When you put it that way it seems pretty reasonable. However, you are leaving out the costs of suppressing new technologies. All of these things that you mention have positive uses, as well as negative. What of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy? What of the things we can learn about aging by studying clones? What of the things we can learn about ecology by reintroducing an extinct species?
Moreover, you are assuming that suppressing the technology will head off the evil effects, which is patently untrue. It's been over fifty years since the last time a nuclear bomb was detonated in anger; yet millions of people today still know the ravages of war. And people have been causing extinctions (both through hunting and through habitat destruction) for a long time now, even without the excuse of reintroducing clones later on. It seems to me that these problems will be solved not by suppressing new technologies, but by addressing their root causes, which in most cases have little to do with technology.
So, the position that I see in a number of the messages here is that this technology will enable humans to engage in behavior that is unethical, irresponsible, and/or downright stupid. The solution that seems to come up most often (by implication, even if it's not explicitly stated) is that this technology should be suppressed, or at least not used.
What I want to know is, why isn't the answer that we as a society should try to behave more ethically, responsibly, and/or intelligently? Heck, there's nobody twisting your arm to make you eat that bacon and omlette, nor to hunt animals for trophies. I mean, if the only thing stopping us from seriously soiling our own nest is that we lack the technology to do so, then we are in real trouble. New technologies are always being invented, and many of them carry the potential for abuse. Must we suppress all of them too?
Furthermore, these technologies do carry potential benefits. Through attempting to reintroduce these species we might learn more, not just about the mechanics of cloning, but also about ecosystems, how they change with the loss of a species, and how they react when that species is reintroduced sometime later. This knowledge could help us to minimize human impact on other ecosystems. Must we forego these benefits simply because the technology has potential for abuse?
I would argue that it is incumbent on us to adapt socially so that we can realize the potential good from new technologies while avoiding the potential evils.
And for those of you who will insist that degrees must be Immediately Useful and Practical, and that Reading Books Is A Waste Of Time? Shut up and go away.
I think you misunderstand the objection people are raising to these degrees. It's not that they're impractical; it's that they're overspecialized. Courses on sf as a part of a literature degree are a Good Thing. A degree program devoted to nothing but sf probably is not, in the same way that a physics program devoted entirely to the Jovian planets is not.
I'm intending to go to grad school for English, and my areas of interest are poetry (studying and writing), Icelandic sagas, and -- you got it -- science fiction. The school I'm looking at has a course on science fiction, and one on fantasy. They also have a sci-fi/fantasy writers' workshop.
Good stuff. Don't be surprised, however, when your coursework and qualifying exam also cover other types of literature. Even in graduate school the conventional wisdom is that you should have a certain amount of breadth to your studies, if for no other reason than to be able to relate your work to what other people are doing.
I'll ask the same question here that I asked about the video game programming degree. What advantage does this specialized degree offer over a traditional literature degree? Will the students in this program become better sf writers than students that take a traditional literature program and later decide to concentrate in sf? As before, I'm skeptical.
-r
Re:What about underweight hackers?!
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Hacker's Diet
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Think about what you just said.. We are meat, but we can't produce those 8 ameino acids. Other animals are meat, but they can? That doesn't make much sense.
It doesn't make much sense if you assume that all animals' metabolisms are the same. However, by that logic we should be able to digest grass since cows seem to manage it. Rule #1: food for other animals, even other mammals, is not necessarily food for humans.
I'm not expert on the matter just using common sense, as I know vegitarians (who don't eat eggs or drink milk) can survive
Rule #2: nature doesn't necessarily follow "common sense"; it is what it is. As for vegans, yes, they can survive and even be healthy without eating meat or animal products. However, they do so by planning their diets very carefully to make sure that they get their nutritional requirements. Assuming that everything you need is "in there somewhere" is a good way to get very sick; I've seen it happen to naive would-be vegans.
Bottom line: if you're thinking about cutting meat (or any of the other traditional components of a "balanced diet", for that matter) out of your diet, make sure you get advice from someone who knows (really knows) what s/he's talking about. If you just make something up and call it "common sense" you're asking for trouble.
The question nobody seems to ask is, is this program really going to produce better game programmers than a more traditional computer science curriculum would? I think a case could be made for just the opposite; viz., that this degree program might attract people who don't understand the hard work that goes into game programming, and who lack the dedication to be successful at it.
Call me old-fashioned, but I am still a big believer in the traditional liberal-arts education. My advice to the aspiring game programmer is to learn good programming fundamentals, learn to write effectively, get a good foundation in mathematics, and get a lot of exposure to history and humanities. In other words, just the things you get in a traditional degree program.
Still, I've seen several posts on Slashdot from people who work in the games industry, and I'd be interested in hearing what they have to say. How about it, guys, do you think the people coming out of this program will make better game designers and programmers? When choosing someone to hire, would you prefer them over graduates of more traditional programs?
The coined phrase 'history' says it all really. History is a man made construction. Tales of men by men.
This is a completely bogus etymology. The word `history' derives from greek, in which it bears no relation to the greek phrase meaning `his story.'
Now, on to the point at hand:
And for the record there has only been one male Einstein also.
I think this is a fascinating statement. The implication is that Einstein was the smartest person who ever lived. I think this perception stems more from his status as a pop icon than from the science he did. Make no mistake; Einstien was a smart guy. However, by the early 1900's it was clear that something was wrong with mechanics, and a lot of scientists were working on fixing it. Einstein's theory was the one that turned out to be right, and so it's him we remember 80 years later, but he achieved that result by proceeding according to sound scientific principles, not through some sort of superhuman genius.
So, I think attempting to draw conclusions about human intelligence by examining Einstein's brain alone is misguided. A more valid approach would be to look at brain sizes from a wide cross section of people and try to find a correlation with intelligence; although, as others have pointed out, such a study would be highly dependent on how you define `intelligence.'
