A "news that doesn't require discussion" section with comments disabled. Is there really anything worthwhile to say about this article? Apple's doing the right thing, roughly. Sure you can nit-pick details, but what a waste.
Some of the ideas presented in the Anti-Mac interface (Google Cache) guildlines. Also, this reminds me a lot of some research that was done by Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell and described in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies". I highly recommend the book if you are interested in AI.
But both the uses of the research (applications) and the priorities of the research need to be moderated by moral, ethical and social concerns. In particular, I am very disturbed by the huge amount of money put into research that benefits the rich, and the lack of money put into research that benefits everyone. Medical research tends towards helping the rich more than anyone else. For example the amount of research on heart disease far outstrips the amount of research on malaria.
One book that really inspired me to question things is "In the Absense of the Sacred" by Jerry Mander. This book is more about technology than science, but it nicely demolishes the idea that technology (application of science) is neutral. Unfortunately the book is also very heavily political and does not question its own assumptions. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in these sort of questions, it is a must read. Another one is "Progress and its Problems" by Larry Laudan which is a classic in the history and philosophy of science. It takes a look at why research goes in certain directions. It is very well written and again, a must read for those interested in science in general and as it relates to politics.
Probably because I recently read a review of the movie "American Beauty" and made a mental leap from "cradle robbing" to inbreeding across a large age gap.
Living to a very old age has serious economic consequences. Just as an example... People could live long enough to amass extraordinarily large fortunes even with extremely conservative investment strategies. The rich who will be able to afford this sort of longevity will become much richer.
There are also serious social or moral consequences. How many generations distant does an offspring need to be before it is "okay" to procreate? Normally, grand parents are too old (decrepit) for this to even be an issue. When great-grandparents are still physically vigorous, is a descendant who only shares 1/8 genetic material "removed" enough for this to be okay?
If lots of people start living to a very much extended age, then population growth will become a very serious problem!
Of course, there are substantial potential benefits: the ability to pursue projects of extremely long duration becomes easier (for example space exploration, long-term experiments, businesses with very long-term returns, mastering vast bodies of knowledge, etc). Less obvious is the possibility of improved social integration of humanity since people will travel much more in a given lifetime, and since life will become more "valuable".
Personally, I think it would be cool to live much longer than my currently expected life-span of 70 or 80 years. However, once everyone is living to 600 years, it won't be "cool" anymore. What will we wish for then?
Yet another reason for IPV6
on
NASA's Sensor Web
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
These things should have Internet presense, of course. Otherwise what are they really good for? Given the sort of things they might be used for, I can see 4 billion IP addresses being used up real quick! And putting them on the Internet seems like a really small step from what is described in the article (I didn't follow the rest of the links... maybe they are already doing this?).
If this sort of thing becomes ubiquitous, they could be really useful for a lot of things that we don't tend to like: e.g. surveillance.
In the last five years or so, the Internet has gone from being fairly calm and safe, to more and more of a virtual reality war zone. Viruses and worms are one front, security holes and exploits are another, intellectual property "theft" and counter-tactics... and counter-counter-tactics are another, spam and filters and anti-spam are yet another. Those early books by William Gibson aren't too far off the mark anymore!
It is interesting that the Internet was viewed as a kind of egalitarian utopia not too long ago. Some people still hold this view, but in reality, it is becoming a constant war zone.
I wonder if all this could have been avoided if the internet was not commercialized? Is all this conflict going to destroy the Internet's potential fertility?
I think that there is no policy, no law, no technology which can create peace on the Internet. I personally think that the Internet is rather a microcosm of what is happening at a slower pace in the "real" world. And that can only be fixed by a fundamental change in the way that people (everyone in the whole world) think. It's like the cold war's arms race. At some point, everyone is going to have to realize that it is getting ridiculous and everyone is losing out because of that.
Actually, that's a good point and I neglected to address it. I too played with pretend guns, played violent video games, etc. as a child and youth. And yet, I am an exceptionally non-violent person. I have never been in a real fight, and I can count the times I have yelled at someone out of anger.
