That is true. I offer interventions to my patients that I would never choose myself. But it is hard to predict what I would choose if I were in their shoes. (Or hospital gowns, rather.)
I doubt this technology will work in the spinal cord. Getting nerves to grow in the peripheral nervous system is pretty easy - they do it on their own. Damaged peripheral nerve axons regrow at a rate of about 1 mm/day, so if you damage a nerve in your armpit it will take weeks to regrow all the way down to your fingertips. Getting nerves to grow in the central nervous system (brain + spinal cord) is tricky. The molecular signaling in the central nervous system actively inhibits regrowth of damaged nerve axons, but we are learning how to experimentally manipulate that signaling to allow some axons to regrow after injury. Someday we hope to therapeutically manipulate that signaling, to help patients with spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, etc.
The nervous system is hugely complex, as you suggested. It is incomprehensibly complex. It is absolutely, beautifully complex. That's why I love it so much.
I am a doctor. In fact, I am a neurologist (IAAN). This article is fascinating, and I hope they keep working on this technology and get it working.
That being said, I would never plug one of these things into my own amputated limb. Going to medical school and doing residency have turned me into something of a Luddite. Medical technology is cool, but every treatment has potential benefits and toxicities. The adverse event I would worry about most with this technology is neuropathic pain. Neuropathic pain is notoriously difficult to treat. What if you plugged this device into some amputee's limb and gave them excruciating pain? I would rather have a metal hook for a hand.
I guess you'd have to make a separate karma for story submission then.
Isn't the concept of karma what motivates most story submission anyway? Story submitters want Google karma (a.k.a pagerank). I have submitted about half a dozen stories, and that was always my motivation. Taking away some of this incentive for those who abuse the system might help the problem. I think it should be retroactive as well. Once your submission karma is poor enough, the nofollow should be added to all of your past stories.
I see two problems with the scheme. First, it would require adding a layer of complexity to slashcode. Second, it would not solve the problem of people submitting stories about their own blog who merely want ad revenue from page views.
All human relationships depend on trust. Mechanisms for evaluating and developing trust need to change as the scale of the relationship changes. The "Wild West" days of Slashdot story submission may be coming to a close because the huge scale necessitates developing a new mechanism for evaluating and developing trust. We can all shed a tear and have a moment of silence for the innocence of Slashdot's youth, but I think it's time to acknowledge that we have outgrown the old method.
Why not make the "nofollow" a matter of karma? Those with por karma have a nofollow added to their link, just as their comments are started at score 0 or -1.
You could even get tricky and make a separate karma just for story submission, with some sort of moderation system. This moderation could be done by the editors themselves, or it could be opened up to the readership. I've read dozens of comments over the years where the submitter wished they could moderate the story. Perhaps it's time to add that functionality to slashcode.
When I interviewed at medical school a couple of years ago my interviewer asked me to name an ethical question and give arguments for both sides. I told him that I had recently read an interesting book that had a chapter describing how an opthalmologist had patented a certain surgical technique and demanded royalties from another opthalmologist who had independently discovered it and had been lecturing on his use of it.
The arguement against this sort of practice is easily the moral high ground, especially in a profession such as medicine which has a tendency to idealize altruism and selflessness. (Not that we succeed all of the time, mind you.) The counter-argument is the old line about creators being entitled to profit from their inventions. This argument is probably stronger in the entertainment industry, but in medicine it's pretty weak.
Proprietary software is actually a big problem in medicine, especially when patient data has to be exchanged between hospitals. I've seen entire imaging studies redone simply because the doctor who needed to see it didn't have the right software to view them. It's absurd to have to repeat an MRI for such a stupid reason.
I've actually considered doing a dual degree program and getting an MD/JD, with a legal specialty in intellectual property law. I predict that the intersection of medicine and IP law will be the scene of an important and bitter battle in the next few decades.
