The point he was making is that predictions about the future which assume a linear progression of current trends are fraught with peril, because trends do not go in the same direction forever.
I understood the point he was making perfectly, and as I said, I agreed. The point I was making, and I admit that it's off-topic wrt the original story, is that I'm not comfortable with these examples being used, as they convey much more to the reader than just the notion that linear extrapolations are often incorrect. I was challenging the indirect implications of the examples so that the average person who read the thread wouldn't necessarily click away with thoughts in their head such as "yeah, AIDS isn't so bad" or "Gee, America better watch out".... When in fact most of Latin America HAS been swallowed up by the imperial power of the United States (a direct descendant of imperial Europe) as well as many Pacific island nations, and in fact AIDS is a worldwide crisis which cannot be measured by numbers with no context.
Of course I am expressing my political views, in response to political views expressed, intentionally or otherwise, by the post to which I am responding.
Did the European expansion throughout the world last forever? Did the AIDS pandemic kill billions?
I agree with your skepticism in general, but I think your choice of examples is pretty poor. European imperialism hasn't gone anywhere.. physical expansion has gone out of fashion, but cultural and economic expansion continue unabated. And while I don't know how many people have died of AIDS, it's certainly not something to belittle.
what a great idea! i've spent about $15 at B&N and $30 at fatbrain since I made the decision to boycott amazon -- i almost certainly would have spent that money at amazon otherwise.
it's frightening to think that people who don't know the difference between a sarcastic remark and a flame are moderating slashdot. this pretty well pisses me off.
I hope they enforce this licensing fee strictly, across the board... and as a result content providers scrap WAP and settle on standards like HTML, XML, TCP/IP... which means that I can see the same stuff with a browser, a handheld, or even a phucking phone if I pheel like it.
However if you wish to reach a large group of people - a webcast is far better, but remember in many areas of the world - people still have a standard 28.8 and cannot hear your broadcast (if this was not so, AOL wouldn't exist).
if you want to reach a large group of white people, then a webcast is certainly the way to go -- but remember that most people aren't connected to the internet.
People aren't acutally thinking about the locations they might be where the want music.
No, I'm not thinking about it; the places I mentioned are places I am using the service. I'm not worried about my boss, and I work on a Mac -- what does that mean, "no sound card"?
That last suggestion you had for a place where I might want to listen to music was very insightful -- that's exactly what I'm looking forward to, as soon as the bandwidth is available. I'm excited to be trying out one of the first services of it's kind and getting a feel for things to come. I just don't understand all the naysaying...
sir, you know not of what you speak. take a closer look, what myplay offers is quite different from my.mp3.com.
myplay requires you to upload your own mp3s.. mp3.com validates a CD you stick in, which takes around one moment, then makes mp3s of that CD available to you in both low- and high-bandwidth versions.
myplay limits you to 250Mb of storage -- maybe 80 songs, perhaps 4 hours worth of music. my.mp3.com may have a limit but i haven't found it yet. i would estimate that the CDs i have available to me from mp3.com take up approximately 2.5 gig -- for the high-bandwidth versions alone. that's 811 tracks, approx 48 hours worth of music.
additionally, my.mp3.com allows you to buy CDs from certain partners and have those CDs available instantly for online streaming, while the physical disc is in transit to your home.
I suppose this makes sense for people who have enough bandwith to listen to streaming mp3s, not enough CPU/disk space to encode their collection themselves, and not enough patience to change cds on their own. Somehow I don't think this is a very large segment of the population.
This also makes sense for people who have enough bandwidth at work to listen to streaming mp3s but not at home, and who don't own a CD burner to burn CDs of mp3s of their CDs. Especially for freelancers who don't have a machine at work they can call their own and load up with mp3s and other junk as they desire. Somehow I suspect this is not a very small segment of the population. I can also see myself using this when I travel.. when I visit my brother who has a cable modem, or friends at college, all my music is available to me.
I've only spent about a half hour on 3 separate occaisions 'beam-it-ing' CDs to mp3.com and already I've got 48 hrs worth of music available to me. Sure beats the hell out of encoding mp3s.
