Finally found some content at Cygnus' EL/IX page, and it appears that this will be POSIX based.
It's going to include most of the base Unix API, the real-time extensions, POSIX threads, the ISO C library, and BSD sockets (minus STREAMS). I assume that the BSD sockets support means that eCos will have a TCP/IP stack, which another poster mentioned as a problem with eCos.
And, one of the design criteria is to make EL/IX a subset of the API that is already available on Linux, so this will not involve any Linux enhancements.
Go Cygnus!:^)
Re:Galileo -- the "martyr" who wasn't
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Galileo's Daughter
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I was not writing to justify the house arrest of Galileo. I think that's something even the Roman Catholic Church would now agree was done wrongly.
The point is, the story of Galileo as persecuted by the Church for the "heresy" of heliocentrism should be thrown into the same category as that of Christopher Columbus "discovering" that the world was round not flat, or of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree as a kid. They are all fiction.
Galileo was never found guilty of heresy; and in fact heliocentrism was never of itself declared heretical
Every educated navagator of Columbus's day knew that the world was round -- the disagreement was over the circumference of the world (and therefore length of the westward voyage to the Indies). Columbus had the faulty figures, and would have died in the middle of the ocean if the Carribean hadn't been where he thought Japan was.
And, the story of George and the cherry tree has a known author who isn't our first President.
So, what we have here is Katz repeating a "spun" version of the story, in order to play upon the supposed conflict of science and faith.
As for Sagan, perhaps I'm reading too much into the end of Contact (the book, not the movie). Still, we do have the phenomenon of scientists making moral pronouncements about The Meaning Of It All, borrowing from their authority in the sciences to appear as "experts" on questions that are really philosophical or religious. And Galileo was a prime and early example of this.
But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about. -- Hilaire Belloc
While Katz seems to take a break from his techno-boosterism and techno-determinism by giving some space to "neo-Luddite" writers (basically, anyone who expresses reservations about the "Limitless March of Technology" gets labeled a "neo-Luddite" these days), he lets the katz out of the bag with this statement:
Whose responsibility is all this? Nobody's, of course. Technology has a mind, life and direction all of its own. It's inherently uncontrollable, even if anybody was up to trying.
With this sweeping statement, all thought of human responsibilty is banished. Forget future AIs and a-life; a-life is here today, and it's name is Technology. Forget futuristic scenarious about human freedom being supplanted by machines; the future is now, and we have lost our freedom to Just Say No. Don't bother unplugging; it's too difficult to try, and you won't make a difference anyway.
"Bah, humbug!" I say.
People are responsible for technology, it doesn't "just happen." People create it, people market it, people build infrastructure for it, and people adopt it. At each of these points, there is responsibility. And there is choice involved. Some of the choices may be difficult. Nobody ever said being a free and responsible human person was going to be easy.
If you would like examples, you need look no further than the Amish, who are the living experts of subordinating technology to a vision of what human society ought to look like.
But who wants to live like the Amish? Not many people. This, however, is a choice.
Another example, nearer and dearer to the hearts of/. readers, is Richard Stallman. Rather than submit to the "inevitable" shift in the computing world to proprietary software, he chose and chooses instead to do without proprietary software, and even to do without employment that would prevent him from creating free software.
But who wants to live like Richard Stallman?:^) Not many people, apparantly.
As a final example, consider Microsoft. They are under no illusion that technology simply happens, and expend every effort to make sure it happens in a way that favors the Reign of Bill. The slogan "Where do you want to go today?" (tm) is not a bad question, except that it's offered as a multiple-choice:
Windows 98
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000
Notice that there is no "none of the above." Slashdot readers will be quick to recognize that such a "choice" is only "choice" in Newspeak; but are slower to recognize this when the question is larger than that of operating systems and office suites.
"Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks." -- G. K. Chesterton
I'm sure similar complaints were made about Automobiles in their embryonic stages. The rate of fatal accidents was atrocious for years, until laws and safety features were hammered out. Now they play a vital role in most of our lives, and have for decades.
The rate of fatal accidents for automobiles is still atrocious. In the USA, more Americans are killed by cars every year than died in the Vietnam War. If an enemy did this to us, we would declare war. If relatively as many people died due to airplanes, no one would fly again. Yet somehow we accept this "collateral damage" from the automobile with little grumbling.
The fact that automobiles "play a vital role in most of our lives" simply means that we've structured our society around them, and that we don't know how to live without them anymore. But just because this is, does not mean it is good.
The automobile is the enabler of urban sprawl, the bringer of smog and greenhouse CO2, and the power base of old-time dictators like the Sultan of Kuwait and modern dictators like Saddam Hussein.
But hey, since we've forgotten how to live without them, they must be OK.
And therefore, it must not be a problem to forget how to live without computers, as well?
"Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks." -- G. K. Chesterton
Both the business wire article and the e/lix page seem to be content-free about what e/lix actually is. Given that the eCos homepage says that they are thinking about implimenting the POSIX APIs, is e/lix simply a POSIX API for eCos?
If so, this is very cool, but not world-shattering. It would bring eCos into closer parity with the major proprietary RTOS's, and should make it easier to have more free (libre) software available for small embedded systems.
In any case, it's nice to see eCos and Cygnus getting good press. I hope they do well with eCos; IMNSHO the embedded-systems market is ripe for a good free OS.
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it needs to be. -- Linus Torvalds
I really wish those who keep flogging the Galileo myth of "brave Scientist persecuted by hidebound Chruch for selfless Pursuit of Knowledge" would apply some of that scientific viewpoint to actually reviewing what happened, and perhaps even (gasp!) revising their opining (in true Scientific fashion) based upon the facts of the case, rather than the received myth.
Otherwise, it certainly looks to me as if the Rational Enlightenment Scientific Geeks are the ones who are desperately clinging to their myths, while the Christians are the ones who are willing to look at the world and history as it actually is.
If there is a modern figure who shows us what Galileo would be if he were alive today, it is not IPO-enriched Internet geeks, but rather Carl Sagan. That is, the scientist who uses his scientific expertise to make himself out to be an expert authority on things religious. The proof that Galileo got himself in trouble with the Chruch over theology and not science is simply the number of Catholics ought to be the number of Catholics (including Kepler, Copernicus himself, and a whole bunch of Jesuit astronomers) who favored heliocentism (in even more accurate models than Galileo held) with no trouble at all.
Of course, stabbing a close personal friend in the back by making him out to be a fool in public was not a particularly diplomatic move, especially when that close personal friend happens to have just been elected Pope.
The Roman Catholic Church has admitted that they screwed up in handling Galileo (though not as badly as the mythmakers would have it). I am still waiting for the mythmakers to admit that they have treated the Catholic Church unfairly, or that Galileo might have been part of the problem himself. But I'm not holding my breath -- after all, what's historical accuracy and fairness, compared to a chance to flog religion in general and Christianity/Catholicism in particular?
I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome -- G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
The "Mark of the Beast 666" does not become relevant in Christianity until after the Rapture. After all of the people who are Christians are taken away by Jesus, then the earth is plunged into times of darkness, and then the Anti-Christ and 666 become an issue. The Bible tells us that we should not actively hunt out the Anti-Christ, but beware the signs. So, until you see all of the Christians you know disappear, no more 666 talk.
