There's nothing legally wrong with that -- it's pretty much what private investigators do all day, except they track you personally, instead of your license plate. There's nothing stopping someone from parking in front of the adult video store, or the liquor store, or the local tittie bar, and snapping a photo of people as they walk in from the street; there's no expectation of privacy there, and thus no violation. Likewise, if you park your car in front of said tittie bar, you have no expectation of privacy. Your car is sitting right there; your license plate number is not a secret (generally anyone can write to the DMV and, for a fee, get the name of the car's owner -- at least you could pre-9/11). You could probably sue someone for libel if they said "Joe Schmoe was in the tittie bar last night," if all they had was knowledge that your car was there -- in reality, all they should be able to say is "Joe Schmoe's car was seen in the parking lot of the tittie bar last night." (The second being fact and the first being potentally false conjecture passed off as fact.)
If you were using a system that tracked license plates to stalk someone, then you'd violate existing anti-stalking laws. But sitting around unsavory places and waiting to see if anyone notable shows up is nothing new. This might make it easier, but there's no great underlying moral dilemma there that the law has yet to solve. You're in public, other people can see you, you have no expectation of privacy: deal with it. If you don't want to be seen going into the brothel, don't go into the brothel. But you can't go into the brothel and then later demand that people just pretend you never did, or bar them from showing that you did in fact go in. (They can't say what you did inside -- there you have an expectation of privacy, probably.)
I could think of some uses of such a database that might really be illegal: looking up the location of someone who has a restraining order on file against you, that might cause you to run afoul of the law, and using it to follow someone around might qualify as stalking in some places.
Although I'm all for the right to privacy, it's equally dangerous to create "rights" where they don't exist. It would be an absolutely Bad Thing if people could simply demand that they couldn't be watched or photographed when standing in a public place; it would undo hundreds of years of settled law, and frankly undermine the whole difference betwen private and public space.
I think there's a real risk that if you tried to represent yourself, a team of RIAA suits would be more than capable of just burying you in procedural minutiae, or wait until you slip up and make some sort of unfortunate mistake yourself and then get a summary judgement. You'd have to have a judge who was really on your side, and a lot of judges don't take too kindly to people who represent themselves, because they think it makes the trial take longer and thus wastes their time.
The entire system is based around how many cases they can grind through in a week, not how fair or right the outcomes are. If you're perceived to be slowing things down, you'll have no friends to help you.
The only self-represented, successful civil suits I've ever heard of is where the issue was really clear-cut: the other people were really evil and totally unsympathetic. While you and I might think the RIAA fits that bill, they might be able to pull off "artists rights" in the courtroom and make you look like the bad guy... and then it's just a matter of the judge yawning as they procedure you to death.
I'd imagine the main reason is the larger pump necessary to circulate the refridgerant from the central AC unit to the heat exchanger in the pool and back. Also, you'd have to insulate the long length of piping pretty well to avoid major heat transfer losses to the air/ground before it reaches the pool.
True, but there's a lot easier way to do it than piping the refrigerant all the way to the pool; you can always just install an extra loop in the pool filter's piping that runs over to the A/C compressor. Then you're just moving water around, rather than Freon, which is pretty simple. If it's in PVC, it's also fairly well-insulated.
Sure, you'd need a slightly bigger pump, but probably not much more than you'd need to pump water through a conventional fossil-fuel fired heater.
I think the problem is more that there aren't air conditioners that are designed to work with pools or to be water-cooled (residential ones, anyway; industrial ones are frequently water cooled, and combined with an evaporative cooling tower). The common design is the barrel-shaped, periperhal-intake/axial-exhaust one, and it's tough to figure out a good way to water-cool it, I expect.
I actually found online that there is at least one company around that does this, by adding an additional heat exchanger to the cooling circuit and then running the pool water through it. It has the downside of apparently making it impossible to run your air conditioner without the pool pump being on (I don't understand quite why -- wouldn't this just make it work like a normal air-cooled system, without the benefit of the water-cooled exchanger?), but it's otherwise pretty neat. http://www.toad.net/~jsmeenen/pool.html
And then there are standalone heat pumps for pool heating, which just move energy from the air into the water in order to raise the latter's temperature; I wonder if you could just redirect the (cool) exhaust air from one of these and use it as air conditioning, for example in an outdoor patio room or something. http://www.centralsolar.com.au/pool_heat_pumps.htm
While the research budgets of the pharma companies are indeed large, and the investment in any particular new drug is indeed substantial, I think the amount of "pure research" that goes on at those companies and which is applied to real 'blue sky' problems is overstated.
While I'm sure they probably have big research budgets when it comes to finding the newest diet or stay-hard pill, the research on things like vaccines (actual solutions to disease, rather than just treatments) are quite limited. The pharmaceutical industry is rampant with the same kind of next-quarter/next-FY, revenue-driven thinking that's polluted the rest of the business world.
Eventually I think we're going to start seeing "real disease" drugs being produced only from the accidental findings or as offshoots of the research that goes on to find "lifestyle" drugs. (Actually, if you want to really go the tinfoil hat route, I could see a situation where a pharmaceutical company would intentionally suppress the knowledge that a lifestyle drug cured some widespread disease, because of the risk that their patents might be ignored and it would be manufactured generically before it could be made profitable.)
