Get an echo mia. Two words: balanced outputs. If you must have surround out then m-audio have something nice too, unbalanced out but far superior audio to creative.
I wasn't changing the subject - warpup wrote a reply to you that comes from a different angle.
I'll take what you say at face value. In some ways the world you describe would be attractive. I suppose that it would be nice to be able to honestly express myself on any topic with no fear of altering my relationship with others, whether profesional or personal. But that is simply not a realistic possibility where human beings are involved. If a co-worker of mine like to talk about about the intrinisic inferiority of blacks, or about how whites were all racists, I would have a different opinion of them that would change my relationship to them. It would be less likely that I would mention them for promotion, etc. If they concealed their views it would be to their advantage, and largely people like that are aware of this. I think you are asking for Solomonic wisdom from average people.
Much of what the government funds is funded in a non-partisan way. And your point that Theo isn't being funded for a political end is well taken. But he's being funded by the department of defense, and he's openly and roundly criticizing them. From what I've heard from some friends who interacted with the National Endowment for the Arts, it's the same way there but far worse - toe the line or forget about funding. Any one of them would laugh at the notion of the NEA continuing to fund people who criticize it, if they had a choice not to continue.
I want to avoid the tangential topic of white supremicists in Congress largely because I don't think it's directly relevant. But I'm pretty sure that David Duke never served in the U.S. congress. He was in the state legislature of Louisiana for one term. Here's the Anti-Defamation League page on him. And I'm pretty sure too that it was a democrat, Robert Byrd, who chose to use the term "white nigger" twice in a television interview in 2001, saying "I'm going to use that word." Criticism from civil-rights groups was essentially non-existant, as discussed here. So maybe there's the same double-standard you dislike, but in reverse: because he's a democrat, his speech is unpunished, even though his job is a political one, and even though his opinions do not seem consistent with the America we want to live in.
Anyway, you close by saying that the DARPA action was legal, but it wasn't right. If the contract was terminated due to Theo's comments, which I think is still undemonstrated, then we agree to the first part. I think reasonable people can differ as to the rightness of an action like this, because it depends very much on what priorities we assign to different government functions. I appreciate that you've thought a lot about your views, and also your willingness to discuss them reasonably rather than in the over-inflamed manner too common on net boards.
OK, you seem like a good sport. I guess there just wasn't enough of your first comment to tell whether you were being sarcastic-bitter or just flippant.
Is the "Lighten up, Francis" a quote that I should recognize, or perhaps have you mistaken me for some other pedant of your acquaintance?:)
Of course DARPA knew where the money was going. And if it was Theo's comments that prompted the termination of the grant, which has yet to be demonstrated, then the sole and only point I am making with respect to his nationality and country of residence/employment is that there cannot be a 1st Amendment violation, as there might be were a similar action to be taken with a U.S. citizen or resident.
I'm going to ignore your attempted dig, and just address your "point."
The question in the scenario I outlined isn't whether the CIA is legally allowed to eavesdrop without a warrant on a foreign national in a foreign country according to the laws of the foreign country. The question is the legality of that behavior under United States law. If Charles Manson should ever be paroled, the FBI would need to show probable cause and obtain a warrant to listen to his telephone calls. But the same is not true of Yussef Mohammed, released from Camp X-Ray back to his home in Kabul. And the reason why that's true is because our Bill of Rights is not understood to limit the actions of our government with respect to foreign nationals abroad.
If you look back, you'll find that this was indeed the original point. I'd suggest a closer reading before making free with the sarcasm.
I apologize if my remarks were easily interpreted to mean that Canada makes no guarantees for free speech among its citizens. I mean to convey only precisely what I said, that the 1st Amendment to the Constituion of the United States doesn't give Canadians in Canada any such guarantees. I should, I suppose, have realized that people elsewhere might also think of 1st Amendment as being equal to Freedom of Speech.
But it's quite clear. The FBI can't arrest the French police for trying to prevent Yahoo! France from auctioning Nazi items, or arrest German police for trying to prevent a violent videogame from entering the country. The Supreme Court can't rule those countries' laws unconstituional. So I meant specifically to say that the U.S. 1st Amendment doesn't give foreign nationals who are not within our borders any protections for their speech.
The fact that Canada's charter makes such assertions for the entire world (if that's how your courts interpret that) has, as you know, absolutely no legal consequences whatsoever.
