Seriously, you have *no* idea what you're getting when you buy a "nutritional supplement".
Let's suppose there is some clinical evidence for a supplement's effectiveness. If you buy it in "herbal" form, it might not contain the same parts of the plant that were studied. If you buy the compound, you might not get the same enantiomer studied.
In fact, in the United States you might not be getting what the label says at all. There was a study cited in Science News a few years back which showed that "dietary supplements" often contained *none* of the headline ingredients, and often had ingredient that weren't listed. I've had this problem with herbal *tea*; I once drank a cup of chamomile tea and had an unmistakable pseudophed reaction -- probably due to contamination with ephedra.
Next year, the FDA will put into effect rules that will require supplement labels to be accurate and for the supplement not to be contaminated with other substances. Believe it or not, this is the first time the FDA has had a policy of enforcing those things. It's no wonder that research support for supplement claims is wanting. Even if the supplement has value, if they are using commercial supplements who knows what they are giving the test subjects. In fact, I'd say it's probably ethically questionable to conduct human research with commercial supplements, until the FDA gets its act together.
Except that Gingko wasn't used for cognitive enhancement in traditional Chinese medicine. It was used to treat respiratory ailments.
Most of the herbal potions sold in drugstores are just as questionable from TCM standpoint as they are from a scientific one, for example "ginseng" preparations spiked with *ma huang*, whose active ingredients are ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.
when a woman asks her friend whether her husband is cheating on her. The fact she has to ask tells the friend everything she needs to know.
These shirts are symbols. Basic semiotics here: symbols in themselves are meaningless. They require context to interpret. If your reaction is, "Gee, what an intriguing idea," then you can take management assurances at face value. If your immediate reaction is, "This sounds like yet another indignity being heaped upon us," it probably is.
You insist on conflating design and assembly, as if they took identical skills. I think they are different.
Rutan is *not* an amateur designer. Period. He is a professional engineer with a proven track record.
There are people I know whom I'd trust to assemble an aircraft of proven design. I wouldn't hesitate to get in such an aircraft assembled by them, but I would hesitate to get in an aircraft *designed* by them, because they don't have a track record or demonstrable skills in aircraft design, mechanically competent as they may be. After the planes they designed had a few thousand hours of successful flights, maybe.
There also are people I know who might choose to buy and build a proven kit aircraft, but I wouldn't get in that aircraft for any amount of money. They aren't bad people; they're just bad mechanics.
I suppose it's even possible for there to be some brilliant engineer to be able to design sound aircraft but to have ten thumbs. In that case I'd get in their planes, so long as somebody else built them.
I did, and I'm not surprised that the autogyro was successful. If I had to build an aircraft that my life depended on with more or less the skills I have now, it'd probably be an autogyro.
There's an apples-and-oranges element to the comparisons of course; each of these guys has a different dream he's pursuing. But my point is that each of these guys is also building the most sophisticated aircraft he can. Money is a limiting factor. The farmer needs ingenuity to make something like the autogyro. The wealthy businessman does not.
The farmer could probably build his autogyro for something like 20,000 Yuan (under 3 grand US $). If he had a billion Yuan to play with, maybe he'd still build an autogyro. Or maybe he'd build a suborbital spacecraft. But if 20K is all he has, an autogyro it is. An electric airplane is out of the question.
Now if the guy who is building the electric airplane built an autogyro instead, we wouldn't be as impressed as when the farmer does it, because we'd *assume* he used his money to overcome any problems he hit. Can't get a rotor that works? Buy one. Not enough lift? Buy a more powerful motor and build the frame out of titanium. What we really admire is ingenuity yoked with ambition.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have built their own helicopters around the world.
I don't doubt that for a moment. That doesn't mean the idea isn't *scary*. If an engineer from Sikorsky invites me for a ride in the latest model, I'll accept his assertion that it's perfectly safe. If Joe Experimenter invites me for a ride in his home built and designed helicopter, assuring me it's just as safe, I don't doubt that it's *physically possible* for that to be true, but I'd pass, thank you.
I'd also have no problems getting into an aircraft designed and built under Burt Rutan's supervision, or designed by Rutan and assembled without engineering improvisation by a competent mechanic. But Rutan is not an amateur. He has a degree in aeronautical engineering and worked in the field for years before selling his designs to other people. That's a hell of a lot different from some guy with no experience who decides he's going to design a helicopter from first principles.
That's not a bad way of looking at it. So we imagine that there's a smooth surface in three dimensions; each of these guys dreams of escaping that surface.
