I suspect that all of these things are still far enough from practical that the best place for them is still in science fiction. Best get writing that novel to plant the seed in a future generation that can actually do something with it.
A buggy modification might conclude that it's useful even when it is highly defective.
As it always has been! It's always the most crazy who are quite certain they're not at all insane. It's the ones who never run a self-diagnostic reality check who most need to do it. *shrug*
You and ChrisMaple and jd all make some reasoned arguments, but that is then precisely why the topic should not be taboo and forbidden. It needs to be openly debated free of emotional baggage, not kept locked up under house arrest away from the public square.
I don't have any disagreement with your conclusions, except perhaps regarding the last paragraph. I fear the problem is not that technology - i.e. COMPLEXITY - has "outpaced" human comprehension so much as it's completely outstripped it. The average middle-of-the-Bell-Curve human is now incapable of comprehending the complexities of civilization, to the point that it affects economics: people no longer know how to correctly value what they buy because they have no comprehension of the materials, process, and cost involved in production. Even the very best of us, in terms of either rote memory or fluid intelligence, can only handle limited slices of this complexity, by "specializing". What this means, if correct, is that simply slowing down the pace, as you suggest, will not solve the problem. The people further out the right side of the Bell graph will simply be overwhelmed less quickly but still be overwhelmed.
The only two solutions I can see are (1) a complete halt to "progress" or (2) become further reliant on the very technology we've created to continually abstract the complexity... essentially dumbing it down for our limited finite comprehension. We're already doing this, actually. Eventually even that tactic will hit a wall, since *somebody* would still have to comprehend enough to use the technology to create and maintain those abstractions. This has been a topic of science fiction for decades.
Of course we can also consider some consensual directed evolution - that taboo topic eugenics - to attempt to overcome our limits with respect to all that complexity. *ducks*
Mars may be smaller than Terra, but it's still an awfully big place. Even if life exists or once existed on Mars, there's no guarantees its presence would leave a mark everywhere. Six immovable probes might find nothing and STILL not answer the question. The only way we get a useful answer at all from just six bullets fired into the dunes is that one of them actually finds something; if they find nothing it still doesn't disprove the presence of life.
It's great that the people behind this want to make names for themselves, but we need to think - and plan and budget - much bigger than this if we truly want a definitive answer. This plan with a spaghetti western budget won't give us one. It's essentially a waste of time. Bold, yes, but also pointless where the stated goal is concerned.
Monkeys can do that job, and they don't demand a 401k or benefits. Slashdot should employ a few, which would really help since the monkey unemployment rate is about 100%, unless you count laboratory servitude. Maybe Caesar will even be among the hires? I for one welcome my new banana-eating editorial overlords.
I recognize with regret that not everyone who posts to the Interwebs will have a fluent grasp of English. That is why editors/moderators exist. It's the job of the editor to either clean up your non-native English or reject the submission if it's irredeemable. This particular editor did neither.
I know what his point was. My point is that he communicated his point rather poorly. I didn't appreciate having to waste extra calories trying to figure out what he actually meant to say. Reducing calorie consumption is after all the point of effective language use.
Most importantly, if we do have a revolution and everybody shows up, how do we propose to avoid creating new institutions that will be as flawed and corrupt as the old ones, merely replacing the former bad actors with a fresh new crop? Historically revolutions haven't served much purpose except fulfilling the ambitions of those newly minted Immortals who seek the heads of their predecessors. If all a revolution does is replace the current One Percent with a different One Percent, I want no part of it. These institutions we're talking about are precisely what allows the One Percent to remain the One Percent.
I doubt if very many of the people suffering from continual Guinea worms they ingest from contaminated surface water would share your worry. They're too busy trying to yank two-foot-long spaghetti aliens out of their arms, legs, feet, and abdomens. Having a guaranteed uncontaminated water source from a gigantic aquifer would end their daily war against the alien invasion.