An eventual problem will be slave-clones, born and raised to work in factories.
Wouldn't it be cheaper just to automate the factory? Moreover, regardless of what the legal status of clones turns out to be, do you think that labor unions would sit still while their members are replaced by slave labor? Given the unions' vigorous opposition to robotic factories I'd say probably not.
[Cloning spare parts.]
I, for one, have a hard time believing this will ever happen. The number of people actively supporting such a use for clones would be small (basically only the people who could afford to use the parts), and the number of people with ethical objections would be huge. I just can't see this one as politically feasible, no matter how technically feasible it might be.
A more subtle, creeping problem - genetic purism.
On some level we already practice eugenics as a matter of course. We choose spouses that have qualities that we approve of, and we mate with them, producing offspring that are more likely to have those same qualities. Cloning and genetic engineering just makes the process more efficient. And if Joe Bloggs feels that he is the pinacle of human evolution, and he wants his children to be just like him, well, who is harmed by that. As long as people are still free to have children the ``old fashioned way'' I don't see the problem.
Perfect Soldiers and Perfect Spies
What qualities would these perfect warriors have? The ability to withstand a burst of machine gun fire in the chest, perhaps? I don't think any amount of cloning or genetic engineering is going to give you that. Now, if we just figure out how to bump up the typical person's intelligence, or make him more resistant to disease, well, that seems like a Good Thing to me.
My take on this is that it seems to me that the question of nature vs. nurture invariably gets swept under the rug in the genetic engineering debate. We never really settled that one, and I personally think that a lot of genetic engineers are in for quite a surprise when they find that it isn't as simple as dialing up a desired IQ and pressing enter. Likewise, when you clone someone you get an exact genetic copy, but the person could come out totally different. In that light the entire genetic engineering/cloning debate pretty much begins to look like a tempest in a teapot.
To be precise, we can't aspire to their greatness, because we're too old and have too low a midichlorian count.
I suppose that's true if you stipulate that you have to be a Jedi to be ``great.'' In the final battle, though, Queen Amidalah took back her own planet with the help of her own people and their new Gungan allies (which she herself recruited). The Jedi functioned mainly to cancel out the Sith that was there mostly because the Jedi were. For all we can tell Queen Amidalah may have had a midichlorian count of epsilon and therefore no Jedi potential at all; so, I don't think Lucas' message is that you have to be a Jedi to be great.
But, truly, I think the medichlorians are a red herring. Just because our heroes are larger than life doesn't mean that we're not meant to identify with them. Sure, they have titanic prowess, but they are beset by titanic forces. We see them tested just as our mortal powers are tested by mortal forces, and it inspires us to carry on the fight. As I said earlier, I think there is room in our mythology for both heroes and everymen.
Brin is looking at the subtext of some of Lucas's messages, and he's right, some of it is pretty creepy.
I'm not sure it is any creepier than Brin's own least common denominator philosophy, but that is a whole other argument.
I don't like the idea of inborn Destiny
Nor do I, but I don't think its presence in a story invalidates the story, and sometimes watching people come to terms with their knowledge of their destiny can make for an interesting story in itself.
...and I don't like the idea that righteous anger always leads to evil.
As others have pointed out, there are other interpretations to the whole anger issue. My personal interpretation is that it is not anger per se that leads to the Dark Side, but rather acting out of anger. That is, the Jedi must strive to control his anger and channel it toward "goodness." For instance, I thought Obi-Wan was visibly angry after Qui-Gon was killed, but he couldn't allow his anger to get the best of him. In the end he mastered it and was able to prevail. So, apparently that particular anger didn't lead to the Dark Side.
When somebody tells you he's handing out a Myth, you're entitled to examine his theology.
That seems reasonable enough to me. However, when I learned informal reasoning I was taught that you should be faithful and charitable to your opponent's argument; otherwise you are knocking down straw men. I think Brin demolished a few straw men in his article -- too many for my tastes.
That's all Brin is doing.
I disagree here because I don't believe that that's all Brin is doing. He seems to be peddling an alternate Myth of his own, and what's more, he's doing so in such a way as to avoid the kind of scrutiny that he applies to Lucas. Brin's strategy is to oppose his theology with Lucas' and then proceed to trash Star Wars on any grounds he can think of (whether related to "the message" or not). In my book that's a form of rhetorical dirty pool.
One problem with putting this sort of system to practical use is that for most real-world problems parallel scaling only works up to a point; after that your parallel efficiency tends to drop through the floor. It is even possible for a problem to run slower in parallel than it does in serial. As a result, distributed computing efforts tend to gravitate toward the so-called "embarrassingly parallel" problems.
There is also another problem that "researchers on tight budgets" face in using all these spare cycles, which is that often your carefully crafted serial code has to be completely rewritten to get it to work in parallel. This is a lot of work (particularly if your code is some crufty old fortran monstrosity), and even if things go smoothly you have to spend a lot of time testing the new version of the code. Unless you're really hurting for resources it's often not worth the effort. You would probably be better off spending the time and effort writing a proposal for time at one of the national supercomputing centers.
It's the heroes that count, not the endless patterns of zeroes.
Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road
I think David Brin does an excellent job of contrasting George Lucas' style of fiction with David Brin's style of fiction. There is a lot of validity to his obeservations about the differences between a hero story and an everyman story. However, unlike (apparently) David Brin I think there is a place for both in our popular mythology. Now, when an author contrasts his own point of view with someone else's it would be unrealistic to expect him to present a perfectly balanced view; however, I think Brin goes overboard in these articles. The Godwin's Law implications of his Nazi allusions have been mentioned by others, but what I notice is that his treatment of Star Wars is both uncharitable and unfaithful to Lucas' films.
