No offense, but what did you expect him to say? Go bombers go? Of course they're not pro-violence, and (in this matter at least) they're honest. The problem is what thay preach and beleve leads other people who "know better" to do the bombings. The least that could be acceptable (considering they are the original cause for the bombings) would be to strongly speak against violence _every time_ they are talking about abortions, or other sensitive matters. One speach too late isn't even worth mentioning.
We're talking science fiction, so we don't worry how feasible or far in the future this is.
But past that, it's possible to imagine one nanobot or a group of several thousand make a mini-fusion plant when they need to. And the raw material is plentiful - water in the athmosphere for example.
For more immediate applications (this century) I have to agree that most we can do is use nanobots in very controled enviroments, providing them with energy and construction blocks. And if we started with the wishful thinking, I want an automated factory already dammit!:)
As far as I remember the problems with nano-machines were supposed to happen when 'bots had acces to fusion. _That_ would indeed be scary, because it would give them a huge advantage over "regular" life-forms, plus the posibility to escape any confines.
Fortunately this is many many many years in the future;)
I'm using Java 1.5 for several months now, and besides the new language feature goodies it also has shared memory between applications.
Now I can't say how much better swing has gotten since 1.4 because a dont' remember how good it used to be;) but in 1.5 it's pretty good. No reason why I'd hesitate to do any UI in java anymore. It's way better than in 1.2 or 1.3, that's for sure.
This is the internet. Sooner or later there will be enough material to keep somebody happy for a lifetime. And if not, there are cartoons and maybe more realistic artificial stuff.
Censorship on the other hand will bend the market only one way: more scarce means more expensive, means a lot more likely that someone will be tempted to create new porn with real children.
Compare scenarios:
a. make completely legal (_not_ moral or socialy accepted, just legal) posessing and exchanging child porn, but illegal to perform or record sexual acts with children and enforce it;
b. make it equally illegal to produce, posess and exchange child porn.
Now, a. is a handlable situation. Someone makes new material (for little financial gain), it's possible to catch it as soon as its product sees the light of day.
b. on the other hand is a lot harder to handle because it gives the producer a lot of material incentive to make new stuff, and the consumer a real interest to keep the producer's identity secret.
And for people who don't do it to make money, well, censorship doesn't affect them at all. If anything, maybe its absence makes them easier to catch if they record and distribute.
This looks a lot like soft drugs. It is easier to handle them if they're legal, but that's impossible because of a social taboo. Granted, nobody gets hurt growing pot, but this only makes the right decision mode dificult to make.
Try not to freak at the ideea: if you aren't too serious about programming and don't intend to do big things it's actually ok.
- no need for a complicated programming environment, notepad will do - quick gratification - first "programs" will likely do something visual - fully functional programming language. I read somewhere it's the simplest language that's also turing complete.
You have to mix it with html of course but if you keep a clean separation between javascript code and html code everything will be fine:)
And still there is a fact that a single programmer with a hobby is sometimes more productive then a team of hired people, and sponsoryng this guy to do what he wants full time is best for consumers of the software.
Any other activity like consulting would take too much time from him especially if he's not inclined to such things.
What would probably help is more awareness towards this kind of sponsorship. Also getting some value for your money, except the free software, would help too. Maybe preferrencial feature development/bug fixing? there could be a market for this kind of thins with open projects. Maybe even feature auctioning;)
Remember Services vs Production percents: as far as I remember less then 20% workforce is employed in production.
Many jobs can be replaced by robots (or automation) even in services, true, but most can be done better with some social interaction.
And many people-centric sectors will develop as soon as quality people become available and cheaper. Education is done today using 50 year old methods. We know for example that good education should use a 1:1 student teacher ration, but this is still way too impractical. And I am sure that many profesions will develop or be created should the conditions appear.
Nothing new here... Last this was on slashdot they still had to choose the site for the facility (France or Japan), just like now. The only "news" is... well... none.
Still, I can't wait to see this started. A lot of things can happen if this works. Most of them will happen to our children but still:)
Try this thought experiment. Tax oil. Consumption goes down (supply/demand etc.). Competing suppliers respond with lower prices barrel prices in an attempt to keep market share. We (as a nation) effectively pay *less* for our oil AND our consumption rate decreases AND new markets are created for energy effiency AND alternative sources of energy become more attractive AND greenhouse gas emmisions decrease.
Tax oil. Keep taxing it for several months, maybe years. Lose elections. Stop taxing oil.
