What does convincing the population have to do with whether it's a good idea to expand into space?
If you think you can colonize space all by yourself, then by all means, be my guest.
But otherwise, it's going to take a lot of money and labor and natural resources. You're going to need to get a lot of people to agree with you before you can even get started.
you're either a troll or a smoker of the good crack
If I'm a troll, I hope I'm the good kind. The kind that starts conversations. A hell of a lot better than that bozo who just posts long lists of numbers.
Now, as to your points. First of all, I'm not dismissing evolution at all. The mechanism by which successful organisms reproduce and pass their genes on to future generations is well documented, and makes perfect sense. Humanity as we know it today may very well have evolved from more primitive organisms.
But you should remember that evolution takes place over uncountable lengths of time. No human can truly grasp the span of a hundred thousand years, and yet in that time (according to the fossil record) our species has changed very little, in the gross biological sense. In order to see real differences in our ancestors, you have to go back thirty times that far.
These spans of time are utterly beyond comprehension. We can talk about them, and we can understand them in the literal sense, but we can't truly grasp them. Who knows what events took place during that time? Where were you when the foundations of the earth were laid?
The facts that we do have are these: according to the fossil record, humanity has existed in its present physical form for three million years, more or less. But sometime around 8,000-10,000 years ago, people started practicing agriculture. With that came settlements, which eventually grew into cities. Then it was like a big game of Civilization II for several thousand years, and then BOOM! Slashdot.
Why? Trying to answer that question puts you pretty firmly in Von Daniken territory.
Given this circumstance, why is it so hard to believe that there is something fundamentally different about humanity, something that we do not understand?
Once upon a time, diseases in the body were believed to be caused by devils. At another time, physical sickness was thought to be the result of one's state of mind-- melancholia, for example. Then came the germ theory, and a new idea of disease and sickness.
So now we contemplate our uniqueness. All around the world, in every culture, there exists the idea that humanity is divine, created somehow by a god or gods, some kind of primal motive force. The idea of the soul, of the divine spark, is common to all peoples in one form or another.
Personally, I don't believe in the soul. Personally, I don't believe in spiritual things or unseen deities. But I am willing to consider the possibility that the universal belief in the soul-- for every culture has such a belief, even if individuals may not share it personally-- might attempt to explain a real phenomenon.
How's that for trolling?
(And one more thing...lay off the sophomoric imagery, please. "Beautiful and terrifying in its complexity" proves nothing.)
You see, we have just a teeny-tiny iddy-bidy bit more complexity than say some of the earlier hominids - just enough, just a tad more, in order to think abstractly and create all this and this web site, etc.
If there were some way to quantify the differences between things, some sort of absolute vector between two items that could be established and measured, then we would see something like this:
The difference between a raven and a writing desk: huge. Birds are animate organisms that consume and excrete and reproduce. Furniture is a made thing, constructed out of other objects by a third party; it cannot reproduce.
Write all the differences down and add them up. Fair to say that, despite the fact that both are made from the same basic elements, birds and furniture are really, really different in very significant ways, no?
Likewise, people and elephants are really, really different. People play football. People commit murder. People enjoy books and songs and pornography. People argue about whether they are unique in the world. Elephants, apes, dolphins, mice, australopithecines, bacteria, furniture, mayonnaise, steam engines, candles, computers, shoes, ships, and sealing wax do none of these things.
The difference between human being and everything else is not small. It's incomprehensibly enormous.
I haven't the foggiest idea how humanity arose. And you don't either. It would be wise of you to remember that.
What you describe is nothing more than a model: a mental model of the universe that people have devised over the past 150 years or so. Remember that in recorded history, many models have been believed for a while and then discarded when they were proved wrong. In fact, if you draw it up numerically, you'll see that human beings are much more likely, statistically, to be totally wrong about nature and the universe than we are to be right.
It's very important, as we try to sort out how the world works, that we remember that we don't understand anything. All we have is conjecture that is more likely to be wrong than right. Remembering this keeps us humble.
What do my eyes tell me? That human beings are amazingly complex things. My girlfriend recently got her PhD in molecular genetics. She spent years studying the behavior of one specific set of bases in one specific chromosome. (It had to do with acetyl CoA synthetase, but that's all I know; everything else she talks about is beyond me.) If she chooses, she could make a lifetime's work out of studying that one invisible part of us.
But the same can be said for elm trees, or spider webs. Everything around us is beautiful and terrifying in its complexity.
And yet... through it all, humans are different. Humans argue about the nature of humanity, and as far as we know, that makes us unique in all the world. Why are we unique? Why was I born a person and not a goldfish? Am I a Chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams he is a Chinese philosopher?
I challenge anyone to behold the uniqueness of humanity and come out the other side saying that we're "just complex machines." To reduce us to those terms is to call a bird a complex rock; it denies everything that defines us, and it's foolish.
Look down, past the celular level, down to the molecular. We operate the same as any other matter in the universe, as far as we know. We are a series of chemical and physical reactions.
Of course you're correct. Technically. Literally. Deconstruction can be applied to anything, rendering it empty and meaningless.
At what point does "sound" become "music?" Bach's Air on a G-String is just a sequence of sounds, right?
The probable destruction of human civilization isn't a very good reason to start getting into space while we can?
(Probable?? Discussions of probability become meaningless when the event domain is expanded too far. It's the million-monkey problem. Given a million asteroids in random orbits and an infinite amount of time, one of those asteroids will hit the Earth. This means absolutely nothing.)
Exactly how much good will it do me to have a million people living on the moon? Not humanity in general, but me, personally.
This is the point of view through which most humans see the world: self-interest. It's not a moral thing-- not absolutely good or absolutely bad-- it's just the way things are.
