"That doesn't answer the question. Schools used to carry Apple ][ computers way back in the day, so thusly OS X is better for research?"
You are missingthe point. Researchers are used to Apple. Period. What particular OS Apple uses is irrelevant - the researchers like Apple, so that's what they get.
I made a point in another post - us over here in userland (researchers included) DON'T CARE about the OS - as long as it works reasonably well. But we do tend to get attached to a manufacturer, or particular programs. Researchers and academics tend to like Apple - they liked Apple with the Apple II OS, they liked Apple with the MacOS, and they stil like apple with OSX. With corporations it was/is IBM with AS400's, PC's, etc. I like thinkpads.
"Not sure why he thinks OSX is better for researchers, though"
I would guess that, when the researchers in question were in school, Apple owned the education market. They got used to Apples, and Apples are what they are used to. And if their researchers are anything like the ones I've dealt with, hiring extra staff is far easier on the organization than listening to the bitching, pissing, and moaning that ensues when a medical researcher doesn't get his or her way.
Think of it this way - they've been indoctrinated in the "doctor's are gods" attitude by their traing, but their people skills are so poor that they prefer to work for less pay as long as they can be relatively isolated. But tehy are still cranky and bitter about it.
Come to think of it, that describes a lot of the attitudes ascribed to programmers here...
"I'm not sure I'd trust this guy as a Linux expert, however "well-known" he may be."
Sigh...
The whole point is that he is NOT a Linux expert, just like the other 99% of us out here in userland. Just like 95% of us are not Windows "experts". Allow me to clue in the 1%:
1) I don't care about KDE and Gnome either, nor do I care to know. 2) I don't want to be an "expert" at either system, but that doesn't mean I can't form opinions about how well something works for me or my organization.
It sounds like the Ubuntu folks seem to get what a large portion of the Linux community refuses to see - most end users don't care about esoterica. We just want it to work reasonably well. Not even perfect - just reasonably easy to use. Hell, I'm ready to make the switch to Ubuntu, but for my slavery to Quicken. But the other distributions? Meh. I ditched the command line with Dos and Win3.1 - my memory s crowded enough without having to emmorize command line switches for operations I don't do every day.
I'm reminded of the recent regulations concerning diesel emissions, specifically particulate emissions. The propriety of the regulations aside, one of the most striking things to me was that the basis of the regulations was not that diesel particulates make people sick per se, but that they exacerbate [sp?] preexisting asthma and other lung conditions, and that statistically this would cause x amount of "premature" deaths.
In other words, we will probably never be able to identify an individual who died, or was even made sick, by diesel particulates. But over a span of time, various individuals, already sick, died earlier than they otherwise would have.
In the book "White Noise", by Don DeLillo, the protagonist is exposed to some agent that has a very small probability of decreasing his lifespan by a very short length of time - iirc, it was a 1 in 100,000 chance of decreasing his lifespan by 1 year. This had lief changing consequences for him - not the exposure, but the knowledge of the exposure.
I read the book in as part of a curriculum on Science, Technology, and Society, and it made very good points about risk and perception of risk. I just never really thought that I would see it acted out in real life as part of national policy.
1) Did anyone NOT know the batteries weren't replaceable? 2) If he didn't like it, why didn't he return it for a refund? 3) Has he actually been harmed yet? One of the parts about civil courts is that there actually need to BE damages, not just potential damages, except for certain circumstances.
There is an effective defense - it's called racial profiling. Since 9/11, a vast majority of the terrorists involved in any of the activities since 9/11 have been Arab or Near/South Asian. So simply let all the grannies, kids, Caucasians, African Ameicans, Asians go through, and strip search all of the terrorist looking folks, and everything will run a lot smoother.
Oh, wait - that's a huge violation of a lot of different laws, and makes teh vast majority of the US populace outraged.
So here are three options: Treat the people who look like terrorists as terrorists, or treat everyone like a terrorist, or wave a magic wand/go back in time and make terrorism not exist.
The summary states:" 'Moore's law is great for making tech faster, and for making slower, existing tech cheaper,"
And then asks: but when consumers realize their personal lust for faster hardware makes almost zero financial sense, and hurts the environment with greater demands for power, will they start to demand cheaper, more efficient 'third-world' computers that are just as effective?"
So Moore's law is good for going smaller/faster/cheaper, but the demand for s/f/c will spell the end of Moore's law?
The problem with thought experiments on ethics is that the proposition has as much to do with the outcome as the experimenter. For instance, you would probably get a different distribution of answers depending on the number of embryos or babies. Same goes with the Prisoner's Dilemna and the Radium Cure - modify the premises slightly, the answers can change drastically.
