Just because it's data packets instead of ink or sound being sent doesn't change a whole lot.
But it does! Surely one of the prime considerations in the creation of a law must be whether it can be reasonably, fairly, and consistently enforced. Technology changes that immensely. For example, digital media has shattered the usefulness of copyright law by making controlling copying impossible. Encryption makes content regulation of private communication useless.
These laws may still be on the books, but in the not-too-distant future they'll be about as meaningful as Maryland's laws against adultery and swearing.
Rather than trying to enforce the unforcable (see what a success that's been in our War on (Some) Drugs?) we should step back, recall what the intent of the law was, and try to find a means (legal or social) of accomplishing that goal in the context of new technology.
No commute? That's great! Except for the fact that you weren't being paid to commute in the first place
Why is that an "except"? If I was being paid to commute, I'd have no problem doing it. (And do I know one fellow who took a laptop on the train and got his client to allow him to bill them for his travel time.) But commuting reduces my "real" hourly wage by almost 14% - take pay for an 8 hour day and divide it by (8 hours + 1.25 hour commute) - as well as costing me gas, vehicle maintence, and (sometimes) parking fees. Given this, I can actually work more hours for a lower rate when telecommuting and still come our with more free time and more money at the end of the month!
I did a six month stint of telecommuting, and I really want to find a job where I can do it again - anyone looking for a good Unix hacker who likes to work from his bedroom?
I would keep that news quiet from the oil and mineral companies that hired him during his 'quiet' years
So big companies got scammed. Nothing new here. (Insert Bil Gate / Windows reference here.)
Also, the only time anyone replicated the spoonbending it took about 4 days to set up the scam.
Nope. I saw famed debunker James "The Amazing" Randi "bend" a spoon - and even make it break - when he spoke at the physics department at the University of Maryland, College Park about 8 or 10 years ago. Most definitely didn't take 4 days to set up. And he's hardly the only one to replicate it.
C'mon, if you've seen David Copperfield or Penn and Teller you've seen much more impressive illusions and didn't believe they were the results of "psychic powers". Why would you believe it of Geller?
Selective breeding in agriculture wasn't utilized or fully understood until the agricultural boom around the early 1700's.
Selective breeding was the mechanism that neolithic man used to domesticate animals - kill the agressive ones, keep the docile ones with big udders. (Consideration of the relation of this process to man's treatment of women is left as an exercise for the reader.) That far predates the 1700s. It may not have been practiced with the precision used in more modern times, especially post-Mendel, but it's been around for many a year.
The world's population keeps growing because underdeveloped countries feel the need to reproduce unchecked.
But they couldn't breed unchecked without food, no? (Not meant as an argument for letting people starve to death, just for realizing that just throwing food at them is no more a long term solution that is giving whiskey to an alcoholic with the DTs.)
If your theory held correct, then the US's steady surplus of food would have resulted in a skyrocketting population growth.
Food supply is not the only factor that determines the rate of increase. (And many of the best things we can do about overpopulation deal with those other factors.) But our population is increasing.
Yet, the US of A has held roughly around 270 million since the early seventies.
Only for a very loose definition of "roughly". US population in 1970 was around 203 million. Today's population is 30-35% higher.
While countries such as India, China, and Ethiopia (where they've never had enough food for the populace) have increased at PHENOMINAL rates.
If the population is increasing, then they do have enough food - not enough for comfortable, healthy lives, but enough to breed, and that's all evolutionary pressures care about. (Your genes don't give a fsck about your quality of live, they just want a new host.)
Re:I did prepare...for stupidity
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Now I have a nice supply of water and ammo, a shortwave radio, and a bunch of really good flashlights, things I should have around anyway.
Exactly. I took the Y2K runup as an opportunity to increase my general preparedness for whatever may come. My power didn't go out on Jan 1, but it's gone out before during storms or when some idiot hit a pole, so I'm sure I'll use that diesel generator someday. The wind-up solar-powered radio is not only good for power outages but for camping trips too. A couple extra cans of soup are useful if I get snowed in.
Re:Forget Y2K... how about Y10K?
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Y2K is not too serious of a problem. But what happens when we roll over to 5 digit years?
Back in April I posted the following to the RISKS Forum:
So maybe I'm an April Fool, but it seems to me that the Y10K issue is worth a little serious thought.
There are areas of human endeavor in which 8000 years is not an extreme time span. At present, we deal with these long time spans only in modeling things like geological and cosmological events. But it is not unreasonable that within the next century, we may begin to build very high technology systems with mission durations of thousands of years - for example, a system to contain radioactive wastes, or a probe to another star system.
Y2K issues have raised our consciousness about timer overflows, but it's quite possible that this may fade in succeeding generations. There's no reason not to start setting standards now.
