"...so we should have government regulate us so that we don't do anything that isn't in our best interest."
Not necessarily government. But letting big business police world trade is like letting the foxes guard the hen house.
To revive the card-trading analogy... maybe the world playground doesn't need heavy-handed adult supervisors to protect the kindergarteners from losing their best cards to savvy fifth-graders, but some of the other schoolyard traders might like to know where the cards they're bartering for came from. If they knew that a kindergartener got defrauded out of his best stuff, they might choose (not the same as being forced by big-brother) to avoid trading with the ripoff artist. The schoolyard might be able to police itself if the traders are informed. But multinationals, like schoolyard bullies, have no interest in allowing consumers to know who might have been hurt in getting their products to market faster and cheaper than the other guy.
Now the developing world might object to being compared to vulnerable kindergarteners, and there might be a better analogy out there, but the fact remains that Europe and America have had years to get their negotiating skills polished. The developing world and the former Soviet bloc are still learning. They've got a lot of catching up to do, and they stand a good chance of losing out big-time if consumers don't take action.
And they can't very well take action if they're uninformed.
Any society that strives for bigness eventually falls. The Persians empire fell. The Greek empire fell. The Roman empire fell. The British empire fell. The German empire fell.
And the Soviet Union didn't fall?
And the Soviet Union didn't strive for bigness?
Sorry - I just don't see how the body of this post supports the title. There is no chance for Marxism, but that's primarily because there's no chance for any system over the long haul.
The Greek, Roman, and Persian (not to mention the Egyptian, the Inca, and the Mississippian) empires fell, but they were hardly failures, and they didn't fall because they strove for bigness. The United States will fall someday too, but it wouldn't be right to call it a failure. Striving for bigness may doom empires to failure, but striving for smallness dooms them too. Just faster.
Like it or not, trade has always benefited human beings...
Sorry - trade has sometimes benefitted human beings. Done right, both sides benefit. But very often, one set benefits at the other side's expense. Or both sides benefit short-term, but suffer far greater long-term consequences.
...even going back to when the settlers came over to what is now known the United States. There was trade with the Native American Indians.
You might ask them how fair it was, and whether they benefitted by it.
Okay - that was a cheap shot. It wasn't trade alone that decimated Native American society - nor was it conquering armies with muskets. It was disease. The conquering armies and unscrupulous traders just took advantage of a situation that disease created for them. But the point stands. Trade is not always beneficial to everyone involved. Remember how you felt when you traded baseball (or Magic, or Pokemon) cards as a youth? You may have got rid of your duplicates in exchange for cards you didn't have, but you may also have traded away rare and valuable cards for common ones. Trade can be beneficial, but it can also be harmful. This should be kept in mind.
Bully for Arnold if he's found some faith in his life. Really. But he didn't need to share.
I had some problems with that bit too. The third sentence seems to contradict the first. It could have been worded better, but I think I get what Katz is trying to say. He's saying that End Of Days is a stinky movie, and one reason for that (among many) is that Arnold seems to be promoting his newfound faith rather than just playing a role.
IMHO, sharing one's faith is not the problem. It's human nature. People find something they like, something that brings them happiness, and they want to share it with others. That's not necessarily a bad thing. What sometimes is bad is the way in which this sharing is done. Beating people over the head with it is not the right way to go about it.
I don't understand. What's wrong with showing the positive, uplifting side of faith in a movie? You don't seem to have a problem with a movie that purportedly criticizes faith (Dogma).
Showing the positive, uplifting side of faith is fine (IMHO - I can't speak for Katz). But I don't think that's what End Of Days is doing. Did you read the review? It didn't sound like a positive uplifting movie at all. Oh Well.
there is a code of hacker ethics that precludes any profit from the activity -- the only motive is the activity itself
My understanding of the hacker ethic is that it doesn't preclude any profit from the activity - hackers gotta eat too - but more that it prohibits being malicious. Profiting by hacking may always be secondary to the joy of a good hack, and the determined hacker will hack even if there's no money to be made by it, but it's still okay to turn a profit. Money isn't evil - it's only a tool, and can be used for good or for evil. Like so many other things.
The ethical individual will not use his/her tools (be they money, brute strength, hacking skills, or magic spells) maliciously, but may still make a fair profit from them.
The minimum skill-set needed to be a 'script-kiddy' is simply the ability to read English and follow directions.
Since when is English required? While I'm sure it helps, I doubt it's necessary. The article had a (tiny little) picture that was supposed to represent hackers in Germany. D'ya suppose they all used only English?
The most truthful line in the whole article is probably "Disinformation is easily spread". Sad to say, it's doing its share. Better luck with the later versions.
Ever think about how fast technology progressed after the US became a country?
