Where did you pull that from? Islam claims to be the one true religion, Judaism says there is only one God and the Jews are his chosen people and Christianity says that the only way to God is through Jesus. It's been that way fro the last couple of millenia.
You mentioned the way it's been for millenia. There's a reasonable historic overview in Christianity in its relation to Judaism, which also talks about the Islamic point of view. Islam considers the Jewish and Christian prophets to be true prophets, and recognizes the high moral qualities of Christians. It's amazingly small-minded to simply close yourself off to a thousand-year history of tolerance and understanding between the deepest thinkers and framers of the faiths of the major religions, and simply say "everyone is wrong but me and my religion". You place yourself squarely amongst the ignorant majority by doing so.
I've said that God is more loving than I am.... And I'm not the one who has judged entire religions to be wrong - God has and I think he's in a pretty good position to decide.
He may be, but *you* are not. How do you know that God has judged entire religions to be wrong? I suppose you're going to tell me it's based on your selective reading of the Bible.
That's an incredibly presumptuous and arrogant thing for you to say.
I'm responding to what I see as your incredible presumption and arrogance to be able to put words in God's mouth. You speak of love, but you don't seem to want to share God with anyone else unless it's on your own terms. I know many Christians - you do not seem like one to me.
Let me cut to the chase and say that you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. The most important point is not that I think that your position is absolutely wrong - but that you have to consider the possibility that you might be wrong in some ways, and act accordingly, and thoughtfully. Acting in the certain belief that you, and your religion are the only ones who know what is right are what leads to problems.
As for the matter of religions agreeing with each other, I really dont care what other religions say because I consider them all to be wrong.
Um... but how is it that you know that you're right about this? I hope you realize that in this respect, you're out of step with most major religions, including the larger branches of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, all of which have reached conclusions, which are part of their respective doctrines, about their relationship to other churches. And it's nowhere near as close-minded as your "consider them all to be wrong".
The absolutism you describe is *morally* indefensible. One simple reason is, you might be wrong in what you think - as you said, "People can lie about what he says, or misunderstand" - and this might lead you to take wrong actions. In fact, it's exactly the sort of absolutism you're demonstrating that has led to wars and atrocities in the name of religion. If you act as an unthinking "soldier of God", only following orders - which may be from a faulty source, i.e. not directly and personally from God herself - then you're almost bound to be wrong.
For this reason, the major religions tend to take positions in their doctrines - e.g. the Catholic Catechism - in which the role of your own conscience is described as being crucial. It specifically tells you to not necessarily listen to authority - to listen also to your conscience. But it also talks about how your conscience is not just "whatever you think" - if anything, thinking "I know I'm right and everyone else is wrong" is a warning sign that you are being misled. It talks about these exact issues, and certainly doesn't espouse the kind of simplistic, "I know what is right" absolutism that you do.
Of course, you're probably not Catholic - but unless you belong to a fundamentalist religion, with rules taken unchanged from a couple of hundred years ago - when morals were different! - then your religion probably has similar exhortations, and you're simply demonstrating that you have not, in fact, studied your own religion in sufficient depth to be making the kind of pronouncements you're making.
Going up to [God] on judgement day and saying "I'm sorry, but you've got this whole morality business wrong," isn't going to do you any good
Going up to God and saying "But I thought I was supposed to do such and such" isn't going to do you any good either, if you're wrong.
Morality requires absolutes to have any value.
The very existence of the human race for the past 5,000 odd years that we have history for contradicts this. You have personally judged entire religions to be wrong - but how do you know that your God is not more tolerant and loving than you are?
If God exists, he provides absolutes wich can be trusted. People can lie about what he says, or misunderstand
So how then do you know what the absolutes are? How do you know you're not misunderstanding?
but that doesn't change the fact that the absolutes exist and determine the only valid and useful definition of what is moral and what isnt.
Where do you personally get these absolutes from? From your church? If so, that's an example of the "popularity" I'm talking about. Your church wouldn't exist if it wasn't popular.
They are the vales by which we will all one day be judged. I deserve to be judged and found wanting, but thankfully Jesus died on the cross and rose again, so I can be forgiven and have nothing to fear come that.
