Why do these trolls keep getting moderated up to 5 points? Let me go over this again:
o Duplication of effort, whilst often unecessary, is not the death of Free Software. Maybe some people don't like the code architecture of KDE, and so choose to code for Gtk and GNOME; maybe some people dislike the lack of challenge in approaching Konqueror and so choose to code on Mozilla. It's people's choice, and I see no reason why we should try to force all FS developers to code in particular projects.
o Many projects with the same goal is also not that big a problem. Look at the many different ideas that KDE and GNOME have developed, and then shared when good. Relations between the projects are improving a lot, to the extent that now KDM and GDM (the login managers) are sharing certain configuration files!
o Different distributions are also always a good thing. They each provide a different focus, with different strengths and weaknesses. Whilst this might be more confusin than one GNU/Linux distribution, consumer choice is an important thing. When you buy a car, you research the many options and chooce the one best for you. Why should we have to put up with such a limited choice in operating systems?
This is just as wrong as if a country mandated 80% Microsoft. Mandate open file formats and protocols, but don't mandate people or agencies MUST use a specific type of software
Not at all, it makes a lot of sense for a government to mandate Free Software, just as it makes sense for a government to mandate the use of open standards. Open standards will only get an organisation so far -- they will be able to switch to different software should they need to, and interoperate with other clients with ease -- and should be mandated across the board IMO. Free Software gives governments several extra advantages that are crucial to good accountable government:
o Since they have access to the source code, they can be sure that no company is doing naughty things on their systems
o Since the source code is available, it allows them to bring in local businesses to develop the codebase for them, promoting many home businesses rather than single (usually foreign) businesses
o Since they are likely to be developing the software for in-house changes, they are providing a lot back because of licenses like the GPL
I don't remember the role of the editor including giving personal opinions over and above those stated in linked articles. Why don't editors submit the story with a summary of other people's reasons, then post their own comment?
I do agree with Michael though, it seems fairly pluasible. All the same, it obviously has a competition-killing aspect to it, since Microsoft will tightly control their DRM technology, meaning that DRM-only web sites will probably be IE only, or at the very best IE plus other browsers whose licenses allow embedded proprietary code.
Considering the U.S.'s behaviour, don't you think the so called
Department of "Defense" should consider a name change?
Never! If they did, they'd have to change all their other names, like The House of "Representatives", The Courts of "Justice" and the land of the "Free"! At least now that their language has developed as a series of antonyms of English we can know where we stand!
Although it's always risky to argue from analogy, think of the current internet as the world prior to the arrival of the nation state. No borders, as such, freedom to go wherever, little control.
I love to be picky;) before the nation state (first recognised under the Treaty of Wesphalia in 16-something), you had borders, but you didn't have clearly defined nations, governed by legitimate soverign authorities; you just had warring factions.
Anyway, yes, your vision of what will become of the network is probably pretty accurate, but that's not what is being discussed here. What is significant is the logic layer and the culture layer, which have marked differences to the logic and culture of contemporary western society. Lose those, and the Internet loses everything that makes it really interesting, and really important. It becomes another method of delivering the status quo.
You have to be a [i]real[/i] hardcore technophile to think that technology will save the day here. I mean, come on, we're talking about the death of the most pervasive and potentially revolutionary technology in a century, because quite simply technology is not above the law.
You have to get this into your head: technology is not a tool for authority, it allows you to exercise some power, but at the end of the day, if you're falling foul of the laws set down by legitimate authorities, your technology is about as useful as a lump of cheese (though arguably the cheese is [i]more[/i] useful).
Nerds [b]must[/b] understand and act upon that maxim soon, or we're just going to lose something incredibly special. The hacker culture will amount to little more than Slashdot, and no offence to Taco et. al. but it's hardly a very important web site in the scheme of things.
I think you'll find there's a lot of big ideas coming through, both in the back- and front-ends of GUI design.
Take KDE, for example, and its KIOSlave system, which is slowly moving KDE from being a collection of applications to a collection of pluggable components, with things like Konqueror becoming complicated wrappers for these components. The whole desktop is totally integrated - that's big, isn't it?
Or Enlightenment, whish is going even further to do away with the whole application concept altogether, or so I've heard (I don't use it).
And even little projects are doing interesting things, like Slicker, experimenting with how we manage our desktop space.