I'm rather cynical of the pharmaceutical companies -- I'm sure there are good ones out there somewhere, but it seems like an awful lot of the pure research on actual diseases is the domain of academia and government today.
Are there even any agencies (Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, DOE, etc) who are willing to fund a "we're OK with no results but knowledge gained" project in what is currently considered an applied science field?
That's the wrong question to ask; the real question is who's OK with funding something, if the only "results" are that knowledge was gained? In effect, who is willing to pay for knowledge?
DOE used to be, particularly in nuclear physics for weapons research, but that's slowed down a lot. I don't understand why they're not the premier source of funding for fusion research now: shouldn't that be right up their alley? Not to mention in the national interest. (Of course, it's probably not in the oil companies' interest.)
There are quite a few places that seem like they ought to be doing more research, but don't; I'd expect the DOE to be funding find-stuff-out, blue-sky projects; I'd expect DARPA to be paying for bizarre sharks-with-laserbeams and killer android research. When I don't see them doing stuff like that, I think they're forgetting at least part of their mission.
I think there's a key difference between innovation and invention. I'm not saying this to disparage innovation or engineering at all, being more on that side myself, but I think that you have to draw a line between solving a particular problem by applying existing technology in a potentially new way, from actually creating new technology and pushing the limits of what's currently known.
I'd say that Google falls more on the innovation/engineering side of things. I haven't seen much out of them that's really new knowledge; I guess maybe some of the ways that they're using AJAX or their AI stuff could be new, but mostly it seems to be new only in terms of application. Useful stuff, to be sure, but it's not like the transistor or the microprocessor; things that just fundamentally change how we work.
The dividing line between 'innovation' and 'invention' is always a fuzzy one at best, and I'm aware that there are lots of things which are neither one nor the other, and lots of innovative projects which contribute substantially to our collective body of knowledge just by applying existing tech in a new way -- developing new techniques, for example -- but I still maintain that there is some difference there.
Although you got modded down, I was thinking about what companies are like Bell Labs/PARC/etc. today. It's a pretty short list. I'd say that IBM is still on there; they still do some stuff that gets into pure research, although I think it's become more market-focused than it used to be; Google strikes me as someone who is trying to take up the helm that was dropped by Xerox PARC -- a combination of marketable stuff and real blue-sky tech... but I think a lot of other research has moved from the corporate sphere to the realm of small startups. \
It seems like people who are coming out of grad schools now don't hope to get a position as a Fellow at IBM as much as they hope to get a big wad of funding from somebody (usually without thinking too hard about who "somebody" might be) and playing the startup game. Even though as a startup, you usually don't have much flexibility or opportunity to do research, it's all about productization.
I'm still not sure though that I would put Google into the same category as the old research companies of the Cold War era. Google's stuff is good, and it's definitely innovative, but in many cases it looks less like actual new knowledge development than just new and different ways of recombining existing stuff. That definitely has value -- don't get me wrong -- but it's different than the huge amount of capital investment and long time horizons that used to be the norm at Bell Labs, for instance.
Honestly I think it's the time horizon issue that's the worst part of today's market. I don't know if it's a product of instability -- nobody is sure what's going to be going on in 5 years, so they only plan for two -- or if it's just the desire to make short-term gains, but I think that we're starting to see the effects of lots of places not having a very coherent long-term strategy. Stagnation is bad, but a certain amount of predictability in the market can be good, if it lets people plan for longer, and thus take bigger calculated risks.
Nobody is willing to pay for research that might take 10 or more years to productize in today's market, and thus the burden falls on government and academia. They're basically some of the only institutions left that can afford to plan in multiple-decade ranges.
Except that these companies actually developed the stuff that they patented... which is the difference between a legitimate business model and the anticompetitive scum that are the patent trolls.
So basically, they're nothing like patent troll corporations.
I think we may have a different idea of 'civil society.'
Personally, if people show up with pitchforks and torches, I think it's fair to say that civil society has broken down. If all that's happening is people are arguing with each other in a courtroom, then I think we're still in business.
Lawyers are how stuff works in civil society; when that society breaks down, that's when you start taking out the pitchforks/torches/guns/etc. You seem to be advocating exchanging the first for the second, and I don't think that's a great idea.
Although I'm not necessarily a fan of the extent to which we've taken litigiousness in our society, I certainly think it's a better way of solving problems than having everyone gathering up all their friends and settling their disagreements by force. Anything that doesn't leave people dead at the end of the day is an inherently superior method of problem-solving than one that does. (Of course, only if it solves the problem: sometimes you need to break some eggs, as the saying goes.)
The other problem I have with the "cellphones as bad as being drunk" claim is that if you look at the past 10 or 15 years, the number of cellphones has exploded; there ought to be a huge and obvious increase in the total number of auto accidents per year, roughly proportional to the adoption of cellphones. I've never seen anything that suggests this. In fact, the driving fatalities per million miles travelled has gone down over the past 10 years, as cellphone use has increased. While cars have gotten safer, I don't think the developments of safety technologies can be said to outweigh something as dangerous as a large percentage of drivers being "practically drunk," if that were the case.
