Wow. On slashdot, of all places. "You're right", finding its way into a discussion.
Good work.
I sort of took your comment as an excuse to fire off a reply to the line of reasoning I've heard used by a lot of people.
I know how easy that is... you start covering the same ground explaining something to people so often that you start to get the same conceptual map of each discussion....
Good argument, magnanimous "You're right". I'm probably adding more noise than signal to this discussion, but I'm impressed.
And how are those of us with jobs, families and a mortgage supposed to do this?
That's an excellent question, and I think it's near one heart of the problem.
Some people out there have no spare time at all. They are forced, by necessity, to spend all their time working to keep a roof up and food on the table.
But I think a fair number of us simply choose not to leave any time to participate in public affairs. And if you're interested in being an activist, you have to get your own life under enough control that you have 2 to n hours per week to work on it. That's step one.
Our friend keeps saying there needs to be a way to let YOU decide
what gets opened with what by default. A program that will let you
map a file type to whatever application you wish.
So someone should write this program. Make it freely downloadable.
License it freely to third party software developers who realize this
is one of the best things they can include with their program to insure they aren't steamrollered by Windows. Heck, write your own version of Code Red that installs this program on every machine it encounters. Or release a report that tells IT departments how much they can save in terms of time or TCO if they'll just deploy this in their organization (see, there's default installs, and there's default installs).
Sometimes I've wondered if it would be possible to seriously combat how microsoft does their dirty work by setting up a website to the effect of "http://www.betterthandefaultinstall.com". Tips, tools, and free software for the user who wants to get the most out of their computer! This app could go on it....
Stop misrepresenting the netcraft numbers, you mental midget. Apache runs 60% of *sites*
I'm fully aware of this (o thou relative mental giant)... along with the parallel fact that as a percentage of machines, MS has 50%, and Linux is much lower.
Still, it says something about *mindshare*. Apparently, that 60% of people prefer to run their sites off apache. A certain number, of course, don't care what's run, or don't know, but I'm going to assume that percentagewise, those numbers are probably same. So the proportion would still be equal. MS's claim of leadership is still quite tenuous.
The interesting thing is: they're not the leaders. Not in Web servers. You saw the Netcraft survey results a few days ago. Apache 60% or so, IIS holds about half that. Half.
Excellent spin, to imply that the reason for all the vicious attacks is market leadership. But they don't have it, and that isn't the reason.
Can you say "cowardice"? Can you say "stupid moderator"? "Overatted" is what you do with someone elses post if they've been modded up
undeservedly.... not what you give to a plain
ol' post -- an a cogently written one at that.
If you think I'm wrong, hit post. Don't just
mod down.
The guys who wrote Nimda and Sircam have caused a lot of frustration and lost time, I'll grant, but in some ways, they've accomplished something that neither evangelism, nor PR group, nor Marketroid has been able to do.
Think about it. Nimda got Gartner to admit that IIS should be dumped.
After years and years of virus attacks that demonstrate the shoddy default config of MS software (and possibly, the shoddiness of the software itself, depending on who you ask), one dimension of the cost of just using what everyone else uses (despite any demonstration of merits) has been soundly demonstrated.
Most of the time, I think people here on Slashdot who hate Katz hate him because he's preaching to the choir: he wraps up Slashdotish ideas in mainstream journalistic prose, and those of us who can't stand being told what we think we already know (especially in the rhetoric of modern journalism) make fun of him and try to rip him to shreds.
Today he presented a viewpoint that was his own and probably different from the majority of slashdotters. That's the first brave part of
Katz's article. The second brave part is that he's essentially telling people -- even us intelligent tech-savy geeks who tend to think we have it all figured out -- that we too need to not simply give our usual knee jerk reactions to the situation. Yes, calling for increased eavesdropping powers and mandatory backdoors for encryption are knee-jerk reactions. But rather than jerking back, we need to education and also seriously consider what we CAN do for greater security.
Yeah, I've heard the quote: if you trade freedom for security, you'll have neither. It's partially true. But it's shallow as a complete policy guide.
It's worth some measure of hassle and even loss of privacy if we really can make society safer. Giving up a bit of convenience and privacy is not the same thing as losing freedom. I think that's what Jon's asking us to consider. That doesn't mean that we put up with patently stupid ideas like mandatory backdoors in all encryption, which likely won't help us at all, but it DOES mean that we need to seriously consider possibilities for increasing the governments capacity to watch people at the same time as putting in checks for abuse.
