I happen to agree that we have our priorities upside down. Dope is bad, but sweatshops are OK? It doesn't make any sense. But none of this is relevant to my earlier point, which is that we must decide as a society what is morally and legally wrong and assign culpability and bring justice to ALL parties involved. It's up to us to demand reason ble legislation from our government, and we're doing a pretty shite job of that.
And even though Apple may be a part of the problem, they are certainly not the cause.
I'm sure plantation owners in 19th Century South Carolina would have said the same thing. Your qualifications about the immorality of the situation do indeed prevent the above quote from being a totally asinine statement, but you're hanging on by your fingernails. You agree that what is occuring is morally wrong. That would make it a moral offense, if not an actual crime under the law. How, then, can perpetrators of an offense be 'part of the problem' but 'certainly not the cause'? That's like saying crack dealers are 'part of the problem' but 'certainly not the cause' since it is drug lords in banana republics that make the stuff. The drug lords can point the fingers right back at the dealers and say the same thing. And they can both say that the people who buy crack are the real cause of the problem.
There are a lot of causal agents in the case of both sweatshops and drugs. It is easy to fall back on the old adage that when everybody is guilty, nobody is guilty. But the truth is that when everybody is guilty, then EVERYBODY IS GUILTY.
The solution? Hold the people responsible who you can get your hands on. That's what we do with drugs. We bust users, bust dealers, and bust producers. With sweatshops, we need to bust the people we can get ahold of. In this case, that means creating legislation to make it illegal for American companies or any company that sells products in America to use sweatshop labor. And then bust offenders like Nike and Apple.
Passion (emotion, affect) is the prioritizer of reasoning that allows
it to respond effectively (sometimes in real time) to the relevant aspects
of situations. Without the guidance of emotion, no common-sense reasoning engine would be powerful
enough, no matter how parallel it was, to process all of the ramifications of situations and
come up with relevant and useful and communicable and actionable conclusions.
I think you mean that emotions are the source of values, and reasoning is dependent upon values. No emotions = no values = no contextual singificance = no reasoning = no intelligence. Without values, everything is lost in an abstraction of insignificance.
Data and Spock, to continue your example, if they were truly emotionless, would have no logical basis upon which to consider a person more important than a pair of shoes, and would therefore be unable to prioritize (i.e.: value) one over the other in any situation. The result would be functional paralysis in which they would, of logical necessity, devote equal attention (i.e.: processing power) to every detectable object/variable in sensory range. Since in our physical reality that range is effectively infinite, and since processing power is finite, they would be unable to function.
Values would need to be assigned arbitrarily by a external source in order to form the basis of a contextual system of significance, such as that which humans build up over a lifetime of experiences.
Something interesting: as I understand it, autistic people often have difficulty assigning 'appropriate' value to the objects they interact with because their emotional circuitry is abnormal, and so, for example, a person is not necessarily more significant to them than a can of soda, and the result can be indecision, confusion, and accompanying fear and anxiety especially in unfamiliar or complex environments with foreign stimuli, resulting in a general a lack of functional intelligence.
I've not been able to figure out why flash RAID setups aren't more popular in portable devices. 10 4GB flash disks in a RAID would give you what, 20GB drive space with 100Mb/s bandwidth. Not bad for memory that doesn't have any moving parts and doesn't vanish without power. And a 'drive' like that would be about the size of a typical laptop network adapter card. I'm guessing cost is the main problem?
One point I haven't really seen mentioned in detail in these discussions is unconscious pattern recognition. This is somewhat separate from telepathy, but certainly related.
To take the above example, where twins got the same birthday cards, the explanation could simply be that the givers arrived at the same choice which was the result of unconscious responses to patterns too complex or subtle to be detected consciously.
Applying this idea to more general ESP/psychic stuff, I suspect that a large part of the intuitions and insights we get are unconscious responses to stimuli in our environment. Everyone has experienced the sorts of coincidences that defy explanation, such as suddenly having an old song pop into your head for the first time in 10 years and then hearing it an hour later on the radio.
