Anyone who has piloted a modern âoefly by wireâ aircraft has already experienced this. The computer is always there âoehelping, guiding, nudging and smoothing your inputs.â
Slashdot, are you serious? Two of this guys comments have been moded "insightful." Yet he offers no insight. Having government run healthcare is going to result in numerous incidents like this one. Information is going to be lost that shouldn't. Of course you're kidding yourself if you think that the private insurers aren't losing things they just aren't telling. But that is beside the point what really bothers me is the acceptance by the moderators these two statements as "insightful":
How many examples of incompetency like this do we need before maybe people will reconsider whether having government get into the health care business and all these other "growth areas" for government is really such a good idea?... What I am not doing is endorsing any alternative proposals or anything like that.
Where is the insight? Right now hundreds of thousands of Americans are without healthcare. Many more have inadequate health care. Instead of this in many countries everyone has healthcare. Now admittedly in those countries everyone is subject to "government errors." BUT THEY ALL GET HEALTHCARE. What would be insightful would be to suggest a way for everyone to get healthcare without these types of problems. Maybe that is why some folks are so keen on electronic records? Better record keeping might reduce errors. Come on causality, let's hear some insight!
My experience is the opposite of the headline of this story. I think most non-IT types are more worried about privacy than they should be. They are terrified of MySpace, paranoid about their SSN's, warn me that file sharing will inevitably lead to me being "hacked," etc. It's true that the internet can be hazardous, less than crossing the street but true. But is also true that of the millions of people on MySpace of the millions of servicemen's SSN's that have been stolen, I am not an attractive target in a very target rich environment. I have long felt that a little bit of common sense in the face of "the internet is DANGEROUS" meme popular on FoxNN would go a long way. My neighbors won't let their kids have a facebook account, my inlaws are afraid of online banking, my parents are afraid of debit cards. I think it's time for the non-IT people to calm down.
Of course it isn't as clear cut as that. Grammar Girl writes one of the best blogs and here's what she had to say on "a versus an" The rule is that you use a before words that start with a consonant sound and an before words that start with a vowel sound (1).
When I say "RIAA" out loud it sounds like "aR-EYE-A-A" so to my mind it should be "an RIAA subpoena." You might disagree but I think you must see that it isn't clear cut enough for you to get so huffy.
The nicest thing about NMCI might be that it scares the Navy/Marine Corps off of all commercial software solutions. The system is incredibly dysfunctional and expensive. Moving a computer from one user to another or from one side of the room to the other usually costs several hundred dollars and weeks of delay. Moving a whole unit is a nightmare. Most software will not work on the network and users seem to devote themselves mostly to hacking printers and external drives onto the system because that is the only way they can get their work done.
Open source software encourages the user to solve problems. If you know how to fix it, do so. If the Marine Corps/Navy adopted this concept (as opposed to just some open source software, rigidly controlled) it would be a perfect about face from the NMCI system where you have no access of any kind to your own machine and neither does the S-6 shop (the computer shop) in your unit. Instead you have to rely on some under trained and, in any case, unavailable, tech located on the other side of the world.
We are literally ceding an advantage to our enemy with NMCI and Open Source (which in many ways had it's birth in DARPA) is the perfect solution to this strategic disaster.
IANAL either but here is how I understand it: Your rights against self incrimination are not the same as your rights against illegal search and seizure (different amendments). You have the right not to incriminate your self by testimony "I did it" but if someone comes to your house with a legal search warrant you are not aloud to lock the door and say "you can't come in." You could go to jail for interfering in a legal investigation. If the search is legal you must not imped it. The problem here, I think, is the constitution was written so long ago. In this new world the key to the lock is not something physical but something verbal. So you might argue they are forcing you to SAY something incriminating which the constitution forbids. They might argue that they are forcing you to not prevent a legal search, that the a key is not itself ever incriminating it is the EVIDENCE that is incriminating and you have no constitutional right to evidence legally obtained.
I suspect we will have to wait for the courts to sort out which argument is most persuasive.
