I think the problem here is that the RIAA still gets our money and this is kind of a feeble attempt to fight back. They could care less if we burn DVDs that we have already paid for.
How about something more along the lines of the early Luddites -- walk into stores in massive mobs and smash all the DVDs? =)
So, it seems to me that this judge is not the brigtest nor the best judge to hear our case.
Does anyone know if we can disqualify a federal judge on the grounds that he or she is biast toward the prosecution? I am pretty sure that California judges can be disqualified for this reason...
Great -- this is all consumer society needs -- more products that degrade over time and have to be disposed of. I think one of the most important things we should consider when we make new stuff these days is "how long is this thing going to last?" -- we need to make stuff that:
Lasts a long time long
Is easily serviceable
Is as energy efficient as possible
I would hate to see this idea work, simply because of the waste involved. *sigh* This "throw away" society really worries me a lot. Stupid, stupid, stupid idea. In so many ways. I hope they fail miserably.
I agree with you -- we should be developing ways to inhabit the heavans -- but this technology is still awhile away -- and if we say that "well, we are destroying the environment, so let's get the hell out of here" we are kind of taking the wrong approach to the problem. What will we do? Go to another planet and proceed to exploit the environment and resources on it? No... not the solution. We could then quite possibly find ourselves screwed yet again. If we are going to solely depend on space technology to save our arses, that would be a very bad idea. Think redundancy here, people. =) Taking that analogy further, if we don't take care of the earth, it may well crash, leaving us with nothing... and we don't have a backup yet!
Okay, enough with the cheesy analogies. At the risk of sounding like someone who uses the shallow (if not logically unfounded) argument of "we have no business exploring space when there are starving people in China", I think that while extraterrestrial technology is important, we can't lose sight of the core problem here which is that we are destroying Earth. Rapidly. We are just evading the issue by running away to space. We have a much better chance of survival if we fix the environmental problems here at the same time as we work on tackling space; we are overrunning our planet exponentially at the moment, and if we don't do something quick I think we are going to start feeling the backlash.
And if you think that you can't make a difference; you're wrong, you can. Here are a couple of links:
On one hand, I don't like advertising -- and it was pretty creative to block out NBC's logo. But on the other hand, I think CBS was wrong to do this. Why? The main reason is that you are no longer reporting what is *actually* happening -- not only are you "slanting" it (as is what usually happens) but you are decieving viewers into thinking that the something is there which is not there. Done well, sure, it's hard to notice, (unless you're NBC) -- but I think it's unethical. Furthermore, I think it's unethical to plaster your logo in other places where it actually isn't, like the buildings and carriages that the story was talking about.
It's great to have the technology to do this. Pretty darn nifty, I would say -- but I think it is unethical to use the technology in a deceiving way.
The bottom line? They can do whatever they want with their broadcast. But I think it makes them look bad when they deceive people -- but hey, what am I complaining about -- I don't watch TV anyway. Yet another reason not to watch CBS.
I disagree with you about the performance of ported games... In the Quake 1 days (before the win32 ports of quake becamae popular), I had something like a Pentium 100-120 or so. (I think) Quake ran pretty well in DOS/Windows, but if I was running it in Windows I couldn't have anything else open or else it would go excrutiatingly slow. In Linux, on the other hand, I could run a quakeworld client and a quakeworld server at the same time, with no performance loss. It was just sweet! =) Now, however, I think a lot of it has to do with support of graphics cards in linux. I think it has been getting a *lot* better over the past few months, and I plan to check it out again when I get some time -- but last I checked the drivers for the various 3d accelerators and MesaGL were a tad slow. I'd have to know what games you were having problems with to infer much more..
Well, I never said I was speaking for anyone else, but that decision would be quite easy for me. Personally, I think fast food is one of the most wasteful ventures in our culture, and I would never be willing to support their industry by giving them a nice, effective marketing scheme.
Everyone bitched about him "selling out" to KFC and Taco Bell and everything else in sight. Right - as if you would actually say no if someone offered you hundreds of millions of dollars to put your art on cups and taco wrappers.
You're wrong. Personally, money does not drive me. I use enough of it to get by and live pretty simply. If someone offered *me* millions to put *my* art on cups and taco wrappers (hah, people would go "what? what does 'int main(void)' mean?") I would politely refuse. Actually, it would go against the very fiber of my being to sell my artwork to the marketing departments' of fast food. Lucas has made some pretty good movies; I will give him that, but he is definitley a big ideological loser in my book.