Rubbish. Why should a "valid and binding" legal agreement have to use obtuse language? Did the human-readability of GPL2 make it somehow less binding or valid? Is it okay to violate the BSD license because it's only a few sentences long, and doesn't even have a DEFINITIONS section?
The GPL must be written for lawyers and The Courts, not you.
You're wrong. Part of the strength of the Free Software movement is the simplicity and elegance of the GPL. Any developer who wants to use the license can easily understand it. Would you release your own personal software project, coded in your parent's basement on your own free time, under a license that you couldn't understand because of the compexity of its language?
Have you ever read the US Constitution? It is a great example of a legal document that uses very readable language. It doesn't have a DEFINITIONS section either.
My Suggestion
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Make sure that GPL3 is human-readable, as version 2 was. I absolutely hate reading legalese. It really bothers me that so many important things in my life (such as student loans, credit cards, computer software) assume that I am capable of understanding, and hold me accountable to understand the contents of legal documents. I appreciate the simplicity of the GNU GPL, and consider it an essential feature of the license. The BSD license is even simpler.
<tangent>One thing that bothers me is when GPL software requires that you agree to the license during the install procedure. The GPL is not an end-user license; it is a distribution license. You must accept and comply with the terms of the license if you wish to redistribute GPL'ed works. End users are not required to agree to anything in order to simply use it, or even to modify it for their own use.</tangent>
...the ability to retract unread messages (45%) and a way to track the forwarding of their own email (43%)
Novell Groupwise can do at least the first one. I don't know about the second one. I used to work in a corporate environment that used GroupWise for email, calendaring, and document sharing. You could monitor to see who had opened and read messages you sent out. Handy feature, that.
Here's a related anecdote: My brother's wife worked as a secretary downstairs in the office building, and we used to chat over email. One day I accidentally emailed her from the shared account used by my team (we were in end-user tech support). In the email I told her about the date I had been on the night before, and how we had kissed rather awkwardly at the end of it. She replied to the shared account and included my original message. She retracted the message as soon as she realized what she had done, but not before my supervisor had read it. Luckily he just thought it was funny.
And the happy ending: The second kiss was much less awkward, and we were happily married a few months later (and still are). The crimson color of my face eventually faded, but my supervisor still mentioned the event to me and chuckled on my last day o work.
Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.
I think this last paragraph is important. "nofollow" is not on the official list of link-types. If blog authors wish to use this attribute in anchor elements, they need to define it properly (or at least properly reference a definition).
Remember back in the 90's when Netscape and MS were breaking standards right and left so that their browsers would have an edge on the competition? That was the wrong way to do it, and it created the mess we're in now with sloppy HTML spewed all over the web and designers unable to use compliant designs because the most popular browser doesn't even try to support standards (an example here). Google is doing this the right way. They went back and read the HTML specification to see if it was already capable of doing what they needed. It does? Great! Let's utilize the standard!
Granted, HTML these days has a much better design than it did in the pre-4.0 specifications. Back when Netscape and MS were at each other's throats the document format was actually incapable of doing a lot of things that designers wanted to do on the web. But HTML is a very mature format these days.
An important read on this topic is The Unfinished Revolution by the late Michael Dertouzos. In the book he describes the core technologies and approaches of human-centric computing, and speech interface is included as an essential ingredient. It's not just for "slow typists who would like to use their voice to write", it's for the future of computing.
That last century you spend in a nursing home probably would Suck with a capital "S".
This reminds me of a topic we recently covered in my patient-centered medicine class (I'm a med student). More and more people are living with chronic diseases that are kept in check by aggressive treatments. Often there is a slow decline, or a punctuated decline with relative stability between crises. Examples of diseases people live with as a chronic condition include various types of cancer, diabetes, heart diesase, and even HIV/AIDS in recent years.
Modern medicine has done some incredible things to keep the disease process at bay. A good part the increase in the average life expectancy is due to people being able to live with chronic conditions where they otherwise would die.