You're right to say that that is what the constitution says. However, it has never been interpreted as meaning what you suggest. No one has ever suggested, for example, that the CIA needs a warrant to eavesdrop on a foreign national in a foreign country. If they are here, they get the protections.
As far as the famous (isn't it Ben Franklin) quote, I don't consider that Theo has given up any liberty for any security. He's spoken out, and is still a free man. He's free to say that same thing again. Nor was he more secure before he spoke. So as much as I agree with the quote, I don't see the application here.
I was not afraid to speak my mind lest I be fired. I have no more interest in a conversation of the type you suggest with that particular person than I would with a random person in the street. I didn't think I would learn from him, or vice versa. But that's beside the point. I was paid to work as a software engineer, not as a polemicist.
Frankly, I don't think I would have been fired. I expect that personal relations witht that person would have been strained, which would make it more difficult for me to do my job. I would possibly have had more difficulty getting a raise. But even if I did think that an expression of, say, my religous views would get me fired, you don't want to answer the question of why I would be expressing those views to my boss on company time in the first place.
Just to touch on your last line, no one is suggesting that your country be run like that. But there are some obvious parallels that you might think of. For example, there was an Air Force General during the Clinton Administration that said some disparaging things about Clinton. He was fired. That seems to me to be consistent with the position that I am taking, but I sense that you would disagree. I'd like to know how you think the military can maintain an effective chain of command, etc. if people are free to mouth off in this way.
Well, you can claim that my boss intimidated me. I certainly didn't feel intimidated.
I often don't express highly controversial views (politics, religion, etc.) in a venue where the results aren't to my benefit and are to my detriment. And I'd venture that most people act the same way. Just for example, when I get on an airplane, I don't turn to my seatmate and ask if they are a christian, and do they care to defend that position. What's the point? What is served by this behavior?
Actually, more to your point, I have personally "intimidated" people into not expressing their views in the workplace, where those views were inappropriate. This applies to view with which I agree, and with which I disagree. Just for example, I once had a subordinate who joined the company and began closing all his emails "God bless,." This included emails to customers. Whatever his religious views and rights to speech, they don't extend to forcing other company employees to endure his speech when they don't care for it, and they don't include a right to attribute his views to the company by implication. I told him that this behavior would have to stop if he wished to continue with the company. His reaction was perhaps similar to what yours would be - he began to argue with me about the truth or falsity of the proposition that God exists, etc. I had to tell him, firstly that my religious views were none of his business, and secondly that his religious views had nothing to do with our business.
If you want to say whatever you want, whenever you want, you will have to live with the consequences, and these will include not being able to remain in certain social and professional situations. If that's a worthwhile trade in your view, more power to you. But I think it's unfair to characterize people who disagree as "intimidated."
1) Theo is a Canadian living and working in Canada. He doesn't have any 1st Amendment rights. His rights to free speech are entirely determined by his country of residence and to a much lesser extent, his citizenship. So where the government cutting an American professor's research funds because of comments he made on an unrelated political issue might be a 1st Amendment violation, this isn't and can't be.
2) No one has produced any evidence that Theo's comments were a factor in the cancellation of the contract, let alone a decisive factor.
3) It's not unreasonable on it's face for the Department of Defense to choose not to fund a vocal critic who is a foreigner working abroad. There's plenty of American programmers looking for work right now, and it's our tax money.
4) Theo needs to get his priorities straight. I once worked for a boss who was a religious conservative. I disagree with his views on most everything to do with religion, philosophy, and government. However, I did not choose to decorate my office with signs and images to that effect. Although I would indicate some disagreement in our conversations, I would never reveal my true views which he would have perceived as radical and threatening. That's because to me, his most important relationship to me was that of employer, not that of debating partner or anything else, and my comments would have interfered with that relationship. As long as Theo thinks that his freedom to make statements on touchy subjects is more important than the health of the OpenBSD project, this kind of thing will continue, and knowing that, he shouldn't complain.
I mean really, if a local school board member came by soliticing donations, and you knew that they had just voted to condemn free software (in the GPL sense) as "communistic" you might choose not to donate, right? I'm still boycotting Blizzard projects over b.net, so maybe I'm in the minority here, but I think people who use their freedom of action and speech should be accountable for their choices. I wouldn't be buying OpenBSD CD's from Theo, no matter how terrific it is, if he used his position to advocate white supremecy, or killing abortionists, or any one of an infinite number of such things. Whether I disagree or not, the point is, if getting money for OpenBSD is the most important thing for Theo, he's making a mistake by alienating potential donors with his speech, regardless of his right to make it.
