"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang
In a way, DARPA is right to cut funding to academia. Over the last forty years, scientists have made a complete mess of programming. We now have a world full of incompatible operating systems and programming languages, a veritable tower of Babel. Yet, software is as failure prone as ever. Software disaster stories are now making the evening news on a regular basis. Does academia take the blame, even partially? Don't count on it. They've invented every excuse in the book, from "there is no silver bullet" to "we don't have enough funding." It's sickening.
I say, unless the computer science community gets off its spoiled collective ass and comes up with a solution to the software reliability problem, it deserves to get its funding decreased. Drastically.
TFA is about signals in the brain regarding physical movement. What does this have to do with proving innocence or guilt with crimes? "Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking" was just the title. It's not a story about scientists being able to peer into people's memories or complex thoughts.
Well, you'd be surprised to find out that so called complex thoughts are just as much motor activations as normal muscle control. They both involve the part of the brain known as the Basal Ganglia, the seat of motor coordination and control. The only difference is that the final motor effectors in the BG are inhibited during thinking. However, during thinking, unconscious motor activation may still take place in the cerebellum.
From my understanding, you aren't getting all possible answers simultaneously. You are evaluating all possible answers simultaneously and statistically getting the "right" answer.
So are you saying that you already know the probability of the right answer before you compute it? Or are you saying that the QC already knows what answer you're looking for and somehow futzes with the probabilities so that when you collapse the wave function, voila! the correct answer is revealed, as if by magic?
You know, the more I read about this quantum computer stuff, the more I am convinced that it's nothing but rancid snake oil. Just one man's opinion, of course.
"Two entangled qubits, meanwhile, can simultaneously evaluate four inputs. Put another way, a traditional memory register with eight bits can store only one of a possible 28, or 256, digital "words," but a quantum register with eight qubits can represent and compute with all 256 words at once."
So, If you get all possible answers simultaneously, how do you tell which one is the right answer to the problem you're working on?
No, they fled to higher ground after they saw the water level drop knowing that it would come back up the same amount that it dropped.
True but it is also probable that they fled to higher ground because there was a big earthquake. Big earthquakes are known to often precede tsunamis in that part of the world. No unexplained sixth sense is needed.
The security problem really has to do with flaws in software. Most viruses and trojans take advantage of defects in operating systems and applications such as email and browser programs. Microsoft is being targeted because they have a monopoly but all software is at fault.
Software is bad, period. And, contrary to what Frederick Brooks and others continue to claim, unreliability is not an essential property of complex software systems. Unreliability stems from a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Switch to a synchronous, signal-based approach and the problem will disappear. For an alternative approach to software construction, see link below.
...it is somewhat flawed in my opinion. Bonobo is based on Corba and Microsoft OLE. It is an attempt at achieving a common programming interface for implementing reusable software components and compound documents. The weakness of Bonobo is that it brings with it all the complex abstractions and unwieldy charateristics of Microsoft OLE and Corba, things like QueryInterface and reference counting.
While Bonobo goes a long way to automate a good portion of the task of connecting components together, it does not go far enough IMO. A proper paradigm for compositional software architecture should follow the example of hardware connectors and plugs. Connecting two components should be 100% safe and automatic. There should be no need for the programmer to query interfaces or count references. Just connect and disconnect components and the system should take care of the rest automatically and painlessly.
Here are some charateristics of what I think is a good compositional software environment:
1. Automatic enforcement of type and secure password compatibility. Just connect, the system takes care of the rest.
2. Symmetrical connectors (male, female)
3. Prioritized message passing only. No function calls.
4. Symmetry. Unidirectional message flow (e.g. from male to female). Bidirectional communication requires two connectors.
5. Multi-connectors: single male connector sends messages to multiple female connectors.
6. Prioritized Queue components.
There is more but you get the idea. If I said something above that mischaracterizes Bonobo, please do correct me.
I'm not "male-bashing", I'm simply pointing out that not every aspect of male behaviour is necessarily a good thing.
What you are doing is thinking of yourself as being wiser than nature. You are a fool.
Just don't confuse it with territoriality, which in of itself neither feeds nor protects anybody, but rather seeks self-aggrandizement, if need be at the expense of the community or even family. Howler monkeys are probably not our best models.
Nature sets up a system among animals that ensures both species survival and ecological balance. It's a system that has been tried and tested over millions of years and you think you can do better? You are worse than a fool. You are an arrogant, self-righteous fool.