I'm not sure it's correct to say that "[no one's] ever argued that DNA has anything we'd call intelligence." It seems to me that is the central argument of Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene." If you haven't read it, I highly recommended it. It's very well done. Wikipedia describes his argument this way: "Dawkins proposes that genes that help the organism, which they happen to be in, to survive and reproduce tend to also improve their own chances of being passed on, so - most of the time - "successful" genes will also be beneficial to the organism. An example of this might be a gene that protects the organism against a disease, which helps the gene spread and also helps the organism. There are other times when the implicit interests of the vehicle and replicate are in conflict, such as the genes behind certain male spiders' instinctive mating behavior, which increase the organism's inclusive fitness by allowing it to reproduce, but shorten its life by exposing it to the risk of being eaten by the cannibalistic female."
That sounds like swarm theory to me.
"They went to an unlimited plan. - If your daughter doesn't have the discipline to hold down a job or to monitor her cell phone usage, perhaps it's because you respond to her problems by spending throwing (more) money at them.
Oh well that clears it up then, just block thoes websites with "no educational value" because, that should be easy to define. If you visit my MySpace you'll note that the DNC hired an RIAA shill (a fact I wanted to share with my friends that I learned on Slashdot). Is MySpace now educational?
Maybe I'd have to experience it but I don't get it. They are putting out press releases saying this thing only penetrates 1/16th of an inch of skin, is ultimately harmless, but uncomfortable. Won't any trained adversary prepare for this, deal with their discomfort, concentrate on not dropping their weapon, take a knee and shoot the operator of this "discomfort" causing weapon?
I'm not opposed to non-lethal weapons but it seems to me like immobilization (think tasers, rubble bullets, mace, etc) is key.
Parent says: "Apple had to produce a DRM that was acceptable to the music industry, or else iTunes would never exist." While this may have been true it is unresponsive the article in which Apple is shown making this argument in court and then Mr. Stross makes a counter argument. TFA:
"Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker's lawsuit, Apple's lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: "Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist." In other words, however irksome customers may find the limitations imposed by copy protection, the fault is the music companies', not Apple's. This claim requires willful blindness to the presence of online music stores that eschew copy protection. For example, one online store, eMusic, offers two million tracks from independent labels that represent about 30 percent of worldwide music sales."
Mr. Stross also notes later in the article that eMusic and Yahoo have had some recent success getting the major lables to give them access to their music sans DRM. Tell me, why can't Apple provide DRM free music downloads to indi artists who want that?
I'm not sure exactly what is meant by "offset" but if it is like a 'credit" I'm all for it. Damaging the atmosphere costs us all (skin cancer treatment is expensive) but the polluters don't bear the burden of their pollution. So they have no incentive to avoid it. The idea of carbon trading markets is indeed to transfer wealth from one entity to another, ideally from a polluter to someone else (like a Amazon rainforest preserver) who absorbs carbon and needs cash to do so. A good capitalist way to do that is to assign some cost to polluting. Which has everything to do with protecting the environment.
By the way, who the hell modded parent "+4 Insightful?"
It is clearly Apple's responsibility to ensure they do not produce any products that can pass on virus. I do think it is fair for them to mention in their apology that if other companies (MS) had designed their operating systems with security in mind this wouldn't be an issue. Apple's PR is trying to sell macs. It is fair of them to point out that there are no virus' for macs.
As to the parent, Yea I would go ahead and say Leap-A is a the invention of antivirus company known as Sophos. Fortunately though as it is says on their press release announcing their "discovery" you can buy their protection. "Sophos's reliably engineered, easy-to-operate products protect more than 35 million users in more than 150 countries." It's the oldest trick in the book: "buy our protection... you wouldn't want to get hurt."
I think John Gruber put it best on his site DaringFireball "I, on the other hand, had never been under the impression that the Mac was either magically or technically "immune" or "invulnerable" to viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, malware, and so forth. Rather, I thought it was simply the case that, for whatever reasons, such software isn't a problem for Mac users and hasn't been for the last 15 years or so. I.e. that Macs aren't magically protected, and that in theory, malware could be written to target the Mac, but that the point is that in practice, in the real world, they aren't.