You're right, and now I did a little research. In about 10 minutes on google I found out:
- there are air conditioners that work on solar power. They consume about as much as a PC and it's a safe bet they're quite expensive
- to power a regular air conditioner by solar panels only would be "prohibitive" (the word came from my research;)
Anyway, my point was that you can't expect people to save energy if that implies disconfort or expences, especially in countries where energy savings would mean not just disconfort but poverty. You could (maybe can right now) build a house that would be completely solar powered even up north, but who'd afford to buy it at four-ten times the price?
There are some non-conventional power sources that are competitive, like river dams. They're still more expensive then nuclear power, and they tend to disrupt more environment, but still are probably second best (and better then OLD nuclear power plants).
I'm sorry to tell you, but sometimes numbers _do_ matter. It's true, we can get energy from sun, wind, biomass or tides, but it's the order of magnitude that kills you.
I didn't do the math, but try to think: what can you get from sun energy? 5% growing crops? 60% fotocells? Even at 100% it's just not enough. Covering square miles with cheap reliable high-efficiency solar panels would (maybe) get us close, but we don't even have that. From 1 square meter you can maybe boil a glass of water, but you can't heat your house in winter, nor make cars or computers.
There's more energy in the wind and in the tides, but 1. it's still not enough and 2. how much energy goes into melting 1 ton of steel? not to mention processing of ore etc. It takes years for such technology to break even (wind turbines have a lot of steel in them).
The real answer (not counting truly non-conventional approaches) is fusion, but nobody pretends it's closer then 50 years.
What we have left is classic nuclear power, or fission. It has its problems, mainly radioactive waste, but has a big hidden advantage: currently all nuclear power plants use old technologies, sometimes even ancient. Why? because the political climate is against innovation in this field, and sometimes greed: it's expensive to update a power plant that still works.
New plants can be cheaper, more efficient and a lot cleaner then what we have now, _if_ we give them a chance.
And another aspect: we, as a species, will never reduce our energy consumption in the forseeable future. SUVs or not, a lot more power goes into industry then cars and air conditioning. _And_ there's two thirds of the planet that still has to reach the level of cars and air conditioning, and they're not going to care about ecology until they do (nor should they, truth be told).
Nobody's stopping you to use contracts, they are actually quite a piece of software engineering. As a rule you should know pre and post conditions for your methods, and definitely should write them down (comments) for library methods.
Enforcing them it's a different matter. You can cheat easy anyway (someone said in another comment that one way is to use the error messages) and if a programmer is used to know his contracts enforcing them brings very little.
But I suppose there will always be a market for things like this, like with managers/clients who want to feel secure about their code.
I was about 12 in '89 when we switched to capitalism. Before that and some years after things were a lot like India (a little less Misha, but definitely Yuri Gagarin and Einstein).
Most things we wanted to do in school were not necesarily science but _useful_ Science was actually the cool stuff.
Now it's different. Things changed while I was in high-school and a lot in college - it's _all_ about money and a good job and nothing about learing for its own sake. The downside is that the shift turned our education system upside-down: I wouldn't count on an university graduate to know how to screw a lightbulb these days. Really.
The net is gonna change a lot in the next decade. Just because now it's a breeze to add a feedback forum doesn't mean that it will be for _any_ type of media.
Maybe some judge will decide someday google has to offer feedback because it's a news site. Or maybe 5 years from now 50% of news will be delivered in a freakish ultra mobile wireless user-dependent anonymous fashion and it'll be _really_ hard to tell which users read which news.
I'm now saying the right to reply is a bad thing per se. Only that applying it and other regulations on the internet as a whole is going to create more problems than it solves.
And about the picture of me etc. I would mind seeing it in Washington Post or CNN, or other "serious" news site. But i would not deny everybody's right to do it. Let's say my ex, or a friend/aquintance etc. should be able to express themselves without consulting a lawyer first.
And what's the difference? I don't know. Maybe WP or CNN are news organisations and should accept the responsability for this, while my ex is just my ex with a forum.
One more thing. I'm not really against this particular regulation. If anything I'm for it. But I strongly dislike the fact while each regulation is justified, in the not-too-distant future their sum forces me to hire a lawyer.
Maybe that's civilisation after all - learning to respect more rules. But as sound/simple system engineering it sucks.
In the beginning you could put anything up on the net, and it was the user's job to select/judge/rate or otherwise use theit minds to decide weather it was worth anything.
There were/are plenty of moderated areas to help the user in this (slashdot is one) but it is ultimately his responsibility.
Things are changing however. DMCA, the yahoo natzi memorabilia suit, now this, the trend is to start placing responsibility on the poster.
Which I think is not so good. Yes, more and more normal, not technical people enter the internet, children, and they need to be protected. But I think more effort should be invested in creating "safe" areas, with various definitions of safe, instead of imposing a norm on all net activity.
