Wow, I never thought I would defend Katz, but here goes: This is the best thing he has ever written for/. Not a single word about how those mean Republicans want to crucify Clinton, or how we pay too little in taxes. No tortured attempts to fit some inherently libertarian Net phenomenon into a comfortable oldthink Democrat/union/UN/feminist framework. It's good to get information without a subtext on why I should drive slower, vote for Gore, or send a check to a bunch of Bolsheviks in public broadcasting. I am amazed.
Oh please. In the U.S. most medical expenses are paid by private insurers. Cosmetic surgery and a lot of dentistry are paid out of pocket. And if you think nose jobs and boob jobs are a small part of our GNP, you ain't been to Long Island or L.A.
The real effect of making current tax systems impossible to administer will be simpler and more transparent tax systems. Making life for the tax man easier has never made anyone else's life simpler or easier.
What really makes the above prediction seem ridiculous is the fact that the U.S. grew to become a world power while taxing at a rate less than one-third the current rate. It is much more likely that any large decline in taxation would bring on a new golden age rather than a disaster.
What percentage of the time it is wrong to tell government to shove off? 99.99%? More? The government sometimes does good things by mistake, as with the early Internet. Tang and Space Food Sticks come to mind. And when the government actually notices it is doing something, watch out!
I use Windows "monopoly" software. I don't use AOL "monopoly" Internet access or sites. In fact, I can't remember the last time I did AOL anything on the Internet. I'm sure that if I used a Mac (which I once did) I would have equally little to do with Microsoft.
I find it very hard to believe government involvement won't simply bring taxation where there was none before, and screw things up worse than the worst scenario sketched out here. Nobody will dominate the Internet. Not Microsoft, not AOL, not Intel, not Cisco, not AT&T. All will have a significant role, maybe even a dominant role in some aspect of it, but no real overall dominance. Only a government could achieve that.
Sorry, pissing upwind like this is wrong. The legal arguments used to protect content-protection systems, and the ones used against distribution of cracking tools have two very harmful effects:
1. They create "thought crimes." If you have knowledge about how to break a protection system, you are marked as dangerous and selected for harassment. Just think you you would feel if you got a letter on big scary lawyer letterhead telling you you should never utter another word about how some lame protection scheme can be cracked. Disagreeing can cost you everything you own. The people who unleash this kind of harassment deserve to have their businesses laid to waste.
2. Lame-ass protection schemes erode our control over our own PCs. Soon we will be criminals for ripping out code that is inserted in our PCs to rat us out if we make copies. This is very very dangerous and should be resisted at every turn.
So it is too bad that the recording industry, a general hive of corruption, drugs, fraud, bribery, and other high-minded values is on its deathbed. Musicians, who will not go extinct any more than they were before the recording industry existed, will find different business models. Does Hollywood deserve better?
I write books, not making a living at it, but money is always nice. Still, I would rather be free to put anything I want on my personal computer than avoid inconveniencing my publisher to adjust their business model to take into account the fact of unprotecable content. They might have to sponsor conferences, or Webcasts, or make the book interactive so that readers would have to verify that their copies are legit to particpate. Businesses evolve. Those that don't, don't deserve to live.
USB is nicer than serial for uploading your address book, and Bluetooth modules will likely have USB interfaces, so if you are building a phone that incorporates Bluetooth, you will use USB (if it has both USB host and USB peripheral interfaces, if it is peripheral only, you are SOL for high-speed Bluetooth).
1. The wife saying "Oh, you're watching your 'creature' show again." It was easier when "Sisters" was on and I had bad show parity.
2. Gravity. We put all this trouble and expense into going to space, and nobody wants to float. What a waste. Not even in CGI shows like War Planets (which rocks, even though it is a kids' show).
3. Bipedal aliens with ugly heads. I mean, Jar-Jar is even bipedal, has a nose, etc. You go to the trouble of CGI-ing a whole actor for cinema-grade resolution, and it's less cool than Roger Rabbit.