All these calls are ill-founded, and probaly stem from the fact that it is easy to keep up to date on Microsoft's and Apple's big moves, since you only get the occasional big article, whilst developments in the Free Software world come thick and fast.
But doesn't it worry you that we get, one the one hand (in journals, and occasionally newspapers) the realist agenda coming from the think-tanks who push the policy but can get away with being frank, and on the other the liberal agenda coming from politicians who are the human face of the actions? The radical split between words and deeds certainly worries me, especially because it seems that politicians don't feel it necessary or expedient to be honest with their electorate.
Even in British Parliament, we get dismissals and bluffs from Government ministers when asked about the material interests we have in Iraq/Afghanistan... they just will not be seen publicly to admit the obvious, and so many simply believe that the agenda is in fact liberal, and not realist.
I'd have a lot less problems with these Governments if they were at least honest democrats.
Rwanda is very different to Iraq, I accept, but not all that different to the Balkans. Most ignored African conflicts share the common themes (with the Balkans) of civil war, ethnic cleansing and refugee problems. In the Balkans, despite UN intransigence, NATO took action, later backed up by EU&UN peacekeeping forces. The reason they gave? To stop a humanitarian crisis developing within a country. How is that so different to Rwanda? Whilst there are many finer points to be made, the most obvious and important difference is that the Balkans are on the doorstep of the EU, they're close to home, and it's a conflict in an ex-Soviety area that Europe is keen to keep stable, and America is keen to have in the EU asap.
So I believe my simplistic thesis still stands. It is kind of funny that the anti-war movement has to repeat the basic tenets of realism to the rest of the public, because that is what our governments are operating on, when the anti-war movement believes either in idealism or liberalism. It is sick that the pro-war camp preach liberalism when in fact they know full well that their world view is one of realism, and that they are covering each "intervention" in the cloak of liberalism.
And the UN is so good at working things out, huh? There's a huge number of dead in Rwanda, the Balkens, Ivory Coast, etc.
Actually, you provide two good examples that immediately rubbish any idea that America and Britain "police" the world for humanitarian reasons, and any idea that America and Britain give a damn about the UN as a method of dealing with humanitarian crises. If you look at every intervention the two nations been involved with since WW2, then in every single one there is an obvious political/strategic/economic reason for doing so (central america - political, south east asia - strategic/economic, iraq - economic/strategic, balkans - strategic). Where they haven't done a thing, there is no particular reason beyond humanitarianism (rwanda - nothing thre but people dying, boo hoo).
The likes of Robert Kagan, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld have pulled a huge coup in convincing America that we should see America as the benevolent and willing actor, and the UN as the impotent fool. Really, America is the self-interested willing actor, and the UN is the melting pot of diplomacy made impotent by America and the former USSR.
Where the UN hasn't followed up on numerous resolutions (Iraq, Israel, America), it is because at least one member of the security council (Iraq - Russia, France and America, Israel - America, America - America;) vetoes any forceful resolution in their own interests. If states would follow the likes of most "old Europe" states (Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, to some extent Germany, etc.) and focus forieign policy on common security, peace and sustainable propserity, we wouldn't have these problems. But as it stands, the G8's economies and international strategies are so tied up in supporting corrupt regimes that we don't get anywhere.
Somehow this doesn't excite me too much. I mean really, why would this be cool enough to be worth the effort?
It's not exactly exciting, but it's an interesting statement, and a lot of art can essentially boil down to little more than that. The web is this worldwide phenomenon, and yet each site is located in one particular place on the globe -- why not turn the system on its head a little and have the web site rove around the world, being hosted all over the place. I say turn the system on its head, when of course in another sense it demonstrates the flexibility of the DNS/IP system. One could go so far as to say that it shows just how insignificant the web has made geography, and national borders, when it comes to information, when not one part of the web site's chain (from the hard drive to you) need be located in one place. It's also interesting to see your traceroute along with other peoples', and I'm sure that in time some interesting, and probably quite aesthetically interesting patterns will emerge.
Of course, the creators probably have much better explanations, but that's my immediate interpretation. That's the great thing about art - it serves to provoke us into seeing things from a different perspective; it questions the way we see the world, and even though it may not seem as wonderful as a huge canvas painting, this sort of art definitely has its place.
