Of course, in the modern-day push to privatization, the most likely outcome of any such measure to "help" US citizens would be to fund billions of dollars of construction on the taxpayer's bill and then immediately turn control of it over to a profit-maximizing local monopoly to further soak money out of all the new utility's customers. (... Make that "consumers" -- customers are people you have to treat with dignity.)
I'd rather have the government in control of content over the private sector. The First Amendment allows for court challenges to the overreaching hand of the government as does the ability to vote-out egregious offenders. There's absolutely no recourse against people like Comcast who can do whatever they want to their network and tell you, "Like it or lump it."
Compared to another article that I tried to get posted yesterday about biological evidence that aggressive people's brains react much more strongly to nicotine than non-aggressive people -- a little.
I'm guessing Slashdot editors smoke and eat M&Ms all day.
Don't know. I didn't support the war in Iraq. I would have developed more intel and backed up *suprise* inspections with UN troops.
I'm pretty much in that camp too.
But one nitpick. The Hussein government was irrelevant beyond potentially funding active WMD programs. Those could have made their way into terrorist hands without Hussein ever knowing about it, much less approving it. People act like he was some sort of omnipotent god who controlled every atom in Iraq. There's thought that the anthrax used in those attacks could have been leaked from labs in the US, so how secure would the Iraqi labs be?
I seriously doubt that any large quantity of the product of a serious military project could get into the hands of foreigners without someone discovering it. After all, the lives of Iraqi scientists were carefully watched to avoid leaking info to UN weapons inspectors. Plus, Iraqi scientists came from mostly secularist backgrounds and would be unlikely candidates for cooperating with terrorists, and many were fiercely loyal to the regime.
As for the anthrax, we're a more free society.
Is it completely unimaginable that organized terrorists couldn't run an operation to get the WMDs by, shall we say, less official means?
No, not completely. However, I don't consider Iraq to be a threat of being a source of terrorist WMDs any more than I would consider Russia and other former Soviet states or one of the nuclear capable religious Muslim states.
2. You really can't answer this on your own? You really cannot see it as a different situation that calls for a different approach? I mean... really?
Sorry, I lumped you in with the group of fanatical conservatives that I like to call "Fox News viewers" who have now said that WMDs are irrelevant and that we were right to go to war because (1) Iraq was a threat US security and (2) Saddam was torturing his people and once used chemical weapons on them. I just like to point out that Kim Jong Il is torturing and gassing his people right now, and the major reason why we don't go in all gung-ho is because he actually IS a threat to US security. We just prefer attacking paper tigers to real ones.
I never said the US was innocent, so spare me the lecture.
My bad, I think I read too much into the whole "no use in talking to people outside the US" bit.
Then you're incapable of reading and reasoning, then. Let me describe in the most simplisitc, most childishly plain terms that I can, and perhaps it will register in the dark recessess of your underused cranium: Iraq had the ability to manufacturer chemical, biological, and nuclear arms.
Ah, good. Opening with an insult. That's the best way to present your argument as grounded in firm logic instead of emotion and supposition, isn't it?
I should point out that the experts -- by which I mean David Kay, the man Bush hired to look for weapons programs and not Fox News pundits -- would disagree with you. Saddam seems to have had R&D on chemical and biological weapons, but he had no actual weapons produced, he had no plants ready to produce them, and his nuclear program was a complete shambles with no capacity to manufacture weapons.
Now, if you said that he was clearly deceiving the international community, that he was in violation of UN resolutions to show inspectors around properly, or that he actually had conventional weapons that were in violation of the UN resolutions, then I'd agree with you. I might even agree now that that justified the war. However, if you want to nod your head along with the ludicrous statement that he the capacity to produce "over 25,000 liters of anthrax," "more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," or "as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent," then I'm going to have to laugh in your face. Saddam's programs were mostly dead by the time the second war started.
[H]is very possession of them could put him in a position of blackmailing the entire world. It doesn't help that, as the formerly most powerful Arabic nation, he could have singlehandedly walked all over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and more if he chose to do so.
Not without retribution. The entire lesson learned by the war on Kuwait was that he could not do so without terrible retribution. Saddam has bargaining power only because there was international pressure against the US moving. An actual attack with WMDs in the current environment would've seen France, Russia, Germany, and China's (paid-for) political position crumble and support given to walk all over the country. Saddam wasn't a fanatic. He was a cold-blooded, rational dictator who played the game of brinksmanship and lost hard.
Such an action would've caused grave economic damage to this nation...
Didn't do that much the first time, did it? It actually helped pick up the economy quite a bit when we stepped on his little army the last time.
Again, you completely misunderstand the subtlety involved here.