We need HUMAN intelligence more than more tech
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 2
My opinion is that we're vulnerable to terrorist attacks because of two things:
1) We invested too much in technology and not enough in human intelligence
2) We're strong enough in a conventional military sense there's no way for anyone to attack us that way, so we got complacent...
We're wary now, but it's interesting how much of the talk is centered around technical intelligence again. It's like we can't get over our own obsession with technology. I can agree that some measure of surveillance tech can help analysts do their work better, but my bet is that the real beef we need in law enforcement and intelligence is more and better human informants and analysts. Write your congressmen and encourage them to invest in that.
As for #2... well, it will take some doing, but the US and the world will likely start thinking more closely about what needs to be done to protect civil targets in these kind of situations, and how to affect the cultural change necessary to eliminate terrorism.
Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I barely know where to begin when I read crap like this. The simple truth is that people hate us because we're the biggest kid on the block.
yes, they care about individual policy decisions, but there isn't a nation on earth that doesn't make the exact same decisions every day. WE're criticized for butting our noses into foreign affairs, then criticized for being isolationist if we DON'T get involved in foreign affairs.
There's some degree of truth to your statement -- not all the reasons america is disliked are legitimate, and the prettiest girl at the party metaphor was great. We've done some great things in the world.
But indications are that we've been responsible for some pretty terrible things at times in our nations history. We've supported and trained regimes who've used terrorism and torture because it suited us. Israel is a prime example. Several central american governements are an example.
There's a book called "What Uncle Sam Really Wants" by Noam Chomsky with some details. I'm still trying to figure out how much of it to swallow, but he paints a grim picture, and if even a fraction of it is true, we have a lot to own up to here in the US.
That said, attacking such a large civilian target as the WTC in peacetime is unprecedented and completely wrong. The people who did/would do that need to be fought.
There's a book I've been reading by Humphrey Carpenter called The Inklings... it's about the association between Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams andd others. Fascinating stuff... sort
of a quasi-biography of all three and the confluence of their lives. Carpenter also wrote
a whole bio of Tolkein and collected a book of
his personal letters, both of which I've read bits of and are pretty good.
Warning: it's a different experience than reading
Tolkein's fiction. Tolkein spins grand myths; these are biographical.
There's a review here of the "Logical Journey of the Zoombinis", which is supposed to be one of the better puzzle games out there. Of course, it's created for 8-12 year olds, but depending on the developmental level of your charges, it might still be appropriate.
"Who would you listen to, the richest man in the world, or just another Mexican?"
That's really the question here. It will tell us whether Fox is much like his opportunist counterparts here in the United States, or whether he really analyzes the situation.
Not that there can't be a few arguments for windows; however, to me, the arguments for an open source solution, especially in the public sector, are compelling.
Is he somehow related to Roger Penrose, author of "The Emperors New Mind"?
Ooops. That's who I meant. I accidently got him mixed up with a Mormon Musician. Fortunately, it wasn't my fault, since I don't have free will. Whew.:)
I woudn't say we have no idea what consciousness is, there's been research on it.
There's been research on a number of things that we still haven't a clue about.
I haven't seen anything I was thought was truly convincing advanced about consciousness yet. I like Charles Penrose's theories a little bit, because they're just different and wacky enough to go what seems like a wacky phenomenon. I'm well aware that there are many who consider him a quack. Though I don't see any competing theories offering a compelling argument.
Finally, I'm not aware of any experiments that could be designed to effectively test consciousness -- for any of the theories I've seen. The Turing Test is the most frequently advanced, but as I said above, it's a cop out.
A fairly popular one is that we actually don't make any decisions (we have no real free will), our consciousness is just an interpretation of physical events in our brain, so that we PERCEIVE free will.
So what's behind the phenomenon of perception?
What's perceiving the free will?
I'll take the illusion of free will as readily as I'll take the illusion of consciousness.:) Maybe Descartes would too.
The turing test is being passed by thousands of human beings today that couldn't possibly enslave the human race.:)
Furthermore, it's hard not to be skeptical about the Turing test. I have no doubt that with enough processing power and engineering efforts, someone can design a machine that effectively fools human beings into thinking it is one.
