I think timmarhy has a very valid point - I don't know of many religions, vertainly not in the West, where the physical remains of a person are of any significance, even if you believe in life after death in some form. And I find it deeply revolting to see how the burial industry preys on people when they are most likely to be vulnerable.
On a personal note - I have indicated very clearly to my children that I don't want them to spend money on cemetries and memorials. Instead I want to be cremated; then they can split the ashes and bury them under a bush or whatever they feel like. That will be cheap and straight forward, and it will give them a lasting memory if they want it. Or feed the body to the vultures, like in India. At least they only go after the dead remains, not the bereaved when they are most vulnerable.
So, you wouldn't mind turning one towards your eye and giving yourself a blast, right?
Your comment about melting ice-cubes is of course nonsense. The energy required for the phase-change from ice to water is quite surprisingly high, as you ought to know - I'm sure they teach that in school even nowadays. And the damage to the eyes is not because of the heat energy deposited, but because the nerve cells in your retina can't take the overload; same as with looking at the sun - the sun's light doesn't burn or overheat the nerve cells, but they make you blind none the less.
While we're at it, let's ban bright beams so drivers can't be blinded either! Most countries have clear restrictions on how bright your headlights can be, as a matter of fact. But quite apart from that, a laser pen can inflict permanent damage on a person's eyes, making them blind, which is why there is good reason to put restrictions on them. Seeing how you Americans are paranoid about terrorist getting into the country, you shouldn't have any qualms about this one - a laserpen is small enough to pose as a normal pen and can potentially cause trafic accidents, plane crashes etc.
So even if you don't care that irresponsible idiots could intentionally or accidentally blind people - including you - you should be able to see the sense in this.
I remember the days of the Cultural Revolution and the cold war; everybody in the West agreed that the Chinese people was being oppressed and the they would, all as one, welcome us if we came and liberated them. The best that could happen, we were told, was if they got Democracy (TM) and Capitalism (TM) and Opened Up (TM) to the world - now that they opened up and introduced capitalism and are on the way to democracy, everybody is howling because they have turned out to be bloody good at what they do and we have a hard time competing.
In recent years we have been hearing loads about how the Chinese government controls all aspects of the news, and if the Chinese people knew what really went on, they would turn against the evil government etc etc. This view doesn't quite add up, of course, not when you consider how easy it is to circumnavigate the so-called 'Great Firewall' - and now it turns out that not only are the Chinese not so cut off from the world news as we've been told, but they actually support their government.
Isn't it time that we in the West - and especially in the US - stopped imagining things about what people in other countries want, and instead look at the facts. The Chinese like their way of life, they support their government and agree with most of their government's policies. Haven't we already learned a little bit of humility from what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq? Neither the Iraqis not the Afghanis have turned out be overly eager to embrace The American Way. So what if their world view seems radically different from ours? They prefer their own way, same as us, and they weren't really trying to force it on us.
Why doesn't anyone over here see that when we barge in with harsh and insulting criticism, and talk about forcing our lifestyle and views on them, we can only be seen as enemies? If there is anything that can drive people away from us and into the arms of radicals, it is if they feel under serious threat from us. So, back to China: do we want the whole population of China to unite under a radical and possibly aggressive form of Communism/Nationalism? It is not an impossible scenario - the Chinese are rightly proud of what they have achieved, and they are beginning to feel that we are trying to deny them their rightful place in the world.
It is possible that we have more and bigger weapons than them, but believe you me, we don't want an all out confontation with China. So let us turn around and moderate our language and attitudes just a bit. We can still have our opinions and express them, but there is such a thing as being responsible and mature.
Hey, calm down a bit. First of all - they all do this. Haven't you ever noticed how certain kinds of traffic is obnoxiously slow? So Branston is saying that Virgin too do this. The big news is that he has the guts to tell it as it is. Maybe it would be worth looking at what kind of price plans he has in mind - perhaps you can pay a little bit more for your subscription and get better bandwidth, or something like that. As things are at the moment there are some bandwidth-hogs that pay the same cheap price as everyone else and almost blocks everybody else out at times.