Oh so you can hold an e-book, but it's not paper, it hsn't got that wonderful old/new book smell, you can't turn the pages, flick back and forth, it's just not the same. There's something altogether romantic about holding a novel in the form of a well-bound book. I've only ever read one novel off a screen, and it sucked. I just couldn't lose myself in it.
Of course for reference, none of that matters. Like I said, different media, different advantages/disadvantages.
I fail to see how looking through the newspaper will turn up more obscure refernces then googling.
It won't. But how often do you, with half an hour to spare, read some news online, and then google extensively for references that you wouldn't even know or think of? In a newspaper, they're all there, collected for you by professionals in an accesible format. Maybe if you find something really interesting, then you'll go googling for more information:)
Where is that magical library which has more stuff than the whole Internet?
I didn't say more quantity of material can be found in libraries, but that there's something about looking for a particular book that always leads to finding about five others on the same shelf:) You just don't get that sort of in-depth cross referencing on the web, and it's not half as nice as beholding a shelf full of books you want to read.
One thing I like about my favourite newspapers (The Independent and The Guardian in the UK) is that they are not only of a very high standard, with a broad range of issues covered, but they also do summaries of what other papers around the world have to say about things, and The Guardian does the UK media too, so I can get an even broader view than the editorial spin of the particular newspaper. I find that incredibly useful and really interesting, something that's hard to come by without A LOT of browsing on the web.
I think September 11 had a profound impact on how much current events information people crave.
I think it has just made many people crave reassurance. Witness the huge ratings for "news" channels like Fox, and the reaction against many channels like BBC News 24 here in the UK for providing such constant, raw (in the sense of live and out of the studio, because it was of course more or less scripted by the military) coverage, which was just too much for a lot of people.
Of course it's probably had the side effect that many people are now far more current affairs savvy, and hopefully it will transfer into more of a current-affairs-savvy culture, not just in relation to America's latest ventures. The Internet is one possible vehicle for this, given it's strength in linking many issues together (though of course on the flipside it will often just as easily contain people through a lack of wider linking). That's one thing that Google is good for - a slightly wider view:)
I had a long conversation with my Aunt about this, who's a university lecturer who loves her books:)
It seems to me that print media won't die out for a while yet (never say never;), since there are so many advantages to paper copies. They're nicer to hold, and easier/more comfortable to read. They're more intuitive to browse, and they give you a chance to just sit back and drift through the information, rather than whizzing through pages like you do on the web. Going to libraries and looking through newsPAPERS also helps you find stuff you might otherwise not have looked at.
That said, electronic media also have several advantages. They're quicker and easier to access, and so are ideal if you just want to find something out. Being able to word/phrase search, and use powerful tools is also a huge boon for research purposes.
Paper and electronic media both have their advantages. I think we'll just see a reduction in the scale of production of paper reference media, as that's primarily where electronic holds more advantages than paper.
That football analogy is really haunting me now:) It was a bad analogy poorly explained. Basically, all I am saying is that some people seem to think that all technology that makes certain aspects of our life easier, or of a higher quality/skill, or more enjoyable, is necessarily good, and will necessarily make our lives better. To follow that line of thought to its conclusion, we'd all be on drugs sitting motionless in chairs in pure delirium. There has to be more to life than the pursuit of perfection and pleasure, and often it seems to me that technologists forget this. That's a general observation, not focused on all genetic engineering.
We already, as you say, have, as a society, a pernicious obsession with (amongst other things) being perfectly beautiful, intelligent and sociable. It's a nasty trait that manifests itself in the extreme in cosmetic surgery shops, where technology purports to make people "better". Introducing genetic modifications of humans in the embryonic stage (I assume we're now both talking about modifications pre-birth?) will allow people one more chance to make their child "better", and so will make it even more common and acceptable, and normal, for people to see these traits as [i]needing[/i] modification, when they evidently do not. This will clearly make people more obsessed with the importance of these traits, as plastic surgery has done.
On crops...
Many companies, yes, and for millenia man has selectively bred, yes, but let's look at the scales here: through selective breeding, we still have many hundreds of strains of the different crops around the world, that have developed in the ecosystems in which they are "deployed", and which have, by and large, adapted to cope with new problems due to the diversity of stock. But with GM you tend to get a handful of strains being deployed over large areas, and so the number of strains is dramatically reduced. There are different strains, yes, but not nearly as many, and so should one or two of those strains be hit by a particular problem, vast areas of cropland are affected.