But the technical sophistication of the effort and the wealth of the experimenter certainly *are* related.
The idea of a amateur homebrew helicopter is truly frightening, but *anybody* can dream, especially if he doesn't realize how incompetent he really is.
The minimum successful example is the guy with the autogyro. For that you need the kind of practical skills a farmer who maintained his own equipment would have. The most sophisticated component he'd need is the rotor, which *could* be manufactured from glued wood.
The next step up is the human powered guy. He needs a long carbon fiber boom as the main longitudinal structural component, and probably another one to carry the lift generated along the wings to the main boom. That's pretty expensive. Once he has that, then the drivetrain is bicycle technology.
The rest of the wings and pilot's nacelle are fairly sophisticated, but within the capability of a weekend tinkerer to construct. The key is the sophisticated materials you can buy. You make a basketwork out of lightweight wood and Kevlar tape, then heat shrink polyester sheeting on it to create a skin. Weekend boatmakers have been constructing ultralight boats this way for *years*. You can make a 17 foot canoe that weights under ten pounds this way, or a full sized rowboat that weights maybe fifteen pounds.
The guy who is working on a certifiable electric aircraft needs to have the most money. He needs a real machinist and sophisticated fabrication techniques. Batteries aren't really good enough for practical aviation yet, so for his demo he needs the best batteries and motor money can buy.
Each of these guys is designing the most practical aircraft possible within his financial means. Give the homebrew helicopter guy a million dollars, and he'll *probably* end up killing himself, but it would no doubt be in a more impressive aircraft.
Well, doubt that's technically correct. The engineers who did GSM weren't *that* incompetent. It's more likely that the *protocol* relies on a single key that has to be widely disseminated.
Think of the DRM scheme for DVDs. The operational model is that the data carrier for a movie is mass manufactured. In order for that to work, they key to decrypt the DVD has to be built into every licensed player. What is worse, every DVD has to be encrypted with the same key. It's inevitable that somebody who's taken undergraduate cryptography somewhere would have the ability to crack that scheme. That's inherent in the model.
The cell phone situation is somewhat different. You could imagine a public key crypto system, or perhaps a system where a private key is generated when the phone is provisioned or the SIM card is manufactured. That would be competent for *today*. But you have to remember GSM was conceived in the same year the 80286 processor debuted, at a blazing 8MHz clock speed (up from 4.7MHz on the 8086). You've got to squeeze that protocol onto the *extremely* primitive mobile devices of that era.
In 1982, analog cell traffic was readily intercepted by anybody with a completely generic radio receiver tuned to the right frequency. A system which in a decade or so could be penetrated by sufficiently determined and sophisticated people was *still* a huge improvement. I'm sure plenty of people saw the fault, but I doubt anybody had an immediately practical solution to address it. So should the radio traffic be unobscured like analog cell phones until the handsets got better?
Ultimately, secrecy is not absolute; it's a question of how long you can keep a secret. Something that can be broken today in a matter of hours would have, using 1982's computing technology, given a useful margin of secrecy.
It's been a long, long time since I looked at GSM's protocols (some twenty years) so I don't remember the details, but *really competent would have been to build in some kind of crypto protocol negotiation into the system. Mind you, it wouldn't have had *any* practical use for a decade or so. But ten years is a much longer time when looked at from the system design phase than a decade after the product launch.
Well, personally I think the sweet spot is uncomfortable engagement.
Compare the US stances toward China, Cuba and South Africa, and the policy outcomes.
(1) China. Policy: pretend everything is fine. Result: One of the most stable oppressive regimes in the world.
(2) Cuba. Policy: try to make into a pariah state. Result: one of the most stable oppressive regimes in the world.
(3) South Africa. Policy: continually and awkwardly try to split the difference between pretending everything is OK and treating South Africa as a pariah. Result regime cracks under the strain of continually charting where its self interest lay in all that confusion.
If humans used technology to destroy their home planet, that wouldn't make *technology* bad. Technology, unlike its wielders, has no choice in the matter.
Animals, of which humans are a kind, will destroy their environment if allowed to reproduce unchecked. If a grazing species strips the grass in its range bare and tramples all its seedlings, it suffers local extinction. Humans are mobile and adaptable, which means the range of our population is pretty much the entire surface of the planet. It is quite conceivable that we can could drastically reduce the carrying capacity of the planet for humans by our actions, although I doubt we'll literally go extinct until the Sun's evolution destroys our planet.