It's truly sad that the fear of losing our jobs and the necessity of supporting our families comes first before the security of highly confidential information. I'm not sure I can see it as "sad". Life in general and business in particular consists of taking calculated risks. If we are too paranoid to do anything, what kind of life is that? Not one I would want to live, that's for sure.
"Security" is being used over and over as an excuse to deny everybody something, one way or other, and I don't think it gives us much in return. Isn't it true that by far the biggest security risk is employees either being too naive or being hostile to their employer? But how many companies spend resources on 1) educating employees about how to avoid social engineering and other con tricks? - and 2) building trust and loyalty between employer and employees? Instead they go for the easy way out: technology, which, at the end of the day is next to useless if the employees are either stupid of disloyal.
No, the only sad thing here is that pseudo-security is being used to bully everybody, as if security was more important than life itself.
I used to work for a company some 10 years ago that made POSes (POS: Point Of Sale), or rather the software for them. The basic system is simply a PC with some specialized externals: electric cash drawer, bar code scanner etc, and the SW takes care of all the usual things, like reading input from the scanner, looking up items in the database, calculating discounts, handling electronic payments, communicating with the backend system etc.
Try to search for 'linux point of sale' - I immediately found http://www.viewtouch.com/poshome.html. I don't know whether they are any good, but there you are. I expect that this system lets you access everything you need - otherwise, what is the point of having a till/cash register?
Two things: What does this study show us? That we make a large part of our decisions before we are conscious of it - but conscious thought is not the only kind of thought we have. The article interprets this as if consciousness and subconscious were two sharply dissociated things, while the reality is that the boundary, if it is at all meaningful to talk about a boundary, is blurry. It would be much more scientifically interesting to talk about what consciousness actually is in that context. It is not as if a person is only the conscious part of his/her mind - so if you make a decision unconsciously, it is still a decision you have made; thus there is no question about the freedom of your will.
The other thing is of course the question of what free will is. It could be 'free' as in 'totally un-influenced by anything except the person him-/herself' or it could mean 'free' as in 'under no subjective duress'. I don't have much faith in the first variant - free will simply means that you feel that you have no been forced by others to make a certain choice.
Are you sure about that? All public procurements in EU member states have to follow this - that has been one of the major headaches from time to time. I know Denmark has got burned on several occasions because they didn't follow those rules. It could mean that Microsoft gets banned from all major, public contracts in all EU member states.
Microsoft has not been punished yet - they have not only ignored the orders to disclose information and pay fines, they have continued their illegal practises as well as expanded them into new areas. Perhaps it would finally sink in if this happened to them. And I don't think there is anything leftist in requiring respect for the law; although it is characteristic that it is the parties on the left that have to raise these issues, because the parties to the right sit far too comfortably in the pockets of big money.
One can only wonder when the drugs legislation is going to reflect reality. I personally am not sure that I think all drugs should simply be legalised, no matter what, but the law has to make sense, and to make sense, it has to follow the general shape of what people actually do. A large percentage of the population has clearly decided that using certain drugs is OK, whether they are illegal or not.
The other part of this argument is that the drug laws don't reflect the objective harmfulness of the substances - nicotine and alcohol are clearly a lot more dangerous than some of the substances that are currently illegal. When the legislation is so obviously out of touch with reality, it is very difficult to persuade people, especially young people, that they shouldn't use drugs.
The intention of criminal law is to protect people - but the drug laws don't. As it is, people can say "Cannabis is clearly not as dangerous as nicotine" - unfortunately it is all too easy to go on to say "- so all this about drugs being dangerous is just a load of crap".
When was the last time you actually discovered something that has never been discovered before, by yourself, without any aids? It may be clever to twist what I said to sound like I talked about making new, scientific discoveries, but I think you know better than actually believing that. But, if you must, one could take the cramped, philosophical view, that when I discover a new, exciting cafe in a Paris backstreet, it is an entirely new discovery to the world, since the combination of this discovery and myself has never occurred. But I don't want to sound silly - I prefer to trust that those intelligent enough to use a computer are also able to grasp more than just the most extreme interpretation.