Given the limited resources at our society's disposal, it's hard to convince the population as a whole that setting up homesteads on other planets is a better use of money, time, and raw materials than, say, curing heart disease.
So given the opportunity costs involved, no, the eventual possibility of the destruction of our planet is not a very good reason to get into space.
We don't even know everything about our own planet, much less the universe. Saying that we're unique in the very, very small part of the universe that is our experience proves nothing.
The thing about the unknown universe is that it's unknown. To even speculate about what's out there, in the face of an overwhelming lack of evidence, is folly.
You can talk all you want about what might be. It might be possible for Venus to be inhabited by seven-foot-tall beaver-people who communicate through flatulence; there may be nothing in the universe that prevents that from being the case. But that doesn't mean you should send probes to Venus with tags on them that say, "With love to the beaver people. Poot!"
Show me one piece of evidence-- evidence, not conjecture or speculation-- that another species like us exists in the universe. Just one.
I read as much science fiction as anybody I know. I love to think about the larger universe, and life on distant worlds, and all of that. But wishing doesn't make it so.
But the real bummer of it all is that I don't think we'll have a permanent, independent manned presence in space for at least the next thousand years. Why? Because such a group of people represents a greater threat to the U.S. (or any large, power-greedy government) than any other country on Earth.
I think you're missing the much simpler point: what advantage would come from having a permanent habitat in space? Science and abstract knowledge, yes, and practical knowledge of how to live and work in that environment, but what else?
Living in space is hard, orders of magnitude harder than setting up a settlement in an uninhabited place on Earth. So our reason for moving into space would have to be orders of magnitude better than our reasons for (for example) colonizing and populating North America in the 1500s.
The only compelling reason I can think of to set up settlements in space or on other worlds is the "all your eggs in one basket" problem. It is at least theoretically possible that a catastrophe could make our planet uninhabitable, and thereby wipe out our entire species. Setting up settlements on Mars (for example) would help guarantee that no catastrophe that wipes out our whole planet would wipe out our whole species. And even that argument appeals to an ethic-- survival of the species-- that most people find it hard to personalize.
Of course, even then we have the whole death-of-the-sun thing to worry about. So we should colonize planets around other stars. The we have to keep an eye on this fragile galaxy of ours-- one really big black hole at the whole thing is kaput! And, sooner than you realize, you're worrying about how to stop proton decay and fend off the eventual heat death of the universe, problems so far off that even talking about them requires scientific notation.
All in all, it just doesn't add up to a very good reason to spend a lot of effort on living in space.
The author claims that a being like HAL or the robot-kid in A.I. will never be possible? What crap be this? Why? We are just complex machines.
I disagree with your premise. Maybe it's sheer hubris, but I believe that people are more than "just complex machines." I have no proof for this. It is an article of faith, and though it's not based on religion, it's almost religious in its intensity.
Let's look at the evidence. Human beings are unique in the known universe: we alone among all creatures and constructs create art, technology, religion, and science. Fencepost cases like termites constructing their castles and chimps learning sign language just reinforce the evidence for a fundamental difference between humans and other creatures or things.
What evidence exists to indicate that we are "just complex machines?"
All in all, I think it's like saying that a bird is really just a complex rock.
Isn't it possible that your rewrite was better just because it was a 2nd draft? There's really no reason you can't define interfaces for Perl classes and share them among a group of developers, like you did with your C++ header files.
Yes, TMTOWTDI.
But I still think that C++ is my language of choice for big projects because it helps do some of the job of collaboration for me. If you, as a team member, don't implement the interface completely, your module won't compile. And if you change the interface, nobody else's modules will compile. So less time is spent doing module-level integration.
And C++ has a lot going for it in the preemptive bug-squashing arena, too, with strong typing at compile time and such.
But I didn't intend for this to be a "C++ is better than Perl" comment; as I said before, I love Perl. I just think C++ is more appropriate for some things than Perl is, and medium-and-larger programming is one of them.
FUCK YOU,YOU STUPID LACKY. I bet your just another sheep who thinks that things cant be changed.I call for real action.A bombing or two,maybe a couple of CRIMINALS such as presidents get killed..you know..the usual..
I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to... wait, no, never mind. You're just an asshole.
You might want to reconsider perl as the language of choice for a large scale application.
I agree 100%. My company started to bring a commercial application to market a little less than a year ago. I prototyped the code in Perl, and the prototype was sufficiently okay that the decision was made to evolve the prototype into the release code.
This was A Mistake. It was A Dumb Idea. It was also My Decision. I have taken Much Shit for this from my coworkers. But you live and you learn.
I have since (over the past four months or so) rewritten the entire application-- every line, every file-- in C++. The source tree is 3.8 MB, and it compiles to about 100 MB of object code. (The actual executables, of course, are much smaller than that.) It was a pretty big job.
Not only is my code tighter and cleaner than the original Perl stuff (which was actually pretty okay code) but it's between 2 and 10 times faster.
I love Perl, absolutely adore programming in it, but there are some things that are easier to do with C, or C++, or (presumably) Java. When you split a project up among a number of people, for example, using the Bridge design pattern and distributing read-only interface header files makes modular integration so very much easier. That's just one example.
We would not have been able to get our app to market without the Perl prototype. And I don't think it would have been worth a damn if we hadn't rewritten it in C++.
Sorry. The laws being passed recently, and the motivations behind them, make respect and honor quite difficult. And it's not at all clear that it's worth the effort.
Unless you want to contend that Robin Hood respected the laws of King John (he was careful not to get caught, so an argument could be made).
First of all, Robin Hood is fiction, and besides that the story predates the modern legalistic society.
'Round about the time of the American and French revolutions a shift took place in world politics. The absolute authority of monarchs began to be replaced by the absolute authority of The Law. I don't mean any one law specifically, but rather the idea that The Law, as a body of rules, is the highest authority.
