It takes alot less than a "little non-automatic rifle" to kill someone.
And it takes a lot more than a little non-automatic rifle to detonate an entire platoon of soldiers from thirty miles away. The US military could squash a people's revolt in a matter of days. With those weapons you'd have to resort to guerilla tactics (involving killing innocent civilians) in order to put up a non-laughable resistance.
But what you are proposing is the worse possible combination of totalitarianism and anarchy that is possible in a human society, one that offers neither stability, nor safety, nor freedom. You are setting up a situation in which the most powerful group rules by right of
military force (in the US this will be the Christian Right) and violence rather than law is the arbiter of disputes. No higher authority exists to protect an unpopular individual, the only rights you have are the ones you can defend, and if the majority doesn't like your beliefs or life-style then you are dead. If the local warlord decides he wants your daughter or your wife, your ability to protect them is limited to how many people are on your side. The most powerful members of this society will tend to be the most violent, and they will no longer have to answer to anyone for their actions.
I can't think of a single example in history of an armed rebellion against a domestic power resulting in more freedoms for the citizenry. Ever heard of the Taliban? Iran? The Soviet Union? Time and time again we see overwhelming evidence that an armed citizens' militia is more likely to rape your freedoms than any legitimate State. You cannot tell me that the right-wing membership of the NRA, given the opportunity, wouldn't trample my freedoms far more heinously than the US government.
Besides which this whole "Guns == Freedom" argument can only be an argument for legalizing fully automatic weapons, grenades, missile launchers, and tanks, not handguns and non-automatic rifles. I had this conversation with a friend of mine who is a career Marine. Though he is somewhat pro-2nd amendment, he readily admitted that the only problems our military would have with putting down a citizen's uprising would be moral in nature: they would have absolutely no difficulty squashing any significant resistance within a matter of days in terms of military power. In fact, the term "arms" as the founding fathers use it in the Constitution refers to no form of military technology in practical use today, but to single-shot muskets.
By this logic you should be legally allowed to obtain mines, missiles, tanks, and rocket-launchers. We might be going down a slippery slope to include nukes as well, but you get the point. The government is probably more restrained from intruding on your rights because of moral/ethical/social reasons than because of any actual fear of your little non-automatic rifle there.
Both Reagon and Bush lied to the people and abused their power in far more heinous and relevant ways than Clinton did.
Clinton's biggest flaw was the somewhat human and personal failing of cheating on his wife (Reagan also had an affair when he was Clinton's age). Bush perjured himself in front of the Senate during Iran-Contra by lying about his presence and involvement at key meetings (and then pardoned everyone who was scheduled to testify against him when he became president). Reagan and Bush both compromised our national security by selling guns to our sworn enemies, imported illegal drugs into our country, took actions that were specifically denied them by both the Constitution and the Congress, then lied to us about it when they got caught.
While this doesn't absolve Clinton by any means, I just get tired of the moral double-standard that I see Republicans applying to Clinton.
...that you have somewhat over-estimated the impact of the Green Revolution. Unlike the widespread adoption of innoculations, which has affected almost everyone on the planet, the Green Revolution was almost entirely restricted to developing nations. Farm yields have been steadily increasing throughout the century and there is no unusual increase in global crop yields during the 60's and 70's. And one of the big 'innovations' that led to the Green Revolution was convincing India to switch to wheat.
An innovation of the past 50 years is responsible for the existence of roughly one third of all humans who have ever lived in all of human history.
The Green Revolution wasn't an innovation, but the effect of an innovation. The technologies of the Borlaugian approach to agriculture were developed mostly during the 40's and 50's.
Any depth of knowledge as to the technological underpinnings of a society seems to have escaped the purview of a modern liberal arts education.
For some reason (techno elitism???) you are over-reacting to this article. While he certainly lapses on some points, the fundamental argument the guy is making, that technological advance over the past 50 years seems to be giving diminishing returns, is more or less right on.
