Monsanto is in bed with the Fed bigtime - the US funds "basic research", Monsanto buys only the successful results - the patents on them - cheaply, Monsanto gets rich. The innovation isn't theirs.
No, you just need something that uses your retina as the screen -
they exist already, nano should make them better.
Re:Can I submit a paper magazine as a story?
on
The Ottoman PC
·
· Score: 1
I'm planning to build a livingroom computer based on a dictionary or music stand - close old analogies to the two computer problems: heavy things you need to adjust in 3 angles, and see with your hands full.
Effeminate maybe, but not actual, say, housekeepers... who would have known that 1) furniture gets kicked around, and 2) things kept under flip-top lids are counterproductive because there's always stuff piled on top of the lid.
Editors and factcheckers are useful to the reader, although often irritating to the writer. Mercy knows too many books get published with homophone typos, including Cryptonomicon.
Another e-publisher, which does light editing & seems to be trying to be format-neutral, is HardShell.
When you, the geek aware that there are many lonely geeks in this world, meet an intelligent but computer-ignorant woman who needs to use computers in any way,
teach her how as though she's a potential geek. She is.
Not all of these attempts will prosper. Most of them, if you honestly believe that anyone can understand computers to the limits of their intelligence, will at least improve these women's affection for computers and understanding of geeks. (Adjectives are in the right order.) A few of them will take root in that familar larval-stage way.
Result: a few more she-geeks; more women who can understand an interest in computers; and almost all of them will now think of geeks as people they can talk with, not people who talk at them. Far more, dare I say, fertile ground for romance.
Caveat: Assume that you won't date this woman; this may be an untrue assumption, but it will probably improve the interaction. (Talking to women only because you hope to sleep with them is emotionally analagous to sleeping with men only in hopes of getting money from them.) You get to date the woman some other/.er is teaching, or the friend she knows who needed someone to talk to about machines, or...
Well, if I write my sweetie a personalized piece of software with emotional content, that almost gets across the emotional interest. (Judging from reactions.)
I agree that physical tokens are even more endearing, though; it's like the difference between sending sheet-music for a song you wrote, and singing it yourself.
New Urbanism doesn't require massive multifamily housing blocks; that's the goal of Modernism, by and large, and indeed, most people consider Brasilía (sp?) a failure. New Urbanism is mostly against building for the convenience of automobiles, and can easily handle detached single family dwellings if zoning and transit don't require everyone to drive everywhere.
Curitaba, for instance, is said to be quite pleasant, having decided to defend its pedestrian boulevards and make their bus system fast and easy to use. I haven't been there; I have been to central and medium-suburb Paris, mostly townhouses and four -or-six story apartment buildings, and found it really remarkably livable, even the un-swank neighborhoods that aren't incredibly expensive. I could even imagine living in the outskirts of Tokyo, where the dwellings are tiny by US standards but I found the layout full of safe, interesting public spaces. It can be done.
The better public schools do have something to do with racism, or classism; the US laws about school funding reinforce any differences in neighborhood wealth and education. (This leaves schools for the poor that have very little chance of helping even the bright, willing poor into the middle class. Note that the best cases of magnet schools that can help people bootstrap are (IMO) in New York, where teenagers aren't dependent on private automobiles to get them to the magnets.)
One of the New England states - Vermont? Maine? NH? recently voted to even out school funding across the state; result, bitter rage from the bedroom and retirement towns that their taxes would pay for the education of the poor. The poor there are largely white rural & agricultural families; of course the arguments get nastier when there are racial differences.
Concentrating on current figures is braindead given the references to changing the course of history in this century; obviously, the earlier someone lived, the more of the century they may have affected.
I like the nomination of Henry Ford; it fits well with the sense of history that assumes our physical environments, and sense of physical possibility, 'really' shape history. In the "Great Man" theory of history, I'd nominate whoever was responsible for starting WWI: unlike WWII, WWI doesn't seem inevitable to historians, but once WWI became as broad as it did WWII probably was inevitable in some catastrophic form.