By ``uncharitable,'' I mean that given two or more ways to interpret a passage from the film, Brin invariably chooses the most harmful. For example, the scene: a dysfunctional Senate divided by its internal politics and unable to act decisively in the face of an incipient crisis. Brin interprets this as an indictment of our democratic institutions and a glorification of autocracy. But is it really? Lucas' portrayal of the Senate would be viewed as a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow our democratic institutions to drift too far out of touch with the people they government, perhaps something along the lines of ``Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.''
Another example: Brin interprets Lucas' larger than life heroes as ``demigods.'' The heroes greatness (Brin claims) suggests that we ordinary mortals need not concern ourselves with great matters; we lack the wit and the strength. Okay, but isn't it possible that Lucas (and Homer, and all the rest) meant for us to aspire to be like their heroes. Of course, we will fall short of their greatness, but the only way for us to reach our maximal potential is to aim higher than any mortal could achieve, lest we set our goals too low. I can't say for certain the either of these two interpretations is what Lucas had in mind, but I can't believe that they didn't at least cross Brin's mind; yet, he dismisses them without mention.
Brin is also unfaithful to Lucas' films. That is, he invents specious objections that are not supported by the films themselves. For instance, he lowers Anakin's age, objections to Darth Vader not recognizing C3PO (if they ever met face to face I don't remember it, and protocol droids all look pretty much alike), ascribing the decision to allow Obi-Wan to train Anakin to Yoda (Yoda was against it; he goes along with the council's wishes despite his misgivings--so much for autocracy), and so on. In fact, almost everything beyond Brin's analysis of the hero story vs. the everyman story is based on one sort of strained interpretation of the action on the screen. It says to me that either he did not watch the movies particularly carefully, or that he's digging up mud to create a mood which makes his readers more antagonistic toward Lucas' films, and therefore more receptive toward Brin's own theses.
Now, look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that TPM was a perfect film, nor that Star Wars is a perfect saga. I cringed at the ``medichlorians'' and the virgin birth mumbo-jumbo just like everyone else. I do, however, think it was a fine film, and it deserved better than Brin was giving it here. But, more than that, in what is essentially a political debate over ``elitism'' vs. ``egalitarianism'' I want to see an honest assessment of the two sides. In this respect Brin fails miserably, and I think that such overt proselytizing is far more harmful than whatever message ``the children'' (somehow it's always about protecting the children, isn't it?) may have gotten from TPM.
Mr. Katz lambastes the media for confusing ``true'' hackers with people (whatever you choose to call them) who break into computer systems. Yet, in several places throughout the article Katz commits the same sin. For example he talks about ``the FBI's war against the hackers'' (true, if you mean the kind that break into computers, false otherwise), and he also says that ``hackers built the web and the internet'' (true, if you mean the ``true'' hackers, false otherwise).
So, how can Katz pillory the media for making this same mistake? Answer: the media do it out of ignorance, while Katz is deliberately equivocating to draw a specious connection between the criminals the FBI is pursuing (who often make no useful contribution to the hacker community) and the people who ``built the web.''
You see, it's hard to get people worked up over the FBI arresting actual criminals, but if you hint that they're really after the benign sort of ``hacker,'' well, then, that's a different story. Then it's us they're after.
Katz also engages in the most pernicious form of rationalizing when he states that ``Many hackers believe that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality,'' and ``few hackers have ever done any serious damage to government or any other institutions, and have never to my knowledge caused any sort of physical harm to a real human being.'' First, the notion that you have to cause physical harm to a real human being in order to cause any harm at all is ridiculous. Second, implicit in the second statement is the admission that some people do break into systems and cause harm, and this is where the first statement falls down. Since harmful intruders do exist any intrusion must be treated seriously. Causing time and resources to be diverted to respond to these supposedly "harmless" attacks is itself causing harm. There is no such thing as a benign computer break-in, any more than there is such a thing as a benign home or business break-in.
It seems to me that the time wasted breaking into other people's computers is better spent hacking on systems that we have legitimate access to. Best of all, when you do that you have no FBI raids, no media demonization, and best of all you don't have to sacrifice your intellectual integrity concocting specious arguments to justify behaviors that no real hacker should condone.
The essence of the essay was that folks these days prefer mediated experiences to "real" ones. People want easy-to-digest movies,...
I find this truly depressing because I don't want pre-digested movies and entertainment. Unfortunately, as the predilection for watered-down entertainment becomes more prevalent those of us who want entertainment with substance start to become a niche market. I think Lucas has shown himself quite capable of truly first-class storytelling, and I hope the market for that sort of story has not yet become so marginal that he won't attempt it here.
Put simply, it is an extension of our right to our own life and the products thereof. This is why we can sell our own labor, because it represents a portion of our life and, thus, belongs to us. It is the most basic economic principle, on which all property rights, intellectual or otherwise, are founded. (Ethically, anyway. As you note, there are lots of pragmatic arguments, too.)
I guess I'm not convinced that the right to our own lives extends to ownership of the "products thereof." (I'm not even exactly sure what that term comprises.) So, I would argue that the right to sell my labor derives from my right not to do something if I feel I'm not being adequately compensated, not from any ownership of the products of life.
You continue:
If I spend a weeks farming a piece of land, the crop I produce should belong to me. Why is it any different to claim that if I spend the same time doing research resulting in an invention, I should own that invention? The nature of the fruits of my labor are different, but not the principle.
As I said, I think any analogy to physical artifacts (crops in this case) is flawed. Somebody has to own the crops because only one person can use them. The same is not true of ideas. In other words, the crops and the idea are different only in nature, but that difference is too significant to be swept under the rug.
There is another problem with your analogy as well. Suppose you spend a season laboring over your drawing board and come up with an idea. Elsewhere, somebody else spends a similar amount of labor to come up with the same idea. His idea comes first, but you came up with it without any input from him. Now, why is it that his labor is valuable (i.e. he owns the idea), but yours is not?
I'm going to have to stick by my original statement; intellectual property rights derive from pragmatic concerns, not ethical ones.