It also depends on the ethical system you are using.
From a strictly utilitarian point of view (the framework you seem to set as the standard), the number is irrelevant - 2 embryos should outweigh 1 baby, much less 40,000. What if it were 40 million embryos?
A rights-based decision would probably come down squarely for the baby, as we as a society have determined strongly that babies have rights, but are still debating about embryos.
A duty-based decision would be tougher - what is our duty toward the future vs. our duty toward the present. Could break either way.
A care-based decision would break for the baby, UNLESS it was the *decider's* embryos as part of the 40k. Many would not care for someone else's baby as much as their own genetic stuff.
Finally, you are proposing a false equivalence - that the moral value of an embryo is equivalent to that of a baby. Right now the pro-choicers are sticking to the party line on the moral value of embryos - it's negligible. They then paint pro-lifers as hopelessly naive (or hypocritical) for considering embryos the equivalent of babies. Unfortunately, the pro-life movement has pretty much bought into this absolutist view, playing right into an argument that they can't really win. But that doesn't mean that the pro-choice movement is correct, either.
It is possible to accept that an embryo has less moral value than a baby, but still has greater value than "a lump of cells". A more nuanced view could have a great impact on how we make moral and policy decisions. Unfortunately, "nuance" is in short supply all around.
Larry Niven tells a story about a NASA panel he was on in the 80's regarding future exploration. It was obvious that the NASA administrator was a bureaucratic hack, and Niven got irritated and started pushing him.
Niven asked him what the future plans for colonizing the Moon was, and the man replied, incredulously, "Why would anyone want to live on the moon?"
Niven turned to the assembled reporters and said "Why don't we ask? Let's have a show of hands: How many of you would want to live on the Moon" About 90% of the hands went up, baffling the administrator.
One reporter said out loud "I'd have to ask my wife". The reporter next to him turned and said "I'd leave my wife."
"Would your average user be able to distinguish 'faulty software' from 'lucky'?"
Kind of like when the A Lottery was rigged back in the 70's/80's. There was a record payout on the combo "666". Why? Because rumor got around to play sixes and fours.
Word gets out when gamblers figure out something is going on. Assuming the software was actually faulty and not rigged, my guess is that it took about an hour for word to get out that machine x was paying out WAY over the average, and then folks flocked to it.
Can they be prosecuted? Doubt it - how does the state prove that someone acted on a rumor with intent to defraud.
Should they be prosecuted? Maybe, depending on the level of sophistication.
Think of the case of the armored car whose door popped open and someone grabbed the cash (also in PA IIRC). All tehy did was grab up cash on the street, but they knew full well it was someone elses money and that something was wrong with what they did.
One assumes that your point is that, being autonomous, the *military* drones could "go wild" and should have some type of *civilian* override. Which would be insightful, except that
a) The drones are not autonomous; they are remotely piloted. A human is always in control (RTFA for that one)
b) The military already IS under civilian control, in the form of the President and the Secretary of Defense. You may not like them, but the are civilians. And the US hasn't had a military coup or direct military rule in a looong time.
c) Civilian control of tactical military decistions (and these are tactical devices) is a miserably bad idea. Ask how well it went when Johnson and McNamara per personally picking each day's bombing targets in Viet Nam.
So, your comment would be insightful, except that every premise in it is completely incorrect.
It is the height of hubris to assume that only humans can wreck a planet. A large comet or asteroid doesn't give a rat's ass about whether it will be destroying humanity or dinosaur-ity when it hits. The rest of the universe is quite capable of destroying the earth without any human participation; why should we not look for a way to get out of Dodge?
Well, between "My company has been in the space for about a year" and "which will have some very seriously monetization implications", you have shown that you are:
1) Buzzword compliant 2) a very poor spokesperso for your "company", such as it is.
Seriously, leave out the link next time - that way teh world won't know what company hired you, and that's probably good for your career.
Slashdot Mirror
"There can be no wisdom so long as people quote TV shows."
R2.0
"For real paranoia, have two printers making two simultaneous copies."
Not paranoid enough - printers in different states.
"thoughtful husbands buy their wives trackballs as well as flowers"
My wife own all of my balls already, you insensitive clod!
"That doesn't answer the question. Schools used to carry Apple ][ computers way back in the day, so thusly OS X is better for research?"
You are missingthe point. Researchers are used to Apple. Period. What particular OS Apple uses is irrelevant - the researchers like Apple, so that's what they get.