That's not a good enough excuse for not thinking deeply about your faith. I suggest you study your own religion in more depth, and with more humility.
I'm not going to get into a debate on if it those things are wrong, but keep something in mind: Morals are static. Values are not. Morals, therefore, cannot change.
Huh? Where on earth do you get this from? Sorry, but it's makes no sense. I've written more in this post.
Morality by popularity is ridicuous. Something is either right ro it is wrong. That doesn't change. By your logic, if a majority believe that rape is right, then suddenly it is.
Sounds like you need a lesson in moral relativism. Of course morals change. Morals in the Old Testament era were different than they are today. Ditto the New Testament. Morals aren't necessarily set by popularity, but they can be, and in fact have been to some extent in many western nations. Religious leaders may set morals. The morals of conservative religious groups, whether Islam, Judaism, or Christian, are very different from the morals in more mainstream religious groups. And in fact, since one's membership in those groups is, at least in part, by one's own choice, there's an element of popularity there too. If no-one wanted to be an Orthodox Jew, for example, there just wouldn't be any. Simple as that.
If you believe morals have some absolute basis, you have to say where that comes from. God? Whose conception of god? The Pope? Saddam Hussein? Jesse Jackson? Joseph Smith? L. Ron Hubbard? The Bible? Which book? Which passages? How do you know which passages to accept, and which to ignore?
Certainly, within each religion, there are well-defined answers to most of these questions, but they don't all agree with each other. What's considered perfectly acceptable by a Christian westerner is a moral crime against Allah in some Islamic states. For that matter, this happens within different branches of the same religion.
So what was that about morality by popularity again? Face it: you could almost say there is no other morality than popular morality. Even if there is a god, gods, or a big turtle holding the Earth up, you cannot know what to believe in, except by faith. But everyone's faith is different. And the morality of our societies is determined by the popular faiths.
2.1? That's a bit cutting-edge for me. I'm still running a server with 2.0.36, circa '98. Works great as a mail & web server, serving a handful of friends and colleagues, on a zippy Pentium 90MHz. Runs an active mailing list with about 90 members.
Security? Aside from all the patches I've installed over the years, the script kiddies have forgotten how to hack into a box that old.
I figure I'll upgrade it when its hard disk or power supply dies.
Of course, the difficulty of getting n qubits entangled probably scales exponentially with n as well, so I think the whole notion of quantum computing will remain theoretical. Keeps some physicists in grant money, though.
Indeed. One reason to keep funding them, at least until hard limits to the problem are determined, is that the payoff is potentially enormous. Quantum codebreaking could revolutionize the CIA and NSA's job for a while, putting them back to the golden era in WWII when they had cracked German codes like Enigma, without the knowledge of the Germans.
Quantum computing will be almost the exact opposite of ordinary computing: today, the difference in computing power available to the average joe, compared to large corporations and governments, is not that great. Quantum computing will change this balance - it'll only be available to the big guys, at least for a good long time. It'll potentially be an enormously profitable tool, which could confer great power to those who control it.
It's like the information-age equivalent of the atomic bomb - once the possibilities were understood, it didn't make sense *not* to work on it, because the possibility of one's enemies/competitors having it when you didn't was horrible to contemplate.
it's quite apparent you don't, or haven't used Windows. 2000 and newer of the Windows operating systems have NEVER crashed on me, installing drivers and in simple day to day operations.
Why don't you grow up and stop trying to whore karma just by flaming Windows with redundant lies?
Way to extrapolate your own limited experience to everyone in the world!
I've seen Windows 2000 crash from installing drivers. Less than some older versions did, certainly, but it happens. As for day to day operations - let me guess - you turn your computer off every night, don't you? Try leaving it on for a few weeks and see how it works for you. You haven't lived until your Win2K machine silently runs out of resources, refusing to open new windows or menus and simply responding to clicks with silence.
Windows 2000 is still a poor attempt to be a real operating system. It's only recently approached the level of stability needed for a server OS; and as a workstation OS, it passes muster only with people who don't know any better, or who are overly influenced by pretty pictures.