The arguments he made... especially in the "ethical" section were poorly formulated, and lacked a basic understading of the bases of intellectual property.
What exactly are the bases of intellectual property? It is not clear to me why having thought of an idea should give a person some sort of ownership over that idea. If so, then why does not independently reinventing an idea give the "reinventor" joint ownership of that idea?
I think that any theory of intellectual property that has as its basis, "I thought of it first so it's mine, and you can't have it unless you pay," is fundamentally flawed because it has at its heart an analogy to physical property. Ideas, however, are not physical artifacts. A physical artifact (say, a Coke bottle dropped from the sky by the gods) in general can only be used by one person at a time for one task at a time. As such, there needs to be some mechanism for deciding who gets to use a physical artifact at any given time. Ownership of property is one way (although not the only way) of doing this.
Now, contrast this with the case of an idea. For one person to take an idea does not deprive another person of the use of that idea, so intellectual property is fundamentally disanalogous to physical property. In fact, in many ways an idea becomes more valuable the more widely it is disseminated both because more people will be able to use the idea and because being exposed to the idea may stimulate further invention. So, the goal of any theory of intellectual property should be to help ensure that ideas are as widely disseminated as possible.
Now, if ideas just came into existence spontaneously this would be an argument against any protection for intellectual property, but ideas don't just pop into existence. People spend time and resources developing and refining them. So, if we want to encourage people to spend time inventing new ideas we have to give some thought to finding a way for them to recoup their investments in developing those ideas. This was, in fact, the basis for intellectual property in the US Constitution:
[Congress shall have the power] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Notice that there is no mention of an inherrent right to own or control one's ideas and inventions; there is only a provision that the government should promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
By and large, patents and copyrights have served their purpose fairly well; however, they need to be reevaluated from time to time and tweaked if necessary to ensure that they continue to serve the purpose of promoting the exchange of ideas. I see several challenges facing intellectual property right now:
What constitutes a patentable invention? It seems to me that some of the patents being granted, especially for software, are overly broad, resembling less a patent on "a device that does X" than a patent on "all devices that do X".
What sort of restraint can an intellectual property owner exercise over the use of his intellectual property? Can he regulate how it is used? How often it is used? By whom? For instance, what about per-use licensing of {text|movies|software}? Should it be considered harmful?
Should intellectual property rights be usable to suppress dissemination of an idea altogether? Consider the article's example of the LotR film. Should intellectual property rights have a "use it or lose it" provision?
Hopefully some balance can be struck between addressing intellectual property's problems and keeping its benefits. Simply throwing it out altogether as the article suggests would, as far as I can tell, fail miserably on the second count.
ComputerWorld and Wired report that DejaNews is discontinuing its policy of tracking click throughs on mailto: links. Click throughs on http: links will apparently still be monitored, but DejaNews is revising its privacy policy statement to clarify just what data is being kept.
In his writeup in Risks 20.36 Richard Smith (one of the folks that reported the tracking policy) points out that keeping too much information poses a risk to the Website or ISP collecting the information as well as to the users who are being monitored. To summarize his argument, the more information these sites collect, the more likely they are to get dragged into a legal dispute that doesn't really involve them directly. So, an argument can be made that respecting users' privacy is beneficial for users and ISPs alike.
These logs have nothing to do with accountability, since my own mail server's logs provide all the accountability necessary. Indeed, DejaNews' logging is trivial to defeat if you know it is there, so it is useless for providing accountability.
Note, also, that anonymity is not at issue here. To see why, let's set up a scenario. Mr. Y is tired of his old job and is looking for a new one. He doesn't want his current employer to know, in case he doesn't find a new job, so he avoids using the company email server for any job searching. Instead he uses his personal account with foo.net to manage all of his correspondence. As part of his search he looks up some Usenet posts on DejaNews, and he responds to several companies and head hunters by clicking their mailto: links.
Now, our hero's employer suspects something is up. (Perhaps he looks bright and cheerful at his new prospects--something unheard of at his company.) He (the employer) checks the company's email logs (within his rights at many companies) and finds nothing unusual. He goes to foo.net and asks to see their mail logs, but they tell him to go scratch; that's against their usage agreement. So, Mr. Y's employer decides to follow up a long shot and contact DejaNews.
Unlike foo.net, DejaNews has no usage agreement with Mr. Y (other than the standard "usage of this site leaves you at our mercy" boilerplate), so they could release this information, and if Mr. Y's employer is willing to pay handsomely they might well do so. Certainly Mr. Y has no guarantee that they won't, and (here's the kicker) DejaNews never warned him that this information was being kept. In fact, they have gone to some pains to hide the fact.
Note in particular that Mr.Y never had any expectation of anonymity; he only expected that his correspondence would not be exposed to traffic analysis by third parties.
So, as I see it, the differences between DejaNews' logging and legitimate system logs are:
1) DejaNews' logs serve no useful security function, and they are redundant with a user's own system's mail logs.
2) DejaNews does not inform its users that these logs are being kept, and logging by the referring agent is not the usual behavior for clicking on a link in a web browser.
3) Unlike a sysadmin for an organization with which a user has a usage agreement DejaNews has no restrictions on how it uses the logs it keeps.
So, in light of these differences, I still maintain that any comparison between these logs and legitimate server logs is specious, and that what DejaNews is doing is an unwarranted invasion of its users' privacy.
Well, there is no log of most of my activities this morning, nor are my fingerprints on file anywhere. Have we started our slide down to anarchy yet?
In fact, this information is collected only when there is a compelling reason to do so. Similarly, when websites collect some information on us, for instance their httpd logs, nobody complains because there are good reasons for the sites to keep these logs. However, DejaNews has no good reason to keep logs of links selected by users of their service. Now, I won't dispute thatthey are within their rights to collect this information, but to do so without warning their users is unconscionable.
