I can see the value of particle physics, is is astrophysics I question. Sure, build new particle accelerators and fusion reactors--but what good does it do anyone to know about stars trillions of light years away?
I also think you underestimate how much progress we can make even without new fundamental physics discoveries. For example, look at biological systems--self-assembling machines of complexity and versatility far beyond any human constructed machines, yet based entirely on physics and chemistry that we already understand. Perhaps we could program the DNA of new creatures, essentially making organic machines vastly more cheaply than current robots.
That sort of thing I believe could prevent the end of science--if humanity's capacity for economic production could be made exponentially bigger, it will become easier to justify the next physics project. If the population of humanity was 100 billion people scattered throughout the solar system, we could probably build as many Hubble telescopes as you could possible desire. Perhaps human productive ability requires greater physics to grow, but physics needs greater human productive ability to grow. It's a bit of a chicken and egg--and right now, I think our engineering needs to catch up to our physics.
There is one insight we are guaranteed to gain from Mars--is it possible for humans to live long-term outer space? Granted, that's a biological rather than physics insight. But it is a vitally important thing to know in the future, nonetheless.
I've never believed it was humanities destiny to be united at all--it is neither possible nor desirable for six billion humans to agree on anything. I don't see human space exploration as either scientific venture or feel-good diplomatic event, rather as a vital economic decision. I really don't like Bush, but for once I'm on the same side as he.
No, I cannot prove it, but isn't the risk alone significant enough to influence our actions? From a cosmologists perspective, look at it like this--you can either spend billions on acquiring a little bit more data now, or you can spend billions on ensuring that humanity will still be in a position to collect data and conceptualize new theories for some time to come. You are correct, it is possible humanity can survive with 10 billion people on Earth resources alone sustainably, but you risk the future of cosmology with that theory.
My suggestion is that we should be pioneers, and let our great grandchildren be butterfly collectors at their leisure.
Why does everyone throw around the words "real science" as though everyone on Earth should consider it the ultimate highest priority? Why should ordinary human beings, and their elected representatives, consider it more important for astrophysicists to collect more and more data about the universe they can't really apply to life within this solar system than the attempt to launch their fellow human beings outside of Earth orbit, which could have SOME possibility of changing life for Earthlings by enabling interplanetary migration? So the ordinary person things humans in space is "sexy", while you think assigning numbers to a billion new discovered stars is "sexy". I see no reason why funding priorities should not be changed to reflect the democratically determined "sexiness". The real question is why NASA thought it could get away with spending billions of dollars to satisfy only a few elite astrophysicists.
I truly despise the Bush administration, but I REALLY like the proposed changes with NASA. With our exponentially growing population and complete inability to get people off of planet Earth long term, we are approaching an economic crunch. The finite resources of our planet are being quickly exhausted--if we don't find a way to make permanent self-sustaining colonies off-world by the end of the 21st century, I think humanity will soon be so overcrowded that we will no longer be able to spend ANY money on science whatsoever--every man, woman, and child will be working the earth, futilely trying to beat Malthus by extracting more and more food from the same dirt.
We need to focus on space exploration that has economic and technological benefits. The Hubble telescope is awesome at seeing things billions of light years away from us, but what good does it do us to know what exists billions of light years away from us if we can't even move off this planet? If humanity is wise, it will delay "pure science" space research for a few centuries. As long as we manage to avoid ecological collapse, the people of the 24th century will find it much easier to build and maintain outer space telescopes.
And that is the real kicker about pure science in space--I am almost absolutely sure that Milky Way galaxy is still going to be here for future scientists to explore when humanity's needs are not quite so pressing. I am not absolutely sure that humanity is going to survive the next hundred years. Studying the effects of long term life in outer space on humans and building a permanent manned colony on the Moon are MUCH more important than the Hubble telescope, at least in the 21st century.
Epiphany (the Gnome Mozilla-based browser) also does this. Since for some strange reason Mozilla 1.5 has been performing particularly badly on my Gentoo linux, I've been using Epiphany lately and been rather pleased with it, even though the rest of my Desktop is KDE>
There's more than one model of MS Sidewinder. I don't know which is which, but I know the one I'm stuck with (being too lazy to go buy a new controller) has rather lousy d-pad--frequently i push left only to see my protagonist move diagonally up and left. Very sad.