Again, you miss the fact that Saddam didn't like jihadists like al-Qai'da. (Furthermore, according to the linked article, Osama didn't like Saddam either.) He was more than willing to fund money into Palestinian terrorism because it was a good PR move with other Arabic nations and Palestinian terrorists had a defined goal that wouldn't come back to bite him, but al-Qai'da has made its mission to see Sharia implemented worldwide. That would mean toppling his own secularist government, too. Remember, the reason we allied with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war was that we saw Iraq as one of the few non-fanatical governments in the Middle East. The Baathists were secularists who oppressed a lot of the more religious minorities in Iraq. This and the flood of foreign fighters is why Iraq is seeing its first waves of suicide bombings. Iraqis were too scared to do this before.
Also, Hussein didn't have to want political gains here. Haven't you noticed that these terrorists aren't trying to make political points?
Once again, Hussein was a ruthless dictator, not a terrorist -- just as evil, but completely different g
Personally, while no one's really weeping over the loss of Hussein here, part of the reason that we have such a bad rep is that people like the poster above you actually seem to think that the war in Iraq has something to do with stopping terrorism or promoting freedom or some such nonsense. Each one can be countered with a simple question each:
1) How does taking down a stable, secular dictatorship and leaving a country in the hands of its first ever rash of suicide bombers and pissing off the entire Middle East keep America safe from terrorism?
2) Why is Kim Jong Il -- man who is everything that Saddam was claimed to be, turned to 11 -- still in power?
A lack of understanding of the ramifications of our acts combined with heavy hypocrisy (Pakistan nuke scandal anyone?) is what makes our foreign policy so hated now compared to 4 years ago. America-hating didn't become a world-wide fashion until we made it so. Besides, if you're from South America or the Middle East, you've almost certainly got a good reason to have a grudge against the US. If I were you, I'd read more history. I know it's not in vogue here in America compared to jingoistic posturing, but maybe you should consider examining their complaints and seeing if there's any merit to them. We're never 100% responsible, but we're rarely as innocent as we claim to be either.
So unless 'hollywood' buys the entire fiber backbone, all the comsat time, overthrows ICANN, and starts blocking all IP server traffic from publishers it doesn't personally greenlight - nothing can change.
You're almost correct. Unless Hollywood (and other entertainment industries) buys enough fiber backbone and comsat companies, it can't happen. Many people make the mistake of thinking that a monopoly means 100% ownership of a market where it really means unchallenged control of a market (e.g. Microsoft the in PC market even though Apple still exists). With controlling interest in the backbones and a little more deregulation, they can simply raise the prices on bandwidth for businesses that they don't own, lock down all markets to the DSL monopoly, the cable monopoly, the fiber monopoly, etc., and start making demands on their own end users to modify their sites in accordance with their own design. If you don't like it, take it somewhere else -- but where?
At that point, the majority of good websites become like college radio stations -- insignificant for shaping tastes and beliefs nationwide, but still having a small cult following. Welcome to the world of big media consolidation. Enjoying the effects of ClearChannel domination of the American radio stations? Learn to love the same bland ad-filled pandering if media companies get controlling interest in the internet -- especially if one of them buys out Google.
Is it difficult to do? Yes. Is it a gamble which promises rich, rich rewards for the media companies if they succeed? Hell, yes. That's motivation enough to try. As long as conservative politics dominates the day in the US, you can expect no anti-trust action to stop this until it's mostly too late.
Slashdot and thousands of communities like it still exist today, and there is no sign that they are on the decline. Come to me when they start collapsing.
17"? I think, my chum, if you don't have room for a 17" monitor, then you are in completely the wrong market for the techonlogies being spoken of here. We are talking home theater technologies, not desktop. We're talking HDTVs in the 40"-70" range.
For the home theater, CRT is dying. It's power hungry, it's space hungry, and it's heavy. There are only two things that CRT technology has going for it over all other HDTV technologies: (1) price and (2) the ability to easily change resolutions. Only the first of those two matter outside of the PC monitor world.
I predict a similar dispute will erupt over the Thunderbird name, leading them to go with Thundermouse instead, solving all of their trademark problems....What? Why is everybody looking at me like that?
Well, that's because these drugs are very expensive to research and create. That money has to be repaid somehow, and African nations cry foul if the drug companies charge them the same amount that they charge the US and Europe and decide to buy reverse engineered Indian and South American knockoffs. So, the drug companies are basically forced to dump their original drugs on Africa for cheap while hiking prices in the better-off nations that are stuck actually respecting the drug companies' patent porfolios.
It's pretty much a lose-lose situation....Well, as much as any profitable business can be a lose-lose situation.