Apparantly people were e-mailing Patrick Volkerding and asking him "Why is your Linux not 'version 6' yet?"... and he just snapped. =) Maybe we should write "Understanding-Linux-Versioning-HOWTO". =)
I don't think anyone has implied that legal or illegal duplication of copyrighted material doesn't occur. But that just isn't the point! DVD aficianados are still going to buy DVDs. They want the original disks, cases, cover art, etc. Pirating DVD-quality movies is not very practical right now, and even if it were to become more practical, people would still buy movies! I don't think movie and music sales have suffered at all because of the pirating of them. For me to buy a DVD or a CD, two things have to happen:
I have to like it -- a lot
I have to be able to afford it
As a somewhat poor college student, I can't always afford to buy everything that I like a little bit. But if I like an artists' work enough, I will sure as hell buy it! Their sales are not suffering at all, and I will not cry for them when they try to hurt the free software community with mindless lawsuits.
Yes, it's probably not "free software" in the sense that it's not GPL'd. But this is definitley a step in the right direction, I would say. From the web site: "We are committed to making our freely available environment the natural starting point for creative new ways to improve the Java development experience." It seems that they just want to get people to use it and add to it. They want people to start using Java more, and they're giving them a motivation. Personally, I'll be more motivated if all their source is open. =) Who knows.
I use JBuilder3 at work; it's great for debugging, and I agree that the interface is a little bizairre, but it's pretty useful at times. Especially when you have large source files with lots of variables and methods -- the listing on ths side shows a concise list of everything. And although also annoying at times, it's nice to just type a function name and then a (, and then have it tell you the syntax of the function. And it's nice to be able to type "[name of class]." and have it, after a couple of seconds, list all the public methods and variables in that class. Especially when you're working with large SDKs, these features save a lot of time. Not to mention, if you've got the name of a class or method somewhere in your source, you can hold down control and click on the class, and JBuilder will find the source code to that class. All kinds of nifty features. The down side is it's pretty bloated and akward at times, but I can live with that; I'd rather browse through huge SDKs with JBuilder than grep through thousands of lines of code in lots of different directories.
I still use vi/javac to hack out small portions of code, but when I'm working on a big project, JBuilder is quite useful. When I'm doing an "offical" build, I always use javac, because JBuilder can tend to do some weird things. Maybe with the Inprise/Sun alliance this situation will get better; I don't know.
News for you: we already are. Let's say all electric power irrevocably dies. In this case most of humanity will die out from hunger fairly quickly (within one year). The human species will not die out, but maybe ~80% of population will.
Not news -- that was one of my points exactly. I'm glad you understand. =)
Good, because it has been abstracted. The Pill, latex condoms, etc. have broken this connection.
No, these technologies have not abstracted sex from the process of making children. They have abstracted the consequence of children from the process of sex. Big difference.
Since it's fairly clear we are not going to change over to genetically engineering everybody within one generation, the answer is that the first few "guinea pigs" will die from that disease and the rest will wait until the technology gets fixed.
Good point, but that won't make the "guinea pigs" feel any better about it. I really think that rather than trying to correct genetic failures in the lab, the people who have these genetic flaws should maybe think about either not breeding (as not only is the world overpopulated already, but there are tens of thousands of orphan children who could really benefit from loving parents) or learning what they can do to change their lifestyle such that their genetics don't hamper their success. For example, people with heart disease that runs in their family should seriously consider, say, becoming vegetarian, rather than trying to correct their genetic flaws by therapy, drugs, genetic engineering, or some other means.
Why would we depend on it for survival?? You are jumping waay too much ahead...
I'll use your electricity example here -- when electricity was invented, I bet we didn't think for a minute that, soon, everyone in the western world would have electricity at their disposal. Now, we have come to depend on electricity.