I'm not trying to say that GM crops are inherently bad -- that's distinctly irrational -- but that there are problems which aren't addressed by the companies involved, because it's not in their interests to do so. To have scientific experiments, which is what the GM crop deployments are, being led by companies is unscientific and not in the public's/ecosystem's interests.
As for science occuring in safe environments, I think you misinterpreted me slightly. Sticking with the GM example, a scientific approach would be to research the crops in the lab and theory rooms until some strains were being developed, and to then test the crops on a small production scale, or (if paranoid) in a properly isolated site, until one could be absolutely certain that the truth about the crops had been reached, and to then accept that truth -- are they going to be a good to deploy on a larger scale -- and to then deploy the new technology in a scientific manner.
This is in contrast of course to how technology companies work, as I pointed out, and it is this contrast in which the troubles lie, and which many who are quick to defend science miss.
Ahh c'mon I had to think up an analogy in a few seconds, and that's the best I came up with:) You can still understand my point -- that we might think it better for technology to do something for us, or make things easier for us, but it won't necessarily make us better off, or improve our life quality.
You're only seeing one side of the die here though, as many of the more technophilic (is that a word?:)) posters here seem to do. Technology, even that which seems to improve things, isn't always a good thing.
Let's say I invent a really good robot that automatically plays football. It means we get to watch better football on TV, and you don't need to pay them huge salaries, so everyone's a winner! Unfortunately, kids stop kicking balls around, and everyone who plays football loses both a pasttime and a healthy form of exercise and socialisation.
We may make the human species far "better", but what would be better? If we were all beautiful and intelligent and suave? There's a place for people who are obsessed with this false ideal of perfection - Hollywood. What makes us special is our character, our spirit, not some superficial traits we can genetically modify, and so going down the road of genetically engineering humans will only serve to make people even more obsessed with essentially meaningless traits. Of course there are more difficult cases, like diseases, but that's altogether different.
There's also a genetic problem with genetic unification, which is neatly illustrated by the way that Monsanto and others are thinning and consolidating their gene pools. There are many hundreds of different type of rice around the world, and the strength of this is that should a disease or pest come along that affects one type, the chances are that others won't be susceptible. If they are all oe or two types taken from the same original parent, they're all doomed. Genetic diversity is extremely important, and any genetic engineering that tries ti consolidate is only asking for nature's troubles.
Come on people, let's be scientific here. Scientists (as opposed to technologists) study things in safe isolation, with a view to discovering the whole truth about the subject, and this simply isn't what is happening with genetic engineering. What we are seeing is science driven with the philosophy of technology (develop until it seems practical enough to sell, then roll out), which is unscientific and dangerous. Don't call critics of technology unscientific, because it's plainly untrue.
Your argument carries no weight whatsoever, and missed the point the physicit was making. He wasn't talking about safe research that produces technology that can be used for evil means. He was talking about research whose outcome is unpredictable and dangerous, in which the research itself might be catastrophic.
Limiting research in such situations, until a safe alternative can be found, is pragmatic and ethical. Going around like some cowboy scientist thinking we you can do any test you like in the name of mankind, whilst putting mankind and other species in grave danger without their consent, is immoral and outrageouly egoistic.
This is great. I don't have a Mac, and I have no intention of getting one, but I really like seeing good progress in Safari, since by the time KDE 3.2 comes out, I'll get most of those advances in my own lurvely Konqueror.
Maybe you didn't, but I have noticed very big differences between games performance in a vanilla Gentoo install and a SuSE install on the same system. I get an extra 20fps in Half-Life under Wine, which is quite handy given that it now runs at 30fps, and even bigger jumps in Quake3.