DRM gives sellers more freedom to set the particular distribution model they desire--so we shouldn't be surprised to see worthy DRM business models that simply don't work without DRM. The (non-insane) objection to DRM is not that it has no laudable uses that cannot be done otherwise, but that it puts vastly more power in the hands of the sellers of content. It's all fine and dandy when it's just this particular artist who chooses to use a DRM technology in a way that most people would agree is pretty reasonable (unless we've all been too jaded by Napster/FastTrack/etc...), but it also gives monopolsitic corporations the ability to impose much more harsh restrictions on the entire marketplace--for example, the concept of "buying a song" could be eliminated--everyone could be made to pay a fee for every play.
It's a tough call, because there are even better uses of DRM-type technology that simply aren't possible without DRM. One popular idea is a camera that could digitally sign pictures with the time, date, and GPS location at which they were taken for legal purposes. It's not really possible with trusted hardware enforced by DRM-type technologies. This is the paradoxical nature of Power--the user actually GAINS the ability to submit legally trustworthy digital pictures as court evidence, by LOSING control of his/her own camera and the ability to Photoshop the original file. Does this mean Richard Stallman needs to study Michel Foucault--is Freedom/Power really as simple as the Free Software movement advocates?
The purely objective world I spoke of is unperceivable because it is dead--the only purely objective world is a world without life. So, yes, I agree, without the subjective there is no meaning. This does not contradict me--for I also believe that without the objective world, and our admittedly shaky perceptions of it, a society's subjective world will quickly shrink down to noise and eventually silence. Yes, logic can still be applied to purely subjective ideas as long as such applications remain in your head--but if nothing outside our own skulls matters, why the heck should we bother? We might as well believe any old random thing. And I suspect many people do.
I don't find the subjective/objective dichotomy boring at all--I'm just saying that I find pure subjectivism boring, because it can only expand itself so far. Would Postmodernism literary theory have ever been born if we still had the science, technology, and logic of the middle ages? I believe the current space of ideas--and the space of human ideas throughout all of history--is unimaginably narrow, and that the only way to expand it is to seek a constant influx of new sensory/experimental data (even if such data is provided by a Cartesian Deceiver Demon just to trick us). It's not that I don't value the subjective world--it's that the objective world, however tenuous our grasp upon it, is the only way to expand the subjective world. The more emphasis human beings put on their own ideas, the less interesting those ideas will become. We have nothing to talk about in the objective-only world--but what the heck are we supposed to talk about in a purely subjective world?
"I believe this."
"Oh, well I believe this."
"Well, that's nice. There's no way to argue for one belief or the other, so I guess I'll see you tomorrow."
"Okay, I believe it was nice meeting you."
You need both objective and subjective to have a conversation, like you need both particles and waves to have light.
I DO claim that sollipsism and PURE subjectivity are the same, or at the very least that people are SOME people are rallying behind solipsism under the banner of subjectivity (and since I believe that words are defined by how people use them, I guess that means I equate purely subjective with purely sollipsist simply because many others do) and that is precisely the problem with SOME of the people in academia, as this engineer has stated. I am familiar with engineer's disease, perhaps I am even recovering from it now, but I do not believe this particular engineer suffers from it. I agree that subjectivity is important, and I'm even a very low ranking amateur fan of postmodernism. But if human beings were incapable of crashing our knees into the table, we'd have no reason to analyze our subjective worlds, and our thoughts would become nothing but noise.
Acadmeic software engineers (NOT computer scientists in general, but specifically those theorists who study the role of "process" in building code) seem to simply under-qualified sociologists. When programmers are arguing about software without actually using math or logic to confirm what they say, they end up being just as vague as any pomo lit theorist. Given the tendency towards autism of programmers, this never turns out well, thus most Software Engineering process is less a means of fulfilling the customer's goals and more a means of enforcing power structures within the IT firm.
Won't work--if the spec was logically rigourous enough to prohibit all undesirable outcomes, you could have the computer execute the specification directly instead of having programmers implement it.