None of the articles that I've read about this have said what functionality they're taking out of the system. For all we know, all the apps that we complain about (i.e. Explorer, Outlook, and Media Player) will be in the OS and other non-downloadable, core/system functionality will be removed (e.g. VPN, IPv6, and other networking protocols) or something else vexing but replaceable with third-party software.
In other words, it's perfectly possible that it will be both "anti-competitive" AND crippled.
Congratulations! You've managed to abbreviate a word to the exact same number of characters as the original. Only this time, they're mostly keys that are harder to type than the original.
You may now enter the dustbin of history and sit beside the inventor of 2K+1.
Well, first of all, it seems that we need to define some terms:
The commonly accepted definition of a grey goo disaster scenario in popular fiction is a self-reproducing group of nanotech devices that eat everything around them.
To reproduce and to continue eating, they must be capable of turning surrounding material into more of themselves. For the disaster scenario to be truly vicious, they must be self-sufficent, which implies that they have no external power supply and that they have no external master device coordinating them. This scenario comes in two different levels of improbability. Either they are limited to consuming organic matter only, or they can consume anything and everything until the planet is reduced to nanites and magma. Also, they must be capable of coordinating with each other to avoid eating each other and to move outwards from the group instead of inwards where there is no more work left to do. This is the mythical "grey goo" scenario.
Let's use your numbering scheme:
1) I never said that carbon-based was the only way. I purely said that your assertion that bacteria living in rocks proves the possibility of "grey goo" belays a lack of understanding of how such organisms live as well as a lack of understanding about what "grey goo" is supposed to be.
However, while we're at it -- by the very definition of a grey goo plague, it must either be carbon-based if it uses living organisms as source material to reproduce with, or it must at least be capable of doing so if it's capable of eating anything around it.
2) You're ignoring my point that some predictions are just flat out wrong no matter how much hand-waving you do about the future, and science can prove this. Relativity shows us that FTL travel of matter is utterly impossible. Quantum physics shows us that it may be theoretically possible to let information travel FTL, but there may be no way to actually deliver a person and a starship FTL. Similarly, an understanding of physics can let us know that certain pie-eyed claims of nanotech futurists are also likely to be bunk.
3) You don't seem to understand what a perpetual motion machine is and why it's impossible. A perpetual motion machine is self-powered -- using solar energy does not count. That's why I used it as an example.
4) Okay, well obviously you're using an idiosyncratic definition of a "grey goo" since your vision of the weapon doesn't require that it be capable of reproduction. Fine -- I'll work with that. It is simpler, but not necessarily possible.
You now have a problem of what level to work on -- molecular (mechanical), molecular (chemistry), or merely microscale. Each one of these has its own set of problems that can be boiled down to two questions: How do you power the nanite's destructive capabilities, and how do you prevent wear and tear from stopping it?
In the case of the molecular (mechanical) scale, you have to figure out how to snap molecular bonds without snapping the bonds in the machines itself. There are essentially only three ways of severing a molecular bond -- heat, so-called mechanochemisty, and a more favorable chemical reaction. Heat requires a power source strong enough to sever molecular bonds after efficiency losses in the energy transfer medium. This power must be contained without destroying the nanite. The severed molecule leaves behind excited fragments which desperately need to react with something to enter a stable state again, leaving the nanite vulnerable to erosion every time it breaks something. This self-limits the damage that a non-reproducing nanite can do.
Smalley well-exposes the fact that mechanochemisty is highly impractical even with macroscale machinery. The idea of using physical forces and geometry to build (or break) a molecule ignores that fact that most molecules are always wildly gyrating and are nigh impossible to get ahold of without generating electromagnetic (a.k.a. chemical) attraction. The problem of letting go a sub
I was with you until you mentionned discovery channel as quality tv. Uh, have you watched the thing lately?
Not really. I look at my budget of money and -- even more importantly -- my free time and decided that television wasn't worth the resources two years ago. My TV exists for video games and as the monitor to my PC.
...So, no, I didn't know that the Discovery channel had gone downhill.
If grey-goo is a miracle, then there are no bacteria living inside of rocks.
That is possibly the most facile assertion I've heard to date in debates on nanotech. Bacteria living inside of rocks have (a) organic materials available to produce themselves from and (b) are not well-suited to living in environments outside of their specially adapted niche. The extremophile bacteria are basically the opposite of grey goo -- they only live and reproduce in a narrow environmental range, and they aren't making themselves out of the surrounding rock like the mythical omnivorous grey good does.
Both the hopes and fears are a long way from realization, but that's typical of future speculation. And we don't really know how far off. Or what's possible. Unpredicted things happen, and you can't know ahead of time what they will be.