BTW, I've used and developed software for the Windows NT series of OSes (NT, 2000, XP) since the betas of NT back in '91, so I'm pretty familiar with them. If anything, stability has *reduced* since NT v3.1 - ever since they added Internet Explorer, and the UI geegaws taken from Win9x, things began going downhill.
If my mother thought I was studying it so I could become 31337, imagine what John Ashcroft might think.
You have a good point. I'd like to add to that, that you're doing 2600 a bit of a disservice by characterizing it or its contributors so glibly as "bad guys". There's plenty of questionable stuff in 2600, but the point of it all is to encourage curiosity about, and understanding of, actual systems in the world - things you won't necessarily ever learn about in school etc. Since it's targeted mainly towards a young audience (afaict), this naturally gets bound up in a certain amount of rebelliousness and so on. But a thinking adult can see past this.
There's a really fundamental point here, which is that if you're surrounded by black boxes that you don't understand, you become a helpless consumer, unable to understand or effectively deal with the world around you except in a second-class citizen sort of way. That's what many corporations would like to be the case, of course, and it's the direction that consumer culture naturally gravitates towards - but not everybody buys into that, and wanting to find out more about the world around you, and the technology on which so much depends, is not a crime.
Does the open-source world really need the assistance or oversight of the Department of Homeland Security? That's just sort of... creepy.
Besides, it seems out of proportion to the threat. Why can't they go bother Microsoft, instead, who's just promised to open Windows source code up to the Chinese government - the same source code that they claimed, under oath in the anti-trust trial, would be a national security risk if were made public. So let's see - they can't trust ordinary American citizens with it, but it's OK for the Chinese government to see it. So the next Chinese-crafted worm will be able to trash Windows installations nationwide, while American citizens have no defense because they can't get the source code?
Write your congressperson if you think you should have at least the same rights to the critical source code that runs on your machine, as the Chinese government does.
I wasn't suggesting that/. etc. were somehow more important than what goes on in the real world. Nevertheless, Garrett made a completely unfounded assumption, which is that because there were people online dissecting her personal email, that they had nothing better to do and weren't contributing to the broader society in any way, and she accused them of that. Some people responded quite angrily to that, as well they might. I know people heavily involved in politics of various kinds, for example, who also enjoy discussing things in online forums. Ditto for some very successful business people. In many cases, the online forums are used to form or test opinions that will later find their way into other areas.
In fact, it's really hard to measure the political impact of the Internet on the "real world", because so much of that sort of thing happens beneath anyone's radar. We only see the glaringly obvious examples, like when Jane's magazine pulls an article about cyberterrorism because of feedback from/. Things like that are only the tip of an iceberg. Opinions aren't always formed instantly or in a vacuum.
Garrett also demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of economics in her essay. Her picture of the global economy is skewed by having hung out at Davos, where the emphasis is on the economic fortunes of some of the world's richest people. For them, the picture may very well be bleak: e.g. Bill Gates lost something like 23% of his paper worth last year. In fact, the gloom in Davos in some respects relates directly to tech and the Internet: e.g. the concern with intellectual "property". A highly networked world raises a lot of difficulties for people who rely on chokepoints for siphoning off their piece of the economic pie. That's exactly why the DMCA etc. are such contentious issues: it represents the land grab of some traditional businesses doing their best to hang on to business as they knew it.
For someone with Garrett's education and achievements in terms of industry prizes etc., I would expect a bit more sophistication. When I first read her email, I got the impression she must be a very young reporter who somehow lucked into an opportunity. Turns out she's quite experienced, with Pulitzer and other prizes. It's ironic that she does her most interesting reporting unintentionally - interesting because it gives some insight into some of the kinds of things journalists often *don't* tell us, and the way in which their need to ingratiate themselves into the circles in which they want to move might affect their journalistic integrity.
Talking politics to complete strangers in a bar or over dinner to non-geeks, or teaching a kid how to calculate...that equates real world change.
Why do you think that talking to complete strangers in a bar is somehow more valid or impactful than online? I suspect if Garrett discovered that people in bars were chatting about her private email, she's lash out at them for being just as uninvolved. There are a lot of similarities. In both cases, you're talking about informal forums where nothing official is taking place, but where things happen whose consequences can't be measured directly.