What I want to know is where did they get their mp3s? I imagine that from day one they've been having all their employees bring in every CD they own, or can beg, steal, or borrow, and encoding them all and storing them up for the day they were ready (legally, technically, whatever) to announce this service. Now that is an interesting strategy if you ask me. I'm not familiar with myplay.com but it sure seems that someone at mp3.com has got a bit of vision.
If they really open-source MacOS X it will mean even more monetary losses for the company.
I doubt it. If they open the source to OS X, they'll no doubt continue selling what will become the premier distribution of the operating system. 99%+ of their current operating system customers will want to buy the OS off the shelf rather than construct it on their own, and I'd bet a whole lot of linux and interested WinXX users will want to check it out too and will find it easier to drop $100 than to invest a couple of days of work to get it running. Looks like more sales, not less, to me.
word. that is a great list of improvements. i hope this stuff is being worked on, but i kind of doubt it. palm is going to look to MIS departments to drive their future development, as they try to create a huge market by convincing corporate america that every rank-and-file employee -needs- one of their own...
the icons at the top of the page are always 3-8 stories behind? Why is that? When I first saw it, I thought it was a temporary result of some changes, but now it's been there for a couple months.
I've been wondering what's up with that. It wasn't always like that, was it? I thought the first icon on the left used to represent the top story on the page...
What is to be gained by criticizing an article on how it fails to inspire you to join a debate? Clearly a lot of people who are posting have lots of thoughts on the matter of a Gattaca-style future and genetic engineering, etc.. But for some reason they'd rather fill their comments with nit picky attacks on how this article reaches a bit beyond its grasp and doesn't present the issue precisely how the poster would present it. A lot of posts are arguing that "scientists should go ahead." Wow. Great idea. Why didn't I think of that? Other posts flesh out the position to "scientists should go ahead, screw religion." Aha! Now we're getting somewhere. Please people, why do we insist on framing the debate in terms of whether this should happen? That's not at all the point. It is happening, and the question is precisely "how can we ensure that this technology is handled responsibly, for the benefit of all and not just a privileged powerful some or few."
Personally, I'm afraid that we cannot -- that capitalism doesn't allow morality to place checks on greed, and that to the extent that genetic engineering/profiling becomes profitable & useful to the transnat'l corporations, we are in for a hell of a ride.
Surely someone has some thoughts on the matter, which can be moderated higher than a stale joke and a lot of Katz bashing? Another poster related the Human Genome Project to the Open Source movement -- perhaps there's some good discussion going on over there. I certainly hope so.
On that note (but first this note: no more Gattaca content) it really disappoints me to see rabid anti-Katz sentiment get moderated up where it interferes with my desire to read thoughtful discussion of the issues Katz raises in this article. Nevermind how well it's written, nevermind whether Katz himself provides enough details and a complex enough analysis of the big picture -- in fact, that's what I read the comments hoping to find! Instead, posters who are usually quite thoughtful and articulate would rather tear apart an article written for a general audience as though it was written for their approval.. or something.
I don't know.
What I DO know is that those who complain that Katz dilutes the quality of the slashdot experience do no better when they post less than interesting/insightful diatribes at the sight of his byline.
What boggles my mind is how those who have accounts and proclaim all of his stuff to be drivel refuse to simply edit their preferences so they won't be presented with his articles.
To be clear, I'm not referring specifically to the post I'm replying to here.
Re:Ok, let me try this one...
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
To be quite honest, I don't think a "Gattaca" style future can ever be implemented, for two reasons: there are too many powerful people who would not be included in the "elite", and number two, we already have a discriminatory scale in place, that of money.
To your first point, remember that Hitler did not fit the blond blue eyed ideal that (as I understand it) he was attempting to engineer. To your second I would argue that money is not an effective tool for discrimination -- perhaps the second greatest achievement of capitalism is the ease with which money changes hands in the system, increasing (to a limited extent) class mobility. Witness the occaisonal person who receives public funds for education and successfully rises out of the situation they were born into to earn a wage significantly greater than their parents and peers, or for a clearer example, the lottery.