There is also a set of kernel sources tweaked for gaming, which is meant to squeeze out even more performance. I'mt not that bothered, as my performance is acceptable and I don't want to mess anything else up, but for hardcore gamers, especially on borderline systems, I can see it making a great difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Introducing the kernel, key concepts, and installing your own customised kernels.
n el .shtml
http://www.newtolinux.org.uk/tutorials/linuxker
Why do these trolls keep getting moderated up to 5 points? Let me go over this again:
;-)
o Duplication of effort, whilst often unecessary, is not the death of Free Software. Maybe some people don't like the code architecture of KDE, and so choose to code for Gtk and GNOME; maybe some people dislike the lack of challenge in approaching Konqueror and so choose to code on Mozilla. It's people's choice, and I see no reason why we should try to force all FS developers to code in particular projects.
o Many projects with the same goal is also not that big a problem. Look at the many different ideas that KDE and GNOME have developed, and then shared when good. Relations between the projects are improving a lot, to the extent that now KDM and GDM (the login managers) are sharing certain configuration files!
o Different distributions are also always a good thing. They each provide a different focus, with different strengths and weaknesses. Whilst this might be more confusin than one GNU/Linux distribution, consumer choice is an important thing. When you buy a car, you research the many options and chooce the one best for you. Why should we have to put up with such a limited choice in operating systems?
o I could go on but my food is ready
This is just as wrong as if a country mandated 80% Microsoft. Mandate open file formats and protocols, but don't mandate people or agencies MUST use a specific type of software
Not at all, it makes a lot of sense for a government to mandate Free Software, just as it makes sense for a government to mandate the use of open standards. Open standards will only get an organisation so far -- they will be able to switch to different software should they need to, and interoperate with other clients with ease -- and should be mandated across the board IMO. Free Software gives governments several extra advantages that are crucial to good accountable government:
o Since they have access to the source code, they can be sure that no company is doing naughty things on their systems
o Since the source code is available, it allows them to bring in local businesses to develop the codebase for them, promoting many home businesses rather than single (usually foreign) businesses
o Since they are likely to be developing the software for in-house changes, they are providing a lot back because of licenses like the GPL
For a very good appraisal of why governments should use Free Software, read a Peruvian Congressman's letter to Microsoft.
I think the truth is just that...
I don't remember the role of the editor including giving personal opinions over and above those stated in linked articles. Why don't editors submit the story with a summary of other people's reasons, then post their own comment?
I do agree with Michael though, it seems fairly pluasible. All the same, it obviously has a competition-killing aspect to it, since Microsoft will tightly control their DRM technology, meaning that DRM-only web sites will probably be IE only, or at the very best IE plus other browsers whose licenses allow embedded proprietary code.
Never! If they did, they'd have to change all their other names, like The House of "Representatives", The Courts of "Justice" and the land of the "Free"! At least now that their language has developed as a series of antonyms of English we can know where we stand!
Although it's always risky to argue from analogy, think of the current internet as the world prior to the arrival of the nation state. No borders, as such, freedom to go wherever, little control.
;) before the nation state (first recognised under the Treaty of Wesphalia in 16-something), you had borders, but you didn't have clearly defined nations, governed by legitimate soverign authorities; you just had warring factions.
I love to be picky
Anyway, yes, your vision of what will become of the network is probably pretty accurate, but that's not what is being discussed here. What is significant is the logic layer and the culture layer, which have marked differences to the logic and culture of contemporary western society. Lose those, and the Internet loses everything that makes it really interesting, and really important. It becomes another method of delivering the status quo.
You have to be a [i]real[/i] hardcore technophile to think that technology will save the day here. I mean, come on, we're talking about the death of the most pervasive and potentially revolutionary technology in a century, because quite simply technology is not above the law.
You have to get this into your head: technology is not a tool for authority, it allows you to exercise some power, but at the end of the day, if you're falling foul of the laws set down by legitimate authorities, your technology is about as useful as a lump of cheese (though arguably the cheese is [i]more[/i] useful).
Nerds [b]must[/b] understand and act upon that maxim soon, or we're just going to lose something incredibly special. The hacker culture will amount to little more than Slashdot, and no offence to Taco et. al. but it's hardly a very important web site in the scheme of things.
You obviously haven't used KDE, because what Microsoft did with IE is merely cosmetic in comparison.
I think you'll find there's a lot of big ideas coming through, both in the back- and front-ends of GUI design.
Take KDE, for example, and its KIOSlave system, which is slowly moving KDE from being a collection of applications to a collection of pluggable components, with things like Konqueror becoming complicated wrappers for these components. The whole desktop is totally integrated - that's big, isn't it?