BTW, to take your example of teaching a kid how to calculate: through online sources, I've discovered useful educational material for teaching kids computing, and have passed that on to a friend of mine who sits on a school board. It's the kind of information that was very difficult to disseminate, pre-Internet. The online world is a tool which some of the most effective people among us use. It's simplistic to dismiss it, and simply shows a lack of appreciation for the complexity of modern life, and a lack of understanding that what we're dealing with now is only the beginning.
She's annoyed about her alleged friend's betrayal, and she mistakenly lashed out at the wrong people. She's annoyed precisely because her email shows what a shallow person she is, and she can't help herself but prove that further in her reaction.
She's a journalist, but she doesn't understand global economics, she doesn't understand the Internet, she doesn't understand social or grassroots or networked behavior, and she learned English from TV. Don't be mad at her, feel sorry for her. Or just ignore her.
The journalist made a glaring blooper that reveals the fact that she learned English by watching TV, and that she doesn't do much reading of the print medium for which she writes. That's worthy of a bit of ribbing. She's lucky she has editors who (hopefully) have a better education.
"Misspelleme" might suck as a term, but it's a real enough phenomenon. Other examples include "congradulations" (based on American pronunciation) and "alot", as in "thanks alot". There are others, but they escape me at the moment...
The only real disadvantage of interpreted/scripting languages is raw power. They are just a greater abstraction from pure machine code than lower level languages like C, etc., which are themselves abstractions from that machine code.
Try Scheme. It has all the dynamic flexibility of the best scripting languages, and the abstraction capabilities of the most high level academic languages, but can be compiled to very fast code. On benchmarks, some of the compiled Schemes are up there with languages like C.
You missed half-American Daimler-Chrysler
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10 Techno-Cool Cars
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· Score: 1
If you're only concerned about ownership, then you missed DaimlerChrysler, which is half American, and makes Mercedes-Benz (along with Jeep, Dodge and Chrysler - quite a strange combination!)
I don't know what this holy-grail-type intelligence is that you speak of
Not really talking about the current discussion re chess, but the ability to learn would be a good start in demonstrating "holy grail" style intelligence. In fact, that would make a good enhancement to Turing's test. Computers are already at the point where they can fool some humans into thinking that there's a human on the other end of the wire. That's because it's not a good enough test. A better test would be one in which you try to teach the entity on the other end something new, in English - for example, the rules of an invented game. If the entity is capable of learning those rules, and thus playing the game, it's intelligent. Otherwise, it's a mere executor of programs designed by someone else.
While chess and Go make for interesting problems, assembling a bunch of intelligent-seeming preprogrammed behaviors doesn't really get us any closer to intelligent machines, in the sense in which we consider other humans intelligent.
It's even more easy to make a mistake when reading a speech instead of extemporaneously making one up.
Have you heard Bush speak extemporaneously? He's even worse than when he's reading, because he doesn't appear to have a useful or original idea in his head, and he hammers that home beyond all possibility of doubt when he opens his mouth.
Clarke does the technical SciFi type stuff, and Lee adds the human touch.
Eewwww. Gentry Lee is an awful author, who when not teamed with someone like Clarke, belongs in the romance novel section. I once read about a classification supposedly used in the publishing industry called S&F - nothing to do with SF, it stands for shopping and fuc****, which hardly needs much further description. Anyway, Gentry Lee could be a master of that genre, and IMO, it spoils any book he's involved with.
The scenario you describe is optimistic. Consider the Soviet's planned nuclear attack on China, in 1971. Had they gone through with that, the US would have attacked the Soviets, and the Soviets would have retaliated. Targets would not necessarily have been limited to China, Soviet Union, and US. The page linked above has some scenario descriptions. A nuclear winter resulting from such an event could produce conditions essentially similar to those described in "On the Beach", even if the technical details weren't perfect.
Yes, I read the article. I read part of "On the Beach" many years ago but I didn't like it much, and it's not like you couldn't see how it was going to end.