Speak for your self. And by the way what are you doing on Slashdot? This is exactly the kind of stuff that makes us (slashdotters) very happy indeed. So, is/. only for people who fall in a swoon over every gadget and want to be microchipped like a pedigree dog? I think perhaps you are using a special, American meaning of the word 'happy': the one that simply means 'glad', like in "Eating icecream makes me happy". I too would feel glad if I got myself a new, electronic toy, but I don't think I would be happy, in the sense of 'feeling a profound, persistent joy' - perhaps I am just too demanding.
What's the appeal? I think it is because, although most of us would love to have the latest and greatest, a lot less can do it, if the price is right. Do I really need a laptop with a super graphics card, an incredible sound card, a high density DVD burner, huge memory and 100s of GB disk? I already have that on my desktop and I have a network printer and a NAS. What I would like to have is something that is easy to carry around and can do just enough to satisfy my limited needs when I am out and about. Long battery life, small size, low weight are essential, but huge capacity aren't - I am not going to carry my entire CD- and DVD collection with me, or all my holiday pictures ever.
The functionality I would like to have in such a gadget is: networking (cable and wireless), USB, Firefox (no email client - I do that at home or on the web), OpenOffice, a Chinese dictionary with radical lookup, a couple of games that don't require much graphics and a calendar with alarm functions. Many of these things are already on many mobiles, but that's another thing - I'd much rather have a simple, minimal phone and an ultra portable PC than a mobile that tries to everything poorly.
This seems to be yet another fantasy about a future where technology does all the work and people are more less passive spectators. Always being on-line, always having your computer tell you things, never having to go and discover things by yourself - is that really what we want? I'm not convinced - do I want to be besieged by what to me looks a lot like advertising all the time? The answer is definitely a big "NO" to that. Do I want to be accessible through the net at all times? I don't think so. Enhanced senses that can 'see' or 'hear' not just what the natural eyes and ears can, but also, say UV, IR, radio, microwaves etc etc?
You know, much as one can fantasize about living in a science fiction world, I can't see that it would be all that good in reality. All these extensions to our abilities are, in a way, extra senses - and we simply don't have enough brain capacity to process it. Take our visual cortex, for example: it has a certain size that matches the visual ability of our eyes. There is no extra capacity in there; it wouldn't make evolutionary sense to build in more capacity than needed, as it would cost resources that could have been used more productively elsewhere. If we add artificial 'sensory apparatus' to our natural set of senses, it will take capacity away from other areas - maybe we would be able to 'see' the internet, but we would not be able to see or hear the physical world anymore, or something like that.
This kind of technology won't make us happier - the way to be happy is by learning to live in the body and the reality that we find ourselves in. We won't escape that until we die.
Let's see, just exactly WHO should be responsible for the banks' security? The banks, of course. However, as far as I understand it, this is not about bank security, but about the responsibility customers have to keep their PIN safe. I think it is entirely fair that you not only don't tell your PIN to somebody else, but that you make sure that you don't use it in an unsafe setting, such as on a PC that hasn't been secured properly. What we need is some sort of guideline saying that if I have followed those steps, then my PC is legally secure, and I have done everything required.
I know this is probably futile, but what the hell...
We in the West enjoy democracy and freedom. Well, "enjoy" may be an exaggeration, but we have it, sort of. Does anybody on/. know how long it took for us to get these things? I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure it took generations. Part of the explanation is that those in power didn't always want it to happen, but another part is that democracy and political freedom are things that people need to learn, and it takes time. Just look to history to see how many times people have fought for freedom in a revolution, only to throw it away as soon as they've won. We in the West held on to it because of another revolution: the Enlightenment.
So how can we imagine that any country can just slap democracy and freedom down in the middle of society and say "Here you go, chaps, have fun"? China and the Chinese go through that phase now, what we went through 100+ years ago, and they are doing it a lot faster than we did, not least because of modern technology, but a lot of things can go wrong if the government just let it loose. Thankfully the Chinese government aren't about to let foreign pressure push them around.
What would happen if they did suddenly try to introduce full democracy and all the freedoms the Americans still only dream about? Just look at what happened in Russia: organised criminal gangs (the Russian mafia) grew very strong and tried take over, certain big companies grew extremely strong and tried to take over, the people in general suffered great need, and the government went in circles. Now they are returning to something closer to Soviet style strong-man government, because this is what the people seems to prefer.