However, the simulation of conversation isn't anywhere near a test of consciousness or ability to have "insights". Even after being fooled by a totally Turing Compliant (TM) conversation machine, I'd have to wonder: was conversation effectively simulated because AI researchers doped the machine with enough domain specific knowledge and specialized algorithms? Or was there some basic technology that led it to acquire language on its own?
Think of it this way: after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, if Kasparov had challenged Deep Blue to fencing or a pistol duel, or even Othello, Deep Blue would likely have been toast without a few years of research.
I've looked into the Tel Aviv thing, and it's intruiging, but even HALs motivations are only arbitrarily set algorithms -- not consciousness. Not that we have any idea what consciousness is, so maybe my statement is premature.:) But the point of the Turing Test is not so much to define a benchmark for consciousness as it is to skirt the problem that we're not even sure that consciousness are an observable phenomenon.
That's an interesting idea.... would municipalities then connect into the telco backbones? Or would the county create its own backbone(s), and those would connect to the state backbone(s), and then to nationwide backbones.....
The other problem.... I think in general that having public networks for ANY vital utility (and then letting lots of companies compete to provide services via that network) is a wise thing. I'm just not sure how the networks get built in the first place... I am a little worried about private expertise vs. public expertise in such things. Then again, cities do it with sewers....
Only two things will prevent a monopoly and create the kind of free market that will actually evolve towards providing better services:
1) The network is publically administered, giving everyone an
equal opportunity to sell services using it (I think ALL utility
networks should have a public base).
2) Every provider has their own network
There isn't any other way. We made a half-hearted stab at #1, requiring telcos to sell use of their networks to those who wanted to start up, but things haven't been administered fairly enough to bring about the desired results. What the market is sortof lurching towards is #2 -- a cable network, perhaps a few wireless networks, and phone wires.
So our friend is right in the sense that the free market will eventually come up with alternatives down the line of #2. I'm not sure about his treatment of the phone lines. Arguing that the local phone cos have exclusive property rights to the phone networks falls somewhere between semi-reasonable and dubious. For one thing, the networks fly
over or run through public lands and private lands not owned by the phone company. For another, the concept of property is given out by the people/law/government/social contract/shared fiction that we all agree is good and useful to live by in general... but we also have a history of regulating anything that becomes a public utility. With good reason.
"Hi. My name is John... and I have no understanding of the proper way to do n-tier development".
I've always wondered about what the issues here were... I have no experience with anything beyond some very simple client server apps. Would you be inclined to point out print or online resources that could give me a point in the right direction?
Three Browsers? Feh! At LEAST 5. Maybe more...
on
BSD User's Review Of OS X
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Our friend's browser count for Mac OS X is a little low. He includes:
Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, and Mozilla.
He neglects: Opera and iCab and Lynx. I'm posting this from iCab, which
I love (though it can't seem to handle hotmail and crashes on a few things, it's overall snappier than IE. I can almost quit and restart it
in the time it takes IE to come up with a new window after switching
back from another app). I don't know how any Unix geek could possibly
leave lynx out of the pantheon of browsers.
As for Mozilla: uch. I can't even get beyond the splash screen on my
machine. I almost think it doesn't count.
Someone needs to write some viruses that do the following things:
1) educates -- infects your computer and gives you
a multimedia presentation on flaws within "Hi! I'm Victor Virus!
I'm an Outlook Virus. How did I get in your machine?"
2) secures -- "Would you like me to install a Zone Management
package?"
3) explains alternatives -- "Did you know there are other alternatives
to Microsoft?"
That's an excellent point that illustrates the difficulty of actually turning everything into gray goo.
However, it doesn't remove the possibility: it just says that one design methodology (which we'll assume is undirected evolution) has failed to produce the gray gooifier.
Human directed design has been able to produce lots of things that didn't occur naturally: nuclear weapons and the back street boys, for example (and if gray goo were music, you know what it'd be...).
Plus, even turning a large portion of Utah into gray goo would be mighty inconvenient. Or having a dark-colored goo plague that spread over Europe and only turned 90% of people into goo (not unlike Ebola). That goal seems much more attainable....
In short, the obstacles you mentioned to destroying the world are present, but the basic danger is still real and requires some serious vigilance.
Slashdot Mirror
jason? gumby? That you?
You're right
Wow. On slashdot, of all places. "You're right", finding its way into a discussion.
Good work.