But that still leaves a question: if I learned about violence from my environment, how did I also learn to be peaceful, how did that choice happen if it was a choice? And then, what are my responsibilities as a parent? I don't really know the answer in totality. I try my best but like I said at the very beginning, I'm going off of completely anecdotal evidence.
I know from my own anecdotal evidence that children are adversely affected by violence they are exposed to. Violence can be as innocuous as name-calling in family-rated cartoons. Or it can be as brutal as sexual abuse by a parent. Either way, a child learns the violence will act it out. My own two young children are only exposed to a tiny amount of violence compared to most children (we do not have a TV, and we very carefully select their movies and games), but still they both play with guns and swords. My wife and I try our best both through example and through our words to teach them to be gentle and loving... and at the same time not to shelter them completely, but it is a real struggle. Seeing their personalities and behavior change as a result of environmental violence is a real tragedy.
Regardless of any laws, either rational or irrational, parents have the first responsibility to their children. However, being a parent in a society which does not support parenting makes the job almost impossible to do properly. Laws might be able to help...
good information about one of the most important aspects of persistance in an object oriented language: Object Relational Mapping. I haven't read the book myself, but if it doesn't cover Java OR mapping layers such as Cocobase, Toplink and EOF (part of WebObjects), or any of the open source OR mapping frameworks, and the theoretical foundation they are all based on, then to me it isn't worth it.
Linux is great. I personally use it as a server (along with FreeBSD), and I have RH8 running in a desktop configuration. However, I still haven't completely rid myself of Windows because I am lacking certain types of software that will run on Linux. Dreamweaver for myself and my wife, and a multitude of educational games for our kids.
So I have a question... what is available to replace this type of software? I haven't heard of _any_ educational games for kids! Is there some other way that I can solve this problem?
Slashdot was compromised back a few years ago. The maintainers were very quick to notify everyone and recommend changing passwords immediately. If only other businesses were as forthcoming!
And there weren't any credit card numbers involved!
I have to admit that I learned a lot from this chapter. I have always wondered about the fact that in university the marketing class I took as some enrichment for my comp sci degree was by far the most useful class I took. Now I know that there was even more basic knowledge missing. Expect to see my name in headlines in a few years:-)
!!! Okay, yes, the roads were already there - but I didn't say that there weren't. There were trails when we were nomads, and the Romans actually built paved roads in an extensive network. That doesn't change the basic fact that cars require smooth, paved roads to maximize their utility. This requirement, or perhaps "symbiosis", is manifested by the fact that the more cars we have, the more resources we spend in building/maintaining the infrastructure.
Your causal assumption is flawed.
What causal assumption? I did not say "iff". I said that cars -> roads. The fact that there were already roads does not change the truth of that relationship.
I also said more than just cars-> roads. I also said that technologies (in general) are not morally or societally neutral. This lack of neutrality can been seen clearly because every technology has a set of intended and unintended uses, a required infrastructure to support its construction/manufacture and its uses, and consequences that are the result of its uses.
The widespread adoption of the car as a means of transportation allowed workplaces to become more centralized. Since in some respects, centralization exhibits economic efficiencies at the local level, businesses have taken advantage of the opportunity. As a society we rarely even think about this. What is the effect of this growing centralization on our attitudes towards government? towards nature? towards entertainment? These effects may be small... or they may be large. Do we even know? Do we care?
I do not know from your comment if you agree with my central statement that technology is not neutral. However, it seems to imply, since you attacked my example, that you believe that technology is neutral. You are/were sitting at a computer terminal when you wrote that comment. Do a little thought exercise and try to piece out even just the physical consequences of the networked personal computer. Try to prove to yourself that all those effects are neutral... that those effects "depend on how you use the technology"...
Technology is not morally or societally neutral, despite what we would like to think. A very simple example of this is the car: cars, in order to maximize their utility, require a vast network of roads, parking spaces, and gas stations. This network is expensive to society for environmental reasons and has definite social and economic effects (such as time lost in commuting and traffic jams). These are unavoidable if we wish to use the technology of cars.