I had the same failure arise with the Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GS chipset in a Toshiba Satellite P105-S9337 model laptop. The laptop was out of warranty. In this instance, though, the graphics were a separate discrete board. After being fully ignored by Toshiba, I began looking for used, refurbished, or 'pre-owned' replacements. I had also modded the laptop to force the GPU fan to draw power from a nearby USB port, thus forcing it to run continuously in the hope of preventing symptoms. (It didn't, really.) I knew the chipset itself was essentially defective, but it's not a guarantee that every chip will fail, so I was hoping to get lucky. I found an eBay seller, a liquidation business, that was selling a whole batch of allegedly refurbished ones, and for much less than I had seen them previously. I purchased two. One of the two boards was still faulty, and the seller replaced it; the other one wasn't actually what I had ordered: in fact it was a Geforce Go 7900 GTX, a slightly upscale version and with more onboard VRAM. I discovered that it was compatible with my system, though I was concerned about the potential heat generation. I wound up keeping both, installing the replaced 7900 GS and keeping the 7900 GTX as a spare. Thus far the laptop has continued working, but I certainly suffered a substantial net loss over the whole affair, in actual material cost and labor and time. I wish I'd had the opportunity and courage to do what this fellow did, but since I has a system out of warranty it would have been more difficult.
I also had a similar problem with a cherished 21-inch Nokia CRT monitor years ago. Six years after I bought it, it failed. I wanted very much to get it repaired. I discovered that in the meantime Nokia had abandoned the display market, selling its brand name to Viewsonic and the manufacturing to another Finnish company. When I contacted Viewsonic, they told me there were no spare parts for it, and refused to replace it with an equivalent Viewsonic model (which I really didn't want). That Finnish company had apparently stopped making Nokia display parts, and Viewsonic refused to otherwise honor its obligations from acquiring the brand name. I even contacted Nokia and tried to persuade them to pressure Viewsonic, but nothing came of it. I didn't create enough of a public relations fiasco. I finally contacted numerous third-party repair services, but each one also told me nothing could be done as parts were not available.
You might be thinking to yourself, "Dude, it's six years old, what do you expect?" I happen to live in California, and this state has a so-called "lemon law" that attempts to force manufacturers to not... well, sell lemons! It stipulates that any product - not just the automobiles with which it's usually associated - with a manufactured cost over $100 should be repairable for a period of no less than 7 years from the date of manufacture. That means the manufacture is obligated to make available the parts and service materials necessary for repairs for those 7 years, and if not to otherwise make amends for failure to do so.
Obviously Viewsonic had failed to do that. Because of that lemon law I had an open and shut case, had I taken Viewsonic to court here in California. I didn't, but again I wish I had.
My point in sharing these anecdotes is that this is a consistent pattern of behavior with all manufacturers, not just one or two or a handful of them. It's endemic to the system we've allowed to take hold. It's this unfair system that makes consumers the inferior party in transactions with these manufacturers that motivated California's lemon law in the first place. It SHOULD be a Federal law applicable in every state. Better yet a globally recognized law.
Seriously, what are you gonna do to persuade the average human of the critical importance of space exploration and colonization? They can neither see nor reason past the ends of their noses. They would rather argue about abortion and gay rights and whether so-and-so 'had work done' and what sort of debauchery they have planned for Friday night. That's on the 99-percent end of the scale; on the other end you have people who can't see nor reason past their own bloated bank accounts and genitalia.
Considering that even after electing a "transparent" Democratic President we *still* have torture protocols in place, we should be happy for even getting them to be apologetic about it. Getting anything more ethical than that out of 'em will require the use of some re-purposed plowshares, if you get my drift.
Hey, ya gotta give 'em credit for trying to avoid torture. Technology will solve it eventually, though: just plug a cable in the back of their neck and download everything... so long as you can get the "detainee" to cough up his mental encryption key.
So was he the CEO in 2004, I wonder? I'm not quite so desperate to confirm a bias that I'd spend the time to research it, but it's fun to consider he might be the same singularly genius-y douchebag.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that all of these things are still far enough from practical that the best place for them is still in science fiction. Best get writing that novel to plant the seed in a future generation that can actually do something with it.
A buggy modification might conclude that it's useful even when it is highly defective.
As it always has been! It's always the most crazy who are quite certain they're not at all insane. It's the ones who never run a self-diagnostic reality check who most need to do it. *shrug*
You and ChrisMaple and jd all make some reasoned arguments, but that is then precisely why the topic should not be taboo and forbidden. It needs to be openly debated free of emotional baggage, not kept locked up under house arrest away from the public square.