Those grazing animals are not bad because they can destroy their local environment. We are not bad because we can destroy our global environment. We'd be bad, or at least stupid, if we used our adaptability to destroy the global carrying capacity for humans. We'd *definitely* be stupid to blame it on the tools we used.
The current human population of the planet exceeds what the planet could support if we suddenly decided to go back to medieval technology. There are twenty times as many people on the Earth as there were in AD 1000. If we rolled back technology to that point, the Earth's habitats would be striped bare. If the preservation of the Earth's biological systems is *good*, then technology is instrumental to that good. The only other solution to preserving the Earth's ecology is to deliberately reduce the human population by 95%.
I don't know about that. I was a teenager in the 70s when it was almost socially acceptable among people under 30 to smoke pot. I've known plenty of people who indulge fairly regularly (say on the order of once a week or even a bit more) who probably weren't much different than if they'd never used at all. It's dangerous to make such generalizations as "dope makes you a dope", because practically no generalization of that sort is *always* true. Often they can be true enough to be worth paying attention to without being *usually* true.
I've also seen the other side, the people who effectively rewired their brains and lives around dope. It's very easy to do, because so much of what we as animals do is avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. As *humans*, we are driven by something more as well: dissatisfaction. The Pali word "dukka" which is often translated when discussion Buddhism as "suffering" might better be translated as "dissatisfaction". Most of the "suffering" in our life is not grand enough to be called "suffering". It's a niggling, persistent dissatisfaction with the things we thought would make us happy. The very low intellectual standards of people who are stoned are a consequence of easy satisfaction. They laugh at jokes that aren't funny because their standards of funny are low. They don't mind physical squalor because they are beyond dissatisfaction.
It's a funny thing; pain, pleasure and dissatisfaction drive us as individuals, but they aren't there for *our* benefit. They improve us as a *species*. We may wish to subscribe to a philosophy of ethical egoism, but we're still constructed neurologically so the quality of our subjective experience serves the species. Surely it would be to our benefit to live a life devoid of pain and full of pleasure and satisfaction. Any counter argument to this is bound to rest on the benefit to society or to the species, not to us as individuals.
It is conceivable that we could, in a sense, take charge of our lives, truly live them for ourselves, by using biomedical technology to control pain, pleasure, and over time even *dissatisfaction*. But I doubt in such a world read books. Why would we?
When you see a book, you anticipate the pleasure of reading it. Why bother reading it if you can get pleasure at the push of a button? Oh, at first you would make a distinction between "earned" and "unearned" pleasure, but one day you'd be a little tired and instead of picking up the book you'll push the happy button, and sooner or later you'll be going for the happy button because you won't tolerate the effort of reading. In fact it's a kind of intellectual lust that drives us to read, isn't it? And lust is kind of a pleasurable pain; a deficit we imagine in ourselves that is pleasant to fill; an itch that we scratch. If we can eliminate the itch and get the pleasure of scratching, we won't be any kind of lust, physical or intellectual, because we won't accept any kind of discomfort.
I remember working on the early Arpanet, and the amazement of seeing text from a computer appear, printed line by line on a printing terminal. The equivalent of a Slashdot article and its comments would probably have taken fifteen or twenty minutes to "load", but to *us* this was information traveling at amazing rates. Now we consider *any* perceivable delay as intolerable; there is no sensation of speed, only of varying degrees of slowness.
People adjust their feeling of what is pleasurable and satisfactory to what they experience on a day to day basis. Read about how people lived a few centuries ago. YetI suspect people were just as happy or unhappy as they are now, even though the conditions they lived in -- even the aristocrats -- were miserable by modern standards. Our modern threshold of suffering is extremely low; of satisfaction extremely high. When we can control suffering and satisfaction biomedically, the process will not only have reached its logical limit, human life as we know it will cease to be, because that life is organized around the imperatives to seek elusive pleasure, to elude inevitable pain, and to suage unavoidable dissatisfaction.
I've worked up near 128 myself. Most of those guys are great at blue-skying, but unfortunately many cannot tie their shoe laces or bath on a regular basis.
Yes, but we weren't arguing over whether Saabs were the best cars ever made. We were discussing why this is "news for nerds".
Because the weren't *interesting* like those weird old Saabs were.
When I was at MIT back in early 80s, I knew a lot of guys whose dads worked at think-tanky engineering labs like Draper, Mitre and Lincoln. It seemed like half of those dads had at least one Saab. The weird two strokes were the most prized. A friend of mine fell dozed off while driving one up to NH and drifted onto the median strip. The car rolled over (he claims) three times, ending up on its roof. He walked away literally without a scratch.