You know, there was a day once when you would pay money for a regular old email account...
...or am I the only one who remembers two years ago?
They have to make their money somehow, and if tracking your habits gives them a valid excuse to give you a free email account, stop complaining.
The problem is that the information is collected regardless of whether the user has an email account with DejaNews or not. The idea is that if you click on a link in an article you retrieved from DejaNews, you are not sent to the link you see on the screen. Instead you are sent to a script on the DejaNews site that records whatever statistics they keep and then redirects you to the link you thought you were following. So, in other words, if the highlighted link reads:
Now, this is easy enough to avoid by simply cutting and pasting the displayed URL into your browser's location field, but the point is that most users would not think to do this because there is no indication that the link is anything other than what it appears to be. Regardless of what you think about privacy, collecting this information covertly is, at best, underhanded.
While we're on the topic, several other people have replied comparing this practice to sendmail's logging. I think this analogy is flawed. Sendmail records logs of local activity; these logs are necessary to administer the local mail server. DejaNews, on the other hand has no legitimate reason to keep this information, since the mail is not going through their server. Moreover, if my local administrator misuses the information in the system logs he is accountable under the terms of service that I agreed to when I got my account. No such accountability exists with DejaNews, since I have never made any formal agreement. I find this troubling.
Finally, some people have said that they don't really need privacy, since they don't care if people know who they send mail to. They are welcome to make that choice, but many people do have legitimate reasons for wanting to keep their correspondence private. The burden should not be on them to prove their need for privacy; instead let those who want us to waive our privacy show some compelling reason why we should.
The reason many people have so much trouble saying what GEB is "really" about is that on fine scales it's about a lot of different things: math, music, Zen, wordplay, AI, and so on. However, there is a unifying theme behind all of these topics. In this respect the book is similar to the Bognard problems (BPs)of Chapter XIX. In each BP each panel is about something different, but the real subject isn't spelled out explicitly; it has to be deduced from the "microsubjects."
I don't think it's quite correct to say that "absolutely nobody" can say what GEB is about. It really isn't that hard to figure out, but it does require the reader to think about it a bit. This book is by no means a light read. In this respect it is no different than any other substantial piece of literature (or art, or music, or mathematics, for that matter). Still, if you are willing to put forth the effort, you will be well rewarded. Give yourself a treat: read this book.
Next week: all about the time I was riding my bike around campus and nearly ran over Douglas Hofstadter -- my brush with fame!
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover, you are assuming that suppressing the technology will head off the evil effects, which is patently untrue. It's been over fifty years since the last time a nuclear bomb was detonated in anger; yet millions of people today still know the ravages of war. And people have been causing extinctions (both through hunting and through habitat destruction) for a long time now, even without the excuse of reintroducing clones later on. It seems to me that these problems will be solved not by suppressing new technologies, but by addressing their root causes, which in most cases have little to do with technology.
What I want to know is, why isn't the answer that we as a society should try to behave more ethically, responsibly, and/or intelligently? Heck, there's nobody twisting your arm to make you eat that bacon and omlette, nor to hunt animals for trophies. I mean, if the only thing stopping us from seriously soiling our own nest is that we lack the technology to do so, then we are in real trouble. New technologies are always being invented, and many of them carry the potential for abuse. Must we suppress all of them too?
Furthermore, these technologies do carry potential benefits. Through attempting to reintroduce these species we might learn more, not just about the mechanics of cloning, but also about ecosystems, how they change with the loss of a species, and how they react when that species is reintroduced sometime later. This knowledge could help us to minimize human impact on other ecosystems. Must we forego these benefits simply because the technology has potential for abuse?
I would argue that it is incumbent on us to adapt socially so that we can realize the potential good from new technologies while avoiding the potential evils.
-r
I think you misunderstand the objection people are raising to these degrees. It's not that they're impractical; it's that they're overspecialized. Courses on sf as a part of a literature degree are a Good Thing. A degree program devoted to nothing but sf probably is not, in the same way that a physics program devoted entirely to the Jovian planets is not.
Good stuff. Don't be surprised, however, when your coursework and qualifying exam also cover other types of literature. Even in graduate school the conventional wisdom is that you should have a certain amount of breadth to your studies, if for no other reason than to be able to relate your work to what other people are doing.
I'll ask the same question here that I asked about the video game programming degree. What advantage does this specialized degree offer over a traditional literature degree? Will the students in this program become better sf writers than students that take a traditional literature program and later decide to concentrate in sf? As before, I'm skeptical.
-r
It doesn't make much sense if you assume that all animals' metabolisms are the same. However, by that logic we should be able to digest grass since cows seem to manage it. Rule #1: food for other animals, even other mammals, is not necessarily food for humans.
Rule #2: nature doesn't necessarily follow "common sense"; it is what it is. As for vegans, yes, they can survive and even be healthy without eating meat or animal products. However, they do so by planning their diets very carefully to make sure that they get their nutritional requirements. Assuming that everything you need is "in there somewhere" is a good way to get very sick; I've seen it happen to naive would-be vegans.
Bottom line: if you're thinking about cutting meat (or any of the other traditional components of a "balanced diet", for that matter) out of your diet, make sure you get advice from someone who knows (really knows) what s/he's talking about. If you just make something up and call it "common sense" you're asking for trouble.
-r
Call me old-fashioned, but I am still a big believer in the traditional liberal-arts education. My advice to the aspiring game programmer is to learn good programming fundamentals, learn to write effectively, get a good foundation in mathematics, and get a lot of exposure to history and humanities. In other words, just the things you get in a traditional degree program.
Still, I've seen several posts on Slashdot from people who work in the games industry, and I'd be interested in hearing what they have to say. How about it, guys, do you think the people coming out of this program will make better game designers and programmers? When choosing someone to hire, would you prefer them over graduates of more traditional programs?