The US becoming a country is immaterial. These technologies have appeared in the last 200 years, give or take a few decades. The US became a country about 220 years ago, give or take a few decades. But no cause-and-effect relationship should be concluded. Unless you can provide some evidence that these events are more than coinicidental.
Flintlocks to nuclear weapons in 169 years.
Nuclear weapons? There's other examples that might have illustrated the point better.
Horse and buggy transportation to automobiles and airplanes.
Hermetic medicine to antibiotics to protease inhibitors.
Smoke signals to the internet.
Hole-in-the-ground sanitation to high tech toilets that monitor body wastes for chemical imbalances.
However, don't get too worked up about encryption export laws or whether evolution is taught in schools in this country. People here have always been a mixture of paranoid and pious.
Don't get worked up? Whyever not? People have a NIMBY attitude, all the while the schools are in disrepair and failing miserably, racism is resurfacing in new guises, Big Brother uses heavy-handed tactics to "protect us from ourselves", and The Almighty Buck reigns supreme. 'Twas ever thus, sure, but that's no reason to be complacent. Hell yes I'll get worked up, because if no one does it'll never change.
True, things are still better here than in many other places, and it's not so bad yet that people are firebombing the congressional chambers... but that doesn't mean that things are just swell and we should thank our leaders for the fine job they've done. They have not done fine, and they need to be pushed to do better. Or get the hell out of office and turn the job over to someone who can.
Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer
The owners of the computer, or the authors of the software? In cases where patents have been rewarded (Linden's antenna algorithms) it seems to have been the author of the software, rather than the owner of the hardware who gets the patent.
This was reported on in Science News a few months ago. Unfortunately it only appeared in the pulp-and-staples publication, not the online one. But a little search through the patent office turned up only a patent on the algorithms themselves, not on the antennas that the algorithm invented. Unless I really misunderstood the abstract.
As neat as the amino acid thing was (I'd include the wonderful replication ability of the ribonucleic acids in with that one), it seems that it just sorta...happened. A unique combination of the right energies with the right raw materials, thrown together by random chance. A hack without a hacker.
Unless you're of the religious persuasion, in which case the Creator(s) would be the ultimate hacker(s).
Comparing consumers and perverts is like comparing apples and oranges. They're not really very similar (some consumers are perverted, but that's beside the point), so at first I was baffled by the article. Even the gummint's response to them is very different. Protect the consumers; prosecute the perverts (and scare consumers with horriffic stories about perverts). The only similarity seems to be that both are used to justify regulation of the net.
the invocation of the Pervert as a means of controlling the Net hasn't worked.
That's because controlling the environment is never (or very seldom anyway) the right way to deal with malcontents within those environments. And a lot of people know it. It has little or nothing to do with how many - or how few - perverts are really out there. Regulate the net because there might be perverts there, and you end up penalizing all the law-abiding folk instead. It's like dealing with regular offline perverts. If there's one in your neighborhood, you could insist that everyone stay indoors in order to protect themselves. But that's the wrong way to go about it. A better approach would be (to use a very politically-correct term) to empower the law-abiding folk, so that they're aware of the pervert, and can avoid falling into his/her clutches. It works the same way for online perverts, nosey privacy-destroying corporations eager to target new markets, and other dangers. Knowledge is power. Spread the knowledge, and you reduce or eliminate the need for draconian regulations.
In many cases, these companies are invoking protection of the Consumer - the successor to the lurking Pervert - as a rationale for controlling the Internet.
It's still the wrong approach, whether it's companies or governments who are attempting it.
Why are the goals of accuracy and speed mutual exclusive?
Well, here's a demonstration you can try at home. Find a recipe for, say, chocolate chip cookies. You want more speed? Double the heat setting on your oven, and cut the baking time by half. Watch what happens. Your output is no longer accurate, even though the input (yer ingredients, order in which you combined them, etc.) is the same as what was called for in the original "source".
Now open-sourcing recipes is a fine idea. Go ahead and experiment in the kitchen, and if you can come up with a faster way to make cookies that taste as good as the slow-cooking ones, more power to ya. But don't expect Betty Crocker to print your recipe in her next cookbook until she gets to test it out herself.
The folks at Seti@home might be better served if they open-sourced their code. It seems like a good way to improve it. But one programmer's improvement is another programmer's bug. And if someone's "improved" Seti@home code is fast but sloppy, and gives unacceptable results, the folks at Seti (and all of us who care about the project) lose out big-time.
It would be nice if the code were available to be tampered with, fine-tuned, and "improved". It would also be nice if only "real" improvements - not quick'n'dirty shortcuts - were used in crunching the data. But how to tell? We don't live in a perfect world. Open the source and big improvements - as well as tiny-but-devastating bugs - may follow.
