There is another factor which consistently is overlooked when talking about the famous "Drake Equation" (the equation first proposed to define the total possible number of civilizations in the galaxy), and that is space-time.
Our galaxy is 100,000 light years (l.y.) across. Even if there are several million potential civilizations in this galaxy (according to Drake), once you randomly distribute them across 100,000 l.y. of space and some ten to fifteen billion years of time, you end up with a few dozen existing "at the same time" but separated by hideously immense distances. The chances of any two being close enough to communicate via radio are utterly slim.
And that about wraps it up. All your UFOs are belong to Hollywood.
The Republican lead jihad against the "liberals" has torn down almost all the remaining protections (those both legal as well as merely traditional) between public officials and their private lives. Thus, a sitting president can be sued for propositioning a former state employee while in office. The private sex life of a president can be used to entrap him in an impeachment trial.
Now imagine if that president was instead selling weapons to the sworn enemy of the state? Wouldn't that issue receive more scrutiny now that the few remaining privacies of official power are gone? Just imagine the trials that Bush will be put through as his close ties to the energy industry are revealed in quid pro quo deals with his buddies...
In their zeal to take down Clinton, the Republicans have left Bush wide open to assault from numerous fronts. (Of course, they are stuffing the Judiciary with their Chosen Ones and they control Congress and the Supreme Court so this isn't as easy as it was, say, last year.) I can't wait.
By conservative I meant resistant to change, not the Conservative Party. If I had intended the latter, I would have just used the American acronym GOP. As it stands, orthodox is a fine synonym for conservative.
PS. The one thing everyone agrees on is that public education in America is less than optimal, regardless of your political affiliation.
In my experience with school officials, the word "No" comes up more often than any other. They don't have the power to make anything happen, just to stifle it. This is the mind set of what is, arguably, one of the more conservative institutions publicly funded in the US. As Jon Katz keeps reminding us, today's schools are more like prisons than institutions of higher learning.
Re:Why is the war still raging?
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 1
A conservative friend once put it succinctly:
Legislate widely but enforce selectively.
Is there a better description of the Drug War than that?
Remake? Would you remake The Wizard of Oz? In 1999 I read a rumor that Kubrick was considering redoing some of the visuals for a re-release in (when else?) 2001, but beyond Kubrick "Lucasizing" his masterpiece, I would rather it be left alone, never mind being "remade". The visuals stand to this day... achieved the only way possible, with insanely big models (the Discovery model was sixty feet long!).
One thing would be amusing, however: updating the product placement logos. PanAm (rest in piece) becomes American Airlines (or did Trumbull do that already with Silent Running?), Howard Johnson becomes Days Inn, etc. Oddly enough, IBM's logo is essentially the same, and I am pretty sure that Lou Gestner would be delighted to have the company highlighted this time around. Now everyone knows what a computer is... no more boogie monster with the IBM logo.
During production, Clarke kept revising the novelisation of the screenplay, but at almost two years into the effort, had to submit a proof to the publisher so they could begin creating layout galleys for printing. Shortly after that, the effects team (Trumbull, Dykstra) told Kubrick that they just couldn't get the Saturn visuals to work, and Kubrick was forced to take the film's conclusion to Jupiter instead. That's why the novel goes to Saturn, not Jupiter! Also (another side disagreement) Clarke moved HALs birthday to 1997 from 1992, figuring that no one would go to Jupiter/Saturn with an out dated computer. The NASA Space Shuttle still uses 1970s era computers!
I use pneumatic tubes everytime I visit my Credit Union's motor bank. Sheesh.
The "new" rapid transit system in Dallas, Texas is essentially the same as the electric trolley system that once ran from Sherman to Dallas. Only this time, it costs 1000x more to (re)build.
Amigas, Apple ][s, and NeXTs liter my house. And they all work.
I have my father's 1956 slide rule (and sabre). It is huge, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you that I remember how to use it effectively. But my 1984 HP-15c is the Best Damned Engineering Calculator invented, and I *do* still use it.