-r
This is a completely bogus etymology. The word `history' derives from greek, in which it bears no relation to the greek phrase meaning `his story.'
Now, on to the point at hand:
I think this is a fascinating statement. The implication is that Einstein was the smartest person who ever lived. I think this perception stems more from his status as a pop icon than from the science he did. Make no mistake; Einstien was a smart guy. However, by the early 1900's it was clear that something was wrong with mechanics, and a lot of scientists were working on fixing it. Einstein's theory was the one that turned out to be right, and so it's him we remember 80 years later, but he achieved that result by proceeding according to sound scientific principles, not through some sort of superhuman genius.
So, I think attempting to draw conclusions about human intelligence by examining Einstein's brain alone is misguided. A more valid approach would be to look at brain sizes from a wide cross section of people and try to find a correlation with intelligence; although, as others have pointed out, such a study would be highly dependent on how you define `intelligence.'
-r
Wouldn't it be cheaper just to automate the factory? Moreover, regardless of what the legal status of clones turns out to be, do you think that labor unions would sit still while their members are replaced by slave labor? Given the unions' vigorous opposition to robotic factories I'd say probably not.
I, for one, have a hard time believing this will ever happen. The number of people actively supporting such a use for clones would be small (basically only the people who could afford to use the parts), and the number of people with ethical objections would be huge. I just can't see this one as politically feasible, no matter how technically feasible it might be.
On some level we already practice eugenics as a matter of course. We choose spouses that have qualities that we approve of, and we mate with them, producing offspring that are more likely to have those same qualities. Cloning and genetic engineering just makes the process more efficient. And if Joe Bloggs feels that he is the pinacle of human evolution, and he wants his children to be just like him, well, who is harmed by that. As long as people are still free to have children the ``old fashioned way'' I don't see the problem.
What qualities would these perfect warriors have? The ability to withstand a burst of machine gun fire in the chest, perhaps? I don't think any amount of cloning or genetic engineering is going to give you that. Now, if we just figure out how to bump up the typical person's intelligence, or make him more resistant to disease, well, that seems like a Good Thing to me.
My take on this is that it seems to me that the question of nature vs. nurture invariably gets swept under the rug in the genetic engineering debate. We never really settled that one, and I personally think that a lot of genetic engineers are in for quite a surprise when they find that it isn't as simple as dialing up a desired IQ and pressing enter. Likewise, when you clone someone you get an exact genetic copy, but the person could come out totally different. In that light the entire genetic engineering/cloning debate pretty much begins to look like a tempest in a teapot.
-r
I suppose that's true if you stipulate that you have to be a Jedi to be ``great.'' In the final battle, though, Queen Amidalah took back her own planet with the help of her own people and their new Gungan allies (which she herself recruited). The Jedi functioned mainly to cancel out the Sith that was there mostly because the Jedi were. For all we can tell Queen Amidalah may have had a midichlorian count of epsilon and therefore no Jedi potential at all; so, I don't think Lucas' message is that you have to be a Jedi to be great.
But, truly, I think the medichlorians are a red herring. Just because our heroes are larger than life doesn't mean that we're not meant to identify with them. Sure, they have titanic prowess, but they are beset by titanic forces. We see them tested just as our mortal powers are tested by mortal forces, and it inspires us to carry on the fight. As I said earlier, I think there is room in our mythology for both heroes and everymen.
I'm not sure it is any creepier than Brin's own least common denominator philosophy, but that is a whole other argument.
Nor do I, but I don't think its presence in a story invalidates the story, and sometimes watching people come to terms with their knowledge of their destiny can make for an interesting story in itself.
As others have pointed out, there are other interpretations to the whole anger issue. My personal interpretation is that it is not anger per se that leads to the Dark Side, but rather acting out of anger. That is, the Jedi must strive to control his anger and channel it toward "goodness." For instance, I thought Obi-Wan was visibly angry after Qui-Gon was killed, but he couldn't allow his anger to get the best of him. In the end he mastered it and was able to prevail. So, apparently that particular anger didn't lead to the Dark Side.
That seems reasonable enough to me. However, when I learned informal reasoning I was taught that you should be faithful and charitable to your opponent's argument; otherwise you are knocking down straw men. I think Brin demolished a few straw men in his article -- too many for my tastes.
I disagree here because I don't believe that that's all Brin is doing. He seems to be peddling an alternate Myth of his own, and what's more, he's doing so in such a way as to avoid the kind of scrutiny that he applies to Lucas. Brin's strategy is to oppose his theology with Lucas' and then proceed to trash Star Wars on any grounds he can think of (whether related to "the message" or not). In my book that's a form of rhetorical dirty pool.
-r
One problem with putting this sort of system to practical use is that for most real-world problems parallel scaling only works up to a point; after that your parallel efficiency tends to drop through the floor. It is even possible for a problem to run slower in parallel than it does in serial. As a result, distributed computing efforts tend to gravitate toward the so-called "embarrassingly parallel" problems.
There is also another problem that "researchers on tight budgets" face in using all these spare cycles, which is that often your carefully crafted serial code has to be completely rewritten to get it to work in parallel. This is a lot of work (particularly if your code is some crufty old fortran monstrosity), and even if things go smoothly you have to spend a lot of time testing the new version of the code. Unless you're really hurting for resources it's often not worth the effort. You would probably be better off spending the time and effort writing a proposal for time at one of the national supercomputing centers.
-r
I think David Brin does an excellent job of contrasting George Lucas' style of fiction with David Brin's style of fiction. There is a lot of validity to his obeservations about the differences between a hero story and an everyman story. However, unlike (apparently) David Brin I think there is a place for both in our popular mythology. Now, when an author contrasts his own point of view with someone else's it would be unrealistic to expect him to present a perfectly balanced view; however, I think Brin goes overboard in these articles. The Godwin's Law implications of his Nazi allusions have been mentioned by others, but what I notice is that his treatment of Star Wars is both uncharitable and unfaithful to Lucas' films.
