The reason why biological systems are good at cleaning up pollution is the same as the reason that nanotech poses a potential threat to mankind in the future. Essentially, it's a question of how much information you can pump into a piece of matter. It's very hard to imagine taking a chunk of matter of any description and sticking into polluted soil with the result that the piece of matter in question develops a source of energy for itself and starts sorting through the stuff in the soil molecule by molecule. But if the piece of matter in question happens to be a plant, it does exactly what I just described. A stick from a poplar tree develops its own root system and leaves and starts sorting through the molecules it finds in the soil. That makes it very useful to anyone trying to clean up anything. Cleaning polluted soil is an information problem - you somehow have to flag every molecule in your sample as polluted or unpolluted and the collect the polluted ones. The hard part isn't moving the molecules, it's moving only the right molecules. Organisms can do this because every molecule they contain is custom built atom by atom to carry out a specific task. Organisms contain a huge amount of information about how each molecule is built and how many of which kind of each molecule each cell contains. Nanotechnology is the idea of using "assemblers" to manufacture useful things atom by atom. Living things having been doing this for some time. (Surprisingly neither Drexler nor Bill Joy seem to know about the information side or the biological side of the story.) Nanotechnology has so much positive and negative potential because it's so much like life. I discuss all this at some length on my website. Werner Loewenstein wrote a great book called "The Touchstone of Life" in which he shows that molecular biology is all about information.
I think nanotechnology is about how you manufacture things, not about how big the result is. Nanotechnology means building things atom by atom using itsy bitsy robots that handle each atom individually. I don't think IBM is doing that at all.
Actually I wasn't being obtuse, I was being confused. I misunderstood the original remark! It is already illegal to deny the holocaust, as you say, and censorship tools like this one would be used to enforce the law. Most of the neo Nazi stuff you hear in Germany nowadays comes from abroad, especially America, and the internet makes things easier for all demagogues. However, none of this is ever going to happen in any significant way. As I mention somewhere else, the German government's hands are pretty much tied, what's the point of blocking a URL anyway?
Believe me, there is nothing that needs to be done. The German government's hands are tied. It's caught between the German states on the one hand, which according to the constitution regulate the media (but not the telecoms) and the European Union on the other, which is now the de facto trade regulator. It's just talk. The Germans are funny - they used to go on and on about how their national telecoms monopoly was a Good Thing, and everyone seemed to believe it until the EU forced the government to allow competition. Within months, Germany was one of the most competitive telecoms markets in the world.
You've mistranslated the German. It should read "we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people", not "those creators of threatening powers" I really think you're being knee-jerk about the Holocaust. I don't see the connection at all. It's just some pompous corporate posturing by some guys who would rather protect the market share they inherited than risk innovation.
This is sort of repetitive, but the actually there's no real reason to assume that Microsoft's low pricing indicates a loss leader. It could just be the result of the competitive advantage Microsoft reaps from having such a large scale operation. Basically, any product or service has two kinds of costs - fixed and marginal. Fixed costs are fixed (geddit?) but marginal costs are incurred for every additional delivery. So the fixed costs per unit fall with each additional delivery.
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The reason why biological systems are good at cleaning up pollution is the same as the reason that nanotech poses a potential threat to mankind in the future.
Essentially, it's a question of how much information you can pump into a piece of matter. It's very hard to imagine taking a chunk of matter of any description and sticking into polluted soil with the result that the piece of matter in question develops a source of energy for itself and starts sorting through the stuff in the soil molecule by molecule.
But if the piece of matter in question happens to be a plant, it does exactly what I just described. A stick from a poplar tree develops its own root system and leaves and starts sorting through the molecules it finds in the soil. That makes it very useful to anyone trying to clean up anything. Cleaning polluted soil is an information problem - you somehow have to flag every molecule in your sample as polluted or unpolluted and the collect the polluted ones. The hard part isn't moving the molecules, it's moving only the right molecules.
Organisms can do this because every molecule they contain is custom built atom by atom to carry out a specific task. Organisms contain a huge amount of information about how each molecule is built and how many of which kind of each molecule each cell contains.
Nanotechnology is the idea of using "assemblers" to manufacture useful things atom by atom. Living things having been doing this for some time. (Surprisingly neither Drexler nor Bill Joy seem to know about the information side or the biological side of the story.) Nanotechnology has so much positive and negative potential because it's so much like life.
I discuss all this at some length on my website. Werner Loewenstein wrote a great book called "The Touchstone of Life" in which he shows that molecular biology is all about information.
I think nanotechnology is about how you manufacture things, not about how big the result is. Nanotechnology means building things atom by atom using itsy bitsy robots that handle each atom individually. I don't think IBM is doing that at all.
Actually I wasn't being obtuse, I was being confused. I misunderstood the original remark! It is already illegal to deny the holocaust, as you say, and censorship tools like this one would be used to enforce the law. Most of the neo Nazi stuff you hear in Germany nowadays comes from abroad, especially America, and the internet makes things easier for all demagogues.
However, none of this is ever going to happen in any significant way. As I mention somewhere else, the German government's hands are pretty much tied, what's the point of blocking a URL anyway?
Believe me, there is nothing that needs to be done. The German government's hands are tied. It's caught between the German states on the one hand, which according to the constitution regulate the media (but not the telecoms) and the European Union on the other, which is now the de facto trade regulator. It's just talk.
The Germans are funny - they used to go on and on about how their national telecoms monopoly was a Good Thing, and everyone seemed to believe it until the EU forced the government to allow competition. Within months, Germany was one of the most competitive telecoms markets in the world.
You've mistranslated the German.
It should read "we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people", not "those creators of threatening powers"
I really think you're being knee-jerk about the Holocaust. I don't see the connection at all. It's just some pompous corporate posturing by some guys who would rather protect the market share they inherited than risk innovation.
This is sort of repetitive, but the actually there's no real reason to assume that Microsoft's low pricing indicates a loss leader. It could just be the result of the competitive advantage Microsoft reaps from having such a large scale operation. Basically, any product or service has two kinds of costs - fixed and marginal. Fixed costs are fixed (geddit?) but marginal costs are incurred for every additional delivery. So the fixed costs per unit fall with each additional delivery.