they are the ones going around and causing all the independents to close down.
I hear this argument quite a bit, yet in my town three years ago a Barnes and Nobles moved in three blocks from a good independent bookstore....and it is still there.
This argument about "less diversity" is, to be blunt, pure crap. I've been an avid bookshopper for almost twenty years and I can say flat out that things have not been better in terms of the diversity of books that can be bought than they are right now. Even ignoring the online retailers. I remember, in the late eighties, being amazed that I could finally get all of those obscure Aliester Crowley novels that I'd been looking for. Where? A Texas based chain called "Bookstar". I remember being amazed at the selection of SF at the new Barnes and Nobles that opened around that time. The only SF section that was better was 150 miles away.
I remember being a teenager and having difficulties finding anything but the most mainstream SF, little in terms of history, etc. To get anything better, you had to drive to a used bookstore, and there it was still hit or miss. Now, with these book superstores on every corner, it is a hell of a lot easier to get what you want.
Truth is, the independents that are going out of business are mostly the bad ones. The good ones can stay in business with one of these "superstores" nearby.
they are the ones going around and causing all the independents to close down.
I hear this argument quite a bit, yet in my town three years ago a Barnes and Nobles moved in three blocks from a good independent bookstore....and it is still there.
This argument about "less diversity" is, to be blunt, pure crap. I've been an avid bookshopper for almost twenty years and I can say flat out that things have not been better in terms of the diversity of books that can be bought than they are right now. Even ignoring the online retailers. I remember, in the late eighties, being amazed that I could finally get all of those obscure Aliester Crowley novels that I'd been looking for. Where? A Texas based chain called "Bookstar". I remember being amazed at the selection of SF at the new Barnes and Nobles that opened around that time. The only SF section that was better was 150 miles away.
I remember being a teenager and having difficulties finding anything but the most mainstream SF, little in terms of history, etc. To get anything better, you had to drive to a used bookstore, and there it was still hit or miss. Now, with these book superstores on every corner, it is a hell of a lot easier to get what you want.
Truth is, the independents that are going out of business are mostly the bad ones. The good ones can stay in business with one of these "superstores" nearby.
It is like "cruising" down the main drag of a small city. Those doing it complain that they "have the right" to drive anywhere. But what about the rights of the rest of us to drive downtown without running into a wall of cars circling the block?
I'm not saying that things like Napster should be illegal. I am saying that clogging up a network with Napster when people are trying to do real work is antisocial behavior and should be considered on-par with playing a boom-box at volume ten on the bus, talking loudly on a cell-phone in a supermarket, and otherwise acting like an obnoxious ass.
First, I'm wondering if this is really needed. There are certainly cases of authors putting copyrighted material out there electronically, free for the copying. I know O'Reilly did this with on of their books. Bruce Sterling also did this with The Hacker Crackdown.
The reason this concerns me is that if I were an author, I'd want to get a royalty for any copy of the work that gets sold for cash. It doesn't seem right that a publishing company could publish the book and pay nothing. (see below.) And given the two examples above, I don't think that selling a book to a publisher and getting royalies precludes free electronic distribution.
In other words, it seems to me to make sense to have a license that allowed free electronic distribution, but that required print distributors to come to an agreement with the authors regarding payment. (Obviously complicated if it has passed through many hands.)
My second comment is that I suspect that the motivation to "FDL" a document won't be nearly as strong as the motivation to "GPL" a piece of software. One of the reasons I think that the GPL works is that most GPL'd software was written for the authors. They write something they need, perhaps throwing in things for people to ask as a favor. Regardless, they end up with something they can use themselves. In other words, their work has value to them after they've completed it. Documentation, on the other hand, is pretty much useless to the author (in most cases) after its completion. Presumably the author knows everything in the document and thus no longer needs the document.
And that's the thing. The motivation to write an FDL'd document may be altruism, or the desire for community approval, but it won't be self-interest. On the other hand, the motivation to write a GPL'd piece of software certainly can be self-interest. I write a program because I want the program, first and foremost.