While I'm sure that using a cellphone while driving can be distracting, and they're definitely a cause of accidents, I think their risk is being somewhat exaggerated: if they were as dangerous as people claim, then our roads would have to be far more dangerous than they are right now. While the number of fatal traffic accidents has gone up slightly since 1994, it's nowhere near the increase you'd expect if cellphones were as dangerous as some people are making them out to be. Either very few people are using them when driving (not likely -- anyone who's been outside recently can verify that a lot of people are), people are using them in place of some other already dangerous activity (using their cellphone instead of being drunk? Also not likely), or cellphones are not universally as dangerous as they're being made out to be.
I think there is a perception that cellphones are dangerous, because a lot of crappy drivers use their phones when they're driving. There is a correlation then between shitty driving and cellphone use, but it isn't necessarily causative as often as it might appear: the person who's dumb enough to run into you because they were dialing their phone might still have run into you, in the absence of a phone, because they would have found something else to do. The problem isn't the phone, it's the bad driver. The ultimate solution isn't to ban phones, it's to have tougher licensing requirements for drivers, and make it easier to take someone's license away if they're not up to the task. (My proposal is to require anyone who gets a moving violation to retake a drivers test. I think there are quite a few people on the road who probably couldn't pass if their lives depended on it; sadly, other people's lives do.)
1) Windows 9x - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory; if there is no more memory to give, your computer crashes. 2) MacOS 8/9 - if a program needs more memory, the system tells you and you have to fiddle around with a fussy little dialog box to give it more manually and try again, at which point another program will complain that it no longer has enough memory. Repeat ad infinitum, all the while gritting your teeth and reciting the mantra "this is better than Windows, this is better than Windows" until you almost believe it.
You think Option 1 is better than Option 2? I hope you don't have any say in the design of things like aircraft or cars... all those fussy little gauges; so much more obnoxious than just crashing.
If a program crashed because it was out of memory, and you consequently raised its memory limit and then tried to reopen it, and had insufficent memory, that was your cue to either buy more RAM, or quit some other programs. (Or increase the virtual memory limit, at the expense of speed.)
Lots of people have swimming pools, and yet still have air conditioners...the presence of a liquid heat sink doesn't make air conditioning any less attractive.
Personally, I've always thought that people who have swimming pools that are heated with fossil fuels or electricity, and also have air conditioners, are wasting a lot of energy: why not just use the air conditioner to pump the heat from the house (which you want to cool) into the swimming pool (which you want to heat)?
Even a medium-size residential swimming pool has a pretty large heat capacity, particularly if you leave it uncovered (so that heat is constantly lost to evaporation) and even moreso if it's an above-ground pool.
Basically, what these companies are doing, when they pull out these bogus contracts, is bluffing you. They're blowing smoke up your ass, and hoping that you won't have the balls* to actually call them on it.
Your options are basically: 1) Call their bluff: get a lawyer, and sue them; or make them think that you're going to. 2) Bend over and take it, and whine a lot. Whining includes going to the BBB and other toothless organizations. (No large corporation gives a shit about the BBB.) 3) Bend over and take it, and like it.
Lawyers are how you get business done in civil society. They are in many ways even superior to violence, because they can be used to attack vaporous legal constructs that you can't well go out and shoot if you wanted to. They're like samurai: have enough of them, and you can do anything you want. Don't have any, and you're just a peasant.
It helps if you happen to have a lawyer who's willing to work for you cheap, or better yet for free. Lawyers willing to work for free are notoriously hard to find (your best bet is probably to marry one, and even than it's not guaranteed to work). Short of actually having a lawyer, the next best thing would be someone who's familiar enough with the language of law to write a nasty letter that makes them think you're a Force To Be Reckoned With; of course, there's always the risk that they'll call your bluff, and then hang your lawyer-less ass out to dry. Or you could try suing them in small-claims directly, where you don't need a lawyer and can represent yourself; if you really haven't signed any contracts or agreed to anything, then they can't force you into arbitration (which is a normal stipulation in many sleazy contracts), and you can sue them in your own jurisdiction and force them to show up and defend their conduct. If you act like a reasonable, rational, average person, you might do well this way. (Particularly if they just don't want to bother to show up in court.)
All in all, your best bet of success is probably going to involve either the reality or at least substantial threats of spending quality time inside a courtroom somewhere. This is life; in our world, the conflicts that aren't solved with a gun or a knife are usually solved by well-paid guys in suits shuffling paper. (And depending on where you live, possibly someone in a wig.)
You can almost certainly use OTR through Trillian using OTR's proxy mode (where you point Trillian to the localhost as a proxy server for AIM, and OTR encrypts the messages and then sends them out to the real AOL server -- this method is AIM-only), and there does seem to be significant interest in getting a native plugin so that it works as easily as GAIM and Adium do.
Supposedly (according to one post in that thread above), the makers of Trillian have a plugin available for download so you can use OTR, and you can get it from this login-required link: http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/forums/showthread.p hp?s=&threadid=80721 (You need some sort of 'premium' membership or something.)
I would be very interested if you wanted to check it out (if you have a membership) and report back, and I'd also be curious if they're distributing source. It's a bit sleazy of them IMO to be restricting downloads of the thing to members only, but maybe that's just because it's beta. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt there, I suppose, since the Cerulean people have played pretty nicely with OSS efforts in the past, I've heard.