This isn't a new idea; it's embedded pretty firmly in Judeo-Christian cultures going all the way back to the time of the Hebrews. In the pre-Christian era, The Law was handed down by Yahweh himself and was considered to be infallible. The coming of the Christian church in the first century AD brought the era of the Popes, which led in part to the medieval idea of the divine right of kings. Suddenly The Law was no longer an entity of itself, but rather simply an extension of the will of kings and queens and Popes who had a divine mandate to rule.
Philosophical shifts in the 17th century led to yet another change in this paradigm. John Locke refuted the divine right of kings pretty thoroughly in Two Treatises On Government; in these writings Locke first put forth the idea of the legitimacy of government through the consent of the governed. Locke took some of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes-- notably the concept of man in a state of nature and of moral law-- and extended them, attempting to apply them to the real world in a practical sense. Locke contended that, in an ideal world, Hobbes's ideas would hold sway, but that the real world is one of scarcity, and as such it is necessary for man to willingly delegate some of his natural moral authority to society in the name of greater good for all.
Then came the American Revolution (among other changes in the world at the end of the 18th century) and with it a political system never before seen in the world: one based on the very Lockian idea of political legitimacy and the consent of the people.
Inherent in this idea is the notion that we, as citizens, must respect the law of our land, for man in the natural state and man as a citizen of the society are incompatible ideas. In order for a government to stand, all of its members must uphold their end of Locke's social contract.
A lack of respect for The Law leads to anarchy and chaos. Perhaps the anarchy may come in a small way, and be hardly noticable at first, but eventually it will erode our society and lead us back to barbarism.
So I stand by my original opinion. Disagree with laws. Disobey when your conscience tells you that you must. But if you fail to respect the law, the only source of authority that our society allows, then you're destroying our country and our society as surely as if you did it with guns and bombs.
I am pretty sure statements made in public can be used against you in court.
Yes, anything you say can be used against you if the judge in the case believes it to be relevant. But you cannot be arrested on the weight of a statement alone.
It is never appropriate to ignore a law. You can obey it, or you can lobby against it, or you can openly defy it, but you must never ignore it.
The strength of our society (by which I mean the modern judicial society in general, wherever in the world it is found) is based on the authority of the law. We consent to be bound by the authority of law, and in return we live in a prosperous, ordered society. If a law is unjust, you must fight-- within the system when possible-- to overturn it.
But ignoring a law, even an unjust law, trivializes The Law as a whole, which erodes the core pillar of our society.
Disagree or even disobey, but always respect and honor.
What's interesting about The Screen Savers is that almost on a daily basis, the entire cast of the show admits to/talks about breaking the DMCA.
It's important to understand that, in the US, statements made by an individual cannot be used as criminal evidence unless the individual has been duly arrested and informed of his Miranda rights, and been given the opportunity to seek the advice of legal counsel.
So the idea that a person might get up on television and say, "I have broken the law in such-and-such a way" and be arrested just for that is completely against everything our Bill of Rights stands for.
On the other hand, if you stood up and said, "I have murdered my next-door neighbor," a judge might consider that probable cause and issue a warrant to search your house. If the police find your neighbor's body, you're in for it.
But you couldn't be arrested-- or even detained beyond reason-- based solely on something you said on television.
Actually, it's worse than that - chromosomes don't say "make hair like this" - they say "make this protein", and that's -all- they say.
It's much worse than you think. This site codes for protein so-n-so. So does that one over there. But this here site codes for the suppression of that same protein.
There doesn't appear to be a simple correspondence between codons and protein expressions. Rather, it seems that the actual proteins that get expressed in the cell are the result of a complex interference pattern among the codons in the cell's genome.
This makes DNA fairly redundant-- quite a bit has to go wrong before the cell stops working altogether. Of course, proof against accidental changes (transcription errors or whatnot) is also proof against deliberate changes (gene therapy).
So it's a lot more complex than it appears at first glance.
in the case of the 15k, your talking up to 106 cpus, linux bogs down into a useless sludge past 8 or so
I'm not entirely sure that's always true. I can't find the URL right now, but I vividly remember some time ago reading that SGI had gotten the Linux kernel compiled for MIPS running, supposedly really well, on a 32-processor Origin 2000 system. I've tried google, groups.google.com, and archive.org with no luck. Maybe somebody can post a link so I don't look like a complete moron....
Good Thing AT&T doesn't do buisness in Louisiana....
Actually, I lived in Louisiana for 20 years. If I remember correctly, the oft-cited statute is really the Louisiana Oilfield Anti-Indemnity Act of 1981, La.Rev.Stat.Ann. 9:2780. Texas has a similar law.
Unless there's something I don't know, this law specifically prohibits indemnification from personal injury caused by negligence. It's not a broad prohibition against anti-indemnity clauses of any kind.
How long until "real" wireless internet is a reality? I mean not point-this-at-the-antenna-a-block-away, but real iridium-style satellite-driven internet? Those of us stuck on dialup in the middle of nowhere want to know!:)
A coworker of mine has a home on a lake someplace in Michigan; he nominally works out of our Detroit office, but I gather that his residence is fairly out in the sticks.
He has had a satellite Internet service for some time from a provider called StarBand. It's two-way satellite: incoming and outgoing packets both hit the bird, rather than sending outgoing packets over a POTS line.