You're picking at some fairly minor details. I'm not saying that "On the Beach" had perfect science, compared to "Prey". I'm saying that the general scenario that "Beach" described was possible, based on technology known and available at the time, even if the details weren't perfect. A nuclear winter could affect the entire globe (the linked page describes some scenarios).
BTW, I was visiting Switzerland shortly after the Chernobyl meltdown. No milk was available at the time, because of possible contamination. I have no idea how realistic a concern that was. However, Zurich is quite a long way from Chernobyl, and Chernobyl was a small event, compared to a major nuclear war.
There's just no comparison to "Prey", which is talking about technology that doesn't even remotely exist yet, and probably will never exist in the form described.
Not sure what you're asking. The point is that when On the Beach was written, nuclear weapons existed and their capabilities and effects were known. The book simply described a worst case scenario in which they were used.
In the case of "Prey", it speculates about technology that isn't even close to existing, and may never exist. Some of it may even be physically impossible. So, comparing the two books in terms of their ability to influence our collective psyches about a particular kind of technology makes no sense - since the nanotech described in Prey is nothing like the nanotech we're going to see in the next 10-50 years.
On the Beach was set a mere six years after its publication date. If Prey was set in 2009, it would make no sense. Nanites taking over people's brains? Oh yeah, that's gonna happen soon. I can't see people getting very worried, when they hear that some new product uses nanotech, about whether or not it's going to eat their brains for breakfast. There's just no comparison to "On the Beach". Dyson is way off base.
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Well, for example, here's The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible", from the Vatican. I can dig up other similar things from other religions, if you're interested.
You mentioned the way it's been for millenia. There's a reasonable historic overview in Christianity in its relation to Judaism, which also talks about the Islamic point of view. Islam considers the Jewish and Christian prophets to be true prophets, and recognizes the high moral qualities of Christians. It's amazingly small-minded to simply close yourself off to a thousand-year history of tolerance and understanding between the deepest thinkers and framers of the faiths of the major religions, and simply say "everyone is wrong but me and my religion". You place yourself squarely amongst the ignorant majority by doing so.
He may be, but *you* are not. How do you know that God has judged entire religions to be wrong? I suppose you're going to tell me it's based on your selective reading of the Bible.
That's an incredibly presumptuous and arrogant thing for you to say.
I'm responding to what I see as your incredible presumption and arrogance to be able to put words in God's mouth. You speak of love, but you don't seem to want to share God with anyone else unless it's on your own terms. I know many Christians - you do not seem like one to me.
Let me cut to the chase and say that you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. The most important point is not that I think that your position is absolutely wrong - but that you have to consider the possibility that you might be wrong in some ways, and act accordingly, and thoughtfully. Acting in the certain belief that you, and your religion are the only ones who know what is right are what leads to problems.
Um... but how is it that you know that you're right about this? I hope you realize that in this respect, you're out of step with most major religions, including the larger branches of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism, all of which have reached conclusions, which are part of their respective doctrines, about their relationship to other churches. And it's nowhere near as close-minded as your "consider them all to be wrong".
The absolutism you describe is *morally* indefensible. One simple reason is, you might be wrong in what you think - as you said, "People can lie about what he says, or misunderstand" - and this might lead you to take wrong actions. In fact, it's exactly the sort of absolutism you're demonstrating that has led to wars and atrocities in the name of religion. If you act as an unthinking "soldier of God", only following orders - which may be from a faulty source, i.e. not directly and personally from God herself - then you're almost bound to be wrong.
For this reason, the major religions tend to take positions in their doctrines - e.g. the Catholic Catechism - in which the role of your own conscience is described as being crucial. It specifically tells you to not necessarily listen to authority - to listen also to your conscience. But it also talks about how your conscience is not just "whatever you think" - if anything, thinking "I know I'm right and everyone else is wrong" is a warning sign that you are being misled. It talks about these exact issues, and certainly doesn't espouse the kind of simplistic, "I know what is right" absolutism that you do.