Okay, theoretical situation. (to answer your question) What happens if the technology becomes so widespread that *everyone* in western society uses it to make "better" children, (again, since we don't have the technology yet, I am totally speculating as to what "better" means.) Perhaps the majority of the middle class uses it. After a couple of generations, we discover that we have created a species of people who are invariably predisposed to a new disease, that we have inadvertently created due to an oversight in the way we rebuilt our childens' DNA. (It's entirely possible that this could happen, simply because humans live so long; it would take an incredible amount of time to pinpoint subtle flaws, especially since the flaws could take two or more generations to show up, and the technology could grow much faster than the rate at which we discover the consequences.) Now, in order for this generation to survive, and have their children survive, to correct the problem we would then have to genetically engineer another entire generation. Not only is that a lot of work, but I could see how we could easily come to depend on it in a string of failures. That's why I think for the most part we are better off not relying on this sort of technology, or adopting it for widespread use. I think we should use it sparingly, perhaps to "fix" diseases that otherwise could not be cured by *any other means*, but not to try to create the "perfect" human.
A simpler way to put it might be this: if we create human beings using genetic manipulation, then responsibility for those peoples' well being and survival now depends on the technology of genetic engineering. For those of us who choose not to use genetic engineering -- our survival doesn't depend on it. (Although it could start to depend on it if it were affected by some outside variable, or perhaps if cross-breeding between genetically engineered and "natural" humans caused some weirdness. I don't know why it would, but I wouldn't discount the possibility.)
Like I implied in my previous post, I think it's good to think as far in advance as possible. We should think critically and carefully about the responsible use of technology we develop. (Many examples come to mind, but they're a bit off-topic -- this irresponsible use of technology has happened over and over in history, and is causing us a lot of problems right now. I could write another multiple-page rant about that.) Someone once said that "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children...", and I think that applies -- we simply cannot depend on technology to always save the day.
Katz's article is stupid (insofar as it has any content, which I am not sure about) and is anti-progress, because it is, basically, fear-mongering -- it tries to raise dark, vague, primal fears about technological progress.
I think that we have these "dark, vague, primal fears" for a reason; you seem to be saying that they are bad... Sure, it can be of great benefit to have technology at your disposal. But when you start depending on technology for survival, you raise these fears for a very good reason. Is this "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" really so unfounded? Think for a moment about what would happen if something went wrong in one one of the abstraction layers that has been placed between you and your survival. (and, in this case, the survival of your offspring) For example, what is someone made a mistake in developing this technology, causing every genetically engineered human being on the planet to suffer from a degenerative disease? Plenty of things could go wrong, forseen or unforseen. Should we not go ahead and research these things because of this uncertanty? No, that's what research is supposed to do -- clear up the FUD.
It's one thing to abstract, say, food production from your survival. Modern agriculture is fairly developed and reliable. But I laugh when I think of the idea of abstracting sex from the process of making children. Personally, I wouldn't trust it. I would rather trust my choice in a mate who I determine worthy of staying in the gene pool. =) I shudder to think about screwing the gene pool up so much that we come to depend on genetic engineering for the survival and well-being of our species; I think that's a sign that we could be in a truly sad state of affairs.
I don't know -- I really haven't thought about this issue much. Personally, I wouldn't say I'm anti-progress -- I'm pro-forethought. Not everything that has been defined as "progress" yields good results for everyone and everything that is connected to it. Let the research continue, as far as I'm concerned. It's not research that's bad. We just need to be responsible about what we do with the technology that comes from research. It may be possible to walk a fine line between OK and not-OK -- but I don't know, and I can't make a judgement, because we don't even have the technology yet.
Re:Uses for large ROM devices, social implications
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A 140GB CD-ROM?
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The US government is said to have recently ordered a 100,000 disk RAID system, capable of holding a petabyte of data, presumably for activities like archiving Usenet, the web, stock market transactions, etc.
This is very interesting... do you have a link to an article or something about this?
Hey buddy, guess what -- the slashdot source is out there, and a lot of other sites use it. It might not be the latest version, but who cares; It's not our right to always have the latest code. Having any code at all is a priveledge that is much appreciated. Pretty ironic that 15 seconds of work on your part could have prevented you from screaming that out.
Agreed -- with a closed source product, how do we know that the product isn't doing something that it is not advertised to do -- like sending out personal information, opening up my computer to crackers, etc? When I tried the closed-source napster, I created a 'testuser' account on my linux box, and ran it from there... there was no way in hell that I would risk running a closed-source product from an untrusted company using my main user account. I shudder at the idea of using it on a Windows box; that would essentially open up my entire computer to attack, should anything sneaky be in the client. Gnap, on the other hand, I can trust! Why? Because when the source is open, I can be reasonably sure that there is nothing malicious in it. (and if it was ever found out that there was, someone would make a huge stink about it and I would find out.) And besides, if I suspect foul play, I can always look over the source myself. It's a win-win situation for everyone! Unless you happen to want to make money off of proprietary code, or something...
