Rational people don't have a problem with fiction until the authour starts passing off as fact. The "change in view" occured when Crichton started beliving his own fiction in a subject that actually matters politically (yes, before the senate appearance). Pretty much the same thing happened to Dan Brown and his book "The DaVinci Code".
On the subject of scientific bluntness let me just say you are talking out of your arse and dribbling shit all over the place. The last line of your post only confims that you are more concerned with parinoid political dogma than with robust scientific findings.
"Or current generations whose economic interests *will* be significantly affected?"
Not trying to pick on you personally but why is it that economic models that predict dire cosequences are taken as gospel, yet the more scientifically robust climate models are taken with a grain of salt?
Dogma of any kind is dangerous, inviting a fiction writer to give scientific evidence to a senate commitee would seem to be the opposite to "playing it safe".
"The subject of the cartoons must relate to political interference in science in the federal government."
Inviting an opinionated fiction writer to "advise a senate committe on science facts" is both funny and sad at the same time. I think a cartoon that bounces the ridicule back on to Crichton and the puppet senators is exactly what the UCS are looking for.
"In all honesty, how has your life changed in the past five years?"
Unless you live in a cave....hang on I'll start again. Everybody living on the planet had their life changed after 911, wether they realise it or not. The change was not the threat of another 9/11, it was the (planned?) reaction to it. World oil production has peaked and so has the USA's political, economic & military power, regardless of who is running the planet the "cheap energy ride" is over and we are all in for a much rougher ride over the next few decades as global population makes it's downward "correction". Hopefully those who come out the other side will have more than goats and thorny weeds.
Also please don't lecture me about civil rights and McCarthy, it is the fact that these things are fresh in the social memory that people now scream so loudly when they see the political pendulum swing wildly to EITHER "side" (ever notice how both extreme left/right look different but produce the same results for joe sixpack). Rummy is nothing less than a carictature of McCarthy, he has been foaming at the mouth about terrorists/communists and suicase nukes since the seventies.
I was born in the 50's, where I live the government was still taking children from natives in bark huts (often violently), the kids were adopted out to white families in the suburbs, the natives were not told what happened to their kids and did not get voting rights untill 1969. Today the Aborigines are back on the front page, this time it's all about family violence, drugs and petty crime, and for some strange reason these people simply don't understand "law and order" and see the cops as their enemy. It's also reported in such a manner that one would assume isolated, uneducated white families don't exist.
I ask myself, is this current political push to force aborigines to abandon their "unviable communites" in any way connected with our mineral boom and sudden interest in exporting more uranium?
"To hook up to a quantum computer cluster. That's all I really want before I die..."
IANAP but isn't the Universe one big "qomputer"? Since you are part of the Universe......is "quantum computer cluster" a euphemisim for group sex? ASL?
"Why should open source software get a free ride, just because the user gets the source code? If I buy a car with defective brakes and get injured, the fact that if I'm enough of a mechanic I can pull the car apart and fix the brakes is irrelevant."
It's not about access to the code, it's about what the customer paid for. You don't pay for OSS, you pay for the distribution of it, if you have installed it then you got what you paid for (ie: it was distributed to you). If you subsequently hire the authour to fix it then it's a employer-employee relationship, if the employee doesn't fix it, bad luck. If you contract the OSS company to fix it and they fail to do so you MAY have a point.
You usually get what you pay for so examine the license agreement carefully. Software that has the potential to kill people/profit is normally given to the customer for UAT, the customer must sign off (and thus take responsibility).
To sum up: Nobody in their right mind will offer "flawless software" and conversly nobody in their right mind will expect it.
"If you can just download a library that can do X, write a bit of glue code, and be done your productivity has skyrocketed."
When I worked for IBM in the 90's the CEO made the pronouncement: "All code has been written, it just needs to be managed". We all thought he was clueless, nevertheless here I am 10yrs later writing "glue code" for somebody else and IBM is still the largest "software as a service" company on the planet.
I'm an Aussie and the woed is so common over here I was suprised that it was a serious question. So what do Americans use instead of the word fortnightly, as in "fortnightly pay check"? "Two weekly pay check" sounds too funny to be true.
Re:Sonds like a job for Judge Judy!
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Online Revenge
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I think Judy was looking for some independent verification, such as a link to a complaint lodged through ebay.