I'm quite skeptical about the notion of indefinitely prolonging life by genetic engineering, etc. To have God-like power, one must have God-like omniscience and omnipotence. To keep a person optimally healthy for eternity you would have to:
know the gene sequence of every gene in every cell of the body and monitor all changes over time
know the significance of every possible change in the gene sequence
be able to make corrective measures
We can do none of these things right now with any proficiency.
I Am Not A Biologist, but I have a degree in biology. (I'm a medical student.) This article is a bunch of hooey, but I think the alternative view does an inadequate job of debunking it. The main argument of the article is similar to this: "I'll be able to drive from New York to London just as soon as I get the radiator in my car fixed." The real problem is much bigger than he's making it out to be.
We have indeed learned a lot about aging in the past few decades, particularly with the advent of molecular biology. We have been successful in raising the average life expectancy for those who have access to modern medical care. But there is no evidence that the maximum possible age is getting any older. The only thing increasing is the chance that people with good health care will approach the maximum age.
One of the curses of old age is the increasing chance of getting cancer. Cancer treatment has improved dramatically in recent decades, but is nowhere near guaranteeing complete recovery for all. The basic strategy of all cancer therapies is to use agents which are relatively more harmful to cancer cells than to the rest of the body, and to hope that the agent kills all of the cancer cells before it kills the patient. Some types of cancer are still basically untreatable. Cancer is not a problem which will be "solved" in the next few decades like polio was "solved" by vaccination. And as more and more people live longer and longer the cancer problem will actually increase.
Modern agriculture depends heavily on fossil fuel energy for plowing fields, harvesting, synthesizing fertilizers (which are mostly petrochemical-based), transporting to markets, etc. Were you planning to run your tractor on biodeisel too? It may turn out that the fuel used to plow a certain area of a field needs the same area's worth of produce to make the biodeisel that powers the tractor. It will be very hard to break even.
You could envision a system where the farm equipment used petrochamical fuels to make biodeisel for use by urban transportation vehicles. This solves a lot of the problems with urban air pollution. A similar idea is to use electric cars for consumer transportation and to generate the electricity away from urban centers using petroleum/coal/etc.
The heavy reliance of modern agriculture on petrochemicals is troubling. The human population explosion is largely based on the increased food supply generated by agriculture. What happens to the food supply when the fossil fuels run out? What happens to the human population? Our current tragectory is not sustainable with the technology available today.
For those of you who like this sort of software, check out Celestia. It is a 3D space simulator, and lets you visit objects in our solar system and a bunch of stars. It's really amazing, and it's open source! My sister uses it for teaching astronomy to the neighborhood kids in their home-schooling class.
Parent poster is exactly right. The semantic web is designed exactly for just this kind of thing, and would drastically reduce the amount of computing power needed to do it.
For a good discussion of the semantic web, and why we need to get going and build it, read the relevant chapter in The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I didn't quite understand what Tim Berners-Lee was getting at when he described the semantic web in Weaving the Web. Dertouzos explains it better, I think.
I had an idea earlier this week about broken links. I use Amaya as my primary word processor, and I use hyperlinks to connect related documents. But directory structures change over time as different areas change in importance. For instance, it may have made sence to keep your financial aid status documents in the 'School' folder during the summer, but after the semester begins that folder fills up with lecture notes. Then those lecture notes are partitioned into child folders for separate subjects. Maybe now you want to move your financial aid documents to a child folder called 'Financial Aid'. It would be really nice if the application (or the operating system) kept track of changes to the directory structure and updated the link urls in the documents. Perhaps it could leave a pointer in the old place for a certain amount of time, just in case the change is only temporary.
It shouldn't matter where the document is - on my local machine in a certain folder, on a removable disk, on a network share, or on the Web. Things get trickier when the document is on the web, which is where this technology could help.