What the article says (and what the poster exaggerates, in true/. style) is that, for a certain definition of "paranoid thoughts", 41% of people in a VR study experienced "paranoid thoughts". First note the grammatical tense: "experienced" - it may be correct to extrapolate from what happened in the past, but this study doesn't propose to do that. We have to wait to see what further studies reveal.
Next, these results were achieved using VR - maybe they give us a real insight into what people really feel during a ride on the London Underground, but that still has to be verified. And even if this checks out, we still only know what people feel on the Underground.
Finally, the definition of "paranoid thoughts" is very scientific, in that it 1) captures what seems to be an essential feature of paranoia, and 2) is miles away from what the general public imagines about paranoia. Perhaps a better name for it would be "anxious thoughts", except that these researchers appear to be studying paranoia, so to them it is perhaps most natural to use the term "paranoid thoughts".
In defence of the troll (UbuntuDupe) I'd like to point out that the socalled Christian fundamentalists in the US, and everywhere, do put a huge emphasis on the Old Testament; thus the silliness of the Creationsist, to take one example. If they focused strictly on the teachings of Jesus or even the whole of the New Testament, we wouldn't see Christian evangelists who live a life of luxury, and we wouldn't hear them claim that being rich is God's reward to you.
That aside - I have no idea what mr Heston's impact on anything was, but I have see the 10 Cmds, and I found him overly pompous; he didn't make me believe in the character he portrayed. But, hey, I may just be ignorant and uncultured.
This is not about getting to the truth, in the sense most people mean it, this is about finding the TRUTH: what they already know is TRUE - they just need somebody to admit it. Hence the use of torture, sorry coercion, polygraphs and other dubious methods. It is scary to see how these things are used in the US - the nation that is supposed to be the epitome of scientific knowledge.
A deterrent is, basically, a threat. The problem with threatening other people is that you may end up in a situation where you have to carry out your threat. One can only speculate whether the cold war could have been avoided, but if we want world peace at some point in the future, we have to work towards reducing the level of threats globally. This may be a scary prospect for some, but at the end of the day, it is the only way. The US likes to see itself as 'the leader of the free world' - do you guys have the courage to lead the way towards world peace?
Once it was intellectuals that were suspicious because 'they think differently'. Now it is engineers, same difference. This is reactionary fear-mongering, simply: You take a group of people that belong to a different stereotype than your own, and then you cast suspicion on them. So intellectuals are "revolutionary" and engineers are "terrorists", as if they were somehow not quite people like the rest of us. It is strange to see how "security" is being twisted to imply that you have to be scared of your own shadow - you would have thought that "security" meant "feeling secure".
The difference is not that engineers and intellectuals think differently, but that they think at all.
This article, or possibly the book he reviews, makes some startling leaps of conclusion. What the researchers have done is to compare brain activity to mental activity; nothing new in this, just another step on the way to understanding. The advertising agency has used this to evaluate which kind of adverts seems to work best, on average, with people; nothing new in this either, but now they are trying to use another data source than before.
The article then jumps from these admittedly interesting results to start musing about 'what if "they" could read or even influence your mind as you walk into the shop' - which is of course utter nonsense. As things stand now you still require expensive machinery - you cannot 'scan' people's thought as they pass, and it is not likely that it will ever be possible to pick out individuals in a crowd anyway; and you cannot subject people to strong magnetic fields etc on a daily basis, it is simply too bad for their health. Put on top of that the fact that our actual thoughts are not something that can be easily interpreted from the electrical state of your brain - even if one could work out a precise rule book that would allow us to read the thoughts of one person, there is no guarantee that the same rules would work for somebody else. Each person has a unique brain, which is why they have different taste, reach different conclusions from the same facts and behave in different ways. What you can do is see some of the basic ingredients of our state of mind - how much anxiety, elation, sexual arousal, hunger etc - but one can't really tell what decisions a person will make, at least not in much detail. The complexity in doing this is as great as or even greater than predicting the weather.
So where does this leave things? The advertising agency now believes they can design better marketing campaigns because they have used 'scientific data'; but the fact is that all they can hope for is to strike a chord with an average of people. This doesn't really change a thing - it is not difficult to predict average behaviour, but it is next to impossible to predict what an individual will do. As far as I can see, this is just an advert: an advert for the agency.