Territoriality is crucial to the survival of the species. It allows the strongest to survive while maintaining a balanced control over population. Human societies need to institute rules of behavior that are linked to territorial resources in order to guarantee a comparable balance. We don't need to eat our children to do that. The females of all species (including human females) must choose their mates according to their abilities to provide and maintain a profitable territory. This is the only natural way to control world population without instituting a fascist system that destroys our freedoms. The only way to do this is through a system of land inheritance. The land must not be divided for a price and sold like other commodities. This is pure folly, a sure prescription for disaster and we see the disatrous results of our present system all over the world. The land should be preserved as an inheritance for us, our children and their children.
The territorial instinct is often vested in the male, it's true, and it's frankly one of the more embarrassing aspects of my gender since it's not good for much of anything yet takes up so much time and energy. Male lions are very good at protecting their territory against other male lions, but not nearly as good at hunting as their females. Pimps are exteremely territorial, but all the work is done by the hookers. Gang members will defend their turf against other gangs, but still live with their mothers because all their efforts are completely unproductive. The very fact that females tend to be less territorial and more practical inclines me to invest in them rather than their mates.
IOW, you are a male basher who delights in seeing men and women constantly at war. It's idiots like you who are responsible for the sorry state of the world.
disenfranchised adj : deprived of the rights of citizenship especially the right to vote [syn: disfranchised, voteless]
Your peasant may be exploited all to hell, but that's not the same thing as disenfranchised.
This is a modern and misleading interpretation of the word. One of the rights a human being should have is a right to a piece of the pie, the pie being the earth and its resources. One can be given the right to vote all one's life, but if one does not have a means of independent subsistence, one is a slave, ready for exploitation. And it does not matter how much they try to brainwash you into thinking you are free. Besides, there is nothing more pathetic than a slave who is deluded into thinking he's free, just because he/she has achieved some status among the other slaves. This was the definition of freedom (enfranchisement) in the Roman and Babylonian empires: you were free if you and your family were granted property. The others were slaves.
And I have to ask: why should the groom be required to show that he can support a family? My interest would be in showing that somebody can support the family, and my money's on the wife. The World Bank has been finding that, tradition notwithstanding, a hell of a lot of women are better businessmen than their husbands anyway, less inclined to piss away wealth on status and liquor (in fact, I'd bet the dowery tradition has a lot to do with fathers showing off how much they can give away.)
You can put as much of a politically correct spin on it as you want but the fact is that, in 99.9% of the earth's species (including the human species), the male is the one with the territorial instinct. Sure the females usually have more sense in making the territory prosper (in fact, in some African societies, the women control the market place and I think that's cool) but territoriality is the domain of the male. Any social system that ignores this basic human (and animal) instinct is a formula for disaster. Indeed, we witness the failure of modern social engineering in big cities all around the world, what with crime, poverty, abuse and countless family dysfunctions.
Yes, democracy is implemented haphazardly in India, but to suggest that anyone in India is disenfranchised is ridiculous. Maybe you don't know what the word disenfranchised means.
You should look it up yourself. A landless peasant is disenfranchised and is forced to be a slave by moving into a big city where he is exploited. This is true all over the world.
The land must be redistributed
The commies are coming, the commies are coming...
Communism does not redistribute the land. It confiscates it and turns everybody into a slave for the state. Capitalism, on the other hand, gives the land to a few and enslaves the rest. This is sad. I've said it before, any system that is based exclusively on labor is doomed. What will happen to a slave economy when robots replace everybody, i.e., when human labor and expertise become worthless. Don't think it won't happen in your lifetime. You'd be fooling only yourself. Thanks to the internet, we are about to see an explosion in human knowledge and technology. One little breakthrough, that's all it will take. After that you'll witness an explosion in automation that will make all previous economic revolutions look like child's play. Unless we are prepared to change the system, get ready to face disaster.
and social (marriage) laws enacted so as to link the wealth of the land to population increases. There should not be more people than the resources of the country can support comfortably.
I have no idea what you mean by that but if you're thinking of forcibly sterilizing people or disallowing them from getting married or having children, I'm very, very afraid of you.
You should indeed be afraid, but not of me. You should be afraid of your own gullibility. Anybody who does not realize that population control must be tied to the wealth of the land has not a clue. Even animals know this instinctively. It is much more acceptable to institute marriage laws that are directly tied to how much people can afford than to forcibly sterilize people and make them abort their unborn fetuses.