I sort of took your comment as an excuse to fire off a reply to the line of reasoning I've heard used by a lot of people.
I know how easy that is... you start covering the same ground explaining something to people so often that you start to get the same conceptual map of each discussion....
Good argument, magnanimous "You're right". I'm probably adding more noise than signal to this discussion, but I'm impressed.
And how are those of us with jobs, families and a mortgage supposed to do this?
That's an excellent question, and I think it's near one heart of the problem.
Some people out there have no spare time at all. They are forced, by necessity, to spend all their time working to keep a roof up and food on the table.
But I think a fair number of us simply choose not to leave any time to participate in public affairs. And if you're interested in being an activist, you have to get your own life under enough control that you have 2 to n hours per week to work on it. That's step one.
Our friend keeps saying there needs to be a way to let YOU decide
what gets opened with what by default. A program that will let you
map a file type to whatever application you wish.
So someone should write this program. Make it freely downloadable.
License it freely to third party software developers who realize this
is one of the best things they can include with their program to insure they aren't steamrollered by Windows. Heck, write your own version of Code Red that installs this program on every machine it encounters. Or release a report that tells IT departments how much they can save in terms of time or TCO if they'll just deploy this in their organization (see, there's default installs, and there's default installs).
Sometimes I've wondered if it would be possible to seriously combat how microsoft does their dirty work by setting up a website to the effect of "http://www.betterthandefaultinstall.com". Tips, tools, and free software for the user who wants to get the most out of their computer! This app could go on it....
Stop misrepresenting the netcraft numbers, you mental midget. Apache runs 60% of *sites*
I'm fully aware of this (o thou relative mental giant)... along with the parallel fact that as a percentage of machines, MS has 50%, and Linux is much lower.
Still, it says something about *mindshare*. Apparently, that 60% of people prefer to run their sites off apache. A certain number, of course, don't care what's run, or don't know, but I'm going to assume that percentagewise, those numbers are probably same. So the proportion would still be equal. MS's claim of leadership is still quite tenuous.
The interesting thing is: they're not the leaders. Not in Web servers. You saw the Netcraft survey results a few days ago. Apache 60% or so, IIS holds about half that. Half.
Excellent spin, to imply that the reason for all the vicious attacks is market leadership. But they don't have it, and that isn't the reason.
Can you say "cowardice"? Can you say "stupid moderator"? "Overatted" is what you do with someone elses post if they've been modded up
undeservedly.... not what you give to a plain
ol' post -- an a cogently written one at that.
If you think I'm wrong, hit post. Don't just
mod down.
--Weston
The guys who wrote Nimda and Sircam have caused a lot of frustration and lost time, I'll grant, but in some ways, they've accomplished something that neither evangelism, nor PR group, nor Marketroid has been able to do.
Think about it. Nimda got Gartner to admit that IIS should be dumped.
After years and years of virus attacks that demonstrate the shoddy default config of MS software (and possibly, the shoddiness of the software itself, depending on who you ask), one dimension of the cost of just using what everyone else uses (despite any demonstration of merits) has been soundly demonstrated.
Most of the time, I think people here on Slashdot who hate Katz hate him because he's preaching to the choir: he wraps up Slashdotish ideas in mainstream journalistic prose, and those of us who can't stand being told what we think we already know (especially in the rhetoric of modern journalism) make fun of him and try to rip him to shreds.
Today he presented a viewpoint that was his own and probably different from the majority of slashdotters. That's the first brave part of
Katz's article. The second brave part is that he's essentially telling people -- even us intelligent tech-savy geeks who tend to think we have it all figured out -- that we too need to not simply give our usual knee jerk reactions to the situation. Yes, calling for increased eavesdropping powers and mandatory backdoors for encryption are knee-jerk reactions. But rather than jerking back, we need to education and also seriously consider what we CAN do for greater security.
Yeah, I've heard the quote: if you trade freedom for security, you'll have neither. It's partially true. But it's shallow as a complete policy guide.
It's worth some measure of hassle and even loss of privacy if we really can make society safer. Giving up a bit of convenience and privacy is not the same thing as losing freedom. I think that's what Jon's asking us to consider. That doesn't mean that we put up with patently stupid ideas like mandatory backdoors in all encryption, which likely won't help us at all, but it DOES mean that we need to seriously consider possibilities for increasing the governments capacity to watch people at the same time as putting in checks for abuse.