I disagree with the idea that most of what is interesting in life is subjective--without an objective world, there would be no GUIs, art, food, or deconstuctionism. A purely objective world--basically a world without life--is pretty boring, but a purely subjective world--a world in which humans are incapable of perceiving anything outside their own thoughts, quickly becomes empty of all meaning or hope. It's only by studying the world Outside ourselves that we can grow as people.
Without the constraints of an objective (even if unknowable in prinicple) world, Subjective Life decays into Random Noise.
There may be no state a solution to the problem, any more than there is a way to state the Tao, but diverging from the proper mix of subjective/objective is just as possible as diverging from the Tao. You can never be right but you may be wrong.
Seriously, this is exactly it. I hate socialism. I hate the government. I hate being told what to do. And THAT is why I'm so resentful of global corporations subverting democracy--as time goes on, corporate boards of directors look more and more like Soviet Politburos. These guys need to realize--its not Socialism vs. Capitalism, its Democracy vs. Feudalism.
Plentiful fusion fuel (this will be important in the next 10-20 years).
Not if we spend all of the Fusion research money on Mars. I think we should hold off on a mars program until we have better robot construction technologies--if we can land a team of robots on the Moon or Mars and have them build a fully functioning colony for us before we even arrive--a task vastly more impressive than the silly rovers we're capable of sending now--human space exploration would be a piece of cake. In general, I suspect that if we simply keep increasing terrestrial technology, going off-world will eventually be an inevitable necessity rather than an election year boondoggle. I'd rather see fusion advances, or even widespread hydrogen or hybrid automobiles, than another 1960s-style Mars landing publicity stunt that inspires no one long term.
If it it is for the benefit of the people that businesses be forced to do something, then force them to do it. That's what we made a government for--does the phrase "to promote the general welfare" sound familiar to you?
If you're asking people to choose between abstract capitalist ideals and food on their table, food on the table is going to win every time--because people aren't as stupid as capitalists would like them to be.
There shouldn't be a such thing as user interface METHOD, capital letters or no capital letters. Two reasons: Absolutely no usability research today is done in hopes of gaining a patent, therefore patents are useless. Everyone knows consistancy promotes usability, so why have a body of law that forces competing apps to be controlled differently? From a utilitarian standpoint (the supposed basis of patent law), patentable user interface is a bad idea in every possible way.
From a more philosophic point of view--the user interface isn't a method, it's the function. The method is the technology underneath that allows the user interface to exist.
They did patent a non-obvious METHOD that they spent a huge amount of time figuring out.
And they still would have figured it out if they hadn't been able to patent it. Innovation is how you sell products, not obtain patents.
I doubt you came close to coming up with something like this until after a few years that a Tivo was out and even then I doubt you could write up with the software anew today.
Tivo isn't accusing anyone of stealing their code, just the idea of pausing television or whatever. Of course I think you're full of crap here--you know the extra few seconds or minutes they use to bleep out profanity from live broadcasts? How long has that been around?
Wouldn't you still have bought Tivo stock if they didn't have a patent on this technology? Wouldn't Tivo still have sold the same products if they couldn't patent them? Do you plan to sell all of your stock if courts decide this patent is worthless?
I don't know the precise legal details, but this case is certainly more argument against patents. Very little innovation takes place because someone expects to make money from patents. Companies innovate because they want to sell products. They won't STOP innovating because they can't patent--the patents are just an unpredictable bonus they might be able to cash in on later if they have sufficient lawyers--not something to be counted on at all to support the costs of research. Tivo is just another example of this--Tivo would still be Tivo in a patent-less world.
Two things--there is not necessarily an ideal place to put a tetris piece, it's a strategic decision, like chess--a move opens up a range of opportunities for new moves. And sure, The Sims has no clearly defined goal, you could kinda say GTA has no defined goal, but Halo has no defined goal? I don't get it.
You're right, most of those sound tracks are really awesome--except F-Zero GX, I'm kind of surprised to hear anyone speak well of that. It just didn't stick out to me.
Nostalgically, this seems true. The pixelated graphics just remind us how silly and trivially we expended our youth. But the music...the music makes us want to waste our youth yet again. On the other hand, I can't think of any memorable video game sound tracks I've heard since the Playstation 2 went on sale.