In India and elsewhere in the world where there is a population problem, the family of the bride is called upon to offer all sorts of dowery to the groom. It should be the other way around. The groom should show proof that he can afford a family. Change this stupid ass-backward practice and you'll see a drop in world population.
...child pornography is one of the arguments that those who would steal our freedom use to enact their laws. The poster may have been joking but child abuse is indeed a problem in India and elsewhere. Taking away people's freedom by snooping on them is not going to solve the problem.
Children are not the only people being abused in India and elsewhere. India needs to make social and land reforms. India is a huge and rich country with a resourceful people. Unfortunately only a small percentage of the upper class controls the wealth of India. The vast majority of the people are landless and disenfranchised. So they flock to big cities in search of a living and they become target for abuse and exploitation. They are slaves by necessity. The land must be redistributed and social (marriage) laws enacted so as to link the wealth of the land to population increases. There should not be more people than the resources of the country can support comfortably.
The internet is your weapon. Download it all and copy it all!
All Indian citizens should rise up against this affront on their freedom. Hackers around the world should come to aid of their Indian counterparts in finding technological solutions around this crap. It is thought slavery, pure and simple. Resist it with everything you've got. Do it in the name of Ghandi if you have to. A billion Indians passively demonstrating with civil disobedience should do the trick. It would also send a powerful message to the rest of the world that the human species is not about to be enslaved by Big Brotherism whereever it takes root.
The internet is your weapon. Download it all and copy it all!
Re:Interesting and SCARY
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
Oh, and one more thought - this has been discussed on/. elsewhere, but currently to be successful in academics, you are almost required to publish constantly. Asking people not to publish their information would be the same as saying "don't do this research" and there are good reasons to do the research or it wouldn't get funded. Also, just becuase we're not doing the research doesn't mean Big Enemey Of The Day isn't doing research either (that's the logic we violated the BWTC under!)
Thanks for the info and the pertinent comments. Good luck in your career. I hope you never have to decide between publishing your work and putting the world in danger. Thanks.
...and that is to immediately and globally engage in mass copying, uploading, downloading and distributing of all copyrighted and patented materials. This is the only way we are going to prevent the powers that be from enacting increasingly Big Brother-type measures to ensure that their so-called intellectual property is not stolen. We must not allow this to happen. We must weaken them where it hurts the most, their pocket book. Otherwise our freedom is history.
The powers that be got their power and wealth from our money and our work. We allowed them to be what they are. Resist all Orwellian systems that take away your liberty a little bit at a time, one little law at a time. We can take it back. The internet is our weapon. Refuse to pay for any copyrighted music, software, patents, ideas, etc...
Copy it all and distribute it all! Reclaim your liberty!
...and that is to immediately and globally engage in mass copying, uploading, downloading and distributing of all copyrighted and patented materials. This is the only way we are going to prevent the powers that be from enacting increasingly Big Brother-type measures to ensure that their so-called intellectual property is not stolen. We must not allow this to happen. Otherwise our freedom is history. The powers that be got their power and wealth from our money and our work. We allowed them to be what they are. Resist all Orwellian systems that take away your liberty a little bit at a time, one little law at a time. We can take it back. The internet is our weapon. Refuse to pay for any copyrighted music, software, patents, ideas, etc...
Copy it all and distribute it all! Reclaim your liberty!
Re:Interesting and SCARY
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
Who's watching? You mean nonconspiracy stuff, right? AFAIK, there isn't anyone.
Yes. I mean, are there any public watchdog organizations monitoring the spread of potentially deadly biological information in society?
In the Village Voice article, people are calling on scientists to police themselves. Scientists normally publish their findings in various peer reviewed journals. Just recently I read a story about a growing number of scientists demanding that journals make their contents freely available online for everyone to read/download. What is to stop a Kaczinski/unabomber-type individual working alone in his/her garage from using published data to concoct and unleash some life threatening biological agent into the world?
What I am driving at is this. Should not scientists be urged to anticipate possible dangerous consequences of their work and provide contingency plans, antidotes, etc... before they publish. Should this be the job of the editors or should some international watchdog organization be formed to suggest public policy and advise scientific journals on these issues? On a differnt slant, this also has definite bearing on free speech rights, etc...? I, for one, am very nervous about the spread of Big Brotherism or anything that further encroaches on our freedom. It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of problem.