Where would modern society be without the laser and the IC? Not to mention the incredible impact the previously unknown field of molecular biology is having on medicine as well as politics. The advances in the field of chemistry have been equally rapid. NMR, GC-MS, polymer science etc. have had a huge impact on modern life.
The author himself admits this in the article: those things have certainly had a huge impact on modern life. However, I think it's fairly non-contraversial that the measurable gross impact of all of the things you have mentioned taken together is still less than the measurable gross impact of just the internal combustion engine, penicillin, telephone, broadcast, and trans-continental flight.
Scientific advances come in the form of fabrics with undreamed of mechanical properties (Aramid etc), drugs that work at an extrodinary level of sophistication, instruments that can image the processes occurring in the body in 3D with molecular discrimination level without using damaging radiation, etc.
You have not shown any evidence that even a single one of the advances you have mentioned has fundamentally altered the daily life of the average individual. This is because for the most part they haven't fundamentally altered our lives. Not in the way that mechanical appliances, automobiles, and penicillin did.
the first world wide satellite television broadcast included the Beatles singing "All you need is Love".
I think it's fairly obvious that the transition from "broadcast" to "global broadcast" is not as society-changing as the transition from "no broadcast" to "broadcast."
Of all the articles I have seen posted on/. this has to be the biggest, stinkingest crock of all.
That is a massive and unfair over-reaction. A lot of people here seem to have misread this article, misinterpreting the author's argument, or reading sensationalist implications into it that the author never made, or making counter-arguments against it that the author himself mentioned in the damn article. This author openly admits the level of generality he is indulging in, has the decency to point out some exceptions to his generalizations, and provides backup evidence for his points (something YOU never did in most of your objections). Give the guy a break, by any objective measure it's a good and fairly correct article.
Likewise, the impact of today's inventions isn't going to be really felt for a long time; we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible once biotechnology and computing become ubiquitous.
I though he said this exact same thing in the article. A currently-emerging technology may eventually have a profound impact, but as of right now most of the innovation of the past 50 years has been largely redundant in any measurable sense.
How superficial the article is, you can see from its concluding remarks.
For such a superficial article (keep in mind it was intended for a popular audience) he already mentioned virtually every objection that I have heard voiced here on Slashdot. Give the guy a break, he doesn't really draw any definite lines in the sand but rather identifies a general trend. And he definitely has a point.
these will bring about changes at least as profound as agriculture or the industrial revolution. much greater than even public sanitation or electricity.
That's a speculation at this point, kind of like moonbases were back in 1960.
Agreed that the whole "end of history" thing is pretty dumb. Even if everything else stops changing, I assure you that fashions and cultures will not.
I don't even see a specific objective or subjective qualitative or quantitative argument made here.
While gross statements like "the wheel had more impact than the transistor" are pretty unwieldy, it seemed like the original article did a pretty good job of identifying some specific, objective measures for the "impact" of technology (lifespan, etc). In terms of subjective measures, the "time-travelling Ozzy and Harriet" was a pretty good hypothetical situation, and I feel he is absolutely correct about it: Ozzy and Harriet would feel much more out of place in 1900 than in 2000.
It is not THAT difficult to compare the essentially arbitrary innovations the average individual has been exposed to in the last 30 years and the radically new innovations that were occuring between 1900-1930. He admits that current technological innovations may, in the future, radically change society. He admits that there are a few exceptions to the trend (GA grains, the Pill, etc). The guy even uses the oft-misquoted "average lifespan" statistic correctly. It's a solidly-argued, statistically well-informed case that this guy is making here. I don't see how you could reasonably disagree, for the time being it looks like he's right.
Hundreds of millions of people have been saved by technology. Look in any hospital: would it be there without computers? Probably. Would it be even 5% as efficient? Absolutely not.
The statistics quoted in the article were attempting to make the case that the 95% efficiency gains in the hospital's work probably only resulted in a 5% improvement in your lifespan. That was the whole point of the article. Not "Technology is slowing down" but "Technological improvement is giving diminishing returns to the average human being."
