Excuse me but that is just plain bullshit.
It is actually quite normal for planes to crash every now and then, therefore it is most likely to be an accident.
However, through your statement all you are doing is spreading fear. Simply by doing that you are *helping* terrorists, as spreading fear is (by definition) their main objective.
Stay cool. The chance of getting hit by a terrorist attack is smaller than the chance of getting hit by a 4WD because the driver was so afraid of being hit by a terrorist that he/she was not paying attention.
A) US is *not* a free country
example1:
-say that you are a communist you will be shot or end up in jail.
-say that you are KKK, nazi, anti-negro etc and you will have 'freedom of speech'
example2: DMCA
example3: your voting system
US is free only for the rich to get even richer.
B) I'm no American (thank heaven for that)
Just because you allow insane idiots to spread their insanity around does not make anything free.
One thing that sets M$ Office apart from the many others is that it comes with a database included. (Gobe does not have one).
As much as I dislike M$ policies, Access is still a good low-end database product (does MySQL have an easy-to-use GUI build in??) that is definitely unmatched in any of its rivals.
Yes, we *can* maintain digital information much better then we can maintain paper info. The problem is that we don't do it.
The good thing about paper is that it will be readable for a very long time WITHOUT anyone bothering with it. If you have CD or whatever you need to backup/alter your data at least every 20 years to keep up with technology. This seems OK for one CD, but what if it comes to the entire historical record?
To give an example: lots of data from the Vietnam war was kept on 1960-technology digital equipment. This resulted in a total loss of data as there is not a single machine left that can read that info back
I haven't seen any Xboxes in the store yet. What is the point of advertising an upgrade to a product that hasn't been sold yet? Why would people buy the Xbox when they can apparently wait a few monts to get a much better version?
For your pleasure:
At the moment there is a very high risk of infection in the third world through the use of dirty needles. Needles are *very* cheap compared to blood (even if it's stemcell freeze-dried multipack discount-of-the-day blood).
If they can't afford needles, what makes you think they can afford US-made blood?
Saying that a technology does not work to solve a particular problem is not the same as pessimism. Saying that a technology *does* solve a problem even though it probably won't, not only inhibits further work into this problem area (because the 'solution' is already there) it also gives false hope to the people actually having the problem.
What we are talking about is *not* basic drugs. For instance: antibiotics can be kept in powder at room temperature for a long time. Blood cells will have to be kept on cold, and have a short life span.
Did you not read about the AIDS medicines in Africa? If you consider those 'basic drugs' how do you explain Africa is unable to afford them? Pharmaceutical companies are no charity mate.
What we consider basic lab environments in Europe and the US is usually equipment third world countries cannot afford (a reasonable centrifuge costs about $7000, and that's probably the cheapest instrument you'll need). An uninterupted stable power supply is pretty essential too.
Your dreams are nice, but unfortunately they are dreams.
You do not understand patents. a US patent is only valid in the US, not anywhere else. In africa there are no patents whatsoweve. My point is Africa does not have the facilities or the money to set up a stem cell plant
Is your evidence for the possibiliy of changing your SSN the fact that it's done in a movie???
Sheesh.
I sure hope you haven't seen 'deep impact' or godzilla.
Yes
If it wasn't for the fact that the countries that have a shortage of blood and trouble with AIDS in transfusions are exactly those countries that cannot afford to grown stem cells. Therefore all it does is make life in the US (and europe) cheaper. This will *not* alter the living conditions in poor countries!
Actually no
Taylorising is making the proces as efficient as possible by analising all the steps and finding out the most efficient way to perform each step. This will also give you more effieincy, but in the computerworld that should be compared to re-examining the keyboard and placing the most-used keys in placed where they can be accessed the easiest (for windows: placing CTRL-ALT-DEL in the middle). Taylorising will get you RSI, that's for sure.
For the same amount of money you can make awesome pictures of Africa without any national debts or children starving.
Really, the costs going to these space projects is just insane. Where are our priorities?
Ford discover this a long time ago while setting up the production line: If the task you perform is as simple as possible (i.e. the same thing all of the time) the efficiency is the highest.
I guess you are right.