On the other hand, I can't figure out what the heck the author means by this categorization--
The first (Tetris, Pac-Man, Space Invaders) is the game that plays you. Your interactivity is merely a response to dilemmas inherent in the game. Move or be eaten. Shoot or be invaded. Reach the end before time is up.
The second type (GTA3, The Sims, Halo) is the game that you play. There are ground rules, but there are also choices. This is the next evolution of gaming: replicating an experience.
After reading this, I'm at a loss to figuring out what he means by this--the first set of games has low quality graphics, the second his hi quality, but I doubt that's it. There are no choices in Tetris?
Yeah we are definitely offtopic here. My fault I guess. I think once you allow programs as speech, DeCSS becomes protected speech. It is illegal, as you point out, to incite someone to commit a crime. But to tell someone HOW to commit a crime is protected free speech. You can find lots of books on silly things like putting silencers on guns and making bombs--things that are illegal to do, but not illegal to describe. I can see how it would be criminal to USE DeCSS (though such a prohibition pissess me off, it's not unconsitutional), but I can't see how the First Amendment would allow prohibiting me from distributing DeCSS itself. Not all speech is protected speech, but there IS still a such thing as protected speech, and it isn't just any speech that isn't illegal yet. To my naive point of view, I can see how asking or facilitating someone else's playing GTA3:VC could be made illegal, but the PS2 game itself, as an unexecuted disk sitting in the retail store, is protected speech.
Says who? I don't want everyone knowing my email address--only those people I give it to. When I give someone my email, I don't expect them to give it to anyone they like--I have the exact same preferences I have with my credit card number. Telephone numbers are not publicly available either--otherwise I wouldn't be able to get an unlisted number.
Street addresses are a completely different matter--ownership of a piece of property is a completely public, legal fact. Unlike telephone numbers and email addresses.
Of course it should be illegal to sell aggregated lists of addresses to spam. It's no different than selling a list of credit card numbers--sure there is "value added in the indexing and providing of tools to manage so many" credit card numbers, but that doesn't make it any less of a privacy violation. It is perfectly reasonable to put restrictions on the sale of databases of personal information--like email addresses.
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I also think you underestimate how much progress we can make even without new fundamental physics discoveries. For example, look at biological systems--self-assembling machines of complexity and versatility far beyond any human constructed machines, yet based entirely on physics and chemistry that we already understand. Perhaps we could program the DNA of new creatures, essentially making organic machines vastly more cheaply than current robots.
That sort of thing I believe could prevent the end of science--if humanity's capacity for economic production could be made exponentially bigger, it will become easier to justify the next physics project. If the population of humanity was 100 billion people scattered throughout the solar system, we could probably build as many Hubble telescopes as you could possible desire. Perhaps human productive ability requires greater physics to grow, but physics needs greater human productive ability to grow. It's a bit of a chicken and egg--and right now, I think our engineering needs to catch up to our physics.
There is one insight we are guaranteed to gain from Mars--is it possible for humans to live long-term outer space? Granted, that's a biological rather than physics insight. But it is a vitally important thing to know in the future, nonetheless.
I've never believed it was humanities destiny to be united at all--it is neither possible nor desirable for six billion humans to agree on anything. I don't see human space exploration as either scientific venture or feel-good diplomatic event, rather as a vital economic decision. I really don't like Bush, but for once I'm on the same side as he.
My suggestion is that we should be pioneers, and let our great grandchildren be butterfly collectors at their leisure.
Why does everyone throw around the words "real science" as though everyone on Earth should consider it the ultimate highest priority? Why should ordinary human beings, and their elected representatives, consider it more important for astrophysicists to collect more and more data about the universe they can't really apply to life within this solar system than the attempt to launch their fellow human beings outside of Earth orbit, which could have SOME possibility of changing life for Earthlings by enabling interplanetary migration? So the ordinary person things humans in space is "sexy", while you think assigning numbers to a billion new discovered stars is "sexy". I see no reason why funding priorities should not be changed to reflect the democratically determined "sexiness". The real question is why NASA thought it could get away with spending billions of dollars to satisfy only a few elite astrophysicists.