Or Enlightenment, whish is going even further to do away with the whole application concept altogether, or so I've heard (I don't use it).
And even little projects are doing interesting things, like Slicker, experimenting with how we manage our desktop space.
All these calls are ill-founded, and probaly stem from the fact that it is easy to keep up to date on Microsoft's and Apple's big moves, since you only get the occasional big article, whilst developments in the Free Software world come thick and fast.
But doesn't it worry you that we get, one the one hand (in journals, and occasionally newspapers) the realist agenda coming from the think-tanks who push the policy but can get away with being frank, and on the other the liberal agenda coming from politicians who are the human face of the actions? The radical split between words and deeds certainly worries me, especially because it seems that politicians don't feel it necessary or expedient to be honest with their electorate.
Even in British Parliament, we get dismissals and bluffs from Government ministers when asked about the material interests we have in Iraq/Afghanistan... they just will not be seen publicly to admit the obvious, and so many simply believe that the agenda is in fact liberal, and not realist.
I'd have a lot less problems with these Governments if they were at least honest democrats.
Rwanda is very different to Iraq, I accept, but not all that different to the Balkans. Most ignored African conflicts share the common themes (with the Balkans) of civil war, ethnic cleansing and refugee problems. In the Balkans, despite UN intransigence, NATO took action, later backed up by EU&UN peacekeeping forces. The reason they gave? To stop a humanitarian crisis developing within a country. How is that so different to Rwanda? Whilst there are many finer points to be made, the most obvious and important difference is that the Balkans are on the doorstep of the EU, they're close to home, and it's a conflict in an ex-Soviety area that Europe is keen to keep stable, and America is keen to have in the EU asap.
So I believe my simplistic thesis still stands. It is kind of funny that the anti-war movement has to repeat the basic tenets of realism to the rest of the public, because that is what our governments are operating on, when the anti-war movement believes either in idealism or liberalism. It is sick that the pro-war camp preach liberalism when in fact they know full well that their world view is one of realism, and that they are covering each "intervention" in the cloak of liberalism.
And the UN is so good at working things out, huh? There's a huge number of dead in Rwanda, the Balkens, Ivory Coast, etc.
;) vetoes any forceful resolution in their own interests. If states would follow the likes of most "old Europe" states (Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, to some extent Germany, etc.) and focus forieign policy on common security, peace and sustainable propserity, we wouldn't have these problems. But as it stands, the G8's economies and international strategies are so tied up in supporting corrupt regimes that we don't get anywhere.
Actually, you provide two good examples that immediately rubbish any idea that America and Britain "police" the world for humanitarian reasons, and any idea that America and Britain give a damn about the UN as a method of dealing with humanitarian crises. If you look at every intervention the two nations been involved with since WW2, then in every single one there is an obvious political/strategic/economic reason for doing so (central america - political, south east asia - strategic/economic, iraq - economic/strategic, balkans - strategic). Where they haven't done a thing, there is no particular reason beyond humanitarianism (rwanda - nothing thre but people dying, boo hoo).
The likes of Robert Kagan, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld have pulled a huge coup in convincing America that we should see America as the benevolent and willing actor, and the UN as the impotent fool. Really, America is the self-interested willing actor, and the UN is the melting pot of diplomacy made impotent by America and the former USSR.
Where the UN hasn't followed up on numerous resolutions (Iraq, Israel, America), it is because at least one member of the security council (Iraq - Russia, France and America, Israel - America, America - America
It's not exactly exciting, but it's an interesting statement, and a lot of art can essentially boil down to little more than that. The web is this worldwide phenomenon, and yet each site is located in one particular place on the globe -- why not turn the system on its head a little and have the web site rove around the world, being hosted all over the place. I say turn the system on its head, when of course in another sense it demonstrates the flexibility of the DNS/IP system. One could go so far as to say that it shows just how insignificant the web has made geography, and national borders, when it comes to information, when not one part of the web site's chain (from the hard drive to you) need be located in one place. It's also interesting to see your traceroute along with other peoples', and I'm sure that in time some interesting, and probably quite aesthetically interesting patterns will emerge.
Of course, the creators probably have much better explanations, but that's my immediate interpretation. That's the great thing about art - it serves to provoke us into seeing things from a different perspective; it questions the way we see the world, and even though it may not seem as wonderful as a huge canvas painting, this sort of art definitely has its place.