Gattaca is well on its way to becoming a reality. As soon as the tech is in place, every traffic stop will include a swab of the cheek for an instant genetic check. Police departments are already lobbying to get and deploy this stuff. Who is going to stop them? After all, the innocent have nothing to hide, correct?
Why was this moderated 'funny'?
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
the moderation system needs some work -- crap like this should not happen. i'm sure a dozen people have come across this post and said "that's not funny..." but none of them could do anything about this. i'd really like to see how the who-wants-to-be-a-millionare-the-audience-is-never -wrong effect works on slashdot.
Re:Vincent didn't murder the superior
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Vincent plans to voyage into space in only a few days if he can avoid the gene police, who are trying to track him through an eyelash he left behind on an office floor after a superior who discovered his secret is found dead.
Katz never said whether Vincent did or didn't commit the murder.
In working with a few hundred genes, would we create something that brings about the end of organic life as we know it on this planet?
Certainly not the end of organic life, but quite possibly the end as we know it, I suspect. I imagine that the earth as a complex system, Gaia or no Gaia, demonstrates quite a capacity for self-correction when faced with the odd catastrophic event -- but this happens in terms of geologic time, not human time. Note that all of recorded history is reflects something on the order of one minute if the earth has existed for one year. I'm probably remembering this wrong.. recorded history is probably several orders of magnitude shorter. Anyone know?
I remember something like this too.. I also remember upon further inspection that the process was flawed somehow, or at least so fundamentally different from the conditions under which life supposedly evolved that the experiment didn't demonstrate much of anything. I think.
Does being able to make working DNA necessarily mean that you can create a new organism?
Well that's the question, right? As I understand it, the experiment would involve assembling all of the necessary genes, putting them inside of something approximating a cell, or cell nucleus (forgive me... freshman biology is 10 yrs behind me) or whatever, and watching to see if the thing spontaneously starts 'working' in the presence of chemicals, compounds, nutrients that it would need to 'work,' i.e. 'live.' I think.
Has anyone ever agreed on what makes a better human being?
Western society has long held that white skin makes a better human being, and that a drop of black blood makes a negro. This perception has changed little in hundreds of years.
The car programs on US television reported on this feature weeks ago, complete with a demo. It is curious that it took so long to make it on to Slashdot, and given the non-timeliness, that it was posted here.
I'd imagine info on HUDs for automobiles will be timely for at least a few years to come, until they become utterly commonplace. Actually once they do become commonplace, they're sure to enter a never ending cycle of bug fixes and upgrades, and eventually change the nature of driving itself. Such news will always be timely to anyone who drives a car....
As for me, I don't watch so-called "car programs on US television," and I didn't see this story anywhere else. I'm glad it was on Slashdot no matter when.
Slashdot Mirror
What term do you think is more appropriate than 'African-American'?
I understood the point he was making perfectly, and as I said, I agreed. The point I was making, and I admit that it's off-topic wrt the original story, is that I'm not comfortable with these examples being used, as they convey much more to the reader than just the notion that linear extrapolations are often incorrect. I was challenging the indirect implications of the examples so that the average person who read the thread wouldn't necessarily click away with thoughts in their head such as "yeah, AIDS isn't so bad" or "Gee, America better watch out".... When in fact most of Latin America HAS been swallowed up by the imperial power of the United States (a direct descendant of imperial Europe) as well as many Pacific island nations, and in fact AIDS is a worldwide crisis which cannot be measured by numbers with no context.
Of course I am expressing my political views, in response to political views expressed, intentionally or otherwise, by the post to which I am responding.
I agree with your skepticism in general, but I think your choice of examples is pretty poor. European imperialism hasn't gone anywhere.. physical expansion has gone out of fashion, but cultural and economic expansion continue unabated. And while I don't know how many people have died of AIDS, it's certainly not something to belittle.
The worst scenario I can see is:
* Jon gets tried
* Jon gets aquitted because reverse engineering is legal.
* US trials note that the code was reverse engineered legally in Norway, therefor the "trade secret" is not a secret anymore.