On the other hand, Macs do happen to be immune to Windows viruses and spyware and adware and Trojan horses, thousands of which are discovered every month. But why sweat the details?"
Yea, I'm not sure I understand this. If someone were to force my wireless headset to pair with their device well then it wouldn't simultaneously be operating with my phone. I guess my question is: I understand that Bluetooth can be hacked trivially, allowing someone, for instance, to steal all the phone numbers in the Bluetooth enabled cell phone in my pocket, but can they listen to my call by intercepting the signal from my headset? Seems to me if they have to "pair" to steel then the answer is no. Am I wrong?
At the risk of veering off topic, YOU don't get it. Your electronics have a life of about 3 years. In a consumer society it doesn't matter what bizarre protections gun nuts have rigged up to protect stop the feds they have to venture out once in a while. Unless you stand up for free speech, and free information (as in beer) you will find your choices severely limited when you do leave your compound.
Mine did. The gifted program at my primary school was run by a phenomnol teacher Mrs. Martin. The entier program was stuctured around (I see now) creativity. When we studdied bridges we built them. When we studdied language we made up one. When we studdied spelling... we'll we didn't.
But the rest of the program was amazing. Then we I went to middle school all they did in their program was word puzzles from the paper. My friends and I quickly lost intrest.
This is an interesting example, but I wonder how your guy knows that file sharing is what is hurting his business. The music industry has complained that P2P has ruined their business but their numbers are going up? I think the recent downturn in music sales might have more to do with the recent dearth of quality pop music. That is just an opinion but so is your friend's opinion that P2P is what is hurting him. And my opinion is also the result found by a harvard study.Any good debater would know that you must back up your opinion with evidence rather than assertion. Does your friend have any evidance directly conecting his drop in business to filesharing?
As a former High School and College debater I am well aware of the usefulness of the type of briefs your friend produces and I recognize that the market is very small. However, I am also well aware that the problems your friend faces existed well before P2P came on the scene. High School and college debate are relatively small communities. These people see each other every weekend and they probably go to camp together over the summer. One of the main activities at summer camps is photo copping useful information. That is the primary motivation for going to camp. We would make sure someone went to camp every summer from our HS team just to be sure we had a copy of all the latest briefs? Did we pay for them? Well the camps are not cheap, but I suppose not. On the other hand no one would go to camp if they didn't come back with two or three decent cases. So maybe it is the camps stealing from your friend rather than the individual debaters (some camps do work very hard to prevent the reproduction of copywriter works but it is very hard to do when you have kids up all night and day at the photocopier).
In short, the photocopier, the word wide web, and plain old sharing (not file sharing) are, in my experience, a greater threat to your friend's livelihood. And I know it to be a fact. Your friend chooses to blame P2P but how does he know?
Is un-dialectically some sort of new code word for Troll?
I wonder if by making people who agree with you spell out their agreement you are actually strengthening your position or weakening it? You are setting up the opposition as a straw-man by your failure even attempt to persuasively argue it. If enough people acted like you instead of understanding the opposition it would be impossible to respond to the opposition when it really appeared.
Give me a break. Where does this right to permanence come from? You state "I have the right to not have that thing [I produced] be constantly changed and altered by the world at large."
You accuse this book of being pedantic but I wonder if you could offer up some argument for your little "right." From whom does this right extend? Is some sort of natural right that proceeds from "life, liberty etc?" If this is a natural law than surly before this technology came into existence it must have been the way things were, correct?
Can you name for me a single work which has survived the test of time unmodified unrevised? Even if you could (and you can not) it seems clear that you have a incomplete understanding of the nature of the idea. You are correct that your ideas are yours so long as you don't share them with anyone. Though you should be honest with yourself about just how original your ideas really are.