There is supposed to be one accepted program for crunching Seti's data. Arrange it so several versions are running, and you introduce more variables into the experiment. Not good.
If the DNA would be flexible enough you could make clothes out of it. That could be neat...
Oh, DNA is flexible enough...the problem isn't that it's inflexible, but that it degrades/dissolves so rapidly. You don't want your clothes to fall apart when you wear them out in the sun or spill something on them, do you?
But not to worry. There's actually plenty of DNA in your clothes already, unless you're wearing synthetics. Wool is chock-full of (probably quite degraded) sheep DNA. Cotton has cotton DNA, hemp has hemp DNA, linen has flax DNA, and leather has DNA from whatever animal the skin came from. Enjoy!
Modern science has shown that a virus is incapable of a strangling (or much of any other) action. However, it is an expert at embracing and extending.
Viruses are most proficient at embracing and extending...themselves. Often at the expense of their hosts. True, they're not capable of doing much of anything on their own, being merely a snippet of genetic material w/ a protein coat and all. But that genetic material is stealthy! It sneaks into its host's cellular apparatus and gets the host to do all the work that the virus is incapable of by itself. Like making more viruses and maybe even strangling the host.
Now technology is, of course, not a virus. It has no genetic material and no protein coat. But sucessful ideas and complexes of ideas (like technology) are frequently compared to viruses. They're analogous to viruses. They seem to propagate throughout the human population in the same way that viruses do. By inducing their hosts to replicate them.
...an inevitable question: does the world's lust for technology really ease human suffering?
Yes and no. Certainly it would have eased suffering for the woman who died hauling water. With better technology, she might have lived a longer, more fulfilling, and productive life. But technology creates new kinds of suffering even as it eases old suffering. Instead of dying tragically young, more people live a long time. But they also die slow, painful, lingering deaths.
Technology has to some extent made humans into domestic animals. We're better fed, and we live longer than our ancestors could have hoped to. But we've given up something too.
Would I choose to go back (to a preindustrial age) if I could? Not a chance! The good old days were not that good. But neither will I give up and admit that those aspects of the preindustrial past that were better (cleaner air, less noise, starry skies, etc.) are no longer attainable. I suspect our best hope to regain them is not through abandoning technology (if that were even possible), but through pursuing better technology.
The past is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
[Asians and Indians] cannot take the alcohol as well as we do (hence the entire "chinese and indians are all drunks" stereotype, since they're [sic] immune system is not able to handle it).
It has nothing to do with the immune system. It has to do with an enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase, which helps break alcohol down into less toxic substances. Europeans typically have more of it than other people.
Native Americans made their own alcohol long before Columbus. It was a lot like modern tequila. But they had strict rules for its use. A few people got very drunk seeking visions, but they didn't destroy their society with it.
...bringing in things like harmful cigarettes...
That one's really funny. Who do you think grew the tobacco? The Native Americans! They invented smoking! Maybe it's justice after all, that Native Americans probably killed more Europeans with tobacco than Europeans ever killed Native Americans with muskets. Then again, at least the smokers had a choice. Oh Well...
Native Americans did not have alcohol until we came to North America. (What's this "we" sh1t?)
Wrong! Some (probably not all) Native American people did have alcohol before European contact. The Natives of what is now the Southwest U.S. and Mexico made a drink much like today's tequila. However, they did not use alcohol in the same way that Europeans did (unless you count Communion wine). They used it in religious ceremonies.
The "bad alcoholism genes" you speak of are genes that make an enzyme - alcohol dehydrogenase, IIRC - that helps break down alcohol into non-toxic substances. These genes were not so vital for Asians and Native Americans, who drank little alcohol, but they were vital for Europeans, for whom wine and ale were often less toxic than the local water. Asians and Native Americans did have the technology to make alcohol, but their culture compensated for their lack of alcohol dehydrogenase. In Asia, they typically drink from tiny saki cups, and in the Americas alcohol was used sparingly, by a select few, in order to see visions in religious ceremonies.
In another post, vivekb remarks that Katz is probably "talking more about Greek Tragic than Plane-Crash tragic."
I agree. Plane-Crash tragic is, well, bad. Katz seems to be saying that technology is neither good nor bad. But it might be tragic. It's certainly worth looking in to.
Tragedies (not the plane-crash kind), perhaps paradoxically, can be uplifting. The people in them are not typically evil; they're frequently good people. But they suffer (boy do they suffer!) the unintended consequences of their plots and machinations.