After reading a few posts I thought it's kind of silly to try and judge something like this based on a couple of web sites. I thought about posting a "conclusion mat" comment but changed my mind. For some reason the words silly and judge reminded me of Judy, so I made her the devils advocate.
In simpler words: The quote means jack shit.
Sonds like a job for Judge Judy!
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Online Revenge
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· Score: 1
What law has he broken?
Don't know about a full blown criminal trial but wasn't there some sort of "restrain the village idiots" law introduced into the UK a few years back?
Cut to Judge Judy ruffling through buyers papers:
Did you contact the seller for his money back or did you skip straight to revenge?...don't interupt me...I can read them myself...All I see here are some ebay comments saying the seller can't be trusted. So what?....(shot of buyer standing in puzzled silence)...Cat got your tounge?...Answer me!
Data minning can only find pre-existing objective facts. Terrorist, patriot and agnostic are all subjective categories that exist solely in the minds of humans.
The sex itself is free but you can be arrested for releasing it in the public domain. Sex always has associated costs, the price of breakfast being at the low end of the scale.
My bad, I misread your taunt at the bottom as an endorsement of the quote.
I agree with your general sentiments about macho behaviour but it's not going away any day soon. To a great degree it's part of a young males instinctive mating behaviour (the "my genes are indestructable" factor). However, if a man is still doing the same thing at 35 then they have a problem and they are also passing the behaviour on to the young guys they seem to always hang out with. What is largely missing from our modern culture is the ubiquitous tribal idea of a "test of manhood/womanhood" for post pubecent teens. It doesn't solve the "problem" but it does drive the hormones in a predictable direction toward an achievable goal.
Having said that, I'm sure I would have argued otherwise 30yrs ago.
"Entertainment has been technically non-Free for a couple of centuries."
That might be true if your only form of entertainment is sex, otherwise it's total bollocks, do you feel compelled to pay every busker, pub band, musically talented relative/friend you encounter? It's only when one of these artist's can draw a big enough crowd to sell seats that money enters the equation (some people erroneously think that if you throw enough money at a good looking kid it will make them a popular artist). During the 20th century technology has made distance practically irrelevant, an artist in the 19th century could not even invision an audience of a billion westerners with disposable income. Today the cream of the popular talent bubbles to the top and it's almost impossible for their potential audience not to know their names.
It won't take long (in historical terms) before the perverted music/video distribution model built up around physical media collapses under it's own weight. Artists will routinely release digital music/video for free, and the market will return to selling seats at theaters and concerts. Print media vs the web is a whole other game, both would suffer greatly without advertising dollars and geek-shop trinkets.
"Real-life fight clubs are the male version of the girls who cut themselves"
Funny, I thought boys who cut themselves would be the male version of girls who cut themselves. Perhaps you meant to say "the girls who mud-wrestle to win"?
The whole "sadomasochistic thread" thing is total pyco-babble. Young men have been beating the shit out of each other since the dawn of time, the reason is simple - strong/daring men attract women. It's the same thing that makes young men drive like maniacs.
"I'd say that UNIX incompatibilities helped solutions like Java to exist."
I don't think it was unix, I think it was java's "safe sandpit" that caught peoples interest. Portable C code was common well before Java, and I recall my first impression of Java was...it's an update of that P-CODE thing they taught at uni.
As for the "downfall of unix", the biggest influence was definitely cost, I recall that during the mid 90's unix meant you had a fat wallet. Often the same applications that ran on say NT & HP would have very different price tags, even though they were built from the same code base and NT versions probably drew more help desk calls. Also for some strange reason, unix with a gui demanded (and got) 21 inch, state of the art monitors, yet the exact same application on windows got a bog standard 15 inch monitor. NT was a long way from perfect but from a corporate accounting point of view it was "good enough" and putting it to use would "iron out the bugs" and drive costs down further. There are conter-examples of course, back then apache was a very good reason to have a "unix" box, then again, it still is.
There were many other factors, the generation of graduates that caught the wave of the internet bubble were also the first to have graduated with both windows and unix.
Disclaimer:After leaving school at 15 I obtained a BSc in computer science as a 30yr old, it was just before the advent of win3.1 and right in the middle of a recession, I was taught on unix, dos and VAX but made ridiculous amounts of money from windows.