That's not to say that I'm opposed to other people using the FDL. If people want to, more power to them. But if I were going to write technical docs (which I have thought about doing) I'd want to retain copyright. I'd probably allow free unmodified distribution, but I'd want to have the ability to sell the work to a publisher as well. It doesn't seem that the FDL allows this, unless the publisher is real stupid.
Various pig transplants, usually not bigger than heart valves (excuse me for my bad english here) have been attempted first in the 60-es when the heart surgery was just emerging and they all failed.
Hmmm....I don't think they all failed. I have a coworker who has one (a pig heart valve). (From the last ten years, I assume.)
(Or did you mean anything bigger than a heart valve failed? If so, nevermind.)
By the way, you forgot the ozone hole--though there are those who are starting to think it ain't the problem it once was, only because ground-level UV levels have not changed one iota. But there are those who still believe that in 10-20 years we're going to have to go out in the sun with SPF 5000 or die.
Though the banning of CFCs may have something to do with this.
The trouble is that few of the improved traits are likely to be wholly without risk. Would you take a risk of a nerve disease to get improved reflexes? Would you take a shorter lifespan with improved strength?
I'm not saying that it won't happen. I'm just saying that it is going to take a long time to completely work out all the details. Given that they can't test the lifetime effects in under fifty years or so, you take a risk at any modifications.
Also bear in mind that it is much easier to genetically engineer an embryo than an adult creature. We are nearly there for the embryo but barely started on the adult. It is likely that you will still be waiting in line while children a quarter your age already have those traits.
Specifically, the idea is to first work out the building blocks - the equivalents of neurons - and then have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose.
yes, and you've got to problems. 1) What exactly does a neuron do? and 2) how are they organized into a brain? Neither are easy questions.
Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it.
One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed.
... is a problematic thing. What, exactly, is an ehancement? We can start be removing genetic diseases. That's something pretty straightforward and few would object. But "won't get sick" isn't quite "superhuman".
Beyond this, it ain't so easy. The thing is, the human body is not a bundle of individual, unconnected traits that can be manipulated at will. It is a bunch of interdependent traits that have been optimized by evolution for a certain environment. Given that it is optimized, improving it may be difficult. Try to improve strength, and you may find that strength is a tradeoff with some other feature. Increase intelligence and you may get a higher incidence of insanity. Decrease insanity and you may lose creativity.
Not that it can't, or won't, be done, but it is no where as easy as many people think. Personally, I think our grandkids will likely not worry about most genetic diseases, but it will be a couple generations after that before we get anyone that would be recognizably "superior" in general.
Remember, there are two big problems in human genetic engineering. You have to be sure before you do anything. Mistakes are not an option. And you have to deal with a very long generation time. This isn't like fruit flies, where you can try things out and have the results in a few weeks.
It didn't seem unreasonable to people in 1950 that we'd have artificial intelligence by 1965. It didn't seem unreasonable to people in 1970 that we'd have artificial intelligence by 2000. It didn't seem unreasonable to many of my professors and or fellow students to think we'd have it by 2010 when I studied it in 1985.
The error is in thinking that AI is just a matter of getting enough transisters together. Hardly! The real problems in AI are not hardware speed so much as what to do with that hardware to make it intelligent. This is not a trivial problem. it is an extremely difficult problem, IMHO probably the hardest problem the human race has ever faced.
The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it also have emotions? If so, what would it feel?
And this is really the key thing. You can't build an artificially intelligent computer unless you have a damn good idea of those things. You can't build something with desires, emotions, etc. unless you know, in detail, what desires and emotions are, at a far deeper level than we do now.
This idea, that technology will kill us all, is not new. It started around World War I, and really gained momentum with the invention of the bomb. And for the most part, the timeframe in which destruction (from war/pollution/technological change) was going to rain down is always something like 10-20 years in the future. Close enough to be something to fear, but far enough away to seem likely.
Such ideas are almost always based on linear trends. Just like the guy in the early part of the 19th century who projected that New York would be hip deep in horseshit by the year 2000. That's what the trend showed, after all.
This is not to say that we shouldn't worry about the downsides of technological progress, but for the most part, these "global extinction" thoughts are fueled by accentuating the negative and ignoring the positive.