I made a point in another post - us over here in userland (researchers included) DON'T CARE about the OS - as long as it works reasonably well. But we do tend to get attached to a manufacturer, or particular programs. Researchers and academics tend to like Apple - they liked Apple with the Apple II OS, they liked Apple with the MacOS, and they stil like apple with OSX. With corporations it was/is IBM with AS400's, PC's, etc. I like thinkpads.
It's what is behind the OS that matters.
"Not sure why he thinks OSX is better for researchers, though"
I would guess that, when the researchers in question were in school, Apple owned the education market. They got used to Apples, and Apples are what they are used to. And if their researchers are anything like the ones I've dealt with, hiring extra staff is far easier on the organization than listening to the bitching, pissing, and moaning that ensues when a medical researcher doesn't get his or her way.
Think of it this way - they've been indoctrinated in the "doctor's are gods" attitude by their traing, but their people skills are so poor that they prefer to work for less pay as long as they can be relatively isolated. But tehy are still cranky and bitter about it.
Come to think of it, that describes a lot of the attitudes ascribed to programmers here...
"I'm not sure I'd trust this guy as a Linux expert, however "well-known" he may be."
Sigh...
The whole point is that he is NOT a Linux expert, just like the other 99% of us out here in userland. Just like 95% of us are not Windows "experts". Allow me to clue in the 1%:
1) I don't care about KDE and Gnome either, nor do I care to know.
2) I don't want to be an "expert" at either system, but that doesn't mean I can't form opinions about how well something works for me or my organization.
It sounds like the Ubuntu folks seem to get what a large portion of the Linux community refuses to see - most end users don't care about esoterica. We just want it to work reasonably well. Not even perfect - just reasonably easy to use. Hell, I'm ready to make the switch to Ubuntu, but for my slavery to Quicken. But the other distributions? Meh. I ditched the command line with Dos and Win3.1 - my memory s crowded enough without having to emmorize command line switches for operations I don't do every day.
I'm reminded of the recent regulations concerning diesel emissions, specifically particulate emissions. The propriety of the regulations aside, one of the most striking things to me was that the basis of the regulations was not that diesel particulates make people sick per se, but that they exacerbate [sp?] preexisting asthma and other lung conditions, and that statistically this would cause x amount of "premature" deaths.
In other words, we will probably never be able to identify an individual who died, or was even made sick, by diesel particulates. But over a span of time, various individuals, already sick, died earlier than they otherwise would have.
In the book "White Noise", by Don DeLillo, the protagonist is exposed to some agent that has a very small probability of decreasing his lifespan by a very short length of time - iirc, it was a 1 in 100,000 chance of decreasing his lifespan by 1 year. This had lief changing consequences for him - not the exposure, but the knowledge of the exposure.
I read the book in as part of a curriculum on Science, Technology, and Society, and it made very good points about risk and perception of risk. I just never really thought that I would see it acted out in real life as part of national policy.
Ahh. In school it was called "beer", and drinking enough would give all the women +5 "Tits!".
Ask me how I know.
1) Did anyone NOT know the batteries weren't replaceable?
2) If he didn't like it, why didn't he return it for a refund?
3) Has he actually been harmed yet? One of the parts about civil courts is that there actually need to BE damages, not just potential damages, except for certain circumstances.
There is an effective defense - it's called racial profiling. Since 9/11, a vast majority of the terrorists involved in any of the activities since 9/11 have been Arab or Near/South Asian. So simply let all the grannies, kids, Caucasians, African Ameicans, Asians go through, and strip search all of the terrorist looking folks, and everything will run a lot smoother.
Oh, wait - that's a huge violation of a lot of different laws, and makes teh vast majority of the US populace outraged.
So here are three options: Treat the people who look like terrorists as terrorists, or treat everyone like a terrorist, or wave a magic wand/go back in time and make terrorism not exist.
Choose.
Re. your title:
Welcome to the real world.
The adult in me says guns of destruction are good...
The Martian in me says "Where's the kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom!"
The summary states:" 'Moore's law is great for making tech faster, and for making slower, existing tech cheaper,"
And then asks: but when consumers realize their personal lust for faster hardware makes almost zero financial sense, and hurts the environment with greater demands for power, will they start to demand cheaper, more efficient 'third-world' computers that are just as effective?"
So Moore's law is good for going smaller/faster/cheaper, but the demand for s/f/c will spell the end of Moore's law?
The problem with thought experiments on ethics is that the proposition has as much to do with the outcome as the experimenter. For instance, you would probably get a different distribution of answers depending on the number of embryos or babies. Same goes with the Prisoner's Dilemna and the Radium Cure - modify the premises slightly, the answers can change drastically.