I don't have any websites about this, all my references are paper journals. New Scientist had a lot of articles on these topics. If you're really serious about going and looking up the articles, I'll find my references and type them in.
I would be grateful if you could post them.
Interesting and SCARY
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
Thanks for the info. Do you (or anybody) have good links to websites, government or otherwise regarding this stuff. Any info on who is watching over the spread of biological technology would be helpful.
Ten or twenty years ago I would not be so worried. Now with the global internet, knowledge is bound to skyrocket. Anytime a new communication technology is introduced that multiplies interactions between peoples things start moving really fast. And with knowledge comes all the dangers associated with it. The problem is that, this time around, the lives of millions if not billions of people may be at stake. Haysoos Martinez! I need to get off this planet!
In a world where everybody hates everybody, maybe it's better to be ignorant. But then again, I keep holding on to the wisdom that knowledge is better than ignorance in the end. I hope I'm right.
Wars, Famines and Pestilences
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
Did not some weird guy with a beard predict this stuff about 2000 years ago? Did he not also say that the love of many would grow cold? I guess that if one country (or terrorist organization) is at war with one another, what's to stop them from targetting the other's population via genetically modified viruses. Heck why not target their food supply with a virus that destroys their crops? That would starve them to death! Problem is, this stuff can backfire and become a real nightmare for everybody, friend and foe alike.
What's really scary is that the technology behind all this biological stuff may become so easy to duplicate or so cheap to acquire that your average Beavis and Butthead may think it's cool to fool around with it. Brave new world, indeed!
What if a technology based on quantum entanglement is perfected that makes it impossible for anybody to eavesdrop on private peer-to-peer communication? What will the fascist governements do?
Outlaw it, of course. If the RIAA can strangle digital audiotape technology to death in the cradle, then governments who have more power to decide legality can easily prevent the technology from coming to market.
True but they can't stop you from using it unless they constantly spy on you. It would be like stopping people from smoking pot.
Slashdot Mirror
"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang
In a way, DARPA is right to cut funding to academia. Over the last forty years, scientists have made a complete mess of programming. We now have a world full of incompatible operating systems and programming languages, a veritable tower of Babel. Yet, software is as failure prone as ever. Software disaster stories are now making the evening news on a regular basis. Does academia take the blame, even partially? Don't count on it. They've invented every excuse in the book, from "there is no silver bullet" to "we don't have enough funding." It's sickening.
I say, unless the computer science community gets off its spoiled collective ass and comes up with a solution to the software reliability problem, it deserves to get its funding decreased. Drastically.
TFA is about signals in the brain regarding physical movement. What does this have to do with proving innocence or guilt with crimes? "Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking" was just the title. It's not a story about scientists being able to peer into people's memories or complex thoughts.
Well, you'd be surprised to find out that so called complex thoughts are just as much motor activations as normal muscle control. They both involve the part of the brain known as the Basal Ganglia, the seat of motor coordination and control. The only difference is that the final motor effectors in the BG are inhibited during thinking. However, during thinking, unconscious motor activation may still take place in the cerebellum.
From my understanding, you aren't getting all possible answers simultaneously. You are evaluating all possible answers simultaneously and statistically getting the "right" answer.
So are you saying that you already know the probability of the right answer before you compute it? Or are you saying that the QC already knows what answer you're looking for and somehow futzes with the probabilities so that when you collapse the wave function, voila! the correct answer is revealed, as if by magic?
You know, the more I read about this quantum computer stuff, the more I am convinced that it's nothing but rancid snake oil. Just one man's opinion, of course.
"Two entangled qubits, meanwhile, can simultaneously evaluate four inputs. Put another way, a traditional memory register with eight bits can store only one of a possible 28, or 256, digital "words," but a quantum register with eight qubits can represent and compute with all 256 words at once."
So, If you get all possible answers simultaneously, how do you tell which one is the right answer to the problem you're working on?
No, they fled to higher ground after they saw the water level drop knowing that it would come back up the same amount that it dropped.
True but it is also probable that they fled to higher ground because there was a big earthquake. Big earthquakes are known to often precede tsunamis in that part of the world. No unexplained sixth sense is needed.
The security problem really has to do with flaws in software. Most viruses and trojans take advantage of defects in operating systems and applications such as email and browser programs. Microsoft is being targeted because they have a monopoly but all software is at fault.