Of course, you're probably not Catholic - but unless you belong to a fundamentalist religion, with rules taken unchanged from a couple of hundred years ago - when morals were different! - then your religion probably has similar exhortations, and you're simply demonstrating that you have not, in fact, studied your own religion in sufficient depth to be making the kind of pronouncements you're making.
Going up to [God] on judgement day and saying "I'm sorry, but you've got this whole morality business wrong," isn't going to do you any good
Going up to God and saying "But I thought I was supposed to do such and such" isn't going to do you any good either, if you're wrong.
Morality requires absolutes to have any value.
The very existence of the human race for the past 5,000 odd years that we have history for contradicts this. You have personally judged entire religions to be wrong - but how do you know that your God is not more tolerant and loving than you are?
If God exists, he provides absolutes wich can be trusted. People can lie about what he says, or misunderstand
So how then do you know what the absolutes are? How do you know you're not misunderstanding?
but that doesn't change the fact that the absolutes exist and determine the only valid and useful definition of what is moral and what isnt.
Where do you personally get these absolutes from? From your church? If so, that's an example of the "popularity" I'm talking about. Your church wouldn't exist if it wasn't popular.
They are the vales by which we will all one day be judged. I deserve to be judged and found wanting, but thankfully Jesus died on the cross and rose again, so I can be forgiven and have nothing to fear come that.
That's not a good enough excuse for not thinking deeply about your faith. I suggest you study your own religion in more depth, and with more humility.
Huh? Where on earth do you get this from? Sorry, but it's makes no sense. I've written more in this post.
Sounds like you need a lesson in moral relativism. Of course morals change. Morals in the Old Testament era were different than they are today. Ditto the New Testament. Morals aren't necessarily set by popularity, but they can be, and in fact have been to some extent in many western nations. Religious leaders may set morals. The morals of conservative religious groups, whether Islam, Judaism, or Christian, are very different from the morals in more mainstream religious groups. And in fact, since one's membership in those groups is, at least in part, by one's own choice, there's an element of popularity there too. If no-one wanted to be an Orthodox Jew, for example, there just wouldn't be any. Simple as that.
If you believe morals have some absolute basis, you have to say where that comes from. God? Whose conception of god? The Pope? Saddam Hussein? Jesse Jackson? Joseph Smith? L. Ron Hubbard? The Bible? Which book? Which passages? How do you know which passages to accept, and which to ignore?
Certainly, within each religion, there are well-defined answers to most of these questions, but they don't all agree with each other. What's considered perfectly acceptable by a Christian westerner is a moral crime against Allah in some Islamic states. For that matter, this happens within different branches of the same religion.
So what was that about morality by popularity again? Face it: you could almost say there is no other morality than popular morality. Even if there is a god, gods, or a big turtle holding the Earth up, you cannot know what to believe in, except by faith. But everyone's faith is different. And the morality of our societies is determined by the popular faiths.
Security? Aside from all the patches I've installed over the years, the script kiddies have forgotten how to hack into a box that old.
I figure I'll upgrade it when its hard disk or power supply dies.
If only the theory formerly known as string theory were able to be tested so easily!
Indeed. One reason to keep funding them, at least until hard limits to the problem are determined, is that the payoff is potentially enormous. Quantum codebreaking could revolutionize the CIA and NSA's job for a while, putting them back to the golden era in WWII when they had cracked German codes like Enigma, without the knowledge of the Germans.
Quantum computing will be almost the exact opposite of ordinary computing: today, the difference in computing power available to the average joe, compared to large corporations and governments, is not that great. Quantum computing will change this balance - it'll only be available to the big guys, at least for a good long time. It'll potentially be an enormously profitable tool, which could confer great power to those who control it.
It's like the information-age equivalent of the atomic bomb - once the possibilities were understood, it didn't make sense *not* to work on it, because the possibility of one's enemies/competitors having it when you didn't was horrible to contemplate.
Why don't you grow up and stop trying to whore karma just by flaming Windows with redundant lies?
Way to extrapolate your own limited experience to everyone in the world!
I've seen Windows 2000 crash from installing drivers. Less than some older versions did, certainly, but it happens. As for day to day operations - let me guess - you turn your computer off every night, don't you? Try leaving it on for a few weeks and see how it works for you. You haven't lived until your Win2K machine silently runs out of resources, refusing to open new windows or menus and simply responding to clicks with silence.