He's got a pretty decent argument, it seems to me.
. Paying to get past this bottlneck between the artist and their (potential) fans is one of the things that putting your music on the Internet eliminates.
Except that it doesn't eliminate it, it just puts it into the hands of the people who control Internet content rather than radio content.
More to the point, what law are they going to be able to pass to prevent the inevitable?
This actually is a solid point that you make: Theoretically I believe in gun control, in practice I know better. Same thing with copying, and I'm not sure what the solution is here. Gotta run.
Most authors and composers have a day job, a relatively small number make enough money at it to make it their full-time profession.
"Most people who play basketball do it in their spare time. Therefore, if we abolished the NBA, the quality of basketball players overall would not be affected. Michael Jordan would be just as good a player if he was only able to practice in his free time, between waiting tables for a living."
I thought Ani made most of her money off of her album sales, not her live shows. She plays some pretty small venues. And the only reason I bought a ticket for one of her live shows was because I had heard her records.
Courtney Love fails to mention that no one would have bought a ticket for her show if they hadn't heard it on the radio first.
A much better fix for this problem would be to make it illegal to patent a naturally-ocurring product like the Arabica bean (this is probably going to end up happening, btw). Citing this type of IP *abuse* as evidence for throwing out the whole system is like trying to ban computer programs because they sometimes have bugs.
If the man who had first created the wheel refused to let other people use it or know of it,
Would he have created the wheel in the first place if there was not some material incentive for doing so?
If fact, this is the right time to know how many musicians actually do it for the love of music, and how many for fame and glory
The "fame and glory" motivation is the only thing that gets them to perform in front of the rest of us. Otherwise they'd be jamming in their room, which does those of us who would like to hear some music no good.
but it is the work of programmers who did it for the sheer love of it rather than for money that has got computing to where it is today.
It seems to me that if you take out the influence of material compensation for researchers we wouldn't even have computers today, much less the people who program them.
The greatest talents......have never needed money to motivate them to create.
The earliest artwork made by human beings, all those cave drawings, were made for the explicit purpose of gaining material wealth by influencing magical forces. The first written language, the first numbers that appear in history, were for tax purposes. I'm going to guess that it's a mathematical necessity that you must have a fairly abundant material comfort before any serious full-time artwork gets done. Ironically, you cite Lady Lovelace, an independantly wealthy aristocrat, as evidence that monetary compensation is not needed for quality intellectual work! In the meantime Shakespeare, Beethoven, and most of those Renaissance cats were workin' mainly to put food on the table and not just for the sheer love of creation.
The best programmers today are no different; they would be hacking away whether someone was paying them to or not.
1) Those 10 hours a day spent programming professionally now becomes two hours in my spare time at the end of the night after working 10 hours at a car wash. For those with families, programming becomes
"something I did when I was a kid." 2) The only things that get programmed would tend to be the things geeks enjoyed programming, rather than the not-fun-to-make-but-necessary tools that non-computerati can't make for themselves.
These kids are actually getting to learn computer languages in school??? I never got that when I was a kid, I had to learn entirely on my own, aided by a cryptic book and endless frustrating hours of trial-and-error guesses. I used MSDOS for years, my first language was MS_BASIC. And it did not make me a Microsoft zealot, it just made me computer literate.
While we're on the subject, I knew how to program before I went to school, but I did not learn how to be a "good" programmer until I went to college. Your experience may differ.
Does a lawyer really work 70 hours a week because the latest model mercedes is so much more comfortable - of course not. The only reason he cares that he's driving the latest model mercedes is the status it affords him in his brain-damaged world.
Actually, he probably works 70 hrs a week so that he can provide for himself and his family. (and before you start pasting me as apple pie naive, keep in mind that I actually know a few lawyers) And most of them can't afford to buy the newest model Mercedes any old time they want anymore than you can....