I don't have any disagreement with your conclusions, except perhaps regarding the last paragraph. I fear the problem is not that technology - i.e. COMPLEXITY - has "outpaced" human comprehension so much as it's completely outstripped it. The average middle-of-the-Bell-Curve human is now incapable of comprehending the complexities of civilization, to the point that it affects economics: people no longer know how to correctly value what they buy because they have no comprehension of the materials, process, and cost involved in production. Even the very best of us, in terms of either rote memory or fluid intelligence, can only handle limited slices of this complexity, by "specializing". What this means, if correct, is that simply slowing down the pace, as you suggest, will not solve the problem. The people further out the right side of the Bell graph will simply be overwhelmed less quickly but still be overwhelmed.
The only two solutions I can see are (1) a complete halt to "progress" or (2) become further reliant on the very technology we've created to continually abstract the complexity... essentially dumbing it down for our limited finite comprehension. We're already doing this, actually. Eventually even that tactic will hit a wall, since *somebody* would still have to comprehend enough to use the technology to create and maintain those abstractions. This has been a topic of science fiction for decades.
Of course we can also consider some consensual directed evolution - that taboo topic eugenics - to attempt to overcome our limits with respect to all that complexity. *ducks*
Mars may be smaller than Terra, but it's still an awfully big place. Even if life exists or once existed on Mars, there's no guarantees its presence would leave a mark everywhere. Six immovable probes might find nothing and STILL not answer the question. The only way we get a useful answer at all from just six bullets fired into the dunes is that one of them actually finds something; if they find nothing it still doesn't disprove the presence of life.
It's great that the people behind this want to make names for themselves, but we need to think - and plan and budget - much bigger than this if we truly want a definitive answer. This plan with a spaghetti western budget won't give us one. It's essentially a waste of time. Bold, yes, but also pointless where the stated goal is concerned.
Disturbingly apropos, both from the described purpose of the restaurant AND the company mindset in general....
Yes, that must be it!
Cue the orchard jokes in 3...2...1....
... eugenics.
Did I just manage to invoke Godwin's Law without using a certain historical name? (Never mind that said person didn't invent or implement it first.)
I stand correc... errr, edited.
Monkeys can do that job, and they don't demand a 401k or benefits. Slashdot should employ a few, which would really help since the monkey unemployment rate is about 100%, unless you count laboratory servitude. Maybe Caesar will even be among the hires? I for one welcome my new banana-eating editorial overlords.
You're not fooling anybody... you would've eaten that extra Twinkie anyway!
I recognize with regret that not everyone who posts to the Interwebs will have a fluent grasp of English. That is why editors/moderators exist. It's the job of the editor to either clean up your non-native English or reject the submission if it's irredeemable. This particular editor did neither.
I know what his point was. My point is that he communicated his point rather poorly. I didn't appreciate having to waste extra calories trying to figure out what he actually meant to say. Reducing calorie consumption is after all the point of effective language use.
A recently reported flaw... isn't necessary... anymore.
Hmmm... I would have thought all flaws are unnecessary by definition.
God, it would be nice if editors did their damned jobs instead of rubber-stamping every gush of malformed junk that makes its way into the hose.
Most importantly, if we do have a revolution and everybody shows up, how do we propose to avoid creating new institutions that will be as flawed and corrupt as the old ones, merely replacing the former bad actors with a fresh new crop? Historically revolutions haven't served much purpose except fulfilling the ambitions of those newly minted Immortals who seek the heads of their predecessors. If all a revolution does is replace the current One Percent with a different One Percent, I want no part of it. These institutions we're talking about are precisely what allows the One Percent to remain the One Percent.
I doubt if very many of the people suffering from continual Guinea worms they ingest from contaminated surface water would share your worry. They're too busy trying to yank two-foot-long spaghetti aliens out of their arms, legs, feet, and abdomens. Having a guaranteed uncontaminated water source from a gigantic aquifer would end their daily war against the alien invasion.