Several (most?) of the American Revolutionaries believed in the moral tradition of Western Europe, including Christianity, chastity, honesty, etc. A representative quote is from John Adams, who said:
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
What are your views on this issue? Are your views consistent with the predominant views of the Founders? Please explain.
It is not difficult to argue that the importance of these values and morals are being diminished in our current society. Do you think there is a direct relationship between this change in our moral climate and the changes in civil liberties that have heppened in the last hundred or so years? Or do you think that these changes are not directly related to one another?
My brother (who works for IBM) recently sent me an article on USA Today about the system IBM and Honda have developed for speech-interface with a GPS-enabled navigation computer. Really cool stuff.
For those of you who haven't read it, check out The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I don't agree with all of his analysis (he was a little lacking in pragmatism on some points), but overall this book was very insightful. This book, along with Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, caused a big paradigm shift in my thinking about computer technology.
I've had the same problem. No word processors are any good at outlining, with one exception: Amaya. Amaya is a web browser/editor developed by the W3C. It is the very best HTML authoring tool I have ever used. HTML is the very best language for creating structured documents, especially outlines. The first reply suggested using HTML + CSS, which is right. But Amaya is the software tool to use in authoring. I use Amaya for taking notes during lectures (I'm a medical student). An added benefit is that I can easily browse through my notes following hyperlinks between documents. I could also post my notes on the web if I wanted to. The Windows version is quite nice to use, but the Mac version (which I use most of the time) is terrible.
I had beginning undergraduate chemistry from Joel Miller at the University of Utah. He's working on plastic magnets as well, but he doesn't have them working at room temperature yet AFAIK. He was quite possibly the worst teacher I've ever had, though he's apparently a fabulous chemist. When talking about the noble gasses, he would always pronounce it 'Nobel', and he even corrected his spelling on the chalkboard from 'noble' to 'nobel'. Our TA's said that he has his eyes on the prize.
The last few chapters discuss ways that individuals and governments can and should act to preserve free culture and prevent the culture cartels from gaining more influence. He gives several examples of proactive efforts to preserve freedoms that were lost as technology developed. The Free Software movement was the first example, and Lessig explained how the GPL proactively protects freedom to derivitize, use, and distribute software. It has taken a couple of decades, but there is now a healthy and vibrant ecology in the copyleft commons of software.
He then listed several examples of using ideas from the FSF copyleft commons to proactively protect freedom of non-software things. The Public Library of Science was discussed, as well as the Creative Commons. I remember reading the philosophy section of the GNU project website a few years ago and thinking, "You know, these guys are really on to something..." The ball is rolling, and with work and time we will have a free culture protected by copyleft, including art, literature, music, software, entertainment, and scientific discovery. This is not about communism. It's about FREEDOM, sweet FREEDOM.
Slashdot has totally changed my browsing habits since I started reading it a few years ago. I find that I don't "get out" as much as I used to and just surf around. When in doubt, reload the Slashdot main page and see if there's a new story. Nothing? Hmmm... Maybe there's a new comment in a story I've already read. Or maybe I'll read the comment thread under that boring story that I don't care about after all...
Lately I've been browsing around at Wikipedia more. Just find an interesting page and open up a few internal links into new tabs as you go. It's easy to read half a dozen or more pages in one sitting, and you always learn something cool and interesting.
Of course, I learned about Wikipedia from a Slashdot article...
I use Safari for developing, and I'm not sure what to do about the missing unicode character. I just looked through the SVG recommendation, but I can't find anything about character entity references like in HTML. I suppose I could create an alpha using alternate glyphs. I'll have to think it over. That was one of my disappointments when I started using my Mac for SVG.
I haven't ever used an SVG build of Mozilla, but Adobe's SVG viewer slows Firefox to a crawl on OS X. (I have a G3 with 128 MB RAM.) Safari is still quick when viewing SVG, so I use it instead.