Windows 2000 is still a poor attempt to be a real operating system. It's only recently approached the level of stability needed for a server OS; and as a workstation OS, it passes muster only with people who don't know any better, or who are overly influenced by pretty pictures.
BTW, I've used and developed software for the Windows NT series of OSes (NT, 2000, XP) since the betas of NT back in '91, so I'm pretty familiar with them. If anything, stability has *reduced* since NT v3.1 - ever since they added Internet Explorer, and the UI geegaws taken from Win9x, things began going downhill.
You have a good point. I'd like to add to that, that you're doing 2600 a bit of a disservice by characterizing it or its contributors so glibly as "bad guys". There's plenty of questionable stuff in 2600, but the point of it all is to encourage curiosity about, and understanding of, actual systems in the world - things you won't necessarily ever learn about in school etc. Since it's targeted mainly towards a young audience (afaict), this naturally gets bound up in a certain amount of rebelliousness and so on. But a thinking adult can see past this.
There's a really fundamental point here, which is that if you're surrounded by black boxes that you don't understand, you become a helpless consumer, unable to understand or effectively deal with the world around you except in a second-class citizen sort of way. That's what many corporations would like to be the case, of course, and it's the direction that consumer culture naturally gravitates towards - but not everybody buys into that, and wanting to find out more about the world around you, and the technology on which so much depends, is not a crime.
Besides, it seems out of proportion to the threat. Why can't they go bother Microsoft, instead, who's just promised to open Windows source code up to the Chinese government - the same source code that they claimed, under oath in the anti-trust trial, would be a national security risk if were made public. So let's see - they can't trust ordinary American citizens with it, but it's OK for the Chinese government to see it. So the next Chinese-crafted worm will be able to trash Windows installations nationwide, while American citizens have no defense because they can't get the source code?
Write your congressperson if you think you should have at least the same rights to the critical source code that runs on your machine, as the Chinese government does.
In fact, it's really hard to measure the political impact of the Internet on the "real world", because so much of that sort of thing happens beneath anyone's radar. We only see the glaringly obvious examples, like when Jane's magazine pulls an article about cyberterrorism because of feedback from /. Things like that are only the tip of an iceberg. Opinions aren't always formed instantly or in a vacuum.
Garrett also demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of economics in her essay. Her picture of the global economy is skewed by having hung out at Davos, where the emphasis is on the economic fortunes of some of the world's richest people. For them, the picture may very well be bleak: e.g. Bill Gates lost something like 23% of his paper worth last year. In fact, the gloom in Davos in some respects relates directly to tech and the Internet: e.g. the concern with intellectual "property". A highly networked world raises a lot of difficulties for people who rely on chokepoints for siphoning off their piece of the economic pie. That's exactly why the DMCA etc. are such contentious issues: it represents the land grab of some traditional businesses doing their best to hang on to business as they knew it.
For someone with Garrett's education and achievements in terms of industry prizes etc., I would expect a bit more sophistication. When I first read her email, I got the impression she must be a very young reporter who somehow lucked into an opportunity. Turns out she's quite experienced, with Pulitzer and other prizes. It's ironic that she does her most interesting reporting unintentionally - interesting because it gives some insight into some of the kinds of things journalists often *don't* tell us, and the way in which their need to ingratiate themselves into the circles in which they want to move might affect their journalistic integrity.
Talking politics to complete strangers in a bar or over dinner to non-geeks, or teaching a kid how to calculate...that equates real world change.
Why do you think that talking to complete strangers in a bar is somehow more valid or impactful than online? I suspect if Garrett discovered that people in bars were chatting about her private email, she's lash out at them for being just as uninvolved. There are a lot of similarities. In both cases, you're talking about informal forums where nothing official is taking place, but where things happen whose consequences can't be measured directly.