"Even if the only evidence is the popular opinion of other people, it is evidence nonetheless."
Fair point, I probably should have said emprical evidence or something similar.
"True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith."
Given your uid, it's about time you had an insightfull sig. The quote above is an excellent candidate. I'm not trying to blow smoke up you, the last paragraph rates as one of the most insightfull and succinct bits of prose I have read in my (surprisingly quick) five decades.
Far be it for me to argue against a giant such as Popper, but Philosophy contains much more (see: Hoffsteader).
From your earlier post: "Once we have a better grasp on that, we can start working out how to make a computer understand that and use it."
You are making the assumption that we need to understand how something works in order to use it. This is not generally the case, for example we heat our food with microwaves but have no idea why water mocules react the way they do to microwaves. Simarly we could (therorectically) replace one neuron at a time with an electronic device that mimics it's functionality until we have an entire electronic brain. If this approach worked then we have created an intelligence that is indistinguishable from the original human mind that would presumably pass the Turing test, yet we would still not understand how language or the mind works. (Horatio also comes to mind).
"and higher notions about the "True Nature of Reality" are irrelevant."
If your perception of reality is not dramatically different to "normal" (and I don't doubt that) then I agree it makes no practical difference to anything. BTW: I am no philosopher and don't belive in God but I do have a BSc in computer science and dear old dad was a mechanical engineer.
"The three-body problem is indeed complicated...but it's not magical."
The magic is found in the fact that problems, spanners and humans exist in the first place.
"When you can guarantee that noone on earth can harm me, I will give up my weapons. Oh and if you could do that without turning the world into a police state, that would be great.
"
Grow up, life dosen't come with guarantees. You fear a "police state", yet you are advocating the "shoot first ask later" rule, it's a rule entrenched in totalitarian ideology that has nothing to do with policing or justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Rational people don't have a problem with fiction until the authour starts passing off as fact. The "change in view" occured when Crichton started beliving his own fiction in a subject that actually matters politically (yes, before the senate appearance). Pretty much the same thing happened to Dan Brown and his book "The DaVinci Code".
On the subject of scientific bluntness let me just say you are talking out of your arse and dribbling shit all over the place. The last line of your post only confims that you are more concerned with parinoid political dogma than with robust scientific findings.
Some facts on volcanos and climate.
"Environmentalists behave just like religious nuts when you are critical of their beliefs."
I would say all humans react pretty much the same when you attack their beliefs, the reason I dislike Crichton is the psudeo-science he sprouts to the senate as fact.
BTW: You also betray your own bias and ignorance by building a straw man and calling it "the environmentalist movement".
Perhaps it is because he is now advising the senate about the "scientific facts" of climate change.
"Or current generations whose economic interests *will* be significantly affected?"
Not trying to pick on you personally but why is it that economic models that predict dire cosequences are taken as gospel, yet the more scientifically robust climate models are taken with a grain of salt?
Dogma of any kind is dangerous, inviting a fiction writer to give scientific evidence to a senate commitee would seem to be the opposite to "playing it safe".
"The subject of the cartoons must relate to political interference in science in the federal government."
Inviting an opinionated fiction writer to "advise a senate committe on science facts" is both funny and sad at the same time. I think a cartoon that bounces the ridicule back on to Crichton and the puppet senators is exactly what the UCS are looking for.
"In all honesty, how has your life changed in the past five years?"
Unless you live in a cave....hang on I'll start again. Everybody living on the planet had their life changed after 911, wether they realise it or not. The change was not the threat of another 9/11, it was the (planned?) reaction to it. World oil production has peaked and so has the USA's political, economic & military power, regardless of who is running the planet the "cheap energy ride" is over and we are all in for a much rougher ride over the next few decades as global population makes it's downward "correction". Hopefully those who come out the other side will have more than goats and thorny weeds.
Also please don't lecture me about civil rights and McCarthy, it is the fact that these things are fresh in the social memory that people now scream so loudly when they see the political pendulum swing wildly to EITHER "side" (ever notice how both extreme left/right look different but produce the same results for joe sixpack). Rummy is nothing less than a carictature of McCarthy, he has been foaming at the mouth about terrorists/communists and suicase nukes since the seventies.