There is a lot of work going on at Gnome and KDE to use SVG on the desktop. They are using SVG for the GUI: icons, program launchers, etc. See here and here.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I remember reading about that on Slashdot years ago. That must have been nearly ten years ago.
That is true. I offer interventions to my patients that I would never choose myself. But it is hard to predict what I would choose if I were in their shoes. (Or hospital gowns, rather.)
I doubt this technology will work in the spinal cord. Getting nerves to grow in the peripheral nervous system is pretty easy - they do it on their own. Damaged peripheral nerve axons regrow at a rate of about 1 mm/day, so if you damage a nerve in your armpit it will take weeks to regrow all the way down to your fingertips. Getting nerves to grow in the central nervous system (brain + spinal cord) is tricky. The molecular signaling in the central nervous system actively inhibits regrowth of damaged nerve axons, but we are learning how to experimentally manipulate that signaling to allow some axons to regrow after injury. Someday we hope to therapeutically manipulate that signaling, to help patients with spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, etc.
The nervous system is hugely complex, as you suggested. It is incomprehensibly complex. It is absolutely, beautifully complex. That's why I love it so much.
I am a doctor. In fact, I am a neurologist (IAAN). This article is fascinating, and I hope they keep working on this technology and get it working. That being said, I would never plug one of these things into my own amputated limb. Going to medical school and doing residency have turned me into something of a Luddite. Medical technology is cool, but every treatment has potential benefits and toxicities. The adverse event I would worry about most with this technology is neuropathic pain. Neuropathic pain is notoriously difficult to treat. What if you plugged this device into some amputee's limb and gave them excruciating pain? I would rather have a metal hook for a hand.
I guess you'd have to make a separate karma for story submission then.
Isn't the concept of karma what motivates most story submission anyway? Story submitters want Google karma (a.k.a pagerank). I have submitted about half a dozen stories, and that was always my motivation. Taking away some of this incentive for those who abuse the system might help the problem. I think it should be retroactive as well. Once your submission karma is poor enough, the nofollow should be added to all of your past stories.
I see two problems with the scheme. First, it would require adding a layer of complexity to slashcode. Second, it would not solve the problem of people submitting stories about their own blog who merely want ad revenue from page views.
All human relationships depend on trust. Mechanisms for evaluating and developing trust need to change as the scale of the relationship changes. The "Wild West" days of Slashdot story submission may be coming to a close because the huge scale necessitates developing a new mechanism for evaluating and developing trust. We can all shed a tear and have a moment of silence for the innocence of Slashdot's youth, but I think it's time to acknowledge that we have outgrown the old method.
Why not make the "nofollow" a matter of karma? Those with por karma have a nofollow added to their link, just as their comments are started at score 0 or -1.
You could even get tricky and make a separate karma just for story submission, with some sort of moderation system. This moderation could be done by the editors themselves, or it could be opened up to the readership. I've read dozens of comments over the years where the submitter wished they could moderate the story. Perhaps it's time to add that functionality to slashcode.
When I interviewed at medical school a couple of years ago my interviewer asked me to name an ethical question and give arguments for both sides. I told him that I had recently read an interesting book that had a chapter describing how an opthalmologist had patented a certain surgical technique and demanded royalties from another opthalmologist who had independently discovered it and had been lecturing on his use of it.
The arguement against this sort of practice is easily the moral high ground, especially in a profession such as medicine which has a tendency to idealize altruism and selflessness. (Not that we succeed all of the time, mind you.) The counter-argument is the old line about creators being entitled to profit from their inventions. This argument is probably stronger in the entertainment industry, but in medicine it's pretty weak.
Proprietary software is actually a big problem in medicine, especially when patient data has to be exchanged between hospitals. I've seen entire imaging studies redone simply because the doctor who needed to see it didn't have the right software to view them. It's absurd to have to repeat an MRI for such a stupid reason.