Both candidates pay lip service (and nothing more) to censorship. It's a non-issue that the President has little effective control over, but which plays well in Peoria (#include for residents of Peoria). What scares me is that Bush will do what ever the top corporations want, and in the media biz right now, that's a call to de-legalize many forms of software and software development (eg. reverse engineering). If he presses these issues, we'll see a "Drug War" like effort against... programmers.
THINK ABOUT IT.
As opposed to a World owned by a single monolithic Corporation? That's all Capitalism offers to counter the "evils" of Socialism. Either way, the individual is crushed. Some alternative.
NeXTstep (old spelling) was a fantastically clever GUI built upon Mach/BSD4.X and (of all things) Display Postscript. Everything I read about MacOS X tells me that the core ideas of NeXTSTEP remain buried under a slightly different Mac UI; nothing of significance has been removed. Mac OS X is NeXTSTEP.
Was the UNIX under NeXTSTEP bad? Not really. It was typically a year out of date in terms of the core utilities, but the kernel was unique (Mach) and quite powerful. If you had access to the source of BIND, Perl and other tools, you could update the essential sys admin and developer tools and be quite up to date. Remember, it was just emulating BSD 4.X (2, 3 & 4).
What makes me sad is how few of you actually got to work on the NeXT. This is like the Second Coming of NeXT, and as one of the few (lucky) ones who saw it in the Cube Daze, let me tell you, it's great to see it back.
Gates hired many of the best NeXTSTEP people as fast as he could drag them away from the (unfortunately) failing software startups. One fellow in particular (as I recall) went to work on a "radically new OS from MS" that he couldn't talk about. I assume he meant NT, but the features he alluded to never made it out of the lab.
Yes, many of the innovations in NeXTSTEP have (finally) been cloned by Redmond, but that is their standard modus operandus. They never innovate... just co-opt. Gates was widely quoted as saying, "Develop for NeXTSTEP? I'd rather piss on it!" Well, COM and.NET are badly issued copies of ideas first demonstrated on NS.
This argument is just as valid with regard to Windows NT in all it's flavors. NT is not for the weak of stomach, it makes huge demands of you and is very difficult to setup correctly. Sound like UNIX, anyone? Operating Systems are some of the most complicated machines ever devised by humans, and they rely (very much) on a squishy brain to keep them working day-to-day. Don't expect that to change any time soon... as machines get faster and bigger, the OS grows too.
Companies are fined, implicitly, when cracked. The downtime, hassles of reloading and de-rootkitting are not inexpensive, and can easily exceed your suggested 100 quid fine.
The Gold Rush came before the railroads did. The railroads only came after the Federal Government promised to guarantee the railroad companies huge swatches of land (and the military power to defend them). Even then, the rail companies didn't build until there was a huge, pent-up demand for cargo transport. Once they were in place, huge depletions of the natural resources ensued (killing the Buffalo, decimating the native American populations, etc.).
In any case, the Federal Government (especially under Jefferson) financed and conducted the earliest explorations of the lands west of the Mississippi. There was little economic incentive, in the minds of the Eastern Establishment, to do this. The same can be said of today's corporations and exploring Mars.
Gates' use of this (2nd) Outlook-based virus as a defense against the breakup of M$ is utterly appalling. The sonnofabitch should be publicly flogged for that.
It is the crappy, crappy, crappy security of Outlook and Visual Basic that created the ecology that this virus used to propogate. As it has been pointed out (after Melissa), why didn't M$ issue a "critical security update" that switched Outlook's VBS run mode to "suspected at all times"? If anything, this stupid virus is one more reason to split M$ so that the idiots in charge of applications have to do a better job at security than on marketing.
There is merit to your assessment of this generation's "I didn't do it, I was compelled to do it by..." argument.
However, both selling government sanctioned addictive drugs and monopolizing the desktop software market are activities that are wrong and should be prosecuted against. Tobacco companies knowingly and profitably sell lethal products, which any sensible person can agree are bad for the consumer. So it is with M$'s domination of the desktop market. In the absence of any real competition (sorry, Mac) M$'s desktop OS has only been augmented to force consumers to buy newer versions, not to benefit the consumer.