I have an essay in progress on this topic: The Analysis of Technologies - its got some stuff that is quite out of date since I started working on the essay eight years ago:-)
A really great book on the subject of analyzing the future effects of technology is "In the Absense of the Sacred" by Jerry Mander. This book is very much slanted politically to the "small/simple is beautiful" outlook, but provides a very substantial wealth of logical arguments and academic studies to demonstrate some of the necessary principle of analyzing technologies.
As for your specific questions, one obvious effect will be that in our commercial environment, not everyone will have equal access to the benefits that may be provided by the integration of computational and biological technologies.
Since it will not be genetic engineering in the "traditional" sense, this technology may be used as a backdoor for creating designer babies without actually modifying a zygote's genetic material.
"The premise of censorship is that offensive content contaminates the hearts and minds of people.
But you can only have censorship if someone can judge content without himself being contaminated. This contradicts the premise of censorship, which alleges that these contaminating powers exist inherently in the offensive material. On the other hand, if a censor can censor without being contaminated, that implies that offensive content does not automatically contaminate the mind or heart of a person. In that case, you would be admitting that censorship is unnecessary. That is the contradiction of censorship." - don't have the name of the quoter sorry.
That's ridiculous. Censorship is about having guardians who willingly put themselves in harms way in order to protect others. It is similar to having an army that protects from physical harm, censors are the "army" that protects from emotional, intellectual or spiritual harm. I have not had the chance myself, but I think it would be very interesting to ask a person involved in this work of censorship how they see their role and if they feel like they are or are not affected by the material they view.
that is being addressed partly by the research and practice of agile methodologies. The idea is to change the focus of software development to a new set of principles (for example favoring running software over documentation).
There is also a problem with the way that many managers and business people view software creation as a construction or engineering process. I wrote a paper about this: "The Software Construction Analogy is Broken". The summary is that software has so many attributes that are unlike physical things that its creation cannot be accurately mapped to the creation of buildings. For example, the economics of distribution are completely different: a building cannot generally be moved after it is constructed, yet software can not only be moved, but also can be duplicated for almost zero cost.
Ultimately, I think that software creation is actually the creation of completely new media of communication. Every program created defines a new set of communication interactions that didn't exist before. We don't really have any "science" for that.
I have bought several monitors of various brands. The best two I have are both NEC's: the MultiSync FE1250 which is a 22" monitor capable of 1920x1440, and a newish LCD (I don't have it in front of me so I can't give the details.
I have always known that the monitor is the longest-lasting, least-depreciating, most visible part of any computer system so feel free to spend big. When I got my 22 incher almost three years ago, I spent C$1300 on it which was half the cost of my total system. It did have a problem in-warrenty but NEC conveniently shipped me a new one to replace it (I had to return the old one).
I've also used VeiwSonic monitors and they seem to be pretty good too.
I am in the process of reading PoEAA - I agree wholeheartedly with the review. As a professional software architect and mentor, I often recommend Fowler's books. Another great one is "Refactoring" which presents a systematic method for improving the design of existing code.
I have a list of excellent resources for software developers, architects, project managers, executives, etc.
I have read Software Craftsmanship. I have also read extensively in the general field of software development methodologies, software engineering, and project management. On thing that this book does, that is very rarely dealt with is the personal responsibility that one has as a software developer. Most methodologies are designed, in essense, around the idea of minimizing the human impact on the bottom line. Software Craftsmanship deals with this question to a superlative degree.
One thing that I found lacking is the issue of why exactly craftsmanship is a better model than software engineering. There is some discussion of this, and although I agree with the conclusion, it was not very well supported. My feeling is that engineering works for physical structures where humans intuitively understand the rules and the use of the structure follows the same rules as the creation of the structure, but in software, you make up the rules themselves and the rules are different for the process of creation and the actual use of the software!
Another two books which deal with the question of personal responsibility are Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn. If you are interested, I have compiled a list of resources for people interested in creating software.
I've been developing software professionally for over 10 years and I can count the number of time I've used a debugger on my fingers.