I am wondering if all this "great abstraction" is really good for society. Every day, more and more is abstracted away from our daily routine.
Even today, we are largely abstracted from pretty much everything that is important. And I'm talking about things that are truly important -- life or death kind of importance, not meeting "crucial" deadlines to get the latest (buggy) version of Windows out. I am referring to basic survival needs. How many of you grow or kill your own food? Yeah, it's nice that we have the technology to grow and distribute all this food to millions of people -- but if something should ever happen to that method of distribution, then we could be pretty screwed.
Okay, so most of us probably don't have the knowledge or resources to grow our own food. What about shelter? Who here knows how to make clothes? I am willing to bet that most of us live in houses or apartments that we wouldn't have the slightest clue how to build ourselves, should we ever need to. Granted, we're smart people, I'm sure we could figure something out, but the point is -- we're already heavily abstracted from basic needs such as food and shelter already.
The list only grows from there. Transportation? Well, (mostly) everyone can walk... but, nope, transportation has been abstracted into an elaborate system where if you don't have an automobile of some kind, you simply can't get to where you want to go, when you want to go there. Commercial zones are heavily separated from Residential zones, making it difficult and expensive for most people to live close enough to their place of work to walk there, should they want to. (If anyone has ever been to San Jose, you know what I mean; I tried to get gas there one time, I had to drive through countless miles of suburbs before I even found a gas station. Not exactly a great model of efficiency, any way you look at it.)
So, here's my point -- what happens when one of the layers in the "great abstration" breaks? It has happened before, and it's likely that it will happen again. (A good example would be the Great Depression; it happened because of short-sightedness on our parts, and also a layer of abstraction we like to call the "economy".) The whole Y2K scare? It happened (and still is happening) because of short-sightedness on our parts, combined with many, many layers of abstraction. If something fails on one of the lower levels of abstraction, it has the potential to create a tidal wave that wipes out the rest of the entire system. The more layers of abstraction, the more potential failure points. (This is why the linux kernel is so blindingly fast, and stable)
Personally, I would prefer to eliminate the overhead of unnessecary layers of abstraction. The superficiality of society today irritates me to no end. All us geeks need to unite to make this world a better, more peaceful, more efficient place. The less abstraction involved, the better off we will all be in the long run.
I agree; how can institution claim that after their augmentation, operation, breasts will be "more natural"?! I could understand that in the case of reconstructive surgery, this might be the case, but usually it's an obvious oxymoron...
That's not useless -- that would kick ass! =) I'd buy a car DVD player that could use to burn 85 hours of music onto a single DVD and be good to go for an eternity. =) And, yes, even if they made 40 more releases of "Now That's What I Call Music" you would probably still be able to fit them all on one disc in MP3 format. =) Personally, I would rather have single DVD disc with a huge music library on it than a 100-disc CD changer. Some really cool uses for DVDs could be developed -- I would never disregard these as useless ideas.
Well, to put it into perspective, I have 1575 MP3 files in 5.90 gigs sitting on my hard drive. If a DVD disc will hold 5 gigs, that gives: 5.90/1575 = 5/x = roughly 1335 MP3 files. (if my MP3 files are about average size) If I'm not mistaken, then at about an average of a megabyte per minute, then 5 gigs would be able to hold about 85 hours, 20 mintues of music. (5*1024/60)
I'd also like to add that I found this post funnier than mine. =) Why did you get the 'insightful'? What the heck? I guess there is a fine line between "insightful' and 'funny' depending on how you look at it. =) So insightful that it's funny, perhaps! Who knows...
I don't see how my post could be considered "bigoted" until the "funny" label is slapped on it, really. "Funny" is in the eye of the beholder. My post was asking a valid question, and some people obviously thought it was funny, and hey, that's okay!
Hey now, I didn't call Catholics stupid. I didn't make fun of Catholics. No one answered my question, either. (I was kind of disappointed that I got moderated up as "Funny" rather than "Insightful" or something) =) Are you a Catholic who attends church regularly? If so, what percentage of your church, would you guess, has more than a mindless faith?
I have little faith in modern medicine. I doubt that a cheap cure for Cancer or Osteoperosis or heart disease will be devised any time soon. (That's one reason I took matters into my own hands and became a vegetarian.) I don't have faith in the modern medical industry any more than I have faith in prayer.