Everything I know about the service I know secondhand; I've never even been to this guy's house. All I know firsthand is that, from a technical point of view, It Is A Piece Of Shit, And It Stinks. Typical ping times exceed 500 ms under the best of circumstances. Look:
PING 148.64.XXX.XXX (148.64.XXX.XXX) from 192.168.2.2 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=0 ttl=114 time=680.534 msec
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=669.960 msec
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=2 ttl=114 time=689.971 msec
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=3 ttl=114 time=709.969 msec
This makes sense, because every packet has to go to geosynchronous orbit or come back (a one-way trip of slightly over 1/10th of a second) four times: twice for the ping and twice for the return. So even with no latency of any kind, anywhere, there would still be a minimum round-trip time of about 470 msec.
Sure, he can surf the web. But his experience using our VPN is, to say the least, unpleasant. When we were first getting him set up with a home office, the joke making the rounds was that he should just write down the packets in hex and fax them to us so we could key 'em in manually. Take about as long. I mean, half-second lags between keypress and echoback in a telnet session! And that's the best case! Augh!
If only there were a way to do low-bandwidth, low-latency transmissions over terrestrial wired or wireless links, and use satellite links for the high-bandwidth bulk data transfers. Maybe split the TCP connection into control vs. payload, the way FTP does, and use QOS routing or something similar to discriminate between the two.
Anyway, until that or some similar solution to the latency problem becomes available, I won't be considering satellite-based Internet access for myself.
Totally depends on what state you're in. Deleware charges like $10 or something... half the more mysterious-looking junk mail I get has a DE return address because it's so cheap to register a corporation there.
This may be true, but it's not the only reason to incorporate in Delaware. My company's CFO keeps telling me that Delaware is very friendly to corporations from a tax point of view. Now that we're going international, it turns out the same thing holds for The Netherlands. We're setting up a holding company to do business (through subsidiaries) in the US and Australia, and the holding company is going to be incorporated in The Hague. Makes no sense to me, but the bean-counters tell me it's the right thing to do.
Why was this topical again? Oh, well. Easy karma, easy goma.
FINALLY, YOU AGREE TO DEFEND, INDEMNIFY, AND HOLD HARMLESS AT&T AND THIRD PARTIES WHO CONTRIBUTE TO THE AT&T WORLDNET HIGH SPEED SERVICE BLAH BLAH BLAH I'M SO STUFFY GIVE ME A SCONE
Believe it or not, this is completely typical stuff probably cut-and-pasted out of a boilerplate terms and conditions for commercial service document.
Any time you sign up for any kind of service, from telephone all the way up to managed technical support like my company sells, you're told in the sales contract that you're waiving your rights to sue in case something goes wrong. It's right up there with the "no warranty express or implied, including guarantee of merchantability or fitness of purpose" language that goes in every software license agreement.
It's the company's way of saying, "Just because we're providing you with this product or service, don't think we're accepting the full and permanent responsibility for any deranged misuses of our product or service that you might think of with your sick little mind."
So if you violate the AT&T terms and conditions and they shut off your connection, thereby costing you umpteen million boxtops in lost business from your work-from-home pyramid scheme web site, don't think you can run to your lawyer and claim damages.
On the other hand, if AT&T violates their end of the bargain in any way-- although I can't think of an example; those T&C documents are usually pretty well written-- you still have all those rights and privileges that flesh is heir to.
So don't get all huffy about these conditions. They're nothing new or unusual.
Okay, I'll brave the trolls and weigh in with my thoughts on this subject. What the heck.
I spent 1991-1997 as a graphic artist, and I did all my work on Macs: various versions of Illustrator, Photoshop, and Quark mostly, with brief excursions elsewhere, but always in the Mac way.
Since then, I've kept up the graphic arts stuff as a hobby, mostly, doing fill-in for my company's marketing department or mocking up user interfaces, stuff like that. I use Windows 2000 at work, and I do my software engineering with XEmacs under one flavor or another of Unix.
When I want to mock up a user interface, I fire up Illustrator on my iBook. Similarly, I did some quick-and-dirty marketing brochures for a last-minute event earlier this fall, and I did those in QuarkXPress on my iMac at home.
I wouldn't try to do office-type stuff-- spreadsheets or whatever-- with my Mac, even though Office v.X is very nice. Likewise, I wouldn't try developing software with Windows tools, even though lots and lots of people do.
And I have never had any success using Windows or Unix tools to do graphic arts. I've even tried Photoshop 3 on an SGI under IRIX; it was essentially the same application as Photoshop 3 for the Mac, but I couldn't find my way around it worth a damn.
See, the keyboard was the wrong shape, and the toolbars weren't exactly right, and it just felt wrong. I was so used to Photoshop on the Mac that the same program on another platform was virtually unusable for me.
I learned my lesson well, and I've applied it ever since. I choose the tools that work best for me for the job I'm trying to do, because I get the job done faster and better if I work that way. My desk at work has a PIII workstation under the desk with two graphics cards and two 21" monitors set for 1280x1024. I toggle back-and-forth between the Windows desktop and Exceed, which is showing me the IRIX desktop on my server in the lab. Beside this stuff I have my iBook, which, at work, I use exclusively for email.
Every task I do, I could do with different tools. I use the ones I use because they work well for me. If I sit down at somebody else's desk, I spend as much time fiddling around as I do actually working. God help them if they expect me to use a different OS, or a different editor, or a different email program than the one I'm most comfortable with. You'll hear me bitching all the way down the hall.
If you're comfortable using Freehand or QuarkXPress under Windows, keep using them. Don't change your tools unless you have a really compelling reason. For myself, I don't count "I hate Microsoft" as a compelling reason, so if that's your argument, don't bother.
This is just my opinion: use the tools that work best for you, and don't worry about anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
What does convincing the population have to do with whether it's a good idea to expand into space?
If you think you can colonize space all by yourself, then by all means, be my guest.
But otherwise, it's going to take a lot of money and labor and natural resources. You're going to need to get a lot of people to agree with you before you can even get started.
you're either a troll or a smoker of the good crack
;-)
If I'm a troll, I hope I'm the good kind. The kind that starts conversations. A hell of a lot better than that bozo who just posts long lists of numbers.