People say the same sorts of things about practical free energy, anti-gravity, and faster-than-light travel. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Wild thought of what mutants might be like haven't yet happened.
Neither have giant radioactive ants or the reanimated dead, but most people discount Hollywood fiction as serious problems to be debunked. Unfortunately, nanotech has the stigma of being the next "radiation" for a generation of modern fantasy and horror artists who want to keep a sense of the unknown X-factor in their stories without wholly embracing the magical and supernatural.
Grey-goo hasn't been proven impossible.
Technically, neither have perpetual motion machines, but a good grasp of quantum physics, physical chemistry, and thermodynamics will point you to understanding that "grey goo" is just as improbable -- which in modern scientific understanding is practically as good as impossible.
It's probably a lot simpler than a general purpose assembler, and nobody has proven them either possible or impossible.
You do realize that a "grey goo" IS a general purpose assembler, right? It has to be able to recreate itself from ANY material, which would basically require Drexlerian mechanochemistry to accomplish since there's absolutely NO way do to that with any sort of normal chemistry. As for general purpose assemblers, Nobel prize winners like Smalley make extremely compelling arguments that mechanochemistry of the sort that Drexler wrote about is physically improbable if not unsurmountable problem. Having actually taken p.chem in college, I'll have to go with Smalley over Drexler's hand-wavy futurism. Smalley at least knows something about the nanoscale forces that would prevent such a thing from being possible to direct with the kind of vibrations that accompany room temperature.
Cells provide a reasonable argument that at least in a limited sense an assembler is possible.
Cells prove that very specialized assemblers are possible. They are also extremely finicky about what sort of operating conditions they can work in. Practically no unicellular organism is capable of reproduction away from a liquid water medium. Multicelluar organisms do all their cellular reproduction within a liquid water environment (usually an internal one). This sort of ionic environment prevents a lot of the delicate mechanochemistry that Drexler advocates. Plus, a nice genetic algorithm that's been running for 2 trillion years has yet to produce an organism capable of reproducing in any environment using any materials available. What makes you think man can design one if evolution couldn't?
Even if you limit your grey goo to only the carbon-based organic world, nature has failed to deliver on the perfect germ that eats all life despite great evolutionary pressure to succeed at such a task.
(There are, of course, theoretical limits that are nearly certain to apply, like atomic bond strength, the speed of light, etc.) But do note that I said *nearly* certain.
Well, atomic bond strength IS certain to apply, both ionic and covalent. Also, vibra
At my parent's house, we occasionally have problems with the weather, but only with severe storms that are likely to knock out the power half an hour later anyway. At least the satellite gives us a nice 30-minute warning that we're going to have bad weather.
In other words, we only have had problem with satellite in the same situations where we would've been without cable too. I agree with the parent. Pick the service based on the programming.
(Don't TELL me Slashdot is more intellectually stimulating than Must See T.V.)
Why not? Heck, being forced to listen to the Barney song 24/7 while immersed in a sensory deprivation tank for three months with a severed spinal cord is more intellectually stimulating than so-called "Must See TV."
I mean you could've picked the Discovery channel, the History channel, Food Network, the Sundance channel, or any of a dozen other sources of good quality television, and I might've conceded the point, but network television? Come on, playing Tic-Tac-Toe against a toddler is more intellectually stimulating than network television. It's like having a shiny, flashy, happy video lobotomy.
Oo -- Time-Warner cable modem. I hope you don't download use more than 15 GB of uploads + downloads per month, or you'll hit the cap and get a nastygram demanding that you upgrade to the $80-90/month service (with its 40 GB cap).
Also, you can get a DVR from DishNet including a HD-DVR soon. It too lacks the inherent coolness of TiVo's ability to find shows for you.
All of the concerns you express are basically junk science. "Grey goo" is practically miraculous technology. The idea of self-assembling machines that can use (a) any material to reproduce themselves in (b) any environment is just preposterous. The general consensus nowdays from people who follow the low-level effects of quantum mechanics on designing any such device is that they will have to be operate in extremely controlled conditions.
Worry not about nano-tech viruses that kill people with selected genetic properties either. Worry about biotechnology and not machines for man made plagues. As for the free energy bit -- I'm not going to even dignify that with a reply.
Well, if they're already used to authoring for two different media types, why not move to one that allows you to keep your Mac-using audience instead of alienating them?
Slashdot Mirror
Better Uncle Sam than Comcast, in my opinion.
Of course, in the modern-day push to privatization, the most likely outcome of any such measure to "help" US citizens would be to fund billions of dollars of construction on the taxpayer's bill and then immediately turn control of it over to a profit-maximizing local monopoly to further soak money out of all the new utility's customers. (... Make that "consumers" -- customers are people you have to treat with dignity.)