Examples you say? Internet Explorer was forced down the throat of the consumer because M$ wanted to stifle Netscape, not because millions of desktop users needed another browser. And it was given away for the same reasons. Every "upgrade" of Windows has forced the average desktop customer to throw out an existing PC and replace it with a new one, which (conincidentally) has a copy of the newer Windows on it, whether or not you wanted to pay for it. Millions more would still be running Win 3.1 on 486 machines if M$ hadn't cut off their air supply (now only the poorest of the poor, school districts, run Win 3.1).
I wish you could live in a society where Capitalism ruled. You'd find yourself the property of the One and Only Company that eventually bought all the other smaller ones.
I sit here horrified, reading that M$ is openly paying a dangerously successful media manipulator (RR) to sway "Shrub" Bush to interfere with the DoJ suit against M$. Who wants to live in a country where a big, fat and (now we can all safely say it) criminal company can openly buy their next President and give him a quid pro quo (something Daddy was Famous for)-- a show of hands, please?
Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your mother, that M$ is responding to the anti-trust conviction by bribery. It's appalling.
Edison was obsessive, both with his "experimental method" and with his desire to prevent anyone, especially his former employee Nicolai Tesla, from usurping his domination of the nascent electrical power industry. He conducted a campaign of terror against AC power, performing horrific acts of cruelty to "prove" how dangerous AC was. He failed to show that DC, similarly, could fry your ass, counting on the layman's ignorance of electricity to cover the truth behind his scare tactics.
Comparing Bill Gates to Edison makes Edison seem less despicable than he really was. He embodied all the best of Gates but also of Scrooge and De Sade. He had no genius at all, and that is why he had to try literally everything he could lay his hands on when "experimenting". His technic reminds me of the medieval alchemists, vainly searching for the Philosopher's Stone, without the slightest benefit of understanding of chemistry or physics.
Tesla, by contrast, was a true genius. He seemed to intuit AC phenomena so clearly that he could design the "impossible" AC motor, and then continue to improve it over and over again. What he lacked was Edison's (and Gates') ability to promote mediocrity over better technology. Selling his patents for AC motors and generators (the basis of our current electrical power grid) to George Westinghouse was a desperate move to financially stay afloat; friendships aside, he gave Westinghouse the keys to the castle. Imagine owning a patent for wall current.
Edison's inventing was done by his sweatshop labs, and while his firm created lots of technology, like Microsoft, the bulk of it was created by uncredited minons and not Edison himself (he vainfully took full credit for anything his labs generated -- sound familar?). Tesla did have some extreme theories... broadcast energy would work, but it would make broadcast radio very diffcult to implement (besides, with current high voltage power lines runing hundreds of miles across the continent, in the end we implemented a form of broadcast electricity!).
Today's analog of Tesla is probably Wozniak, a man who single-handedly invented the personal computer: microprocessor based, with a bus, in a beige box, with a built-in keyboard, external storage logic, BIOS with "high level language", and video display. Consider that he's considered a "crackpot" by today's standards for not obsessively chasing more wealth, instead choosing to spend his time and talents helping children. That's a man we should all hold up as the Tesla of our time.
(With apologies to The Woz for using the c****pot word).
Don't get too misty eyed. RadioShack and Microsoft have been in bed before (Bill has only ever personally appeared in one series of ads... for Tandy PCs back in 1983-4). The Sh*tShack will still be a good place to get resistors and stuff, but now you'll have to wade past the stacks of RC cars *and* (ick) Microsloth Products(tm).
But it makes sense. If teachers change the criteria for a passing grade to the criteria in some software - which can be inferred by analyising its behavior, or REing the program - than students don't have to learn anything. Just successfully spoof the program. Or learn only what the program needs them to know, and nothing more.
In Texas, the TAAS (standardized tests) have become the sole focus of factory education, and this perfectly mimics the phenonmena described above. The tests are essentially given and graded by machine, and so the teaching has followed suit. We teach K-12 students to answer the questions on the TAAS, and not much else. This over-emphasis on the TAAS creates and reinforces the self-referential goal of automated education endless looping on itself. I think this has lead directly to the situation described in this article.
