging around on the streets.
I hear a lot of people complaining about Times Square's traditional sleaze being replaced by a Disnified/chain store/megacorporate wonderland. Neither is great in my opinion, but given the choice, I would've have preferred it be left alone.
I'm a little suprised that the words "bandwidth" and "rent" occur so often in this discussion, compared to the words "music" and "chicks". I guess some geeks are geekier than others...
Anyway, this is my shortlist:
transit should run late, ideally all night
bike lanes
diverse live music scene & dance clubs
funky coffee houses, and restaurants without vallet parking
In short, it's important to me to live in a place where I feel like things are really happening, as opposed to a museum of a city, glorifying the things that used to happen (both NY and SF are in danger of going that route).
Things that once would have been on my list:
Lots of interesting, unattached women (the Valley loses on this one, including Stanford, which has lots of women married to their careers and/or their insecurities).
Proximity of ocean and mountains.
Lots of tech jobs.
The reasons these aren't on my list any more: (1) got a babe already, don't need another (though they do improve the scenery); (2) Geographic proximity doesn't help if car traffic will always turn any outing into an ordeal that you can only endure a few times a year; (3) good people are more important than "good jobs", everything is interesting from a certain point of view.
There you have it, though it's not like anyone is going to read this. (Is there anything more quixotic than posting to a slashdot discussion with more than 300 responses?)
Rats, cockroaches, soot, stink, human vermin, crime, rents that make Boston MA look like a trailer park in Memphis TN (in terms of price)
Sorry, you're out of date. Guliani (aka, the Great Dictator) has cleaned up the joint. The actual problem with New York is that Manhatten is getting really slick and boring. You need to get further out from the center every year to find some place with some character (my guess is Brooklyn would be okay... living in Manhatten itself is no longer my idea of a fun time).
You're right about the rents though. But what overpaid, single young geek really cares that much about high rents?
That means you make the atoms go *pop* and you get a whole pandemonium of even more radioactive and/or poisonous substances.
Which decay relatively rapidly into the Uranium that you don't seem to be too concerned about. In general the hot stuff decays fastest (the stories you hear about it taking a gazillion years for, say, plutonium to disappear are the figures for it to all turn into lead, not for it to turn back into uranium).
Think about the thermodynamics of the situation for a moment. The plants produce energy, the energy comes from converting radioactivity into heat. So the total amount of radioactivity has to decline, right?
And Uran dispersed somewhere underground is a lot less problematic than thousands of hyperradioactive barrels stashed somewhere.
Ah, but why is the stuff sitting above ground in barrels? Because everyone is too nervous about putting it back into the ground somewhere, because it might leak out somehow or other. What about the danger of the natural ores "leaking"? You never see these two compared... the radioactives are supposed to just magically appear as a by-product of the nukes.
And noone said Coal plants are a good thing, so please stop talking past the issue he mentioned.
Check. It does appear that the original poster knows more about this than I gave him credit for.
So let me address "the issue", which is evidentally that prevention is better than repair. But is there really a difference? The clean-up technologies don't neatly separate from the production technologies. For example if you're really good at cleaning up stray particles of radioactive metals, you may be able to do it inside the gates of the plant. So that's prevention, right?
And then there's the question of prevention of *what*. The whole energy business is part of a centuries old effort to prevent things like death by exposure, starvation, etc (it's not all about racing around in SUVs to sit in front of CRTs). Would it have been better to have, say, never learned to burn coal?
Unless you're some sort of anti-human "deep ecologist" or something, the answer is "hell no". The history of technology is a history of juggling evils, ameliorating some problems at the expense of causing other (hopefully lesser) problems, which we may then ameliorate at a later date. Over the centuries, this juggling act has clearly been a big win for the industrialized world, more than doubling our lifespan and changing our lives from a hand-to-mouth existance to ones with the luxury to waste time scoring debating points on slashdot.
Yes, I agree about the Hindenberg. 35 people died in that fire, and that's one of the worst screw-ups of the Millenium? You can lose that many in a bad pile-up on I-5 here in California... and this happens nearly every time the central valley has some fog.
The really notable thing about the Hindenberg is that it was the first "disaster" reported live on the radio by a hysterical, babbling reporter. Mass media was new in those days, it didn't take much to get people going (e.g. the "War of the Worlds" fiasco).
And the real tragedy of the Hindenberg, in my opinion, is that whenever you suggest using hydrogen powered vehicles of any kind, people look at you like you're crazy. "My god man, don't you know that hydrogen is *dangerous*?" Sure: it's explosive. Just like gasoline, except that when you burn it you just get water vapor.