Software is bad, period. And, contrary to what Frederick Brooks and others continue to claim, unreliability is not an essential property of complex software systems. Unreliability stems from a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Switch to a synchronous, signal-based approach and the problem will disappear. For an alternative approach to software construction, see link below.
I can't see them killing Martian bacteria just for a little elbow room.
Have you thought of the possibility that warming up the planet would save whatever lifeforms might be left on Mars from complete extinction.
The fact is nobody knows how to make really complex systems without bugs, like it or not, and software systems are more complex than anything else.
Someone does. See below.
...it is somewhat flawed in my opinion. Bonobo is based on Corba and Microsoft OLE. It is an attempt at achieving a common programming interface for implementing reusable software components and compound documents. The weakness of Bonobo is that it brings with it all the complex abstractions and unwieldy charateristics of Microsoft OLE and Corba, things like QueryInterface and reference counting.
While Bonobo goes a long way to automate a good portion of the task of connecting components together, it does not go far enough IMO. A proper paradigm for compositional software architecture should follow the example of hardware connectors and plugs. Connecting two components should be 100% safe and automatic. There should be no need for the programmer to query interfaces or count references. Just connect and disconnect components and the system should take care of the rest automatically and painlessly.
Here are some charateristics of what I think is a good compositional software environment:
1. Automatic enforcement of type and secure password compatibility. Just connect, the system takes care of the rest.
2. Symmetrical connectors (male, female)
3. Prioritized message passing only. No function calls.
4. Symmetry. Unidirectional message flow (e.g. from male to female). Bidirectional communication requires two connectors.
5. Multi-connectors: single male connector sends messages to multiple female connectors.
6. Prioritized Queue components.
There is more but you get the idea. If I said something above that mischaracterizes Bonobo, please do correct me.
I'm not "male-bashing", I'm simply pointing out that not every aspect of male behaviour is necessarily a good thing.
What you are doing is thinking of yourself as being wiser than nature. You are a fool.
Just don't confuse it with territoriality, which in of itself neither feeds nor protects anybody, but rather seeks self-aggrandizement, if need be at the expense of the community or even family. Howler monkeys are probably not our best models.
Nature sets up a system among animals that ensures both species survival and ecological balance. It's a system that has been tried and tested over millions of years and you think you can do better? You are worse than a fool. You are an arrogant, self-righteous fool.
Territoriality is crucial to the survival of the species. It allows the strongest to survive while maintaining a balanced control over population. Human societies need to institute rules of behavior that are linked to territorial resources in order to guarantee a comparable balance. We don't need to eat our children to do that. The females of all species (including human females) must choose their mates according to their abilities to provide and maintain a profitable territory. This is the only natural way to control world population without instituting a fascist system that destroys our freedoms. The only way to do this is through a system of land inheritance. The land must not be divided for a price and sold like other commodities. This is pure folly, a sure prescription for disaster and we see the disatrous results of our present system all over the world. The land should be preserved as an inheritance for us, our children and their children.
The territorial instinct is often vested in the male, it's true, and it's frankly one of the more embarrassing aspects of my gender since it's not good for much of anything yet takes up so much time and energy. Male lions are very good at protecting their territory against other male lions, but not nearly as good at hunting as their females. Pimps are exteremely territorial, but all the work is done by the hookers. Gang members will defend their turf against other gangs, but still live with their mothers because all their efforts are completely unproductive. The very fact that females tend to be less territorial and more practical inclines me to invest in them rather than their mates.
IOW, you are a male basher who delights in seeing men and women constantly at war. It's idiots like you who are responsible for the sorry state of the world.
Captain Kirk:
What do think of this turkey à l'orange Bones?
The Doctor:
He's dead Jim.
disenfranchised adj : deprived of the rights of citizenship especially the right to vote [syn: disfranchised, voteless]
Your peasant may be exploited all to hell, but that's not the same thing as disenfranchised.
This is a modern and misleading interpretation of the word. One of the rights a human being should have is a right to a piece of the pie, the pie being the earth and its resources. One can be given the right to vote all one's life, but if one does not have a means of independent subsistence, one is a slave, ready for exploitation. And it does not matter how much they try to brainwash you into thinking you are free. Besides, there is nothing more pathetic than a slave who is deluded into thinking he's free, just because he/she has achieved some status among the other slaves. This was the definition of freedom (enfranchisement) in the Roman and Babylonian empires: you were free if you and your family were granted property. The others were slaves.