However, once you realize your idea into the market place it becomes all of ours. I can remember when I heard that George Lucas was remastering star wars. "Who is he to do that?" I thought. What right did he have? The truth is that movie was nothing without the fans who made it so popular. We adopted it's mythology as our own and retold it in so many new ways just as Lucas did the stories he had heard when he wrote the movie. Sure he had a right to modify the movie but so do I.
Fact is ideas survive through time because we all have made an investment in them. This investment means we have literally made it our own and will, deliberately or not be reshaping your idea as we pass it along. That's how ideas survive and grow.
Honestly, who's idea was it to mod this post up so far?
Re:Author has "no idea what was responsible for na
on
The History Of Pentium
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· Score: 1
The author begins by noting that he has no idea where the name Pentium came from, but that it wasn't sufficiently geeky. The company that did come up with the name Lexicon is certainly very geeky (IMO I've never met anyone who works there), composed primarily of linguists who break speech into it's smallest parts and recombine to come up with some of the most famous geek names ever:
A person I know with Crone's diseases must be within 60' of a bathroom at all times. This makes commuting to work basically impossible for him. I met this person through an online college I work for. He now is gainfully employed as a graphic designer working from home using the degree he got at that college. What would this man's life be like if he couldn't meet people online?
It is so cool! I do everything on my laptop and have a kickass stero at home. Every night I get home and plug my nice portable laptop into three cords (ethernet, stereo and power). Suddenly, two of thoes cords are gone! I couldn't bring myself to get a linksys or a airport for my studio apartment. I am always within reach of a cable... This is cheaper, this hooks up to my stereo, it is small and portable. I love it.
I ordered mine, they say it won't be here until "mid July" I guess I'll just have to keep plugging in my stereo. I think my neighbors like that high pitched squeal it makes when I forget to turn down the volume.
A fascinating idea of course but to be clear Card had a definite notion of soul. The network did not become aware by itself but the Buggers actually took a conscious from the ether and placed in the network in the same way they did with new queens. They did this in hope of contacting ender through the game he played in the battle school and eventually the conscious evolved to utilize the ancible to create a large galactic AI. Card did not see grid computing (on a planetary scale) equaling AI.
To nitpick even farther you allude to a definition of AI (a human like intelligence) that is less and less embraced by those who work in the field. An AI is simply a learning computer. In a very real sense primitive AI's are currently present doing tasks like flying planes and competing against humans in games. The thing to remember is the AI remains a computer and we would expect it to behave like any computer with the exception that it will undergo a process of self-improvement based on experience. Any human like qualities (as Jane had) are only likely to be programmed in (or taught) to ease human user interface with a complex machine.
End geeky nitpick
For what is worth an emergent AI is not the only way to get to Jane. The user agent concept has come a long way from Clippy. I do not expect we will have to wait for aliens and a galaxy wide computing network to get AI agents that prepare our data for us and do some of the work online that we currently do manually.
I agree with the Dr. Mu's general sentiment: If you don't like math you will not like CS. However I think he probes deep enough. When I entered college I took many courses and found that the problems addressed by computers and philosophy most closely matched by natural interests and so I double majored. I am a hard worker and persuaded myself I could stick it through the many math courses required for my CS degree. I did stick it out but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
I find logic and the interaction of the human and the technical interesting. I currently develop custom interfaces for a small private college's online education proprietary software. This I enjoy. I recently read a story (wired maybe?) about an MIT researcher who dropped out of three CS programs before he finally wound up in MIT's UI lab. He was lucky. I believe most UI's are extremely poorly designed, and nearly all EUA's are similar travesties. These things are central to the usability and usefulness of a piece of software but you cannot learn how to do them well in any CS department I'm aware of.
I briefly considered MIS and took a class and sat in another and found it to be a joke, they were teaching kids how to do cool tricks with MS Access, give me a break.