Ok folks, here's the problem: It is not OK to be making all of this radioactive crap in the first place.
My understanding is that the radioactive crap isn't exactly created by the nuclear industry. It's there naturally in the ground, it gets dug up and concentrated, the radioactivity runs down a bit inside the plant, and then you get to try and pick a safe place to put what's leftover. Think of it as an environmental clean-up program, gathering together poisonous material and stashing it out of the way.
Sure, I know, we all need energy and nuclear is cleaner than blah blah blah.....
If you really know this, it doesn't seem to have sunk in. The fact that we worry about where to put nuclear waste is an advantage of nuclear power. There is no "coal waste disposal" problem because it's just assumed that it will all be dumped into the air (including radioactives particles embedded in the coal). This causes kilodeaths every year in the US, but somehow this is all shrugged off in comparision to nuclear power, which *might* cause kilodeaths *if* something went radically wrong.
There's lot's of interesting side issues on this thread, but to get back to what the fellow was saying about the "gloss" of Windows, I think there's a fundamental issue here that will make it difficult for the 'nix world to match Windows.
Unix is a huge pile of software that's evolved under the direction of a large number of people. Getting it to work involves getting lots of different layers of software to work together, and this is both a strength and a weakness. For example, Unix users get to choose between window managers, and having chosen, they have a lot of choice about how to configure their window managers. That's a whole class of software that doesn't even exist as far as the typical Windows user is concerned.
And the problem is, if anything getting worse, with more layers being added to the system... Pretend you're a naive user, and then consider Gnome. Everyone's talking about it, but what the hell is it? It's not a window manager. It's not an application. It's not a C library. Do you need it? How are you supposed to know?
You might hope that it would be the job of the distribution packagers to work out these issues, but as far as I can tell, they haven't been that much help. And there's a limit to how much they *can* help, because one of the virtues of the Unix world is the amount of choice it offers the user. Freedom is what it's about, and freedom can be confusing.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't get to read stuff like this on slashdot itself, except in little bursts that are quickly labeled "off-topic".
I recommend reading: A proposal to Slashdot
Suggesting that we may have an election fraud problem in the good old can't-happen-here-or-at-least-not-these-days USA is a quick way of getting yourself branded a conspiracy nut, but this strikes me as the "innocent until proven guilty" attitude taken to an insane extreme.
I actually think that there are a lot of urban areas in the US with all sorts of election problems. For example, in the last mayoral election in San Francisco, there were a number of disturbing articles about how it's not even possible to check whether the people registered to vote are real people (e.g. if you find a dozen people registered using the address of a bar, you can't dismiss them out of hand, that really may be the closest thing to a stable address that they've got).
And a few years back there was an election that smelled really bad in a number of ways (there's no disagreement that there was some fraud going on, the only question is whether there was enough to swing the election): San Francisco Stadium Election
``Votation.com makes elections more secure than existing election systems currently do,'' company Chief Executive Officer Joe Mohen said
My first thought was: "Laboring to produce a mouse."
And also: "And paralyzing the world with RSI instead."
Linus Torvalds that touches on the monolithic/microkernel issue:
The Linux Edge - Linus Torvalds
This is also a good place to find a copy of the
famous argument Linus had on the subject with
the author of Minix:
Appendix A: The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate
Take slashdot as an example. Somone submits a story about software licenses. A bunch of us beat our heads together in public about the merits of the GPL, the BSD, and so on. Moderators work it over and make it easy to find the better written arguments. And then a day later, the information is effectively all dead, and we all get to go through the same scramble the next time software licenses come up.
Wouldn't it be better if we were working *toward* something here? Say if we were all trying to develop a document that summarizes the basic arguments, so we don't have to go through the same old stuff every time?
The trouble is that whenever anyone tries to perfect something like this, they run into some kind of difficulties. I tend to think of this as "The Curse of Xanadu" (now open sourced, but still apparently dead: www.udanax.com).
(And it doesn't bode well that he's using terms like "CoDIAK". Screwed up capitialization is is one of the marks of a doomed project.)
Anyway, I second the recommendation to check out The Bootstrap Alliance. It looks like they're going for it: http://www.bootstrap.org/alliance/dkr/.
Ah, I see, it looks like they're doing a close-up of his mis-matched eyes: www.bowiebanc.com
This seems like a classic case of techies missing the point: "Oh, running out of domains? Let's add more." But it isn't domainspace that's crowded, it's the trademark namespace...
On the other hand, some new TLDs would:
(Goddamn reality. Never stays where I put it.)