I've actually considered doing a dual degree program and getting an MD/JD, with a legal specialty in intellectual property law. I predict that the intersection of medicine and IP law will be the scene of an important and bitter battle in the next few decades.
So how did my interview go? I got accepted!
Rubbish. Why should a "valid and binding" legal agreement have to use obtuse language? Did the human-readability of GPL2 make it somehow less binding or valid? Is it okay to violate the BSD license because it's only a few sentences long, and doesn't even have a DEFINITIONS section?
You're wrong. Part of the strength of the Free Software movement is the simplicity and elegance of the GPL. Any developer who wants to use the license can easily understand it. Would you release your own personal software project, coded in your parent's basement on your own free time, under a license that you couldn't understand because of the compexity of its language?
Have you ever read the US Constitution? It is a great example of a legal document that uses very readable language. It doesn't have a DEFINITIONS section either.
Make sure that GPL3 is human-readable, as version 2 was. I absolutely hate reading legalese. It really bothers me that so many important things in my life (such as student loans, credit cards, computer software) assume that I am capable of understanding, and hold me accountable to understand the contents of legal documents. I appreciate the simplicity of the GNU GPL, and consider it an essential feature of the license. The BSD license is even simpler.
<tangent>One thing that bothers me is when GPL software requires that you agree to the license during the install procedure. The GPL is not an end-user license; it is a distribution license. You must accept and comply with the terms of the license if you wish to redistribute GPL'ed works. End users are not required to agree to anything in order to simply use it, or even to modify it for their own use.</tangent>
Novell Groupwise can do at least the first one. I don't know about the second one. I used to work in a corporate environment that used GroupWise for email, calendaring, and document sharing. You could monitor to see who had opened and read messages you sent out. Handy feature, that.
Here's a related anecdote: My brother's wife worked as a secretary downstairs in the office building, and we used to chat over email. One day I accidentally emailed her from the shared account used by my team (we were in end-user tech support). In the email I told her about the date I had been on the night before, and how we had kissed rather awkwardly at the end of it. She replied to the shared account and included my original message. She retracted the message as soon as she realized what she had done, but not before my supervisor had read it. Luckily he just thought it was funny.
And the happy ending: The second kiss was much less awkward, and we were happily married a few months later (and still are). The crimson color of my face eventually faded, but my supervisor still mentioned the event to me and chuckled on my last day o work.
I think this last paragraph is important. "nofollow" is not on the official list of link-types. If blog authors wish to use this attribute in anchor elements, they need to define it properly (or at least properly reference a definition).
Remember back in the 90's when Netscape and MS were breaking standards right and left so that their browsers would have an edge on the competition? That was the wrong way to do it, and it created the mess we're in now with sloppy HTML spewed all over the web and designers unable to use compliant designs because the most popular browser doesn't even try to support standards (an example here). Google is doing this the right way. They went back and read the HTML specification to see if it was already capable of doing what they needed. It does? Great! Let's utilize the standard!
Granted, HTML these days has a much better design than it did in the pre-4.0 specifications. Back when Netscape and MS were at each other's throats the document format was actually incapable of doing a lot of things that designers wanted to do on the web. But HTML is a very mature format these days.
An important read on this topic is The Unfinished Revolution by the late Michael Dertouzos. In the book he describes the core technologies and approaches of human-centric computing, and speech interface is included as an essential ingredient. It's not just for "slow typists who would like to use their voice to write", it's for the future of computing.
This reminds me of a topic we recently covered in my patient-centered medicine class (I'm a med student). More and more people are living with chronic diseases that are kept in check by aggressive treatments. Often there is a slow decline, or a punctuated decline with relative stability between crises. Examples of diseases people live with as a chronic condition include various types of cancer, diabetes, heart diesase, and even HIV/AIDS in recent years.
Modern medicine has done some incredible things to keep the disease process at bay. A good part the increase in the average life expectancy is due to people being able to live with chronic conditions where they otherwise would die.