Now that I have seen my error, can I correct it by withdrawing my post? Can anyone tell me how?
(This is not intended as a troll)
AN DIEGO -- VERNOR VINGE, a computer scientist at San Diego State University, was one of the first not only to understand the power of computer networks but also to paint elaborate scenarios about their effects on society. He has long argued that machine intelligence will someday soon outstrip human intelligence.
But Dr. Vinge does not publish technical papers on those topics. He writes science fiction.
And in turning computer fact into published fiction, Dr. Vinge (pronounced VIN-jee) has developed a readership so convinced of his prescience that businesses seek his help in envisioning and navigating the decades to come.
"Vernor can live, as few can, in the future," said Lawrence Wilkinson, co-founder of Global Business Network, which specializes in corporate planning. "He can imagine extensions and elaborations on reality that aren't provable, of course, but that are consistent with what we know."
Dr. Vinge's 1992 novel, "A Fire Upon the Deep" (Tor Books), which won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction, is a grand "space opera" set 40,000 years in a future filled with unfathomable distances, the destruction of entire planetary systems and doglike aliens. A reviewer in The Washington Post (news/quote) called it "a wide-screen science fiction epic of the type few writers attempt any more, probably because nobody until Vinge has ever done it well."
But computers, not aliens, were at the center of the work that put Dr. Vinge on the science fiction map -- "True Names," a 30,000-word novella that offered a vision of a networked world. It was published in 1981, long before most people had heard of the Internet and a year before William Gibson's story "Burning Chrome" coined the term that has come to describe such a world: cyberspace.
For years, even as its renown has grown, "True Names" has been out of print and hard to find. Now it is being reissued by Tor Books in "True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier," a collection of stories and essays by computer scientists that is due out in December.
"True Names" is the tale of Mr. Slippery, a computer vandal who is caught by the government and pressed into service to stop a threat greater than himself. The story portrays a world rife with pseudonymous characters and other elements of online life that now seem almost ho-hum. In retrospect, it was prophetic.
"The import of `True Names,' " wrote Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, in an afterword to an early edition of the work, "is that it is about how we cope with things we don't understand."
And computers are at the center of Dr. Vinge's vision of the challenges that the coming decades will bring. A linchpin of his thinking is what he calls the "technological singularity," a point at which the intelligence of machines takes a huge leap, and they come to possess capabilities that exceed those of humans. As a result, ultra- intelligent machines become capable of upgrading themselves, humans cease to be the primary players, and the future becomes unknowable.
Dr. Vinge sees the singularity as probable if not inevitable, most likely arriving between 2020 and 2040.
Indeed, any conversation with Dr. Vinge, 56, inevitably turns to the singularity. It is a preoccupation he recognizes with self-effacing humor as "my usual shtick."
Although he has written extensively about the singularity as a scientific concept, he is humble about laying intellectual claim to it. In fact, with titles like "Approximation by Faber Polynomials for a Class of Jordan Domains" and "Teaching FORTH on a VAX," Dr. Vinge's academic papers bear little resemblance to the topics he chooses for his fiction.
"The ideas about the singularity and the future of computation are things that basically occurred to me on the basis of my experience of what I know about computers," he said.
"And although that is at a professional level, it's not because of some great research insight I had or even a not-so-great research insight I had. It's because I've been watching these things and I like to think about where things could go."
Dr. Vinge readily concedes that his worldview has been shaped by science fiction, which he has been reading and writing since childhood. His dream, he said, was to be a scientist, and "the science fiction was just part of the dreaming."
Trained as a mathematician, Dr. Vinge said he did not begin "playing with real computers" until the early 1970's, after he had started teaching at San Diego State. His teaching gradually shifted to computer science, focusing on computer networks and distributed systems. He received tenure in 1977.
"Teaching networks and operating systems was a constant source of story inspiration," Dr. Vinge said. The idea for "True Names" came from an exchange he had one day in the late 1970's while using an early form of instant messaging called Talk.
"Suddenly I was accosted by another user via the Talk program," he recalled. "We chatted briefly, each trying to figure out the other's true name. Finally I gave up and told the other person I had to go -- that I was actually a personality simulator, and if I kept talking, my artificial nature would become obvious. Afterwards I realized that I had just lived a science fiction story."