Perhaps all time counters should bignums?
Re:Conspiracy theorists want no need to believe.
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Does anyone have any clue about WHY there could be problems on Feb. 29th?
The rule for leap years is actually a bit complex:
If the year is divisable by four, it's a leap year - UNLESS it's divisable by 100, in which case it's not - UNLESS it's divisable by 400, in which case it is. (Does any programming language have an UNLESS clause?) So 1900 wasn't, and 2000 is.
If someone just coded "Every 4th year is leap", it'll work fine this year. (Break in 2100, though.) If someone got the rule right, it'll work fine. (Duh.) There may have been a significant number of systems that got the first two but not the third clause above; but I can't imagine that many got through Y2K testing.
I'm happy to report that "cal" on my trusty old Red Hat box reports Feb 2000 as 29 days and Feb 2100 as 28, as it should.
I'm just glad we have another century of using '00' through '99' for the year...
I'm currently working on EDOS, the ground system for the Earth Observing System. (The recently lauched "Terra" is the first satellite in the system.)
In this system, spacecraft contact session ids are based on spacegraft id, ground station id, date and time. The date part uses - you guessed it - a two digit year. Makes me wanna cry...
Current movies, TV, and music foster a culture of nihilism where quality and self-discipline are sneered at.
Nonsense. The lack of involvement that workers have with the outcome of their labor has nothing to do with Hollywood; at most, the media reflects, not creates, this attitude.
The cause lies in industrial capitalism: how can a person feel ownership and responsibility for the outcome of their work when they are not owners and the work process is designed to make them an easily-replacable cog in a machine? What pride can one take in work that is so narrowly circumscribed?
Taken to the extreme, software process is an attempt to bring the assembly-line attitude to the development of code; and it will result in the same apathy about quality.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Quality -- you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes
poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in
the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others -- but what's the ``betterness''? -- So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?
...
``Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and formswe give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''
The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us because we don't have analogues to them to sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.
This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions. They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge. But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.
In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically every time. There was no way to test this, however, so it had to remain just
speculation.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Yes, these IT methodologies are important because they enforce the measurement of quality. Without measurement there is no science.
The problem is that their measurement of quality has nothing to do with the actual quality of the end result. Bad science can be worse than no science at all - "so, obviously, if she weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood, and therefore a witch."
Producing a libraries's worth of unusable documentation just because it fulfils a line of a checklist is not quality, only the shadow thereof.
Many folks would rather "get on" with the coding (or whatever) rather than take care of procedural chores. This is the wrong attitude. The procedural chores are part of the work. CS people seem to be the only folks who don't recognize this....The IT methodologies put the science back into "CS".
No, I think anyone with a real CS background understands the need for the procedure. We just want procedures that help, rather than hinder, quality results. Faddish "IT" methodologies (indeed, pretty much anything with "IT" in the name) are based on a poor understanding of quality and creativity.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
(such as selective breeding and hybridization, which was originally labelled as "genetic manipulation", or "playing God")
Horseshit. Selective breeding is thouands of years old, far predating our knowledge of genetics. Or monotheism, for that matter.
If farmers don't begin looking to technological advancements in crop production, our food supply is going to be incredibly short in the next few years, if the world population keeps growing at its current rate.
The world's population keeps growing because farmers keep increasing production. Every species increases population in the presence of food surpluses.
Even putting that aside, unsustainable agricultural methods only delay, not prevent, population overtaking food production - and by allowing population to grow in the meantime they could create a greater disaster.
...proper use of GM foods would permit less use of chemicals for the growth of foods. GM is the least of your worries, I would be far more concerned about the pesticides and fertilizers.GM is the least of your worries, I would be far more concerned about the pesticides and fertilizers.
One of the leading uses of GM is to make crops herbicide resistant ("Roundup ready"), so that farmers can actually use chemicals indiscriminately. Another popular use is to make plants actually produce their own pesticides (Bt).
The was something based on nicotine that my folks wouldn't let me get within a mile of, and they used masks and changed clothing after using it.
While they require more care during application, isn't it true that nicotine-based pesticides don't build up in the environment the way things like DDT do?
We either increase yield per acre, or learn to live on a cup of rice a day,
In the long run, increasing yield is not a solution, for feeding people or for saving farms.
Every animal expands population in the presence of food surplues. And every increase in production has brought about a fall in prices that keeps the farmer in the same economic position.
Every human on the planet went day to day wondering if they would have enough food the next day
Hmm. My understanding is that hunter-gatherer societies in hospitable climates were able to feed themselves pretty well with only a few hours work per day. Agriculture allowed many more to be fed, but at the cost of more labor being required to feed a person, and a much heavier environmental impact.