Science, on the other hand, I don't have to nessecarily have faith in, but I know that it tends to work well sometimes. For example, if I fall off of a 10-story building, I can calculate without too much uncertainty what my velocity will be right before I hit the pavement. I would say that I have more faith in science (that has been proven to work well) than I have faith in prayer. All the will and prayers I can muster will not stop my bones from breaking from that impact.
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We should make it portable enough to run on win32, too. Then it could truly make it out of the hacker community.
I think I heard about some nice libraries for portability between the two platforms... anyone know what they are?
How about something more along the lines of the early Luddites -- walk into stores in massive mobs and smash all the DVDs? =)
Does anyone know if we can disqualify a federal judge on the grounds that he or she is biast toward the prosecution? I am pretty sure that California judges can be disqualified for this reason...
Great -- this is all consumer society needs -- more products that degrade over time and have to be disposed of. I think one of the most important things we should consider when we make new stuff these days is "how long is this thing going to last?" -- we need to make stuff that:
I would hate to see this idea work, simply because of the waste involved. *sigh* This "throw away" society really worries me a lot. Stupid, stupid, stupid idea. In so many ways. I hope they fail miserably.
I agree with you -- we should be developing ways to inhabit the heavans -- but this technology is still awhile away -- and if we say that "well, we are destroying the environment, so let's get the hell out of here" we are kind of taking the wrong approach to the problem. What will we do? Go to another planet and proceed to exploit the environment and resources on it? No... not the solution. We could then quite possibly find ourselves screwed yet again. If we are going to solely depend on space technology to save our arses, that would be a very bad idea. Think redundancy here, people. =) Taking that analogy further, if we don't take care of the earth, it may well crash, leaving us with nothing... and we don't have a backup yet!
Okay, enough with the cheesy analogies. At the risk of sounding like someone who uses the shallow (if not logically unfounded) argument of "we have no business exploring space when there are starving people in China", I think that while extraterrestrial technology is important, we can't lose sight of the core problem here which is that we are destroying Earth. Rapidly. We are just evading the issue by running away to space. We have a much better chance of survival if we fix the environmental problems here at the same time as we work on tackling space; we are overrunning our planet exponentially at the moment, and if we don't do something quick I think we are going to start feeling the backlash.
And if you think that you can't make a difference; you're wrong, you can. Here are a couple of links:
This is an interesting issue...
On one hand, I don't like advertising -- and it was pretty creative to block out NBC's logo. But on the other hand, I think CBS was wrong to do this. Why? The main reason is that you are no longer reporting what is *actually* happening -- not only are you "slanting" it (as is what usually happens) but you are decieving viewers into thinking that the something is there which is not there. Done well, sure, it's hard to notice, (unless you're NBC) -- but I think it's unethical. Furthermore, I think it's unethical to plaster your logo in other places where it actually isn't, like the buildings and carriages that the story was talking about.
It's great to have the technology to do this. Pretty darn nifty, I would say -- but I think it is unethical to use the technology in a deceiving way.
The bottom line? They can do whatever they want with their broadcast. But I think it makes them look bad when they deceive people -- but hey, what am I complaining about -- I don't watch TV anyway. Yet another reason not to watch CBS.
I disagree with you about the performance of ported games...
In the Quake 1 days (before the win32 ports of quake becamae popular), I had something like a Pentium 100-120 or so. (I think) Quake ran pretty well in DOS/Windows, but if I was running it in Windows I couldn't have anything else open or else it would go excrutiatingly slow.
In Linux, on the other hand, I could run a quakeworld client and a quakeworld server at the same time, with no performance loss. It was just sweet! =)
Now, however, I think a lot of it has to do with support of graphics cards in linux. I think it has been getting a *lot* better over the past few months, and I plan to check it out again when I get some time -- but last I checked the drivers for the various 3d accelerators and MesaGL were a tad slow. I'd have to know what games you were having problems with to infer much more..
Well, I never said I was speaking for anyone else, but that decision would be quite easy for me. Personally, I think fast food is one of the most wasteful ventures in our culture, and I would never be willing to support their industry by giving them a nice, effective marketing scheme.
Everyone bitched about him "selling out" to KFC and Taco Bell and everything else in sight. Right - as if you would actually say no if someone offered you hundreds of millions of dollars to put your art on cups and taco wrappers.