I was born in the 50's, where I live the government was still taking children from natives in bark huts (often violently), the kids were adopted out to white families in the suburbs, the natives were not told what happened to their kids and did not get voting rights untill 1969. Today the Aborigines are back on the front page, this time it's all about family violence, drugs and petty crime, and for some strange reason these people simply don't understand "law and order" and see the cops as their enemy. It's also reported in such a manner that one would assume isolated, uneducated white families don't exist.
I ask myself, is this current political push to force aborigines to abandon their "unviable communites" in any way connected with our mineral boom and sudden interest in exporting more uranium?
"To hook up to a quantum computer cluster. That's all I really want before I die..."
IANAP but isn't the Universe one big "qomputer"? Since you are part of the Universe......is "quantum computer cluster" a euphemisim for group sex? ASL?
"Why should open source software get a free ride, just because the user gets the source code? If I buy a car with defective brakes and get injured, the fact that if I'm enough of a mechanic I can pull the car apart and fix the brakes is irrelevant."
It's not about access to the code, it's about what the customer paid for. You don't pay for OSS, you pay for the distribution of it, if you have installed it then you got what you paid for (ie: it was distributed to you). If you subsequently hire the authour to fix it then it's a employer-employee relationship, if the employee doesn't fix it, bad luck. If you contract the OSS company to fix it and they fail to do so you MAY have a point.
You usually get what you pay for so examine the license agreement carefully. Software that has the potential to kill people/profit is normally given to the customer for UAT, the customer must sign off (and thus take responsibility).
To sum up: Nobody in their right mind will offer "flawless software" and conversly nobody in their right mind will expect it.
"If you can just download a library that can do X, write a bit of glue code, and be done your productivity has skyrocketed."
When I worked for IBM in the 90's the CEO made the pronouncement: "All code has been written, it just needs to be managed". We all thought he was clueless, nevertheless here I am 10yrs later writing "glue code" for somebody else and IBM is still the largest "software as a service" company on the planet.
I'm an Aussie and the woed is so common over here I was suprised that it was a serious question. So what do Americans use instead of the word fortnightly, as in "fortnightly pay check"? "Two weekly pay check" sounds too funny to be true.
I think Judy was looking for some independent verification, such as a link to a complaint lodged through ebay.
After reading a few posts I thought it's kind of silly to try and judge something like this based on a couple of web sites. I thought about posting a "conclusion mat" comment but changed my mind. For some reason the words silly and judge reminded me of Judy, so I made her the devils advocate.
In simpler words: The quote means jack shit.
What law has he broken?
...don't interupt me...I can read them myself...All I see here are some ebay comments saying the seller can't be trusted. So what?....(shot of buyer standing in puzzled silence)...Cat got your tounge?...Answer me!
Don't know about a full blown criminal trial but wasn't there some sort of "restrain the village idiots" law introduced into the UK a few years back?
Cut to Judge Judy ruffling through buyers papers:
Did you contact the seller for his money back or did you skip straight to revenge?
Data minning can only find pre-existing objective facts. Terrorist, patriot and agnostic are all subjective categories that exist solely in the minds of humans.
The sex itself is free but you can be arrested for releasing it in the public domain. Sex always has associated costs, the price of breakfast being at the low end of the scale.
My bad, I misread your taunt at the bottom as an endorsement of the quote.
I agree with your general sentiments about macho behaviour but it's not going away any day soon. To a great degree it's part of a young males instinctive mating behaviour (the "my genes are indestructable" factor). However, if a man is still doing the same thing at 35 then they have a problem and they are also passing the behaviour on to the young guys they seem to always hang out with. What is largely missing from our modern culture is the ubiquitous tribal idea of a "test of manhood/womanhood" for post pubecent teens. It doesn't solve the "problem" but it does drive the hormones in a predictable direction toward an achievable goal.
Having said that, I'm sure I would have argued otherwise 30yrs ago.
"Entertainment has been technically non-Free for a couple of centuries."
That might be true if your only form of entertainment is sex, otherwise it's total bollocks, do you feel compelled to pay every busker, pub band, musically talented relative/friend you encounter? It's only when one of these artist's can draw a big enough crowd to sell seats that money enters the equation (some people erroneously think that if you throw enough money at a good looking kid it will make them a popular artist). During the 20th century technology has made distance practically irrelevant, an artist in the 19th century could not even invision an audience of a billion westerners with disposable income. Today the cream of the popular talent bubbles to the top and it's almost impossible for their potential audience not to know their names.