I think I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think there's a serious flaw in your logic, and in the argument of many alternative-energy boosters.
The problem is this: alternative sources of energy are hard. As in really tough problems. They require a lot of effort, and investment of time, energy, and materials to solve. Almost all alternative sources of energy are like this. Large-scale geothermal power extraction (from areas not located on geologically active zones) is hard. Tidal power: hard. High-efficiency solar power: very hard. Fusion is likewise hard.
The other problem is that only a few of these sources could, by themselves, satisfy our demands for energy.
Given that as a civilization we have a basically limited amount of resources at any given time to commit to researching new energy sources, it's understandable that we tend to focus our attentions on the few sources that seem like viable wholesale replacements for our steadily depleting fossil fuels.
To put it bluntly, until it becomes clear that fusion simply won't work, it's going to receive most of the attention, because the possible payoff there is much higher than in any other avenue of research. Most alternative sources only make sense as aspects of a larger plan, consisting of a mix of sources. While this diversity is probably wise in the long run, it also represents a huge investment of time and effort into each source. And as the fossil fuels run out and energy becomes more expensive, the research becomes more difficult and our options more constrained. There is a risk, I think, of spreading ourselves too thin and not having a viable replacement for petroleum when its time is up.
It is a mistake to view fusion (or any other single source) as a 'magic bullet.' However, it makes a certain amount of sense to want to secure a source of energy that can replace fossil fuels first, and then research other alternatives in order to diversify our societal energy portfolio afterwards. To do otherwise might risk us not finding a replacement for our energy needs before the fossil fuels run out, which would be a disaster of unthinkable proportions.
Well, I'm not sure if it's been dropped from the OLPC at this point, but early prototypes were supposed to have a screen that either worked in color (with a backlight, I think) in dim/indoor light, or as passive high-contrast monochrome displays (with higher resolution and longer battery life) when in direct/bright light. I'm not sure where I read this; I think it was in a Wired Magazine article.
Sounded pretty neat to me. Until a while back, I had a monochrome-display Apple laptop that I still used for basic word-processing/email/Telnet text-based stuff, when I was sitting out on my deck next to the pool. I didn't care if it got wet, and it was the only machine I've ever owned that worked well in bright sunlight. You could just turn the backlight on the screen down to zero, and still read stuff. (Unless you had the sun glare right in your eyes; then it wouldn't work obviously, but anything else it was good for.) In the end, its battery died and that was all she wrote, but even as it was getting old, it could still run for an hour or so without the screen backlight.
If the OLPC incorporates such a screen, I really would like to see them become more common. I'd love the ability to switch from regular-rez color to high-resolution, low-power monochrome when I'm working in well-lit environments.
OTR does perfect forward secrecy -- I'm not sure about the keysize -- and already has a substantial base of users out there with it installed. (Including all the OS X users of Adium, who have but to turn it on in Preferences.)
I guess the Tor thing could be a neat feature, but it still seems like the encryption could have been done with existing plugins rather than creating a new system. The last thing we need is another, mutually-incompatible, IM encryption standard.
I disagree. Message-level protocols like OTR are very easy to use when they're implemented correctly into the software, and don't require any particular level of geekitude in order to use.
I've handled the installation, but I know of many non-technical friends who use GAIM+OTR (or Adium, which has it built-in) to communicate, without any problems. It's just like security in a web browser: when the lock icon is closed, it's secure. Nothing else is required out of the user, unless they want to turn it off or on manually (which is very simple; a dropdown menu).
The average user may be an idiot, but I think you're selling them a little short. The trick is getting them to want or care about security; if they care about it, there are technologies available that are well within the ease-of-use range of most people (post-installation; setup can still be tricky).
Are you sure about this? I clicked "Configure" on one of Dell's consumer laptops, and it pretty clearly states that you options for "Operating System" are your choice of "Windows® XP Home Edition [Included in Price]" or "Windows® XP Professional [add $149 or $4/month]". See this page, although I'm not sure if the link is stable.
There is no mention made, nor selectable option for, FreeDOS, RHEL, or anything else besides Windows.
Are those special "business" options? Because if that's the case, it's a lot less significant, since most people will never see them.
Until Linux is on the list of options right next to Windows, it's still going to be a 'hack' to most people; something the computer wasn't 'designed for.'
And your DVD player, and your TV, and your cable box.
And anything else that you use a remote-control to turn on and off. Something has to be there, monitoring the IR receiver, so that it can switch the main power on when you press the button -- that's the cost of not getting up and pressing a mechanical switch to start it up.
Does anyone else think they would have a hard time learning from and listening to an object that didn't exude intelligence
I've had to learn from quite a few professors that don't exactly exude intelligence, so I'm not sure this really changes anything. If anything, they absorbed it.
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There's nothing legally wrong with that -- it's pretty much what private investigators do all day, except they track you personally, instead of your license plate. There's nothing stopping someone from parking in front of the adult video store, or the liquor store, or the local tittie bar, and snapping a photo of people as they walk in from the street; there's no expectation of privacy there, and thus no violation. Likewise, if you park your car in front of said tittie bar, you have no expectation of privacy. Your car is sitting right there; your license plate number is not a secret (generally anyone can write to the DMV and, for a fee, get the name of the car's owner -- at least you could pre-9/11). You could probably sue someone for libel if they said "Joe Schmoe was in the tittie bar last night," if all they had was knowledge that your car was there -- in reality, all they should be able to say is "Joe Schmoe's car was seen in the parking lot of the tittie bar last night." (The second being fact and the first being potentally false conjecture passed off as fact.)