If everyone on the planet had access to *all* information on the planet everyone would be better off.
Exactly how would everyone be better off? Sounds to me like everyone would just be scared.
Capitalism is a good system for optimal distribution of scare resources but people are too stupid to notice when the model is no longer valid.
You can conjure up material goods out of the vacuum and teleport them instantaneously across the planet without anyone having to work or think to get any of it done?
grettaeb is right: this is crackpot BS
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
...it is highly suspicious that this guy is claiming to have proven that P = NP. That is an extremely radical claim that defies all prior experience and would turn the entire field of computer science on its ear, not just in theory but in practice.
100% of the evidence available at this time points to the conclusion that P does NOT equal NP, and most every CS would tell you that they intuitively believe that P != NP. We just haven't been able to mathematically prove that this is the case.
If this guy was claiming to have proven that P does NOT equal NP I might be interested in reading what he has to say. But since he is claiming that P = NP, I can say, without even looking at his argument, that a mistake has almost certainly been made somewhere.
Complexity theory deals with measurements of time and space required by computational processes, establishing the intracability of a solution, that whole NP-complete, NP-hard thing. The basic question it is trying to answer is "Why are some types of problems easy to compute an answer for and other types of problems hard?"
It is definitely, absolutely NOT chaos theory, which I've never formally studied but which I'm given to understand involves order spontaneously emerging out of disorder. Two totally different things from what I understand....
Slashdot Mirror
And it takes a lot more than a little non-automatic rifle to detonate an entire platoon of soldiers from thirty miles away. The US military could squash a people's revolt in a matter of days. With those weapons you'd have to resort to guerilla tactics (involving killing innocent civilians) in order to put up a non-laughable resistance.
But what you are proposing is the worse possible combination of totalitarianism and anarchy that is possible in a human society, one that offers neither stability, nor safety, nor freedom. You are setting up a situation in which the most powerful group rules by right of military force (in the US this will be the Christian Right) and violence rather than law is the arbiter of disputes. No higher authority exists to protect an unpopular individual, the only rights you have are the ones you can defend, and if the majority doesn't like your beliefs or life-style then you are dead. If the local warlord decides he wants your daughter or your wife, your ability to protect them is limited to how many people are on your side. The most powerful members of this society will tend to be the most violent, and they will no longer have to answer to anyone for their actions.
Please show some real-world statistical evidence to back up this rhetorical statement.
Besides which this whole "Guns == Freedom" argument can only be an argument for legalizing fully automatic weapons, grenades, missile launchers, and tanks, not handguns and non-automatic rifles. I had this conversation with a friend of mine who is a career Marine. Though he is somewhat pro-2nd amendment, he readily admitted that the only problems our military would have with putting down a citizen's uprising would be moral in nature: they would have absolutely no difficulty squashing any significant resistance within a matter of days in terms of military power. In fact, the term "arms" as the founding fathers use it in the Constitution refers to no form of military technology in practical use today, but to single-shot muskets.
By this logic you should be legally allowed to obtain mines, missiles, tanks, and rocket-launchers. We might be going down a slippery slope to include nukes as well, but you get the point. The government is probably more restrained from intruding on your rights because of moral/ethical/social reasons than because of any actual fear of your little non-automatic rifle there.
Clinton's biggest flaw was the somewhat human and personal failing of cheating on his wife (Reagan also had an affair when he was Clinton's age). Bush perjured himself in front of the Senate during Iran-Contra by lying about his presence and involvement at key meetings (and then pardoned everyone who was scheduled to testify against him when he became president). Reagan and Bush both compromised our national security by selling guns to our sworn enemies, imported illegal drugs into our country, took actions that were specifically denied them by both the Constitution and the Congress, then lied to us about it when they got caught.
While this doesn't absolve Clinton by any means, I just get tired of the moral double-standard that I see Republicans applying to Clinton.