You're wrong.
Personally, money does not drive me. I use enough of it to get by and live pretty simply.
If someone offered *me* millions to put *my* art on cups and taco wrappers (hah, people would go
"what? what does 'int main(void)' mean?") I would politely refuse. Actually, it would go against the very fiber of my being to sell my artwork to the marketing departments' of fast food.
Lucas has made some pretty good movies; I will give him that, but he is definitley a big ideological loser in my book.
Apparantly people were e-mailing Patrick Volkerding and asking him "Why is your Linux not 'version 6' yet?"... and he just snapped. =) Maybe we should write "Understanding-Linux-Versioning-HOWTO". =)
As a somewhat poor college student, I can't always afford to buy everything that I like a little bit. But if I like an artists' work enough, I will sure as hell buy it! Their sales are not suffering at all, and I will not cry for them when they try to hurt the free software community with mindless lawsuits.
Yes, it's probably not "free software" in the sense that it's not GPL'd. But this is definitley a step in the right direction, I would say. From the web site: "We are committed to making our freely available environment the natural starting point for creative new ways to improve the Java development experience." It seems that they just want to get people to use it and add to it. They want people to start using Java more, and they're giving them a motivation. Personally, I'll be more motivated if all their source is open. =) Who knows.
I use JBuilder3 at work; it's great for debugging, and I agree that the interface is a little bizairre, but it's pretty useful at times. Especially when you have large source files with lots of variables and methods -- the listing on ths side shows a concise list of everything. And although also annoying at times, it's nice to just type a function name and then a (, and then have it tell you the syntax of the function. And it's nice to be able to type "[name of class]." and have it, after a couple of seconds, list all the public methods and variables in that class. Especially when you're working with large SDKs, these features save a lot of time. Not to mention, if you've got the name of a class or method somewhere in your source, you can hold down control and click on the class, and JBuilder will find the source code to that class. All kinds of nifty features. The down side is it's pretty bloated and akward at times, but I can live with that; I'd rather browse through huge SDKs with JBuilder than grep through thousands of lines of code in lots of different directories.
I still use vi/javac to hack out small portions of code, but when I'm working on a big project, JBuilder is quite useful. When I'm doing an "offical" build, I always use javac, because JBuilder can tend to do some weird things. Maybe with the Inprise/Sun alliance this situation will get better; I don't know.
News for you: we already are. Let's say all electric power irrevocably dies. In this case most of humanity will die out from hunger fairly quickly (within one year). The human species will not die out, but maybe ~80% of population will.
Not news -- that was one of my points exactly. I'm glad you understand. =)
Good, because it has been abstracted. The Pill, latex condoms, etc. have broken this connection.
No, these technologies have not abstracted sex from the process of making children. They have abstracted the consequence of children from the process of sex. Big difference.
Since it's fairly clear we are not going to change over to genetically engineering everybody within one generation, the answer is that the first few "guinea pigs" will die from that disease and the rest will wait until the technology gets fixed.
Good point, but that won't make the "guinea pigs" feel any better about it. I really think that rather than trying to correct genetic failures in the lab, the people who have these genetic flaws should maybe think about either not breeding (as not only is the world overpopulated already, but there are tens of thousands of orphan children who could really benefit from loving parents) or learning what they can do to change their lifestyle such that their genetics don't hamper their success. For example, people with heart disease that runs in their family should seriously consider, say, becoming vegetarian, rather than trying to correct their genetic flaws by therapy, drugs, genetic engineering, or some other means.
Why would we depend on it for survival?? You are jumping waay too much ahead...
I'll use your electricity example here -- when electricity was invented, I bet we didn't think for a minute that, soon, everyone in the western world would have electricity at their disposal. Now, we have come to depend on electricity.
Okay, theoretical situation. (to answer your question) What happens if the technology becomes so widespread that *everyone* in western society uses it to make "better" children, (again, since we don't have the technology yet, I am totally speculating as to what "better" means.) Perhaps the majority of the middle class uses it. After a couple of generations, we discover that we have created a species of people who are invariably predisposed to a new disease, that we have inadvertently created due to an oversight in the way we rebuilt our childens' DNA. (It's entirely possible that this could happen, simply because humans live so long; it would take an incredible amount of time to pinpoint subtle flaws, especially since the flaws could take two or more generations to show up, and the technology could grow much faster than the rate at which we discover the consequences.) Now, in order for this generation to survive, and have their children survive, to correct the problem we would then have to genetically engineer another entire generation. Not only is that a lot of work, but I could see how we could easily come to depend on it in a string of failures. That's why I think for the most part we are better off not relying on this sort of technology, or adopting it for widespread use. I think we should use it sparingly, perhaps to "fix" diseases that otherwise could not be cured by *any other means*, but not to try to create the "perfect" human.