In a lot of ways (according to, e.g., the Economist) world culture is only now recovering the health it had before WWI; truly global trade, cities that haven't seen war in generations, artists and intellectuals who assume they can collaborate across boundaries and languages.
"if I choose to live in a lot in the middle of nowhere" -
Someone has to. The cities don't feed themselves, or provide their own building materials, or have room yet for everyone in the nation. Rural routes are cheap compared to housing-development buildouts, and more necessary to an informed democracy including rural people.
You might believe that Kelly et al. are right and we're in a guaranteed "Long Boom" - in which case, it might not be hard to stay well-employed enough to warrant working preposterous hours, unless there's enough Schumpeterian destruction that all the money starts flowing away from computers and into, oh, materials science.
Or, of course, the Wired crew could be as right about the economy as they were about Push and their own IPO. Are you pulling enough out of your programming job to tide you over if the stockmarket panics on 9/9/99? Enough money, enough totally-other-economy skills, enough friends with some of the above? Enough current happiness to not mind if it all blows west?
But that's a as healthy a quandary as a quandary can be - the district feels the effect of its decisions, and isn't preventing other districts from their choices.
With Internet and catalog sales untaxed, towns have a different quandary, that they can't afford the infrastructure that makes people happy and safe while people buy from whatever source is cheap this year (greenfield big-box stores, catalogs, the Internet...).
Taxing all *atoms* equally removes a big free-rider problem while leaving decisions about the right rate of taxation local.
Not taxing *bits* rewards people who sensibly desire the only luxury there's always enough of.
If I buy a material object and have it delivered to my material person, I'm using local resources - both for the delivery (roads and workers) and to support my person. These deliveries should be taxed, maybe by ZIP code, which is in all delivery records anyway.
Some people will live in wellfurbished communities, buy a lot of stuff, and pay for it. Some will live in poor or privatized communities; their taxes will be low. (Some people will set up delivery sites in low-tax neighborhoods; this happens with bricks-and-mortar stores too, but is usually less important than convenience.)
Some people will live in nice places but have lower loads on services. If I buy an immaterial object and have it sent over the wire, I'm making so much less load on local services that it's fair not to tax me - it would, in general, be good for many places if luxury spending weren't on physical objects. (Besides, these would be incredibly hard to track, so let's not.)
White males don't make up a majority of the population - *males* don't make up a majority of the population in the US. It is statistically significant that the last decade of "How Could this happen Here?" school killings have been committed by males. (The claims that AIDS was a white male disease were never true worldwide, and were exaggerated in the US by some political groups on both sides. This did its other victims no good.)
There's also a considerable correlation, according to criminologists, between some kinds of violence and some races & social backgrounds. Children get shot in Cabrini Green, but the warning signs are much different than they were in Littleton or Conyers.
"More data needed"? You want MORE? Hah. There's been enough. Do your research.
Some pre-technological communities had (fewer have) remarkably high average standards of living - I am blanking out on the names, but as an anthro prof pointed out, the bones left behind do tell you how old people got and whether they died of malnutrition or violence.
But idyllic peaceful cultures are almost certainly on good cropland, and can't defend themselves well against unpleasant invaders.
Well, if your public school assigned you Asimov's Foundation series instead of actual history texts, you do have something to blame them for, but you sound old enough to mend the error yourself.
- I mention Foundation because your idea of social engineering is unusual; it was kind of you to finally define it, but you have no evidence that monolithic efforts are the only ones that deserve the name. Do you believe the same of physical and software engineering?
Social engineering efforts that have succeeded; the settlement houses were the beginning of organized social work - they were set up to help immigrant communities (e.g. Eastern Europeans in Chicago at the turn of the century), by trying all sorts of small programs, keeping track of results, and expanding the successful ones. They had fairly clear goals - lowering mortality, increasing political representation, etc. - and were remarkably successful. A few very determined people managed their policy.