And I have to ask: why should the groom be required to show that he can support a family? My interest would be in showing that somebody can support the family, and my money's on the wife. The World Bank has been finding that, tradition notwithstanding, a hell of a lot of women are better businessmen than their husbands anyway, less inclined to piss away wealth on status and liquor (in fact, I'd bet the dowery tradition has a lot to do with fathers showing off how much they can give away.)
You can put as much of a politically correct spin on it as you want but the fact is that, in 99.9% of the earth's species (including the human species), the male is the one with the territorial instinct. Sure the females usually have more sense in making the territory prosper (in fact, in some African societies, the women control the market place and I think that's cool) but territoriality is the domain of the male. Any social system that ignores this basic human (and animal) instinct is a formula for disaster. Indeed, we witness the failure of modern social engineering in big cities all around the world, what with crime, poverty, abuse and countless family dysfunctions.
Yes, democracy is implemented haphazardly in India, but to suggest that anyone in India is disenfranchised is ridiculous. Maybe you don't know what the word disenfranchised means.
You should look it up yourself. A landless peasant is disenfranchised and is forced to be a slave by moving into a big city where he is exploited. This is true all over the world.
The land must be redistributed
The commies are coming, the commies are coming...
Communism does not redistribute the land. It confiscates it and turns everybody into a slave for the state. Capitalism, on the other hand, gives the land to a few and enslaves the rest. This is sad. I've said it before, any system that is based exclusively on labor is doomed. What will happen to a slave economy when robots replace everybody, i.e., when human labor and expertise become worthless. Don't think it won't happen in your lifetime. You'd be fooling only yourself. Thanks to the internet, we are about to see an explosion in human knowledge and technology. One little breakthrough, that's all it will take. After that you'll witness an explosion in automation that will make all previous economic revolutions look like child's play. Unless we are prepared to change the system, get ready to face disaster.
and social (marriage) laws enacted so as to link the wealth of the land to population increases. There should not be more people than the resources of the country can support comfortably.
I have no idea what you mean by that but if you're thinking of forcibly sterilizing people or disallowing them from getting married or having children, I'm very, very afraid of you.
You should indeed be afraid, but not of me. You should be afraid of your own gullibility. Anybody who does not realize that population control must be tied to the wealth of the land has not a clue. Even animals know this instinctively. It is much more acceptable to institute marriage laws that are directly tied to how much people can afford than to forcibly sterilize people and make them abort their unborn fetuses.
In India and elsewhere in the world where there is a population problem, the family of the bride is called upon to offer all sorts of dowery to the groom. It should be the other way around. The groom should show proof that he can afford a family. Change this stupid ass-backward practice and you'll see a drop in world population.
The internet is your weapon. Download it all!
...child pornography is one of the arguments that those who would steal our freedom use to enact their laws. The poster may have been joking but child abuse is indeed a problem in India and elsewhere. Taking away people's freedom by snooping on them is not going to solve the problem.
Please he was Gandhi not Ghandi.
Sorry.
Children are not the only people being abused in India and elsewhere. India needs to make social and land reforms. India is a huge and rich country with a resourceful people. Unfortunately only a small percentage of the upper class controls the wealth of India. The vast majority of the people are landless and disenfranchised. So they flock to big cities in search of a living and they become target for abuse and exploitation. They are slaves by necessity. The land must be redistributed and social (marriage) laws enacted so as to link the wealth of the land to population increases. There should not be more people than the resources of the country can support comfortably.
The internet is your weapon. Download it all and copy it all!
All Indian citizens should rise up against this affront on their freedom. Hackers around the world should come to aid of their Indian counterparts in finding technological solutions around this crap. It is thought slavery, pure and simple. Resist it with everything you've got. Do it in the name of Ghandi if you have to. A billion Indians passively demonstrating with civil disobedience should do the trick. It would also send a powerful message to the rest of the world that the human species is not about to be enslaved by Big Brotherism whereever it takes root.
The internet is your weapon. Download it all and copy it all!
Oh, and one more thought - this has been discussed on /. elsewhere, but currently to be successful in academics, you are almost required to publish constantly. Asking people not to publish their information would be the same as saying "don't do this research" and there are good reasons to do the research or it wouldn't get funded. Also, just becuase we're not doing the research doesn't mean Big Enemey Of The Day isn't doing research either (that's the logic we violated the BWTC under!)