I've fired the Desert Eagle.50 AE one-handed, with no ill effects.
This is one of those type of stories that is always being passed around when the topic is something macho, like cars or guns. I used to hear about how people would "set off" a Ruger Super Redhawk and bury the front sight in their forehead, too. Also bs.
Not to say that firing powerful guns can't cause you pain, especially if you do it a lot. But like most things, practice and intelligent attention to the body mechanics involved will spare you most of it.
>You read *news on FoxNEWS? FoxNEWS is an oxymoron.
Enjoy the following quote then.
LESLIE H. GELB, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, watches international news obsessively, skipping from channel to channel. "I never watch a commercial," he said.
He now considers Fox News Channel often to be a more reliable news source for international reporting than CNN or the nightly network news. Fox, he said, provides a "fairer picture, a fuller version of the different parts of the arguments" over world affairs.
Mr. Gelb said he makes a distinction between Fox's news coverage and its opinion programs, like "The O'Reilly Factor," which he considers biased. But even here, he finds himself drawn to Fox. "CNN's commentary tends to be less biased and less interesting," he said.
A lot of other people who do not fit comfortably into the right-wing stereotypeof Fox viewers apparently agree."
Looks like you can't just blacken Fox's reputation together with the intellectual capacity of its viewers with the standard liberal "smarter-than-thou and nobler of purpose" brush. Because when people on the CFR, much less the President, are willing to go on record and say that they find Fox less biased, "fairer" and "fuller," then that dog won't hunt.
Of course you provide nothing to back up your claims, and I'll bet you haven't even thought the matter through.
No, read them. Actually, re-read both in the last 30 days.
In _MiR_ one of the ideas you suggest not being "good " was that everyone was destroyed by hostile aliens. I don't recall any other really "bad" ones. It's worth noting that the actual main characters are trying to recreate a singularity, since they missed the first one, and that they maintain this positive view throughout the book. So its evident that the disappearance of all humanity isn't supposed to be seen as a turn-off to a reasoning being.
Blood Music was a pretty good example of a true Singularity that just happens to be started off by accident. Instead of willing intelligent machines working with humans explicitly to move forward, Bear has us accidently set the match to the fuse by having lots of tiny intelligences that can cluster fire up in an environment where natural selection is still active. It's a typical Bear cop-out on the way to Transcendence.
Your last paragraph is the reason why I question the idea of a ship of people waiting to flee if things turn bad, or even well out into interstellar space. When you get close to this kind asymptotic behavior, all contacts are "Out of Context Problems" to borrow from Ian Banks.
We can decide to stop, or not. But if we decide to go, there's no avoiding putting all the eggs in one basket. That's all I am saying here.
I think your discussion is a terrific argument for a Vinge-style singularity, and not against. But then, I think you may misunderstand Vinge.
You point out that again and again, humans have surmounted the horizon of the possible, and that this is happening more and more closely spaced in time. Great! But Vinge doesn't claim that some lightning bolt will fall and transform everything all at once - he simply points out that the rate of change curves keep climbing such that we can't possibly predict or understand what will happen past a certain point. That seems to be what you are saying, too.
The main difference between the big event coming up, and say ancient Egypt, is that in ancient Egypt they weren't on the brink of creating tools that could participate in the upward spiral on their creators behalf. They were still limited by economic ineffeciency to having around 1% of the population doing all the thinking.
I agree that our tools will help us assimilate change. Of course, we're not spinning some foolish fable like Future Shock, this is reality.
You make a lot of points, and have obviously thought some on the subject, so I urge you to go back to Vinge and see if you really differ from him in the basic description of Singularity.
I think you can turn to any recent treatment of the subject to learn why making "grey goo" would be much more difficult than making assemblers in the general case, and that doing it accidently is just this side of impossible. The short form is just to point out that if it were possible to easily get free energy from all the world's molecules, then evolution would already have provided us an example of something that does so, and we'd live in goo land. But, it's not.
The rest of your discussion is more reasonable, simply because we can't easily rule out threats we can't forsee and don't understand. But the problem with standing on the sidelines is that you have no power to effect the situation. Imagine if the Hottentotts decided to disarm the U.S., claiming that Bush had gotten out of line.
Seriously, if the mainline of humanity is climbing an exponential curve of intelligence and knowledge, how can a few relative aboriginees stop things from going bad? Or save themselves if active malignancy arises?