Bad things will almost certainly happen in the future. Maybe even very bad things. But destroy the human race? Not likely. Slow it down, even? Probably not. The worst global disaster with real evidence behind it we have to face right now is global warming and while global warming could cause a lot of discomfort, with the sea-level rising and weather changing, the human race would certainly survive.
An Emmy? Oy... Are most shows you watch emmy-winners?
Yes, actually.
The only shows I watch with any regularity are "The Simpson", "The X Files", "Futurama" and "Win Ben Stein's Money". Three out of four are emmy winners.
(And yes, I know it might suck even winning an emmy. But the odds that it doesn't improve.)
There's a movie of "War and Peace" that is supposed to be extremely good, done back in the silent film era. It is something like twelve hours long, though.
Anyway, what they are squabbling over is an addictive drug that can provide the prescience needed to navigate hyperspace or somesuch. A little more interesting than just "spaceship fuel".
There have been some good adaptions of books. The most famous in SF is probably Bladerunner, though it wasn't particularly faithful to the book. But on the whole, they tend to be bad because the directors are rarely people who actually like the book in the first place. (Probably the root problem in the original "Dune".)
The real interesting adaption to wait for is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. I've heard very positive things about that.
When I was something like 16 years old, I raced to the theater on opening day, excited that my favorite book ever was now going to be a movie, which big stars like "Sting" in it.
Those of you that have actually seen the original "Dune" movie can likely guess how the rest of that day went.
So I'm not going to do that again. Until I hear that this has won an emmy or something, I am not even going to think about watching.
A large company like Amazon, not a large company like IBM.
If both you and Jeff Bezos came up with the exact same idea at the exact same time, who do you suppose would have it in front of a million web-surfers first?
1) A large company is going to be able to capitalize on a new idea faster than a startup. By the time the average startup gets moving, a 2-5 year patent would be half gone.
2) These days, it usually takes years for the patent to be issued in the first place.
You are confusing the average user with the average current Linux user. The average user doesn't have a clue how to even open up the source, and most likely won't figure out how to e-mail the developer unless there is something to click on to bring up his e-mail.
I've seen this a lot around here, mistaking what is easy for the average technical/. reader for the average user. Linux is very well designed for its current user base. Its various UIs are far better than Windows for its current user base.
But what people really need to have hammered into them is that this is not at all the same as being well designed for the average person. For me, you and most other Linux users, being able to just edit the config file with vi instead of wading through a bunch of menus is a dream come true. For the average person, this is hell.
There is no one perfect UI. There are UIs that are good for techies and UIs that are good for nontechies. Don't expect them to be at all the same.
The "Open Source" model is probably the supreme way of getting feedback from the average technical user. This does not mean that it is at all good at getting feedback from the average nontechnical user.
Trademark is different from copyright. There is no such thing as a "copyrighted" verb. In any case, I may be wrong (IANAL) but I don't think a trademark can stop me from using a word in normal speech, as long as I am not advertising a product or somesuch.
Slashdot Mirror
(A vi fanatic)
That was so cool! I wish my populous disk still worked :(
Rearrange your stereotypes accordingly.
But we all know that Windows NT is "posix compliant", right?
(I can here the gails of laughter already. Has anyone actually gotten any of that to work?)
they are the ones going around and causing all the independents to close down.
I hear this argument quite a bit, yet in my town three years ago a Barnes and Nobles moved in three blocks from a good independent bookstore....and it is still there.
This argument about "less diversity" is, to be blunt, pure crap. I've been an avid bookshopper for almost twenty years and I can say flat out that things have not been better in terms of the diversity of books that can be bought than they are right now. Even ignoring the online retailers. I remember, in the late eighties, being amazed that I could finally get all of those obscure Aliester Crowley novels that I'd been looking for. Where? A Texas based chain called "Bookstar". I remember being amazed at the selection of SF at the new Barnes and Nobles that opened around that time. The only SF section that was better was 150 miles away.
I remember being a teenager and having difficulties finding anything but the most mainstream SF, little in terms of history, etc. To get anything better, you had to drive to a used bookstore, and there it was still hit or miss. Now, with these book superstores on every corner, it is a hell of a lot easier to get what you want.
Truth is, the independents that are going out of business are mostly the bad ones. The good ones can stay in business with one of these "superstores" nearby.