Take Slashdot for example, the UI is sublime, I never read trolls and I am consistently engaged by comments relevant to the topic and my experience. I have been on a lot of (boards, blogs, BBs what the hell is this?) and none even come close to the elegance of the moderating solution Slashdot uses. Creating a useful online forum is at least a 20 year old Computer Science problem, but it has nothing to do with math (ok adding up moderator points is arithmetic). Why is there no computer science department that teaches students how to come up with such elegant solutions? A world of mathematics and code for four years can produce a person who is unable to create an easy to understand interface. I know, I graduated with 100 such Computer Scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who has piloted a modern âoefly by wireâ aircraft has already experienced this. The computer is always there âoehelping, guiding, nudging and smoothing your inputs.â
Where is the insight? Right now hundreds of thousands of Americans are without healthcare. Many more have inadequate health care. Instead of this in many countries everyone has healthcare. Now admittedly in those countries everyone is subject to "government errors." BUT THEY ALL GET HEALTHCARE. What would be insightful would be to suggest a way for everyone to get healthcare without these types of problems. Maybe that is why some folks are so keen on electronic records? Better record keeping might reduce errors. Come on causality, let's hear some insight!
My experience is the opposite of the headline of this story. I think most non-IT types are more worried about privacy than they should be. They are terrified of MySpace, paranoid about their SSN's, warn me that file sharing will inevitably lead to me being "hacked," etc. It's true that the internet can be hazardous, less than crossing the street but true. But is also true that of the millions of people on MySpace of the millions of servicemen's SSN's that have been stolen, I am not an attractive target in a very target rich environment. I have long felt that a little bit of common sense in the face of "the internet is DANGEROUS" meme popular on FoxNN would go a long way. My neighbors won't let their kids have a facebook account, my inlaws are afraid of online banking, my parents are afraid of debit cards. I think it's time for the non-IT people to calm down.
Of course it isn't as clear cut as that. Grammar Girl writes one of the best blogs and here's what she had to say on "a versus an" The rule is that you use a before words that start with a consonant sound and an before words that start with a vowel sound (1). When I say "RIAA" out loud it sounds like "aR-EYE-A-A" so to my mind it should be "an RIAA subpoena." You might disagree but I think you must see that it isn't clear cut enough for you to get so huffy.
The nicest thing about NMCI might be that it scares the Navy/Marine Corps off of all commercial software solutions. The system is incredibly dysfunctional and expensive. Moving a computer from one user to another or from one side of the room to the other usually costs several hundred dollars and weeks of delay. Moving a whole unit is a nightmare. Most software will not work on the network and users seem to devote themselves mostly to hacking printers and external drives onto the system because that is the only way they can get their work done. Open source software encourages the user to solve problems. If you know how to fix it, do so. If the Marine Corps/Navy adopted this concept (as opposed to just some open source software, rigidly controlled) it would be a perfect about face from the NMCI system where you have no access of any kind to your own machine and neither does the S-6 shop (the computer shop) in your unit. Instead you have to rely on some under trained and, in any case, unavailable, tech located on the other side of the world. We are literally ceding an advantage to our enemy with NMCI and Open Source (which in many ways had it's birth in DARPA) is the perfect solution to this strategic disaster.
IANAL either but here is how I understand it: Your rights against self incrimination are not the same as your rights against illegal search and seizure (different amendments). You have the right not to incriminate your self by testimony "I did it" but if someone comes to your house with a legal search warrant you are not aloud to lock the door and say "you can't come in." You could go to jail for interfering in a legal investigation. If the search is legal you must not imped it. The problem here, I think, is the constitution was written so long ago. In this new world the key to the lock is not something physical but something verbal. So you might argue they are forcing you to SAY something incriminating which the constitution forbids. They might argue that they are forcing you to not prevent a legal search, that the a key is not itself ever incriminating it is the EVIDENCE that is incriminating and you have no constitutional right to evidence legally obtained.
I suspect we will have to wait for the courts to sort out which argument is most persuasive.