Well, that's one theory.
More precisely, this is the Pre-Tribulation Rapture model, which is a particular millenialist interpretation of Revelation. While this model has been heavily popularized in the last few decades (esp. by Hal Lindsey, A Thief in the Night, and more recently LaHaye and Jenkin's "Left Behind" series ), it's not even the only millenialist interpretation, much less the only Christian understanding, of Revelation.
For those who aren't theology nerds like me, eschatological (== "concerning the end of things") theories can be divided into at least two groups, "millenial" and "amillenial", depending on how they view the thousand-year reign of Christ described in Revelation 20. Millenialists insist that the 1000 years is to be understood literally, and generally insist on (a) as literal as possible an understanding of Revelation and other end-time prophecies of Scripture, and (b) that Revelation and related passages are only applicable to this end period of history. Within the millenialist camp, you can find Pre-Trib, Post-Trip, and even Mid-Trib Rapture theories.
Amillenialists are then distinguished by not being millenialists. I don't know the amillenial theories as well, but in general it is understood that much of Revelation is (a) symbolic (b) applicable to more than one generation in history (although most applicable to the final generation).
Historically, the millenialist viewpoint is relatively recent, originating in various fundamentalist/evangelical Protestant groups (and in the English world, at that), within the last 150 years. Most of Christianity, for most of Christian history, has been amillenialist.
And yes, I tend to be an amillenialist these days myself. For an excellent novel portraying a non-Rapture-first end times, see Father Elijah: An Apocalyspe. Like all good apocalypses, it is at least as much about today as about the future.
What does this have to do with cybernetics?
Good question. The answer is that some Christians have speculated that the "mark" mentioned in Revelation 13:11-18 could, given current technology and society, be literally implemented as, for example, a tattooed barcode or implanted chip. Set up the economy so that it's illegal, or at least practically possible, "so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark" (Rev. 13:17). As opposed to earlier days, which relied on cruder methods of citizen control and loyalty assurance such as requiring a pinch of incense be burned to the Emperor under pain of death (what Christians were experiencing when Revelation was written).
Personally, while Warwick seems like Yet Another Scientist In Disinterested Pursuit of KnowledgeTM, I don't think that where he's going with cybernetics is necessarily a good direction. Implanted RF locators? I can flip the lights on myself, thank you very much. This would give both State and Corporation intelligence powers that Nero could only dream of. And brain/computer direct links, thought-to-thought communication? Great, so now detecting thoughtcrime would become technologically feasible. Big Brother will be so happy with this developement.
But this should be opposed because it's bad and wrong, not because it might fulfill the prophecy about the "mark." It will be tough to tell when exactly the Last Days will be -- Jesus himself didn't know, and told his disciples not to believe everyone who yelled "it's here! it's now!". But we can figure out if something is a good or a bad thing in the meantime.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress. -- G. K. Chesterton
As he sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?" And Jesus answered them, "Take heed that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, `I am the Christ,' and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.
Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because wickedness is multiplied, most men's love will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come. -- Matthew 24:3-14 (RSV)
notice that Pope John Paul has recently made a statement saying that evolution is "More than a theory", and is now accepted as fact by the Catholic Church.
Well, you could always look at Fides et Ratio, "Faith and Reason" for John Paul's opinion about science, evolution, and the Faith. But I think "accepted as fact" is a slight mischaracterization.
think I need to get me one of those Jesuit IP lawyers....
I think your dislike for Katz has clouded your thinking. I sympathize.
I don't actually dislike Katz; I simply disagree intensely with a number of his viewpoints. For all I know, if we had a chance to sit down, crack a few beers together, and argue philosophy into the wee hours, I'd end up with a genuine affection for the man. But I'd still disagree vehemently with what he is writing here.
Of course pain is not irrelevant. When you say that pain is irrelevent but personhood is relevant, you fail to see that pain includes personhood.
You're right, I don't see that at all.
While persons experience pain, pain is not an intrinsic part of personality. Before the Fall (I write as a Christian, of course) humanity was human, and had the gift of personality, before there was pain in the world. And, we look forward to a day when this will be true again. So, while it may appear that pain and personality are linked, this is simply an accident of our local conditions in time and space.
Now, I'm not trying to promote some angists philosophy, or, for that matter, arguing that ability to sense equals personhood. What I am saying is that when Katz says "Can Androids Feel Pain" he really means "Are Androids Going To Be Persons Just Like Me And You Really Soon Now." (Note the difference of sense and feel.)
Yes, that is exactly what I understood Katz to mean. And my point is, to ask the question of pain when one really means to ask the question of personality is to misunderstand personality. The question itself is bogus -- it's simply a bad question, a philosphical equivalent of "have you stopped beating your wife?" One can't simply answer the question without dealing with the assumption behind the question first.
Person isn't very good word for the use you are putting it into. Person is rather synonymous with human and that may well lead to assumptions that aren't correct.
No, I'm not using "person" as synonymous with "human," but to mean "a being with the quality of personality." Christians understand that there are non-human persons. God is three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit (the mystery of the Trinity), only one of whom is also human (the mystery of the Incarnation). Angels are persons too, although they are not human, but of different races from us.
In Star Trek, for example, Humans, Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans, Ferrengi, etc. are all clearly persons. Commander Data is clearly portrayed as a person as well. I don't know what word is used in Trek to distinguish between Klingons and cats ("sentient"?), but whatever that word is, is what I am talking about.
As to choice and meaning provived by modern technology. Clarke speaks about future not today.
In the past and present, we have heard these promises before. Nuclear power would soon become "too cheap to meter", the Industrial Revolution, the Nuclear Revolution, the Green Revolution, all promised and failed to deliver humanity from need and want. All have failed on that promise, and have instead helped make certain men rich beyond the dreams of Midas while "saving" so much labor that we now have an unemployment problem. Most folks who haven't hit the jackpot on these various "revolutions" have been transformed into oppressed Morlocks or effete Eloi. Meanwhile, the promised "freedom from necessity" is further away than ever. This is not a technological problem -- we could implement a society with no poverty today if we had the will and the virtue to do so. We have not done so, we are not going to do so, because greed ("Greed is good! It fuels The Economy!") is the rule.
And now, we have the hype of the Computer Revolution (under way already), the AI Revolution, and the Nanotech Revolution, bearing the same promises. I shall remain skeptical. So far, I see that we have some new robber-barons who have become richer than the old robber-barons, through control of the new resources. I don't see that I or my neighbors who require the necessity of a steady paycheck to put food on the table are closer to this mythical state of "freedom" than our ancestors 150 years ago, who could at least plant a garden and spin wool, and worried about the weather rather than the stock market.
Sure numerous men and women have contemplated the meaning before but they have more or less been part of that other 1% and have chosen to think about meaning.
I disagree. There are a lot of philosophers on the farm and the factory floor today. Certainly at least as many as among the cubicle-dwelling Eloi. I don't know what Clarke thinks we're going to be "freed" from, because history and observation show us that a life of work is not incompatible with the highest contemplation, and in fact may be a benefit to it.
Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. -- G. K. Chesterton
Of course, one can never forget the Eric Conspiracy.
There is no Eric Conspiracy. You must be (fnord) imagining thing. Here, let this nice young men in their clean white coats stand with you until the next Orbital Mind Control Laser comes over the horizon... er, I mean, isn't it a lovely sunset this evening?
For one thing I have my doubts that even the most foolish inventor would construct a computer or AI that would lead to the destruction of the human race. While Asimov's 3 laws are deceptively complex (and probably prohibitively so), a person would be a fool to create a life form that destroys them.
Ah, but according to Edward Teller, it's not a scientist's business to inject morality or even common sense into research. One ought to simply do the work for the Corporation or the State, and let other take care of whether to drop the bomb/boot the AI/etc.
Of course, what the "common man" gets told is that such things are far too complex for anyone but experts to understand, so don't worry about it. You'll read the press release when we feel like it. Besides, technology is inevitable, and if we don't build it, somebody else will.
Who is making these decisions anyway?
Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London town Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
Hoo boy, off into the techno-spiritualism and "porn makes kids better" garbage again...
A complete, well-structuted and footnoted criticism of everything wrong with this essay would take far more time than I dare give it this morning, but a few thoughts:
Pain is irrelevant:
That's right, the ability of an AI or a-life program to "feel" pain is irrelevant to any moral or ethical issues. It is interesting, but it is not the ethical quandry that Katz makes it out to be. Think about it for a moment -- we already share the planet with entities which are demonstrably intelligent and capable of experiencing pain. We call them "animals". They've been around for a long time, perhaps you've encountered one recently?
Now, if an AI could achieve personhood, that would be a different can of worms. But what, exactly, is personhood? That, at either an explicit or implicit level, is a crucial question in today's "culture wars." The traditional Christian answer which shaped Western culture for many centuries is that personhood is a spiritual attribute, and humans are persons because we are created in the imago dei, the Image of God, Who is Himself personal.
Therefore, (to steal a phrase from A Canticle for Leibowitz), "all that is born of woman" are persons.
The current, post-Christian viewpoint seems to be to reject any spiritual basis for personhood, and to then try to base recognition of personhood from some observed attribute, perhaps cleverness (if it's intelligent enough, it must be a person) or emotional response (if it feels pain and can articulate enough angst, it must be a person). But, the distinction between person and non-person is muddled, because (it is argued) there is no way to draw distinctions other than quantitative. So, a Darwinist would claim that humans are simply animals with opposable thumbs. Minsky, etc., claim that humans are simply carbon-based computers with a big specialized processor and complicated software.
From the Christian perspective, the issue with AIs is simple enough -- we have to determine whether an AI could ever be a person, and proceed accordingly. From that, one can proceed figuring out the ethical issues.
From the post-Christian, modern/post-Modern materialist viewpoint, there's no good way to make any distinction other than some quantitative ones, so you drop into a quagmire of muddle, providing wonderful employment opportunities for professors of ethics and for cyber-pundits.
Modern technology does not provide "choice" or "meaning":
Katz quotes Clarke:
"Perhaps 99 per cent of all the men who have ever lived have known only need; they have been driven by necessity and have not been allowed the luxury of choice," Clarke philosophizes. " In the future, this will no longer be true. It maybe the greatest virtue of the UltraIntelligent (UI) machine that it will force us to think about the purpose and meaning of human existence. It will compel us to make some far-reaching and perhaps painful decisions, just as thermonuclear weapons have made us face the realities of war and aggression, after five thousand years of pious jabber."
For argument's sake, I'll take Clarke's 99% statistic as a given. It's not clear to me that a European peasant of the Middle Ages, who had a secure landholding, the ability to live off of it, and little regulation other than some taxes, had less "choice" than today's Dilbert-ized cubicle dwellers, who don't own their own homes but merely lease them from the bank, and who are at the mercy of the next "rightsizing."
It is simply ludicrous that Clarke can believe that "the purpose of meaning of human existance" has not been thought about to this point. He seems to want to have it both ways, because what is this "pious jabber" that he so casually dismisses if not the very thing he claims has never yet existed?
As for his example of thermonuclear weapons, give me a break. If anything, thermonuclear weapons have made us less able to face "the realities of war and agression" than generations past, by making war an unimaginable catastrophe. And I truly think that those for whom war meant close combat had a better handle on war and agression than we for whom war means smart bombs and air strikes.
But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced. -- G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton wrote this as a warning. It is perhaps the most frightening thing about Clarke and Katz that they seem to think this is a desirable state.
In an otherwise decent essay, Jon Katz manages to get this point nearly backwards:
American-style democracy dates to an era when most voters never got to lay eyes on their elected officials, let alone participate in civic information-gathering and decision-making. Washington was constructed to do the talking and voting on behalf of constituents unable to join. Technology, especially computer technology, has completely transformed that reality...
The small kernel of truth in this statement is that the U. S. Constitution deliberately sets up a republic rather than a direct democracy. This is for reasons both practical (the country has always been too big to run via direct vote) and ideological (the founders were concerned with the problem of mob rule, or "tyranny of the majority").
But otherwise, this is sheer hogwash.
At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, town-hall democracy was well-established in New England, giving citizens more experience in "civic information-gathering and decision-making" than most citizens get today.
Given the smallness of most communities in those days, the idea that voters "never got to lay eyes on their elected officials" is nonsense. Perhaps for the President, or their state's Senators. But, the Constitution originally established that there would be one Representative per 30,000 citizens. Now tell me, do you really think that a polititican, who needs to run for office every two years, can stay out of sight for the majority of voters in that small of a district? This doesn't even count the variety of State and local offices, which in the days before telecommunications, interstate highway systems, and immense growth in Federal bureaucracy and power, had much more effect than they do today.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates, it has been estimated that more than half of the voters of Illinois attended at least one debate. These debates were over six hours long. When was the last time that more than half the voters of a state heard their senatorial candidates in person engaging in substantive debate for more than a few minutes of media sound-bites?
Technology, for the most part, has not helped. Oh, sure, it's tough to avoid seeing candidates mugs on TV during the election season. Great, so know I know what they look like at their most photogenic and hair-styled. What is their political philosophy? How is Tweedledum different from Tweedledee this year? TV campaigning takes us further away from those answers, not closer.
And the internet? I have to admit that the ability to check pending bills, voting records, etc. without having to be physically present at the site of the legislature can be nice. But that is subject to how timely that legislature's web site is. And, if the "real" politicing is done the old-fashioned way, via face time, dollars, and grass-roots vote-gathering, then the "wired"-ness of legislative or executive bodies is not particularly transforming. At best, it's a nice bonus. At worst, it provides the illusion of public access and accountability without the reality.