By ``uncharitable,'' I mean that given two or more ways to interpret a passage from the film, Brin invariably chooses the most harmful. For example, the scene: a dysfunctional Senate divided by its internal politics and unable to act decisively in the face of an incipient crisis. Brin interprets this as an indictment of our democratic institutions and a glorification of autocracy. But is it really? Lucas' portrayal of the Senate would be viewed as a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow our democratic institutions to drift too far out of touch with the people they government, perhaps something along the lines of ``Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.''
Another example: Brin interprets Lucas' larger than life heroes as ``demigods.'' The heroes greatness (Brin claims) suggests that we ordinary mortals need not concern ourselves with great matters; we lack the wit and the strength. Okay, but isn't it possible that Lucas (and Homer, and all the rest) meant for us to aspire to be like their heroes. Of course, we will fall short of their greatness, but the only way for us to reach our maximal potential is to aim higher than any mortal could achieve, lest we set our goals too low. I can't say for certain the either of these two interpretations is what Lucas had in mind, but I can't believe that they didn't at least cross Brin's mind; yet, he dismisses them without mention.
Brin is also unfaithful to Lucas' films. That is, he invents specious objections that are not supported by the films themselves. For instance, he lowers Anakin's age, objections to Darth Vader not recognizing C3PO (if they ever met face to face I don't remember it, and protocol droids all look pretty much alike), ascribing the decision to allow Obi-Wan to train Anakin to Yoda (Yoda was against it; he goes along with the council's wishes despite his misgivings--so much for autocracy), and so on. In fact, almost everything beyond Brin's analysis of the hero story vs. the everyman story is based on one sort of strained interpretation of the action on the screen. It says to me that either he did not watch the movies particularly carefully, or that he's digging up mud to create a mood which makes his readers more antagonistic toward Lucas' films, and therefore more receptive toward Brin's own theses.
Now, look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that TPM was a perfect film, nor that Star Wars is a perfect saga. I cringed at the ``medichlorians'' and the virgin birth mumbo-jumbo just like everyone else. I do, however, think it was a fine film, and it deserved better than Brin was giving it here. But, more than that, in what is essentially a political debate over ``elitism'' vs. ``egalitarianism'' I want to see an honest assessment of the two sides. In this respect Brin fails miserably, and I think that such overt proselytizing is far more harmful than whatever message ``the children'' (somehow it's always about protecting the children, isn't it?) may have gotten from TPM.
-r
So, how can Katz pillory the media for making this same mistake? Answer: the media do it out of ignorance, while Katz is deliberately equivocating to draw a specious connection between the criminals the FBI is pursuing (who often make no useful contribution to the hacker community) and the people who ``built the web.''
You see, it's hard to get people worked up over the FBI arresting actual criminals, but if you hint that they're really after the benign sort of ``hacker,'' well, then, that's a different story. Then it's us they're after.
Katz also engages in the most pernicious form of rationalizing when he states that ``Many hackers believe that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality,'' and ``few hackers have ever done any serious damage to government or any other institutions, and have never to my knowledge caused any sort of physical harm to a real human being.'' First, the notion that you have to cause physical harm to a real human being in order to cause any harm at all is ridiculous. Second, implicit in the second statement is the admission that some people do break into systems and cause harm, and this is where the first statement falls down. Since harmful intruders do exist any intrusion must be treated seriously. Causing time and resources to be diverted to respond to these supposedly "harmless" attacks is itself causing harm. There is no such thing as a benign computer break-in, any more than there is such a thing as a benign home or business break-in.
It seems to me that the time wasted breaking into other people's computers is better spent hacking on systems that we have legitimate access to. Best of all, when you do that you have no FBI raids, no media demonization, and best of all you don't have to sacrifice your intellectual integrity concocting specious arguments to justify behaviors that no real hacker should condone.
-r
I find this truly depressing because I don't want pre-digested movies and entertainment. Unfortunately, as the predilection for watered-down entertainment becomes more prevalent those of us who want entertainment with substance start to become a niche market. I think Lucas has shown himself quite capable of truly first-class storytelling, and I hope the market for that sort of story has not yet become so marginal that he won't attempt it here.
-r
I guess I'm not convinced that the right to our own lives extends to ownership of the "products thereof." (I'm not even exactly sure what that term comprises.) So, I would argue that the right to sell my labor derives from my right not to do something if I feel I'm not being adequately compensated, not from any ownership of the products of life.
You continue:
As I said, I think any analogy to physical artifacts (crops in this case) is flawed. Somebody has to own the crops because only one person can use them. The same is not true of ideas. In other words, the crops and the idea are different only in nature, but that difference is too significant to be swept under the rug.
There is another problem with your analogy as well. Suppose you spend a season laboring over your drawing board and come up with an idea. Elsewhere, somebody else spends a similar amount of labor to come up with the same idea. His idea comes first, but you came up with it without any input from him. Now, why is it that his labor is valuable (i.e. he owns the idea), but yours is not?
I'm going to have to stick by my original statement; intellectual property rights derive from pragmatic concerns, not ethical ones.
-r
What exactly are the bases of intellectual property? It is not clear to me why having thought of an idea should give a person some sort of ownership over that idea. If so, then why does not independently reinventing an idea give the "reinventor" joint ownership of that idea?
I think that any theory of intellectual property that has as its basis, "I thought of it first so it's mine, and you can't have it unless you pay," is fundamentally flawed because it has at its heart an analogy to physical property. Ideas, however, are not physical artifacts. A physical artifact (say, a Coke bottle dropped from the sky by the gods) in general can only be used by one person at a time for one task at a time. As such, there needs to be some mechanism for deciding who gets to use a physical artifact at any given time. Ownership of property is one way (although not the only way) of doing this.