Advertising is fine.. "MARKETING" is what people dont like. Actually, no. Advertising is the useless crap that litters an otherwise well-functioning web (as well as just about every street, magazine and tv-channel) and turns what would have been an enjoyable journey into a noisy, uncomfortable run of the gauntlet in a desperate attempt to get to the information you are after. And that is why people hate it.
I suspect most of us would mind it a lot less if we only saw adverts that were discreet and addressed our needs exactly; in fact, I think the best and probably most efficient kind of advertising is the one that comes in a form similar to the good, old Yellow Pages telephone catalogue. You only see them when you are actively looking for them, at which point you are higly motivated, and the adverts therefore are highly relevant.
The article makes it clear that no one knows how China will play its burgeoning antitrust influence What nonsense - everybody on/. knows with full certainty that the Chinese are evil, Satanic Communists, and they will do everything they can to hurt and subdue good, red-blooded American capitalists.
- and all that. I remember the GIER machine he talks about; those were the days.
One of the things that strike me is the colossal difference between Stroustrup's vision of C++ and the way it has been put to use; which I suppose is the point he makes in the interview. Having seen abominations like MFC - which isn't atypical of how C++ has been used - you realise that people just use it like any other programming language, making things up as they go along. Stroustrup's assumption, however, was that you work out all your theoretical concepts and models before you start coding anything - in which case C++ has all the features you need.
The problem is, of course, that very few businesses have the patience or indeed the skills required to work out a good, theoretical model for their products; I certainly haven't been in one in my nearly 30 years in computing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think timmarhy has a very valid point - I don't know of many religions, vertainly not in the West, where the physical remains of a person are of any significance, even if you believe in life after death in some form. And I find it deeply revolting to see how the burial industry preys on people when they are most likely to be vulnerable.
On a personal note - I have indicated very clearly to my children that I don't want them to spend money on cemetries and memorials. Instead I want to be cremated; then they can split the ashes and bury them under a bush or whatever they feel like. That will be cheap and straight forward, and it will give them a lasting memory if they want it. Or feed the body to the vultures, like in India. At least they only go after the dead remains, not the bereaved when they are most vulnerable.
So, this qualifies as "News for nerds, stuff that matters" because you can use GPS to find the graves? Interesting.
So, you wouldn't mind turning one towards your eye and giving yourself a blast, right?
Your comment about melting ice-cubes is of course nonsense. The energy required for the phase-change from ice to water is quite surprisingly high, as you ought to know - I'm sure they teach that in school even nowadays. And the damage to the eyes is not because of the heat energy deposited, but because the nerve cells in your retina can't take the overload; same as with looking at the sun - the sun's light doesn't burn or overheat the nerve cells, but they make you blind none the less.
So even if you don't care that irresponsible idiots could intentionally or accidentally blind people - including you - you should be able to see the sense in this.
I remember the days of the Cultural Revolution and the cold war; everybody in the West agreed that the Chinese people was being oppressed and the they would, all as one, welcome us if we came and liberated them. The best that could happen, we were told, was if they got Democracy (TM) and Capitalism (TM) and Opened Up (TM) to the world - now that they opened up and introduced capitalism and are on the way to democracy, everybody is howling because they have turned out to be bloody good at what they do and we have a hard time competing.
In recent years we have been hearing loads about how the Chinese government controls all aspects of the news, and if the Chinese people knew what really went on, they would turn against the evil government etc etc. This view doesn't quite add up, of course, not when you consider how easy it is to circumnavigate the so-called 'Great Firewall' - and now it turns out that not only are the Chinese not so cut off from the world news as we've been told, but they actually support their government.
Isn't it time that we in the West - and especially in the US - stopped imagining things about what people in other countries want, and instead look at the facts. The Chinese like their way of life, they support their government and agree with most of their government's policies. Haven't we already learned a little bit of humility from what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq? Neither the Iraqis not the Afghanis have turned out be overly eager to embrace The American Way. So what if their world view seems radically different from ours? They prefer their own way, same as us, and they weren't really trying to force it on us.