Why do bureaucracies do this kind of non-sense? If I give a school district an "obsolete" computer, why does it have to be insured for anything? It's replacement cost is $0. I gave it to them. I'll get them another if some kid takes it (I hope he uses it). In my experience (see this link) school districts come up with N+1 excuses for preventing technical people from helping, because (IMHO) they don't understand the tools you can provide, and therefore they cannot "manage" them.
I think a better approach is to give computers directly to disadvantaged familes -- screw the bureaucrats at school districts. And these machines come with a no-nonsense guarantee: if they break, bring back the pieces and we'll find you another one. No cost. No questions. No hassles. If only NetZero supported Linux... we could offer full Internet capabilities over any phone line at no cost (a 14.4 or 28.8 modem and SLIP).
It's worth noting that the only successful "geeks in the streets" organizations don't support school districts, but rather smaller, more flexible organizations. Be proactive -- help those in need, not bloated, top heavy school districts.
Slashdot Mirror
Our galaxy is 100,000 light years (l.y.) across. Even if there are several million potential civilizations in this galaxy (according to Drake), once you randomly distribute them across 100,000 l.y. of space and some ten to fifteen billion years of time, you end up with a few dozen existing "at the same time" but separated by hideously immense distances. The chances of any two being close enough to communicate via radio are utterly slim.
And that about wraps it up. All your UFOs are belong to Hollywood.
Now imagine if that president was instead selling weapons to the sworn enemy of the state? Wouldn't that issue receive more scrutiny now that the few remaining privacies of official power are gone? Just imagine the trials that Bush will be put through as his close ties to the energy industry are revealed in quid pro quo deals with his buddies ...
In their zeal to take down Clinton, the Republicans have left Bush wide open to assault from numerous fronts. (Of course, they are stuffing the Judiciary with their Chosen Ones and they control Congress and the Supreme Court so this isn't as easy as it was, say, last year.) I can't wait.
PS. The one thing everyone agrees on is that public education in America is less than optimal, regardless of your political affiliation.
In my experience with school officials, the word "No" comes up more often than any other. They don't have the power to make anything happen, just to stifle it. This is the mind set of what is, arguably, one of the more conservative institutions publicly funded in the US. As Jon Katz keeps reminding us, today's schools are more like prisons than institutions of higher learning.
Legislate widely but enforce selectively.
Is there a better description of the Drug War than that?
One thing would be amusing, however: updating the product placement logos. PanAm (rest in piece) becomes American Airlines (or did Trumbull do that already with Silent Running?), Howard Johnson becomes Days Inn, etc. Oddly enough, IBM's logo is essentially the same, and I am pretty sure that Lou Gestner would be delighted to have the company highlighted this time around. Now everyone knows what a computer is ... no more boogie monster with the IBM logo.
During production, Clarke kept revising the novelisation of the screenplay, but at almost two years into the effort, had to submit a proof to the publisher so they could begin creating layout galleys for printing. Shortly after that, the effects team (Trumbull, Dykstra) told Kubrick that they just couldn't get the Saturn visuals to work, and Kubrick was forced to take the film's conclusion to Jupiter instead. That's why the novel goes to Saturn, not Jupiter! Also (another side disagreement) Clarke moved HALs birthday to 1997 from 1992, figuring that no one would go to Jupiter/Saturn with an out dated computer. The NASA Space Shuttle still uses 1970s era computers!
I use pneumatic tubes everytime I visit my Credit Union's motor bank. Sheesh. The "new" rapid transit system in Dallas, Texas is essentially the same as the electric trolley system that once ran from Sherman to Dallas. Only this time, it costs 1000x more to (re)build. Amigas, Apple ][s, and NeXTs liter my house. And they all work. I have my father's 1956 slide rule (and sabre). It is huge, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you that I remember how to use it effectively. But my 1984 HP-15c is the Best Damned Engineering Calculator invented, and I *do* still use it.
Both candidates pay lip service (and nothing more) to censorship. It's a non-issue that the President has little effective control over, but which plays well in Peoria (#include for residents of Peoria). What scares me is that Bush will do what ever the top corporations want, and in the media biz right now, that's a call to de-legalize many forms of software and software development (eg. reverse engineering). If he presses these issues, we'll see a "Drug War" like effort against ... programmers.