The Green Revolution wasn't an innovation, but the effect of an innovation. The technologies of the Borlaugian approach to agriculture were developed mostly during the 40's and 50's.
For some reason (techno elitism???) you are over-reacting to this article. While he certainly lapses on some points, the fundamental argument the guy is making, that technological advance over the past 50 years seems to be giving diminishing returns, is more or less right on.
Where would modern society be without the laser and the IC? Not to mention the incredible impact the previously unknown field of molecular biology is having on medicine as well as politics. The advances in the field of chemistry have been equally rapid. NMR, GC-MS, polymer science etc. have had a huge impact on modern life.
The author himself admits this in the article: those things have certainly had a huge impact on modern life. However, I think it's fairly non-contraversial that the measurable gross impact of all of the things you have mentioned taken together is still less than the measurable gross impact of just the internal combustion engine, penicillin, telephone, broadcast, and trans-continental flight.
Scientific advances come in the form of fabrics with undreamed of mechanical properties (Aramid etc), drugs that work at an extrodinary level of sophistication, instruments that can image the processes occurring in the body in 3D with molecular discrimination level without using damaging radiation, etc.
You have not shown any evidence that even a single one of the advances you have mentioned has fundamentally altered the daily life of the average individual. This is because for the most part they haven't fundamentally altered our lives. Not in the way that mechanical appliances, automobiles, and penicillin did.
the first world wide satellite television broadcast included the Beatles singing "All you need is Love".
I think it's fairly obvious that the transition from "broadcast" to "global broadcast" is not as society-changing as the transition from "no broadcast" to "broadcast."
Of all the articles I have seen posted on /. this has to be the biggest, stinkingest crock of all.
That is a massive and unfair over-reaction. A lot of people here seem to have misread this article, misinterpreting the author's argument, or reading sensationalist implications into it that the author never made, or making counter-arguments against it that the author himself mentioned in the damn article. This author openly admits the level of generality he is indulging in, has the decency to point out some exceptions to his generalizations, and provides backup evidence for his points (something YOU never did in most of your objections). Give the guy a break, by any objective measure it's a good and fairly correct article.
I though he said this exact same thing in the article. A currently-emerging technology may eventually have a profound impact, but as of right now most of the innovation of the past 50 years has been largely redundant in any measurable sense.
How superficial the article is, you can see from its concluding remarks.
For such a superficial article (keep in mind it was intended for a popular audience) he already mentioned virtually every objection that I have heard voiced here on Slashdot. Give the guy a break, he doesn't really draw any definite lines in the sand but rather identifies a general trend. And he definitely has a point.
That's a speculation at this point, kind of like moonbases were back in 1960.
I don't even see a specific objective or subjective qualitative or quantitative argument made here.
While gross statements like "the wheel had more impact than the transistor" are pretty unwieldy, it seemed like the original article did a pretty good job of identifying some specific, objective measures for the "impact" of technology (lifespan, etc). In terms of subjective measures, the "time-travelling Ozzy and Harriet" was a pretty good hypothetical situation, and I feel he is absolutely correct about it: Ozzy and Harriet would feel much more out of place in 1900 than in 2000.
It is not THAT difficult to compare the essentially arbitrary innovations the average individual has been exposed to in the last 30 years and the radically new innovations that were occuring between 1900-1930. He admits that current technological innovations may, in the future, radically change society. He admits that there are a few exceptions to the trend (GA grains, the Pill, etc). The guy even uses the oft-misquoted "average lifespan" statistic correctly. It's a solidly-argued, statistically well-informed case that this guy is making here. I don't see how you could reasonably disagree, for the time being it looks like he's right.
The statistics quoted in the article were attempting to make the case that the 95% efficiency gains in the hospital's work probably only resulted in a 5% improvement in your lifespan. That was the whole point of the article. Not "Technology is slowing down" but "Technological improvement is giving diminishing returns to the average human being."
He's got a pretty decent argument, it seems to me.