It won't take long (in historical terms) before the perverted music/video distribution model built up around physical media collapses under it's own weight. Artists will routinely release digital music/video for free, and the market will return to selling seats at theaters and concerts. Print media vs the web is a whole other game, both would suffer greatly without advertising dollars and geek-shop trinkets.
"Real-life fight clubs are the male version of the girls who cut themselves"
Funny, I thought boys who cut themselves would be the male version of girls who cut themselves. Perhaps you meant to say "the girls who mud-wrestle to win"?
The whole "sadomasochistic thread" thing is total pyco-babble. Young men have been beating the shit out of each other since the dawn of time, the reason is simple - strong/daring men attract women. It's the same thing that makes young men drive like maniacs.
"I'd say that UNIX incompatibilities helped solutions like Java to exist."
I don't think it was unix, I think it was java's "safe sandpit" that caught peoples interest. Portable C code was common well before Java, and I recall my first impression of Java was...it's an update of that P-CODE thing they taught at uni.
As for the "downfall of unix", the biggest influence was definitely cost, I recall that during the mid 90's unix meant you had a fat wallet. Often the same applications that ran on say NT & HP would have very different price tags, even though they were built from the same code base and NT versions probably drew more help desk calls. Also for some strange reason, unix with a gui demanded (and got) 21 inch, state of the art monitors, yet the exact same application on windows got a bog standard 15 inch monitor. NT was a long way from perfect but from a corporate accounting point of view it was "good enough" and putting it to use would "iron out the bugs" and drive costs down further. There are conter-examples of course, back then apache was a very good reason to have a "unix" box, then again, it still is.
There were many other factors, the generation of graduates that caught the wave of the internet bubble were also the first to have graduated with both windows and unix.
Disclaimer:After leaving school at 15 I obtained a BSc in computer science as a 30yr old, it was just before the advent of win3.1 and right in the middle of a recession, I was taught on unix, dos and VAX but made ridiculous amounts of money from windows.
"Even if the only evidence is the popular opinion of other people, it is evidence nonetheless."
Fair point, I probably should have said emprical evidence or something similar.
"True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith."
Given your uid, it's about time you had an insightfull sig. The quote above is an excellent candidate. I'm not trying to blow smoke up you, the last paragraph rates as one of the most insightfull and succinct bits of prose I have read in my (surprisingly quick) five decades.
"if Google and Clippy fell in love..."
...their Gooppy love child would know everything about nothing?
Far be it for me to argue against a giant such as Popper, but Philosophy contains much more (see: Hoffsteader).
From your earlier post: "Once we have a better grasp on that, we can start working out how to make a computer understand that and use it."
You are making the assumption that we need to understand how something works in order to use it. This is not generally the case, for example we heat our food with microwaves but have no idea why water mocules react the way they do to microwaves. Simarly we could (therorectically) replace one neuron at a time with an electronic device that mimics it's functionality until we have an entire electronic brain. If this approach worked then we have created an intelligence that is indistinguishable from the original human mind that would presumably pass the Turing test, yet we would still not understand how language or the mind works. (Horatio also comes to mind).
"you attack me, I kill you."
Nobody is disputing that, but a fleeing thief can not be considered an "attack". If you want to feel "safe", why not just kill everyone?
"and higher notions about the "True Nature of Reality" are irrelevant."
If your perception of reality is not dramatically different to "normal" (and I don't doubt that) then I agree it makes no practical difference to anything. BTW: I am no philosopher and don't belive in God but I do have a BSc in computer science and dear old dad was a mechanical engineer.
"The three-body problem is indeed complicated...but it's not magical."
The magic is found in the fact that problems, spanners and humans exist in the first place.
"When you can guarantee that noone on earth can harm me, I will give up my weapons. Oh and if you could do that without turning the world into a police state, that would be great. "
Grow up, life dosen't come with guarantees. You fear a "police state", yet you are advocating the "shoot first ask later" rule, it's a rule entrenched in totalitarian ideology that has nothing to do with policing or justice.