It is vain to rule if your subjects can and do disobey you. It is vain to vote if your delegates can and do disobey you. -- G. K. Chesterton, "The Great Shipwreck as Analogy"
I was thinking while reading Jon's article about how our population as a nation has grown since 1800, but has the population of our congressional representatives grown? I know the senate has always been 2 per state, but what about house representatives? What I'm getting at, is that the congress has become much less representative simply because of the numbers involved, and the power of each individual congress person has grown way beyond what was originally set up.
Good point. The original way was that every state got one Representative per 30,000 (including the infamous "three fifths" rule, whereby slaves counted as 0.6 person for the purposes of calculating seats in Congress). Minimum 1 per state, of course.
This was superceded by Amendment XIV, Article 2, which states that "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers". That number is currently set at 435, although since it's not hard-coded into the Constitution, in theory Congress could pass a law raising the number of Representatives to, say, 650. As this would dilute the power of each current Representative, I'm not holding my breath.
Note that Senators were originally seen as representatives of the individual States, not as "popular" representatives. A common practice was for the Governor to appoint each Senator. Popular election of Senators was not mandated until Amendment XVII was ratified in 1913.
Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. -- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
Note: I am a hardcore R.A.H.. fan from way back. My senior (high school) term paper was a comprehensive overview of the works of Heinlein.:^) Just because the man was a giant and a pioneer in SF doesn't mean that he couldn't write crap at times, though. My NSHO is that he got very self-indulgent in his last years.
'Number of the Beast' comes to mind.
Yah. The first 2/3 was fun, and I really liked the characters. [Spoiler alert] When I picked it up, I had the misfortune to flip it open, and saw the name "Jubal" mentioned, which raised my hopes too much for the book. Jubal Harshaw was one of my favorite characters from Stranger in a Strange Land. But by the time we got to him, the "all-universes-converge--all-stories-are-true--let -me-pull-in-characters-from-my-old-books " had lost its appeal.
So does the one where the dirty old man gets his brain stuck in the body of his gorgeous (dead) secretary, and proceeds to get all emotional and weepy. Can't remember the title of that one.
R.A.H. can claim somewhat of a medical excuse for some of his work -- for several years, he had partially blocked carotid arteries, which put him in a state of continual oxygen deprivation of the brain. I've heard a story that, after he got the operation to have his arteries cleaned out, he looked at some of his recent books and said "I wrote what?! But he can't claim that excuse for To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
Not only was the ABC built first, but Mauchly got a grand tour of the lab and of ABC years before building ENIAC. In fact, after Mauchly and Eckert had held the patent for a while on the digital computer, it was John Atanasoff's testimony that pretty much helped bust the patent due to prior art. (In fact, Atanasoff and Iowa State had begun putting together a patent application themselves, but WWII intervened, and the application was still sitting in a file cabinet at the university.)
I have forgotten the technical details, but as I recall, ENIAC did have some important technical improvements over the ABC. But the ABC does count as a pre-ENIAC electronic digital computer.
"Cleverness kills wisdom" -- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
In theory, we ought to have privacy rights in the U.S.A. The federal constitution is one of enumerated powers; and the right to pry into and compile the details of everyone's life isn't one of those powers. And the U. S. Supreme Court has held that privacy is a right of citizens (see here for a quick summary).
In practice, we have been suckers for any come-on which promises security, to be "tough on crime" or to protect us from those lurking terrorists. ("Why do you care if you have nothing to hide" is a common attitude.) So there's very little (practically, none) legislation to actually apply that right of privacy to government or private data collecting. The only place that the right to privacy has been actually applied vigorously is as it relates to sex, or to the ability to kill unborn children (the in/famous Roe vs. Wade case where the Court declared the ability to abort a child a fundamental American "privacy" right).
Somebody moderate this rant up! I've been working with pSOS, VxWorks, etc. for some years now, and I can agree with what you say wholeheartedly.
One small item:
But if my target is some weird iron featuring the latest funky embedded microprossesor from motorola, there is zero chance of linux being ported to my target by somebody else, least of all motorola themselves.
This seems to be the whole point of MontaVista -- they take that "weird iron" and get Linux running on it. So far, they seem to have only tackled Pentium CompactPCI systems, but I expect that given time and incentive ($$$) they will branch out. Certainly Force isn't an Intel-only shop.
And if Mot were smart, they'd help push Linux onto their funky embedded chips, especially the 68360 and the PowerPC 860 series. But I've never been able to figure out Mot's OS "strategy"... they seem to just want to make cool hardware and not to have to worry about what's running on top of it.
The AP news report cited claims that ISI and Mitsubishi "will develop a new operating system for hand-held computers". However, the press release from ISI claims that WebPDA is based on ISI's existing pSOS+ RTOS.
A basic breakdown of what WebPDA actually is:
pSOS+ as the operating system
pJava from Sun as the JVM
Mitsubishi's VRPC hardware design
Espial's Java-based desktop and applications
So, rather than a "new" OS, these companies have bundled together an existing RTOS, an existing JVM, an existing PDA hardware platform, and an existing Java framework, and made a big marketing announcement out of it. Big whoop. Every major RTOS vendor competing with ISI either already has a JVM on their platform or is working desperately to get one, and will have one Real Soon Now(tm).
It is nice, though, to see the traditional RTOS vendors not quietly ceding the PDA space to the 800-pound gorilla of Microsoft and Windows CE.
Was Thomas Alva Edison the first 20th-century entrepreneur, a man who contributed greatly to the shape and form of modern society, and was therefore the spiritual godfather of Bill Gates? Or was he another 19th-century corporate baron, a public figure whose greatest talent was self-promotion, and was therefore the spiritual godfather of Bill Gates? -- Brian Santo, EE Times, 7/14/97
It's funny how those little "technical details" can make the difference to a story...
suspect that in a world which allows idiots to sue McDonald's because the coffee they ordered was actually hot will eventualy devolve into a world in which Joe Average can sue Provider-X for losing his index.html and not having a backup on the server.
I used to think that suing McD's for hot coffee was stupid too, until I learned some more details about that case. IIRC, the temperature of the coffeee was 170degF, about 50degF higher than food service "industry standard." This is hot enough to cause third degree burns. The lady who sued McD's originally approached McD's to see if they would cover her hospital costs for those third-degree burns that the spilled coffee caused her. When they told her "get lost, that's not our problem," she then got a lawyer...
It was uncovered, as part of the fact-finding for the case, that McD's in general, and that particular restaurant, had received numerous, documented complaints about the temperature of the coffee being high enough to cause burns. Yet McD's had chosen to ignore the problem. It was this pattern of negligent behavior that lead the jury to award punitive damages as well.
McDonald's never admitted fault or responsibility, but for some mysterious reason, they soon after changed the settings on their coffee heaters down closer to 125degF, not hot enough to burn.
I'm not sure it's possible for an ISP to be this recklessly negligent concerning human health -- it's awfully tough to hurt anyone with bits and bandwidth. While there are stupid lawsuits and greedy lawyers out there, there are also stupid, greedy, negligent companies out there who won't do the right thing unless a judge makes them do it.
"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The problem with represenative democracy in our country is that it is lacking one essential element - informed voters. Intelligent votes are literally washed away by a tidal wave of ignorance.
While the USA has certainly had its share of dumbing down, have you even entertained the thought that withdrawal from the system might be rational behavior?