It also depends on the ethical system you are using.
From a strictly utilitarian point of view (the framework you seem to set as the standard), the number is irrelevant - 2 embryos should outweigh 1 baby, much less 40,000. What if it were 40 million embryos?
A rights-based decision would probably come down squarely for the baby, as we as a society have determined strongly that babies have rights, but are still debating about embryos.
A duty-based decision would be tougher - what is our duty toward the future vs. our duty toward the present. Could break either way.
A care-based decision would break for the baby, UNLESS it was the *decider's* embryos as part of the 40k. Many would not care for someone else's baby as much as their own genetic stuff.
Finally, you are proposing a false equivalence - that the moral value of an embryo is equivalent to that of a baby. Right now the pro-choicers are sticking to the party line on the moral value of embryos - it's negligible. They then paint pro-lifers as hopelessly naive (or hypocritical) for considering embryos the equivalent of babies. Unfortunately, the pro-life movement has pretty much bought into this absolutist view, playing right into an argument that they can't really win. But that doesn't mean that the pro-choice movement is correct, either.
It is possible to accept that an embryo has less moral value than a baby, but still has greater value than "a lump of cells". A more nuanced view could have a great impact on how we make moral and policy decisions. Unfortunately, "nuance" is in short supply all around.
Larry Niven tells a story about a NASA panel he was on in the 80's regarding future exploration. It was obvious that the NASA administrator was a bureaucratic hack, and Niven got irritated and started pushing him.
Niven asked him what the future plans for colonizing the Moon was, and the man replied, incredulously, "Why would anyone want to live on the moon?"
Niven turned to the assembled reporters and said "Why don't we ask? Let's have a show of hands: How many of you would want to live on the Moon" About 90% of the hands went up, baffling the administrator.
One reporter said out loud "I'd have to ask my wife". The reporter next to him turned and said "I'd leave my wife."
"penetrate in places unthinkable until now, with power that would make you shiver."
Poetry. Sheer poetry.
I can't wate to use that phrase on my wife.
"To title a post "Fucking Republicans" is simply ignorant or dishonest."
Did you read the body of the post?
That whistling sound was the joke flying 10' over your head.
"Would your average user be able to distinguish 'faulty software' from 'lucky'?"
Kind of like when the A Lottery was rigged back in the 70's/80's. There was a record payout on the combo "666". Why? Because rumor got around to play sixes and fours.
Word gets out when gamblers figure out something is going on. Assuming the software was actually faulty and not rigged, my guess is that it took about an hour for word to get out that machine x was paying out WAY over the average, and then folks flocked to it.
Can they be prosecuted? Doubt it - how does the state prove that someone acted on a rumor with intent to defraud.
Should they be prosecuted? Maybe, depending on the level of sophistication.
Think of the case of the armored car whose door popped open and someone grabbed the cash (also in PA IIRC). All tehy did was grab up cash on the street, but they knew full well it was someone elses money and that something was wrong with what they did.
Oh, wait...
One assumes that your point is that, being autonomous, the *military* drones could "go wild" and should have some type of *civilian* override. Which would be insightful, except that
a) The drones are not autonomous; they are remotely piloted. A human is always in control (RTFA for that one)
b) The military already IS under civilian control, in the form of the President and the Secretary of Defense. You may not like them, but the are civilians. And the US hasn't had a military coup or direct military rule in a looong time.
c) Civilian control of tactical military decistions (and these are tactical devices) is a miserably bad idea. Ask how well it went when Johnson and McNamara per personally picking each day's bombing targets in Viet Nam.
So, your comment would be insightful, except that every premise in it is completely incorrect.
It is the height of hubris to assume that only humans can wreck a planet. A large comet or asteroid doesn't give a rat's ass about whether it will be destroying humanity or dinosaur-ity when it hits. The rest of the universe is quite capable of destroying the earth without any human participation; why should we not look for a way to get out of Dodge?
"chest plate might be useful to provide radiation protection and protection from micrometeors and the like"
Screw that - I would demand a titanium codpiece.
Gotta protect the parts that really matter.
I saw a girl wearing one of those at the MD RennFest a few years ago. I asked my wife if she would wear one. She declined.
Jesus - talk about hazy memories. If you mean the place at 5 points that served Greekers, the only thing I remember is throwing them up.
Well, between "My company has been in the space for about a year" and "which will have some very seriously monetization implications", you have shown that you are:
1) Buzzword compliant
2) a very poor spokesperso for your "company", such as it is.
Seriously, leave out the link next time - that way teh world won't know what company hired you, and that's probably good for your career.