Now, as to your points. First of all, I'm not dismissing evolution at all. The mechanism by which successful organisms reproduce and pass their genes on to future generations is well documented, and makes perfect sense. Humanity as we know it today may very well have evolved from more primitive organisms.
But you should remember that evolution takes place over uncountable lengths of time. No human can truly grasp the span of a hundred thousand years, and yet in that time (according to the fossil record) our species has changed very little, in the gross biological sense. In order to see real differences in our ancestors, you have to go back thirty times that far.
These spans of time are utterly beyond comprehension. We can talk about them, and we can understand them in the literal sense, but we can't truly grasp them. Who knows what events took place during that time? Where were you when the foundations of the earth were laid?
The facts that we do have are these: according to the fossil record, humanity has existed in its present physical form for three million years, more or less. But sometime around 8,000-10,000 years ago, people started practicing agriculture. With that came settlements, which eventually grew into cities. Then it was like a big game of Civilization II for several thousand years, and then BOOM! Slashdot.
Why? Trying to answer that question puts you pretty firmly in Von Daniken territory.
Given this circumstance, why is it so hard to believe that there is something fundamentally different about humanity, something that we do not understand?
Once upon a time, diseases in the body were believed to be caused by devils. At another time, physical sickness was thought to be the result of one's state of mind-- melancholia, for example. Then came the germ theory, and a new idea of disease and sickness.
So now we contemplate our uniqueness. All around the world, in every culture, there exists the idea that humanity is divine, created somehow by a god or gods, some kind of primal motive force. The idea of the soul, of the divine spark, is common to all peoples in one form or another.
Personally, I don't believe in the soul. Personally, I don't believe in spiritual things or unseen deities. But I am willing to consider the possibility that the universal belief in the soul-- for every culture has such a belief, even if individuals may not share it personally-- might attempt to explain a real phenomenon.
How's that for trolling?
(And one more thing...lay off the sophomoric imagery, please. "Beautiful and terrifying in its complexity" proves nothing.)
Oh, you're just jealous.
You see, we have just a teeny-tiny iddy-bidy bit more complexity than say some of the earlier hominids - just enough, just a tad more, in order to think abstractly and create all this and this web site, etc.
If there were some way to quantify the differences between things, some sort of absolute vector between two items that could be established and measured, then we would see something like this:
The difference between a raven and a writing desk: huge. Birds are animate organisms that consume and excrete and reproduce. Furniture is a made thing, constructed out of other objects by a third party; it cannot reproduce.
Write all the differences down and add them up. Fair to say that, despite the fact that both are made from the same basic elements, birds and furniture are really, really different in very significant ways, no?
Likewise, people and elephants are really, really different. People play football. People commit murder. People enjoy books and songs and pornography. People argue about whether they are unique in the world. Elephants, apes, dolphins, mice, australopithecines, bacteria, furniture, mayonnaise, steam engines, candles, computers, shoes, ships, and sealing wax do none of these things.
The difference between human being and everything else is not small. It's incomprehensibly enormous.
I haven't the foggiest idea how humanity arose. And you don't either. It would be wise of you to remember that.
What you describe is nothing more than a model: a mental model of the universe that people have devised over the past 150 years or so. Remember that in recorded history, many models have been believed for a while and then discarded when they were proved wrong. In fact, if you draw it up numerically, you'll see that human beings are much more likely, statistically, to be totally wrong about nature and the universe than we are to be right.
It's very important, as we try to sort out how the world works, that we remember that we don't understand anything. All we have is conjecture that is more likely to be wrong than right. Remembering this keeps us humble.
What do my eyes tell me? That human beings are amazingly complex things. My girlfriend recently got her PhD in molecular genetics. She spent years studying the behavior of one specific set of bases in one specific chromosome. (It had to do with acetyl CoA synthetase, but that's all I know; everything else she talks about is beyond me.) If she chooses, she could make a lifetime's work out of studying that one invisible part of us.
But the same can be said for elm trees, or spider webs. Everything around us is beautiful and terrifying in its complexity.
And yet... through it all, humans are different. Humans argue about the nature of humanity, and as far as we know, that makes us unique in all the world. Why are we unique? Why was I born a person and not a goldfish? Am I a Chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams he is a Chinese philosopher?
I challenge anyone to behold the uniqueness of humanity and come out the other side saying that we're "just complex machines." To reduce us to those terms is to call a bird a complex rock; it denies everything that defines us, and it's foolish.
Look down, past the celular level, down to the molecular. We operate the same as any other matter in the universe, as far as we know. We are a series of chemical and physical reactions.
Of course you're correct. Technically. Literally. Deconstruction can be applied to anything, rendering it empty and meaningless.
At what point does "sound" become "music?" Bach's Air on a G-String is just a sequence of sounds, right?
The probable destruction of human civilization isn't a very good reason to start getting into space while we can?
(Probable?? Discussions of probability become meaningless when the event domain is expanded too far. It's the million-monkey problem. Given a million asteroids in random orbits and an infinite amount of time, one of those asteroids will hit the Earth. This means absolutely nothing.)
Exactly how much good will it do me to have a million people living on the moon? Not humanity in general, but me, personally.
This is the point of view through which most humans see the world: self-interest. It's not a moral thing-- not absolutely good or absolutely bad-- it's just the way things are.
Given the limited resources at our society's disposal, it's hard to convince the population as a whole that setting up homesteads on other planets is a better use of money, time, and raw materials than, say, curing heart disease.
So given the opportunity costs involved, no, the eventual possibility of the destruction of our planet is not a very good reason to get into space.