It is very, very difficult to effect change without
large gobs of $$$$$
massive investments of time
It can be done. But it is painstakingly difficult. And the results can be wiped out with the next election, or by simply turning your back on the rat-fink who is supposed to be "representing" you for too long.
Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. -- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World Today
Given the level of activity on both KOffice and the GNOME Workshop, I don't think that there's any question that office applications suites can certainly attract free software developers.
The question remains, will StarOffice under Sun's "Community" license attract developers? I'm doubtful -- how may outside developers actually work on projects that Sun has already applied this license to? AFAIK, it's even less than the number of non-Netscape programmers working on Mozilla.
So I don't see this as a "test" of the open source concept. Put StarOffice under GPL/LGPL, or even the MPL, and this might qualify as a test. But right now, this looks more like "free beer" than "free speech." Not that free beer isn't nice, but it's not the same...
I can't find the URL of the study that would contradict the one you gave, so we'll assume for the sake of argument that it doesn't exist. I'll just give you Thurgood Marshall's opinion on affirmative action: "There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race, and under a long line of decisions by the Supreme Court, not on the question of Negroes, but on the Fourteenth Amendment, all courts agree that if there is no rational basis for the classification, it is flat in the teeth of the Fourteenth Amendment."
You seem to have me confused with somebody who actually thinks that current affirmative action policies are The Answer To The Problem(tm).
I was unable to find the URL, so I'm relying on memory of having read the dead trees edition (I'm pretty sure it was in The Institute, the newsletter that comes with IEEE Spectrum.) The point is, whether or not affirmative action admission is good or bad, the existing data do not point to it as the main cause of the differential attrition of black students from college computer and engineering programs.
And yes, I tend to agree with the great Justice Marshall about the reasonablness of race-based classification schemes. That doesn't mean we ought to be naive about the effects of race on American life. (As Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who ended school segregation in the US in Brown vs. Board of Education, no doubt knew very well. May he rest in peace.)
"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Slashdot Mirror
(answering my own question ...)
Finally found some content at Cygnus' EL/IX page, and it appears that this will be POSIX based.
It's going to include most of the base Unix API, the real-time extensions, POSIX threads, the ISO C library, and BSD sockets (minus STREAMS). I assume that the BSD sockets support means that eCos will have a TCP/IP stack, which another poster mentioned as a problem with eCos.
And, one of the design criteria is to make EL/IX a subset of the API that is already available on Linux, so this will not involve any Linux enhancements.
Go Cygnus! :^)
I was not writing to justify the house arrest of Galileo. I think that's something even the Roman Catholic Church would now agree was done wrongly.
The point is, the story of Galileo as persecuted by the Church for the "heresy" of heliocentrism should be thrown into the same category as that of Christopher Columbus "discovering" that the world was round not flat, or of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree as a kid. They are all fiction.
- Galileo was never found guilty of heresy; and in fact heliocentrism was never of itself declared heretical
- Every educated navagator of Columbus's day knew that the world was round -- the disagreement was over the circumference of the world (and therefore length of the westward voyage to the Indies). Columbus had the faulty figures, and would have died in the middle of the ocean if the Carribean hadn't been where he thought Japan was.
- And, the story of George and the cherry tree has a known author who isn't our first President.
So, what we have here is Katz repeating a "spun" version of the story, in order to play upon the supposed conflict of science and faith.As for Sagan, perhaps I'm reading too much into the end of Contact (the book, not the movie). Still, we do have the phenomenon of scientists making moral pronouncements about The Meaning Of It All, borrowing from their authority in the sciences to appear as "experts" on questions that are really philosophical or religious. And Galileo was a prime and early example of this.
While Katz seems to take a break from his techno-boosterism and techno-determinism by giving some space to "neo-Luddite" writers (basically, anyone who expresses reservations about the "Limitless March of Technology" gets labeled a "neo-Luddite" these days), he lets the katz out of the bag with this statement:
With this sweeping statement, all thought of human responsibilty is banished. Forget future AIs and a-life; a-life is here today, and it's name is Technology. Forget futuristic scenarious about human freedom being supplanted by machines; the future is now, and we have lost our freedom to Just Say No. Don't bother unplugging; it's too difficult to try, and you won't make a difference anyway.
"Bah, humbug!" I say.
People are responsible for technology, it doesn't "just happen." People create it, people market it, people build infrastructure for it, and people adopt it. At each of these points, there is responsibility. And there is choice involved. Some of the choices may be difficult. Nobody ever said being a free and responsible human person was going to be easy.
If you would like examples, you need look no further than the Amish, who are the living experts of subordinating technology to a vision of what human society ought to look like.
But who wants to live like the Amish? Not many people. This, however, is a choice.
Another example, nearer and dearer to the hearts of /. readers, is Richard Stallman. Rather than submit to the "inevitable" shift in the computing world to proprietary software, he chose and chooses instead to do without proprietary software, and even to do without employment that would prevent him from creating free software.
But who wants to live like Richard Stallman? :^) Not many people, apparantly.
As a final example, consider Microsoft. They are under no illusion that technology simply happens, and expend every effort to make sure it happens in a way that favors the Reign of Bill. The slogan "Where do you want to go today?" (tm) is not a bad question, except that it's offered as a multiple-choice:
- Windows 98
- Windows NT 4.0
- Windows 2000
Notice that there is no "none of the above." Slashdot readers will be quick to recognize that such a "choice" is only "choice" in Newspeak; but are slower to recognize this when the question is larger than that of operating systems and office suites.The rate of fatal accidents for automobiles is still atrocious. In the USA, more Americans are killed by cars every year than died in the Vietnam War. If an enemy did this to us, we would declare war. If relatively as many people died due to airplanes, no one would fly again. Yet somehow we accept this "collateral damage" from the automobile with little grumbling.
The fact that automobiles "play a vital role in most of our lives" simply means that we've structured our society around them, and that we don't know how to live without them anymore. But just because this is, does not mean it is good.
The automobile is the enabler of urban sprawl, the bringer of smog and greenhouse CO2, and the power base of old-time dictators like the Sultan of Kuwait and modern dictators like Saddam Hussein.
But hey, since we've forgotten how to live without them, they must be OK.
And therefore, it must not be a problem to forget how to live without computers, as well?
Both the business wire article and the e/lix page seem to be content-free about what e/lix actually is. Given that the eCos homepage says that they are thinking about implimenting the POSIX APIs, is e/lix simply a POSIX API for eCos?
If so, this is very cool, but not world-shattering. It would bring eCos into closer parity with the major proprietary RTOS's, and should make it easier to have more free (libre) software available for small embedded systems.
In any case, it's nice to see eCos and Cygnus getting good press. I hope they do well with eCos; IMNSHO the embedded-systems market is ripe for a good free OS.
I really wish those who keep flogging the Galileo myth of "brave Scientist persecuted by hidebound Chruch for selfless Pursuit of Knowledge" would apply some of that scientific viewpoint to actually reviewing what happened, and perhaps even (gasp!) revising their opining (in true Scientific fashion) based upon the facts of the case, rather than the received myth.