I'm quite skeptical about the notion of indefinitely prolonging life by genetic engineering, etc. To have God-like power, one must have God-like omniscience and omnipotence. To keep a person optimally healthy for eternity you would have to:
We can do none of these things right now with any proficiency.
I Am Not A Biologist, but I have a degree in biology. (I'm a medical student.) This article is a bunch of hooey, but I think the alternative view does an inadequate job of debunking it. The main argument of the article is similar to this: "I'll be able to drive from New York to London just as soon as I get the radiator in my car fixed." The real problem is much bigger than he's making it out to be.
We have indeed learned a lot about aging in the past few decades, particularly with the advent of molecular biology. We have been successful in raising the average life expectancy for those who have access to modern medical care. But there is no evidence that the maximum possible age is getting any older. The only thing increasing is the chance that people with good health care will approach the maximum age.
One of the curses of old age is the increasing chance of getting cancer. Cancer treatment has improved dramatically in recent decades, but is nowhere near guaranteeing complete recovery for all. The basic strategy of all cancer therapies is to use agents which are relatively more harmful to cancer cells than to the rest of the body, and to hope that the agent kills all of the cancer cells before it kills the patient. Some types of cancer are still basically untreatable. Cancer is not a problem which will be "solved" in the next few decades like polio was "solved" by vaccination. And as more and more people live longer and longer the cancer problem will actually increase.
Modern agriculture depends heavily on fossil fuel energy for plowing fields, harvesting, synthesizing fertilizers (which are mostly petrochemical-based), transporting to markets, etc. Were you planning to run your tractor on biodeisel too? It may turn out that the fuel used to plow a certain area of a field needs the same area's worth of produce to make the biodeisel that powers the tractor. It will be very hard to break even.
You could envision a system where the farm equipment used petrochamical fuels to make biodeisel for use by urban transportation vehicles. This solves a lot of the problems with urban air pollution. A similar idea is to use electric cars for consumer transportation and to generate the electricity away from urban centers using petroleum/coal/etc.
The heavy reliance of modern agriculture on petrochemicals is troubling. The human population explosion is largely based on the increased food supply generated by agriculture. What happens to the food supply when the fossil fuels run out? What happens to the human population? Our current tragectory is not sustainable with the technology available today.
For those of you who like this sort of software, check out Celestia. It is a 3D space simulator, and lets you visit objects in our solar system and a bunch of stars. It's really amazing, and it's open source! My sister uses it for teaching astronomy to the neighborhood kids in their home-schooling class.
Parent poster is exactly right. The semantic web is designed exactly for just this kind of thing, and would drastically reduce the amount of computing power needed to do it.
For a good discussion of the semantic web, and why we need to get going and build it, read the relevant chapter in The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I didn't quite understand what Tim Berners-Lee was getting at when he described the semantic web in Weaving the Web. Dertouzos explains it better, I think.
I had an idea earlier this week about broken links. I use Amaya as my primary word processor, and I use hyperlinks to connect related documents. But directory structures change over time as different areas change in importance. For instance, it may have made sence to keep your financial aid status documents in the 'School' folder during the summer, but after the semester begins that folder fills up with lecture notes. Then those lecture notes are partitioned into child folders for separate subjects. Maybe now you want to move your financial aid documents to a child folder called 'Financial Aid'. It would be really nice if the application (or the operating system) kept track of changes to the directory structure and updated the link urls in the documents. Perhaps it could leave a pointer in the old place for a certain amount of time, just in case the change is only temporary.
It shouldn't matter where the document is - on my local machine in a certain folder, on a removable disk, on a network share, or on the Web. Things get trickier when the document is on the web, which is where this technology could help.
Several (most?) of the American Revolutionaries believed in the moral tradition of Western Europe, including Christianity, chastity, honesty, etc. A representative quote is from John Adams, who said:
What are your views on this issue? Are your views consistent with the predominant views of the Founders? Please explain.