The US government had a clear social policy intent when it set up land transfer to the railroads and homesteaders in the "opening" of the West. Very successful, did exactly what they wanted it to.
Head Start works. So does Mondragon, and it's been working for fifty.
So you think society has always gotten worse, or that all the improvements in human life were accidental?
... Huh, like the Settlement Houses and adult suffrage could conceivably have been accidental - either you have a definition of "social engineering" so unusual that you should include it; or you have a really short knowledge of history.
Granted, no single Big Idea works forever, but lots of intentional improvements to society have worked. It's like gardening. You have to keep tending it, but that doesn't mean it's accidental or useless, it just means it's complicated.
the US government, under its various auspices as the Army, ag extensions, and the CIA, publishes quite a lot of information specifically on making bombs.
Your tax dollars at work.
Your examples should make us more cautious
on
Gene Leakage
·
· Score: 1
Increasing the vigor of infectious diseases is not a sensible goal for biotechnology.
As you say, penecillin resistance is increasing. This
a) isn't a good thing b) is avoidable; it's largely due to overuse, not use, of antibiotics, and can be slowed or even reversed if people are more sensible (see the CDC's discussion) c) is EXACTLY analagous to what genegeneering pesticides into crops is likely to make happen.
Using Bt twice a season, when the bugs it attacks are multiplying, and leaving untouched reservoirs, allows nonresistant bugs to outcompete resistant ones - just not on our crops. Constant exposure to Bt, in monoculture fields, breeds for resistant bugs alone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The biotech companies want to create these problems so they can sell the solutions, but there's no reason for the rest of us to let them.
Coyote survival is another warning sign - yes, coyotes can survive ecological attacks, as can cockroaches, rats, loosestrife, and bindweed. I have higher ambitions than living in an environment of weeds and scavengers - you can't eat bindweed, and I sure don't want to eat cockroaches.
Genetically modified food
on
Gene Leakage
·
· Score: 1
...this isn't really all that different than hybrids, which are also sterile and give better yield.
No, no, most F1 hybrids - even F2 hybrids - aren't *sterile* at all; they just don't reliably breed true. However, you can usually breed back to open-pollinated species in a few generations, either the F0 parents or plants similar to the F1 plants. People do this regularly - cf. Carol Deppe's book (1993, Little Brown) Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, written by a geneticist for hobby gardeners. (I know you can breed from common corn, tomato, and bean hybrids, I've done it.)
About the UKs resistance to meat hormones - they did just have a serious scare from battery farming techniques; general public sentiment distrusts the ability (and willingness) of meat farmers to tell the consumer how their meat was raised, so general public sentiment supports regulations against hormones. Democracies get to do that, although the WTO wants to prevent it.
There's plenty of reason to distrust our food producers - Vermont passed a popular law just requiring labelling hormone-produced milk, and the big dairies attacked it on the grounds that it affected their First Amendment rights to not speak.
The Department of Labor & Industry probably knows whether a CS or other college degree statistically affects programmers' earnings over a lifetime. If that's what you want to know, go check the real data, not a collection of gee-whizkid stories.
If you want to be a really good programmer, I would guess that it matters more where you get a CS degree than whether. Fierce, constructive criticism will teach you the principles faster than reading the textbooks, and paying for it will get it quickly, before you have deeply ingrained bad habits.
If you want to be more than a coder, if you want to change the world - if you hope or fear that the technological infrastructure we build will shape the world for lifetimes - you're a loon if you don't study more than programming. It's all RFCs, after all - every pamphlet and principle, every historical mistake that cost decades and lives to fix even when change was slow. It's all RFCs for human organization.
Actually, in parts of Europe in parts of the Middle Ages, the general state of health was as good as it was until after WWI - an uncrowded peasant existence can be pretty good for you.
The transition from peasant to postindustrial, now, that hurts.