A simpler way to put it might be this: if we create human beings using genetic manipulation, then responsibility for those peoples' well being and survival now depends on the technology of genetic engineering. For those of us who choose not to use genetic engineering -- our survival doesn't depend on it. (Although it could start to depend on it if it were affected by some outside variable, or perhaps if cross-breeding between genetically engineered and "natural" humans caused some weirdness. I don't know why it would, but I wouldn't discount the possibility.)
Like I implied in my previous post, I think it's good to think as far in advance as possible. We should think critically and carefully about the responsible use of technology we develop. (Many examples come to mind, but they're a bit off-topic -- this irresponsible use of technology has happened over and over in history, and is causing us a lot of problems right now. I could write another multiple-page rant about that.) Someone once said that "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children...", and I think that applies -- we simply cannot depend on technology to always save the day.
I haven't checked the link yet -- so you're saying it's got the java classes, but no source code?
... In that case, decompile it! =)
Katz's article is stupid (insofar as it has any content, which I am not sure about) and is anti-progress, because it is, basically, fear-mongering -- it tries to raise dark, vague, primal fears about technological progress.
I think that we have these "dark, vague, primal fears" for a reason; you seem to be saying that they are bad... Sure, it can be of great benefit to have technology at your disposal. But when you start depending on technology for survival, you raise these fears for a very good reason. Is this "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" really so unfounded? Think for a moment about what would happen if something went wrong in one one of the abstraction layers that has been placed between you and your survival. (and, in this case, the survival of your offspring) For example, what is someone made a mistake in developing this technology, causing every genetically engineered human being on the planet to suffer from a degenerative disease? Plenty of things could go wrong, forseen or unforseen. Should we not go ahead and research these things because of this uncertanty? No, that's what research is supposed to do -- clear up the FUD.
It's one thing to abstract, say, food production from your survival. Modern agriculture is fairly developed and reliable. But I laugh when I think of the idea of abstracting sex from the process of making children. Personally, I wouldn't trust it. I would rather trust my choice in a mate who I determine worthy of staying in the gene pool. =) I shudder to think about screwing the gene pool up so much that we come to depend on genetic engineering for the survival and well-being of our species; I think that's a sign that we could be in a truly sad state of affairs.
I don't know -- I really haven't thought about this issue much. Personally, I wouldn't say I'm anti-progress -- I'm pro-forethought. Not everything that has been defined as "progress" yields good results for everyone and everything that is connected to it. Let the research continue, as far as I'm concerned. It's not research that's bad. We just need to be responsible about what we do with the technology that comes from research. It may be possible to walk a fine line between OK and not-OK -- but I don't know, and I can't make a judgement, because we don't even have the technology yet.
The US government is said to have recently ordered a 100,000 disk RAID system, capable of holding a petabyte of data, presumably for activities like archiving Usenet, the web, stock market transactions, etc.
This is very interesting... do you have a link to an article or something about this?
Hey buddy, guess what -- the slashdot source is out there, and a lot of other sites use it. It might not be the latest version, but who cares; It's not our right to always have the latest code. Having any code at all is a priveledge that is much appreciated.
Pretty ironic that 15 seconds of work on your part could have prevented you from screaming that out.
Agreed -- with a closed source product, how do we know that the product isn't doing something that it is not advertised to do -- like sending out personal information, opening up my computer to crackers, etc? When I tried the closed-source napster, I created a 'testuser' account on my linux box, and ran it from there... there was no way in hell that I would risk running a closed-source product from an untrusted company using my main user account. I shudder at the idea of using it on a Windows box; that would essentially open up my entire computer to attack, should anything sneaky be in the client. Gnap, on the other hand, I can trust! Why? Because when the source is open, I can be reasonably sure that there is nothing malicious in it. (and if it was ever found out that there was, someone would make a huge stink about it and I would find out.) And besides, if I suspect foul play, I can always look over the source myself. It's a win-win situation for everyone! Unless you happen to want to make money off of proprietary code, or something...