I'm not sure it's correct to say that "[no one's] ever argued that DNA has anything we'd call intelligence." It seems to me that is the central argument of Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene." If you haven't read it, I highly recommended it. It's very well done. Wikipedia describes his argument this way: "Dawkins proposes that genes that help the organism, which they happen to be in, to survive and reproduce tend to also improve their own chances of being passed on, so - most of the time - "successful" genes will also be beneficial to the organism. An example of this might be a gene that protects the organism against a disease, which helps the gene spread and also helps the organism. There are other times when the implicit interests of the vehicle and replicate are in conflict, such as the genes behind certain male spiders' instinctive mating behavior, which increase the organism's inclusive fitness by allowing it to reproduce, but shorten its life by exposing it to the risk of being eaten by the cannibalistic female." That sounds like swarm theory to me.
"They went to an unlimited plan. - If your daughter doesn't have the discipline to hold down a job or to monitor her cell phone usage, perhaps it's because you respond to her problems by spending throwing (more) money at them.
Oh well that clears it up then, just block thoes websites with "no educational value" because, that should be easy to define. If you visit my MySpace you'll note that the DNC hired an RIAA shill (a fact I wanted to share with my friends that I learned on Slashdot). Is MySpace now educational?
Maybe I'd have to experience it but I don't get it. They are putting out press releases saying this thing only penetrates 1/16th of an inch of skin, is ultimately harmless, but uncomfortable. Won't any trained adversary prepare for this, deal with their discomfort, concentrate on not dropping their weapon, take a knee and shoot the operator of this "discomfort" causing weapon? I'm not opposed to non-lethal weapons but it seems to me like immobilization (think tasers, rubble bullets, mace, etc) is key.
Parent says: "Apple had to produce a DRM that was acceptable to the music industry, or else iTunes would never exist." While this may have been true it is unresponsive the article in which Apple is shown making this argument in court and then Mr. Stross makes a counter argument. TFA:
"Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker's lawsuit, Apple's lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: "Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist." In other words, however irksome customers may find the limitations imposed by copy protection, the fault is the music companies', not Apple's. This claim requires willful blindness to the presence of online music stores that eschew copy protection. For example, one online store, eMusic, offers two million tracks from independent labels that represent about 30 percent of worldwide music sales."
Mr. Stross also notes later in the article that eMusic and Yahoo have had some recent success getting the major lables to give them access to their music sans DRM. Tell me, why can't Apple provide DRM free music downloads to indi artists who want that?
I'm not sure exactly what is meant by "offset" but if it is like a 'credit" I'm all for it. Damaging the atmosphere costs us all (skin cancer treatment is expensive) but the polluters don't bear the burden of their pollution. So they have no incentive to avoid it. The idea of carbon trading markets is indeed to transfer wealth from one entity to another, ideally from a polluter to someone else (like a Amazon rainforest preserver) who absorbs carbon and needs cash to do so. A good capitalist way to do that is to assign some cost to polluting. Which has everything to do with protecting the environment.
By the way, who the hell modded parent "+4 Insightful?"
It is clearly Apple's responsibility to ensure they do not produce any products that can pass on virus. I do think it is fair for them to mention in their apology that if other companies (MS) had designed their operating systems with security in mind this wouldn't be an issue. Apple's PR is trying to sell macs. It is fair of them to point out that there are no virus' for macs. As to the parent, Yea I would go ahead and say Leap-A is a the invention of antivirus company known as Sophos. Fortunately though as it is says on their press release announcing their "discovery" you can buy their protection. "Sophos's reliably engineered, easy-to-operate products protect more than 35 million users in more than 150 countries." It's the oldest trick in the book: "buy our protection... you wouldn't want to get hurt." I think John Gruber put it best on his site DaringFireball "I, on the other hand, had never been under the impression that the Mac was either magically or technically "immune" or "invulnerable" to viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, malware, and so forth. Rather, I thought it was simply the case that, for whatever reasons, such software isn't a problem for Mac users and hasn't been for the last 15 years or so. I.e. that Macs aren't magically protected, and that in theory, malware could be written to target the Mac, but that the point is that in practice, in the real world, they aren't. On the other hand, Macs do happen to be immune to Windows viruses and spyware and adware and Trojan horses, thousands of which are discovered every month. But why sweat the details?"