Non-GM seed strains are generally developed by subjecting seeds to radiation or mutagenic chemicals...
I've never heard of this. Reference, please.
Genetic engineering techniques do not rely on such scattershot methods - they involve implantation of specific genetic material in the target organism.
But current GM techniques are scattershot! The gene is not inserted carefully into a known place in the plant's genome, but shotgunned into the chromosomes in the hope that it will "take root" somewhere that will produce the desired effects.
Therefore, being afraid that GM crops will drive out non-GM crops (under cultivation) is as silly as being afraid that my new traditionally selected long-grain rice will supplant other breeds of long-grain rice cause mine is better.
This already happens. Our food crops have been losing diversity for years. Crop monoculture is very, very bad - see the Irish potato blight.
...the problem with the current media is that they are by and large left leaning...
The media outlets are no more liberal than are the huge corporations that own them. (NPR may be an exeception, obviously.) Which is not to say that there's not bias, but it's different in every outlet (Washington Times vs. Washington Post) and it's overly simplistic to label it "liberal" (a word that has lost all meaning since Regan-era Republicans managed to turn it into an epithet).
I believe the constitutional injunction on depriving a person of life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness...
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. What the Constitution (Amendment V) says is that "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." Irrelevant to the abortion debate, as an embryo or fetus is not a person.
How many of you really watch movies on your computer?
Maybe I am weird, but I would much rather have the comfort of my couch.
People also watch movies in bed. People often have computers in their bedrooms. A good-sized monitor is about as big as the TVs many people have in their bedrooms. (My 17" monitor has a larger screen than the TV in my bedroom.)
I don't have a DVD player, but I know at least one person who watches DVD movies on the computer in their bedroom.
...lawyers representating the plaintiffs could be reading Slashdot.org. Any potentially damaging and/or slanderous comments could get the plaintiffs to ask for a court order for NSI to pull the registration of http://slashdot.org...
If something like that happened it would be a definitive sign that corporate interests have completed their takeover of the government, and that it was time for the people to forcefully revolt and take it back.
But that's pretty unlikely; the corporate takeover hasn't preceded that far yet. Of course, the bastards want us to fear that it could happen. They want us to be afraid to speak against them, lest we be crushed beneath high-powered legal teams.
In fact, this smacks so heavily of FUD I must question the poster's motives. Are you involved with one of the plaintiffs?
Censorware when done right should impose the same level of censorship that we apply to everyday life. You can go to a library and with enough searching find books on abortion, sexual problems, even steamy novels for housewives- but you won't find the latest issue of Hustler.
Actually, the library in the neighborhood where I grew up had Playboy.
But your analogy is flawed. Censorship software isn't like selecting what books to put in a library; it's like ripping pages out of the books that you do select.
Before anyone says anything about how the age requirements should be lower for any of this stuff, that is not relevant to this discussion. Take it up with the laws that exist already.
You make it relevant by pointing to existing age laws as justification for new laws. The existance of bad laws is no justification for the creation of more bad laws.
(I see that in another comment you write:)
What do you think should be done about the availability of pornography on the net?
I think we should get over it already; we'd all be better off if we stopped acting like seeing people screwing is going to damage children psyches. The only danger of porn is that it can create and unrealistic view of sex; if we were honest and open about sex, it would be a non-issue.
If you don't want your kids to see it, that's your responsibility. Monitor your kids computer use, put filtering software on your computer, but don't make me use it, and don't put it on the computers at the library.
one can use the court of public opinion - with videos of the dumping - which doesn't have as much potential for backfire
Hmf. Seen many reports on Disney's labor practices on ABC news lately?
When defending one's rights in court requires access to the mass media, surely we're in deep trouble. Legal proceedings, civil and criminal, are supposed to be about facts and law, not about who looks better or camera, or who can get the most airtime.
It's bad enough that you would have to hire high-priced lawyers, but under your scheme you'd have to hire video producers and publicists.
Oh no! I had completely forgotten about that one until you mentioned the "starcruiser whoosssh! starcruiser crashhhh!" line. I was happy and safe until you triggered the memory...
Well, one thing they could do would be to de-uglify theit web site. A "best viewed in IE" banner? A photo of the corporate HQ on the front page? A framed layout where I have to scroll to the right to read the content? And, good lord, is that a BLINK tag?? It does not exactly inspire faith in the company.
As for the idea itself...none of the scenarios discussed (other than the creation of more annoying marketing drivel) really call for a paper or disposable computer, they call for better computer-readable data entry. Why have a $5 paper "computer" broadcast its data to a reader when you can have a 1-cent "fill-in-the-bubbles-with-a-number-2-pencil" form scanned by a reader?