Technology (as in coal furnaces and maybe Disneyland) differs from simpler activities like breathing and eating in that technology intends to improve the world. Eating and breathing, while they may have tragic (in the plane-crash sense) consequences for the organisms that get eaten or who die from airborne diseases, are intended to merely perpetuate survival. If things go wrong, it may be bad but it's hardly tragic in the Greek-tragedy sense of the word. But a marvelous new technology - created with the noblest of intentions by the cleverest of inventors - which has devastating unintended consequences, is truly tragic. Esp. if those consequences could have been minimized with a little careful planning.
The fact that he was denies security clearance and ostracized for being gay is northing other than tragic.
It gets worse than that. Not only was Turing persecuted for being gay, he was offered (some would say forced to undergo) "treatment" for his "perversion". In the form of some very powerful medications. It's a pretty good bet that it was the drugs, not just the ostracism (that had been going on for a long time and while it was no doubt unpleasant, it wasn't enough to make the guy kill himself) that led to Turing's suicide.
Interactions between Oppenheimer and the OSS are another good example of the paranoid mentality that the spooks tend to adopt.
Not that it excuses in any way the abominable treatment of Dr. Turing, but maintaining a "paranoid mentality" is how spooks stay alive and do their jobs. They have to be paranoid. They don't have to be bigots. Turing's homosexuality was no more of a security risk (realistically, it was far less of risk) than the "eccentricity" that made him such a genius with codes and codebreaking machines.
My only exposure to Daniel Pinkwater has been his occasional appearances on public radio, and the Young Adults collection. But that's been enough to make me a die-hard Pinkwater fan. So sad to hear that Young Adults is out of print (though it's nice to know I might actually own something valuable) Warning: if you dislike the Pinkwater treatment of females, you'll really dislike certain aspects of The Dada Boys in Collitch excerpt. I felt ashamed even as I was laughing myself silly.
TV reporters covering rallies against the Vietnam War would usually point their cameras at the scruffy hippies or the people waving Vietcong flags, and not at the protesters who looked like normal college students.
Since one poster's comments look about like the next, and no one can tell who's a "scruffy hippie" and who's a necktie-wearing industry insider (not to mention the scruffy industry insiders) just from their text, how are the mainstream media going to determine whose posts to report on? Are ALL CAPS, obscenties, and anonymous posts the text equivalent of long hair, sandals and love beads?
...they confused getting their images on TV with having an impact on public opinion.
Oh, they had an impact on public opinion all right. It just wasn't the sort of impact they wanted.
Microsoft's fat stockholders won't have a happy day today
and
This will not be a happy day for Microsoft or its many fat and happy stockholders.
What he may fail to realize is that it's not just fat-cats who own MS stock. There are a helluva lot of mutual funds that have earnings linked to the DJIA. And, IIRC, MS is now a part of that. Any decline in MS stock will affect far more than just "fat and happy stockholders". It will also affect Joe and Jane Sixpack, if they have money in a mutual fund and are counting on it as retirement income, or to pay Junior's college tuition.
Of course this does not mean MS should be forgiven all its sins "for the good of the common people" any more than they should be forgiven for the good of the fatcats. But it does affect common people, and that should not be glossed over.
If the finding is correct, and MS really has been stifling competition (I think that's pretty obvious) then all the innovators who had been held back by the mighty Beast from Redmond will now be freed to innovate and compete, and any impact on the DOW, NASDAQ, etc. will be temporary. Let's hope so anyway.
Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by giving software away.
Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by adhering to any one strategy. And in some instances they do give software away. Not source code, and not to just anyone (they hand out lots of freebies to developers at seminars and such) but they do give software away. It's another shrewd business practice, and it's not illegal or even ethically questionable.
However...they're not particularly innovative, and their claim that this finding will stifle innovation is ludicrous on the face of it. Most of Microsoft's "innovations" seem to be someone else's innovations that Microsoft bought out from under the innovators. And what they couldn't buy and assimilate, they attempted to stifle. And that is ethically questionable, and probably illegal as well.
These diseases are modern and the eating habits of the western world are modern. Refined sugar is a modern substance...
How many times does this have to be restated? Correlation does not imply causality.
Television is modern too. Does television cause AIDS?
I wouldn't doubt that at one time, some cavedweller claimed that the "modern" invention of the wheel was the cause of a plague (or overall moral decline, or bad weather, or something). The wheel is new; this plague is new, therefore the wheel is the cause of this plague. They were wrong!
Some people today claim that (modern) refined sugar causes (modern) AIDS. Others claim that (modern) television causes (modern) moral decline. They might be right, they might be wrong, but they had better have more to base their arguments on than mere correlation.
Slashdot Mirror
"...so we should have government regulate us so that we don't do anything that isn't in our best interest."
Not necessarily government. But letting big business police world trade is like letting the foxes guard the hen house.