Yea, I'm not sure I understand this. If someone were to force my wireless headset to pair with their device well then it wouldn't simultaneously be operating with my phone. I guess my question is: I understand that Bluetooth can be hacked trivially, allowing someone, for instance, to steal all the phone numbers in the Bluetooth enabled cell phone in my pocket, but can they listen to my call by intercepting the signal from my headset? Seems to me if they have to "pair" to steel then the answer is no. Am I wrong?
Hmmm good point. Now that you mention it, why do we have it?
At the risk of veering off topic, YOU don't get it. Your electronics have a life of about 3 years. In a consumer society it doesn't matter what bizarre protections gun nuts have rigged up to protect stop the feds they have to venture out once in a while. Unless you stand up for free speech, and free information (as in beer) you will find your choices severely limited when you do leave your compound.
Mine did. The gifted program at my primary school was run by a phenomnol teacher Mrs. Martin. The entier program was stuctured around (I see now) creativity. When we studdied bridges we built them. When we studdied language we made up one. When we studdied spelling... we'll we didn't. But the rest of the program was amazing. Then we I went to middle school all they did in their program was word puzzles from the paper. My friends and I quickly lost intrest.
This is an interesting example, but I wonder how your guy knows that file sharing is what is hurting his business. The music industry has complained that P2P has ruined their business but their numbers are going up? I think the recent downturn in music sales might have more to do with the recent dearth of quality pop music. That is just an opinion but so is your friend's opinion that P2P is what is hurting him. And my opinion is also the result found by a harvard study.Any good debater would know that you must back up your opinion with evidence rather than assertion. Does your friend have any evidance directly conecting his drop in business to filesharing?
As a former High School and College debater I am well aware of the usefulness of the type of briefs your friend produces and I recognize that the market is very small. However, I am also well aware that the problems your friend faces existed well before P2P came on the scene. High School and college debate are relatively small communities. These people see each other every weekend and they probably go to camp together over the summer. One of the main activities at summer camps is photo copping useful information. That is the primary motivation for going to camp. We would make sure someone went to camp every summer from our HS team just to be sure we had a copy of all the latest briefs? Did we pay for them? Well the camps are not cheap, but I suppose not. On the other hand no one would go to camp if they didn't come back with two or three decent cases. So maybe it is the camps stealing from your friend rather than the individual debaters (some camps do work very hard to prevent the reproduction of copywriter works but it is very hard to do when you have kids up all night and day at the photocopier).
In short, the photocopier, the word wide web, and plain old sharing (not file sharing) are, in my experience, a greater threat to your friend's livelihood. And I know it to be a fact. Your friend chooses to blame P2P but how does he know?
Is un-dialectically some sort of new code word for Troll?
I wonder if by making people who agree with you spell out their agreement you are actually strengthening your position or weakening it? You are setting up the opposition as a straw-man by your failure even attempt to persuasively argue it. If enough people acted like you instead of understanding the opposition it would be impossible to respond to the opposition when it really appeared.
At least we know how you'll react to being called out.
Give me a break. Where does this right to permanence come from? You state "I have the right to not have that thing [I produced] be constantly changed and altered by the world at large." You accuse this book of being pedantic but I wonder if you could offer up some argument for your little "right." From whom does this right extend? Is some sort of natural right that proceeds from "life, liberty etc?" If this is a natural law than surly before this technology came into existence it must have been the way things were, correct? Can you name for me a single work which has survived the test of time unmodified unrevised? Even if you could (and you can not) it seems clear that you have a incomplete understanding of the nature of the idea. You are correct that your ideas are yours so long as you don't share them with anyone. Though you should be honest with yourself about just how original your ideas really are.
However, once you realize your idea into the market place it becomes all of ours. I can remember when I heard that George Lucas was remastering star wars. "Who is he to do that?" I thought. What right did he have? The truth is that movie was nothing without the fans who made it so popular. We adopted it's mythology as our own and retold it in so many new ways just as Lucas did the stories he had heard when he wrote the movie. Sure he had a right to modify the movie but so do I.
Fact is ideas survive through time because we all have made an investment in them. This investment means we have literally made it our own and will, deliberately or not be reshaping your idea as we pass it along. That's how ideas survive and grow.