The World Trade Organization strikes the Norwegian laws allowing reverse engineering preventing any future jeapordizing of trade secrets in this fashion. If you haven't been following the WTO, now might be the time to read up on them...
http://zmag.org/CrisesCurEvt s/Globalism/GlobalEcon.htm
http://www.indymedia.org/
what a great idea! i've spent about $15 at B&N and $30 at fatbrain since I made the decision to boycott amazon -- i almost certainly would have spent that money at amazon otherwise.
it's frightening to think that people who don't know the difference between a sarcastic remark and a flame are moderating slashdot. this pretty well pisses me off.
I hope they enforce this licensing fee strictly, across the board... and as a result content providers scrap WAP and settle on standards like HTML, XML, TCP/IP... which means that I can see the same stuff with a browser, a handheld, or even a phucking phone if I pheel like it.
if you want to reach a large group of white people, then a webcast is certainly the way to go -- but remember that most people aren't connected to the internet.
No, I'm not thinking about it; the places I mentioned are places I am using the service. I'm not worried about my boss, and I work on a Mac -- what does that mean, "no sound card"?
That last suggestion you had for a place where I might want to listen to music was very insightful -- that's exactly what I'm looking forward to, as soon as the bandwidth is available. I'm excited to be trying out one of the first services of it's kind and getting a feel for things to come. I just don't understand all the naysaying...
actually, there are quite a few differences which i point out in another /. comment.
sir, you know not of what you speak. take a closer look, what myplay offers is quite different from my.mp3.com.
not quite a carbon copy, if you ask me.
This also makes sense for people who have enough bandwidth at work to listen to streaming mp3s but not at home, and who don't own a CD burner to burn CDs of mp3s of their CDs. Especially for freelancers who don't have a machine at work they can call their own and load up with mp3s and other junk as they desire. Somehow I suspect this is not a very small segment of the population. I can also see myself using this when I travel.. when I visit my brother who has a cable modem, or friends at college, all my music is available to me.
I've only spent about a half hour on 3 separate occaisions 'beam-it-ing' CDs to mp3.com and already I've got 48 hrs worth of music available to me. Sure beats the hell out of encoding mp3s.
What I want to know is where did they get their mp3s? I imagine that from day one they've been having all their employees bring in every CD they own, or can beg, steal, or borrow, and encoding them all and storing them up for the day they were ready (legally, technically, whatever) to announce this service. Now that is an interesting strategy if you ask me. I'm not familiar with myplay.com but it sure seems that someone at mp3.com has got a bit of vision.
I doubt it. If they open the source to OS X, they'll no doubt continue selling what will become the premier distribution of the operating system. 99%+ of their current operating system customers will want to buy the OS off the shelf rather than construct it on their own, and I'd bet a whole lot of linux and interested WinXX users will want to check it out too and will find it easier to drop $100 than to invest a couple of days of work to get it running. Looks like more sales, not less, to me.
word. that is a great list of improvements. i hope this stuff is being worked on, but i kind of doubt it. palm is going to look to MIS departments to drive their future development, as they try to create a huge market by convincing corporate america that every rank-and-file employee -needs- one of their own...
the icons at the top of the page are always 3-8 stories behind? Why is that? When I first saw it, I thought it was a temporary result of some changes, but now it's been there for a couple months.
I've been wondering what's up with that. It wasn't always like that, was it? I thought the first icon on the left used to represent the top story on the page...
(1-888-573-8255)
doo-doo-doo, we're sorry... the phone system is slashdotted.. would you please hang up and try your call again later.
--or 'katz bashing & the nature of the debate'--
What is to be gained by criticizing an article on how it fails to inspire you to join a debate? Clearly a lot of people who are posting have lots of thoughts on the matter of a Gattaca-style future and genetic engineering, etc.. But for some reason they'd rather fill their comments with nit picky attacks on how this article reaches a bit beyond its grasp and doesn't present the issue precisely how the poster would present it. A lot of posts are arguing that "scientists should go ahead." Wow. Great idea. Why didn't I think of that? Other posts flesh out the position to "scientists should go ahead, screw religion." Aha! Now we're getting somewhere. Please people, why do we insist on framing the debate in terms of whether this should happen? That's not at all the point. It is happening, and the question is precisely "how can we ensure that this technology is handled responsibly, for the benefit of all and not just a privileged powerful some or few."