Computers and artificial intelligence are, of course, at the center of much science fiction, including the current Steven Spielberg film, "A.I." In the Spielberg vision, a robotic boy achieves a different sort of singularity: parity with humans not just in intelligence but in emotion, too. "To me, the big leap of faith is to make that little boy," Dr. Vinge said. "We don't have evidence of progress toward that. If it ever happens, there will be a runaway effect, and getting to something a whole lot better than human will happen really fast."
How fast? "Maybe 36 hours," Dr. Vinge replied.
Dr. Vinge's own work has yet to make it to the screen, although "True Names" has been under option for five years. "It's been a long story of my trying to convince studio executives to really consider the work seriously because it seemed so far out," said David Baxter, a Hollywood writer and producer who is writing the screenplay with Mark Pesce, co-creator of Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML. "But as time has passed, the world has started to match what was in the book."
In the meantime Dr. Vinge has been providing scenarios in the corporate world as well. He is one of several science fiction writers who have worked with Global Business Network in anticipating future situations and plotting strategies for several major companies.
Mr. Wilkinson, the co-founder of Global Business Network, said that Dr. Vinge's work with the group provided "an unbelievably fertile perspective from which to look back at and reunderstand the present."
"It's that ability to conceptualize whole new ways of framing issues, whole new contexts that could emerge," Mr. Wilkinson said. "In the process he has contributed to the turnarounds of at least two well-known technology companies."
Dr. Vinge, shy and reserved, is hardly a self-promoter. He scrupulously assigns credit to others whenever he can. And although he insists that much of his work is highly derivative, his fans do not necessarily share that view.
"The thing that distinguishes Vernor is he's a scientist and all of his stuff makes sense," Mr. Baxter said. "It's all grounded in the here and now."
Dr. Vinge is now a professor emeritus at San Diego State, having retired to devote his time to his writing and consulting. Over lunch at a restaurant not far from the university, he described a story he was working on.
"Well, there's a recovering Alzheimer's patient," Dr. Vinge began, before being interrupted and asked how one could be a recovering Alzheimer's patient.
His eyes brightened. "You can't," he said, and a sly smile crossed his face. "Yet."
Nope
The cells are sent around for free.
It's the technology around it that is the industry. If the family starts whining they'll just take cells from somebody else. It's not like this woman is very special. She just happened to be around when a scientist needed a cell culture. He could have taken them from anyone.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry because scientist work with these cells, and those scientist have to be paid (GNU's not University). That's where the mony is going. NOBODY is paying royalties to the scientist who happened to isolate these cells. You pay royalties to people to studied the cells (which costs money) and found an application with these cells.
tsk.
compensating the family?? for WHAT?
They've taken cells out of the body to check for cancer, as they do with all cancer patients. Only difference is that they kept propagating the cells. WHY do we have to pay the family of this woman? Did they suffer in any way from this???
If I die of cancer, and scientist manage to use my cells after my death to study and cure other cancer patients, that is more compensation then I could hope for!
also: this had *nothing* to do with patenting genes! That line is just added to create some extra hysteria among the masses who just do not understand how all this biotecho goes.
At first glance I thought "Oh no, these guys are going to get a nasty lawyergram from Macrovision, RIAA, etc."
Didn't you read? It was a European company. In Europe there is no RIAA, no Macrovision, no Bullshit =).
In a global structure, like the net, location-bound laws just don't work.
Isn't this always the case..
The more people you piss off by inventing some restriction, the higher the chance is somebody smart is going to crack it. Therefore protection on mass media (film, music etc) or popular software (Office suites, games) will not ever work. As we see now.....
Slashdot Mirror
" Airplane crash == terrorist attack"
Excuse me but that is just plain bullshit.
It is actually quite normal for planes to crash every now and then, therefore it is most likely to be an accident.
However, through your statement all you are doing is spreading fear. Simply by doing that you are *helping* terrorists, as spreading fear is (by definition) their main objective.
Stay cool. The chance of getting hit by a terrorist attack is smaller than the chance of getting hit by a 4WD because the driver was so afraid of being hit by a terrorist that he/she was not paying attention.