My opinion is that we're vulnerable to terrorist attacks because of two things:
1) We invested too much in technology and not enough in human intelligence
2) We're strong enough in a conventional military sense there's no way for anyone to attack us that way, so we got complacent...
We're wary now, but it's interesting how much of the talk is centered around technical intelligence again. It's like we can't get over our own obsession with technology. I can agree that some measure of surveillance tech can help analysts do their work better, but my bet is that the real beef we need in law enforcement and intelligence is more and better human informants and analysts. Write your congressmen and encourage them to invest in that.
As for #2... well, it will take some doing, but the US and the world will likely start thinking more closely about what needs to be done to protect civil targets in these kind of situations, and how to affect the cultural change necessary to eliminate terrorism.
I barely know where to begin when I read crap like this. The simple truth is that people hate us because we're the biggest kid on the block.
yes, they care about individual policy decisions, but there isn't a nation on earth that doesn't make the exact same decisions every day. WE're criticized for butting our noses into foreign affairs, then criticized for being isolationist if we DON'T get involved in foreign affairs.
There's some degree of truth to your statement -- not all the reasons america is disliked are legitimate, and the prettiest girl at the party metaphor was great. We've done some great things in the world.
But indications are that we've been responsible for some pretty terrible things at times in our nations history. We've supported and trained regimes who've used terrorism and torture because it suited us. Israel is a prime example. Several central american governements are an example.
There's a book called "What Uncle Sam Really Wants" by Noam Chomsky with some details. I'm still trying to figure out how much of it to swallow, but he paints a grim picture, and if even a fraction of it is true, we have a lot to own up to here in the US.
That said, attacking such a large civilian target as the WTC in peacetime is unprecedented and completely wrong. The people who did/would do that need to be fought.
There's a book I've been reading by Humphrey Carpenter called The Inklings... it's about the association between Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams andd others. Fascinating stuff... sort
of a quasi-biography of all three and the confluence of their lives. Carpenter also wrote
a whole bio of Tolkein and collected a book of
his personal letters, both of which I've read bits of and are pretty good.
Warning: it's a different experience than reading
Tolkein's fiction. Tolkein spins grand myths; these are biographical.
Enjoy.
There's a
review here of the "Logical Journey of the Zoombinis", which is supposed to be one of the better puzzle games out there. Of course, it's created for 8-12 year olds, but depending on the developmental level of your charges, it might still be appropriate.
It couldn't have been. The Turing Test is completely domain-inspecific.
Perhaps in domain of knowledge covered, but not in domain of performance. It merely has to be very, very good at string manipulation.
"Who would you listen to, the richest man in the world, or just another Mexican?"
That's really the question here. It will tell us whether Fox is much like his opportunist counterparts here in the United States, or whether he really analyzes the situation.
Not that there can't be a few arguments for windows; however, to me, the arguments for an open source solution, especially in the public sector, are compelling.
Is he somehow related to Roger Penrose, author of "The Emperors New Mind"?
:)
Ooops. That's who I meant. I accidently got him mixed up with a Mormon Musician. Fortunately, it wasn't my fault, since I don't have free will. Whew.
I don't think the human race has proven to be capable of coping with all aspects of the philosophy and mindset around, say, agriculture.
Or sex itself....
Maybe we can get rid of THAT and people will stop f*ing themselves up.
;-)
I woudn't say we have no idea what consciousness is, there's been research on it.
:) Maybe Descartes would too.
There's been research on a number of things that we still haven't a clue about.
I haven't seen anything I was thought was truly convincing advanced about consciousness yet. I like Charles Penrose's theories a little bit, because they're just different and wacky enough to go what seems like a wacky phenomenon. I'm well aware that there are many who consider him a quack. Though I don't see any competing theories offering a compelling argument.
Finally, I'm not aware of any experiments that could be designed to effectively test consciousness -- for any of the theories I've seen. The Turing Test is the most frequently advanced, but as I said above, it's a cop out.
A fairly popular one is that we actually don't make any decisions (we have no real free will), our consciousness is just an interpretation of physical events in our brain, so that we PERCEIVE free will.
So what's behind the phenomenon of perception?
What's perceiving the free will?
I'll take the illusion of free will as readily as I'll take the illusion of consciousness.