I've programmed in c, Objective-C, Java, and a little in C++. I've worked in healthcare, oil and gas, high tech, and most recently the financial field. In all cases I have found that I can track down my bugs by using my brains and sometimes inline print statements (yes, I admit it). I spend approximately 1/10 of my total development time doing debugging work as opposed to design or coding.
Debuggers are too big a context switch. They don't act like part of the IDE. The best I have ever seen is the debugger in Visual Age (by IBM). It allows some pretty amazing things: you can roll back the stack and continue executing, and you can change any code dynamically while debuggin (the debugger figures out how much of the stack needs to be rolled back to allow for the changes). It also has all the usual stuff like value inspectors, conditional breakpoints, etc.
The one thing I would really like is to have a more sophisticated watch system that allows me to use the IDE (not the debugger) to insert development-time only code. This would allow me to put in such things as print statements that would not be part of the "real" source code, but rather just part of my project. It would also allow logging, performance measurment, etc. to be done at development time. Note: I don't want to context switch into a debugger to do this!!!!
The really depressing thing is that, even though I can see the system is broken, I really have no idea what to do about it. The system needs to be reformed, but I'm not entierly sure where to start.
I don't imagine that this suggestion will make you feel much better, but I personally think that the only solution is _very_ long-term and spiritual, not procedural. I come from the Baha'i Faith, and in our scripture it says:
The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.
There is an excellent and logical paper written which addresses the issue of justice very carefully and insightfully at: The Prosperity of Humankind
Well, possibly, I wouldn't claim to know, but the analogy does not need to be taken that far. The analogy simply points out that the progress of moral knowledge may procede similarly to the progress of physical knowledge.
It is easy for us to understand that the study of physics is based on observation, intuition and inspiration and that it presumes that the universe is ordered and non-arbitrary. (Just for a little more detail: science is based on a faith in repeatability but that faith does not make it so. The faith we have in repeatability comes from our experience, not from any more fundamental proof.)
What is not so easy for some people is to have faith that morality can also be ordered and non-arbitrary. This is because history is full of examples of morality prescribed by powerful individuals for their own purposes. Moral codes should be examined just as dispassionately as physical laws: what are the effects of following/not following a moral code, or in other words, what is the descriptive version of a moral stance (see this post's parent's parent:-). (Also I recommend reading Larry Laudan's "Progress and its Problems" one of the best works on the philosophy and history of science.)
As for probabilities, it is conceivable that some moral consequences are probabilistically influenced by deeper unknown moral parameters. To use the analogy with physics a little more, one might consider that the action and consequences of a murder might be described at a level similar to classical mechanics, whereas the intonation used on a particular word while speaking with someone might have consequences that are best described using probabilities and that it is only when one agregates many of these words and intonations that once can "collapse" the probability waveform into a more "classical" result (such as insult, sarcasm, affection, anger, joy etc.).
FWIW, I totally just speculating. Again, I don't presume to have thought this out fully or know any "correct" answers:-)
Morality is not absolute. That is evidenced by the fact that no two societies agree on a common set of morals.
How does this show that morality is not absolute? All it shows is that you do not know which (if any) of those societies have a moral code that is closest to the "correct" moral code.
Think of it similarly to the "laws" of physics. Newtons mathematical description of gravity is accurate, but not perfect. It is useful for understanding and predicting the behavior of physical objects in relation to each other. Einstein improved that description. Both of these descriptions (Newtonian and Einsteinian) take into account a context (masses, distances, gravitational constant, speed of light, time etc.) and predict a result.
A moral code is a description of the laws of human (or "spiritual") interactions. These codes may seem to be simplistic (e.g. murder is wrong) but it is merely because they are stating the understood reality of the universe in a prescriptive manner rather than a descriptive manner. One might think of this like Aristotolean physics (bigger objects should fall faster).
As an example, one could convert the prescriptive "thou shalt not kill" into a descriptive "if you kill someone, then you hurt their family, which leads eventually to the harm of society and to yourself". Of course, we are not anywhere near measuring the human/spiritual consequences of our actions, but that does not preclude that someday we will be able to.