I'd rather have the government in control of content over the private sector. The First Amendment allows for court challenges to the overreaching hand of the government as does the ability to vote-out egregious offenders. There's absolutely no recourse against people like Comcast who can do whatever they want to their network and tell you, "Like it or lump it."
Funny, because that's the correct way to say it.
Compared to another article that I tried to get posted yesterday about biological evidence that aggressive people's brains react much more strongly to nicotine than non-aggressive people -- a little.
I'm guessing Slashdot editors smoke and eat M&Ms all day.
Don't know. I didn't support the war in Iraq. I would have developed more intel and backed up *suprise* inspections with UN troops.
I'm pretty much in that camp too.
But one nitpick. The Hussein government was irrelevant beyond potentially funding active WMD programs. Those could have made their way into terrorist hands without Hussein ever knowing about it, much less approving it. People act like he was some sort of omnipotent god who controlled every atom in Iraq. There's thought that the anthrax used in those attacks could have been leaked from labs in the US, so how secure would the Iraqi labs be?
I seriously doubt that any large quantity of the product of a serious military project could get into the hands of foreigners without someone discovering it. After all, the lives of Iraqi scientists were carefully watched to avoid leaking info to UN weapons inspectors. Plus, Iraqi scientists came from mostly secularist backgrounds and would be unlikely candidates for cooperating with terrorists, and many were fiercely loyal to the regime.
As for the anthrax, we're a more free society.
Is it completely unimaginable that organized terrorists couldn't run an operation to get the WMDs by, shall we say, less official means?
No, not completely. However, I don't consider Iraq to be a threat of being a source of terrorist WMDs any more than I would consider Russia and other former Soviet states or one of the nuclear capable religious Muslim states.
2. You really can't answer this on your own? You really cannot see it as a different situation that calls for a different approach? I mean... really?
Sorry, I lumped you in with the group of fanatical conservatives that I like to call "Fox News viewers" who have now said that WMDs are irrelevant and that we were right to go to war because (1) Iraq was a threat US security and (2) Saddam was torturing his people and once used chemical weapons on them. I just like to point out that Kim Jong Il is torturing and gassing his people right now, and the major reason why we don't go in all gung-ho is because he actually IS a threat to US security. We just prefer attacking paper tigers to real ones.
I never said the US was innocent, so spare me the lecture.
My bad, I think I read too much into the whole "no use in talking to people outside the US" bit.
Then you're incapable of reading and reasoning, then. Let me describe in the most simplisitc, most childishly plain terms that I can, and perhaps it will register in the dark recessess of your underused cranium: Iraq had the ability to manufacturer chemical, biological, and nuclear arms.
...
Ah, good. Opening with an insult. That's the best way to present your argument as grounded in firm logic instead of emotion and supposition, isn't it?
I should point out that the experts -- by which I mean David Kay, the man Bush hired to look for weapons programs and not Fox News pundits -- would disagree with you. Saddam seems to have had R&D on chemical and biological weapons, but he had no actual weapons produced, he had no plants ready to produce them, and his nuclear program was a complete shambles with no capacity to manufacture weapons.
Now, if you said that he was clearly deceiving the international community, that he was in violation of UN resolutions to show inspectors around properly, or that he actually had conventional weapons that were in violation of the UN resolutions, then I'd agree with you. I might even agree now that that justified the war. However, if you want to nod your head along with the ludicrous statement that he the capacity to produce "over 25,000 liters of anthrax," "more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," or "as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent," then I'm going to have to laugh in your face. Saddam's programs were mostly dead by the time the second war started.
[H]is very possession of them could put him in a position of blackmailing the entire world. It doesn't help that, as the formerly most powerful Arabic nation, he could have singlehandedly walked all over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and more if he chose to do so.
Not without retribution. The entire lesson learned by the war on Kuwait was that he could not do so without terrible retribution. Saddam has bargaining power only because there was international pressure against the US moving. An actual attack with WMDs in the current environment would've seen France, Russia, Germany, and China's (paid-for) political position crumble and support given to walk all over the country. Saddam wasn't a fanatic. He was a cold-blooded, rational dictator who played the game of brinksmanship and lost hard.
Such an action would've caused grave economic damage to this nation
Didn't do that much the first time, did it? It actually helped pick up the economy quite a bit when we stepped on his little army the last time.
Again, you completely misunderstand the subtlety involved here.