Well, I suppose calling them "errors" begs the question. You can't call something an error unless there is a "correct " value you can point to.
However, it's probable that most sets of thirty thousand random mutations generate something other than cancer; probably lots of non-viable genomes. From the cancer genome's point of view what we call thirty thousand "errors" amounts to things going amazingly, fortuitously "right".
When making projections for the success of this strategy it's important to remember how successful it *has* to be. On the issue of *using* nuclear weapons as opposed to be *having the ability to threaten* with them, it has to be 100% effective for a very, very long time before we can take the inevitable first failure and say, "well, on balance it was worth it."
We're making gross simplifications when we say that nuclear weapons helped us "keep the peace". It's too much to reduce the last sixty years of history to The Bomb. It was a huge part of that history, but not the only thing going on. That's the advantage of having *lived* that history as opposed to having *read* about it. What you get in history class is a neat, boiled down summation of a very messy and complicated process.
There were other things going on that probably were prerequisites to the general success of Mutually Assured Destruction as a peace keeping strategy. We can't be entirely sure which ones were critical; or if it weren't some kind of critical aggregation of circumstances.
What I worry about his the human ability to adapt to any situation. The prospect of nuclear holocaust was novel. Now it's not any longer. I'm not sure all the players who are pursuing The Bomb are all that horrified by the prospect of using it. Regional players may count on knocking out their rivals before they can become unassailable -- that's what drove the big arms race between the US and the USSR, but sooner or later somebody will get the upper hand against their bitter enemy.
And once the human race survives it's first war in which most of the damage was done by nuclear weapons (unlike WW2 in which The Bomb was an exclamation point at the end), it'll be much more ready to accept another one.
I dunno. I think there's something to be said for looking at the problem in economic terms. Some people tune into the Superbowl to see the advertisements, after all, so that's a kind of exchange: entertainment for eyeballs. I don't mind the advertisements in Google's search results because when I don't want them they don't intrude, but they're often useful enough that I click through before doing a new search. That's win-win for the advertisers and me.
The problem I think is with crude advertising methods from the era of old media. The extreme difficulty of getting many high value impressions by old medial techniques means that if you want to scale your business, you've got to do it with a huge pile of low value impressions. At some scale, the old media advertising game becomes about racking up sheer volume. Since there is no way of distinguishing good impressions from bad, and you *need* impressions, the guiding principle is that there is no such thing as a bad impression. Think of the difference between carpet bombing an entire city and having an agent stick a ricin tipped umbrella into your target as he strolls to work. The assassin is more effective period -- not to mention cost effective. If the only weapons you have are unguided bombs, then no death in that city would be a "bad" one.
If the marginal benefit of the next thousand impressions is greater than their marginal cost, the advertiser will go for it. What Google has done is increase the opportunity costs of going for unwanted impressions. Why do that when you can find consumers who *want* your information? If the process of giving *unwanted* impressions is harder, so much the better for me (and Google, whose business is built on a competing strategy).
Google's search result adverts are a good deal for me: information that is often useful at the price of a few square inches of monitor space for a few seconds. That's the same strategy behind the advertising supported "free phone" idea. Done in an old-media any-impression-is-a-good-one manner, it would be hideous. Done in a way that is useful to me, I might not mind it so much.
I only take issue with the implicit assumption that it's *remarkable* that a peculiarly aggressive champion of public prudery has a few skeletons in his closet. If you don't practice virtue yourself it's easy to urge it on others, but I also think it's overcompensation. It it's really important to prove you're not gay, then the easiest way to do that is to persecute gays. If you want to hide your infidelity, make a big noise condemning the sexual behavior of others.
I suppose it's a chicken-or-the-egg question. In places where there is a lot of social disorder, people look for the government to impose personal virtue. Just as the best job for a bank robber is running the bank, the best job for a pervert in a culture of government imposed virtue is in public office. The kind of harsh, hypocritical intrusion of the government into private life they advocate only produces more disorder in people's lives.
This was all settled years before it became a political football. When politicians figured out AGM had policy implications, they wanted *their* vote in the matter, but it was too late.
I agree that the really *big* screw-ups were not exactly secret. At least not that kind of secret.
It's kind of like when a woman asks her best friend whether her husband might be cheating on her. The fact that she's gotten to the point of asking that question should tell her everything she needs to know. Escaping the consequences of a brazen affair turns out to be easier than escaping the consequences of leaving the toilet seat up, because you are aided by wishful thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they can?
I used to be a nihilist, but I became disillusioned with it.
Seriously, you have *no* idea what you're getting when you buy a "nutritional supplement".