Why doesn't anyone over here see that when we barge in with harsh and insulting criticism, and talk about forcing our lifestyle and views on them, we can only be seen as enemies? If there is anything that can drive people away from us and into the arms of radicals, it is if they feel under serious threat from us. So, back to China: do we want the whole population of China to unite under a radical and possibly aggressive form of Communism/Nationalism? It is not an impossible scenario - the Chinese are rightly proud of what they have achieved, and they are beginning to feel that we are trying to deny them their rightful place in the world.
It is possible that we have more and bigger weapons than them, but believe you me, we don't want an all out confontation with China. So let us turn around and moderate our language and attitudes just a bit. We can still have our opinions and express them, but there is such a thing as being responsible and mature.
Hey, calm down a bit. First of all - they all do this. Haven't you ever noticed how certain kinds of traffic is obnoxiously slow? So Branston is saying that Virgin too do this. The big news is that he has the guts to tell it as it is. Maybe it would be worth looking at what kind of price plans he has in mind - perhaps you can pay a little bit more for your subscription and get better bandwidth, or something like that. As things are at the moment there are some bandwidth-hogs that pay the same cheap price as everyone else and almost blocks everybody else out at times.
"Security" is being used over and over as an excuse to deny everybody something, one way or other, and I don't think it gives us much in return. Isn't it true that by far the biggest security risk is employees either being too naive or being hostile to their employer? But how many companies spend resources on 1) educating employees about how to avoid social engineering and other con tricks? - and 2) building trust and loyalty between employer and employees? Instead they go for the easy way out: technology, which, at the end of the day is next to useless if the employees are either stupid of disloyal.
No, the only sad thing here is that pseudo-security is being used to bully everybody, as if security was more important than life itself.
I used to work for a company some 10 years ago that made POSes (POS: Point Of Sale), or rather the software for them. The basic system is simply a PC with some specialized externals: electric cash drawer, bar code scanner etc, and the SW takes care of all the usual things, like reading input from the scanner, looking up items in the database, calculating discounts, handling electronic payments, communicating with the backend system etc.
Try to search for 'linux point of sale' - I immediately found http://www.viewtouch.com/poshome.html. I don't know whether they are any good, but there you are. I expect that this system lets you access everything you need - otherwise, what is the point of having a till/cash register?
Two things: What does this study show us? That we make a large part of our decisions before we are conscious of it - but conscious thought is not the only kind of thought we have. The article interprets this as if consciousness and subconscious were two sharply dissociated things, while the reality is that the boundary, if it is at all meaningful to talk about a boundary, is blurry. It would be much more scientifically interesting to talk about what consciousness actually is in that context. It is not as if a person is only the conscious part of his/her mind - so if you make a decision unconsciously, it is still a decision you have made; thus there is no question about the freedom of your will.
The other thing is of course the question of what free will is. It could be 'free' as in 'totally un-influenced by anything except the person him-/herself' or it could mean 'free' as in 'under no subjective duress'. I don't have much faith in the first variant - free will simply means that you feel that you have no been forced by others to make a certain choice.
Are you sure about that? All public procurements in EU member states have to follow this - that has been one of the major headaches from time to time. I know Denmark has got burned on several occasions because they didn't follow those rules. It could mean that Microsoft gets banned from all major, public contracts in all EU member states.
Microsoft has not been punished yet - they have not only ignored the orders to disclose information and pay fines, they have continued their illegal practises as well as expanded them into new areas. Perhaps it would finally sink in if this happened to them. And I don't think there is anything leftist in requiring respect for the law; although it is characteristic that it is the parties on the left that have to raise these issues, because the parties to the right sit far too comfortably in the pockets of big money.
One can only wonder when the drugs legislation is going to reflect reality. I personally am not sure that I think all drugs should simply be legalised, no matter what, but the law has to make sense, and to make sense, it has to follow the general shape of what people actually do. A large percentage of the population has clearly decided that using certain drugs is OK, whether they are illegal or not.
The other part of this argument is that the drug laws don't reflect the objective harmfulness of the substances - nicotine and alcohol are clearly a lot more dangerous than some of the substances that are currently illegal. When the legislation is so obviously out of touch with reality, it is very difficult to persuade people, especially young people, that they shouldn't use drugs.