BTW, to take your example of teaching a kid how to calculate: through online sources, I've discovered useful educational material for teaching kids computing, and have passed that on to a friend of mine who sits on a school board. It's the kind of information that was very difficult to disseminate, pre-Internet. The online world is a tool which some of the most effective people among us use. It's simplistic to dismiss it, and simply shows a lack of appreciation for the complexity of modern life, and a lack of understanding that what we're dealing with now is only the beginning.
D'oh!
She's a journalist, but she doesn't understand global economics, she doesn't understand the Internet, she doesn't understand social or grassroots or networked behavior, and she learned English from TV. Don't be mad at her, feel sorry for her. Or just ignore her.
The journalist made a glaring blooper that reveals the fact that she learned English by watching TV, and that she doesn't do much reading of the print medium for which she writes. That's worthy of a bit of ribbing. She's lucky she has editors who (hopefully) have a better education.
Try Scheme. It has all the dynamic flexibility of the best scripting languages, and the abstraction capabilities of the most high level academic languages, but can be compiled to very fast code. On benchmarks, some of the compiled Schemes are up there with languages like C.
If you're only concerned about ownership, then you missed DaimlerChrysler, which is half American, and makes Mercedes-Benz (along with Jeep, Dodge and Chrysler - quite a strange combination!)
Not really talking about the current discussion re chess, but the ability to learn would be a good start in demonstrating "holy grail" style intelligence. In fact, that would make a good enhancement to Turing's test. Computers are already at the point where they can fool some humans into thinking that there's a human on the other end of the wire. That's because it's not a good enough test. A better test would be one in which you try to teach the entity on the other end something new, in English - for example, the rules of an invented game. If the entity is capable of learning those rules, and thus playing the game, it's intelligent. Otherwise, it's a mere executor of programs designed by someone else.
While chess and Go make for interesting problems, assembling a bunch of intelligent-seeming preprogrammed behaviors doesn't really get us any closer to intelligent machines, in the sense in which we consider other humans intelligent.
Have you heard Bush speak extemporaneously? He's even worse than when he's reading, because he doesn't appear to have a useful or original idea in his head, and he hammers that home beyond all possibility of doubt when he opens his mouth.
Eewwww. Gentry Lee is an awful author, who when not teamed with someone like Clarke, belongs in the romance novel section. I once read about a classification supposedly used in the publishing industry called S&F - nothing to do with SF, it stands for shopping and fuc****, which hardly needs much further description. Anyway, Gentry Lee could be a master of that genre, and IMO, it spoils any book he's involved with.
I loved the first Rama book though.
The scenario you describe is optimistic. Consider the Soviet's planned nuclear attack on China, in 1971. Had they gone through with that, the US would have attacked the Soviets, and the Soviets would have retaliated. Targets would not necessarily have been limited to China, Soviet Union, and US. The page linked above has some scenario descriptions. A nuclear winter resulting from such an event could produce conditions essentially similar to those described in "On the Beach", even if the technical details weren't perfect.
You're picking at some fairly minor details. I'm not saying that "On the Beach" had perfect science, compared to "Prey". I'm saying that the general scenario that "Beach" described was possible, based on technology known and available at the time, even if the details weren't perfect. A nuclear winter could affect the entire globe (the linked page describes some scenarios).
BTW, I was visiting Switzerland shortly after the Chernobyl meltdown. No milk was available at the time, because of possible contamination. I have no idea how realistic a concern that was. However, Zurich is quite a long way from Chernobyl, and Chernobyl was a small event, compared to a major nuclear war.
There's just no comparison to "Prey", which is talking about technology that doesn't even remotely exist yet, and probably will never exist in the form described.
In the case of "Prey", it speculates about technology that isn't even close to existing, and may never exist. Some of it may even be physically impossible. So, comparing the two books in terms of their ability to influence our collective psyches about a particular kind of technology makes no sense - since the nanotech described in Prey is nothing like the nanotech we're going to see in the next 10-50 years.
On the Beach was set a mere six years after its publication date. If Prey was set in 2009, it would make no sense. Nanites taking over people's brains? Oh yeah, that's gonna happen soon. I can't see people getting very worried, when they hear that some new product uses nanotech, about whether or not it's going to eat their brains for breakfast. There's just no comparison to "On the Beach". Dyson is way off base.