A) US is *not* a free country
example1:
-say that you are a communist you will be shot or end up in jail.
-say that you are KKK, nazi, anti-negro etc and you will have 'freedom of speech'
example2: DMCA
example3: your voting system
US is free only for the rich to get even richer.
B) I'm no American (thank heaven for that)
Just because you allow insane idiots to spread their insanity around does not make anything free.
It's a nice surprise to have a sensible ruling come out of a federal court
I see *no* niceness whatsoever when it comes to spreading nazi shit around any piece of the globe.
(This is apart from the fact that I believe that, if the opposite was the case, the US would be bombing France by now....)
One thing that sets M$ Office apart from the many others is that it comes with a database included. (Gobe does not have one).
As much as I dislike M$ policies, Access is still a good low-end database product (does MySQL have an easy-to-use GUI build in??) that is definitely unmatched in any of its rivals.
Will you backup ALL your photo's every 5 year?
Because if you don't you won't be able to access your stuff anymore. How is that for cheap...
Yes, we *can* maintain digital information much better then we can maintain paper info. The problem is that we don't do it.
The good thing about paper is that it will be readable for a very long time WITHOUT anyone bothering with it. If you have CD or whatever you need to backup/alter your data at least every 20 years to keep up with technology. This seems OK for one CD, but what if it comes to the entire historical record?
To give an example: lots of data from the Vietnam war was kept on 1960-technology digital equipment. This resulted in a total loss of data as there is not a single machine left that can read that info back
I haven't seen any Xboxes in the store yet. What is the point of advertising an upgrade to a product that hasn't been sold yet? Why would people buy the Xbox when they can apparently wait a few monts to get a much better version?
For your pleasure:
At the moment there is a very high risk of infection in the third world through the use of dirty needles. Needles are *very* cheap compared to blood (even if it's stemcell freeze-dried multipack discount-of-the-day blood).
If they can't afford needles, what makes you think they can afford US-made blood?
Saying that a technology does not work to solve a particular problem is not the same as pessimism. Saying that a technology *does* solve a problem even though it probably won't, not only inhibits further work into this problem area (because the 'solution' is already there) it also gives false hope to the people actually having the problem.
What we are talking about is *not* basic drugs. For instance: antibiotics can be kept in powder at room temperature for a long time. Blood cells will have to be kept on cold, and have a short life span.
Did you not read about the AIDS medicines in Africa? If you consider those 'basic drugs' how do you explain Africa is unable to afford them? Pharmaceutical companies are no charity mate.
What we consider basic lab environments in Europe and the US is usually equipment third world countries cannot afford (a reasonable centrifuge costs about $7000, and that's probably the cheapest instrument you'll need). An uninterupted stable power supply is pretty essential too.
Your dreams are nice, but unfortunately they are dreams.
You do not understand patents. a US patent is only valid in the US, not anywhere else. In africa there are no patents whatsoweve. My point is Africa does not have the facilities or the money to set up a stem cell plant
Is your evidence for the possibiliy of changing your SSN the fact that it's done in a movie???
Sheesh.
I sure hope you haven't seen 'deep impact' or godzilla.
Yes
If it wasn't for the fact that the countries that have a shortage of blood and trouble with AIDS in transfusions are exactly those countries that cannot afford to grown stem cells. Therefore all it does is make life in the US (and europe) cheaper. This will *not* alter the living conditions in poor countries!
actually it does not
It keeps you focussed for a longer time period. That's not the same thing
I've tried quite a few distro's and I've stuck to Redhat and Mandrake because:
-lots of Deja.com questions
-lots of hardcopy books
Actually no
Taylorising is making the proces as efficient as possible by analising all the steps and finding out the most efficient way to perform each step. This will also give you more effieincy, but in the computerworld that should be compared to re-examining the keyboard and placing the most-used keys in placed where they can be accessed the easiest (for windows: placing CTRL-ALT-DEL in the middle). Taylorising will get you RSI, that's for sure.
For the same amount of money you can make awesome pictures of Africa without any national debts or children starving.