Except that it doesn't eliminate it, it just puts it into the hands of the people who control Internet content rather than radio content.
More to the point, what law are they going to be able to pass to prevent the inevitable?
This actually is a solid point that you make: Theoretically I believe in gun control, in practice I know better. Same thing with copying, and I'm not sure what the solution is here. Gotta run.
"Most people who play basketball do it in their spare time. Therefore, if we abolished the NBA, the quality of basketball players overall would not be affected. Michael Jordan would be just as good a player if he was only able to practice in his free time, between waiting tables for a living."
Courtney Love fails to mention that no one would have bought a ticket for her show if they hadn't heard it on the radio first.
A much better fix for this problem would be to make it illegal to patent a naturally-ocurring product like the Arabica bean (this is probably going to end up happening, btw). Citing this type of IP *abuse* as evidence for throwing out the whole system is like trying to ban computer programs because they sometimes have bugs.
If we threw out every seemingly simple task that has been complicated by the presence of lawyers and intricate laws, would anything be left????
Would he have created the wheel in the first place if there was not some material incentive for doing so?
If fact, this is the right time to know how many musicians actually do it for the love of music, and how many for fame and glory
The "fame and glory" motivation is the only thing that gets them to perform in front of the rest of us. Otherwise they'd be jamming in their room, which does those of us who would like to hear some music no good.
but it is the work of programmers who did it for the sheer love of it rather than for money that has got computing to where it is today.
It seems to me that if you take out the influence of material compensation for researchers we wouldn't even have computers today, much less the people who program them.
The earliest artwork made by human beings, all those cave drawings, were made for the explicit purpose of gaining material wealth by influencing magical forces. The first written language, the first numbers that appear in history, were for tax purposes. I'm going to guess that it's a mathematical necessity that you must have a fairly abundant material comfort before any serious full-time artwork gets done. Ironically, you cite Lady Lovelace, an independantly wealthy aristocrat, as evidence that monetary compensation is not needed for quality intellectual work! In the meantime Shakespeare, Beethoven, and most of those Renaissance cats were workin' mainly to put food on the table and not just for the sheer love of creation.
The best programmers today are no different; they would be hacking away whether someone was paying them to or not.
1) Those 10 hours a day spent programming professionally now becomes two hours in my spare time at the end of the night after working 10 hours at a car wash. For those with families, programming becomes "something I did when I was a kid." 2) The only things that get programmed would tend to be the things geeks enjoyed programming, rather than the not-fun-to-make-but-necessary tools that non-computerati can't make for themselves.
If we had the tech to build such a robot, would we pretty much have the tech to defend against it???
While we're on the subject, I knew how to program before I went to school, but I did not learn how to be a "good" programmer until I went to college. Your experience may differ.
Actually, he probably works 70 hrs a week so that he can provide for himself and his family. (and before you start pasting me as apple pie naive, keep in mind that I actually know a few lawyers) And most of them can't afford to buy the newest model Mercedes any old time they want anymore than you can....
If everyone on the planet had access to *all* information on the planet everyone would be better off.
Exactly how would everyone be better off? Sounds to me like everyone would just be scared.
Capitalism is a good system for optimal distribution of scare resources but people are too stupid to notice when the model is no longer valid.
You can conjure up material goods out of the vacuum and teleport them instantaneously across the planet without anyone having to work or think to get any of it done?
100% of the evidence available at this time points to the conclusion that P does NOT equal NP, and most every CS would tell you that they intuitively believe that P != NP. We just haven't been able to mathematically prove that this is the case.
If this guy was claiming to have proven that P does NOT equal NP I might be interested in reading what he has to say. But since he is claiming that P = NP, I can say, without even looking at his argument, that a mistake has almost certainly been made somewhere.
It is definitely, absolutely NOT chaos theory, which I've never formally studied but which I'm given to understand involves order spontaneously emerging out of disorder. Two totally different things from what I understand....