The turing test is being passed by thousands of human beings today that couldn't possibly enslave the human race. :)
:) But the point of the Turing Test is not so much to define a benchmark for consciousness as it is to skirt the problem that we're not even sure that consciousness are an observable phenomenon.
Furthermore, it's hard not to be skeptical about the Turing test. I have no doubt that with enough processing power and engineering efforts, someone can design a machine that effectively fools human beings into thinking it is one.
However, the simulation of conversation isn't anywhere near a test of consciousness or ability to have "insights". Even after being fooled by a totally Turing Compliant (TM) conversation machine, I'd have to wonder: was conversation effectively simulated because AI researchers doped the machine with enough domain specific knowledge and specialized algorithms? Or was there some basic technology that led it to acquire language on its own?
Think of it this way: after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, if Kasparov had challenged Deep Blue to fencing or a pistol duel, or even Othello, Deep Blue would likely have been toast without a few years of research.
I've looked into the Tel Aviv thing, and it's intruiging, but even HALs motivations are only arbitrarily set algorithms -- not consciousness. Not that we have any idea what consciousness is, so maybe my statement is premature.
That's an interesting idea.... would municipalities then connect into the telco backbones? Or would the county create its own backbone(s), and those would connect to the state backbone(s), and then to nationwide backbones.....
The other problem.... I think in general that having public networks for ANY vital utility (and then letting lots of companies compete to provide services via that network) is a wise thing. I'm just not sure how the networks get built in the first place... I am a little worried about private expertise vs. public expertise in such things. Then again, cities do it with sewers....
Only two things will prevent a monopoly and create the kind of free market that will actually evolve towards providing better services:
1) The network is publically administered, giving everyone an
equal opportunity to sell services using it (I think ALL utility
networks should have a public base).
2) Every provider has their own network
There isn't any other way. We made a half-hearted stab at #1, requiring telcos to sell use of their networks to those who wanted to start up, but things haven't been administered fairly enough to bring about the desired results. What the market is sortof lurching towards is #2 -- a cable network, perhaps a few wireless networks, and phone wires.
So our friend is right in the sense that the free market will eventually come up with alternatives down the line of #2. I'm not sure about his treatment of the phone lines. Arguing that the local phone cos have exclusive property rights to the phone networks falls somewhere between semi-reasonable and dubious. For one thing, the networks fly
over or run through public lands and private lands not owned by the phone company. For another, the concept of property is given out by the people/law/government/social contract/shared fiction that we all agree is good and useful to live by in general... but we also have a history of regulating anything that becomes a public utility. With good reason.
"Hi. My name is John... and I have no understanding of the proper way to do n-tier development".
I've always wondered about what the issues here were... I have no experience with anything beyond some very simple client server apps. Would you be inclined to point out print or online resources that could give me a point in the right direction?
Our friend's browser count for Mac OS X is a little low. He includes:
Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, and Mozilla.
He neglects: Opera and iCab and Lynx. I'm posting this from iCab, which
I love (though it can't seem to handle hotmail and crashes on a few things, it's overall snappier than IE. I can almost quit and restart it
in the time it takes IE to come up with a new window after switching
back from another app). I don't know how any Unix geek could possibly
leave lynx out of the pantheon of browsers.
As for Mozilla: uch. I can't even get beyond the splash screen on my
machine. I almost think it doesn't count.
Someone needs to write some viruses that do the following things:
1) educates -- infects your computer and gives you
a multimedia presentation on flaws within "Hi! I'm Victor Virus!
I'm an Outlook Virus. How did I get in your machine?"
2) secures -- "Would you like me to install a Zone Management
package?"
3) explains alternatives -- "Did you know there are other alternatives
to Microsoft?"
4) Highlights Microsoft abuses...
That's an excellent point that illustrates the difficulty of actually turning everything into gray goo.
However, it doesn't remove the possibility: it just says that one design methodology (which we'll assume is undirected evolution) has failed to produce the gray gooifier.
Human directed design has been able to produce lots of things that didn't occur naturally: nuclear weapons and the back street boys, for example (and if gray goo were music, you know what it'd be...).
Plus, even turning a large portion of Utah into gray goo would be mighty inconvenient. Or having a dark-colored goo plague that spread over Europe and only turned 90% of people into goo (not unlike Ebola). That goal seems much more attainable....
In short, the obstacles you mentioned to destroying the world are present, but the basic danger is still real and requires some serious vigilance.