4. Aerodynamic space ships. OK, so Episode I is supposed to be long ago, but why the chrome SR-71?
5. Breathable atmospheres and shirtsleeve temperatures. And every life-form breathes the same stuff. What are the odds?
With current technology and the ability to economically CGI TV shows, we are running out of excuses. If sci-fi does not update its conventions to the possibilities of the media, it will become a dead artform. It will be too laughable.
Babylon 5 and Earth, the Final Conflict do best, but each is just a rehearsal for what could really be done.
Actually, when I was knee-high to a laser printer (and back then a laser printer was the size of a small truck), the Internet was made of PDP-10s, PDP-20s, Xerox Altos, CADRs, Perkin-Elmer 32 bit minis (before anybody else made a 32-bit mini), a couple of Multices, and other funky stuff, a lot of it running roll-your-own OSs. It wasn't till PDP-11s began running UNIX that UNIX played any part in the Internet, and only when VAXes got popular did UNIX really take off.
In fact, I would almost say it is the other way around: if it were not for the Web, and the demand for big Web servers, UNIX would be right down there with NetWare in the has-been OS category, a victim of fragmentation and Sun never getting their act together on a client UI strategy. The Web saved UNIX's bacon, Solaris's especially, while Windows had to earn a place as the dominant client OS. If IE had remained a turkey, I would be typing this on some other kind of machine.
These facts should remind/.ers that Gates's remark about his market share means he is very aware that Microsoft is far from dominant in servers. That problem now has his full attention.
The Forrester results regarding the use of CORBA in corporate IT projects is misleading. Almost all Windows coding involves COM, whether the coder knows it or not. I'd bet most/.ers have never needed to touch CORBA.
The C|Net article nails it when they say that Microsoft has spent a lot of effort making component programming relatively painless. Until UNIX and most of the programming tools embrace component technology, the natural result of standardizing on any technology that Microsoft proposes or can utilize will be that Windows coders will make very wide use of it while only really large UNIX projects will make use of it.
Also, don't confuse this with an alternative to DCOM. DCOM is multi-protocol capable. Microsoft's own explanation of SOAP gets this mixed up, claiming DCOM is a protocol! Eventually, like the multi-protocol capability of Windows, that fact will become irrelevant as TCP/IP and XML become the only protocols actually used. Subsequently, the lines may begin to blur and COM (DCOM is just COM that actually uses RPC) may come to rely on XML, use LDAP instead of OXID resolver, etc. Then, in a next-gen component technology that further blurs the lines between components and native objects in a particular language, you get a Java-oid C++ derivative that is totally dependent on SOAP and its friends. Neat. (And I predict the next shoe to fall will be an open Internet-oriented virtual machine.)
Don't, also, mistake SOAP as a replacement for CORBA. Generally, all distributed component technologies are built on RPC technologies. SOAP is an RPC technology that uses XML.
The SOAP approach does have some interesting aspects: If all the distributed component/object technology implementations could agree on SOAP as an underlying protocol, the need for the clumsy COM-to-CORBA gateway approach to interoperation would go away. Java servlets could easily talk to Windows controls. Microsoft is clearly betting they have the weight to dominate without any mechanism to impose a single higher-level component technology.
What this points out is that, for all the flaws in Windows, component technology does matter, and Windows makes good use of it. Can Linux, or any UNIX, adapt to this challenge? Or is a different approach needed? If I were Steve Jobs I would either adopt SOAP, or find an alternative ASAP, otherwise OS X will not impress among the crowd for whom component technology matters. Adopting SOAP could make the Objective C distributed object technology a player. Furthermore, SOAP opens a new way for Apple's OS X to distinguish itself from other UNIXs.
This will get more and more interesting. If you ask any Microsoft product or program manager "What are you going to do about..." any topic whatever, the answer is likely to be "XML."
The entire Internet is a relatively elite pursuit at this time, which, in part, explains all the white male college educated conservative/libertarians in these discussion threads. It makes those Euro-trash poser student Socialists almost refreshing!