Slashdot Mirror
Monsanto is in bed with the Fed bigtime - the US funds "basic research", Monsanto buys only the successful results - the patents on them - cheaply, Monsanto gets rich. The innovation isn't theirs.
No, you just need something that uses your retina as the screen -
they exist already, nano should make them better.
I'm planning to build a livingroom computer based on a dictionary or music stand - close old analogies to the two computer problems: heavy things you need to adjust in 3 angles, and see with your hands full.
Effeminate maybe, but not actual, say, housekeepers... who would have known that 1) furniture gets kicked around, and 2) things kept under flip-top lids are counterproductive because there's always stuff piled on top of the lid.
Editors and factcheckers are useful to the reader, although often irritating to the writer. Mercy knows too many books get published with homophone typos, including Cryptonomicon.
Another e-publisher, which does light editing & seems to be trying to be format-neutral, is HardShell.
When you, the geek aware that there are many lonely geeks in this world, meet an intelligent but computer-ignorant woman who needs to use computers in any way,
/.er is teaching, or the friend she knows who needed someone to talk to about machines, or...
teach her how as though she's a potential geek. She is.
Not all of these attempts will prosper. Most of them, if you honestly believe that anyone can understand computers to the limits of their intelligence, will at least improve these women's affection for computers and understanding of geeks. (Adjectives are in the right order.) A few of them will take root in that familar larval-stage way.
Result: a few more she-geeks; more women who can understand an interest in computers; and almost all of them will now think of geeks as people they can talk with, not people who talk at them. Far more, dare I say, fertile ground for romance.
Caveat: Assume that you won't date this woman; this may be an untrue assumption, but it will probably improve the interaction. (Talking to women only because you hope to sleep with them is emotionally analagous to sleeping with men only in hopes of getting money from them.) You get to date the woman some other
it's a gift economy all round.
Well, if I write my sweetie a personalized piece of software with emotional content, that almost gets across the emotional interest. (Judging from reactions.)
I agree that physical tokens are even more endearing, though; it's like the difference between sending sheet-music for a song you wrote, and singing it yourself.
New Urbanism doesn't require massive multifamily housing blocks; that's the goal of Modernism, by and large, and indeed, most people consider Brasilía (sp?) a failure. New Urbanism is mostly against building for the convenience of automobiles, and can easily handle detached single family dwellings if zoning and transit don't require everyone to drive everywhere.
Curitaba, for instance, is said to be quite pleasant, having decided to defend its pedestrian boulevards and make their bus system fast and easy to use. I haven't been there; I have been to central and medium-suburb Paris, mostly townhouses and four -or-six story apartment buildings, and found it really remarkably livable, even the un-swank neighborhoods that aren't incredibly expensive. I could even imagine living in the outskirts of Tokyo, where the dwellings are tiny by US standards but I found the layout full of safe, interesting public spaces. It can be done.
The better public schools do have something to do with racism, or classism; the US laws about school funding reinforce any differences in neighborhood wealth and education. (This leaves schools for the poor that have very little chance of helping even the bright, willing poor into the middle class. Note that the best cases of magnet schools that can help people bootstrap are (IMO) in New York, where teenagers aren't dependent on private automobiles to get them to the magnets.)
One of the New England states - Vermont? Maine? NH? recently voted to even out school funding across the state; result, bitter rage from the bedroom and retirement towns that their taxes would pay for the education of the poor. The poor there are largely white rural & agricultural families; of course the arguments get nastier when there are racial differences.
United we stand; divided we fall.
Concentrating on current figures is braindead given the references to changing the course of history in this century; obviously, the earlier someone lived, the more of the century they may have affected.
I like the nomination of Henry Ford; it fits well with the sense of history that assumes our physical environments, and sense of physical possibility, 'really' shape history. In the "Great Man" theory of history, I'd nominate whoever was responsible for starting WWI: unlike WWII, WWI doesn't seem inevitable to historians, but once WWI became as broad as it did WWII probably was inevitable in some catastrophic form.