If you were using a system that tracked license plates to stalk someone, then you'd violate existing anti-stalking laws. But sitting around unsavory places and waiting to see if anyone notable shows up is nothing new. This might make it easier, but there's no great underlying moral dilemma there that the law has yet to solve. You're in public, other people can see you, you have no expectation of privacy: deal with it. If you don't want to be seen going into the brothel, don't go into the brothel. But you can't go into the brothel and then later demand that people just pretend you never did, or bar them from showing that you did in fact go in. (They can't say what you did inside -- there you have an expectation of privacy, probably.)
I could think of some uses of such a database that might really be illegal: looking up the location of someone who has a restraining order on file against you, that might cause you to run afoul of the law, and using it to follow someone around might qualify as stalking in some places.
Although I'm all for the right to privacy, it's equally dangerous to create "rights" where they don't exist. It would be an absolutely Bad Thing if people could simply demand that they couldn't be watched or photographed when standing in a public place; it would undo hundreds of years of settled law, and frankly undermine the whole difference betwen private and public space.
Wait ... you're suggesting that they actually made copies of Gigli? As in, more than one?
... I'm afraid it's already too late.
Call off the air strike, Colonel
Man, I do not want to see what the girls at your school looked like...
I think there's a real risk that if you tried to represent yourself, a team of RIAA suits would be more than capable of just burying you in procedural minutiae, or wait until you slip up and make some sort of unfortunate mistake yourself and then get a summary judgement. You'd have to have a judge who was really on your side, and a lot of judges don't take too kindly to people who represent themselves, because they think it makes the trial take longer and thus wastes their time.
... and then it's just a matter of the judge yawning as they procedure you to death.
The entire system is based around how many cases they can grind through in a week, not how fair or right the outcomes are. If you're perceived to be slowing things down, you'll have no friends to help you.
The only self-represented, successful civil suits I've ever heard of is where the issue was really clear-cut: the other people were really evil and totally unsympathetic. While you and I might think the RIAA fits that bill, they might be able to pull off "artists rights" in the courtroom and make you look like the bad guy
I'd imagine the main reason is the larger pump necessary to circulate the refridgerant from the central AC unit to the heat exchanger in the pool and back. Also, you'd have to insulate the long length of piping pretty well to avoid major heat transfer losses to the air/ground before it reaches the pool.
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True, but there's a lot easier way to do it than piping the refrigerant all the way to the pool; you can always just install an extra loop in the pool filter's piping that runs over to the A/C compressor. Then you're just moving water around, rather than Freon, which is pretty simple. If it's in PVC, it's also fairly well-insulated.
Sure, you'd need a slightly bigger pump, but probably not much more than you'd need to pump water through a conventional fossil-fuel fired heater.
I think the problem is more that there aren't air conditioners that are designed to work with pools or to be water-cooled (residential ones, anyway; industrial ones are frequently water cooled, and combined with an evaporative cooling tower). The common design is the barrel-shaped, periperhal-intake/axial-exhaust one, and it's tough to figure out a good way to water-cool it, I expect.
I actually found online that there is at least one company around that does this, by adding an additional heat exchanger to the cooling circuit and then running the pool water through it. It has the downside of apparently making it impossible to run your air conditioner without the pool pump being on (I don't understand quite why -- wouldn't this just make it work like a normal air-cooled system, without the benefit of the water-cooled exchanger?), but it's otherwise pretty neat.
http://www.toad.net/~jsmeenen/pool.html
And then there are standalone heat pumps for pool heating, which just move energy from the air into the water in order to raise the latter's temperature; I wonder if you could just redirect the (cool) exhaust air from one of these and use it as air conditioning, for example in an outdoor patio room or something.
http://www.centralsolar.com.au/pool_heat_pumps.ht
While the research budgets of the pharma companies are indeed large, and the investment in any particular new drug is indeed substantial, I think the amount of "pure research" that goes on at those companies and which is applied to real 'blue sky' problems is overstated.
While I'm sure they probably have big research budgets when it comes to finding the newest diet or stay-hard pill, the research on things like vaccines (actual solutions to disease, rather than just treatments) are quite limited. The pharmaceutical industry is rampant with the same kind of next-quarter/next-FY, revenue-driven thinking that's polluted the rest of the business world.
Eventually I think we're going to start seeing "real disease" drugs being produced only from the accidental findings or as offshoots of the research that goes on to find "lifestyle" drugs. (Actually, if you want to really go the tinfoil hat route, I could see a situation where a pharmaceutical company would intentionally suppress the knowledge that a lifestyle drug cured some widespread disease, because of the risk that their patents might be ignored and it would be manufactured generically before it could be made profitable.)
I'm rather cynical of the pharmaceutical companies -- I'm sure there are good ones out there somewhere, but it seems like an awful lot of the pure research on actual diseases is the domain of academia and government today.