I had the same failure arise with the Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GS chipset in a Toshiba Satellite P105-S9337 model laptop. The laptop was out of warranty. In this instance, though, the graphics were a separate discrete board. After being fully ignored by Toshiba, I began looking for used, refurbished, or 'pre-owned' replacements. I had also modded the laptop to force the GPU fan to draw power from a nearby USB port, thus forcing it to run continuously in the hope of preventing symptoms. (It didn't, really.) I knew the chipset itself was essentially defective, but it's not a guarantee that every chip will fail, so I was hoping to get lucky. I found an eBay seller, a liquidation business, that was selling a whole batch of allegedly refurbished ones, and for much less than I had seen them previously. I purchased two. One of the two boards was still faulty, and the seller replaced it; the other one wasn't actually what I had ordered: in fact it was a Geforce Go 7900 GTX, a slightly upscale version and with more onboard VRAM. I discovered that it was compatible with my system, though I was concerned about the potential heat generation. I wound up keeping both, installing the replaced 7900 GS and keeping the 7900 GTX as a spare. Thus far the laptop has continued working, but I certainly suffered a substantial net loss over the whole affair, in actual material cost and labor and time. I wish I'd had the opportunity and courage to do what this fellow did, but since I has a system out of warranty it would have been more difficult.
I also had a similar problem with a cherished 21-inch Nokia CRT monitor years ago. Six years after I bought it, it failed. I wanted very much to get it repaired. I discovered that in the meantime Nokia had abandoned the display market, selling its brand name to Viewsonic and the manufacturing to another Finnish company. When I contacted Viewsonic, they told me there were no spare parts for it, and refused to replace it with an equivalent Viewsonic model (which I really didn't want). That Finnish company had apparently stopped making Nokia display parts, and Viewsonic refused to otherwise honor its obligations from acquiring the brand name. I even contacted Nokia and tried to persuade them to pressure Viewsonic, but nothing came of it. I didn't create enough of a public relations fiasco. I finally contacted numerous third-party repair services, but each one also told me nothing could be done as parts were not available.
You might be thinking to yourself, "Dude, it's six years old, what do you expect?" I happen to live in California, and this state has a so-called "lemon law" that attempts to force manufacturers to not... well, sell lemons! It stipulates that any product - not just the automobiles with which it's usually associated - with a manufactured cost over $100 should be repairable for a period of no less than 7 years from the date of manufacture. That means the manufacture is obligated to make available the parts and service materials necessary for repairs for those 7 years, and if not to otherwise make amends for failure to do so.
Obviously Viewsonic had failed to do that. Because of that lemon law I had an open and shut case, had I taken Viewsonic to court here in California. I didn't, but again I wish I had.
My point in sharing these anecdotes is that this is a consistent pattern of behavior with all manufacturers, not just one or two or a handful of them. It's endemic to the system we've allowed to take hold. It's this unfair system that makes consumers the inferior party in transactions with these manufacturers that motivated California's lemon law in the first place. It SHOULD be a Federal law applicable in every state. Better yet a globally recognized law.
Seriously, what are you gonna do to persuade the average human of the critical importance of space exploration and colonization? They can neither see nor reason past the ends of their noses. They would rather argue about abortion and gay rights and whether so-and-so 'had work done' and what sort of debauchery they have planned for Friday night. That's on the 99-percent end of the scale; on the other end you have people who can't see nor reason past their own bloated bank accounts and genitalia.
I'd like one of each, please. And make it a double.
Considering that even after electing a "transparent" Democratic President we *still* have torture protocols in place, we should be happy for even getting them to be apologetic about it. Getting anything more ethical than that out of 'em will require the use of some re-purposed plowshares, if you get my drift.
Hey, ya gotta give 'em credit for trying to avoid torture. Technology will solve it eventually, though: just plug a cable in the back of their neck and download everything... so long as you can get the "detainee" to cough up his mental encryption key.
Damn, it's getting so hard to figure out who to cheer now. Who exactly are the good guys again? Who is my team? I can't tell any more.
So was he the CEO in 2004, I wonder? I'm not quite so desperate to confirm a bias that I'd spend the time to research it, but it's fun to consider he might be the same singularly genius-y douchebag.
Hmmmm... is this the same Best Buy whose CEO just resigned and which reported a 1.7 billion-with-a-B dollar loss? Is this the same Best Buy that years ago sought to identify "demon customers" and bar them from stores? It is the same? I wonder if these events are all somehow connected....