Let's suppose there is some clinical evidence for a supplement's effectiveness. If you buy it in "herbal" form, it might not contain the same parts of the plant that were studied. If you buy the compound, you might not get the same enantiomer studied.
In fact, in the United States you might not be getting what the label says at all. There was a study cited in Science News a few years back which showed that "dietary supplements" often contained *none* of the headline ingredients, and often had ingredient that weren't listed. I've had this problem with herbal *tea*; I once drank a cup of chamomile tea and had an unmistakable pseudophed reaction -- probably due to contamination with ephedra.
Next year, the FDA will put into effect rules that will require supplement labels to be accurate and for the supplement not to be contaminated with other substances. Believe it or not, this is the first time the FDA has had a policy of enforcing those things. It's no wonder that research support for supplement claims is wanting. Even if the supplement has value, if they are using commercial supplements who knows what they are giving the test subjects. In fact, I'd say it's probably ethically questionable to conduct human research with commercial supplements, until the FDA gets its act together.
Except that Gingko wasn't used for cognitive enhancement in traditional Chinese medicine. It was used to treat respiratory ailments.
Most of the herbal potions sold in drugstores are just as questionable from TCM standpoint as they are from a scientific one, for example "ginseng" preparations spiked with *ma huang*, whose active ingredients are ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.
when a woman asks her friend whether her husband is cheating on her. The fact she has to ask tells the friend everything she needs to know.
These shirts are symbols. Basic semiotics here: symbols in themselves are meaningless. They require context to interpret. If your reaction is, "Gee, what an intriguing idea," then you can take management assurances at face value. If your immediate reaction is, "This sounds like yet another indignity being heaped upon us," it probably is.
You insist on conflating design and assembly, as if they took identical skills. I think they are different.
Rutan is *not* an amateur designer. Period. He is a professional engineer with a proven track record.
There are people I know whom I'd trust to assemble an aircraft of proven design. I wouldn't hesitate to get in such an aircraft assembled by them, but I would hesitate to get in an aircraft *designed* by them, because they don't have a track record or demonstrable skills in aircraft design, mechanically competent as they may be. After the planes they designed had a few thousand hours of successful flights, maybe.
There also are people I know who might choose to buy and build a proven kit aircraft, but I wouldn't get in that aircraft for any amount of money. They aren't bad people; they're just bad mechanics.
I suppose it's even possible for there to be some brilliant engineer to be able to design sound aircraft but to have ten thumbs. In that case I'd get in their planes, so long as somebody else built them.
I did, and I'm not surprised that the autogyro was successful. If I had to build an aircraft that my life depended on with more or less the skills I have now, it'd probably be an autogyro.
There's an apples-and-oranges element to the comparisons of course; each of these guys has a different dream he's pursuing. But my point is that each of these guys is also building the most sophisticated aircraft he can. Money is a limiting factor. The farmer needs ingenuity to make something like the autogyro. The wealthy businessman does not.
The farmer could probably build his autogyro for something like 20,000 Yuan (under 3 grand US $). If he had a billion Yuan to play with, maybe he'd still build an autogyro. Or maybe he'd build a suborbital spacecraft. But if 20K is all he has, an autogyro it is. An electric airplane is out of the question.
Now if the guy who is building the electric airplane built an autogyro instead, we wouldn't be as impressed as when the farmer does it, because we'd *assume* he used his money to overcome any problems he hit. Can't get a rotor that works? Buy one. Not enough lift? Buy a more powerful motor and build the frame out of titanium. What we really admire is ingenuity yoked with ambition.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have built their own helicopters around the world.
I don't doubt that for a moment. That doesn't mean the idea isn't *scary*. If an engineer from Sikorsky invites me for a ride in the latest model, I'll accept his assertion that it's perfectly safe. If Joe Experimenter invites me for a ride in his home built and designed helicopter, assuring me it's just as safe, I don't doubt that it's *physically possible* for that to be true, but I'd pass, thank you.
I'd also have no problems getting into an aircraft designed and built under Burt Rutan's supervision, or designed by Rutan and assembled without engineering improvisation by a competent mechanic. But Rutan is not an amateur. He has a degree in aeronautical engineering and worked in the field for years before selling his designs to other people. That's a hell of a lot different from some guy with no experience who decides he's going to design a helicopter from first principles.
That's not a bad way of looking at it. So we imagine that there's a smooth surface in three dimensions; each of these guys dreams of escaping that surface.
But the technical sophistication of the effort and the wealth of the experimenter certainly *are* related.