Are there even any agencies (Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, DOE, etc) who are willing to fund a "we're OK with no results but knowledge gained" project in what is currently considered an applied science field?
That's the wrong question to ask; the real question is who's OK with funding something, if the only "results" are that knowledge was gained? In effect, who is willing to pay for knowledge?
DOE used to be, particularly in nuclear physics for weapons research, but that's slowed down a lot. I don't understand why they're not the premier source of funding for fusion research now: shouldn't that be right up their alley? Not to mention in the national interest. (Of course, it's probably not in the oil companies' interest.)
There are quite a few places that seem like they ought to be doing more research, but don't; I'd expect the DOE to be funding find-stuff-out, blue-sky projects; I'd expect DARPA to be paying for bizarre sharks-with-laserbeams and killer android research. When I don't see them doing stuff like that, I think they're forgetting at least part of their mission.
I think there's a key difference between innovation and invention. I'm not saying this to disparage innovation or engineering at all, being more on that side myself, but I think that you have to draw a line between solving a particular problem by applying existing technology in a potentially new way, from actually creating new technology and pushing the limits of what's currently known.
I'd say that Google falls more on the innovation/engineering side of things. I haven't seen much out of them that's really new knowledge; I guess maybe some of the ways that they're using AJAX or their AI stuff could be new, but mostly it seems to be new only in terms of application. Useful stuff, to be sure, but it's not like the transistor or the microprocessor; things that just fundamentally change how we work.
The dividing line between 'innovation' and 'invention' is always a fuzzy one at best, and I'm aware that there are lots of things which are neither one nor the other, and lots of innovative projects which contribute substantially to our collective body of knowledge just by applying existing tech in a new way -- developing new techniques, for example -- but I still maintain that there is some difference there.
Although you got modded down, I was thinking about what companies are like Bell Labs/PARC/etc. today. It's a pretty short list. I'd say that IBM is still on there; they still do some stuff that gets into pure research, although I think it's become more market-focused than it used to be; Google strikes me as someone who is trying to take up the helm that was dropped by Xerox PARC -- a combination of marketable stuff and real blue-sky tech ... but I think a lot of other research has moved from the corporate sphere to the realm of small startups. \
It seems like people who are coming out of grad schools now don't hope to get a position as a Fellow at IBM as much as they hope to get a big wad of funding from somebody (usually without thinking too hard about who "somebody" might be) and playing the startup game. Even though as a startup, you usually don't have much flexibility or opportunity to do research, it's all about productization.
I'm still not sure though that I would put Google into the same category as the old research companies of the Cold War era. Google's stuff is good, and it's definitely innovative, but in many cases it looks less like actual new knowledge development than just new and different ways of recombining existing stuff. That definitely has value -- don't get me wrong -- but it's different than the huge amount of capital investment and long time horizons that used to be the norm at Bell Labs, for instance.
Honestly I think it's the time horizon issue that's the worst part of today's market. I don't know if it's a product of instability -- nobody is sure what's going to be going on in 5 years, so they only plan for two -- or if it's just the desire to make short-term gains, but I think that we're starting to see the effects of lots of places not having a very coherent long-term strategy. Stagnation is bad, but a certain amount of predictability in the market can be good, if it lets people plan for longer, and thus take bigger calculated risks.
Nobody is willing to pay for research that might take 10 or more years to productize in today's market, and thus the burden falls on government and academia. They're basically some of the only institutions left that can afford to plan in multiple-decade ranges.
Except that these companies actually developed the stuff that they patented ... which is the difference between a legitimate business model and the anticompetitive scum that are the patent trolls.
So basically, they're nothing like patent troll corporations.
(Insightful? What were the mods smoking?)
I think we may have a different idea of 'civil society.'
Personally, if people show up with pitchforks and torches, I think it's fair to say that civil society has broken down. If all that's happening is people are arguing with each other in a courtroom, then I think we're still in business.
Lawyers are how stuff works in civil society; when that society breaks down, that's when you start taking out the pitchforks/torches/guns/etc. You seem to be advocating exchanging the first for the second, and I don't think that's a great idea.
Although I'm not necessarily a fan of the extent to which we've taken litigiousness in our society, I certainly think it's a better way of solving problems than having everyone gathering up all their friends and settling their disagreements by force. Anything that doesn't leave people dead at the end of the day is an inherently superior method of problem-solving than one that does. (Of course, only if it solves the problem: sometimes you need to break some eggs, as the saying goes.)
Good point.
The other problem I have with the "cellphones as bad as being drunk" claim is that if you look at the past 10 or 15 years, the number of cellphones has exploded; there ought to be a huge and obvious increase in the total number of auto accidents per year, roughly proportional to the adoption of cellphones. I've never seen anything that suggests this. In fact, the driving fatalities per million miles travelled has gone down over the past 10 years, as cellphone use has increased. While cars have gotten safer, I don't think the developments of safety technologies can be said to outweigh something as dangerous as a large percentage of drivers being "practically drunk," if that were the case.