> Huh, I'm not sure it's a GOOD thing. Isn't the idea that it's an unpredictable thing? As I understand it, >the theory is that beyond the technological singularity, human society (if it even exists) >will be radically transformed. So, as a person born before the singularity, I probably wouldn't like it.
Certainly the supposition is that a radical and nearly complete transformation will take place, and that due to the vast qualitiative differences engendered by the intervening changes, we will find the nature of that change unpredictable.
But, that doesn't mean that we won't change too. Either we will figure out ways to increase and alter our intelligence, or our machine superintelligences will figure it out for us. So there's no getting from here to there without becoming something you'd never recognize.
Now, maybe you don't like that idea right now, and perhaps you'll stay on the sidelines. But these things have a way of seeming friendly and innocuous after repeated exposure. Remember the "computer-phobia" of the Eighties? They were going to take away our jobs? Now my 75 year-old in-laws have a PC with XP and a Cable modem. They had to get it because the Kiwanis people and the neighborhood garden club people pestered them to get email. Yes! Kiwanis and garden club!
What will you do when you can't understand your granddaughter's 5th grade math assignment? Will you finally decide, hey, I'm going to get vastened. What's the point of clinging to this outrageous mental modality anyway - like keeping a box of all your nail clippings. Worse, it's like running into a burning building to save your box of nail clippings.
So I expect relatively few people will make it to the big one without adequate preparation.
Just a second... to save the race from the Singularity? The Singularity is a good thing. If you read Vinge's essay, or any of the other essays on the subject, you'll find that people look forward to this event and are actively trying to move the date forward. One fellow says that the definition of morally good is that which makes the Singularity happen sooner.
So either the poster is on crack, or ve represents a new and radically different perspective on the Singularity than I have ever seen in print. Which is it?
>>Q. Why are the politics in higher education so dirty and cutthroat? >> >>A. Because the stakes are so small. >Oh, it's also a quote from Henry Kissinger.
Well, it's not exactly a quote because Henry didn't use the Q/A format. But, as Dr. Michael Aquino recently noted in this post on alt.satanism,
Henry the K., who never ceases to nauseate me, ripped that off from one of Parkinson's Laws, which states that the number and force of opinions concerning an issue vary inversely with its complexity. Few board members will contest a complicated five-year sales plan, but everyone will go to the mat concerning whether the office coffee-break should be 15 or 20 minutes.
This is an interesting idea, using psychoacoustic modeling to open a data channel in audio. The article describes some applications, and I'll certainly admit that some of them sound irritating or possibly dangerous (from a security standpoint.) Others sound better.
But not everything interesting to do with this will be done by the company involved, because it may not make good business sense or they may not have thought of it. I'd be interested in what slashdotters can think of to do with such a channel. The obvious use of embedding artist and recording information is mentioned, and I like that one a lot. It would be great to have a radio displaying those things, and to be able to scroll back and look at the last N songs. This would let you find out what that song you heard the end of was, or do a statistical analysis of a station's playlist, whatever you want.
A use that occurs to me is adding the information to advertisements so that adverisers can automate the task of making sure that they get what they pay for. Even performers could use an "ad id" check to make sure they get their voice-over royalties and the like.
Of course, voice of america and similar programs could use this right away. First they start adding this hidden content to all programming, using encrypted books, articles, or any other easily accesible source. They can then easily put a specific message with a specific key into a program that certain people can unlock. There's no entropy difference between the "real" message and the usual dummy ones to detect.
I'm pleased to see Dan moving away from his position about linux on the desktop. It's really quite odd how many people dismiss it, not just in its present form, but as a possibility of any kind.
All the arguments against such a thing apply equally well to the creation of a linux distribution. No one wants to write docs, no one wants to integrate all these pieces and make them work, and so forth. Well, red hat does, and so does debian. There's no reason why the same forces that can result in a highly integrated distribution can't also result in a highly integrated desktop.
Also, as more corporations embrace linux, and as hardware vendors like Sun choose to make it part of their offerings, even more force comes to bear on the human interface issues.
It just reminds me of the Metcalfe "Open Sores" articles of some years back, when he dismissed the whole idea of high quality free software outright. How blind do you have to be to do this? What force will make it get worse, or stop it from improving?
Congratulations to Dan for keeping his eyes open on this issue, and for a solid interview.
The first one looks good, good enough to bookmark. The second doesn't work in Mozilla, so I'm not inclined to follow their advice.