Either broadband content will appear, or it won't. People create content for literary journals that huff and puff to get to 10k subscribers. Why do you think a bunch of guys who have clearly demonstrated the will to spend money on cool toys will go wanting for content? Buy DSL (or cable modem) and the cool stuff will come.
Meanwhile you can download MP3s quite nicely, which just passed "sex" and the #1 searched-for word. Catering to the top two Internet content categories is not exactly product-positioning Siberia.
Civics lesson: Part 1, for the tinfoil hat right wing: Yes, the President can do a lot in foreign policy without the Congress's say so. Part 2, for the kneepad-wearing left: Because treaties involve giving up soveriegnty, the President must get 2/3rds of the Senate to go along with the idea.
Treaties are dangerous and powerful. Most Presidents treat them very carefully. This President thought he could take a lousy treaty and shove it down the Senate's throat. Ir return, the Senate told him he is a lame duck with diminished credibility in foreign policy, the remaining area where a lame duck can act. No wonder Boy Wonder nearly went nuclear (and that's not neccesarily a figure of speech) at his press conference the other day. He deserves what he got.
Cellular will converge with IMT-2000 (aka 3G, aka UMTS). It is unclear if it would have converged sooner. Also the U.S. is an exceptional case in cellular, with a big, well kept, and cheap copper land-line infrastructure, and lower land-line costs than in Europe or Japan. We also have recipient-pays, so cellular usage patterns in the U.S. are peculiar compared to most of the rest of the world. GSM does exist in the U.S., it just has nada for market penetration, in part because it costs too much. Mandating GSM here might not have had a very good outcome.
Similarly, it is even less likely that standards and regulated boundaries between services and providers will work in Internet access. The whole notion of an ISP might become outmoded. How voice and broadband Internet access fit together technologically or in the market has not been worked out. The question of whether multimedia delivery other than over IP will exist on DSL has barely been asked. To me, it is a good bureaucrat who can say "I just don't know enough to act yet."
Jefferson and most of the other founders probably throught slavery would go away on its own soon enough. They did not count on industrialized cotton production having the ironic effect of boosting a slave-based agricultural economy in the American South.
I hope that someday the current police surveillance culture will seem just as intolerable as slavery seems to use.
Cracking isn't violent crime. Most of the time it isn't even a property crime in the conventional sense. And commonsense security measures are not the same as cowering behind locks and grates in an urban crime hotspot.
Overestimating the threat means that people who find it hard work to catch real crooks will be attracted to getting paid for catching minor-league crackers. We should not give in to this distraction, nor should we let law-enforcement people engage in sandbagging by this means. If we let this happen, it means considerably less freedom for everyone, in addition to being a waste of resources. On top of which, there are real world criminals who will go unpunished just because the cops are trying out their new computer toys.
There is real crime that happens on the Web. If you ask ransom for not bringing down an e-commerce site, you are just as bad as a thug who asks for protection money from a night club. Just think in terms of what a reasonable real-world cop would bother to go after and you will see that a) real crime in cyperspace is less frequent than the scare stories say, and b) law enforcement people who find elaborate real-world frauds tedious to prosecute are equally deterred by the complexities of computer crime. However, giving in to the current wish list of intrusive and largely useless measures is not the answer.
An exceeding perseptive remark! One thing that a focus on technological advancement blinds us to is the fact that organization, education, and culture are far better indicators of civilization than technology or modern measures of material wealth.
A non-technological but orderly, educated, and free society would produce results that would be valued by history far more than a nation of Ricky Lake audiences cared for by robot slaves. This type of society can very easily tip into pre-ceivilization chaos.
An optimistic view of the future would be that we will use our leisure to create a new Athens without the human slaves. However, it is probable that only a minority of humanity would be interested in having more of a life of the mind. I wonder, under what circumstances would we not get an explosion of uneducated whiners compaining that their luxurious but relatively less nice slice of Utopia is an injustice and that all the smart people should be killed?
Cold fusion? how about another 100 years of fossil fuels, but no "global warming" or whatever. By that time, we should have something different.