Really, the costs going to these space projects is just insane. Where are our priorities?
Ford discover this a long time ago while setting up the production line: If the task you perform is as simple as possible (i.e. the same thing all of the time) the efficiency is the highest.
I guess you are right.
Now that I have seen my error, can I correct it by withdrawing my post? Can anyone tell me how?
(This is not intended as a troll)
AN DIEGO -- VERNOR VINGE, a computer scientist at San Diego State University, was one of the first not only to understand the power of computer networks but also to paint elaborate scenarios about their effects on society. He has long argued that machine intelligence will someday soon outstrip human intelligence.
But Dr. Vinge does not publish technical papers on those topics. He writes science fiction.
And in turning computer fact into published fiction, Dr. Vinge (pronounced VIN-jee) has developed a readership so convinced of his prescience that businesses seek his help in envisioning and navigating the decades to come.
"Vernor can live, as few can, in the future," said Lawrence Wilkinson, co-founder of Global Business Network, which specializes in corporate planning. "He can imagine extensions and elaborations on reality that aren't provable, of course, but that are consistent with what we know."
Dr. Vinge's 1992 novel, "A Fire Upon the Deep" (Tor Books), which won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction, is a grand "space opera" set 40,000 years in a future filled with unfathomable distances, the destruction of entire planetary systems and doglike aliens. A reviewer in The Washington Post (news/quote) called it "a wide-screen science fiction epic of the type few writers attempt any more, probably because nobody until Vinge has ever done it well."
But computers, not aliens, were at the center of the work that put Dr. Vinge on the science fiction map -- "True Names," a 30,000-word novella that offered a vision of a networked world. It was published in 1981, long before most people had heard of the Internet and a year before William Gibson's story "Burning Chrome" coined the term that has come to describe such a world: cyberspace.
For years, even as its renown has grown, "True Names" has been out of print and hard to find. Now it is being reissued by Tor Books in "True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier," a collection of stories and essays by computer scientists that is due out in December.
"True Names" is the tale of Mr. Slippery, a computer vandal who is caught by the government and pressed into service to stop a threat greater than himself. The story portrays a world rife with pseudonymous characters and other elements of online life that now seem almost ho-hum. In retrospect, it was prophetic.
"The import of `True Names,' " wrote Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, in an afterword to an early edition of the work, "is that it is about how we cope with things we don't understand."
And computers are at the center of Dr. Vinge's vision of the challenges that the coming decades will bring. A linchpin of his thinking is what he calls the "technological singularity," a point at which the intelligence of machines takes a huge leap, and they come to possess capabilities that exceed those of humans. As a result, ultra- intelligent machines become capable of upgrading themselves, humans cease to be the primary players, and the future becomes unknowable.
Dr. Vinge sees the singularity as probable if not inevitable, most likely arriving between 2020 and 2040.
Indeed, any conversation with Dr. Vinge, 56, inevitably turns to the singularity. It is a preoccupation he recognizes with self-effacing humor as "my usual shtick."
Although he has written extensively about the singularity as a scientific concept, he is humble about laying intellectual claim to it. In fact, with titles like "Approximation by Faber Polynomials for a Class of Jordan Domains" and "Teaching FORTH on a VAX," Dr. Vinge's academic papers bear little resemblance to the topics he chooses for his fiction.
"The ideas about the singularity and the future of computation are things that basically occurred to me on the basis of my experience of what I know about computers," he said.
"And although that is at a professional level, it's not because of some great research insight I had or even a not-so-great research insight I had. It's because I've been watching these things and I like to think about where things could go."
Dr. Vinge readily concedes that his worldview has been shaped by science fiction, which he has been reading and writing since childhood. His dream, he said, was to be a scientist, and "the science fiction was just part of the dreaming."
Trained as a mathematician, Dr. Vinge said he did not begin "playing with real computers" until the early 1970's, after he had started teaching at San Diego State. His teaching gradually shifted to computer science, focusing on computer networks and distributed systems. He received tenure in 1977.
"Teaching networks and operating systems was a constant source of story inspiration," Dr. Vinge said. The idea for "True Names" came from an exchange he had one day in the late 1970's while using an early form of instant messaging called Talk.