We don't even know everything about our own planet, much less the universe. Saying that we're unique in the very, very small part of the universe that is our experience proves nothing.
The thing about the unknown universe is that it's unknown. To even speculate about what's out there, in the face of an overwhelming lack of evidence, is folly.
You can talk all you want about what might be. It might be possible for Venus to be inhabited by seven-foot-tall beaver-people who communicate through flatulence; there may be nothing in the universe that prevents that from being the case. But that doesn't mean you should send probes to Venus with tags on them that say, "With love to the beaver people. Poot!"
Show me one piece of evidence-- evidence, not conjecture or speculation-- that another species like us exists in the universe. Just one.
I read as much science fiction as anybody I know. I love to think about the larger universe, and life on distant worlds, and all of that. But wishing doesn't make it so.
But the real bummer of it all is that I don't think we'll have a permanent, independent manned presence in space for at least the next thousand years. Why? Because such a group of people represents a greater threat to the U.S. (or any large, power-greedy government) than any other country on Earth.
I think you're missing the much simpler point: what advantage would come from having a permanent habitat in space? Science and abstract knowledge, yes, and practical knowledge of how to live and work in that environment, but what else?
Living in space is hard, orders of magnitude harder than setting up a settlement in an uninhabited place on Earth. So our reason for moving into space would have to be orders of magnitude better than our reasons for (for example) colonizing and populating North America in the 1500s.
The only compelling reason I can think of to set up settlements in space or on other worlds is the "all your eggs in one basket" problem. It is at least theoretically possible that a catastrophe could make our planet uninhabitable, and thereby wipe out our entire species. Setting up settlements on Mars (for example) would help guarantee that no catastrophe that wipes out our whole planet would wipe out our whole species. And even that argument appeals to an ethic-- survival of the species-- that most people find it hard to personalize.
Of course, even then we have the whole death-of-the-sun thing to worry about. So we should colonize planets around other stars. The we have to keep an eye on this fragile galaxy of ours-- one really big black hole at the whole thing is kaput! And, sooner than you realize, you're worrying about how to stop proton decay and fend off the eventual heat death of the universe, problems so far off that even talking about them requires scientific notation.
All in all, it just doesn't add up to a very good reason to spend a lot of effort on living in space.
The author claims that a being like HAL or the robot-kid in A.I. will never be possible? What crap be this? Why? We are just complex machines.
I disagree with your premise. Maybe it's sheer hubris, but I believe that people are more than "just complex machines." I have no proof for this. It is an article of faith, and though it's not based on religion, it's almost religious in its intensity.
Let's look at the evidence. Human beings are unique in the known universe: we alone among all creatures and constructs create art, technology, religion, and science. Fencepost cases like termites constructing their castles and chimps learning sign language just reinforce the evidence for a fundamental difference between humans and other creatures or things.
What evidence exists to indicate that we are "just complex machines?"
All in all, I think it's like saying that a bird is really just a complex rock.
Isn't it possible that your rewrite was better just because it was a 2nd draft? There's really no reason you can't define interfaces for Perl classes and share them among a group of developers, like you did with your C++ header files.
Yes, TMTOWTDI.
But I still think that C++ is my language of choice for big projects because it helps do some of the job of collaboration for me. If you, as a team member, don't implement the interface completely, your module won't compile. And if you change the interface, nobody else's modules will compile. So less time is spent doing module-level integration.
And C++ has a lot going for it in the preemptive bug-squashing arena, too, with strong typing at compile time and such.
But I didn't intend for this to be a "C++ is better than Perl" comment; as I said before, I love Perl. I just think C++ is more appropriate for some things than Perl is, and medium-and-larger programming is one of them.
FUCK YOU,YOU STUPID LACKY. I bet your just another sheep who thinks that things cant be changed.I call for real action.A bombing or two,maybe a couple of CRIMINALS such as presidents get killed..you know..the usual..
I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to... wait, no, never mind. You're just an asshole.
You might want to reconsider perl as the language of choice for a large scale application.
I agree 100%. My company started to bring a commercial application to market a little less than a year ago. I prototyped the code in Perl, and the prototype was sufficiently okay that the decision was made to evolve the prototype into the release code.
This was A Mistake. It was A Dumb Idea. It was also My Decision. I have taken Much Shit for this from my coworkers. But you live and you learn.
I have since (over the past four months or so) rewritten the entire application-- every line, every file-- in C++. The source tree is 3.8 MB, and it compiles to about 100 MB of object code. (The actual executables, of course, are much smaller than that.) It was a pretty big job.
Not only is my code tighter and cleaner than the original Perl stuff (which was actually pretty okay code) but it's between 2 and 10 times faster.
I love Perl, absolutely adore programming in it, but there are some things that are easier to do with C, or C++, or (presumably) Java. When you split a project up among a number of people, for example, using the Bridge design pattern and distributing read-only interface header files makes modular integration so very much easier. That's just one example.
We would not have been able to get our app to market without the Perl prototype. And I don't think it would have been worth a damn if we hadn't rewritten it in C++.
Sorry. The laws being passed recently, and the motivations behind them, make respect and honor quite difficult. And it's not at all clear that it's worth the effort.
Unless you want to contend that Robin Hood respected the laws of King John (he was careful not to get caught, so an argument could be made).
First of all, Robin Hood is fiction, and besides that the story predates the modern legalistic society.
'Round about the time of the American and French revolutions a shift took place in world politics. The absolute authority of monarchs began to be replaced by the absolute authority of The Law. I don't mean any one law specifically, but rather the idea that The Law, as a body of rules, is the highest authority.