The Dalai Lama in Tibet? Nope. China as a superpower with a regional sphere of influence is more likely.
Hilton Orbiter? Sure. And it will host Comdex. But we will get there with chemical fuels. Geeks puking in zero Gs. Eeeeewwwww.
Braincaps? Hmmmmm. Nah. Unless all the firmware is open source, I would not trust it.
Trip to Halley's Comet? Way cool. But no critters. Just a way cool dirty snowball.
Resume burning fossile fuels to forestall an ice age? Nah. It's comuppance for Canadians being pain-in-the-neck scolds about global warming in the first place.
Not quite. The spin in the news that George Bush let the secrets slip is of the same nature of the stories of Thomas Jefferson having fathered an illegitimate child with a slave (never proven - could have been another Jefferson). Everybody does it, so don't get on MY case!
There is a large qualitative difference between a security failure and an administration that was bought outright by the Chinese. Clinton can be charitably described as our Willy Brandt.
Besides which, if a close examination would reveal that most of the espionage took place under previous administrations, why is Clinton stonewalling to the point that four career FBI agents (that would be four times as many as blew the whistle on Nixon) have testified to the effect that the US Department of Justice obstructed justice in the China spying case? There is every reason to think the U.S. is presently the victim of an espionage project that successfully corrupted an administration at the highest levels.
Ah, but we can count on our fabulous press to bring us the truth and set us free. Maybe not: "Journalistic integrity must prevail in the final analysis. But that doesn't mean that journalistic integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the countries in which you operate..." said Sumner Redstone, new owner of CBS, in Shanghai, on September 28. Gives you a deep feeling of confidence, no?
If you are in Japan and you want to try it out today (albeit for stills), you can get the Kyocera PHS (Personal Handyphone System) phone. It send JPGs.
PHS is kind of neat: The voice-only handsets are unbelievably tiny. PHS also has fixed-mobile intergration that works. You can get relatively inexpensive home base stations that enable you to use PHS handsets on your home wireline connection (and wireless PBX systems for work). PHS can move data at 64kbps, so it is adequate for mobile or in-building wireless Internet access. PHS also supports a widely used pocket e-mail terminal system in Japan.
PHS is popular with kids in Japan for casual use. You can get handsets in sparkly pink colors. There are even "Hello Kitty" PHS phones. So I doubt the picture capability will be used to enhance business transactions.
I'll second that! I was just telling a colleague over dinner how bogus it is to be doing file i/o. It should be a criminal offense to ship an OS for 64 bit systems that does not use memory mapping of files as the basis of access to secondary memory. "Save" is a concept that should have been buried long ago.
There is a mock-up of the HST is the Smithsonian. Look at the date on it (in the 70's as I recall). I think the HST might be a re-purposed recon sat, and not current-generation technology, either. So 2.4m optics is brobably not a limiting factor for the people who are take the best images of the Earth.
I did a search and, yes, he appears to be the same Gary Stix who trashed nanotech. I notice how people like this author never seem to take the time to trash the people behind such frauds as nuclear winter, or power lines causing cancer (this latter one a topic Stix has written on, but in rather kinder tones than about Teller). Nanotech people say some pretty wild things, but they do not go out of their way to commit scientific fraud for some political cause. There are more deserving targets of a good hatchet job.
Comments on the quality of Scientific American are on-topic in that this is one example of the general problem with establishment media: it has become a closed system in which generally anti-Western, anti-capitalist journalism schools pump out PC scribes that go on to pen pap like the article on Teller. The contrast with with the comments here - even the ones that forthrightly disagree with Teller - indicate it is Scientific American that needs its head examined, not Edward Teller.
Exploring this contrast between jouranlism as a profession and journalism as it is practised on the Web, with Slashdot as a prime example, is clearly worthwhile. The failings of the artictle on Teller are illustrative of a wider malaise. And the data provided by the well-articulated criticisms in this discussion are a keen diagnosis of what is wrong. Let's have more of it!