But I think more important is something else. This trend is placing a burden on every net user. Any forum moderator, webmaster, ISP or other form of communication facilitator (which very soon will mean almost everybody) will be required to follow guidelines and regulations and check periodically if he is breaking a number of laws. Laws which are far less obvious then the ones in the real world.
So I'm not saying it's not right. I'm just wondering if it's worth the freedom we _will_ loose over it.
Not funny. I once applied in a student organisation which selected new members based on how much fun they had at a party. And they let us know in advance:)
This is the best ideea yet. But still, you'll probably have to verify that the company actually hired the spammers. And since the spamers are underground, it's not likely to be easy.
Maybe you could force them not to take orders that come because of spam? Neh, that's too complicated... Any ideeas?
It's not equally likely that the "bad guys" also find the problem. 99% of security people are the good guys, and a most bugs are discovered by accident by one of these people. So it's several orders of magnitude harder for the "bad guys" to discover bugs on their own then it is to browse the web and read security-related news.
Theese odds change with time, of course. If you sit on an issue for let's say 6 month, it may become likely that some of the bad guys (or just somebody else) finds it also. And then spreading the word becomes the right thing to do.
I think it's like this: if the programmer is relatively stupid (can't solve the problem in any amount of time), 10-100 programmers can do it.
So it doesn't contradict this 'mythical man month' thing, it's just something different.
I've read most of the comments so far and they don't seem to get the point of the article.
The point is that except for a limited class of applications (multimedia, games), most of the things you can do on tommorow's computers you can do on today's. And that it's becoming incresingly expensive to follow Moore's law while it's less and less necessary.
Much more important will probably become the price and maybe other factors (versatility? miniaturisation? power consumption?). Imagine dirt-cheap wireless chips and p-3 like microprocessors. Think about the applications for a moment.
With the right protocols in place it could mean unlimited bandwith anytime anywhere, just for starters.
When the world will be 100% computerized it won't be because of supercomputers. It'll be because of cheap small chips and smart software.
Re:Well, chalk up another un-american point for me
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
When we start associating patriotism with supporting war
This is not a new at all. I don't think this had ever been new. It's just you'd expect we'd grow out of it sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
No offense, but what did you expect him to say? Go bombers go? Of course they're not pro-violence, and (in this matter at least) they're honest. The problem is what thay preach and beleve leads other people who "know better" to do the bombings. The least that could be acceptable (considering they are the original cause for the bombings) would be to strongly speak against violence _every time_ they are talking about abortions, or other sensitive matters. One speach too late isn't even worth mentioning.
Well, maybe that's because republicans are all lobby and money
We're talking science fiction, so we don't worry how feasible or far in the future this is.
:)
But past that, it's possible to imagine one nanobot or a group of several thousand make a mini-fusion plant when they need to. And the raw material is plentiful - water in the athmosphere for example.
For more immediate applications (this century) I have to agree that most we can do is use nanobots in very controled enviroments, providing them with energy and construction blocks. And if we started with the wishful thinking, I want an automated factory already dammit!
As far as I remember the problems with nano-machines were supposed to happen when 'bots had acces to fusion. _That_ would indeed be scary, because it would give them a huge advantage over "regular" life-forms, plus the posibility to escape any confines.
Fortunately this is many many many years in the future
I'm using Java 1.5 for several months now, and besides the new language feature goodies it also has shared memory between applications.
Now I can't say how much better swing has gotten since 1.4 because a dont' remember how good it used to be
This is the internet. Sooner or later there will be enough material to keep somebody happy for a lifetime. And if not, there are cartoons and maybe more realistic artificial stuff.
Censorship on the other hand will bend the market only one way: more scarce means more expensive, means a lot more likely that someone will be tempted to create new porn with real children.
Compare scenarios:
a. make completely legal (_not_ moral or socialy accepted, just legal) posessing and exchanging child porn, but illegal to perform or record sexual acts with children and enforce it;
b. make it equally illegal to produce, posess and exchange child porn.
Now, a. is a handlable situation. Someone makes new material (for little financial gain), it's possible to catch it as soon as its product sees the light of day.
b. on the other hand is a lot harder to handle because it gives the producer a lot of material incentive to make new stuff, and the consumer a real interest to keep the producer's identity secret.
And for people who don't do it to make money, well, censorship doesn't affect them at all. If anything, maybe its absence makes them easier to catch if they record and distribute.
This looks a lot like soft drugs. It is easier to handle them if they're legal, but that's impossible because of a social taboo. Granted, nobody gets hurt growing pot, but this only makes the right decision mode dificult to make.