Otherwise, it certainly looks to me as if the Rational Enlightenment Scientific Geeks are the ones who are desperately clinging to their myths, while the Christians are the ones who are willing to look at the world and history as it actually is.
If there is a modern figure who shows us what Galileo would be if he were alive today, it is not IPO-enriched Internet geeks, but rather Carl Sagan. That is, the scientist who uses his scientific expertise to make himself out to be an expert authority on things religious. The proof that Galileo got himself in trouble with the Chruch over theology and not science is simply the number of Catholics ought to be the number of Catholics (including Kepler, Copernicus himself, and a whole bunch of Jesuit astronomers) who favored heliocentism (in even more accurate models than Galileo held) with no trouble at all.
Of course, stabbing a close personal friend in the back by making him out to be a fool in public was not a particularly diplomatic move, especially when that close personal friend happens to have just been elected Pope.
The Roman Catholic Church has admitted that they screwed up in handling Galileo (though not as badly as the mythmakers would have it). I am still waiting for the mythmakers to admit that they have treated the Catholic Church unfairly, or that Galileo might have been part of the problem himself. But I'm not holding my breath -- after all, what's historical accuracy and fairness, compared to a chance to flog religion in general and Christianity/Catholicism in particular?
Well, that's one theory.
More precisely, this is the Pre-Tribulation Rapture model, which is a particular millenialist interpretation of Revelation. While this model has been heavily popularized in the last few decades (esp. by Hal Lindsey, A Thief in the Night , and more recently LaHaye and Jenkin's "Left Behind" series ), it's not even the only millenialist interpretation, much less the only Christian understanding, of Revelation.
For those who aren't theology nerds like me, eschatological (== "concerning the end of things") theories can be divided into at least two groups, "millenial" and "amillenial", depending on how they view the thousand-year reign of Christ described in Revelation 20. Millenialists insist that the 1000 years is to be understood literally, and generally insist on (a) as literal as possible an understanding of Revelation and other end-time prophecies of Scripture, and (b) that Revelation and related passages are only applicable to this end period of history. Within the millenialist camp, you can find Pre-Trib, Post-Trip, and even Mid-Trib Rapture theories.
Amillenialists are then distinguished by not being millenialists. I don't know the amillenial theories as well, but in general it is understood that much of Revelation is (a) symbolic (b) applicable to more than one generation in history (although most applicable to the final generation).
Historically, the millenialist viewpoint is relatively recent, originating in various fundamentalist/evangelical Protestant groups (and in the English world, at that), within the last 150 years. Most of Christianity, for most of Christian history, has been amillenialist.
And yes, I tend to be an amillenialist these days myself. For an excellent novel portraying a non-Rapture-first end times, see Father Elijah: An Apocalyspe. Like all good apocalypses, it is at least as much about today as about the future.
What does this have to do with cybernetics?
Good question. The answer is that some Christians have speculated that the "mark" mentioned in Revelation 13:11-18 could, given current technology and society, be literally implemented as, for example, a tattooed barcode or implanted chip. Set up the economy so that it's illegal, or at least practically possible, "so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark" (Rev. 13:17). As opposed to earlier days, which relied on cruder methods of citizen control and loyalty assurance such as requiring a pinch of incense be burned to the Emperor under pain of death (what Christians were experiencing when Revelation was written).
Personally, while Warwick seems like Yet Another Scientist In Disinterested Pursuit of KnowledgeTM, I don't think that where he's going with cybernetics is necessarily a good direction. Implanted RF locators? I can flip the lights on myself, thank you very much. This would give both State and Corporation intelligence powers that Nero could only dream of. And brain/computer direct links, thought-to-thought communication? Great, so now detecting thoughtcrime would become technologically feasible. Big Brother will be so happy with this developement.
But this should be opposed because it's bad and wrong, not because it might fulfill the prophecy about the "mark." It will be tough to tell when exactly the Last Days will be -- Jesus himself didn't know, and told his disciples not to believe everyone who yelled "it's here! it's now!". But we can figure out if something is a good or a bad thing in the meantime.
While this will certainly not win the good graces of RMS, last I knew it was Linus's interpretation that linking a binary-only driver with the Linux kernel did not constitute a "derived work" per the GPL. Given that much of the kernel is © Linux Torvalds, I'd say that his interpretation goes.
Of course, this is a colossally stupid thing to do. But it's not actually illegal.
Sitecopy is a very nice little site-management tool that implements WebDAV uploading today.
It comes in a command-line version, or with a GNOME frontend.
(I don't know what you mean about "drag-and-drop management", I haven't used IE5 yet. But it sounds cool. :^))
Well, you could always look at Fides et Ratio, "Faith and Reason" for John Paul's opinion about science, evolution, and the Faith. But I think "accepted as fact" is a slight mischaracterization.
I don't actually dislike Katz; I simply disagree intensely with a number of his viewpoints. For all I know, if we had a chance to sit down, crack a few beers together, and argue philosophy into the wee hours, I'd end up with a genuine affection for the man. But I'd still disagree vehemently with what he is writing here.
You're right, I don't see that at all.
While persons experience pain, pain is not an intrinsic part of personality. Before the Fall (I write as a Christian, of course) humanity was human, and had the gift of personality, before there was pain in the world. And, we look forward to a day when this will be true again. So, while it may appear that pain and personality are linked, this is simply an accident of our local conditions in time and space.
Yes, that is exactly what I understood Katz to mean. And my point is, to ask the question of pain when one really means to ask the question of personality is to misunderstand personality. The question itself is bogus -- it's simply a bad question, a philosphical equivalent of "have you stopped beating your wife?" One can't simply answer the question without dealing with the assumption behind the question first.
No, I'm not using "person" as synonymous with "human," but to mean "a being with the quality of personality." Christians understand that there are non-human persons. God is three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit (the mystery of the Trinity), only one of whom is also human (the mystery of the Incarnation). Angels are persons too, although they are not human, but of different races from us.
In Star Trek, for example, Humans, Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans, Ferrengi, etc. are all clearly persons. Commander Data is clearly portrayed as a person as well. I don't know what word is used in Trek to distinguish between Klingons and cats ("sentient"?), but whatever that word is, is what I am talking about.
In the past and present, we have heard these promises before. Nuclear power would soon become "too cheap to meter", the Industrial Revolution, the Nuclear Revolution, the Green Revolution, all promised and failed to deliver humanity from need and want. All have failed on that promise, and have instead helped make certain men rich beyond the dreams of Midas while "saving" so much labor that we now have an unemployment problem. Most folks who haven't hit the jackpot on these various "revolutions" have been transformed into oppressed Morlocks or effete Eloi. Meanwhile, the promised "freedom from necessity" is further away than ever. This is not a technological problem -- we could implement a society with no poverty today if we had the will and the virtue to do so. We have not done so, we are not going to do so, because greed ("Greed is good! It fuels The Economy!") is the rule.