Again, you miss the fact that Saddam didn't like jihadists like al-Qai'da. (Furthermore, according to the linked article, Osama didn't like Saddam either.) He was more than willing to fund money into Palestinian terrorism because it was a good PR move with other Arabic nations and Palestinian terrorists had a defined goal that wouldn't come back to bite him, but al-Qai'da has made its mission to see Sharia implemented worldwide. That would mean toppling his own secularist government, too. Remember, the reason we allied with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war was that we saw Iraq as one of the few non-fanatical governments in the Middle East. The Baathists were secularists who oppressed a lot of the more religious minorities in Iraq. This and the flood of foreign fighters is why Iraq is seeing its first waves of suicide bombings. Iraqis were too scared to do this before.
Also, Hussein didn't have to want political gains here. Haven't you noticed that these terrorists aren't trying to make political points?
Once again, Hussein was a ruthless dictator, not a terrorist -- just as evil, but completely different g
Hi, I'm from inside the US.
Personally, while no one's really weeping over the loss of Hussein here, part of the reason that we have such a bad rep is that people like the poster above you actually seem to think that the war in Iraq has something to do with stopping terrorism or promoting freedom or some such nonsense. Each one can be countered with a simple question each:
1) How does taking down a stable, secular dictatorship and leaving a country in the hands of its first ever rash of suicide bombers and pissing off the entire Middle East keep America safe from terrorism?
2) Why is Kim Jong Il -- man who is everything that Saddam was claimed to be, turned to 11 -- still in power?
A lack of understanding of the ramifications of our acts combined with heavy hypocrisy (Pakistan nuke scandal anyone?) is what makes our foreign policy so hated now compared to 4 years ago. America-hating didn't become a world-wide fashion until we made it so. Besides, if you're from South America or the Middle East, you've almost certainly got a good reason to have a grudge against the US. If I were you, I'd read more history. I know it's not in vogue here in America compared to jingoistic posturing, but maybe you should consider examining their complaints and seeing if there's any merit to them. We're never 100% responsible, but we're rarely as innocent as we claim to be either.
Can you name me one time in the past ten years that a merger between two industry giants has resulted in lower prices for consumers?
So unless 'hollywood' buys the entire fiber backbone, all the comsat time, overthrows ICANN, and starts blocking all IP server traffic from publishers it doesn't personally greenlight - nothing can change.
You're almost correct. Unless Hollywood (and other entertainment industries) buys enough fiber backbone and comsat companies, it can't happen. Many people make the mistake of thinking that a monopoly means 100% ownership of a market where it really means unchallenged control of a market (e.g. Microsoft the in PC market even though Apple still exists). With controlling interest in the backbones and a little more deregulation, they can simply raise the prices on bandwidth for businesses that they don't own, lock down all markets to the DSL monopoly, the cable monopoly, the fiber monopoly, etc., and start making demands on their own end users to modify their sites in accordance with their own design. If you don't like it, take it somewhere else -- but where?
At that point, the majority of good websites become like college radio stations -- insignificant for shaping tastes and beliefs nationwide, but still having a small cult following. Welcome to the world of big media consolidation. Enjoying the effects of ClearChannel domination of the American radio stations? Learn to love the same bland ad-filled pandering if media companies get controlling interest in the internet -- especially if one of them buys out Google.
Is it difficult to do? Yes. Is it a gamble which promises rich, rich rewards for the media companies if they succeed? Hell, yes. That's motivation enough to try. As long as conservative politics dominates the day in the US, you can expect no anti-trust action to stop this until it's mostly too late.
Slashdot and thousands of communities like it still exist today, and there is no sign that they are on the decline. Come to me when they start collapsing.
How?
17"? I think, my chum, if you don't have room for a 17" monitor, then you are in completely the wrong market for the techonlogies being spoken of here. We are talking home theater technologies, not desktop. We're talking HDTVs in the 40"-70" range.
For the home theater, CRT is dying. It's power hungry, it's space hungry, and it's heavy. There are only two things that CRT technology has going for it over all other HDTV technologies: (1) price and (2) the ability to easily change resolutions. Only the first of those two matter outside of the PC monitor world.
Speaking of Nintendo, I think it's clear that they've abandoned mythological references and are instead going with a Pokemon theme.
...What? Why is everybody looking at me like that?
Firebird -> Firefox
I predict a similar dispute will erupt over the Thunderbird name, leading them to go with Thundermouse instead, solving all of their trademark problems.
Well, that's because these drugs are very expensive to research and create. That money has to be repaid somehow, and African nations cry foul if the drug companies charge them the same amount that they charge the US and Europe and decide to buy reverse engineered Indian and South American knockoffs. So, the drug companies are basically forced to dump their original drugs on Africa for cheap while hiking prices in the better-off nations that are stuck actually respecting the drug companies' patent porfolios.