Slashdot Mirror
These laws may still be on the books, but in the not-too-distant future they'll be about as meaningful as Maryland's laws against adultery and swearing.
Rather than trying to enforce the unforcable (see what a success that's been in our War on (Some) Drugs?) we should step back, recall what the intent of the law was, and try to find a means (legal or social) of accomplishing that goal in the context of new technology.
I did a six month stint of telecommuting, and I really want to find a job where I can do it again - anyone looking for a good Unix hacker who likes to work from his bedroom?
C'mon, if you've seen David Copperfield or Penn and Teller you've seen much more impressive illusions and didn't believe they were the results of "psychic powers". Why would you believe it of Geller?
If the year is divisable by four, it's a leap year - UNLESS it's divisable by 100, in which case it's not - UNLESS it's divisable by 400, in which case it is. (Does any programming language have an UNLESS clause?) So 1900 wasn't, and 2000 is.
If someone just coded "Every 4th year is leap", it'll work fine this year. (Break in 2100, though.) If someone got the rule right, it'll work fine. (Duh.) There may have been a significant number of systems that got the first two but not the third clause above; but I can't imagine that many got through Y2K testing.
I'm happy to report that "cal" on my trusty old Red Hat box reports Feb 2000 as 29 days and Feb 2100 as 28, as it should.
In this system, spacecraft contact session ids are based on spacegraft id, ground station id, date and time. The date part uses - you guessed it - a two digit year. Makes me wanna cry...
The cause lies in industrial capitalism: how can a person feel ownership and responsibility for the outcome of their work when they are not owners and the work process is designed to make them an easily-replacable cog in a machine? What pride can one take in work that is so narrowly circumscribed?
Taken to the extreme, software process is an attempt to bring the assembly-line attitude to the development of code; and it will result in the same apathy about quality.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
You know, every hacker should read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Producing a libraries's worth of unusable documentation just because it fulfils a line of a checklist is not quality, only the shadow thereof.
No, I think anyone with a real CS background understands the need for the procedure. We just want procedures that help, rather than hinder, quality results. Faddish "IT" methodologies (indeed, pretty much anything with "IT" in the name) are based on a poor understanding of quality and creativity.Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Excellent link! Love the idea of searching for spectral lines indicating the dumping of nuclear waste in stars.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Even putting that aside, unsustainable agricultural methods only delay, not prevent, population overtaking food production - and by allowing population to grow in the meantime they could create a greater disaster.
That hardly counts as less chemical use, does it?
Every animal expands population in the presence of food surplues. And every increase in production has brought about a fall in prices that keeps the farmer in the same economic position.
GM could let us make this mistake even faster.
I don't have a DVD player, but I know at least one person who watches DVD movies on the computer in their bedroom.
But that's pretty unlikely; the corporate takeover hasn't preceded that far yet. Of course, the bastards want us to fear that it could happen. They want us to be afraid to speak against them, lest we be crushed beneath high-powered legal teams.
In fact, this smacks so heavily of FUD I must question the poster's motives. Are you involved with one of the plaintiffs?
But your analogy is flawed. Censorship software isn't like selecting what books to put in a library; it's like ripping pages out of the books that you do select.
You make it relevant by pointing to existing age laws as justification for new laws. The existance of bad laws is no justification for the creation of more bad laws.(I see that in another comment you write:)
I think we should get over it already; we'd all be better off if we stopped acting like seeing people screwing is going to damage children psyches. The only danger of porn is that it can create and unrealistic view of sex; if we were honest and open about sex, it would be a non-issue.If you don't want your kids to see it, that's your responsibility. Monitor your kids computer use, put filtering software on your computer, but don't make me use it, and don't put it on the computers at the library.
When defending one's rights in court requires access to the mass media, surely we're in deep trouble. Legal proceedings, civil and criminal, are supposed to be about facts and law, not about who looks better or camera, or who can get the most airtime.
It's bad enough that you would have to hire high-priced lawyers, but under your scheme you'd have to hire video producers and publicists.
Oh no! I had completely forgotten about that one until you mentioned the "starcruiser whoosssh! starcruiser crashhhh!" line. I was happy and safe until you triggered the memory...
Well, one thing they could do would be to de-uglify theit web site. A "best viewed in IE" banner? A photo of the corporate HQ on the front page? A framed layout where I have to scroll to the right to read the content? And, good lord, is that a BLINK tag?? It does not exactly inspire faith in the company.
As for the idea itself...none of the scenarios discussed (other than the creation of more annoying marketing drivel) really call for a paper or disposable computer, they call for better computer-readable data entry. Why have a $5 paper "computer" broadcast its data to a reader when you can have a 1-cent "fill-in-the-bubbles-with-a-number-2-pencil" form scanned by a reader?