Oh so you can hold an e-book, but it's not paper, it hsn't got that wonderful old/new book smell, you can't turn the pages, flick back and forth, it's just not the same. There's something altogether romantic about holding a novel in the form of a well-bound book. I've only ever read one novel off a screen, and it sucked. I just couldn't lose myself in it.
:)
Of course for reference, none of that matters. Like I said, different media, different advantages/disadvantages.
I fail to see how looking through the newspaper will turn up more obscure refernces then googling.
It won't. But how often do you, with half an hour to spare, read some news online, and then google extensively for references that you wouldn't even know or think of? In a newspaper, they're all there, collected for you by professionals in an accesible format. Maybe if you find something really interesting, then you'll go googling for more information
Where is that magical library which has more stuff than the whole Internet?
:) You just don't get that sort of in-depth cross referencing on the web, and it's not half as nice as beholding a shelf full of books you want to read.
I didn't say more quantity of material can be found in libraries, but that there's something about looking for a particular book that always leads to finding about five others on the same shelf
One thing I like about my favourite newspapers (The Independent and The Guardian in the UK) is that they are not only of a very high standard, with a broad range of issues covered, but they also do summaries of what other papers around the world have to say about things, and The Guardian does the UK media too, so I can get an even broader view than the editorial spin of the particular newspaper. I find that incredibly useful and really interesting, something that's hard to come by without A LOT of browsing on the web.
I think September 11 had a profound impact on how much current events information people crave.
:)
I think it has just made many people crave reassurance. Witness the huge ratings for "news" channels like Fox, and the reaction against many channels like BBC News 24 here in the UK for providing such constant, raw (in the sense of live and out of the studio, because it was of course more or less scripted by the military) coverage, which was just too much for a lot of people.
Of course it's probably had the side effect that many people are now far more current affairs savvy, and hopefully it will transfer into more of a current-affairs-savvy culture, not just in relation to America's latest ventures. The Internet is one possible vehicle for this, given it's strength in linking many issues together (though of course on the flipside it will often just as easily contain people through a lack of wider linking). That's one thing that Google is good for - a slightly wider view
I had a long conversation with my Aunt about this, who's a university lecturer who loves her books :)
;), since there are so many advantages to paper copies. They're nicer to hold, and easier/more comfortable to read. They're more intuitive to browse, and they give you a chance to just sit back and drift through the information, rather than whizzing through pages like you do on the web. Going to libraries and looking through newsPAPERS also helps you find stuff you might otherwise not have looked at.
It seems to me that print media won't die out for a while yet (never say never
That said, electronic media also have several advantages. They're quicker and easier to access, and so are ideal if you just want to find something out. Being able to word/phrase search, and use powerful tools is also a huge boon for research purposes.
Paper and electronic media both have their advantages. I think we'll just see a reduction in the scale of production of paper reference media, as that's primarily where electronic holds more advantages than paper.
That football analogy is really haunting me now :) It was a bad analogy poorly explained. Basically, all I am saying is that some people seem to think that all technology that makes certain aspects of our life easier, or of a higher quality/skill, or more enjoyable, is necessarily good, and will necessarily make our lives better. To follow that line of thought to its conclusion, we'd all be on drugs sitting motionless in chairs in pure delirium. There has to be more to life than the pursuit of perfection and pleasure, and often it seems to me that technologists forget this. That's a general observation, not focused on all genetic engineering.
We already, as you say, have, as a society, a pernicious obsession with (amongst other things) being perfectly beautiful, intelligent and sociable. It's a nasty trait that manifests itself in the extreme in cosmetic surgery shops, where technology purports to make people "better". Introducing genetic modifications of humans in the embryonic stage (I assume we're now both talking about modifications pre-birth?) will allow people one more chance to make their child "better", and so will make it even more common and acceptable, and normal, for people to see these traits as [i]needing[/i] modification, when they evidently do not. This will clearly make people more obsessed with the importance of these traits, as plastic surgery has done.
On crops...
Many companies, yes, and for millenia man has selectively bred, yes, but let's look at the scales here: through selective breeding, we still have many hundreds of strains of the different crops around the world, that have developed in the ecosystems in which they are "deployed", and which have, by and large, adapted to cope with new problems due to the diversity of stock. But with GM you tend to get a handful of strains being deployed over large areas, and so the number of strains is dramatically reduced. There are different strains, yes, but not nearly as many, and so should one or two of those strains be hit by a particular problem, vast areas of cropland are affected.