The author, Gary Stix, seems to have an all-too-common bias to his writing: peace-loving hippies good, hard-headed scientist bad. This can be entertaining, even endearing, when applied to relatively trivial subjects, but here it comes off as biased, naive, and peevish.
The Cold War was the conflict of the century, and Teller played a pivotal role. The world was at stake, literally. Stix is either innocent about whether the world would be better off with Soviet domination or Edward Teller, or he is outright wrong in his preference.
In his remarks about hubris, Stix shows himself to be one of the small-is-beautiful gang, opposed to any plan that might mean digging a big hole or generating a lot of energy. Apart from being narrow-minded, this point of view is ignorant of history. It is likely that our grandchilderen will have machines that make our industry look as if we are hauling coal out of mines with donkeys. Unless we consider things that appear on the surface as "hubristic," we will miss opportunities to give succeeding generations better lives.
Overall, the article is a huge missed chance to create a significant historic document.
Agruments like this one set up and knock down the straw man of dogmatic Libertarianism. There is a long way from where we are at to no government. Let's take a few steps in that direction and see if it works better, then take a few more. If we reduced the size of goverment as gradually as the size has crept up, or even at twice the rate, it will be left to our great-grandkids to ask if government is getting too small.
Social Security privatization is not inconsistent with Libertarianism. Plus, as another poster has pointed out, publishing is explicitly unregulated in the U.S. Other areas of media, like television, would benefit from less regulation, which would reduce government influence over the mass media.
Which appeals to you less: Microsoft unchained, or Microsoft buying influence in a government that is trying to regulate Microsoft? To me, the second choice is less palatable, given what the big influence-buyers/sellers have wrought so far.
Not that I advocate policies that result in 1% growth, but 1% GDP growth is not inconsistent with blue chip stocks gaining 7% per year. These represent a minority of the economy, and the companies in narrow indices like the Dow can quite plausibly continue to add shareholder value at a rate that far outstrips the growth of the economy as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I never thought I would defend Katz, but here goes: This is the best thing he has ever written for /. Not a single word about how those mean Republicans want to crucify Clinton, or how we pay too little in taxes. No tortured attempts to fit some inherently libertarian Net phenomenon into a comfortable oldthink Democrat/union/UN/feminist framework. It's good to get information without a subtext on why I should drive slower, vote for Gore, or send a check to a bunch of Bolsheviks in public broadcasting. I am amazed.
The real effect of making current tax systems impossible to administer will be simpler and more transparent tax systems. Making life for the tax man easier has never made anyone else's life simpler or easier.
What really makes the above prediction seem ridiculous is the fact that the U.S. grew to become a world power while taxing at a rate less than one-third the current rate. It is much more likely that any large decline in taxation would bring on a new golden age rather than a disaster.
I use Windows "monopoly" software. I don't use AOL "monopoly" Internet access or sites. In fact, I can't remember the last time I did AOL anything on the Internet. I'm sure that if I used a Mac (which I once did) I would have equally little to do with Microsoft.
I find it very hard to believe government involvement won't simply bring taxation where there was none before, and screw things up worse than the worst scenario sketched out here. Nobody will dominate the Internet. Not Microsoft, not AOL, not Intel, not Cisco, not AT&T. All will have a significant role, maybe even a dominant role in some aspect of it, but no real overall dominance. Only a government could achieve that.
1. They create "thought crimes." If you have knowledge about how to break a protection system, you are marked as dangerous and selected for harassment. Just think you you would feel if you got a letter on big scary lawyer letterhead telling you you should never utter another word about how some lame protection scheme can be cracked. Disagreeing can cost you everything you own. The people who unleash this kind of harassment deserve to have their businesses laid to waste.
2. Lame-ass protection schemes erode our control over our own PCs. Soon we will be criminals for ripping out code that is inserted in our PCs to rat us out if we make copies. This is very very dangerous and should be resisted at every turn.
So it is too bad that the recording industry, a general hive of corruption, drugs, fraud, bribery, and other high-minded values is on its deathbed. Musicians, who will not go extinct any more than they were before the recording industry existed, will find different business models. Does Hollywood deserve better?