The site I am thinking of, though, is a collection of example pages that people developed using only HTML, even though they appear to use graphics. For example, they even have "pictures" drawn using only HTML.
If anyone recognizes this description, thanks in advance for a link.:)
Slightly off-topic, but I once visited a web site full of examples of HTML pages that "simulated" having embedded graphics using only straight HTML. Does anyone recognize this who can provide a IRL? I'd google but searching for "html no graphics" or "html graphics" etc. is pretty useless.
(I've been waiting for a topic where this wasn't *totally* off-topic, so please spare me.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Get an echo mia. Two words: balanced outputs. If you must have surround out then m-audio have something nice too, unbalanced out but far superior audio to creative.
I wasn't changing the subject - warpup wrote a reply to you that comes from a different angle.
I'll take what you say at face value. In some ways the world you describe would be attractive. I suppose that it would be nice to be able to honestly express myself on any topic with no fear of altering my relationship with others, whether profesional or personal. But that is simply not a realistic possibility where human beings are involved. If a co-worker of mine like to talk about about the intrinisic inferiority of blacks, or about how whites were all racists, I would have a different opinion of them that would change my relationship to them. It would be less likely that I would mention them for promotion, etc. If they concealed their views it would be to their advantage, and largely people like that are aware of this. I think you are asking for Solomonic wisdom from average people.
Much of what the government funds is funded in a non-partisan way. And your point that Theo isn't being funded for a political end is well taken. But he's being funded by the department of defense, and he's openly and roundly criticizing them. From what I've heard from some friends who interacted with the National Endowment for the Arts, it's the same way there but far worse - toe the line or forget about funding. Any one of them would laugh at the notion of the NEA continuing to fund people who criticize it, if they had a choice not to continue.
I want to avoid the tangential topic of white supremicists in Congress largely because I don't think it's directly relevant. But I'm pretty sure that David Duke never served in the U.S. congress. He was in the state legislature of Louisiana for one term. Here's the Anti-Defamation League page on him. And I'm pretty sure too that it was a democrat, Robert Byrd, who chose to use the term "white nigger" twice in a television interview in 2001, saying "I'm going to use that word." Criticism from civil-rights groups was essentially non-existant, as discussed here. So maybe there's the same double-standard you dislike, but in reverse: because he's a democrat, his speech is unpunished, even though his job is a political one, and even though his opinions do not seem consistent with the America we want to live in.
Anyway, you close by saying that the DARPA action was legal, but it wasn't right. If the contract was terminated due to Theo's comments, which I think is still undemonstrated, then we agree to the first part. I think reasonable people can differ as to the rightness of an action like this, because it depends very much on what priorities we assign to different government functions. I appreciate that you've thought a lot about your views, and also your willingness to discuss them reasonably rather than in the over-inflamed manner too common on net boards.
OK, you seem like a good sport. I guess there just wasn't enough of your first comment to tell whether you were being sarcastic-bitter or just flippant.
:)
Is the "Lighten up, Francis" a quote that I should recognize, or perhaps have you mistaken me for some other pedant of your acquaintance?
And your point is?
Of course DARPA knew where the money was going. And if it was Theo's comments that prompted the termination of the grant, which has yet to be demonstrated, then the sole and only point I am making with respect to his nationality and country of residence/employment is that there cannot be a 1st Amendment violation, as there might be were a similar action to be taken with a U.S. citizen or resident.
I'm going to ignore your attempted dig, and just address your "point."
The question in the scenario I outlined isn't whether the CIA is legally allowed to eavesdrop without a warrant on a foreign national in a foreign country according to the laws of the foreign country. The question is the legality of that behavior under United States law. If Charles Manson should ever be paroled, the FBI would need to show probable cause and obtain a warrant to listen to his telephone calls. But the same is not true of Yussef Mohammed, released from Camp X-Ray back to his home in Kabul. And the reason why that's true is because our Bill of Rights is not understood to limit the actions of our government with respect to foreign nationals abroad.
If you look back, you'll find that this was indeed the original point. I'd suggest a closer reading before making free with the sarcasm.
Since you escalated the rhetoric, I'll just say: tell it Daniel Pearl.
I apologize if my remarks were easily interpreted to mean that Canada makes no guarantees for free speech among its citizens. I mean to convey only precisely what I said, that the 1st Amendment to the Constituion of the United States doesn't give Canadians in Canada any such guarantees. I should, I suppose, have realized that people elsewhere might also think of 1st Amendment as being equal to Freedom of Speech.