...Well, as much as any profitable business can be a lose-lose situation.
It's pretty much a lose-lose situation.
None of the articles that I've read about this have said what functionality they're taking out of the system. For all we know, all the apps that we complain about (i.e. Explorer, Outlook, and Media Player) will be in the OS and other non-downloadable, core/system functionality will be removed (e.g. VPN, IPv6, and other networking protocols) or something else vexing but replaceable with third-party software.
In other words, it's perfectly possible that it will be both "anti-competitive" AND crippled.
Ford Expeditions have turn signals??
Holy crap! Better let all their owners know -- that's a real handy safety feature I'm sure none of them were aware existed!
Congratulations! You've managed to abbreviate a word to the exact same number of characters as the original. Only this time, they're mostly keys that are harder to type than the original.
You may now enter the dustbin of history and sit beside the inventor of 2K+1.
What do the computers in your car do?
Could be worse. My first reaction was, "Actually..."
Well, first of all, it seems that we need to define some terms:
The commonly accepted definition of a grey goo disaster scenario in popular fiction is a self-reproducing group of nanotech devices that eat everything around them.
To reproduce and to continue eating, they must be capable of turning surrounding material into more of themselves. For the disaster scenario to be truly vicious, they must be self-sufficent, which implies that they have no external power supply and that they have no external master device coordinating them. This scenario comes in two different levels of improbability. Either they are limited to consuming organic matter only, or they can consume anything and everything until the planet is reduced to nanites and magma. Also, they must be capable of coordinating with each other to avoid eating each other and to move outwards from the group instead of inwards where there is no more work left to do. This is the mythical "grey goo" scenario.
Let's use your numbering scheme:
1) I never said that carbon-based was the only way. I purely said that your assertion that bacteria living in rocks proves the possibility of "grey goo" belays a lack of understanding of how such organisms live as well as a lack of understanding about what "grey goo" is supposed to be.
However, while we're at it -- by the very definition of a grey goo plague, it must either be carbon-based if it uses living organisms as source material to reproduce with, or it must at least be capable of doing so if it's capable of eating anything around it.
2) You're ignoring my point that some predictions are just flat out wrong no matter how much hand-waving you do about the future, and science can prove this. Relativity shows us that FTL travel of matter is utterly impossible. Quantum physics shows us that it may be theoretically possible to let information travel FTL, but there may be no way to actually deliver a person and a starship FTL. Similarly, an understanding of physics can let us know that certain pie-eyed claims of nanotech futurists are also likely to be bunk.
3) You don't seem to understand what a perpetual motion machine is and why it's impossible. A perpetual motion machine is self-powered -- using solar energy does not count. That's why I used it as an example.
4) Okay, well obviously you're using an idiosyncratic definition of a "grey goo" since your vision of the weapon doesn't require that it be capable of reproduction. Fine -- I'll work with that. It is simpler, but not necessarily possible.
You now have a problem of what level to work on -- molecular (mechanical), molecular (chemistry), or merely microscale. Each one of these has its own set of problems that can be boiled down to two questions: How do you power the nanite's destructive capabilities, and how do you prevent wear and tear from stopping it?
In the case of the molecular (mechanical) scale, you have to figure out how to snap molecular bonds without snapping the bonds in the machines itself. There are essentially only three ways of severing a molecular bond -- heat, so-called mechanochemisty, and a more favorable chemical reaction. Heat requires a power source strong enough to sever molecular bonds after efficiency losses in the energy transfer medium. This power must be contained without destroying the nanite. The severed molecule leaves behind excited fragments which desperately need to react with something to enter a stable state again, leaving the nanite vulnerable to erosion every time it breaks something. This self-limits the damage that a non-reproducing nanite can do.
Smalley well-exposes the fact that mechanochemisty is highly impractical even with macroscale machinery. The idea of using physical forces and geometry to build (or break) a molecule ignores that fact that most molecules are always wildly gyrating and are nigh impossible to get ahold of without generating electromagnetic (a.k.a. chemical) attraction. The problem of letting go a sub
I was with you until you mentionned discovery channel as quality tv. Uh, have you watched the thing lately?
Not really. I look at my budget of money and -- even more importantly -- my free time and decided that television wasn't worth the resources two years ago. My TV exists for video games and as the monitor to my PC.
...So, no, I didn't know that the Discovery channel had gone downhill.
If grey-goo is a miracle, then there are no bacteria living inside of rocks.
That is possibly the most facile assertion I've heard to date in debates on nanotech. Bacteria living inside of rocks have (a) organic materials available to produce themselves from and (b) are not well-suited to living in environments outside of their specially adapted niche. The extremophile bacteria are basically the opposite of grey goo -- they only live and reproduce in a narrow environmental range, and they aren't making themselves out of the surrounding rock like the mythical omnivorous grey good does.