I personally find the moral/cultural relativism stance to be incredibly weak since it is in itself a stance. By taking that stance, one is implicitly saying that any other moral stance is wrong, thus undermining ones own position.
It is difficult and frightening to many people in western culture to examine dispassionately the possiblity of a "correct" moral stance. Part of this is a legitimate fear of returning to our dark past of intollerance and prejudice. Part of it is a similarly legitimate fear of being wrong and suffering the consequences. But the answer is not denial. The answer is an open search for truth whereever one may find it.
Slashdot Mirror
A "news that doesn't require discussion" section with comments disabled. Is there really anything worthwhile to say about this article? Apple's doing the right thing, roughly. Sure you can nit-pick details, but what a waste.
Some of the ideas presented in the Anti-Mac interface (Google Cache) guildlines. Also, this reminds me a lot of some research that was done by Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell and described in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies". I highly recommend the book if you are interested in AI.
Wish I had thought of it :-)
But both the uses of the research (applications) and the priorities of the research need to be moderated by moral, ethical and social concerns. In particular, I am very disturbed by the huge amount of money put into research that benefits the rich, and the lack of money put into research that benefits everyone. Medical research tends towards helping the rich more than anyone else. For example the amount of research on heart disease far outstrips the amount of research on malaria.
One book that really inspired me to question things is "In the Absense of the Sacred" by Jerry Mander. This book is more about technology than science, but it nicely demolishes the idea that technology (application of science) is neutral. Unfortunately the book is also very heavily political and does not question its own assumptions. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in these sort of questions, it is a must read. Another one is "Progress and its Problems" by Larry Laudan which is a classic in the history and philosophy of science. It takes a look at why research goes in certain directions. It is very well written and again, a must read for those interested in science in general and as it relates to politics.
Probably because I recently read a review of the movie "American Beauty" and made a mental leap from "cradle robbing" to inbreeding across a large age gap.
Living to a very old age has serious economic consequences. Just as an example... People could live long enough to amass extraordinarily large fortunes even with extremely conservative investment strategies. The rich who will be able to afford this sort of longevity will become much richer.
There are also serious social or moral consequences. How many generations distant does an offspring need to be before it is "okay" to procreate? Normally, grand parents are too old (decrepit) for this to even be an issue. When great-grandparents are still physically vigorous, is a descendant who only shares 1/8 genetic material "removed" enough for this to be okay?
If lots of people start living to a very much extended age, then population growth will become a very serious problem!
Of course, there are substantial potential benefits: the ability to pursue projects of extremely long duration becomes easier (for example space exploration, long-term experiments, businesses with very long-term returns, mastering vast bodies of knowledge, etc). Less obvious is the possibility of improved social integration of humanity since people will travel much more in a given lifetime, and since life will become more "valuable".
Personally, I think it would be cool to live much longer than my currently expected life-span of 70 or 80 years. However, once everyone is living to 600 years, it won't be "cool" anymore. What will we wish for then?
These things should have Internet presense, of course. Otherwise what are they really good for? Given the sort of things they might be used for, I can see 4 billion IP addresses being used up real quick! And putting them on the Internet seems like a really small step from what is described in the article (I didn't follow the rest of the links... maybe they are already doing this?).
If this sort of thing becomes ubiquitous, they could be really useful for a lot of things that we don't tend to like: e.g. surveillance.
In the last five years or so, the Internet has gone from being fairly calm and safe, to more and more of a virtual reality war zone. Viruses and worms are one front, security holes and exploits are another, intellectual property "theft" and counter-tactics... and counter-counter-tactics are another, spam and filters and anti-spam are yet another. Those early books by William Gibson aren't too far off the mark anymore!
It is interesting that the Internet was viewed as a kind of egalitarian utopia not too long ago. Some people still hold this view, but in reality, it is becoming a constant war zone.
I wonder if all this could have been avoided if the internet was not commercialized? Is all this conflict going to destroy the Internet's potential fertility?
I think that there is no policy, no law, no technology which can create peace on the Internet. I personally think that the Internet is rather a microcosm of what is happening at a slower pace in the "real" world. And that can only be fixed by a fundamental change in the way that people (everyone in the whole world) think. It's like the cold war's arms race. At some point, everyone is going to have to realize that it is getting ridiculous and everyone is losing out because of that.