But it's quite clear. The FBI can't arrest the French police for trying to prevent Yahoo! France from auctioning Nazi items, or arrest German police for trying to prevent a violent videogame from entering the country. The Supreme Court can't rule those countries' laws unconstituional. So I meant specifically to say that the U.S. 1st Amendment doesn't give foreign nationals who are not within our borders any protections for their speech.
The fact that Canada's charter makes such assertions for the entire world (if that's how your courts interpret that) has, as you know, absolutely no legal consequences whatsoever.
You're right to say that that is what the constitution says. However, it has never been interpreted as meaning what you suggest. No one has ever suggested, for example, that the CIA needs a warrant to eavesdrop on a foreign national in a foreign country. If they are here, they get the protections.
As far as the famous (isn't it Ben Franklin) quote, I don't consider that Theo has given up any liberty for any security. He's spoken out, and is still a free man. He's free to say that same thing again. Nor was he more secure before he spoke. So as much as I agree with the quote, I don't see the application here.
I was not afraid to speak my mind lest I be fired. I have no more interest in a conversation of the type you suggest with that particular person than I would with a random person in the street. I didn't think I would learn from him, or vice versa. But that's beside the point. I was paid to work as a software engineer, not as a polemicist.
Frankly, I don't think I would have been fired. I expect that personal relations witht that person would have been strained, which would make it more difficult for me to do my job. I would possibly have had more difficulty getting a raise. But even if I did think that an expression of, say, my religous views would get me fired, you don't want to answer the question of why I would be expressing those views to my boss on company time in the first place.
Just to touch on your last line, no one is suggesting that your country be run like that. But there are some obvious parallels that you might think of. For example, there was an Air Force General during the Clinton Administration that said some disparaging things about Clinton. He was fired. That seems to me to be consistent with the position that I am taking, but I sense that you would disagree. I'd like to know how you think the military can maintain an effective chain of command, etc. if people are free to mouth off in this way.
Well, you can claim that my boss intimidated me. I certainly didn't feel intimidated.
." This included emails to customers. Whatever his religious views and rights to speech, they don't extend to forcing other company employees to endure his speech when they don't care for it, and they don't include a right to attribute his views to the company by implication. I told him that this behavior would have to stop if he wished to continue with the company. His reaction was perhaps similar to what yours would be - he began to argue with me about the truth or falsity of the proposition that God exists, etc. I had to tell him, firstly that my religious views were none of his business, and secondly that his religious views had nothing to do with our business.
I often don't express highly controversial views (politics, religion, etc.) in a venue where the results aren't to my benefit and are to my detriment. And I'd venture that most people act the same way. Just for example, when I get on an airplane, I don't turn to my seatmate and ask if they are a christian, and do they care to defend that position. What's the point? What is served by this behavior?
Actually, more to your point, I have personally "intimidated" people into not expressing their views in the workplace, where those views were inappropriate. This applies to view with which I agree, and with which I disagree. Just for example, I once had a subordinate who joined the company and began closing all his emails "God bless,
If you want to say whatever you want, whenever you want, you will have to live with the consequences, and these will include not being able to remain in certain social and professional situations. If that's a worthwhile trade in your view, more power to you. But I think it's unfair to characterize people who disagree as "intimidated."
Let's just take this point by point:
1) Theo is a Canadian living and working in Canada. He doesn't have any 1st Amendment rights. His rights to free speech are entirely determined by his country of residence and to a much lesser extent, his citizenship. So where the government cutting an American professor's research funds because of comments he made on an unrelated political issue might be a 1st Amendment violation, this isn't and can't be.
2) No one has produced any evidence that Theo's comments were a factor in the cancellation of the contract, let alone a decisive factor.
3) It's not unreasonable on it's face for the Department of Defense to choose not to fund a vocal critic who is a foreigner working abroad. There's plenty of American programmers looking for work right now, and it's our tax money.
4) Theo needs to get his priorities straight. I once worked for a boss who was a religious conservative. I disagree with his views on most everything to do with religion, philosophy, and government. However, I did not choose to decorate my office with signs and images to that effect. Although I would indicate some disagreement in our conversations, I would never reveal my true views which he would have perceived as radical and threatening. That's because to me, his most important relationship to me was that of employer, not that of debating partner or anything else, and my comments would have interfered with that relationship. As long as Theo thinks that his freedom to make statements on touchy subjects is more important than the health of the OpenBSD project, this kind of thing will continue, and knowing that, he shouldn't complain.