Now, contrast this with the case of an idea. For one person to take an idea does not deprive another person of the use of that idea, so intellectual property is fundamentally disanalogous to physical property. In fact, in many ways an idea becomes more valuable the more widely it is disseminated both because more people will be able to use the idea and because being exposed to the idea may stimulate further invention. So, the goal of any theory of intellectual property should be to help ensure that ideas are as widely disseminated as possible.
Now, if ideas just came into existence spontaneously this would be an argument against any protection for intellectual property, but ideas don't just pop into existence. People spend time and resources developing and refining them. So, if we want to encourage people to spend time inventing new ideas we have to give some thought to finding a way for them to recoup their investments in developing those ideas.
This was, in fact, the basis for intellectual property in the US Constitution:
Notice that there is no mention of an inherrent right to own or control one's ideas and inventions; there is only a provision that the government should promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
By and large, patents and copyrights have served their purpose fairly well; however, they need to be reevaluated from time to time and tweaked if necessary to ensure that they continue to serve the purpose of promoting the exchange of ideas. I see several challenges facing intellectual property right now:
Hopefully some balance can be struck between addressing intellectual property's problems and keeping its benefits. Simply throwing it out altogether as the article suggests would, as far as I can tell, fail miserably on the second count.
-r
In his writeup in Risks 20.36 Richard Smith (one of the folks that reported the tracking policy) points out that keeping too much information poses a risk to the Website or ISP collecting the information as well as to the users who are being monitored. To summarize his argument, the more information these sites collect, the more likely they are to get dragged into a legal dispute that doesn't really involve them directly. So, an argument can be made that respecting users' privacy is beneficial for users and ISPs alike.
-r
Note, also, that anonymity is not at issue here. To see why, let's set up a scenario. Mr. Y is tired of his old job and is looking for a new one. He doesn't want his current employer to know, in case he doesn't find a new job, so he avoids using the company email server for any job searching. Instead he uses his personal account with foo.net to manage all of his correspondence. As part of his search he looks up some Usenet posts on DejaNews, and he responds to several companies and head hunters by clicking their mailto: links.
Now, our hero's employer suspects something is up. (Perhaps he looks bright and cheerful at his new prospects--something unheard of at his company.) He (the employer) checks the company's email logs (within his rights at many companies) and finds nothing unusual. He goes to foo.net and asks to see their mail logs, but they tell him to go scratch; that's against their usage agreement. So, Mr. Y's employer decides to follow up a long shot and contact DejaNews.
Unlike foo.net, DejaNews has no usage agreement with Mr. Y (other than the standard "usage of this site leaves you at our mercy" boilerplate), so they could release this information, and if Mr. Y's employer is willing to pay handsomely they might well do so. Certainly Mr. Y has no guarantee that they won't, and (here's the kicker) DejaNews never warned him that this information was being kept. In fact, they have gone to some pains to hide the fact.
Note in particular that Mr.Y never had any expectation of anonymity; he only expected that his correspondence would not be exposed to traffic analysis by third parties.
So, as I see it, the differences between DejaNews' logging and legitimate system logs are:
1) DejaNews' logs serve no useful security function, and they are redundant with a user's own system's mail logs.
2) DejaNews does not inform its users that these logs are being kept, and logging by the referring agent is not the usual behavior for clicking on a link in a web browser.
3) Unlike a sysadmin for an organization with which a user has a usage agreement DejaNews has no restrictions on how it uses the logs it keeps.
So, in light of these differences, I still maintain that any comparison between these logs and legitimate server logs is specious, and that what DejaNews is doing is an unwarranted invasion of its users' privacy.
-r
In fact, this information is collected only when there is a compelling reason to do so. Similarly, when websites collect some information on us, for instance their httpd logs, nobody complains because there are good reasons for the sites to keep these logs. However, DejaNews has no good reason to keep logs of links selected by users of their service. Now, I won't dispute thatthey are within their rights to collect this information, but to do so without warning their users is unconscionable.
The problem is that the information is collected regardless of whether the user has an email account with DejaNews or not. The idea is that if you click on a link in an article you retrieved from DejaNews, you are not sent to the link you see on the screen. Instead you are sent to a script on the DejaNews site that records whatever statistics they keep and then redirects you to the link you thought you were following. So, in other words, if the highlighted link reads:
http://mailto:rlink@indiana.edu
The actual link is:
http://x12.dejanews.com/jump/mailto:rlink@india
Now, this is easy enough to avoid by simply cutting and pasting the displayed URL into your browser's location field, but the point is that most users would not think to do this because there is no indication that the link is anything other than what it appears to be. Regardless of what you think about privacy, collecting this information covertly is, at best, underhanded.
While we're on the topic, several other people have replied comparing this practice to sendmail's logging. I think this analogy is flawed. Sendmail records logs of local activity; these logs are necessary to administer the local mail server. DejaNews, on the other hand has no legitimate reason to keep this information, since the mail is not going through their server. Moreover, if my local administrator misuses the information in the system logs he is accountable under the terms of service that I agreed to when I got my account. No such accountability exists with DejaNews, since I have never made any formal agreement. I find this troubling.
Finally, some people have said that they don't really need privacy, since they don't care if people know who they send mail to. They are welcome to make that choice, but many people do have legitimate reasons for wanting to keep their correspondence private. The burden should not be on them to prove their need for privacy; instead let those who want us to waive our privacy show some compelling reason why we should.
-r
I don't think it's quite correct to say that "absolutely nobody" can say what GEB is about. It really isn't that hard to figure out, but it does require the reader to think about it a bit. This book is by no means a light read. In this respect it is no different than any other substantial piece of literature (or art, or music, or mathematics, for that matter). Still, if you are willing to put forth the effort, you will be well rewarded. Give yourself a treat: read this book.
Next week: all about the time I was riding my bike around campus and nearly ran over Douglas Hofstadter -- my brush with fame!