This isn't a new idea; it's embedded pretty firmly in Judeo-Christian cultures going all the way back to the time of the Hebrews. In the pre-Christian era, The Law was handed down by Yahweh himself and was considered to be infallible. The coming of the Christian church in the first century AD brought the era of the Popes, which led in part to the medieval idea of the divine right of kings. Suddenly The Law was no longer an entity of itself, but rather simply an extension of the will of kings and queens and Popes who had a divine mandate to rule.
Philosophical shifts in the 17th century led to yet another change in this paradigm. John Locke refuted the divine right of kings pretty thoroughly in Two Treatises On Government; in these writings Locke first put forth the idea of the legitimacy of government through the consent of the governed. Locke took some of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes-- notably the concept of man in a state of nature and of moral law-- and extended them, attempting to apply them to the real world in a practical sense. Locke contended that, in an ideal world, Hobbes's ideas would hold sway, but that the real world is one of scarcity, and as such it is necessary for man to willingly delegate some of his natural moral authority to society in the name of greater good for all.
Then came the American Revolution (among other changes in the world at the end of the 18th century) and with it a political system never before seen in the world: one based on the very Lockian idea of political legitimacy and the consent of the people.
Inherent in this idea is the notion that we, as citizens, must respect the law of our land, for man in the natural state and man as a citizen of the society are incompatible ideas. In order for a government to stand, all of its members must uphold their end of Locke's social contract.
A lack of respect for The Law leads to anarchy and chaos. Perhaps the anarchy may come in a small way, and be hardly noticable at first, but eventually it will erode our society and lead us back to barbarism.
So I stand by my original opinion. Disagree with laws. Disobey when your conscience tells you that you must. But if you fail to respect the law, the only source of authority that our society allows, then you're destroying our country and our society as surely as if you did it with guns and bombs.
I am pretty sure statements made in public can be used against you in court.
Yes, anything you say can be used against you if the judge in the case believes it to be relevant. But you cannot be arrested on the weight of a statement alone.
I say ignore all unjust laws.
It is never appropriate to ignore a law. You can obey it, or you can lobby against it, or you can openly defy it, but you must never ignore it.
The strength of our society (by which I mean the modern judicial society in general, wherever in the world it is found) is based on the authority of the law. We consent to be bound by the authority of law, and in return we live in a prosperous, ordered society. If a law is unjust, you must fight-- within the system when possible-- to overturn it.
But ignoring a law, even an unjust law, trivializes The Law as a whole, which erodes the core pillar of our society.
Disagree or even disobey, but always respect and honor.
What's interesting about The Screen Savers is that almost on a daily basis, the entire cast of the show admits to/talks about breaking the DMCA.
It's important to understand that, in the US, statements made by an individual cannot be used as criminal evidence unless the individual has been duly arrested and informed of his Miranda rights, and been given the opportunity to seek the advice of legal counsel.
So the idea that a person might get up on television and say, "I have broken the law in such-and-such a way" and be arrested just for that is completely against everything our Bill of Rights stands for.
On the other hand, if you stood up and said, "I have murdered my next-door neighbor," a judge might consider that probable cause and issue a warrant to search your house. If the police find your neighbor's body, you're in for it.
But you couldn't be arrested-- or even detained beyond reason-- based solely on something you said on television.
Actually, it's worse than that - chromosomes don't say "make hair like this" - they say "make this protein", and that's -all- they say.
It's much worse than you think. This site codes for protein so-n-so. So does that one over there. But this here site codes for the suppression of that same protein.
There doesn't appear to be a simple correspondence between codons and protein expressions. Rather, it seems that the actual proteins that get expressed in the cell are the result of a complex interference pattern among the codons in the cell's genome.
This makes DNA fairly redundant-- quite a bit has to go wrong before the cell stops working altogether. Of course, proof against accidental changes (transcription errors or whatnot) is also proof against deliberate changes (gene therapy).
So it's a lot more complex than it appears at first glance.
in the case of the 15k, your talking up to 106 cpus, linux bogs down into a useless sludge past 8 or so
I'm not entirely sure that's always true. I can't find the URL right now, but I vividly remember some time ago reading that SGI had gotten the Linux kernel compiled for MIPS running, supposedly really well, on a 32-processor Origin 2000 system. I've tried google, groups.google.com, and archive.org with no luck. Maybe somebody can post a link so I don't look like a complete moron....
Good Thing AT&T doesn't do buisness in Louisiana....
Actually, I lived in Louisiana for 20 years. If I remember correctly, the oft-cited statute is really the Louisiana Oilfield Anti-Indemnity Act of 1981, La.Rev.Stat.Ann. 9:2780. Texas has a similar law.
Unless there's something I don't know, this law specifically prohibits indemnification from personal injury caused by negligence. It's not a broad prohibition against anti-indemnity clauses of any kind.
How long until "real" wireless internet is a reality? I mean not point-this-at-the-antenna-a-block-away, but real iridium-style satellite-driven internet? Those of us stuck on dialup in the middle of nowhere want to know! :)
A coworker of mine has a home on a lake someplace in Michigan; he nominally works out of our Detroit office, but I gather that his residence is fairly out in the sticks.
He has had a satellite Internet service for some time from a provider called StarBand. It's two-way satellite: incoming and outgoing packets both hit the bird, rather than sending outgoing packets over a POTS line.
Everything I know about the service I know secondhand; I've never even been to this guy's house. All I know firsthand is that, from a technical point of view, It Is A Piece Of Shit, And It Stinks. Typical ping times exceed 500 ms under the best of circumstances. Look:
PING 148.64.XXX.XXX (148.64.XXX.XXX) from 192.168.2.2 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=0 ttl=114 time=680.534 msec
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=669.960 msec
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=2 ttl=114 time=689.971 msec
64 bytes from 148.64.XXX.XXX: icmp_seq=3 ttl=114 time=709.969 msec
This makes sense, because every packet has to go to geosynchronous orbit or come back (a one-way trip of slightly over 1/10th of a second) four times: twice for the ping and twice for the return. So even with no latency of any kind, anywhere, there would still be a minimum round-trip time of about 470 msec.