"Suddenly I was accosted by another user via the Talk program," he recalled. "We chatted briefly, each trying to figure out the other's true name. Finally I gave up and told the other person I had to go -- that I was actually a personality simulator, and if I kept talking, my artificial nature would become obvious. Afterwards I realized that I had just lived a science fiction story."
Computers and artificial intelligence are, of course, at the center of much science fiction, including the current Steven Spielberg film, "A.I." In the Spielberg vision, a robotic boy achieves a different sort of singularity: parity with humans not just in intelligence but in emotion, too. "To me, the big leap of faith is to make that little boy," Dr. Vinge said. "We don't have evidence of progress toward that. If it ever happens, there will be a runaway effect, and getting to something a whole lot better than human will happen really fast."
How fast? "Maybe 36 hours," Dr. Vinge replied.
Dr. Vinge's own work has yet to make it to the screen, although "True Names" has been under option for five years. "It's been a long story of my trying to convince studio executives to really consider the work seriously because it seemed so far out," said David Baxter, a Hollywood writer and producer who is writing the screenplay with Mark Pesce, co-creator of Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML. "But as time has passed, the world has started to match what was in the book."
In the meantime Dr. Vinge has been providing scenarios in the corporate world as well. He is one of several science fiction writers who have worked with Global Business Network in anticipating future situations and plotting strategies for several major companies.
Mr. Wilkinson, the co-founder of Global Business Network, said that Dr. Vinge's work with the group provided "an unbelievably fertile perspective from which to look back at and reunderstand the present."
"It's that ability to conceptualize whole new ways of framing issues, whole new contexts that could emerge," Mr. Wilkinson said. "In the process he has contributed to the turnarounds of at least two well-known technology companies."
Dr. Vinge, shy and reserved, is hardly a self-promoter. He scrupulously assigns credit to others whenever he can. And although he insists that much of his work is highly derivative, his fans do not necessarily share that view.
"The thing that distinguishes Vernor is he's a scientist and all of his stuff makes sense," Mr. Baxter said. "It's all grounded in the here and now."
Dr. Vinge is now a professor emeritus at San Diego State, having retired to devote his time to his writing and consulting. Over lunch at a restaurant not far from the university, he described a story he was working on.
"Well, there's a recovering Alzheimer's patient," Dr. Vinge began, before being interrupted and asked how one could be a recovering Alzheimer's patient.
His eyes brightened. "You can't," he said, and a sly smile crossed his face. "Yet."
Nope
The cells are sent around for free.
It's the technology around it that is the industry. If the family starts whining they'll just take cells from somebody else. It's not like this woman is very special. She just happened to be around when a scientist needed a cell culture. He could have taken them from anyone.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry because scientist work with these cells, and those scientist have to be paid (GNU's not University). That's where the mony is going. NOBODY is paying royalties to the scientist who happened to isolate these cells. You pay royalties to people to studied the cells (which costs money) and found an application with these cells.
tsk.
compensating the family?? for WHAT?
They've taken cells out of the body to check for cancer, as they do with all cancer patients. Only difference is that they kept propagating the cells. WHY do we have to pay the family of this woman? Did they suffer in any way from this???
If I die of cancer, and scientist manage to use my cells after my death to study and cure other cancer patients, that is more compensation then I could hope for!
also: this had *nothing* to do with patenting genes! That line is just added to create some extra hysteria among the masses who just do not understand how all this biotecho goes.
At first glance I thought "Oh no, these guys are going to get a nasty lawyergram from Macrovision, RIAA, etc."
Didn't you read? It was a European company. In Europe there is no RIAA, no Macrovision, no Bullshit =). In a global structure, like the net, location-bound laws just don't work.
There goes my karma...
Isn't this always the case..
The more people you piss off by inventing some restriction, the higher the chance is somebody smart is going to crack it. Therefore protection on mass media (film, music etc) or popular software (Office suites, games) will not ever work. As we see now.....
For Exploder and Netscape there is Adsubtract(.com) which work flawlessly and it's free for home use. Doen't work in Opera5 though
the GPL version is not the same as the other versions in that Borland took quite a few features out of it.