I mean really, if a local school board member came by soliticing donations, and you knew that they had just voted to condemn free software (in the GPL sense) as "communistic" you might choose not to donate, right? I'm still boycotting Blizzard projects over b.net, so maybe I'm in the minority here, but I think people who use their freedom of action and speech should be accountable for their choices. I wouldn't be buying OpenBSD CD's from Theo, no matter how terrific it is, if he used his position to advocate white supremecy, or killing abortionists, or any one of an infinite number of such things. Whether I disagree or not, the point is, if getting money for OpenBSD is the most important thing for Theo, he's making a mistake by alienating potential donors with his speech, regardless of his right to make it.
I've fired the Desert Eagle .50 AE one-handed, with no ill effects.
This is one of those type of stories that is always being passed around when the topic is something macho, like cars or guns. I used to hear about how people would "set off" a Ruger Super Redhawk and bury the front sight in their forehead, too. Also bs.
Not to say that firing powerful guns can't cause you pain, especially if you do it a lot. But like most things, practice and intelligent attention to the body mechanics involved will spare you most of it.
Enjoy the following quote then.
Looks like you can't just blacken Fox's reputation together with the intellectual capacity of its viewers with the standard liberal "smarter-than-thou and nobler of purpose" brush. Because when people on the CFR, much less the President, are willing to go on record and say that they find Fox less biased, "fairer" and "fuller," then that dog won't hunt.
Of course you provide nothing to back up your claims, and I'll bet you haven't even thought the matter through.
How can Jon be in trouble in a country that has a Crown Prince Haakon?
(Boo, sorry, couldn't resist.)
No, read them. Actually, re-read both in the last 30 days.
In _MiR_ one of the ideas you suggest not being "good " was that everyone was destroyed by hostile aliens. I don't recall any other really "bad" ones. It's worth noting that the actual main characters are trying to recreate a singularity, since they missed the first one, and that they maintain this positive view throughout the book. So its evident that the disappearance of all humanity isn't supposed to be seen as a turn-off to a reasoning being.
Blood Music was a pretty good example of a true Singularity that just happens to be started off by accident. Instead of willing intelligent machines working with humans explicitly to move forward, Bear has us accidently set the match to the fuse by having lots of tiny intelligences that can cluster fire up in an environment where natural selection is still active. It's a typical Bear cop-out on the way to Transcendence.
Your last paragraph is the reason why I question the idea of a ship of people waiting to flee if things turn bad, or even well out into interstellar space. When you get close to this kind asymptotic behavior, all contacts are "Out of Context Problems" to borrow from Ian Banks.
We can decide to stop, or not. But if we decide to go, there's no avoiding putting all the eggs in one basket. That's all I am saying here.
I think your discussion is a terrific argument for a Vinge-style singularity, and not against. But then, I think you may misunderstand Vinge.
You point out that again and again, humans have surmounted the horizon of the possible, and that this is happening more and more closely spaced in time. Great! But Vinge doesn't claim that some lightning bolt will fall and transform everything all at once - he simply points out that the rate of change curves keep climbing such that we can't possibly predict or understand what will happen past a certain point. That seems to be what you are saying, too.
The main difference between the big event coming up, and say ancient Egypt, is that in ancient Egypt they weren't on the brink of creating tools that could participate in the upward spiral on their creators behalf. They were still limited by economic ineffeciency to having around 1% of the population doing all the thinking.
I agree that our tools will help us assimilate change. Of course, we're not spinning some foolish fable like Future Shock, this is reality.
You make a lot of points, and have obviously thought some on the subject, so I urge you to go back to Vinge and see if you really differ from him in the basic description of Singularity.
I think you can turn to any recent treatment of the subject to learn why making "grey goo" would be much more difficult than making assemblers in the general case, and that doing it accidently is just this side of impossible. The short form is just to point out that if it were possible to easily get free energy from all the world's molecules, then evolution would already have provided us an example of something that does so, and we'd live in goo land. But, it's not.
The rest of your discussion is more reasonable, simply because we can't easily rule out threats we can't forsee and don't understand. But the problem with standing on the sidelines is that you have no power to effect the situation. Imagine if the Hottentotts decided to disarm the U.S., claiming that Bush had gotten out of line.
Seriously, if the mainline of humanity is climbing an exponential curve of intelligence and knowledge, how can a few relative aboriginees stop things from going bad? Or save themselves if active malignancy arises?