The idea of a amateur homebrew helicopter is truly frightening, but *anybody* can dream, especially if he doesn't realize how incompetent he really is.
The minimum successful example is the guy with the autogyro. For that you need the kind of practical skills a farmer who maintained his own equipment would have. The most sophisticated component he'd need is the rotor, which *could* be manufactured from glued wood.
The next step up is the human powered guy. He needs a long carbon fiber boom as the main longitudinal structural component, and probably another one to carry the lift generated along the wings to the main boom. That's pretty expensive. Once he has that, then the drivetrain is bicycle technology.
The rest of the wings and pilot's nacelle are fairly sophisticated, but within the capability of a weekend tinkerer to construct. The key is the sophisticated materials you can buy. You make a basketwork out of lightweight wood and Kevlar tape, then heat shrink polyester sheeting on it to create a skin. Weekend boatmakers have been constructing ultralight boats this way for *years*. You can make a 17 foot canoe that weights under ten pounds this way, or a full sized rowboat that weights maybe fifteen pounds.
The guy who is working on a certifiable electric aircraft needs to have the most money. He needs a real machinist and sophisticated fabrication techniques. Batteries aren't really good enough for practical aviation yet, so for his demo he needs the best batteries and motor money can buy.
Each of these guys is designing the most practical aircraft possible within his financial means. Give the homebrew helicopter guy a million dollars, and he'll *probably* end up killing himself, but it would no doubt be in a more impressive aircraft.
Well, doubt that's technically correct. The engineers who did GSM weren't *that* incompetent. It's more likely that the *protocol* relies on a single key that has to be widely disseminated.
Think of the DRM scheme for DVDs. The operational model is that the data carrier for a movie is mass manufactured. In order for that to work, they key to decrypt the DVD has to be built into every licensed player. What is worse, every DVD has to be encrypted with the same key. It's inevitable that somebody who's taken undergraduate cryptography somewhere would have the ability to crack that scheme. That's inherent in the model.
The cell phone situation is somewhat different. You could imagine a public key crypto system, or perhaps a system where a private key is generated when the phone is provisioned or the SIM card is manufactured. That would be competent for *today*. But you have to remember GSM was conceived in the same year the 80286 processor debuted, at a blazing 8MHz clock speed (up from 4.7MHz on the 8086). You've got to squeeze that protocol onto the *extremely* primitive mobile devices of that era.
In 1982, analog cell traffic was readily intercepted by anybody with a completely generic radio receiver tuned to the right frequency. A system which in a decade or so could be penetrated by sufficiently determined and sophisticated people was *still* a huge improvement. I'm sure plenty of people saw the fault, but I doubt anybody had an immediately practical solution to address it. So should the radio traffic be unobscured like analog cell phones until the handsets got better?
Ultimately, secrecy is not absolute; it's a question of how long you can keep a secret. Something that can be broken today in a matter of hours would have, using 1982's computing technology, given a useful margin of secrecy.
It's been a long, long time since I looked at GSM's protocols (some twenty years) so I don't remember the details, but *really competent would have been to build in some kind of crypto protocol negotiation into the system. Mind you, it wouldn't have had *any* practical use for a decade or so. But ten years is a much longer time when looked at from the system design phase than a decade after the product launch.
Well, personally I think the sweet spot is uncomfortable engagement.
Compare the US stances toward China, Cuba and South Africa, and the policy outcomes.
(1) China. Policy: pretend everything is fine. Result: One of the most stable oppressive regimes in the world.
(2) Cuba. Policy: try to make into a pariah state. Result: one of the most stable oppressive regimes in the world.
(3) South Africa. Policy: continually and awkwardly try to split the difference between pretending everything is OK and treating South Africa as a pariah. Result regime cracks under the strain of continually charting where its self interest lay in all that confusion.
If humans used technology to destroy their home planet, that wouldn't make *technology* bad. Technology, unlike its wielders, has no choice in the matter.
Animals, of which humans are a kind, will destroy their environment if allowed to reproduce unchecked. If a grazing species strips the grass in its range bare and tramples all its seedlings, it suffers local extinction. Humans are mobile and adaptable, which means the range of our population is pretty much the entire surface of the planet. It is quite conceivable that we can could drastically reduce the carrying capacity of the planet for humans by our actions, although I doubt we'll literally go extinct until the Sun's evolution destroys our planet.
Those grazing animals are not bad because they can destroy their local environment. We are not bad because we can destroy our global environment. We'd be bad, or at least stupid, if we used our adaptability to destroy the global carrying capacity for humans. We'd *definitely* be stupid to blame it on the tools we used.