To revive the card-trading analogy... maybe the world playground doesn't need heavy-handed adult supervisors to protect the kindergarteners from losing their best cards to savvy fifth-graders, but some of the other schoolyard traders might like to know where the cards they're bartering for came from. If they knew that a kindergartener got defrauded out of his best stuff, they might choose (not the same as being forced by big-brother) to avoid trading with the ripoff artist. The schoolyard might be able to police itself if the traders are informed. But multinationals, like schoolyard bullies, have no interest in allowing consumers to know who might have been hurt in getting their products to market faster and cheaper than the other guy.
Now the developing world might object to being compared to vulnerable kindergarteners, and there might be a better analogy out there, but the fact remains that Europe and America have had years to get their negotiating skills polished. The developing world and the former Soviet bloc are still learning. They've got a lot of catching up to do, and they stand a good chance of losing out big-time if consumers don't take action.
And they can't very well take action if they're uninformed.
Any society that strives for bigness eventually falls. The Persians empire fell. The Greek empire fell. The Roman empire fell. The British empire fell. The German empire fell.
And the Soviet Union didn't fall?
And the Soviet Union didn't strive for bigness?
Sorry - I just don't see how the body of this post supports the title. There is no chance for Marxism, but that's primarily because there's no chance for any system over the long haul.
The Greek, Roman, and Persian (not to mention the Egyptian, the Inca, and the Mississippian) empires fell, but they were hardly failures, and they didn't fall because they strove for bigness. The United States will fall someday too, but it wouldn't be right to call it a failure. Striving for bigness may doom empires to failure, but striving for smallness dooms them too. Just faster.
Like it or not, trade has always benefited human beings...
...even going back to when the settlers came over to what is now known the United States. There was trade with the Native American Indians.
Sorry - trade has sometimes benefitted human beings. Done right, both sides benefit. But very often, one set benefits at the other side's expense. Or both sides benefit short-term, but suffer far greater long-term consequences.
You might ask them how fair it was, and whether they benefitted by it.
Okay - that was a cheap shot. It wasn't trade alone that decimated Native American society - nor was it conquering armies with muskets. It was disease. The conquering armies and unscrupulous traders just took advantage of a situation that disease created for them. But the point stands. Trade is not always beneficial to everyone involved. Remember how you felt when you traded baseball (or Magic, or Pokemon) cards as a youth? You may have got rid of your duplicates in exchange for cards you didn't have, but you may also have traded away rare and valuable cards for common ones. Trade can be beneficial, but it can also be harmful. This should be kept in mind.
Bully for Arnold if he's found some faith in his life. Really. But he didn't need to share.
I had some problems with that bit too. The third sentence seems to contradict the first. It could have been worded better, but I think I get what Katz is trying to say. He's saying that End Of Days is a stinky movie, and one reason for that (among many) is that Arnold seems to be promoting his newfound faith rather than just playing a role.
IMHO, sharing one's faith is not the problem. It's human nature. People find something they like, something that brings them happiness, and they want to share it with others. That's not necessarily a bad thing. What sometimes is bad is the way in which this sharing is done. Beating people over the head with it is not the right way to go about it.
I don't understand. What's wrong with showing the positive, uplifting side of faith in a movie? You don't seem to have a problem with a movie that purportedly criticizes faith (Dogma).
Showing the positive, uplifting side of faith is fine (IMHO - I can't speak for Katz). But I don't think that's what End Of Days is doing. Did you read the review? It didn't sound like a positive uplifting movie at all. Oh Well.
They misunderstood the hacker ethic too:
there is a code of hacker ethics that precludes any profit from the activity -- the only motive is the activity itself
My understanding of the hacker ethic is that it doesn't preclude any profit from the activity - hackers gotta eat too - but more that it prohibits being malicious. Profiting by hacking may always be secondary to the joy of a good hack, and the determined hacker will hack even if there's no money to be made by it, but it's still okay to turn a profit. Money isn't evil - it's only a tool, and can be used for good or for evil. Like so many other things.
The ethical individual will not use his/her tools (be they money, brute strength, hacking skills, or magic spells) maliciously, but may still make a fair profit from them.
The minimum skill-set needed to be a 'script-kiddy' is simply the ability to read
English and follow directions.
Since when is English required? While I'm sure it helps, I doubt it's necessary. The article had a (tiny little) picture that was supposed to represent hackers in Germany. D'ya suppose they all used only English?
The most truthful line in the whole article is probably "Disinformation is easily spread". Sad to say, it's doing its share. Better luck with the later versions.
"...ever since Hollywood produced 'Wargames', based on Kevin Mitnic's cracking activities..."
No kidding? Why didn't I hear about this? They even got his name wrong.
Ever think about how fast technology progressed
after the US became a country?