I write books, not making a living at it, but money is always nice. Still, I would rather be free to put anything I want on my personal computer than avoid inconveniencing my publisher to adjust their business model to take into account the fact of unprotecable content. They might have to sponsor conferences, or Webcasts, or make the book interactive so that readers would have to verify that their copies are legit to particpate. Businesses evolve. Those that don't, don't deserve to live.
USB is nicer than serial for uploading your address book, and Bluetooth modules will likely have USB interfaces, so if you are building a phone that incorporates Bluetooth, you will use USB (if it has both USB host and USB peripheral interfaces, if it is peripheral only, you are SOL for high-speed Bluetooth).
1. The wife saying "Oh, you're watching your 'creature' show again." It was easier when "Sisters" was on and I had bad show parity.
2. Gravity. We put all this trouble and expense into going to space, and nobody wants to float. What a waste. Not even in CGI shows like War Planets (which rocks, even though it is a kids' show).
3. Bipedal aliens with ugly heads. I mean, Jar-Jar is even bipedal, has a nose, etc. You go to the trouble of CGI-ing a whole actor for cinema-grade resolution, and it's less cool than Roger Rabbit.
4. Aerodynamic space ships. OK, so Episode I is supposed to be long ago, but why the chrome SR-71?
5. Breathable atmospheres and shirtsleeve temperatures. And every life-form breathes the same stuff. What are the odds?
With current technology and the ability to economically CGI TV shows, we are running out of excuses. If sci-fi does not update its conventions to the possibilities of the media, it will become a dead artform. It will be too laughable.
Babylon 5 and Earth, the Final Conflict do best, but each is just a rehearsal for what could really be done.
In fact, I would almost say it is the other way around: if it were not for the Web, and the demand for big Web servers, UNIX would be right down there with NetWare in the has-been OS category, a victim of fragmentation and Sun never getting their act together on a client UI strategy. The Web saved UNIX's bacon, Solaris's especially, while Windows had to earn a place as the dominant client OS. If IE had remained a turkey, I would be typing this on some other kind of machine.
These facts should remind /.ers that Gates's remark about his market share means he is very aware that Microsoft is far from dominant in servers. That problem now has his full attention.
The C|Net article nails it when they say that Microsoft has spent a lot of effort making component programming relatively painless. Until UNIX and most of the programming tools embrace component technology, the natural result of standardizing on any technology that Microsoft proposes or can utilize will be that Windows coders will make very wide use of it while only really large UNIX projects will make use of it.
Also, don't confuse this with an alternative to DCOM. DCOM is multi-protocol capable. Microsoft's own explanation of SOAP gets this mixed up, claiming DCOM is a protocol! Eventually, like the multi-protocol capability of Windows, that fact will become irrelevant as TCP/IP and XML become the only protocols actually used. Subsequently, the lines may begin to blur and COM (DCOM is just COM that actually uses RPC) may come to rely on XML, use LDAP instead of OXID resolver, etc. Then, in a next-gen component technology that further blurs the lines between components and native objects in a particular language, you get a Java-oid C++ derivative that is totally dependent on SOAP and its friends. Neat. (And I predict the next shoe to fall will be an open Internet-oriented virtual machine.)
Don't, also, mistake SOAP as a replacement for CORBA. Generally, all distributed component technologies are built on RPC technologies. SOAP is an RPC technology that uses XML.
The SOAP approach does have some interesting aspects: If all the distributed component/object technology implementations could agree on SOAP as an underlying protocol, the need for the clumsy COM-to-CORBA gateway approach to interoperation would go away. Java servlets could easily talk to Windows controls. Microsoft is clearly betting they have the weight to dominate without any mechanism to impose a single higher-level component technology.
What this points out is that, for all the flaws in Windows, component technology does matter, and Windows makes good use of it. Can Linux, or any UNIX, adapt to this challenge? Or is a different approach needed? If I were Steve Jobs I would either adopt SOAP, or find an alternative ASAP, otherwise OS X will not impress among the crowd for whom component technology matters. Adopting SOAP could make the Objective C distributed object technology a player. Furthermore, SOAP opens a new way for Apple's OS X to distinguish itself from other UNIXs.