In a lot of ways (according to, e.g., the Economist) world culture is only now recovering the health it had before WWI; truly global trade, cities that haven't seen war in generations, artists and intellectuals who assume they can collaborate across boundaries and languages.
We have daemons, so we might as well have ethos &cetera.
"if I choose to live in a lot in the middle of nowhere" -
Someone has to. The cities don't feed themselves, or provide their own building materials, or have room yet for everyone in the nation. Rural routes are cheap compared to housing-development buildouts, and more necessary to an informed democracy including rural people.
You might believe that Kelly et al. are right and we're in a guaranteed "Long Boom" - in which case, it might not be hard to stay well-employed enough to warrant working preposterous hours, unless there's enough Schumpeterian destruction that all the money starts flowing away from computers and into, oh, materials science.
Or, of course, the Wired crew could be as right about the economy as they were about Push and their own IPO. Are you pulling enough out of your programming job to tide you over if the stockmarket panics on 9/9/99? Enough money, enough totally-other-economy skills, enough friends with some of the above? Enough current happiness to not mind if it all blows west?
But that's a as healthy a quandary as a quandary can be - the district feels the effect of its decisions, and isn't preventing other districts from their choices.
With Internet and catalog sales untaxed, towns have a different quandary, that they can't afford the infrastructure that makes people happy and safe while people buy from whatever source is cheap this year (greenfield big-box stores, catalogs, the Internet...).
Taxing all *atoms* equally removes a big free-rider problem while leaving decisions about the right rate of taxation local.
Not taxing *bits* rewards people who sensibly desire the only luxury there's always enough of.
If I buy a material object and have it delivered to my material person, I'm using local resources - both for the delivery (roads and workers) and to support my person. These deliveries should be taxed, maybe by ZIP code, which is in all delivery records anyway.
Some people will live in wellfurbished communities, buy a lot of stuff, and pay for it. Some will live in poor or privatized communities; their taxes will be low. (Some people will set up delivery sites in low-tax neighborhoods; this happens with bricks-and-mortar stores too, but is usually less important than convenience.)
Some people will live in nice places but have lower loads on services. If I buy an immaterial object and have it sent over the wire, I'm making so much less load on local services that it's fair not to tax me - it would, in general, be good for many places if luxury spending weren't on physical objects. (Besides, these would be incredibly hard to track, so let's not.)
White males don't make up a majority of the population - *males* don't make up a majority of the population in the US. It is statistically significant that the last decade of "How Could this happen Here?" school killings have been committed by males. (The claims that AIDS was a white male disease were never true worldwide, and were exaggerated in the US by some political groups on both sides. This did its other victims no good.)
There's also a considerable correlation, according to criminologists, between some kinds of violence and some races & social backgrounds. Children get shot in Cabrini Green, but the warning signs are much different than they were in Littleton or Conyers.
"More data needed"? You want MORE? Hah. There's been enough. Do your research.
Toffler is management-guff. If you like the subject, try one of the serious books on it; Castells' _The Rise of the Network Society_, for instance.
Some pre-technological communities had (fewer have) remarkably high average standards of living - I am blanking out on the names, but as an anthro prof pointed out, the bones left behind do tell you how old people got and whether they died of malnutrition or violence.
But idyllic peaceful cultures are almost certainly on good cropland, and can't defend themselves well against unpleasant invaders.
Well, if your public school assigned you Asimov's Foundation series instead of actual history texts, you do have something to blame them for, but you sound old enough to mend the error yourself.
- I mention Foundation because your idea of social engineering is unusual; it was kind of you to finally define it, but you have no evidence that monolithic efforts are the only ones that deserve the name. Do you believe the same of physical and software engineering?