While I'm sure that using a cellphone while driving can be distracting, and they're definitely a cause of accidents, I think their risk is being somewhat exaggerated: if they were as dangerous as people claim, then our roads would have to be far more dangerous than they are right now. While the number of fatal traffic accidents has gone up slightly since 1994, it's nowhere near the increase you'd expect if cellphones were as dangerous as some people are making them out to be. Either very few people are using them when driving (not likely -- anyone who's been outside recently can verify that a lot of people are), people are using them in place of some other already dangerous activity (using their cellphone instead of being drunk? Also not likely), or cellphones are not universally as dangerous as they're being made out to be.
I think there is a perception that cellphones are dangerous, because a lot of crappy drivers use their phones when they're driving. There is a correlation then between shitty driving and cellphone use, but it isn't necessarily causative as often as it might appear: the person who's dumb enough to run into you because they were dialing their phone might still have run into you, in the absence of a phone, because they would have found something else to do. The problem isn't the phone, it's the bad driver. The ultimate solution isn't to ban phones, it's to have tougher licensing requirements for drivers, and make it easier to take someone's license away if they're not up to the task. (My proposal is to require anyone who gets a moving violation to retake a drivers test. I think there are quite a few people on the road who probably couldn't pass if their lives depended on it; sadly, other people's lives do.)
See the statistics for yourself here:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/
1) Windows 9x - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory; if there is no more memory to give, your computer crashes.
... all those fussy little gauges; so much more obnoxious than just crashing.
2) MacOS 8/9 - if a program needs more memory, the system tells you and you have to fiddle around with a fussy little dialog box to give it more manually and try again, at which point another program will complain that it no longer has enough memory. Repeat ad infinitum, all the while gritting your teeth and reciting the mantra "this is better than Windows, this is better than Windows" until you almost believe it.
You think Option 1 is better than Option 2? I hope you don't have any say in the design of things like aircraft or cars
If a program crashed because it was out of memory, and you consequently raised its memory limit and then tried to reopen it, and had insufficent memory, that was your cue to either buy more RAM, or quit some other programs. (Or increase the virtual memory limit, at the expense of speed.)
Beats the hell out of just crashing in my book.
Just a piece of advice for you: don't ever try to work for the government, okay?
Because people don't want to get wet?
Lots of people have swimming pools, and yet still have air conditioners...the presence of a liquid heat sink doesn't make air conditioning any less attractive.
Personally, I've always thought that people who have swimming pools that are heated with fossil fuels or electricity, and also have air conditioners, are wasting a lot of energy: why not just use the air conditioner to pump the heat from the house (which you want to cool) into the swimming pool (which you want to heat)?
Even a medium-size residential swimming pool has a pretty large heat capacity, particularly if you leave it uncovered (so that heat is constantly lost to evaporation) and even moreso if it's an above-ground pool.
Bingo.
Basically, what these companies are doing, when they pull out these bogus contracts, is bluffing you. They're blowing smoke up your ass, and hoping that you won't have the balls* to actually call them on it.
Your options are basically:
1) Call their bluff: get a lawyer, and sue them; or make them think that you're going to.
2) Bend over and take it, and whine a lot. Whining includes going to the BBB and other toothless organizations. (No large corporation gives a shit about the BBB.)
3) Bend over and take it, and like it.
Lawyers are how you get business done in civil society. They are in many ways even superior to violence, because they can be used to attack vaporous legal constructs that you can't well go out and shoot if you wanted to. They're like samurai: have enough of them, and you can do anything you want. Don't have any, and you're just a peasant.
It helps if you happen to have a lawyer who's willing to work for you cheap, or better yet for free. Lawyers willing to work for free are notoriously hard to find (your best bet is probably to marry one, and even than it's not guaranteed to work). Short of actually having a lawyer, the next best thing would be someone who's familiar enough with the language of law to write a nasty letter that makes them think you're a Force To Be Reckoned With; of course, there's always the risk that they'll call your bluff, and then hang your lawyer-less ass out to dry. Or you could try suing them in small-claims directly, where you don't need a lawyer and can represent yourself; if you really haven't signed any contracts or agreed to anything, then they can't force you into arbitration (which is a normal stipulation in many sleazy contracts), and you can sue them in your own jurisdiction and force them to show up and defend their conduct. If you act like a reasonable, rational, average person, you might do well this way. (Particularly if they just don't want to bother to show up in court.)
All in all, your best bet of success is probably going to involve either the reality or at least substantial threats of spending quality time inside a courtroom somewhere. This is life; in our world, the conflicts that aren't solved with a gun or a knife are usually solved by well-paid guys in suits shuffling paper. (And depending on where you live, possibly someone in a wig.)
* In Capitalist society, see 'wallet.'
While I'll bite my tongue on your choice of clients, it seems that somebody is or was working on an OTR plugin for Trillian.
p hp?threadid=69580
p hp?s=&threadid=80721
You might want to read through this thread here:
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/forums/showthread.
You can almost certainly use OTR through Trillian using OTR's proxy mode (where you point Trillian to the localhost as a proxy server for AIM, and OTR encrypts the messages and then sends them out to the real AOL server -- this method is AIM-only), and there does seem to be significant interest in getting a native plugin so that it works as easily as GAIM and Adium do.
Supposedly (according to one post in that thread above), the makers of Trillian have a plugin available for download so you can use OTR, and you can get it from this login-required link:
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/forums/showthread.
(You need some sort of 'premium' membership or something.)