The current human population of the planet exceeds what the planet could support if we suddenly decided to go back to medieval technology. There are twenty times as many people on the Earth as there were in AD 1000. If we rolled back technology to that point, the Earth's habitats would be striped bare. If the preservation of the Earth's biological systems is *good*, then technology is instrumental to that good. The only other solution to preserving the Earth's ecology is to deliberately reduce the human population by 95%.
I don't know about that. I was a teenager in the 70s when it was almost socially acceptable among people under 30 to smoke pot. I've known plenty of people who indulge fairly regularly (say on the order of once a week or even a bit more) who probably weren't much different than if they'd never used at all. It's dangerous to make such generalizations as "dope makes you a dope", because practically no generalization of that sort is *always* true. Often they can be true enough to be worth paying attention to without being *usually* true.
I've also seen the other side, the people who effectively rewired their brains and lives around dope. It's very easy to do, because so much of what we as animals do is avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. As *humans*, we are driven by something more as well: dissatisfaction. The Pali word "dukka" which is often translated when discussion Buddhism as "suffering" might better be translated as "dissatisfaction". Most of the "suffering" in our life is not grand enough to be called "suffering". It's a niggling, persistent dissatisfaction with the things we thought would make us happy. The very low intellectual standards of people who are stoned are a consequence of easy satisfaction. They laugh at jokes that aren't funny because their standards of funny are low. They don't mind physical squalor because they are beyond dissatisfaction.
It's a funny thing; pain, pleasure and dissatisfaction drive us as individuals, but they aren't there for *our* benefit. They improve us as a *species*. We may wish to subscribe to a philosophy of ethical egoism, but we're still constructed neurologically so the quality of our subjective experience serves the species. Surely it would be to our benefit to live a life devoid of pain and full of pleasure and satisfaction. Any counter argument to this is bound to rest on the benefit to society or to the species, not to us as individuals.
It is conceivable that we could, in a sense, take charge of our lives, truly live them for ourselves, by using biomedical technology to control pain, pleasure, and over time even *dissatisfaction*. But I doubt in such a world read books. Why would we?
When you see a book, you anticipate the pleasure of reading it. Why bother reading it if you can get pleasure at the push of a button? Oh, at first you would make a distinction between "earned" and "unearned" pleasure, but one day you'd be a little tired and instead of picking up the book you'll push the happy button, and sooner or later you'll be going for the happy button because you won't tolerate the effort of reading. In fact it's a kind of intellectual lust that drives us to read, isn't it? And lust is kind of a pleasurable pain; a deficit we imagine in ourselves that is pleasant to fill; an itch that we scratch. If we can eliminate the itch and get the pleasure of scratching, we won't be any kind of lust, physical or intellectual, because we won't accept any kind of discomfort.
I remember working on the early Arpanet, and the amazement of seeing text from a computer appear, printed line by line on a printing terminal. The equivalent of a Slashdot article and its comments would probably have taken fifteen or twenty minutes to "load", but to *us* this was information traveling at amazing rates. Now we consider *any* perceivable delay as intolerable; there is no sensation of speed, only of varying degrees of slowness.
People adjust their feeling of what is pleasurable and satisfactory to what they experience on a day to day basis. Read about how people lived a few centuries ago. YetI suspect people were just as happy or unhappy as they are now, even though the conditions they lived in -- even the aristocrats -- were miserable by modern standards. Our modern threshold of suffering is extremely low; of satisfaction extremely high. When we can control suffering and satisfaction biomedically, the process will not only have reached its logical limit, human life as we know it will cease to be, because that life is organized around the imperatives to seek elusive pleasure, to elude inevitable pain, and to suage unavoidable dissatisfaction.
typing *without* your brain might be more convenient.
I've worked up near 128 myself. Most of those guys are great at blue-skying, but unfortunately many cannot tie their shoe laces or bath on a regular basis.
Yes, but we weren't arguing over whether Saabs were the best cars ever made. We were discussing why this is "news for nerds".
It's in the trunk of my flying car.
Because the weren't *interesting* like those weird old Saabs were.
When I was at MIT back in early 80s, I knew a lot of guys whose dads worked at think-tanky engineering labs like Draper, Mitre and Lincoln. It seemed like half of those dads had at least one Saab. The weird two strokes were the most prized. A friend of mine fell dozed off while driving one up to NH and drifted onto the median strip. The car rolled over (he claims) three times, ending up on its roof. He walked away literally without a scratch.