Actually, that's a good point and I neglected to address it. I too played with pretend guns, played violent video games, etc. as a child and youth. And yet, I am an exceptionally non-violent person. I have never been in a real fight, and I can count the times I have yelled at someone out of anger.
But that still leaves a question: if I learned about violence from my environment, how did I also learn to be peaceful, how did that choice happen if it was a choice? And then, what are my responsibilities as a parent? I don't really know the answer in totality. I try my best but like I said at the very beginning, I'm going off of completely anecdotal evidence.
I know from my own anecdotal evidence that children are adversely affected by violence they are exposed to. Violence can be as innocuous as name-calling in family-rated cartoons. Or it can be as brutal as sexual abuse by a parent. Either way, a child learns the violence will act it out. My own two young children are only exposed to a tiny amount of violence compared to most children (we do not have a TV, and we very carefully select their movies and games), but still they both play with guns and swords. My wife and I try our best both through example and through our words to teach them to be gentle and loving... and at the same time not to shelter them completely, but it is a real struggle. Seeing their personalities and behavior change as a result of environmental violence is a real tragedy.
Regardless of any laws, either rational or irrational, parents have the first responsibility to their children. However, being a parent in a society which does not support parenting makes the job almost impossible to do properly. Laws might be able to help...
good information about one of the most important aspects of persistance in an object oriented language: Object Relational Mapping. I haven't read the book myself, but if it doesn't cover Java OR mapping layers such as Cocobase, Toplink and EOF (part of WebObjects), or any of the open source OR mapping frameworks, and the theoretical foundation they are all based on, then to me it isn't worth it.
Linux is great. I personally use it as a server (along with FreeBSD), and I have RH8 running in a desktop configuration. However, I still haven't completely rid myself of Windows because I am lacking certain types of software that will run on Linux. Dreamweaver for myself and my wife, and a multitude of educational games for our kids.
So I have a question... what is available to replace this type of software? I haven't heard of _any_ educational games for kids! Is there some other way that I can solve this problem?
Slashdot was compromised back a few years ago. The maintainers were very quick to notify everyone and recommend changing passwords immediately. If only other businesses were as forthcoming!
And there weren't any credit card numbers involved!
I have to admit that I learned a lot from this chapter. I have always wondered about the fact that in university the marketing class I took as some enrichment for my comp sci degree was by far the most useful class I took. Now I know that there was even more basic knowledge missing. Expect to see my name in headlines in a few years :-)
!!! Okay, yes, the roads were already there - but I didn't say that there weren't. There were trails when we were nomads, and the Romans actually built paved roads in an extensive network. That doesn't change the basic fact that cars require smooth, paved roads to maximize their utility. This requirement, or perhaps "symbiosis", is manifested by the fact that the more cars we have, the more resources we spend in building/maintaining the infrastructure.
What causal assumption? I did not say "iff". I said that cars -> roads. The fact that there were already roads does not change the truth of that relationship.
I also said more than just cars-> roads. I also said that technologies (in general) are not morally or societally neutral. This lack of neutrality can been seen clearly because every technology has a set of intended and unintended uses, a required infrastructure to support its construction/manufacture and its uses, and consequences that are the result of its uses.
The widespread adoption of the car as a means of transportation allowed workplaces to become more centralized. Since in some respects, centralization exhibits economic efficiencies at the local level, businesses have taken advantage of the opportunity. As a society we rarely even think about this. What is the effect of this growing centralization on our attitudes towards government? towards nature? towards entertainment? These effects may be small... or they may be large. Do we even know? Do we care?
I do not know from your comment if you agree with my central statement that technology is not neutral. However, it seems to imply, since you attacked my example, that you believe that technology is neutral. You are/were sitting at a computer terminal when you wrote that comment. Do a little thought exercise and try to piece out even just the physical consequences of the networked personal computer. Try to prove to yourself that all those effects are neutral... that those effects "depend on how you use the technology"...