Honestly, who's idea was it to mod this post up so far?
The author begins by noting that he has no idea where the name Pentium came from, but that it wasn't sufficiently geeky. The company that did come up with the name Lexicon is certainly very geeky (IMO I've never met anyone who works there), composed primarily of linguists who break speech into it's smallest parts and recombine to come up with some of the most famous geek names ever:
Apple's Powerbook, Intel's Centrino, GE's OnStar, Blackberry, Adobe's InDesign, HP's Pavillion, etc.
A person I know with Crone's diseases must be within 60' of a bathroom at all times. This makes commuting to work basically impossible for him. I met this person through an online college I work for. He now is gainfully employed as a graphic designer working from home using the degree he got at that college. What would this man's life be like if he couldn't meet people online?
It is so cool! I do everything on my laptop and have a kickass stero at home. Every night I get home and plug my nice portable laptop into three cords (ethernet, stereo and power). Suddenly, two of thoes cords are gone! I couldn't bring myself to get a linksys or a airport for my studio apartment. I am always within reach of a cable... This is cheaper, this hooks up to my stereo, it is small and portable. I love it.
I ordered mine, they say it won't be here until "mid July" I guess I'll just have to keep plugging in my stereo. I think my neighbors like that high pitched squeal it makes when I forget to turn down the volume.
Warning: geeky nitpicking follows.
A fascinating idea of course but to be clear Card had a definite notion of soul. The network did not become aware by itself but the Buggers actually took a conscious from the ether and placed in the network in the same way they did with new queens. They did this in hope of contacting ender through the game he played in the battle school and eventually the conscious evolved to utilize the ancible to create a large galactic AI. Card did not see grid computing (on a planetary scale) equaling AI.
To nitpick even farther you allude to a definition of AI (a human like intelligence) that is less and less embraced by those who work in the field. An AI is simply a learning computer. In a very real sense primitive AI's are currently present doing tasks like flying planes and competing against humans in games. The thing to remember is the AI remains a computer and we would expect it to behave like any computer with the exception that it will undergo a process of self-improvement based on experience. Any human like qualities (as Jane had) are only likely to be programmed in (or taught) to ease human user interface with a complex machine.
End geeky nitpick
For what is worth an emergent AI is not the only way to get to Jane. The user agent concept has come a long way from Clippy. I do not expect we will have to wait for aliens and a galaxy wide computing network to get AI agents that prepare our data for us and do some of the work online that we currently do manually.
I agree with the Dr. Mu's general sentiment: If you don't like math you will not like CS. However I think he probes deep enough. When I entered college I took many courses and found that the problems addressed by computers and philosophy most closely matched by natural interests and so I double majored. I am a hard worker and persuaded myself I could stick it through the many math courses required for my CS degree. I did stick it out but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
I find logic and the interaction of the human and the technical interesting. I currently develop custom interfaces for a small private college's online education proprietary software. This I enjoy. I recently read a story (wired maybe?) about an MIT researcher who dropped out of three CS programs before he finally wound up in MIT's UI lab. He was lucky. I believe most UI's are extremely poorly designed, and nearly all EUA's are similar travesties. These things are central to the usability and usefulness of a piece of software but you cannot learn how to do them well in any CS department I'm aware of.
I briefly considered MIS and took a class and sat in another and found it to be a joke, they were teaching kids how to do cool tricks with MS Access, give me a break.
Take Slashdot for example, the UI is sublime, I never read trolls and I am consistently engaged by comments relevant to the topic and my experience. I have been on a lot of (boards, blogs, BBs what the hell is this?) and none even come close to the elegance of the moderating solution Slashdot uses. Creating a useful online forum is at least a 20 year old Computer Science problem, but it has nothing to do with math (ok adding up moderator points is arithmetic). Why is there no computer science department that teaches students how to come up with such elegant solutions? A world of mathematics and code for four years can produce a person who is unable to create an easy to understand interface. I know, I graduated with 100 such Computer Scientists.