I hear this argument quite a bit, yet in my town three years ago a Barnes and Nobles moved in three blocks from a good independent bookstore....and it is still there.
This argument about "less diversity" is, to be blunt, pure crap. I've been an avid bookshopper for almost twenty years and I can say flat out that things have not been better in terms of the diversity of books that can be bought than they are right now. Even ignoring the online retailers. I remember, in the late eighties, being amazed that I could finally get all of those obscure Aliester Crowley novels that I'd been looking for. Where? A Texas based chain called "Bookstar". I remember being amazed at the selection of SF at the new Barnes and Nobles that opened around that time. The only SF section that was better was 150 miles away.
I remember being a teenager and having difficulties finding anything but the most mainstream SF, little in terms of history, etc. To get anything better, you had to drive to a used bookstore, and there it was still hit or miss. Now, with these book superstores on every corner, it is a hell of a lot easier to get what you want.
Truth is, the independents that are going out of business are mostly the bad ones. The good ones can stay in business with one of these "superstores" nearby.
I'm not saying that things like Napster should be illegal. I am saying that clogging up a network with Napster when people are trying to do real work is antisocial behavior and should be considered on-par with playing a boom-box at volume ten on the bus, talking loudly on a cell-phone in a supermarket, and otherwise acting like an obnoxious ass.
First, I'm wondering if this is really needed. There are certainly cases of authors putting copyrighted material out there electronically, free for the copying. I know O'Reilly did this with on of their books. Bruce Sterling also did this with The Hacker Crackdown.
The reason this concerns me is that if I were an author, I'd want to get a royalty for any copy of the work that gets sold for cash. It doesn't seem right that a publishing company could publish the book and pay nothing. (see below.) And given the two examples above, I don't think that selling a book to a publisher and getting royalies precludes free electronic distribution.
In other words, it seems to me to make sense to have a license that allowed free electronic distribution, but that required print distributors to come to an agreement with the authors regarding payment. (Obviously complicated if it has passed through many hands.)
My second comment is that I suspect that the motivation to "FDL" a document won't be nearly as strong as the motivation to "GPL" a piece of software. One of the reasons I think that the GPL works is that most GPL'd software was written for the authors. They write something they need, perhaps throwing in things for people to ask as a favor. Regardless, they end up with something they can use themselves. In other words, their work has value to them after they've completed it. Documentation, on the other hand, is pretty much useless to the author (in most cases) after its completion. Presumably the author knows everything in the document and thus no longer needs the document.
And that's the thing. The motivation to write an FDL'd document may be altruism, or the desire for community approval, but it won't be self-interest. On the other hand, the motivation to write a GPL'd piece of software certainly can be self-interest. I write a program because I want the program, first and foremost.
That's not to say that I'm opposed to other people using the FDL. If people want to, more power to them. But if I were going to write technical docs (which I have thought about doing) I'd want to retain copyright. I'd probably allow free unmodified distribution, but I'd want to have the ability to sell the work to a publisher as well. It doesn't seem that the FDL allows this, unless the publisher is real stupid.
Hmmm....I don't think they all failed. I have a coworker who has one (a pig heart valve). (From the last ten years, I assume.)
(Or did you mean anything bigger than a heart valve failed? If so, nevermind.)
Are you a vegetarian?
From the pig's point of view, is havng its organs implanted in a person any different from being eaten?
Though the banning of CFCs may have something to do with this.
I'm not saying that it won't happen. I'm just saying that it is going to take a long time to completely work out all the details. Given that they can't test the lifetime effects in under fifty years or so, you take a risk at any modifications.
Also bear in mind that it is much easier to genetically engineer an embryo than an adult creature. We are nearly there for the embryo but barely started on the adult. It is likely that you will still be waiting in line while children a quarter your age already have those traits.
yes, and you've got to problems. 1) What exactly does a neuron do? and 2) how are they organized into a brain? Neither are easy questions.
Yes, neural nets don't have to be explicitly designed at a low level. But that doesn't mean that you can just throw one together, throw data at it, and get it to work. First, you've got to design your network, then you've got to figure out how to train it.