The US becoming a country is immaterial. These technologies have appeared in the last 200 years, give or take a few decades. The US became a country about 220 years ago, give or take a few decades. But no cause-and-effect relationship should be concluded. Unless you can provide some evidence that these events are more than coinicidental.
Flintlocks to nuclear weapons in 169 years.
Nuclear weapons? There's other examples that might have illustrated the point better.
Horse and buggy transportation to automobiles and airplanes.
Hermetic medicine to antibiotics to protease inhibitors.
Smoke signals to the internet.
Hole-in-the-ground sanitation to high tech toilets that monitor body wastes for chemical imbalances.
However, don't get too worked up about encryption export laws or whether evolution is taught in schools in this country. People here have always been a mixture of paranoid and pious.
Don't get worked up? Whyever not? People have a NIMBY attitude, all the while the schools are in disrepair and failing miserably, racism is resurfacing in new guises, Big Brother uses heavy-handed tactics to "protect us from ourselves", and The Almighty Buck reigns supreme. 'Twas ever thus, sure, but that's no reason to be complacent. Hell yes I'll get worked up, because if no one does it'll never change.
True, things are still better here than in many other places, and it's not so bad yet that people are firebombing the congressional chambers... but that doesn't mean that things are just swell and we should thank our leaders for the fine job they've done. They have not done fine, and they need to be pushed to do better. Or get the hell out of office and turn the job over to someone who can.
Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer
The owners of the computer, or the authors of the software? In cases where patents have been rewarded (Linden's antenna algorithms) it seems to have been the author of the software, rather than the owner of the hardware who gets the patent.
This was reported on in Science News a few months ago. Unfortunately it only appeared in the pulp-and-staples publication, not the online one. But a little search through the patent office turned up only a patent on the algorithms themselves, not on the antennas that the algorithm invented. Unless I really misunderstood the abstract.
...Or does a hack imply a hacker?
As neat as the amino acid thing was (I'd include the wonderful replication ability of the ribonucleic acids in with that one), it seems that it just sorta...happened. A unique combination of the right energies with the right raw materials, thrown together by random chance. A hack without a hacker.
Unless you're of the religious persuasion, in which case the Creator(s) would be the ultimate hacker(s).
Comparing consumers and perverts is like comparing apples and oranges. They're not really very similar (some consumers are perverted, but that's beside the point), so at first I was baffled by the article. Even the gummint's response to them is very different. Protect the consumers; prosecute the perverts (and scare consumers with horriffic stories about perverts). The only similarity seems to be that both are used to justify regulation of the net.
the invocation of the Pervert as a means of controlling the Net hasn't worked.
That's because controlling the environment is never (or very seldom anyway) the right way to deal with malcontents within those environments. And a lot of people know it. It has little or nothing to do with how many - or how few - perverts are really out there. Regulate the net because there might be perverts there, and you end up penalizing all the law-abiding folk instead. It's like dealing with regular offline perverts. If there's one in your neighborhood, you could insist that everyone stay indoors in order to protect themselves. But that's the wrong way to go about it. A better approach would be (to use a very politically-correct term) to empower the law-abiding folk, so that they're aware of the pervert, and can avoid falling into his/her clutches. It works the same way for online perverts, nosey privacy-destroying corporations eager to target new markets, and other dangers. Knowledge is power. Spread the knowledge, and you reduce or eliminate the need for draconian regulations.
In many cases, these companies are invoking protection of the Consumer - the successor to the lurking Pervert - as a rationale for controlling the Internet.
It's still the wrong approach, whether it's companies or governments who are attempting it.
Why are the goals of accuracy and speed mutual exclusive?
Well, here's a demonstration you can try at home. Find a recipe for, say, chocolate chip cookies. You want more speed? Double the heat setting on your oven, and cut the baking time by half. Watch what happens. Your output is no longer accurate, even though the input (yer ingredients, order in which you combined them, etc.) is the same as what was called for in the original "source".
Now open-sourcing recipes is a fine idea. Go ahead and experiment in the kitchen, and if you can come up with a faster way to make cookies that taste as good as the slow-cooking ones, more power to ya. But don't expect Betty Crocker to print your recipe in her next cookbook until she gets to test it out herself.
The folks at Seti@home might be better served if they open-sourced their code. It seems like a good way to improve it. But one programmer's improvement is another programmer's bug. And if someone's "improved" Seti@home code is fast but sloppy, and gives unacceptable results, the folks at Seti (and all of us who care about the project) lose out big-time.
It would be nice if the code were available to be tampered with, fine-tuned, and "improved". It would also be nice if only "real" improvements - not quick'n'dirty shortcuts - were used in crunching the data. But how to tell? We don't live in a perfect world. Open the source and big improvements - as well as tiny-but-devastating bugs - may follow.