Thanks for the info and the pertinent comments. Good luck in your career. I hope you never have to decide between publishing your work and putting the world in danger. Thanks.
...and that is to immediately and globally engage in mass copying, uploading, downloading and distributing of all copyrighted and patented materials. This is the only way we are going to prevent the powers that be from enacting increasingly Big Brother-type measures to ensure that their so-called intellectual property is not stolen. We must not allow this to happen. We must weaken them where it hurts the most, their pocket book. Otherwise our freedom is history.
The powers that be got their power and wealth from our money and our work. We allowed them to be what they are. Resist all Orwellian systems that take away your liberty a little bit at a time, one little law at a time. We can take it back. The internet is our weapon. Refuse to pay for any copyrighted music, software, patents, ideas, etc...
Copy it all and distribute it all! Reclaim your liberty!
...and that is to immediately and globally engage in mass copying, uploading, downloading and distributing of all copyrighted and patented materials. This is the only way we are going to prevent the powers that be from enacting increasingly Big Brother-type measures to ensure that their so-called intellectual property is not stolen. We must not allow this to happen. Otherwise our freedom is history. The powers that be got their power and wealth from our money and our work. We allowed them to be what they are. Resist all Orwellian systems that take away your liberty a little bit at a time, one little law at a time. We can take it back. The internet is our weapon. Refuse to pay for any copyrighted music, software, patents, ideas, etc...
Copy it all and distribute it all! Reclaim your liberty!
Who's watching? You mean nonconspiracy stuff, right? AFAIK, there isn't anyone.
Yes. I mean, are there any public watchdog organizations monitoring the spread of potentially deadly biological information in society?
In the Village Voice article, people are calling on scientists to police themselves. Scientists normally publish their findings in various peer reviewed journals. Just recently I read a story about a growing number of scientists demanding that journals make their contents freely available online for everyone to read/download. What is to stop a Kaczinski/unabomber-type individual working alone in his/her garage from using published data to concoct and unleash some life threatening biological agent into the world?
What I am driving at is this. Should not scientists be urged to anticipate possible dangerous consequences of their work and provide contingency plans, antidotes, etc... before they publish. Should this be the job of the editors or should some international watchdog organization be formed to suggest public policy and advise scientific journals on these issues? On a differnt slant, this also has definite bearing on free speech rights, etc...? I, for one, am very nervous about the spread of Big Brotherism or anything that further encroaches on our freedom. It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of problem.
I don't have any websites about this, all my references are paper journals. New Scientist had a lot of articles on these topics. If you're really serious about going and looking up the articles, I'll find my references and type them in.
I would be grateful if you could post them.
Thanks for the info. Do you (or anybody) have good links to websites, government or otherwise regarding this stuff. Any info on who is watching over the spread of biological technology would be helpful.
Ten or twenty years ago I would not be so worried. Now with the global internet, knowledge is bound to skyrocket. Anytime a new communication technology is introduced that multiplies interactions between peoples things start moving really fast. And with knowledge comes all the dangers associated with it. The problem is that, this time around, the lives of millions if not billions of people may be at stake. Haysoos Martinez! I need to get off this planet!
In a world where everybody hates everybody, maybe it's better to be ignorant. But then again, I keep holding on to the wisdom that knowledge is better than ignorance in the end. I hope I'm right.
Did not some weird guy with a beard predict this stuff about 2000 years ago? Did he not also say that the love of many would grow cold? I guess that if one country (or terrorist organization) is at war with one another, what's to stop them from targetting the other's population via genetically modified viruses. Heck why not target their food supply with a virus that destroys their crops? That would starve them to death! Problem is, this stuff can backfire and become a real nightmare for everybody, friend and foe alike.
What's really scary is that the technology behind all this biological stuff may become so easy to duplicate or so cheap to acquire that your average Beavis and Butthead may think it's cool to fool around with it. Brave new world, indeed!
What if a technology based on quantum entanglement is perfected that makes it impossible for anybody to eavesdrop on private peer-to-peer communication? What will the fascist governements do?
Outlaw it, of course. If the RIAA can strangle digital audiotape technology to death in the cradle, then governments who have more power to decide legality can easily prevent the technology from coming to market.
True but they can't stop you from using it unless they constantly spy on you. It would be like stopping people from smoking pot.