One thing we do know about the brain is it is not just a bundle of neurons. Those neurons have an organization that is genetically programmed.
Beyond this, it ain't so easy. The thing is, the human body is not a bundle of individual, unconnected traits that can be manipulated at will. It is a bunch of interdependent traits that have been optimized by evolution for a certain environment. Given that it is optimized, improving it may be difficult. Try to improve strength, and you may find that strength is a tradeoff with some other feature. Increase intelligence and you may get a higher incidence of insanity. Decrease insanity and you may lose creativity.
Not that it can't, or won't, be done, but it is no where as easy as many people think. Personally, I think our grandkids will likely not worry about most genetic diseases, but it will be a couple generations after that before we get anyone that would be recognizably "superior" in general.
Remember, there are two big problems in human genetic engineering. You have to be sure before you do anything. Mistakes are not an option. And you have to deal with a very long generation time. This isn't like fruit flies, where you can try things out and have the results in a few weeks.
The error is in thinking that AI is just a matter of getting enough transisters together. Hardly! The real problems in AI are not hardware speed so much as what to do with that hardware to make it intelligent. This is not a trivial problem. it is an extremely difficult problem, IMHO probably the hardest problem the human race has ever faced.
The question nobody even has a coherent theory for right now is: what would an (artificially) intelligent computer do? What would be its desires? Would it also have emotions? If so, what would it feel?
And this is really the key thing. You can't build an artificially intelligent computer unless you have a damn good idea of those things. You can't build something with desires, emotions, etc. unless you know, in detail, what desires and emotions are, at a far deeper level than we do now.
Such ideas are almost always based on linear trends. Just like the guy in the early part of the 19th century who projected that New York would be hip deep in horseshit by the year 2000. That's what the trend showed, after all.
This is not to say that we shouldn't worry about the downsides of technological progress, but for the most part, these "global extinction" thoughts are fueled by accentuating the negative and ignoring the positive.
Bad things will almost certainly happen in the future. Maybe even very bad things. But destroy the human race? Not likely. Slow it down, even? Probably not. The worst global disaster with real evidence behind it we have to face right now is global warming and while global warming could cause a lot of discomfort, with the sea-level rising and weather changing, the human race would certainly survive.
Yes, actually.
The only shows I watch with any regularity are "The Simpson", "The X Files", "Futurama" and "Win Ben Stein's Money". Three out of four are emmy winners.
(And yes, I know it might suck even winning an emmy. But the odds that it doesn't improve.)
Anyway, what they are squabbling over is an addictive drug that can provide the prescience needed to navigate hyperspace or somesuch. A little more interesting than just "spaceship fuel".
There have been some good adaptions of books. The most famous in SF is probably Bladerunner, though it wasn't particularly faithful to the book. But on the whole, they tend to be bad because the directors are rarely people who actually like the book in the first place. (Probably the root problem in the original "Dune".)
The real interesting adaption to wait for is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. I've heard very positive things about that.
"These aren't the droids you're looking for".
Those of you that have actually seen the original "Dune" movie can likely guess how the rest of that day went.
So I'm not going to do that again. Until I hear that this has won an emmy or something, I am not even going to think about watching.
If both you and Jeff Bezos came up with the exact same idea at the exact same time, who do you suppose would have it in front of a million web-surfers first?
I see a couple problems with "fast patents".
1) A large company is going to be able to capitalize on a new idea faster than a startup. By the time the average startup gets moving, a 2-5 year patent would be half gone.
2) These days, it usually takes years for the patent to be issued in the first place.
I've seen this a lot around here, mistaking what is easy for the average technical /. reader for the average user. Linux is very well designed for its current user base. Its various UIs are far better than Windows for its current user base.
But what people really need to have hammered into them is that this is not at all the same as being well designed for the average person. For me, you and most other Linux users, being able to just edit the config file with vi instead of wading through a bunch of menus is a dream come true. For the average person, this is hell.
There is no one perfect UI. There are UIs that are good for techies and UIs that are good for nontechies. Don't expect them to be at all the same.
The "Open Source" model is probably the supreme way of getting feedback from the average technical user. This does not mean that it is at all good at getting feedback from the average nontechnical user.