Technology is not morally or societally neutral, despite what we would like to think. A very simple example of this is the car: cars, in order to maximize their utility, require a vast network of roads, parking spaces, and gas stations. This network is expensive to society for environmental reasons and has definite social and economic effects (such as time lost in commuting and traffic jams). These are unavoidable if we wish to use the technology of cars.
I have an essay in progress on this topic: The Analysis of Technologies - its got some stuff that is quite out of date since I started working on the essay eight years ago :-)
A really great book on the subject of analyzing the future effects of technology is "In the Absense of the Sacred" by Jerry Mander. This book is very much slanted politically to the "small/simple is beautiful" outlook, but provides a very substantial wealth of logical arguments and academic studies to demonstrate some of the necessary principle of analyzing technologies.
As for your specific questions, one obvious effect will be that in our commercial environment, not everyone will have equal access to the benefits that may be provided by the integration of computational and biological technologies.
Since it will not be genetic engineering in the "traditional" sense, this technology may be used as a backdoor for creating designer babies without actually modifying a zygote's genetic material.
That's ridiculous. Censorship is about having guardians who willingly put themselves in harms way in order to protect others. It is similar to having an army that protects from physical harm, censors are the "army" that protects from emotional, intellectual or spiritual harm. I have not had the chance myself, but I think it would be very interesting to ask a person involved in this work of censorship how they see their role and if they feel like they are or are not affected by the material they view.
that is being addressed partly by the research and practice of agile methodologies. The idea is to change the focus of software development to a new set of principles (for example favoring running software over documentation).
There is also a problem with the way that many managers and business people view software creation as a construction or engineering process. I wrote a paper about this: "The Software Construction Analogy is Broken". The summary is that software has so many attributes that are unlike physical things that its creation cannot be accurately mapped to the creation of buildings. For example, the economics of distribution are completely different: a building cannot generally be moved after it is constructed, yet software can not only be moved, but also can be duplicated for almost zero cost.
Ultimately, I think that software creation is actually the creation of completely new media of communication. Every program created defines a new set of communication interactions that didn't exist before. We don't really have any "science" for that.
I have bought several monitors of various brands. The best two I have are both NEC's: the MultiSync FE1250 which is a 22" monitor capable of 1920x1440, and a newish LCD (I don't have it in front of me so I can't give the details.
I have always known that the monitor is the longest-lasting, least-depreciating, most visible part of any computer system so feel free to spend big. When I got my 22 incher almost three years ago, I spent C$1300 on it which was half the cost of my total system. It did have a problem in-warrenty but NEC conveniently shipped me a new one to replace it (I had to return the old one).
I've also used VeiwSonic monitors and they seem to be pretty good too.
I am in the process of reading PoEAA - I agree wholeheartedly with the review. As a professional software architect and mentor, I often recommend Fowler's books. Another great one is "Refactoring" which presents a systematic method for improving the design of existing code.
I have a list of excellent resources for software developers, architects, project managers, executives, etc.
I have read Software Craftsmanship. I have also read extensively in the general field of software development methodologies, software engineering, and project management. On thing that this book does, that is very rarely dealt with is the personal responsibility that one has as a software developer. Most methodologies are designed, in essense, around the idea of minimizing the human impact on the bottom line. Software Craftsmanship deals with this question to a superlative degree.
One thing that I found lacking is the issue of why exactly craftsmanship is a better model than software engineering. There is some discussion of this, and although I agree with the conclusion, it was not very well supported. My feeling is that engineering works for physical structures where humans intuitively understand the rules and the use of the structure follows the same rules as the creation of the structure, but in software, you make up the rules themselves and the rules are different for the process of creation and the actual use of the software!
Another two books which deal with the question of personal responsibility are Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn. If you are interested, I have compiled a list of resources for people interested in creating software.
I've been developing software professionally for over 10 years and I can count the number of time I've used a debugger on my fingers.
I've programmed in c, Objective-C, Java, and a little in C++. I've worked in healthcare, oil and gas, high tech, and most recently the financial field. In all cases I have found that I can track down my bugs by using my brains and sometimes inline print statements (yes, I admit it). I spend approximately 1/10 of my total development time doing debugging work as opposed to design or coding.