This will get more and more interesting. If you ask any Microsoft product or program manager "What are you going to do about..." any topic whatever, the answer is likely to be "XML."
Either broadband content will appear, or it won't. People create content for literary journals that huff and puff to get to 10k subscribers. Why do you think a bunch of guys who have clearly demonstrated the will to spend money on cool toys will go wanting for content? Buy DSL (or cable modem) and the cool stuff will come.
Meanwhile you can download MP3s quite nicely, which just passed "sex" and the #1 searched-for word. Catering to the top two Internet content categories is not exactly product-positioning Siberia.
Treaties are dangerous and powerful. Most Presidents treat them very carefully. This President thought he could take a lousy treaty and shove it down the Senate's throat. Ir return, the Senate told him he is a lame duck with diminished credibility in foreign policy, the remaining area where a lame duck can act. No wonder Boy Wonder nearly went nuclear (and that's not neccesarily a figure of speech) at his press conference the other day. He deserves what he got.
Similarly, it is even less likely that standards and regulated boundaries between services and providers will work in Internet access. The whole notion of an ISP might become outmoded. How voice and broadband Internet access fit together technologically or in the market has not been worked out. The question of whether multimedia delivery other than over IP will exist on DSL has barely been asked. To me, it is a good bureaucrat who can say "I just don't know enough to act yet."
I hope that someday the current police surveillance culture will seem just as intolerable as slavery seems to use.
Overestimating the threat means that people who find it hard work to catch real crooks will be attracted to getting paid for catching minor-league crackers. We should not give in to this distraction, nor should we let law-enforcement people engage in sandbagging by this means. If we let this happen, it means considerably less freedom for everyone, in addition to being a waste of resources. On top of which, there are real world criminals who will go unpunished just because the cops are trying out their new computer toys.
There is real crime that happens on the Web. If you ask ransom for not bringing down an e-commerce site, you are just as bad as a thug who asks for protection money from a night club. Just think in terms of what a reasonable real-world cop would bother to go after and you will see that a) real crime in cyperspace is less frequent than the scare stories say, and b) law enforcement people who find elaborate real-world frauds tedious to prosecute are equally deterred by the complexities of computer crime. However, giving in to the current wish list of intrusive and largely useless measures is not the answer.
A non-technological but orderly, educated, and free society would produce results that would be valued by history far more than a nation of Ricky Lake audiences cared for by robot slaves. This type of society can very easily tip into pre-ceivilization chaos.
An optimistic view of the future would be that we will use our leisure to create a new Athens without the human slaves. However, it is probable that only a minority of humanity would be interested in having more of a life of the mind. I wonder, under what circumstances would we not get an explosion of uneducated whiners compaining that their luxurious but relatively less nice slice of Utopia is an injustice and that all the smart people should be killed?
The Dalai Lama in Tibet? Nope. China as a superpower with a regional sphere of influence is more likely.
Hilton Orbiter? Sure. And it will host Comdex. But we will get there with chemical fuels. Geeks puking in zero Gs. Eeeeewwwww.
Braincaps? Hmmmmm. Nah. Unless all the firmware is open source, I would not trust it.
Trip to Halley's Comet? Way cool. But no critters. Just a way cool dirty snowball.
Resume burning fossile fuels to forestall an ice age? Nah. It's comuppance for Canadians being pain-in-the-neck scolds about global warming in the first place.
There is a large qualitative difference between a security failure and an administration that was bought outright by the Chinese. Clinton can be charitably described as our Willy Brandt.
Besides which, if a close examination would reveal that most of the espionage took place under previous administrations, why is Clinton stonewalling to the point that four career FBI agents (that would be four times as many as blew the whistle on Nixon) have testified to the effect that the US Department of Justice obstructed justice in the China spying case? There is every reason to think the U.S. is presently the victim of an espionage project that successfully corrupted an administration at the highest levels.