Anyway, some relevant quotations from Chairman Bruce:
The full text of this book is available on-line in various places. Here's one: The Hacker Crackdown
It's a shame that this is the article that got submitted and used as a slashdot story. Consider instead, Bruce Sterling's take on "Pervasive Computing", as presented in a talk at IBM: Viridian Note 113 (some of these ideas were touched on in his last novel, _Distraction_).
I have to admit, I'm a bit uncomfortable with this whole Viridian project of Sterling's... for one thing, the idea that we're undergoing human-induced global warming, and that we've got to cut back on carbon output... that's a really mainstream idea, it's practically conventional wisdom at this point. Sterling is at his best when playing the outsider game, thinking strange thoughts that no one else has gotten to yet...
And by the way: "right-wing libertarian" is at least *supposed* to be something of an oxymoron (believe it or not, it's possible to be neither left nor right, which is how a lot of libertarians would classify themselves). Admittedly though, there are a lot of conservatives around who talk a libertarian line when convienient (e.g. when discussing the right to smoke tobacco, as opposed to marijuana), and maybe that's the kind of person you're talking about.
Personally, I think that there are indeed problems with slashdot as a discussion forum, but far worse than "frequent flame-fests" is the fact that any strongly stated opinion is at the risk of being pounded down as "flamebait", so there's a certain tendency toward blandness.
But far worse than that is simply the speed at which the discussion happens... anything over a day old is effectively dead (compared to usenet, where a discussion can go on for weeks, or months). How much effort are we supposed to put into writing, moderating and meta-moderating discussions that are just going to evaporate in a day?
Before the Bell monopoly was broken up by
the US government, it was officially
sanctioned by the US government. Phone and
cable may be "natural monopolies" or they
might not... we don't know because the
government stepped in and handed them an
exclusive franchise long before any kind
of economic equilibrium was reached.
What I was alluding to was a more anarchist approach, let anyone broadcast anything, anywhere at any frequency, at any power, and yeah, a system like that would have the kind of problem you're talking about (I called it "arms races", i.e. he who can blast enough wattage at a given frequency could win that slot). It would be an interesting world... though I can't in all honesty say I'm sure it would be a better one.
(One possiblity is that with the FCC preventing entry of new stations between the old ones on the dial, there's been no incentive to improve radio tuner sensitivity. Could it be that without a standard spacing between frequencies, we'd have a dozen times the number of stations, and really good tuners to pick them out of the chaos?)
Anyway, radical changes in the way the FCC regulates the airwaves are not going to be easy to bring about. I think the real hope is for new technology to get around the FCC (e.g. the development of celluar internet radio), but there's a real danger that the FCC will always be able to scramble after new tech, and claim it as part of their domain.
I just realized that there's an on-line archive of David Farber's Interesting People mailing list.
The original rational of the FCC was that the bandwidth of radio communications was limited, so you needed this government agency to regulate who owned what frequency and what power (and hence range) they were allowed to have. I'm not sure I agree with this, but at least you can make a case for it (the alternative would involve some pretty chaotic "arms races" with the deepest pockets buying the heaviest signal and stomping on anyone else).
But somehow or other they got from this to a justification for government censorship of the airwaves (restrictions on "sexual or excretory" language, no direct calls to action, noncoms can't mention ticket prices, and so on). This rules are pretty vauge in their details and that seems to be intentional: you don't get shutdown for violating them, but they might be used as a pretext for shutting you down, if it was politically expedient (e.g. there was a college station whose frequency was turned over to a religious group during the Reagan years).
But okay, say that you buy that it's appropriate for the FCC to regulate *broadcast* technology, possibly including speech. How do you justify that the FCC got involved with regulating Cable Television? And now how do you justify that they're getting involved with regulating the Internet? Anything that vaugely involves "communication" seems to fall under the FCCs domain (I expect marriage counsellors will be next).
Anyway, these guys scare me. You're talking about a federal bureaucracy that's in the business of routinely regulating speech, with barely a squeak of anyone shouting "First Ammendment".
There are some reports filtering in on the
redhat-talk mailing list about PCs with older
BIOSes that are refusing to boot now.
Don't assume that everything is okay on your
box until after you've rebooted. If you wanted
to be really paranoid, you'd first check the
website of the company that made your mother
board, download any BIOS upgrades, and install
them before reboothing.
(Me, I upgraded my BIOS about a year ago, so I'll
probably just cross my fingers....)
This illustrates a real problem in the software world, if you *really* need to know that something is going to work, it takes a tremendous effort to get there, and you're never really 100% sure you've got it right.
This problem isn't going to go away, even if the Y2K (and the 2038?) problems are declared dead issues.
(Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)
In general though, I do think people react with excessive hysteria to the idea of biologically engineered foods. I don't trust most of the alarms that I hear sounded about these things, in part because I know how badly the technophobes have exaggerated in the past (nuclear power for me is the canonical example: it's the issue on which the left forever lost my trust as a source of information).
It *would* be nice to have a good way of evaluating technical-public policy questions, but we aren't anywhere near it yet. If you haven't read anything like this yet, you might want to look at Eric Drexler on "Science Courts"/"Fact Forums".
No, I don't think you're "old-fashioned", I think that the anti-tech attitude is really pretty modern. If anything I'm being "retro" in this thread.And as for understanding the opposition: Sure, I do what I can. Time is always the problem, no?
I hear a lot of people complaining about Times Square's traditional sleaze being replaced by a Disnified/chain store/megacorporate wonderland. Neither is great in my opinion, but given the choice, I would've have preferred it be left alone.
Anyway, this is my shortlist:
- transit should run late, ideally all night
- bike lanes
- diverse live music scene & dance clubs
- funky coffee houses, and restaurants without vallet parking
In short, it's important to me to live in a place where I feel like things are really happening, as opposed to a museum of a city, glorifying the things that used to happen (both NY and SF are in danger of going that route).Things that once would have been on my list:
- Lots of interesting, unattached women (the Valley loses on this one, including Stanford, which has lots of women married to their careers and/or their insecurities).
- Proximity of ocean and mountains.
- Lots of tech jobs.
The reasons these aren't on my list any more: (1) got a babe already, don't need another (though they do improve the scenery); (2) Geographic proximity doesn't help if car traffic will always turn any outing into an ordeal that you can only endure a few times a year; (3) good people are more important than "good jobs", everything is interesting from a certain point of view.There you have it, though it's not like anyone is going to read this. (Is there anything more quixotic than posting to a slashdot discussion with more than 300 responses?)
You're right about the rents though. But what overpaid, single young geek really cares that much about high rents?
Think about the thermodynamics of the situation for a moment. The plants produce energy, the energy comes from converting radioactivity into heat. So the total amount of radioactivity has to decline, right?
Ah, but why is the stuff sitting above ground in barrels? Because everyone is too nervous about putting it back into the ground somewhere, because it might leak out somehow or other. What about the danger of the natural ores "leaking"? You never see these two compared... the radioactives are supposed to just magically appear as a by-product of the nukes. Check. It does appear that the original poster knows more about this than I gave him credit for.So let me address "the issue", which is evidentally that prevention is better than repair. But is there really a difference? The clean-up technologies don't neatly separate from the production technologies. For example if you're really good at cleaning up stray particles of radioactive metals, you may be able to do it inside the gates of the plant. So that's prevention, right?
And then there's the question of prevention of *what*. The whole energy business is part of a centuries old effort to prevent things like death by exposure, starvation, etc (it's not all about racing around in SUVs to sit in front of CRTs). Would it have been better to have, say, never learned to burn coal?
Unless you're some sort of anti-human "deep ecologist" or something, the answer is "hell no". The history of technology is a history of juggling evils, ameliorating some problems at the expense of causing other (hopefully lesser) problems, which we may then ameliorate at a later date. Over the centuries, this juggling act has clearly been a big win for the industrialized world, more than doubling our lifespan and changing our lives from a hand-to-mouth existance to ones with the luxury to waste time scoring debating points on slashdot.
The really notable thing about the Hindenberg is that it was the first "disaster" reported live on the radio by a hysterical, babbling reporter. Mass media was new in those days, it didn't take much to get people going (e.g. the "War of the Worlds" fiasco).
And the real tragedy of the Hindenberg, in my opinion, is that whenever you suggest using hydrogen powered vehicles of any kind, people look at you like you're crazy. "My god man, don't you know that hydrogen is *dangerous*?" Sure: it's explosive. Just like gasoline, except that when you burn it you just get water vapor.
Unix is a huge pile of software that's evolved under the direction of a large number of people. Getting it to work involves getting lots of different layers of software to work together, and this is both a strength and a weakness. For example, Unix users get to choose between window managers, and having chosen, they have a lot of choice about how to configure their window managers. That's a whole class of software that doesn't even exist as far as the typical Windows user is concerned.
And the problem is, if anything getting worse, with more layers being added to the system... Pretend you're a naive user, and then consider Gnome. Everyone's talking about it, but what the hell is it? It's not a window manager. It's not an application. It's not a C library. Do you need it? How are you supposed to know?
You might hope that it would be the job of the distribution packagers to work out these issues, but as far as I can tell, they haven't been that much help. And there's a limit to how much they *can* help, because one of the virtues of the Unix world is the amount of choice it offers the user. Freedom is what it's about, and freedom can be confusing.