Well, I suppose calling them "errors" begs the question. You can't call something an error unless there is a "correct " value you can point to.
However, it's probable that most sets of thirty thousand random mutations generate something other than cancer; probably lots of non-viable genomes. From the cancer genome's point of view what we call thirty thousand "errors" amounts to things going amazingly, fortuitously "right".
For better or worse they've kept the peace.
So far.
When making projections for the success of this strategy it's important to remember how successful it *has* to be. On the issue of *using* nuclear weapons as opposed to be *having the ability to threaten* with them, it has to be 100% effective for a very, very long time before we can take the inevitable first failure and say, "well, on balance it was worth it."
We're making gross simplifications when we say that nuclear weapons helped us "keep the peace". It's too much to reduce the last sixty years of history to The Bomb. It was a huge part of that history, but not the only thing going on. That's the advantage of having *lived* that history as opposed to having *read* about it. What you get in history class is a neat, boiled down summation of a very messy and complicated process.
There were other things going on that probably were prerequisites to the general success of Mutually Assured Destruction as a peace keeping strategy. We can't be entirely sure which ones were critical; or if it weren't some kind of critical aggregation of circumstances.
What I worry about his the human ability to adapt to any situation. The prospect of nuclear holocaust was novel. Now it's not any longer. I'm not sure all the players who are pursuing The Bomb are all that horrified by the prospect of using it. Regional players may count on knocking out their rivals before they can become unassailable -- that's what drove the big arms race between the US and the USSR, but sooner or later somebody will get the upper hand against their bitter enemy.
And once the human race survives it's first war in which most of the damage was done by nuclear weapons (unlike WW2 in which The Bomb was an exclamation point at the end), it'll be much more ready to accept another one.
He was a flying monkey, you insensitive clod!
I dunno. I think there's something to be said for looking at the problem in economic terms. Some people tune into the Superbowl to see the advertisements, after all, so that's a kind of exchange: entertainment for eyeballs. I don't mind the advertisements in Google's search results because when I don't want them they don't intrude, but they're often useful enough that I click through before doing a new search. That's win-win for the advertisers and me.
The problem I think is with crude advertising methods from the era of old media. The extreme difficulty of getting many high value impressions by old medial techniques means that if you want to scale your business, you've got to do it with a huge pile of low value impressions. At some scale, the old media advertising game becomes about racking up sheer volume. Since there is no way of distinguishing good impressions from bad, and you *need* impressions, the guiding principle is that there is no such thing as a bad impression. Think of the difference between carpet bombing an entire city and having an agent stick a ricin tipped umbrella into your target as he strolls to work. The assassin is more effective period -- not to mention cost effective. If the only weapons you have are unguided bombs, then no death in that city would be a "bad" one.
If the marginal benefit of the next thousand impressions is greater than their marginal cost, the advertiser will go for it. What Google has done is increase the opportunity costs of going for unwanted impressions. Why do that when you can find consumers who *want* your information? If the process of giving *unwanted* impressions is harder, so much the better for me (and Google, whose business is built on a competing strategy).
Google's search result adverts are a good deal for me: information that is often useful at the price of a few square inches of monitor space for a few seconds. That's the same strategy behind the advertising supported "free phone" idea. Done in an old-media any-impression-is-a-good-one manner, it would be hideous. Done in a way that is useful to me, I might not mind it so much.
I only take issue with the implicit assumption that it's *remarkable* that a peculiarly aggressive champion of public prudery has a few skeletons in his closet. If you don't practice virtue yourself it's easy to urge it on others, but I also think it's overcompensation. It it's really important to prove you're not gay, then the easiest way to do that is to persecute gays. If you want to hide your infidelity, make a big noise condemning the sexual behavior of others.
I suppose it's a chicken-or-the-egg question. In places where there is a lot of social disorder, people look for the government to impose personal virtue. Just as the best job for a bank robber is running the bank, the best job for a pervert in a culture of government imposed virtue is in public office. The kind of harsh, hypocritical intrusion of the government into private life they advocate only produces more disorder in people's lives.
This was all settled years before it became a political football. When politicians figured out AGM had policy implications, they wanted *their* vote in the matter, but it was too late.
I agree that the really *big* screw-ups were not exactly secret. At least not that kind of secret.
It's kind of like when a woman asks her best friend whether her husband might be cheating on her. The fact that she's gotten to the point of asking that question should tell her everything she needs to know. Escaping the consequences of a brazen affair turns out to be easier than escaping the consequences of leaving the toilet seat up, because you are aided by wishful thinking.