And now, we have the hype of the Computer Revolution (under way already), the AI Revolution, and the Nanotech Revolution, bearing the same promises. I shall remain skeptical. So far, I see that we have some new robber-barons who have become richer than the old robber-barons, through control of the new resources. I don't see that I or my neighbors who require the necessity of a steady paycheck to put food on the table are closer to this mythical state of "freedom" than our ancestors 150 years ago, who could at least plant a garden and spin wool, and worried about the weather rather than the stock market.
I disagree. There are a lot of philosophers on the farm and the factory floor today. Certainly at least as many as among the cubicle-dwelling Eloi. I don't know what Clarke thinks we're going to be "freed" from, because history and observation show us that a life of work is not incompatible with the highest contemplation, and in fact may be a benefit to it.
Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.
-- G. K. Chesterton
There is no Eric Conspiracy. You must be (fnord) imagining thing. Here, let this nice young men in their clean white coats stand with you until the next Orbital Mind Control Laser comes over the horizon ... er, I mean, isn't it a lovely sunset this evening?
Ah, but according to Edward Teller, it's not a scientist's business to inject morality or even common sense into research. One ought to simply do the work for the Corporation or the State, and let other take care of whether to drop the bomb/boot the AI/etc.
Of course, what the "common man" gets told is that such things are far too complex for anyone but experts to understand, so don't worry about it. You'll read the press release when we feel like it. Besides, technology is inevitable, and if we don't build it, somebody else will.
Who is making these decisions anyway?
Hoo boy, off into the techno-spiritualism and "porn makes kids better" garbage again ...
A complete, well-structuted and footnoted criticism of everything wrong with this essay would take far more time than I dare give it this morning, but a few thoughts:
Pain is irrelevant:
That's right, the ability of an AI or a-life program to "feel" pain is irrelevant to any moral or ethical issues. It is interesting, but it is not the ethical quandry that Katz makes it out to be. Think about it for a moment -- we already share the planet with entities which are demonstrably intelligent and capable of experiencing pain. We call them "animals". They've been around for a long time, perhaps you've encountered one recently?
Now, if an AI could achieve personhood, that would be a different can of worms. But what, exactly, is personhood? That, at either an explicit or implicit level, is a crucial question in today's "culture wars." The traditional Christian answer which shaped Western culture for many centuries is that personhood is a spiritual attribute, and humans are persons because we are created in the imago dei, the Image of God, Who is Himself personal.
Therefore, (to steal a phrase from A Canticle for Leibowitz), "all that is born of woman" are persons.
The current, post-Christian viewpoint seems to be to reject any spiritual basis for personhood, and to then try to base recognition of personhood from some observed attribute, perhaps cleverness (if it's intelligent enough, it must be a person) or emotional response (if it feels pain and can articulate enough angst, it must be a person). But, the distinction between person and non-person is muddled, because (it is argued) there is no way to draw distinctions other than quantitative. So, a Darwinist would claim that humans are simply animals with opposable thumbs. Minsky, etc., claim that humans are simply carbon-based computers with a big specialized processor and complicated software.
From the Christian perspective, the issue with AIs is simple enough -- we have to determine whether an AI could ever be a person, and proceed accordingly. From that, one can proceed figuring out the ethical issues.
From the post-Christian, modern/post-Modern materialist viewpoint, there's no good way to make any distinction other than some quantitative ones, so you drop into a quagmire of muddle, providing wonderful employment opportunities for professors of ethics and for cyber-pundits.
Modern technology does not provide "choice" or "meaning":
Katz quotes Clarke:
For argument's sake, I'll take Clarke's 99% statistic as a given. It's not clear to me that a European peasant of the Middle Ages, who had a secure landholding, the ability to live off of it, and little regulation other than some taxes, had less "choice" than today's Dilbert-ized cubicle dwellers, who don't own their own homes but merely lease them from the bank, and who are at the mercy of the next "rightsizing."
It is simply ludicrous that Clarke can believe that "the purpose of meaning of human existance" has not been thought about to this point. He seems to want to have it both ways, because what is this "pious jabber" that he so casually dismisses if not the very thing he claims has never yet existed?
As for his example of thermonuclear weapons, give me a break. If anything, thermonuclear weapons have made us less able to face "the realities of war and agression" than generations past, by making war an unimaginable catastrophe. And I truly think that those for whom war meant close combat had a better handle on war and agression than we for whom war means smart bombs and air strikes.
Chesterton wrote this as a warning. It is perhaps the most frightening thing about Clarke and Katz that they seem to think this is a desirable state.
In an otherwise decent essay, Jon Katz manages to get this point nearly backwards:
The small kernel of truth in this statement is that the U. S. Constitution deliberately sets up a republic rather than a direct democracy. This is for reasons both practical (the country has always been too big to run via direct vote) and ideological (the founders were concerned with the problem of mob rule, or "tyranny of the majority").
But otherwise, this is sheer hogwash.
At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, town-hall democracy was well-established in New England, giving citizens more experience in "civic information-gathering and decision-making" than most citizens get today.
Given the smallness of most communities in those days, the idea that voters "never got to lay eyes on their elected officials" is nonsense. Perhaps for the President, or their state's Senators. But, the Constitution originally established that there would be one Representative per 30,000 citizens. Now tell me, do you really think that a polititican, who needs to run for office every two years, can stay out of sight for the majority of voters in that small of a district? This doesn't even count the variety of State and local offices, which in the days before telecommunications, interstate highway systems, and immense growth in Federal bureaucracy and power, had much more effect than they do today.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates, it has been estimated that more than half of the voters of Illinois attended at least one debate. These debates were over six hours long. When was the last time that more than half the voters of a state heard their senatorial candidates in person engaging in substantive debate for more than a few minutes of media sound-bites?
Technology, for the most part, has not helped. Oh, sure, it's tough to avoid seeing candidates mugs on TV during the election season. Great, so know I know what they look like at their most photogenic and hair-styled. What is their political philosophy? How is Tweedledum different from Tweedledee this year? TV campaigning takes us further away from those answers, not closer.
And the internet? I have to admit that the ability to check pending bills, voting records, etc. without having to be physically present at the site of the legislature can be nice. But that is subject to how timely that legislature's web site is. And, if the "real" politicing is done the old-fashioned way, via face time, dollars, and grass-roots vote-gathering, then the "wired"-ness of legislative or executive bodies is not particularly transforming. At best, it's a nice bonus. At worst, it provides the illusion of public access and accountability without the reality.
It is vain to rule if your subjects can and do disobey you. It is vain to vote if your delegates can and do disobey you.
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Great Shipwreck as Analogy"
Good point. The original way was that every state got one Representative per 30,000 (including the infamous "three fifths" rule, whereby slaves counted as 0.6 person for the purposes of calculating seats in Congress). Minimum 1 per state, of course.
This was superceded by Amendment XIV, Article 2, which states that "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers". That number is currently set at 435, although since it's not hard-coded into the Constitution, in theory Congress could pass a law raising the number of Representatives to, say, 650. As this would dilute the power of each current Representative, I'm not holding my breath.
Note that Senators were originally seen as representatives of the individual States, not as "popular" representatives. A common practice was for the Governor to appoint each Senator. Popular election of Senators was not mandated until Amendment XVII was ratified in 1913.
Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad.
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
Note: I am a hardcore R.A.H.. fan from way back. My senior (high school) term paper was a comprehensive overview of the works of Heinlein. :^) Just because the man was a giant and a pioneer in SF doesn't mean that he couldn't write crap at times, though. My NSHO is that he got very self-indulgent in his last years.
Yah. The first 2/3 was fun, and I really liked the characters. [Spoiler alert] When I picked it up, I had the misfortune to flip it open, and saw the name "Jubal" mentioned, which raised my hopes too much for the book. Jubal Harshaw was one of my favorite characters from Stranger in a Strange Land. But by the time we got to him, the "all-universes-converge--all-stories-are-true--let -me-pull-in-characters-from-my-old-books " had lost its appeal.
I Will Fear No Evil . Not one of Heinlein's better books, I agree.
R.A.H. can claim somewhat of a medical excuse for some of his work -- for several years, he had partially blocked carotid arteries, which put him in a state of continual oxygen deprivation of the brain. I've heard a story that, after he got the operation to have his arteries cleaned out, he looked at some of his recent books and said "I wrote what?! But he can't claim that excuse for To Sail Beyond the Sunset .
Not only was the ABC built first, but Mauchly got a grand tour of the lab and of ABC years before building ENIAC. In fact, after Mauchly and Eckert had held the patent for a while on the digital computer, it was John Atanasoff's testimony that pretty much helped bust the patent due to prior art. (In fact, Atanasoff and Iowa State had begun putting together a patent application themselves, but WWII intervened, and the application was still sitting in a file cabinet at the university.)
I have forgotten the technical details, but as I recall, ENIAC did have some important technical improvements over the ABC. But the ABC does count as a pre-ENIAC electronic digital computer.
"Cleverness kills wisdom"
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
In theory, we ought to have privacy rights in the U.S.A. The federal constitution is one of enumerated powers; and the right to pry into and compile the details of everyone's life isn't one of those powers. And the U. S. Supreme Court has held that privacy is a right of citizens (see here for a quick summary).
In practice, we have been suckers for any come-on which promises security, to be "tough on crime" or to protect us from those lurking terrorists. ("Why do you care if you have nothing to hide" is a common attitude.) So there's very little (practically, none) legislation to actually apply that right of privacy to government or private data collecting. The only place that the right to privacy has been actually applied vigorously is as it relates to sex, or to the ability to kill unborn children (the in/famous Roe vs. Wade case where the Court declared the ability to abort a child a fundamental American "privacy" right).
Somebody moderate this rant up! I've been working with pSOS, VxWorks, etc. for some years now, and I can agree with what you say wholeheartedly.
One small item:
This seems to be the whole point of MontaVista -- they take that "weird iron" and get Linux running on it. So far, they seem to have only tackled Pentium CompactPCI systems, but I expect that given time and incentive ($$$) they will branch out. Certainly Force isn't an Intel-only shop.
And if Mot were smart, they'd help push Linux onto their funky embedded chips, especially the 68360 and the PowerPC 860 series. But I've never been able to figure out Mot's OS "strategy" ... they seem to just want to make cool hardware and not to have to worry about what's running on top of it.
The AP news report cited claims that ISI and Mitsubishi "will develop a new operating system for hand-held computers". However, the press release from ISI claims that WebPDA is based on ISI's existing pSOS+ RTOS.
A basic breakdown of what WebPDA actually is:
So, rather than a "new" OS, these companies have bundled together an existing RTOS, an existing JVM, an existing PDA hardware platform, and an existing Java framework, and made a big marketing announcement out of it. Big whoop. Every major RTOS vendor competing with ISI either already has a JVM on their platform or is working desperately to get one, and will have one Real Soon Now(tm).
It is nice, though, to see the traditional RTOS vendors not quietly ceding the PDA space to the 800-pound gorilla of Microsoft and Windows CE.
Was Thomas Alva Edison the first 20th-century entrepreneur, a man who contributed greatly to the shape and form of modern society, and was therefore the spiritual godfather of Bill Gates? Or was he another 19th-century corporate baron, a public figure whose greatest talent was self-promotion, and was therefore the spiritual godfather of Bill Gates?
-- Brian Santo, EE Times, 7/14/97
It's funny how those little "technical details" can make the difference to a story ...
I used to think that suing McD's for hot coffee was stupid too, until I learned some more details about that case. IIRC, the temperature of the coffeee was 170degF, about 50degF higher than food service "industry standard." This is hot enough to cause third degree burns. The lady who sued McD's originally approached McD's to see if they would cover her hospital costs for those third-degree burns that the spilled coffee caused her. When they told her "get lost, that's not our problem," she then got a lawyer ...
It was uncovered, as part of the fact-finding for the case, that McD's in general, and that particular restaurant, had received numerous, documented complaints about the temperature of the coffee being high enough to cause burns. Yet McD's had chosen to ignore the problem. It was this pattern of negligent behavior that lead the jury to award punitive damages as well.
McDonald's never admitted fault or responsibility, but for some mysterious reason, they soon after changed the settings on their coffee heaters down closer to 125degF, not hot enough to burn.
I'm not sure it's possible for an ISP to be this recklessly negligent concerning human health -- it's awfully tough to hurt anyone with bits and bandwidth. While there are stupid lawsuits and greedy lawyers out there, there are also stupid, greedy, negligent companies out there who won't do the right thing unless a judge makes them do it.
"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
While the USA has certainly had its share of dumbing down, have you even entertained the thought that withdrawal from the system might be rational behavior?
It is very, very difficult to effect change without
- large gobs of $$$$$
- massive investments of time
It can be done. But it is painstakingly difficult. And the results can be wiped out with the next election, or by simply turning your back on the rat-fink who is supposed to be "representing" you for too long.Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad.
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World Today
Given the level of activity on both KOffice and the GNOME Workshop, I don't think that there's any question that office applications suites can certainly attract free software developers.
The question remains, will StarOffice under Sun's "Community" license attract developers? I'm doubtful -- how may outside developers actually work on projects that Sun has already applied this license to? AFAIK, it's even less than the number of non-Netscape programmers working on Mozilla.
So I don't see this as a "test" of the open source concept. Put StarOffice under GPL/LGPL, or even the MPL, and this might qualify as a test. But right now, this looks more like "free beer" than "free speech." Not that free beer isn't nice, but it's not the same...
"Cleverness kills wisdom"
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
You seem to have me confused with somebody who actually thinks that current affirmative action policies are The Answer To The Problem(tm).
I was unable to find the URL, so I'm relying on memory of having read the dead trees edition (I'm pretty sure it was in The Institute, the newsletter that comes with IEEE Spectrum.) The point is, whether or not affirmative action admission is good or bad, the existing data do not point to it as the main cause of the differential attrition of black students from college computer and engineering programs.
And yes, I tend to agree with the great Justice Marshall about the reasonablness of race-based classification schemes. That doesn't mean we ought to be naive about the effects of race on American life. (As Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who ended school segregation in the US in Brown vs. Board of Education, no doubt knew very well. May he rest in peace.)
"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.