Sure, he can surf the web. But his experience using our VPN is, to say the least, unpleasant. When we were first getting him set up with a home office, the joke making the rounds was that he should just write down the packets in hex and fax them to us so we could key 'em in manually. Take about as long. I mean, half-second lags between keypress and echoback in a telnet session! And that's the best case! Augh!
If only there were a way to do low-bandwidth, low-latency transmissions over terrestrial wired or wireless links, and use satellite links for the high-bandwidth bulk data transfers. Maybe split the TCP connection into control vs. payload, the way FTP does, and use QOS routing or something similar to discriminate between the two.
Anyway, until that or some similar solution to the latency problem becomes available, I won't be considering satellite-based Internet access for myself.
Woah. An AC post that was neither profane nor off-topic. Weird.
As for the Delaware thing, I'm sure you're right. I do not pretend to understand the ways of financial types; they are subtle and quick to anger.
I wonder, now, if that's the same reason our new venture is going to incorporate in The Netherlands.
Totally depends on what state you're in. Deleware charges like $10 or something... half the more mysterious-looking junk mail I get has a DE return address because it's so cheap to register a corporation there.
This may be true, but it's not the only reason to incorporate in Delaware. My company's CFO keeps telling me that Delaware is very friendly to corporations from a tax point of view. Now that we're going international, it turns out the same thing holds for The Netherlands. We're setting up a holding company to do business (through subsidiaries) in the US and Australia, and the holding company is going to be incorporated in The Hague. Makes no sense to me, but the bean-counters tell me it's the right thing to do.
Why was this topical again? Oh, well. Easy karma, easy goma.
FINALLY, YOU AGREE TO DEFEND, INDEMNIFY, AND HOLD HARMLESS AT&T AND THIRD PARTIES WHO CONTRIBUTE TO THE AT&T WORLDNET HIGH SPEED SERVICE BLAH BLAH BLAH I'M SO STUFFY GIVE ME A SCONE
Believe it or not, this is completely typical stuff probably cut-and-pasted out of a boilerplate terms and conditions for commercial service document.
Any time you sign up for any kind of service, from telephone all the way up to managed technical support like my company sells, you're told in the sales contract that you're waiving your rights to sue in case something goes wrong. It's right up there with the "no warranty express or implied, including guarantee of merchantability or fitness of purpose" language that goes in every software license agreement.
It's the company's way of saying, "Just because we're providing you with this product or service, don't think we're accepting the full and permanent responsibility for any deranged misuses of our product or service that you might think of with your sick little mind."
So if you violate the AT&T terms and conditions and they shut off your connection, thereby costing you umpteen million boxtops in lost business from your work-from-home pyramid scheme web site, don't think you can run to your lawyer and claim damages.
On the other hand, if AT&T violates their end of the bargain in any way-- although I can't think of an example; those T&C documents are usually pretty well written-- you still have all those rights and privileges that flesh is heir to.
So don't get all huffy about these conditions. They're nothing new or unusual.
Okay, I'll brave the trolls and weigh in with my thoughts on this subject. What the heck.
I spent 1991-1997 as a graphic artist, and I did all my work on Macs: various versions of Illustrator, Photoshop, and Quark mostly, with brief excursions elsewhere, but always in the Mac way.
Since then, I've kept up the graphic arts stuff as a hobby, mostly, doing fill-in for my company's marketing department or mocking up user interfaces, stuff like that. I use Windows 2000 at work, and I do my software engineering with XEmacs under one flavor or another of Unix.
When I want to mock up a user interface, I fire up Illustrator on my iBook. Similarly, I did some quick-and-dirty marketing brochures for a last-minute event earlier this fall, and I did those in QuarkXPress on my iMac at home.
I wouldn't try to do office-type stuff-- spreadsheets or whatever-- with my Mac, even though Office v.X is very nice. Likewise, I wouldn't try developing software with Windows tools, even though lots and lots of people do.
And I have never had any success using Windows or Unix tools to do graphic arts. I've even tried Photoshop 3 on an SGI under IRIX; it was essentially the same application as Photoshop 3 for the Mac, but I couldn't find my way around it worth a damn.
See, the keyboard was the wrong shape, and the toolbars weren't exactly right, and it just felt wrong. I was so used to Photoshop on the Mac that the same program on another platform was virtually unusable for me.
I learned my lesson well, and I've applied it ever since. I choose the tools that work best for me for the job I'm trying to do, because I get the job done faster and better if I work that way. My desk at work has a PIII workstation under the desk with two graphics cards and two 21" monitors set for 1280x1024. I toggle back-and-forth between the Windows desktop and Exceed, which is showing me the IRIX desktop on my server in the lab. Beside this stuff I have my iBook, which, at work, I use exclusively for email.
Every task I do, I could do with different tools. I use the ones I use because they work well for me. If I sit down at somebody else's desk, I spend as much time fiddling around as I do actually working. God help them if they expect me to use a different OS, or a different editor, or a different email program than the one I'm most comfortable with. You'll hear me bitching all the way down the hall.
If you're comfortable using Freehand or QuarkXPress under Windows, keep using them. Don't change your tools unless you have a really compelling reason. For myself, I don't count "I hate Microsoft" as a compelling reason, so if that's your argument, don't bother.
This is just my opinion: use the tools that work best for you, and don't worry about anything else.
I'm being a pedantic bastard, but according to webster it doesn't specifically mean that. Where are you getting your definition from?
From some remote sensing guys that I work with. I don't pretend to have all the jargon right, but I'm pretty sure about this one.