Ah, but we can count on our fabulous press to bring us the truth and set us free. Maybe not: "Journalistic integrity must prevail in the final analysis. But that doesn't mean that journalistic integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the countries in which you operate..." said Sumner Redstone, new owner of CBS, in Shanghai, on September 28. Gives you a deep feeling of confidence, no?
PHS is kind of neat: The voice-only handsets are unbelievably tiny. PHS also has fixed-mobile intergration that works. You can get relatively inexpensive home base stations that enable you to use PHS handsets on your home wireline connection (and wireless PBX systems for work). PHS can move data at 64kbps, so it is adequate for mobile or in-building wireless Internet access. PHS also supports a widely used pocket e-mail terminal system in Japan.
PHS is popular with kids in Japan for casual use. You can get handsets in sparkly pink colors. There are even "Hello Kitty" PHS phones. So I doubt the picture capability will be used to enhance business transactions.
I'll second that! I was just telling a colleague over dinner how bogus it is to be doing file i/o. It should be a criminal offense to ship an OS for 64 bit systems that does not use memory mapping of files as the basis of access to secondary memory. "Save" is a concept that should have been buried long ago.
There is a mock-up of the HST is the Smithsonian. Look at the date on it (in the 70's as I recall). I think the HST might be a re-purposed recon sat, and not current-generation technology, either. So 2.4m optics is brobably not a limiting factor for the people who are take the best images of the Earth.
I did a search and, yes, he appears to be the same Gary Stix who trashed nanotech. I notice how people like this author never seem to take the time to trash the people behind such frauds as nuclear winter, or power lines causing cancer (this latter one a topic Stix has written on, but in rather kinder tones than about Teller). Nanotech people say some pretty wild things, but they do not go out of their way to commit scientific fraud for some political cause. There are more deserving targets of a good hatchet job.
Exploring this contrast between jouranlism as a profession and journalism as it is practised on the Web, with Slashdot as a prime example, is clearly worthwhile. The failings of the artictle on Teller are illustrative of a wider malaise. And the data provided by the well-articulated criticisms in this discussion are a keen diagnosis of what is wrong. Let's have more of it!
The author, Gary Stix, seems to have an all-too-common bias to his writing: peace-loving hippies good, hard-headed scientist bad. This can be entertaining, even endearing, when applied to relatively trivial subjects, but here it comes off as biased, naive, and peevish.
The Cold War was the conflict of the century, and Teller played a pivotal role. The world was at stake, literally. Stix is either innocent about whether the world would be better off with Soviet domination or Edward Teller, or he is outright wrong in his preference.
In his remarks about hubris, Stix shows himself to be one of the small-is-beautiful gang, opposed to any plan that might mean digging a big hole or generating a lot of energy. Apart from being narrow-minded, this point of view is ignorant of history. It is likely that our grandchilderen will have machines that make our industry look as if we are hauling coal out of mines with donkeys. Unless we consider things that appear on the surface as "hubristic," we will miss opportunities to give succeeding generations better lives.
Overall, the article is a huge missed chance to create a significant historic document.
Agruments like this one set up and knock down the straw man of dogmatic Libertarianism. There is a long way from where we are at to no government. Let's take a few steps in that direction and see if it works better, then take a few more. If we reduced the size of goverment as gradually as the size has crept up, or even at twice the rate, it will be left to our great-grandkids to ask if government is getting too small.
Which appeals to you less: Microsoft unchained, or Microsoft buying influence in a government that is trying to regulate Microsoft? To me, the second choice is less palatable, given what the big influence-buyers/sellers have wrought so far.
Not that I advocate policies that result in 1% growth, but 1% GDP growth is not inconsistent with blue chip stocks gaining 7% per year. These represent a minority of the economy, and the companies in narrow indices like the Dow can quite plausibly continue to add shareholder value at a rate that far outstrips the growth of the economy as a whole.
As "eductaion" improves, so will my spelling.