Even today, we are largely abstracted from pretty much everything that is important. And I'm talking about things that are truly important -- life or death kind of importance, not meeting "crucial" deadlines to get the latest (buggy) version of Windows out. I am referring to basic survival needs. How many of you grow or kill your own food? Yeah, it's nice that we have the technology to grow and distribute all this food to millions of people -- but if something should ever happen to that method of distribution, then we could be pretty screwed.
Okay, so most of us probably don't have the knowledge or resources to grow our own food. What about shelter? Who here knows how to make clothes? I am willing to bet that most of us live in houses or apartments that we wouldn't have the slightest clue how to build ourselves, should we ever need to. Granted, we're smart people, I'm sure we could figure something out, but the point is -- we're already heavily abstracted from basic needs such as food and shelter already.
The list only grows from there. Transportation? Well, (mostly) everyone can walk... but, nope, transportation has been abstracted into an elaborate system where if you don't have an automobile of some kind, you simply can't get to where you want to go, when you want to go there. Commercial zones are heavily separated from Residential zones, making it difficult and expensive for most people to live close enough to their place of work to walk there, should they want to. (If anyone has ever been to San Jose, you know what I mean; I tried to get gas there one time, I had to drive through countless miles of suburbs before I even found a gas station. Not exactly a great model of efficiency, any way you look at it.)
So, here's my point -- what happens when one of the layers in the "great abstration" breaks? It has happened before, and it's likely that it will happen again. (A good example would be the Great Depression; it happened because of short-sightedness on our parts, and also a layer of abstraction we like to call the "economy".) The whole Y2K scare? It happened (and still is happening) because of short-sightedness on our parts, combined with many, many layers of abstraction. If something fails on one of the lower levels of abstraction, it has the potential to create a tidal wave that wipes out the rest of the entire system. The more layers of abstraction, the more potential failure points. (This is why the linux kernel is so blindingly fast, and stable)
Personally, I would prefer to eliminate the overhead of unnessecary layers of abstraction. The superficiality of society today irritates me to no end. All us geeks need to unite to make this world a better, more peaceful, more efficient place. The less abstraction involved, the better off we will all be in the long run.
I agree; how can institution claim that after their augmentation, operation, breasts will be "more natural"?! I could understand that in the case of reconstructive surgery, this might be the case, but usually it's an obvious oxymoron...
That's not useless -- that would kick ass! =)
I'd buy a car DVD player that could use to burn 85 hours of music onto a single DVD and be good to go for an eternity. =)
And, yes, even if they made 40 more releases of "Now That's What I Call Music" you would probably still be able to fit them all on one disc in MP3 format. =) Personally, I would rather have single DVD disc with a huge music library on it than a 100-disc CD changer. Some really cool uses for DVDs could be developed -- I would never disregard these as useless ideas.
Well, to put it into perspective, I have 1575 MP3 files in 5.90 gigs sitting on my hard drive. If a DVD disc will hold 5 gigs, that gives:
5.90/1575 = 5/x = roughly 1335 MP3 files. (if my MP3 files are about average size)
If I'm not mistaken, then at about an average of a megabyte per minute, then 5 gigs would be able to hold about 85 hours, 20 mintues of music. (5*1024/60)
I don't see how my post could be considered "bigoted" until the "funny" label is slapped on it, really. "Funny" is in the eye of the beholder. My post was asking a valid question, and some people obviously thought it was funny, and hey, that's okay!
Hey now, I didn't call Catholics stupid. I didn't make fun of Catholics. No one answered my question, either. (I was kind of disappointed that I got moderated up as "Funny" rather than "Insightful" or something) =) Are you a Catholic who attends church regularly? If so, what percentage of your church, would you guess, has more than a mindless faith?
I have little faith in modern medicine. I doubt that a cheap cure for Cancer or Osteoperosis or heart disease will be devised any time soon. (That's one reason I took matters into my own hands and became a vegetarian.) I don't have faith in the modern medical industry any more than I have faith in prayer.
Science, on the other hand, I don't have to nessecarily have faith in, but I know that it tends to work well sometimes. For example, if I fall off of a 10-story building, I can calculate without too much uncertainty what my velocity will be right before I hit the pavement. I would say that I have more faith in science (that has been proven to work well) than I have faith in prayer. All the will and prayers I can muster will not stop my bones from breaking from that impact.