Debuggers are too big a context switch. They don't act like part of the IDE. The best I have ever seen is the debugger in Visual Age (by IBM). It allows some pretty amazing things: you can roll back the stack and continue executing, and you can change any code dynamically while debuggin (the debugger figures out how much of the stack needs to be rolled back to allow for the changes). It also has all the usual stuff like value inspectors, conditional breakpoints, etc.
The one thing I would really like is to have a more sophisticated watch system that allows me to use the IDE (not the debugger) to insert development-time only code. This would allow me to put in such things as print statements that would not be part of the "real" source code, but rather just part of my project. It would also allow logging, performance measurment, etc. to be done at development time. Note: I don't want to context switch into a debugger to do this!!!!
You said:
I don't imagine that this suggestion will make you feel much better, but I personally think that the only solution is _very_ long-term and spiritual, not procedural. I come from the Baha'i Faith, and in our scripture it says:
There is an excellent and logical paper written which addresses the issue of justice very carefully and insightfully at: The Prosperity of HumankindHope that helps a little.
:-)
Well, possibly, I wouldn't claim to know, but the analogy does not need to be taken that far. The analogy simply points out that the progress of moral knowledge may procede similarly to the progress of physical knowledge.
It is easy for us to understand that the study of physics is based on observation, intuition and inspiration and that it presumes that the universe is ordered and non-arbitrary. (Just for a little more detail: science is based on a faith in repeatability but that faith does not make it so. The faith we have in repeatability comes from our experience, not from any more fundamental proof.)
What is not so easy for some people is to have faith that morality can also be ordered and non-arbitrary. This is because history is full of examples of morality prescribed by powerful individuals for their own purposes. Moral codes should be examined just as dispassionately as physical laws: what are the effects of following/not following a moral code, or in other words, what is the descriptive version of a moral stance (see this post's parent's parent :-). (Also I recommend reading Larry Laudan's "Progress and its Problems" one of the best works on the philosophy and history of science.)
As for probabilities, it is conceivable that some moral consequences are probabilistically influenced by deeper unknown moral parameters. To use the analogy with physics a little more, one might consider that the action and consequences of a murder might be described at a level similar to classical mechanics, whereas the intonation used on a particular word while speaking with someone might have consequences that are best described using probabilities and that it is only when one agregates many of these words and intonations that once can "collapse" the probability waveform into a more "classical" result (such as insult, sarcasm, affection, anger, joy etc.).
FWIW, I totally just speculating. Again, I don't presume to have thought this out fully or know any "correct" answers :-)
Think of it similarly to the "laws" of physics. Newtons mathematical description of gravity is accurate, but not perfect. It is useful for understanding and predicting the behavior of physical objects in relation to each other. Einstein improved that description. Both of these descriptions (Newtonian and Einsteinian) take into account a context (masses, distances, gravitational constant, speed of light, time etc.) and predict a result.
A moral code is a description of the laws of human (or "spiritual") interactions. These codes may seem to be simplistic (e.g. murder is wrong) but it is merely because they are stating the understood reality of the universe in a prescriptive manner rather than a descriptive manner. One might think of this like Aristotolean physics (bigger objects should fall faster).
As an example, one could convert the prescriptive "thou shalt not kill" into a descriptive "if you kill someone, then you hurt their family, which leads eventually to the harm of society and to yourself". Of course, we are not anywhere near measuring the human/spiritual consequences of our actions, but that does not preclude that someday we will be able to.
I personally find the moral/cultural relativism stance to be incredibly weak since it is in itself a stance. By taking that stance, one is implicitly saying that any other moral stance is wrong, thus undermining ones own position.
It is difficult and frightening to many people in western culture to examine dispassionately the possiblity of a "correct" moral stance. Part of this is a legitimate fear of returning to our dark past of intollerance and prejudice. Part of it is a similarly legitimate fear of being wrong and suffering the consequences. But the answer is not denial. The answer is an open search for truth whereever one may find it.