There is supposed to be one accepted program for crunching Seti's data. Arrange it so several versions are running, and you introduce more variables into the experiment. Not good.
If the DNA would be flexible enough you could make clothes out of it. That could be neat...
Oh, DNA is flexible enough...the problem isn't that it's inflexible, but that it degrades/dissolves so rapidly. You don't want your clothes to fall apart when you wear them out in the sun or spill something on them, do you?
But not to worry. There's actually plenty of DNA in your clothes already, unless you're wearing synthetics. Wool is chock-full of (probably quite degraded) sheep DNA. Cotton has cotton DNA, hemp has hemp DNA, linen has flax DNA, and leather has DNA from whatever animal the skin came from. Enjoy!
Modern science has shown that a virus is incapable of a strangling (or much of any other) action. However, it is an expert at embracing and extending.
Viruses are most proficient at embracing and extending...themselves. Often at the expense of their hosts. True, they're not capable of doing much of anything on their own, being merely a snippet of genetic material w/ a protein coat and all. But that genetic material is stealthy! It sneaks into its host's cellular apparatus and gets the host to do all the work that the virus is incapable of by itself. Like making more viruses and maybe even strangling the host.
Now technology is, of course, not a virus. It has no genetic material and no protein coat. But sucessful ideas and complexes of ideas (like technology) are frequently compared to viruses. They're analogous to viruses. They seem to propagate throughout the human population in the same way that viruses do. By inducing their hosts to replicate them.
This is neither good nor evil. It just is.
...an inevitable question: does the world's lust for technology really ease human suffering?
Yes and no. Certainly it would have eased suffering for the woman who died hauling water. With better technology, she might have lived a longer, more fulfilling, and productive life. But technology creates new kinds of suffering even as it eases old suffering. Instead of dying tragically young, more people live a long time. But they also die slow, painful, lingering deaths.
Technology has to some extent made humans into domestic animals. We're better fed, and we live longer than our ancestors could have hoped to. But we've given up something too.
Would I choose to go back (to a preindustrial age) if I could? Not a chance! The good old days were not that good. But neither will I give up and admit that those aspects of the preindustrial past that were better (cleaner air, less noise, starry skies, etc.) are no longer attainable. I suspect our best hope to regain them is not through abandoning technology (if that were even possible), but through pursuing better technology.
The past is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
...I guess we can't consider Linux a "mainstream" OS quite yet. Only fairly arcane knowledge gets the $1000 (or #1000) answer, right?
[Asians and Indians] cannot take the alcohol as well as we do (hence the entire "chinese and indians are all drunks" stereotype, since they're [sic] immune system is not able to handle it).
...bringing in things like harmful cigarettes...
It has nothing to do with the immune system. It has to do with an enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase, which helps break alcohol down into less toxic substances. Europeans typically have more of it than other people.
Native Americans made their own alcohol long before Columbus. It was a lot like modern tequila. But they had strict rules for its use. A few people got very drunk seeking visions, but they didn't destroy their society with it.
That one's really funny. Who do you think grew the tobacco? The Native Americans! They invented smoking! Maybe it's justice after all, that Native Americans probably killed more Europeans with tobacco than Europeans ever killed Native Americans with muskets. Then again, at least the smokers had a choice. Oh Well...
Native Americans did not have alcohol until we came to North America. (What's this "we" sh1t?)
Wrong! Some (probably not all) Native American people did have alcohol before European contact. The Natives of what is now the Southwest U.S. and Mexico made a drink much like today's tequila. However, they did not use alcohol in the same way that Europeans did (unless you count Communion wine). They used it in religious ceremonies.
The "bad alcoholism genes" you speak of are genes that make an enzyme - alcohol dehydrogenase, IIRC - that helps break down alcohol into non-toxic substances. These genes were not so vital for Asians and Native Americans, who drank little alcohol, but they were vital for Europeans, for whom wine and ale were often less toxic than the local water. Asians and Native Americans did have the technology to make alcohol, but their culture compensated for their lack of alcohol dehydrogenase. In Asia, they typically drink from tiny saki cups, and in the Americas alcohol was used sparingly, by a select few, in order to see visions in religious ceremonies.
In another post, vivekb remarks that Katz is probably "talking more about Greek Tragic than Plane-Crash tragic."
I agree. Plane-Crash tragic is, well, bad. Katz seems to be saying that technology is neither good nor bad. But it might be tragic. It's certainly worth looking in to.
Tragedies (not the plane-crash kind), perhaps paradoxically, can be uplifting. The people in them are not typically evil; they're frequently good people. But they suffer (boy do they suffer!) the unintended consequences of their plots and machinations.