The intention of criminal law is to protect people - but the drug laws don't. As it is, people can say "Cannabis is clearly not as dangerous as nicotine" - unfortunately it is all too easy to go on to say "- so all this about drugs being dangerous is just a load of crap".
The functionality I would like to have in such a gadget is: networking (cable and wireless), USB, Firefox (no email client - I do that at home or on the web), OpenOffice, a Chinese dictionary with radical lookup, a couple of games that don't require much graphics and a calendar with alarm functions. Many of these things are already on many mobiles, but that's another thing - I'd much rather have a simple, minimal phone and an ultra portable PC than a mobile that tries to everything poorly.
This seems to be yet another fantasy about a future where technology does all the work and people are more less passive spectators. Always being on-line, always having your computer tell you things, never having to go and discover things by yourself - is that really what we want? I'm not convinced - do I want to be besieged by what to me looks a lot like advertising all the time? The answer is definitely a big "NO" to that. Do I want to be accessible through the net at all times? I don't think so. Enhanced senses that can 'see' or 'hear' not just what the natural eyes and ears can, but also, say UV, IR, radio, microwaves etc etc?
You know, much as one can fantasize about living in a science fiction world, I can't see that it would be all that good in reality. All these extensions to our abilities are, in a way, extra senses - and we simply don't have enough brain capacity to process it. Take our visual cortex, for example: it has a certain size that matches the visual ability of our eyes. There is no extra capacity in there; it wouldn't make evolutionary sense to build in more capacity than needed, as it would cost resources that could have been used more productively elsewhere. If we add artificial 'sensory apparatus' to our natural set of senses, it will take capacity away from other areas - maybe we would be able to 'see' the internet, but we would not be able to see or hear the physical world anymore, or something like that.
This kind of technology won't make us happier - the way to be happy is by learning to live in the body and the reality that we find ourselves in. We won't escape that until we die.
I know this is probably futile, but what the hell...
/. know how long it took for us to get these things? I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure it took generations. Part of the explanation is that those in power didn't always want it to happen, but another part is that democracy and political freedom are things that people need to learn, and it takes time. Just look to history to see how many times people have fought for freedom in a revolution, only to throw it away as soon as they've won. We in the West held on to it because of another revolution: the Enlightenment.
We in the West enjoy democracy and freedom. Well, "enjoy" may be an exaggeration, but we have it, sort of. Does anybody on
So how can we imagine that any country can just slap democracy and freedom down in the middle of society and say "Here you go, chaps, have fun"? China and the Chinese go through that phase now, what we went through 100+ years ago, and they are doing it a lot faster than we did, not least because of modern technology, but a lot of things can go wrong if the government just let it loose. Thankfully the Chinese government aren't about to let foreign pressure push them around.
What would happen if they did suddenly try to introduce full democracy and all the freedoms the Americans still only dream about? Just look at what happened in Russia: organised criminal gangs (the Russian mafia) grew very strong and tried take over, certain big companies grew extremely strong and tried to take over, the people in general suffered great need, and the government went in circles. Now they are returning to something closer to Soviet style strong-man government, because this is what the people seems to prefer.
What the article says (and what the poster exaggerates, in true /. style) is that, for a certain definition of "paranoid thoughts", 41% of people in a VR study experienced "paranoid thoughts". First note the grammatical tense: "experienced" - it may be correct to extrapolate from what happened in the past, but this study doesn't propose to do that. We have to wait to see what further studies reveal.
Next, these results were achieved using VR - maybe they give us a real insight into what people really feel during a ride on the London Underground, but that still has to be verified. And even if this checks out, we still only know what people feel on the Underground.
Finally, the definition of "paranoid thoughts" is very scientific, in that it 1) captures what seems to be an essential feature of paranoia, and 2) is miles away from what the general public imagines about paranoia. Perhaps a better name for it would be "anxious thoughts", except that these researchers appear to be studying paranoia, so to them it is perhaps most natural to use the term "paranoid thoughts".
In defence of the troll (UbuntuDupe) I'd like to point out that the socalled Christian fundamentalists in the US, and everywhere, do put a huge emphasis on the Old Testament; thus the silliness of the Creationsist, to take one example. If they focused strictly on the teachings of Jesus or even the whole of the New Testament, we wouldn't see Christian evangelists who live a life of luxury, and we wouldn't hear them claim that being rich is God's reward to you.