I would be very interested if you wanted to check it out (if you have a membership) and report back, and I'd also be curious if they're distributing source. It's a bit sleazy of them IMO to be restricting downloads of the thing to members only, but maybe that's just because it's beta. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt there, I suppose, since the Cerulean people have played pretty nicely with OSS efforts in the past, I've heard.
I think I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think there's a serious flaw in your logic, and in the argument of many alternative-energy boosters.
The problem is this: alternative sources of energy are hard. As in really tough problems. They require a lot of effort, and investment of time, energy, and materials to solve. Almost all alternative sources of energy are like this. Large-scale geothermal power extraction (from areas not located on geologically active zones) is hard. Tidal power: hard. High-efficiency solar power: very hard. Fusion is likewise hard.
The other problem is that only a few of these sources could, by themselves, satisfy our demands for energy.
Given that as a civilization we have a basically limited amount of resources at any given time to commit to researching new energy sources, it's understandable that we tend to focus our attentions on the few sources that seem like viable wholesale replacements for our steadily depleting fossil fuels.
To put it bluntly, until it becomes clear that fusion simply won't work, it's going to receive most of the attention, because the possible payoff there is much higher than in any other avenue of research. Most alternative sources only make sense as aspects of a larger plan, consisting of a mix of sources. While this diversity is probably wise in the long run, it also represents a huge investment of time and effort into each source. And as the fossil fuels run out and energy becomes more expensive, the research becomes more difficult and our options more constrained. There is a risk, I think, of spreading ourselves too thin and not having a viable replacement for petroleum when its time is up.
It is a mistake to view fusion (or any other single source) as a 'magic bullet.' However, it makes a certain amount of sense to want to secure a source of energy that can replace fossil fuels first, and then research other alternatives in order to diversify our societal energy portfolio afterwards. To do otherwise might risk us not finding a replacement for our energy needs before the fossil fuels run out, which would be a disaster of unthinkable proportions.
Well, I'm not sure if it's been dropped from the OLPC at this point, but early prototypes were supposed to have a screen that either worked in color (with a backlight, I think) in dim/indoor light, or as passive high-contrast monochrome displays (with higher resolution and longer battery life) when in direct/bright light. I'm not sure where I read this; I think it was in a Wired Magazine article.
Sounded pretty neat to me. Until a while back, I had a monochrome-display Apple laptop that I still used for basic word-processing/email/Telnet text-based stuff, when I was sitting out on my deck next to the pool. I didn't care if it got wet, and it was the only machine I've ever owned that worked well in bright sunlight. You could just turn the backlight on the screen down to zero, and still read stuff. (Unless you had the sun glare right in your eyes; then it wouldn't work obviously, but anything else it was good for.) In the end, its battery died and that was all she wrote, but even as it was getting old, it could still run for an hour or so without the screen backlight.
If the OLPC incorporates such a screen, I really would like to see them become more common. I'd love the ability to switch from regular-rez color to high-resolution, low-power monochrome when I'm working in well-lit environments.
Okay, so how is this different than Gaim+OTR?
OTR does perfect forward secrecy -- I'm not sure about the keysize -- and already has a substantial base of users out there with it installed. (Including all the OS X users of Adium, who have but to turn it on in Preferences.)
I guess the Tor thing could be a neat feature, but it still seems like the encryption could have been done with existing plugins rather than creating a new system. The last thing we need is another, mutually-incompatible, IM encryption standard.
I disagree. Message-level protocols like OTR are very easy to use when they're implemented correctly into the software, and don't require any particular level of geekitude in order to use.
I've handled the installation, but I know of many non-technical friends who use GAIM+OTR (or Adium, which has it built-in) to communicate, without any problems. It's just like security in a web browser: when the lock icon is closed, it's secure. Nothing else is required out of the user, unless they want to turn it off or on manually (which is very simple; a dropdown menu).
The average user may be an idiot, but I think you're selling them a little short. The trick is getting them to want or care about security; if they care about it, there are technologies available that are well within the ease-of-use range of most people (post-installation; setup can still be tricky).
Are you sure about this? I clicked "Configure" on one of Dell's consumer laptops, and it pretty clearly states that you options for "Operating System" are your choice of "Windows® XP Home Edition [Included in Price]" or "Windows® XP Professional [add $149 or $4/month]". See this page, although I'm not sure if the link is stable.
There is no mention made, nor selectable option for, FreeDOS, RHEL, or anything else besides Windows.
Are those special "business" options? Because if that's the case, it's a lot less significant, since most people will never see them.
Until Linux is on the list of options right next to Windows, it's still going to be a 'hack' to most people; something the computer wasn't 'designed for.'
Yes.
And your DVD player, and your TV, and your cable box.
And anything else that you use a remote-control to turn on and off. Something has to be there, monitoring the IR receiver, so that it can switch the main power on when you press the button -- that's the cost of not getting up and pressing a mechanical switch to start it up.
Does anyone else think they would have a hard time learning from and listening to an object that didn't exude intelligence
I've had to learn from quite a few professors that don't exactly exude intelligence, so I'm not sure this really changes anything. If anything, they absorbed it.
No, what you really need is an ultra-rare "+6 Ted Kennedy's Car".
(Is it warm here or is it just you and me?)