It is not difficult to argue that the importance of these values and morals are being diminished in our current society. Do you think there is a direct relationship between this change in our moral climate and the changes in civil liberties that have heppened in the last hundred or so years? Or do you think that these changes are not directly related to one another?
My brother (who works for IBM) recently sent me an article on USA Today about the system IBM and Honda have developed for speech-interface with a GPS-enabled navigation computer. Really cool stuff.
For those of you who haven't read it, check out The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I don't agree with all of his analysis (he was a little lacking in pragmatism on some points), but overall this book was very insightful. This book, along with Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, caused a big paradigm shift in my thinking about computer technology.
I've had the same problem. No word processors are any good at outlining, with one exception: Amaya. Amaya is a web browser/editor developed by the W3C. It is the very best HTML authoring tool I have ever used. HTML is the very best language for creating structured documents, especially outlines. The first reply suggested using HTML + CSS, which is right. But Amaya is the software tool to use in authoring. I use Amaya for taking notes during lectures (I'm a medical student). An added benefit is that I can easily browse through my notes following hyperlinks between documents. I could also post my notes on the web if I wanted to. The Windows version is quite nice to use, but the Mac version (which I use most of the time) is terrible.
I had beginning undergraduate chemistry from Joel Miller at the University of Utah. He's working on plastic magnets as well, but he doesn't have them working at room temperature yet AFAIK. He was quite possibly the worst teacher I've ever had, though he's apparently a fabulous chemist. When talking about the noble gasses, he would always pronounce it 'Nobel', and he even corrected his spelling on the chalkboard from 'noble' to 'nobel'. Our TA's said that he has his eyes on the prize.
I just finished reading Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig's latest book. That was an interesting read, and I found it remarkably similar on some points to thoughts I've had on the subject lately.
The last few chapters discuss ways that individuals and governments can and should act to preserve free culture and prevent the culture cartels from gaining more influence. He gives several examples of proactive efforts to preserve freedoms that were lost as technology developed. The Free Software movement was the first example, and Lessig explained how the GPL proactively protects freedom to derivitize, use, and distribute software. It has taken a couple of decades, but there is now a healthy and vibrant ecology in the copyleft commons of software.
He then listed several examples of using ideas from the FSF copyleft commons to proactively protect freedom of non-software things. The Public Library of Science was discussed, as well as the Creative Commons. I remember reading the philosophy section of the GNU project website a few years ago and thinking, "You know, these guys are really on to something..." The ball is rolling, and with work and time we will have a free culture protected by copyleft, including art, literature, music, software, entertainment, and scientific discovery. This is not about communism. It's about FREEDOM, sweet FREEDOM.
Slashdot has totally changed my browsing habits since I started reading it a few years ago. I find that I don't "get out" as much as I used to and just surf around. When in doubt, reload the Slashdot main page and see if there's a new story. Nothing? Hmmm... Maybe there's a new comment in a story I've already read. Or maybe I'll read the comment thread under that boring story that I don't care about after all...
Lately I've been browsing around at Wikipedia more. Just find an interesting page and open up a few internal links into new tabs as you go. It's easy to read half a dozen or more pages in one sitting, and you always learn something cool and interesting.
Of course, I learned about Wikipedia from a Slashdot article...
I use Safari for developing, and I'm not sure what to do about the missing unicode character. I just looked through the SVG recommendation, but I can't find anything about character entity references like in HTML. I suppose I could create an alpha using alternate glyphs. I'll have to think it over. That was one of my disappointments when I started using my Mac for SVG.
I haven't ever used an SVG build of Mozilla, but Adobe's SVG viewer slows Firefox to a crawl on OS X. (I have a G3 with 128 MB RAM.) Safari is still quick when viewing SVG, so I use it instead.
There is a lot of work going on at Gnome and KDE to use SVG on the desktop. They are using SVG for the GUI: icons, program launchers, etc. See here and here.