That aside - I have no idea what mr Heston's impact on anything was, but I have see the 10 Cmds, and I found him overly pompous; he didn't make me believe in the character he portrayed. But, hey, I may just be ignorant and uncultured.
This is not about getting to the truth, in the sense most people mean it, this is about finding the TRUTH: what they already know is TRUE - they just need somebody to admit it. Hence the use of torture, sorry coercion, polygraphs and other dubious methods. It is scary to see how these things are used in the US - the nation that is supposed to be the epitome of scientific knowledge.
A deterrent is, basically, a threat. The problem with threatening other people is that you may end up in a situation where you have to carry out your threat. One can only speculate whether the cold war could have been avoided, but if we want world peace at some point in the future, we have to work towards reducing the level of threats globally. This may be a scary prospect for some, but at the end of the day, it is the only way. The US likes to see itself as 'the leader of the free world' - do you guys have the courage to lead the way towards world peace?
Once it was intellectuals that were suspicious because 'they think differently'. Now it is engineers, same difference. This is reactionary fear-mongering, simply: You take a group of people that belong to a different stereotype than your own, and then you cast suspicion on them. So intellectuals are "revolutionary" and engineers are "terrorists", as if they were somehow not quite people like the rest of us. It is strange to see how "security" is being twisted to imply that you have to be scared of your own shadow - you would have thought that "security" meant "feeling secure".
The difference is not that engineers and intellectuals think differently, but that they think at all.
This article, or possibly the book he reviews, makes some startling leaps of conclusion. What the researchers have done is to compare brain activity to mental activity; nothing new in this, just another step on the way to understanding. The advertising agency has used this to evaluate which kind of adverts seems to work best, on average, with people; nothing new in this either, but now they are trying to use another data source than before.
The article then jumps from these admittedly interesting results to start musing about 'what if "they" could read or even influence your mind as you walk into the shop' - which is of course utter nonsense. As things stand now you still require expensive machinery - you cannot 'scan' people's thought as they pass, and it is not likely that it will ever be possible to pick out individuals in a crowd anyway; and you cannot subject people to strong magnetic fields etc on a daily basis, it is simply too bad for their health. Put on top of that the fact that our actual thoughts are not something that can be easily interpreted from the electrical state of your brain - even if one could work out a precise rule book that would allow us to read the thoughts of one person, there is no guarantee that the same rules would work for somebody else. Each person has a unique brain, which is why they have different taste, reach different conclusions from the same facts and behave in different ways. What you can do is see some of the basic ingredients of our state of mind - how much anxiety, elation, sexual arousal, hunger etc - but one can't really tell what decisions a person will make, at least not in much detail. The complexity in doing this is as great as or even greater than predicting the weather.
So where does this leave things? The advertising agency now believes they can design better marketing campaigns because they have used 'scientific data'; but the fact is that all they can hope for is to strike a chord with an average of people. This doesn't really change a thing - it is not difficult to predict average behaviour, but it is next to impossible to predict what an individual will do. As far as I can see, this is just an advert: an advert for the agency.
I suspect most of us would mind it a lot less if we only saw adverts that were discreet and addressed our needs exactly; in fact, I think the best and probably most efficient kind of advertising is the one that comes in a form similar to the good, old Yellow Pages telephone catalogue. You only see them when you are actively looking for them, at which point you are higly motivated, and the adverts therefore are highly relevant.
- and all that. I remember the GIER machine he talks about; those were the days.
One of the things that strike me is the colossal difference between Stroustrup's vision of C++ and the way it has been put to use; which I suppose is the point he makes in the interview. Having seen abominations like MFC - which isn't atypical of how C++ has been used - you realise that people just use it like any other programming language, making things up as they go along. Stroustrup's assumption, however, was that you work out all your theoretical concepts and models before you start coding anything - in which case C++ has all the features you need.
The problem is, of course, that very few businesses have the patience or indeed the skills required to work out a good, theoretical model for their products; I certainly haven't been in one in my nearly 30 years in computing.