Personally, I'm afraid that we cannot -- that capitalism doesn't allow morality to place checks on greed, and that to the extent that genetic engineering/profiling becomes profitable & useful to the transnat'l corporations, we are in for a hell of a ride.
Surely someone has some thoughts on the matter, which can be moderated higher than a stale joke and a lot of Katz bashing? Another poster related the Human Genome Project to the Open Source movement -- perhaps there's some good discussion going on over there. I certainly hope so.
On that note (but first this note: no more Gattaca content) it really disappoints me to see rabid anti-Katz sentiment get moderated up where it interferes with my desire to read thoughtful discussion of the issues Katz raises in this article. Nevermind how well it's written, nevermind whether Katz himself provides enough details and a complex enough analysis of the big picture -- in fact, that's what I read the comments hoping to find! Instead, posters who are usually quite thoughtful and articulate would rather tear apart an article written for a general audience as though it was written for their approval.. or something.
I don't know.
What I DO know is that those who complain that Katz dilutes the quality of the slashdot experience do no better when they post less than interesting/insightful diatribes at the sight of his byline.
What boggles my mind is how those who have accounts and proclaim all of his stuff to be drivel refuse to simply edit their preferences so they won't be presented with his articles.
To be clear, I'm not referring specifically to the post I'm replying to here.
To your first point, remember that Hitler did not fit the blond blue eyed ideal that (as I understand it) he was attempting to engineer. To your second I would argue that money is not an effective tool for discrimination -- perhaps the second greatest achievement of capitalism is the ease with which money changes hands in the system, increasing (to a limited extent) class mobility. Witness the occaisonal person who receives public funds for education and successfully rises out of the situation they were born into to earn a wage significantly greater than their parents and peers, or for a clearer example, the lottery.
Gattaca is well on its way to becoming a reality. As soon as the tech is in place, every traffic stop will include a swab of the cheek for an instant genetic check. Police departments are already lobbying to get and deploy this stuff. Who is going to stop them? After all, the innocent have nothing to hide, correct?
the moderation system needs some work -- crap like this should not happen. i'm sure a dozen people have come across this post and said "that's not funny..." but none of them could do anything about this. i'd really like to see how the who-wants-to-be-a-millionare-the-audience-is-never -wrong effect works on slashdot.
Katz never said whether Vincent did or didn't commit the murder.
Certainly not the end of organic life, but quite possibly the end as we know it, I suspect. I imagine that the earth as a complex system, Gaia or no Gaia, demonstrates quite a capacity for self-correction when faced with the odd catastrophic event -- but this happens in terms of geologic time, not human time. Note that all of recorded history is reflects something on the order of one minute if the earth has existed for one year. I'm probably remembering this wrong.. recorded history is probably several orders of magnitude shorter. Anyone know?
I remember something like this too.. I also remember upon further inspection that the process was flawed somehow, or at least so fundamentally different from the conditions under which life supposedly evolved that the experiment didn't demonstrate much of anything. I think.
Well that's the question, right? As I understand it, the experiment would involve assembling all of the necessary genes, putting them inside of something approximating a cell, or cell nucleus (forgive me... freshman biology is 10 yrs behind me) or whatever, and watching to see if the thing spontaneously starts 'working' in the presence of chemicals, compounds, nutrients that it would need to 'work,' i.e. 'live.' I think.
Western society has long held that white skin makes a better human being, and that a drop of black blood makes a negro. This perception has changed little in hundreds of years.
I'd imagine info on HUDs for automobiles will be timely for at least a few years to come, until they become utterly commonplace. Actually once they do become commonplace, they're sure to enter a never ending cycle of bug fixes and upgrades, and eventually change the nature of driving itself. Such news will always be timely to anyone who drives a car....
As for me, I don't watch so-called "car programs on US television," and I didn't see this story anywhere else. I'm glad it was on Slashdot no matter when.