Javascript.
Try not to freak at the ideea: if you aren't too serious about programming and don't intend to do big things it's actually ok.
- no need for a complicated programming environment, notepad will do
- quick gratification - first "programs" will likely do something visual
- fully functional programming language. I read somewhere it's the simplest language that's also turing complete.
You have to mix it with html of course but if you keep a clean separation between javascript code and html code everything will be fine
And still there is a fact that a single programmer with a hobby is sometimes more productive then a team of hired people, and sponsoryng this guy to do what he wants full time is best for consumers of the software.
Any other activity like consulting would take too much time from him especially if he's not inclined to such things.
What would probably help is more awareness towards this kind of sponsorship. Also getting some value for your money, except the free software, would help too. Maybe preferrencial feature development/bug fixing? there could be a market for this kind of thins with open projects. Maybe even feature auctioning
Remember Services vs Production percents: as far as I remember less then 20% workforce is employed in production.
Many jobs can be replaced by robots (or automation) even in services, true, but most can be done better with some social interaction.
And many people-centric sectors will develop as soon as quality people become available and cheaper. Education is done today using 50 year old methods. We know for example that good education should use a 1:1 student teacher ration, but this is still way too impractical. And I am sure that many profesions will develop or be created should the conditions appear.
Nothing new here... Last this was on slashdot they still had to choose the site for the facility (France or Japan), just like now. The only "news" is... well... none.
Still, I can't wait to see this started. A lot of things can happen if this works. Most of them will happen to our children but still
Some kind of photovoltaic paint? That's an ideea...
Try this thought experiment. Tax oil. Consumption goes down (supply/demand etc.). Competing suppliers respond with lower prices barrel prices in an attempt to keep market share. We (as a nation) effectively pay *less* for our oil AND our consumption rate decreases AND new markets are created for energy effiency AND alternative sources of energy become more attractive AND greenhouse gas emmisions decrease.
Tax oil. Keep taxing it for several months, maybe years. Lose elections. Stop taxing oil.
You're right, and now I did a little research. In about 10 minutes on google I found out:
- there are air conditioners that work on solar power. They consume about as much as a PC and it's a safe bet they're quite expensive
- to power a regular air conditioner by solar panels only would be "prohibitive" (the word came from my research
Anyway, my point was that you can't expect people to save energy if that implies disconfort or expences, especially in countries where energy savings would mean not just disconfort but poverty. You could (maybe can right now) build a house that would be completely solar powered even up north, but who'd afford to buy it at four-ten times the price?
There are some non-conventional power sources that are competitive, like river dams. They're still more expensive then nuclear power, and they tend to disrupt more environment, but still are probably second best (and better then OLD nuclear power plants).
I'm sorry to tell you, but sometimes numbers _do_ matter. It's true, we can get energy from sun, wind, biomass or tides, but it's the order of magnitude that kills you.
I didn't do the math, but try to think: what can you get from sun energy? 5% growing crops? 60% fotocells? Even at 100% it's just not enough. Covering square miles with cheap reliable high-efficiency solar panels would (maybe) get us close, but we don't even have that. From 1 square meter you can maybe boil a glass of water, but you can't heat your house in winter, nor make cars or computers.
There's more energy in the wind and in the tides, but 1. it's still not enough and 2. how much energy goes into melting 1 ton of steel? not to mention processing of ore etc. It takes years for such technology to break even (wind turbines have a lot of steel in them).
The real answer (not counting truly non-conventional approaches) is fusion, but nobody pretends it's closer then 50 years.
What we have left is classic nuclear power, or fission. It has its problems, mainly radioactive waste, but has a big hidden advantage: currently all nuclear power plants use old technologies, sometimes even ancient. Why? because the political climate is against innovation in this field, and sometimes greed: it's expensive to update a power plant that still works.
New plants can be cheaper, more efficient and a lot cleaner then what we have now, _if_ we give them a chance.
And another aspect: we, as a species, will never reduce our energy consumption in the forseeable future. SUVs or not, a lot more power goes into industry then cars and air conditioning. _And_ there's two thirds of the planet that still has to reach the level of cars and air conditioning, and they're not going to care about ecology until they do (nor should they, truth be told).
Nobody's stopping you to use contracts, they are actually quite a piece of software engineering. As a rule you should know pre and post conditions for your methods, and definitely should write them down (comments) for library methods.
Enforcing them it's a different matter. You can cheat easy anyway (someone said in another comment that one way is to use the error messages) and if a programmer is used to know his contracts enforcing them brings very little.
But I suppose there will always be a market for things like this, like with managers/clients who want to feel secure about their code.