THINK ABOUT IT.
As opposed to a World owned by a single monolithic Corporation? That's all Capitalism offers to counter the "evils" of Socialism. Either way, the individual is crushed. Some alternative.
Since Microsoft swiped the concept of the NeXT dock (which is the same in MacOS X), your comment seems oddly ... anachronistic.
Learn from the past!
NeXTstep (old spelling) was a fantastically clever GUI built upon Mach/BSD4.X and (of all things) Display Postscript. Everything I read about MacOS X tells me that the core ideas of NeXTSTEP remain buried under a slightly different Mac UI; nothing of significance has been removed. Mac OS X is NeXTSTEP.
Was the UNIX under NeXTSTEP bad? Not really. It was typically a year out of date in terms of the core utilities, but the kernel was unique (Mach) and quite powerful. If you had access to the source of BIND, Perl and other tools, you could update the essential sys admin and developer tools and be quite up to date. Remember, it was just emulating BSD 4.X (2, 3 & 4).
What makes me sad is how few of you actually got to work on the NeXT. This is like the Second Coming of NeXT, and as one of the few (lucky) ones who saw it in the Cube Daze, let me tell you, it's great to see it back.
Gates hired many of the best NeXTSTEP people as fast as he could drag them away from the (unfortunately) failing software startups. One fellow in particular (as I recall) went to work on a "radically new OS from MS" that he couldn't talk about. I assume he meant NT, but the features he alluded to never made it out of the lab. Yes, many of the innovations in NeXTSTEP have (finally) been cloned by Redmond, but that is their standard modus operandus. They never innovate ... just co-opt. Gates was widely quoted as saying, "Develop for NeXTSTEP? I'd rather piss on it!" Well, COM and .NET are badly issued copies of ideas first demonstrated on NS.
This argument is just as valid with regard to Windows NT in all it's flavors. NT is not for the weak of stomach, it makes huge demands of you and is very difficult to setup correctly. Sound like UNIX, anyone? Operating Systems are some of the most complicated machines ever devised by humans, and they rely (very much) on a squishy brain to keep them working day-to-day. Don't expect that to change any time soon ... as machines get faster and bigger, the OS grows too.
Companies are fined, implicitly, when cracked. The downtime, hassles of reloading and de-rootkitting are not inexpensive, and can easily exceed your suggested 100 quid fine.
The Gold Rush came before the railroads did. The railroads only came after the Federal Government promised to guarantee the railroad companies huge swatches of land (and the military power to defend them). Even then, the rail companies didn't build until there was a huge, pent-up demand for cargo transport. Once they were in place, huge depletions of the natural resources ensued (killing the Buffalo, decimating the native American populations, etc.).
In any case, the Federal Government (especially under Jefferson) financed and conducted the earliest explorations of the lands west of the Mississippi. There was little economic incentive, in the minds of the Eastern Establishment, to do this. The same can be said of today's corporations and exploring Mars.
It is the crappy, crappy, crappy security of Outlook and Visual Basic that created the ecology that this virus used to propogate. As it has been pointed out (after Melissa), why didn't M$ issue a "critical security update" that switched Outlook's VBS run mode to "suspected at all times"? If anything, this stupid virus is one more reason to split M$ so that the idiots in charge of applications have to do a better job at security than on marketing.
However, both selling government sanctioned addictive drugs and monopolizing the desktop software market are activities that are wrong and should be prosecuted against. Tobacco companies knowingly and profitably sell lethal products, which any sensible person can agree are bad for the consumer. So it is with M$'s domination of the desktop market. In the absence of any real competition (sorry, Mac) M$'s desktop OS has only been augmented to force consumers to buy newer versions, not to benefit the consumer.
Examples you say? Internet Explorer was forced down the throat of the consumer because M$ wanted to stifle Netscape, not because millions of desktop users needed another browser. And it was given away for the same reasons. Every "upgrade" of Windows has forced the average desktop customer to throw out an existing PC and replace it with a new one, which (conincidentally) has a copy of the newer Windows on it, whether or not you wanted to pay for it. Millions more would still be running Win 3.1 on 486 machines if M$ hadn't cut off their air supply (now only the poorest of the poor, school districts, run Win 3.1).