We need to focus on space exploration that has economic and technological benefits. The Hubble telescope is awesome at seeing things billions of light years away from us, but what good does it do us to know what exists billions of light years away from us if we can't even move off this planet? If humanity is wise, it will delay "pure science" space research for a few centuries. As long as we manage to avoid ecological collapse, the people of the 24th century will find it much easier to build and maintain outer space telescopes.
And that is the real kicker about pure science in space--I am almost absolutely sure that Milky Way galaxy is still going to be here for future scientists to explore when humanity's needs are not quite so pressing. I am not absolutely sure that humanity is going to survive the next hundred years. Studying the effects of long term life in outer space on humans and building a permanent manned colony on the Moon are MUCH more important than the Hubble telescope, at least in the 21st century.
Epiphany (the Gnome Mozilla-based browser) also does this. Since for some strange reason Mozilla 1.5 has been performing particularly badly on my Gentoo linux, I've been using Epiphany lately and been rather pleased with it, even though the rest of my Desktop is KDE>
There's more than one model of MS Sidewinder. I don't know which is which, but I know the one I'm stuck with (being too lazy to go buy a new controller) has rather lousy d-pad--frequently i push left only to see my protagonist move diagonally up and left. Very sad.
It's a tough call, because there are even better uses of DRM-type technology that simply aren't possible without DRM. One popular idea is a camera that could digitally sign pictures with the time, date, and GPS location at which they were taken for legal purposes. It's not really possible with trusted hardware enforced by DRM-type technologies. This is the paradoxical nature of Power--the user actually GAINS the ability to submit legally trustworthy digital pictures as court evidence, by LOSING control of his/her own camera and the ability to Photoshop the original file. Does this mean Richard Stallman needs to study Michel Foucault--is Freedom/Power really as simple as the Free Software movement advocates?
I don't find the subjective/objective dichotomy boring at all--I'm just saying that I find pure subjectivism boring, because it can only expand itself so far. Would Postmodernism literary theory have ever been born if we still had the science, technology, and logic of the middle ages? I believe the current space of ideas--and the space of human ideas throughout all of history--is unimaginably narrow, and that the only way to expand it is to seek a constant influx of new sensory/experimental data (even if such data is provided by a Cartesian Deceiver Demon just to trick us). It's not that I don't value the subjective world--it's that the objective world, however tenuous our grasp upon it, is the only way to expand the subjective world. The more emphasis human beings put on their own ideas, the less interesting those ideas will become. We have nothing to talk about in the objective-only world--but what the heck are we supposed to talk about in a purely subjective world?
You need both objective and subjective to have a conversation, like you need both particles and waves to have light.
I DO claim that sollipsism and PURE subjectivity are the same, or at the very least that people are SOME people are rallying behind solipsism under the banner of subjectivity (and since I believe that words are defined by how people use them, I guess that means I equate purely subjective with purely sollipsist simply because many others do) and that is precisely the problem with SOME of the people in academia, as this engineer has stated. I am familiar with engineer's disease, perhaps I am even recovering from it now, but I do not believe this particular engineer suffers from it. I agree that subjectivity is important, and I'm even a very low ranking amateur fan of postmodernism. But if human beings were incapable of crashing our knees into the table, we'd have no reason to analyze our subjective worlds, and our thoughts would become nothing but noise.
Man--what the heck is .lit? That's a first for me...
Acadmeic software engineers (NOT computer scientists in general, but specifically those theorists who study the role of "process" in building code) seem to simply under-qualified sociologists. When programmers are arguing about software without actually using math or logic to confirm what they say, they end up being just as vague as any pomo lit theorist. Given the tendency towards autism of programmers, this never turns out well, thus most Software Engineering process is less a means of fulfilling the customer's goals and more a means of enforcing power structures within the IT firm.
Won't work--if the spec was logically rigourous enough to prohibit all undesirable outcomes, you could have the computer execute the specification directly instead of having programmers implement it.
Without the constraints of an objective (even if unknowable in prinicple) world, Subjective Life decays into Random Noise.
There may be no state a solution to the problem, any more than there is a way to state the Tao, but diverging from the proper mix of subjective/objective is just as possible as diverging from the Tao. You can never be right but you may be wrong.