Technology (as in coal furnaces and maybe Disneyland) differs from simpler activities like breathing and eating in that technology intends to improve the world. Eating and breathing, while they may have tragic (in the plane-crash sense) consequences for the organisms that get eaten or who die from airborne diseases, are intended to merely perpetuate survival. If things go wrong, it may be bad but it's hardly tragic in the Greek-tragedy sense of the word. But a marvelous new technology - created with the noblest of intentions by the cleverest of inventors - which has devastating unintended consequences, is truly tragic. Esp. if those consequences could have been minimized with a little careful planning.
The fact that he was denies security clearance and ostracized for being gay is northing other than tragic.
It gets worse than that. Not only was Turing persecuted for being gay, he was offered (some would say forced to undergo) "treatment" for his "perversion". In the form of some very powerful medications. It's a pretty good bet that it was the drugs, not just the ostracism (that had been going on for a long time and while it was no doubt unpleasant, it wasn't enough to make the guy kill himself) that led to Turing's suicide.
Interactions between Oppenheimer and the OSS are another good example of the paranoid mentality that the spooks tend to adopt.
Not that it excuses in any way the abominable treatment of Dr. Turing, but maintaining a "paranoid mentality" is how spooks stay alive and do their jobs. They have to be paranoid. They don't have to be bigots. Turing's homosexuality was no more of a security risk (realistically, it was far less of risk) than the "eccentricity" that made him such a genius with codes and codebreaking machines.
My only exposure to Daniel Pinkwater has been his occasional appearances on public radio, and the Young Adults collection. But that's been enough to make me a die-hard Pinkwater fan. So sad to hear that Young Adults is out of print (though it's nice to know I might actually own something valuable) Warning: if you dislike the Pinkwater treatment of females, you'll really dislike certain aspects of The Dada Boys in Collitch excerpt. I felt ashamed even as I was laughing myself silly.
Anyway, here's a link to NPR's Daniel Pinkwater bio.
TV reporters covering rallies against the Vietnam War would usually point their cameras at the scruffy hippies or the people waving Vietcong flags, and not at the protesters who looked like normal college students.
...they confused getting their images on TV with having an impact on public opinion.
Since one poster's comments look about like the next, and no one can tell who's a "scruffy hippie" and who's a necktie-wearing industry insider (not to mention the scruffy industry insiders) just from their text, how are the mainstream media going to determine whose posts to report on? Are ALL CAPS, obscenties, and anonymous posts the text equivalent of long hair, sandals and love beads?
Oh, they had an impact on public opinion all right. It just wasn't the sort of impact they wanted.
Katz wrote:
Microsoft's fat stockholders won't have a happy day today
and
This will not be a happy day for Microsoft or its many fat and happy stockholders.
What he may fail to realize is that it's not just fat-cats who own MS stock. There are a helluva lot of mutual funds that have earnings linked to the DJIA. And, IIRC, MS is now a part of that. Any decline in MS stock will affect far more than just "fat and happy stockholders". It will also affect Joe and Jane Sixpack, if they have money in a mutual fund and are counting on it as retirement income, or to pay Junior's college tuition.
Of course this does not mean MS should be forgiven all its sins "for the good of the common people" any more than they should be forgiven for the good of the fatcats. But it does affect common people, and that should not be glossed over.
If the finding is correct, and MS really has been stifling competition (I think that's pretty obvious) then all the innovators who had been held back by the mighty Beast from Redmond will now be freed to innovate and compete, and any impact on the DOW, NASDAQ, etc. will be temporary. Let's hope so anyway.
Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by giving software away.
Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by adhering to any one strategy. And in some instances they do give software away. Not source code, and not to just anyone (they hand out lots of freebies to developers at seminars and such) but they do give software away. It's another shrewd business practice, and it's not illegal or even ethically questionable.
However...they're not particularly innovative, and their claim that this finding will stifle innovation is ludicrous on the face of it. Most of Microsoft's "innovations" seem to be someone else's innovations that Microsoft bought out from under the innovators. And what they couldn't buy and assimilate, they attempted to stifle. And that is ethically questionable, and probably illegal as well.
These diseases are modern and the eating habits of the western world are modern. Refined sugar is a modern substance...
How many times does this have to be restated? Correlation does not imply causality.
Television is modern too. Does television cause AIDS?
I wouldn't doubt that at one time, some cavedweller claimed that the "modern" invention of the wheel was the cause of a plague (or overall moral decline, or bad weather, or something). The wheel is new; this plague is new, therefore the wheel is the cause of this plague. They were wrong!
Some people today claim that (modern) refined sugar causes (modern) AIDS. Others claim that (modern) television causes (modern) moral decline. They might be right, they might be wrong, but they had better have more to base their arguments on than mere correlation.