I was about 12 in '89 when we switched to capitalism. Before that and some years after things were a lot like India (a little less Misha, but definitely Yuri Gagarin and Einstein).
Most things we wanted to do in school were not necesarily science but _useful_ Science was actually the cool stuff.
Now it's different. Things changed while I was in high-school and a lot in college - it's _all_ about money and a good job and nothing about learing for its own sake. The downside is that the shift turned our education system upside-down: I wouldn't count on an university graduate to know how to screw a lightbulb these days. Really.
The net is gonna change a lot in the next decade. Just because now it's a breeze to add a feedback forum doesn't mean that it will be for _any_ type of media.
Maybe some judge will decide someday google has to offer feedback because it's a news site. Or maybe 5 years from now 50% of news will be delivered in a freakish ultra mobile wireless user-dependent anonymous fashion and it'll be _really_ hard to tell which users read which news.
I'm now saying the right to reply is a bad thing per se. Only that applying it and other regulations on the internet as a whole is going to create more problems than it solves.
And about the picture of me etc. I would mind seeing it in Washington Post or CNN, or other "serious" news site. But i would not deny everybody's right to do it. Let's say my ex, or a friend/aquintance etc. should be able to express themselves without consulting a lawyer first.
And what's the difference? I don't know. Maybe WP or CNN are news organisations and should accept the responsability for this, while my ex is just my ex with a forum.
One more thing. I'm not really against this particular regulation. If anything I'm for it. But I strongly dislike the fact while each regulation is justified, in the not-too-distant future their sum forces me to hire a lawyer.
Maybe that's civilisation after all - learning to respect more rules. But as sound/simple system engineering it sucks.
It's more then just taking responibility.
In the beginning you could put anything up on the net, and it was the user's job to select/judge/rate or otherwise use theit minds to decide weather it was worth anything.
There were/are plenty of moderated areas to help the user in this (slashdot is one) but it is ultimately his responsibility.
Things are changing however. DMCA, the yahoo natzi memorabilia suit, now this, the trend is to start placing responsibility on the poster.
Which I think is not so good. Yes, more and more normal, not technical people enter the internet, children, and they need to be protected. But I think more effort should be invested in creating "safe" areas, with various definitions of safe, instead of imposing a norm on all net activity.
But I think more important is something else.
This trend is placing a burden on every net user. Any forum moderator, webmaster, ISP or other form of communication facilitator (which very soon will mean almost everybody) will be required to follow guidelines and regulations and check periodically if he is breaking a number of laws. Laws which are far less obvious then the ones in the real world.
So I'm not saying it's not right. I'm just wondering if it's worth the freedom we _will_ loose over it.
I completely agree with what you say.
However it strikes me that most empires don't collapse through war. That's only the final blow at best.
It's the small things that bring it down, stuff like say DMCA and the Columbine shooting. Or at least what they are the symptoms for.
Not funny. I once applied in a student organisation which selected new members based on how much fun they had at a party. And they let us know in advance
This is the best ideea yet. But still, you'll probably have to verify that the company actually hired the spammers. And since the spamers are underground, it's not likely to be easy.
Maybe you could force them not to take orders that come because of spam? Neh, that's too complicated... Any ideeas?
It's not equally likely that the "bad guys" also find the problem. 99% of security people are the good guys, and a most bugs are discovered by accident by one of these people. So it's several orders of magnitude harder for the "bad guys" to discover bugs on their own then it is to browse the web and read security-related news.
Theese odds change with time, of course. If you sit on an issue for let's say 6 month, it may become likely that some of the bad guys (or just somebody else) finds it also. And then spreading the word becomes the right thing to do.
I think it's like this: if the programmer is relatively stupid (can't solve the problem in any amount of time), 10-100 programmers can do it.
So it doesn't contradict this 'mythical man month' thing, it's just something different.
I've read most of the comments so far and they don't seem to get the point of the article.
The point is that except for a limited class of applications (multimedia, games), most of the things you can do on tommorow's computers you can do on today's. And that it's becoming incresingly expensive to follow Moore's law while it's less and less necessary.
Much more important will probably become the price and maybe other factors (versatility? miniaturisation? power consumption?). Imagine dirt-cheap wireless chips and p-3 like microprocessors. Think about the applications for a moment.
With the right protocols in place it could mean unlimited bandwith anytime anywhere, just for starters.
When the world will be 100% computerized it won't be because of supercomputers. It'll be because of cheap small chips and smart software.
When we start associating patriotism with supporting war
This is not a new at all. I don't think this had ever been new. It's just you'd expect we'd grow out of it sometimes.