I wish you could live in a society where Capitalism ruled. You'd find yourself the property of the One and Only Company that eventually bought all the other smaller ones.
Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your mother, that M$ is responding to the anti-trust conviction by bribery. It's appalling.
Edison was obsessive, both with his "experimental method" and with his desire to prevent anyone, especially his former employee Nicolai Tesla, from usurping his domination of the nascent electrical power industry. He conducted a campaign of terror against AC power, performing horrific acts of cruelty to "prove" how dangerous AC was. He failed to show that DC, similarly, could fry your ass, counting on the layman's ignorance of electricity to cover the truth behind his scare tactics.
Comparing Bill Gates to Edison makes Edison seem less despicable than he really was. He embodied all the best of Gates but also of Scrooge and De Sade. He had no genius at all, and that is why he had to try literally everything he could lay his hands on when "experimenting". His technic reminds me of the medieval alchemists, vainly searching for the Philosopher's Stone, without the slightest benefit of understanding of chemistry or physics.
Tesla, by contrast, was a true genius. He seemed to intuit AC phenomena so clearly that he could design the "impossible" AC motor, and then continue to improve it over and over again. What he lacked was Edison's (and Gates') ability to promote mediocrity over better technology. Selling his patents for AC motors and generators (the basis of our current electrical power grid) to George Westinghouse was a desperate move to financially stay afloat; friendships aside, he gave Westinghouse the keys to the castle. Imagine owning a patent for wall current.
Edison's inventing was done by his sweatshop labs, and while his firm created lots of technology, like Microsoft, the bulk of it was created by uncredited minons and not Edison himself (he vainfully took full credit for anything his labs generated -- sound familar?). Tesla did have some extreme theories ... broadcast energy would work, but it would make broadcast radio very diffcult to implement (besides, with current high voltage power lines runing hundreds of miles across the continent, in the end we implemented a form of broadcast electricity!).
Today's analog of Tesla is probably Wozniak, a man who single-handedly invented the personal computer: microprocessor based, with a bus, in a beige box, with a built-in keyboard, external storage logic, BIOS with "high level language", and video display. Consider that he's considered a "crackpot" by today's standards for not obsessively chasing more wealth, instead choosing to spend his time and talents helping children. That's a man we should all hold up as the Tesla of our time.
(With apologies to The Woz for using the c****pot word).
Don't get too misty eyed. RadioShack and Microsoft have been in bed before (Bill has only ever personally appeared in one series of ads ... for Tandy PCs back in 1983-4). The Sh*tShack will still be a good place to get resistors and stuff, but now you'll have to wade past the stacks of RC cars *and* (ick) Microsloth Products(tm).
So it goes.
In Texas, the TAAS (standardized tests) have become the sole focus of factory education, and this perfectly mimics the phenonmena described above. The tests are essentially given and graded by machine, and so the teaching has followed suit. We teach K-12 students to answer the questions on the TAAS, and not much else. This over-emphasis on the TAAS creates and reinforces the self-referential goal of automated education endless looping on itself. I think this has lead directly to the situation described in this article.
Why do bureaucracies do this kind of non-sense? If I give a school district an "obsolete" computer, why does it have to be insured for anything? It's replacement cost is $0. I gave it to them. I'll get them another if some kid takes it (I hope he uses it). In my experience (see this link) school districts come up with N+1 excuses for preventing technical people from helping, because (IMHO) they don't understand the tools you can provide, and therefore they cannot "manage" them.
... we could offer full Internet capabilities over any phone line at no cost (a 14.4 or 28.8 modem and SLIP).
I think a better approach is to give computers directly to disadvantaged familes -- screw the bureaucrats at school districts. And these machines come with a no-nonsense guarantee: if they break, bring back the pieces and we'll find you another one. No cost. No questions. No hassles. If only NetZero supported Linux
It's worth noting that the only successful "geeks in the streets" organizations don't support school districts, but rather smaller, more flexible organizations. Be proactive -- help those in need, not bloated, top heavy school districts.