Social engineering efforts that have succeeded; the settlement houses were the beginning of organized social work - they were set up to help immigrant communities (e.g. Eastern Europeans in Chicago at the turn of the century), by trying all sorts of small programs, keeping track of results, and expanding the successful ones. They had fairly clear goals - lowering mortality, increasing political representation, etc. - and were remarkably successful. A few very determined people managed their policy.
The US government had a clear social policy intent when it set up land transfer to the railroads and homesteaders in the "opening" of the West. Very successful, did exactly what they wanted it to.
Head Start works. So does Mondragon, and it's been working for fifty.
So you think society has always gotten worse, or that all the improvements in human life were accidental?
... Huh, like the Settlement Houses and adult suffrage could conceivably have been accidental - either you have a definition of "social engineering" so unusual that you should include it; or you have a really short knowledge of history.
Granted, no single Big Idea works forever, but lots of intentional improvements to society have worked. It's like gardening. You have to keep tending it, but that doesn't mean it's accidental or useless, it just means it's complicated.
the US government, under its various auspices as the Army, ag extensions, and the CIA, publishes quite a lot of information specifically on making bombs.
Your tax dollars at work.
Increasing the vigor of infectious diseases is not a sensible goal for biotechnology.
As you say, penecillin resistance is increasing. This
a) isn't a good thing
b) is avoidable; it's largely due to overuse, not use, of antibiotics, and can be slowed or even reversed if people are more sensible (see the CDC's discussion)
c) is EXACTLY analagous to what genegeneering pesticides into crops is likely to make happen.
Using Bt twice a season, when the bugs it attacks are multiplying, and leaving untouched reservoirs, allows nonresistant bugs to outcompete resistant ones - just not on our crops. Constant exposure to Bt, in monoculture fields, breeds for resistant bugs alone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The biotech companies want to create these problems so they can sell the solutions, but there's no reason for the rest of us to let them.
Coyote survival is another warning sign - yes, coyotes can survive ecological attacks, as can cockroaches, rats, loosestrife, and bindweed. I have higher ambitions than living in an environment of weeds and scavengers - you can't eat bindweed, and I sure don't want to eat cockroaches.
...this isn't really all that different than hybrids, which are also sterile and give better yield.
No, no, most F1 hybrids - even F2 hybrids - aren't *sterile* at all; they just don't reliably breed true. However, you can usually breed back to open-pollinated species in a few generations, either the F0 parents or plants similar to the F1 plants. People do this regularly - cf. Carol Deppe's book (1993, Little Brown) Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, written by a geneticist for hobby gardeners. (I know you can breed from common corn, tomato, and bean hybrids, I've done it.)
About the UKs resistance to meat hormones - they did just have a serious scare from battery farming techniques; general public sentiment distrusts the ability (and willingness) of meat farmers to tell the consumer how their meat was raised, so general public sentiment supports regulations against hormones. Democracies get to do that, although the WTO wants to prevent it.
There's plenty of reason to distrust our food producers - Vermont passed a popular law just requiring labelling hormone-produced milk, and the big dairies attacked it on the grounds that it affected their First Amendment rights to not speak.
The Department of Labor & Industry probably knows whether a CS or other college degree statistically affects programmers' earnings over a lifetime. If that's what you want to know, go check the real data, not a collection of gee-whizkid stories.
If you want to be a really good programmer, I would guess that it matters more where you get a CS degree than whether. Fierce, constructive criticism will teach you the principles faster than reading the textbooks, and paying for it will get it quickly, before you have deeply ingrained bad habits.
If you want to be more than a coder, if you want to change the world - if you hope or fear that the technological infrastructure we build will shape the world for lifetimes - you're a loon if you don't study more than programming. It's all RFCs, after all - every pamphlet and principle, every historical mistake that cost decades and lives to fix even when change was slow. It's all RFCs for human organization.
Actually, in parts of Europe in parts of the Middle Ages, the general state of health was as good as it was until after WWI - an uncrowded peasant existence can be pretty good for you.
The transition from peasant to postindustrial, now, that hurts.