Both the hopes and fears are a long way from realization, but that's typical of future speculation. And we don't really know how far off. Or what's possible. Unpredicted things happen, and you can't know ahead of time what they will be.
People say the same sorts of things about practical free energy, anti-gravity, and faster-than-light travel. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Wild thought of what mutants might be like haven't yet happened.
Neither have giant radioactive ants or the reanimated dead, but most people discount Hollywood fiction as serious problems to be debunked. Unfortunately, nanotech has the stigma of being the next "radiation" for a generation of modern fantasy and horror artists who want to keep a sense of the unknown X-factor in their stories without wholly embracing the magical and supernatural.
Grey-goo hasn't been proven impossible.
Technically, neither have perpetual motion machines, but a good grasp of quantum physics, physical chemistry, and thermodynamics will point you to understanding that "grey goo" is just as improbable -- which in modern scientific understanding is practically as good as impossible.
It's probably a lot simpler than a general purpose assembler, and nobody has proven them either possible or impossible.
You do realize that a "grey goo" IS a general purpose assembler, right? It has to be able to recreate itself from ANY material, which would basically require Drexlerian mechanochemistry to accomplish since there's absolutely NO way do to that with any sort of normal chemistry. As for general purpose assemblers, Nobel prize winners like Smalley make extremely compelling arguments that mechanochemistry of the sort that Drexler wrote about is physically improbable if not unsurmountable problem. Having actually taken p.chem in college, I'll have to go with Smalley over Drexler's hand-wavy futurism. Smalley at least knows something about the nanoscale forces that would prevent such a thing from being possible to direct with the kind of vibrations that accompany room temperature.
Cells provide a reasonable argument that at least in a limited sense an assembler is possible.
Cells prove that very specialized assemblers are possible. They are also extremely finicky about what sort of operating conditions they can work in. Practically no unicellular organism is capable of reproduction away from a liquid water medium. Multicelluar organisms do all their cellular reproduction within a liquid water environment (usually an internal one). This sort of ionic environment prevents a lot of the delicate mechanochemistry that Drexler advocates. Plus, a nice genetic algorithm that's been running for 2 trillion years has yet to produce an organism capable of reproducing in any environment using any materials available. What makes you think man can design one if evolution couldn't?
Even if you limit your grey goo to only the carbon-based organic world, nature has failed to deliver on the perfect germ that eats all life despite great evolutionary pressure to succeed at such a task.
(There are, of course, theoretical limits that are nearly certain to apply, like atomic bond strength, the speed of light, etc.) But do note that I said *nearly* certain.
Well, atomic bond strength IS certain to apply, both ionic and covalent. Also, vibra
At my parent's house, we occasionally have problems with the weather, but only with severe storms that are likely to knock out the power half an hour later anyway. At least the satellite gives us a nice 30-minute warning that we're going to have bad weather.
In other words, we only have had problem with satellite in the same situations where we would've been without cable too. I agree with the parent. Pick the service based on the programming.
(Don't TELL me Slashdot is more intellectually stimulating than Must See T.V.)
Why not? Heck, being forced to listen to the Barney song 24/7 while immersed in a sensory deprivation tank for three months with a severed spinal cord is more intellectually stimulating than so-called "Must See TV."
I mean you could've picked the Discovery channel, the History channel, Food Network, the Sundance channel, or any of a dozen other sources of good quality television, and I might've conceded the point, but network television? Come on, playing Tic-Tac-Toe against a toddler is more intellectually stimulating than network television. It's like having a shiny, flashy, happy video lobotomy.
Oo -- Time-Warner cable modem. I hope you don't download use more than 15 GB of uploads + downloads per month, or you'll hit the cap and get a nastygram demanding that you upgrade to the $80-90/month service (with its 40 GB cap).
Also, you can get a DVR from DishNet including a HD-DVR soon. It too lacks the inherent coolness of TiVo's ability to find shows for you.
All of the concerns you express are basically junk science. "Grey goo" is practically miraculous technology. The idea of self-assembling machines that can use (a) any material to reproduce themselves in (b) any environment is just preposterous. The general consensus nowdays from people who follow the low-level effects of quantum mechanics on designing any such device is that they will have to be operate in extremely controlled conditions.
Worry not about nano-tech viruses that kill people with selected genetic properties either. Worry about biotechnology and not machines for man made plagues. As for the free energy bit -- I'm not going to even dignify that with a reply.
Well, if they're already used to authoring for two different media types, why not move to one that allows you to keep your Mac-using audience instead of alienating them?