Certainly the supposition is that a radical and nearly complete transformation will take place, and that due to the vast qualitiative differences engendered by the intervening changes, we will find the nature of that change unpredictable.
But, that doesn't mean that we won't change too. Either we will figure out ways to increase and alter our intelligence, or our machine superintelligences will figure it out for us. So there's no getting from here to there without becoming something you'd never recognize.
Now, maybe you don't like that idea right now, and perhaps you'll stay on the sidelines. But these things have a way of seeming friendly and innocuous after repeated exposure. Remember the "computer-phobia" of the Eighties? They were going to take away our jobs? Now my 75 year-old in-laws have a PC with XP and a Cable modem. They had to get it because the Kiwanis people and the neighborhood garden club people pestered them to get email. Yes! Kiwanis and garden club!
What will you do when you can't understand your granddaughter's 5th grade math assignment? Will you finally decide, hey, I'm going to get vastened. What's the point of clinging to this outrageous mental modality anyway - like keeping a box of all your nail clippings. Worse, it's like running into a burning building to save your box of nail clippings.
So I expect relatively few people will make it to the big one without adequate preparation.
Just a second... to save the race from the Singularity? The Singularity is a good thing. If you read Vinge's essay, or any of the other essays on the subject, you'll find that people look forward to this event and are actively trying to move the date forward. One fellow says that the definition of morally good is that which makes the Singularity happen sooner.
(There's a lot of interesting things at the Singularity Institute by the way.)
So either the poster is on crack, or ve represents a new and radically different perspective on the Singularity than I have ever seen in print. Which is it?
Well, it's not exactly a quote because Henry didn't use the Q/A format. But, as Dr. Michael Aquino recently noted in this post on alt.satanism,
This is an interesting idea, using psychoacoustic modeling to open a data channel in audio. The article describes some applications, and I'll certainly admit that some of them sound irritating or possibly dangerous (from a security standpoint.) Others sound better.
But not everything interesting to do with this will be done by the company involved, because it may not make good business sense or they may not have thought of it. I'd be interested in what slashdotters can think of to do with such a channel. The obvious use of embedding artist and recording information is mentioned, and I like that one a lot. It would be great to have a radio displaying those things, and to be able to scroll back and look at the last N songs. This would let you find out what that song you heard the end of was, or do a statistical analysis of a station's playlist, whatever you want.
A use that occurs to me is adding the information to advertisements so that adverisers can automate the task of making sure that they get what they pay for. Even performers could use an "ad id" check to make sure they get their voice-over royalties and the like.
Of course, voice of america and similar programs could use this right away. First they start adding this hidden content to all programming, using encrypted books, articles, or any other easily accesible source. They can then easily put a specific message with a specific key into a program that certain people can unlock. There's no entropy difference between the "real" message and the usual dummy ones to detect.
Hmmm lots of fun to be had here...
Andrea Arcangeli is a man.
I'm pleased to see Dan moving away from his position about linux on the desktop. It's really quite odd how many people dismiss it, not just in its present form, but as a possibility of any kind.
All the arguments against such a thing apply equally well to the creation of a linux distribution. No one wants to write docs, no one wants to integrate all these pieces and make them work, and so forth. Well, red hat does, and so does debian. There's no reason why the same forces that can result in a highly integrated distribution can't also result in a highly integrated desktop.
Also, as more corporations embrace linux, and as hardware vendors like Sun choose to make it part of their offerings, even more force comes to bear on the human interface issues.
It just reminds me of the Metcalfe "Open Sores" articles of some years back, when he dismissed the whole idea of high quality free software outright. How blind do you have to be to do this? What force will make it get worse, or stop it from improving?
Congratulations to Dan for keeping his eyes open on this issue, and for a solid interview.
Hi AC, thanks for the links.
:)
The first one looks good, good enough to bookmark. The second doesn't work in Mozilla, so I'm not inclined to follow their advice.
The site I am thinking of, though, is a collection of example pages that people developed using only HTML, even though they appear to use graphics. For example, they even have "pictures" drawn using only HTML.
If anyone recognizes this description, thanks in advance for a link.
Slightly off-topic, but I once visited a web site full of examples of HTML pages that "simulated" having embedded graphics using only straight HTML. Does anyone recognize this who can provide a IRL? I'd google but searching for "html no graphics" or "html graphics" etc. is pretty useless.
:)
(I've been waiting for a topic where this wasn't *totally* off-topic, so please spare me.
Thanks in advance.