I'm not trying to say that GM crops are inherently bad -- that's distinctly irrational -- but that there are problems which aren't addressed by the companies involved, because it's not in their interests to do so. To have scientific experiments, which is what the GM crop deployments are, being led by companies is unscientific and not in the public's/ecosystem's interests.
As for science occuring in safe environments, I think you misinterpreted me slightly. Sticking with the GM example, a scientific approach would be to research the crops in the lab and theory rooms until some strains were being developed, and to then test the crops on a small production scale, or (if paranoid) in a properly isolated site, until one could be absolutely certain that the truth about the crops had been reached, and to then accept that truth -- are they going to be a good to deploy on a larger scale -- and to then deploy the new technology in a scientific manner.
This is in contrast of course to how technology companies work, as I pointed out, and it is this contrast in which the troubles lie, and which many who are quick to defend science miss.
Ahh c'mon I had to think up an analogy in a few seconds, and that's the best I came up with :) You can still understand my point -- that we might think it better for technology to do something for us, or make things easier for us, but it won't necessarily make us better off, or improve our life quality.
You're only seeing one side of the die here though, as many of the more technophilic (is that a word? :)) posters here seem to do. Technology, even that which seems to improve things, isn't always a good thing.
Let's say I invent a really good robot that automatically plays football. It means we get to watch better football on TV, and you don't need to pay them huge salaries, so everyone's a winner! Unfortunately, kids stop kicking balls around, and everyone who plays football loses both a pasttime and a healthy form of exercise and socialisation.
We may make the human species far "better", but what would be better? If we were all beautiful and intelligent and suave? There's a place for people who are obsessed with this false ideal of perfection - Hollywood. What makes us special is our character, our spirit, not some superficial traits we can genetically modify, and so going down the road of genetically engineering humans will only serve to make people even more obsessed with essentially meaningless traits. Of course there are more difficult cases, like diseases, but that's altogether different.
There's also a genetic problem with genetic unification, which is neatly illustrated by the way that Monsanto and others are thinning and consolidating their gene pools. There are many hundreds of different type of rice around the world, and the strength of this is that should a disease or pest come along that affects one type, the chances are that others won't be susceptible. If they are all oe or two types taken from the same original parent, they're all doomed. Genetic diversity is extremely important, and any genetic engineering that tries ti consolidate is only asking for nature's troubles.
Come on people, let's be scientific here. Scientists (as opposed to technologists) study things in safe isolation, with a view to discovering the whole truth about the subject, and this simply isn't what is happening with genetic engineering. What we are seeing is science driven with the philosophy of technology (develop until it seems practical enough to sell, then roll out), which is unscientific and dangerous. Don't call critics of technology unscientific, because it's plainly untrue.
Your argument carries no weight whatsoever, and missed the point the physicit was making. He wasn't talking about safe research that produces technology that can be used for evil means. He was talking about research whose outcome is unpredictable and dangerous, in which the research itself might be catastrophic.
Limiting research in such situations, until a safe alternative can be found, is pragmatic and ethical. Going around like some cowboy scientist thinking we you can do any test you like in the name of mankind, whilst putting mankind and other species in grave danger without their consent, is immoral and outrageouly egoistic.
Yep, same versions, different results, which I assume must be due to the kernel and other bits 'n' bobs being compiled & optimised in Gentoo.
This is great. I don't have a Mac, and I have no intention of getting one, but I really like seeing good progress in Safari, since by the time KDE 3.2 comes out, I'll get most of those advances in my own lurvely Konqueror.
:)
Thanks Apple!
Maybe you didn't, but I have noticed very big differences between games performance in a vanilla Gentoo install and a SuSE install on the same system. I get an extra 20fps in Half-Life under Wine, which is quite handy given that it now runs at 30fps, and even bigger jumps in Quake3.
There is also a set of kernel sources tweaked for gaming, which is meant to squeeze out even more performance. I'mt not that bothered, as my performance is acceptable and I don't want to mess anything else up, but for hardcore gamers, especially on borderline systems, I can see it making a great difference.