Seriously, this is exactly it. I hate socialism. I hate the government. I hate being told what to do. And THAT is why I'm so resentful of global corporations subverting democracy--as time goes on, corporate boards of directors look more and more like Soviet Politburos. These guys need to realize--its not Socialism vs. Capitalism, its Democracy vs. Feudalism.
Plentiful fusion fuel (this will be important in the next 10-20 years). Not if we spend all of the Fusion research money on Mars. I think we should hold off on a mars program until we have better robot construction technologies--if we can land a team of robots on the Moon or Mars and have them build a fully functioning colony for us before we even arrive--a task vastly more impressive than the silly rovers we're capable of sending now--human space exploration would be a piece of cake. In general, I suspect that if we simply keep increasing terrestrial technology, going off-world will eventually be an inevitable necessity rather than an election year boondoggle. I'd rather see fusion advances, or even widespread hydrogen or hybrid automobiles, than another 1960s-style Mars landing publicity stunt that inspires no one long term.
If you're asking people to choose between abstract capitalist ideals and food on their table, food on the table is going to win every time--because people aren't as stupid as capitalists would like them to be.
Only when you end your Stockholm-syndrome lovefest for each every one of Tivo's actions.
From a more philosophic point of view--the user interface isn't a method, it's the function. The method is the technology underneath that allows the user interface to exist.
They did patent a non-obvious METHOD that they spent a huge amount of time figuring out.
And they still would have figured it out if they hadn't been able to patent it. Innovation is how you sell products, not obtain patents.
I doubt you came close to coming up with something like this until after a few years that a Tivo was out and even then I doubt you could write up with the software anew today.
Tivo isn't accusing anyone of stealing their code, just the idea of pausing television or whatever. Of course I think you're full of crap here--you know the extra few seconds or minutes they use to bleep out profanity from live broadcasts? How long has that been around?
I don't know the precise legal details, but this case is certainly more argument against patents. Very little innovation takes place because someone expects to make money from patents. Companies innovate because they want to sell products. They won't STOP innovating because they can't patent--the patents are just an unpredictable bonus they might be able to cash in on later if they have sufficient lawyers--not something to be counted on at all to support the costs of research. Tivo is just another example of this--Tivo would still be Tivo in a patent-less world.
Two things--there is not necessarily an ideal place to put a tetris piece, it's a strategic decision, like chess--a move opens up a range of opportunities for new moves. And sure, The Sims has no clearly defined goal, you could kinda say GTA has no defined goal, but Halo has no defined goal? I don't get it.
You're right, most of those sound tracks are really awesome--except F-Zero GX, I'm kind of surprised to hear anyone speak well of that. It just didn't stick out to me.
On the other hand, I can't figure out what the heck the author means by this categorization--
The first (Tetris, Pac-Man, Space Invaders) is the game that plays you. Your interactivity is merely a response to dilemmas inherent in the game. Move or be eaten. Shoot or be invaded. Reach the end before time is up.
The second type (GTA3, The Sims, Halo) is the game that you play. There are ground rules, but there are also choices. This is the next evolution of gaming: replicating an experience.
After reading this, I'm at a loss to figuring out what he means by this--the first set of games has low quality graphics, the second his hi quality, but I doubt that's it. There are no choices in Tetris?
Yeah we are definitely offtopic here. My fault I guess. I think once you allow programs as speech, DeCSS becomes protected speech. It is illegal, as you point out, to incite someone to commit a crime. But to tell someone HOW to commit a crime is protected free speech. You can find lots of books on silly things like putting silencers on guns and making bombs--things that are illegal to do, but not illegal to describe. I can see how it would be criminal to USE DeCSS (though such a prohibition pissess me off, it's not unconsitutional), but I can't see how the First Amendment would allow prohibiting me from distributing DeCSS itself. Not all speech is protected speech, but there IS still a such thing as protected speech, and it isn't just any speech that isn't illegal yet. To my naive point of view, I can see how asking or facilitating someone else's playing GTA3:VC could be made illegal, but the PS2 game itself, as an unexecuted disk sitting in the retail store, is protected speech.
Street addresses are a completely different matter--ownership of a piece of property is a completely public, legal fact. Unlike telephone numbers and email addresses.
These CDs should be illegal.