Does this mean you're psychic? No. The explanation may be quite ordinary: information travels rapidly through our physical environment and leaves imprints on the patterns all around us. For simple and obvious patterns, such as for example such as hearing a car horn honk and garbage cans falling over in the distance, and then seeing a cat with a puffed up tail racing by, our brains have no trouble modeling the patterns of the environment in our minds and deducing from the available data what actually took place in reality.
But as the patterns become more complex, more subtle, and as effects diffuse in time and space away from their causes, more and more noise creeps into the chaotic system and our conscious minds have a harder and harder time modeling what's going on and drawing any accurate conclusions. But we should not allow ourselves to presume that it is impossible to perform such modeling and extract meaningful information from the extremely complex environment around us in ways well beyond our ordinary human capacities - even just using normal sensory means: audio, visual, olafactory, temperature, and tactile information.
Mammalian intelligence has evolved over millennia to produce creatures with varying degrees world-modeling and pattern recognition capability. One could argue that humans are the most intelligent of all mammals in many respects. But it is egotistical hubris to think we have reached the limit of what is possible. A vastly more intelligent being would be able to observe the environment and reach conclusions that would appear to us to be totally indistinguishable from being psychic, just as from a dog's perspective the human capacity for anticipation must seem magical. Indeed, anticipation is perhaps the most singularly defining quality of human intelligence.
My suspicion is that we all here and there get unconscious glimmers, via our intuitions and gut-feelings, of what it would be like to be much more intelligent than we actually are. I think that probably goes a long way towards explaining our everyday experiences of ESP and telepathy.
Whenever you hear one of these physics of Superman debates where they ask MIT physicists or whatever, the assumption is always that Superman has his abilities because he has a super version of a human body. So he's super strong and super fast because his muscles are super powerful, and so on. But if this is the case and he's constrained by the ordinary laws of physics, then everything about him from strength to flight to x-ray vision is totally implausible.
However, if you escape from the assumption that he's some fancy biological being, then things change completely. In my mind, Superman is a being composed of energy. His appearance is just a convenient form, a shell. Kryptonian technology seems to be advanced enough for this to be plausible, and it also rids us of the unlikely coincidence that Kryptonians and humans happen to look exactly the same.
Composed of energy and manipulating forces, all of Superman's powers become plausible - as energy, flight makes sense, speed makes sense, and strength could be the transmutation of energy into forces. With Kryptonian technology, it might be possible to create force fields of two dimensions (planes, or surfaces) or three dimensions (volumes, or zones), which you could also view as curving space. Then things like lifting a car by its bumper would make sense, whereas with human phyics you'd just rip the bumper of. And as for lifting continents, if the force required to lift a continent was applied to an area the size of your hand it would pass through any known substance as easily as we pass through air. Strength-by-force-field is the only thing that makes any sense.
Kryptonite also makes more sense with Superman as an energy being. Maybe it gives off some weird particles that interfer with Superman's ability to transmute energy into gravitons or other force particles. Superman being solar-powered makes better sense this way too. And obviously heat vision, x-ray vision, and flying at cose to the speed of light make more sense for an energy being than for a material being.
Well, if we had absolutely no regulation, we'd have one single giant company that was the phone company, the cable company, the satellite TV company, the power company - everything. In fact, that's where we've been heading. And then you get very little competition indeed, and terrible quality products and services as a result. In a perfectly free market, companies do not function to serve anyone or anything except their own bottom line. In a perfectly free market, the One Giant Corporation would probably just sell TV dinners and crack.
The job of government is to sustain an environment of maximum competition. That does NOT mean ZERO regulation. It means appropriate regulation.
Think of a biological analogy: why do you suppose sharks don't eat one another? Because if they did, you'd very quickly just end up with one big fat shark who happen to be the toughest, meanest, biggest monster in the sea. As it happens, that doesn't serve the interests of survival of genes very well, and so sharks have evolved to have 'boundaries', or 'rules' for their behavior, one important on of which is: do not eat other sharks of the same species. This rule is not hard and fast, and the analogy is not perfect, but the point is made nevertheless.
This brings up the issue of software companies use differential pricing, and I wonder about the ethics and legality involved.
For products it is not legal to charge two customers different prices without some approved mechanism (like coupons). Mr. White comes in and buys a loaf of bread for $1, then Mr. Black comes in and it's suddenly $2. Illegal. Now if Mr. French comes into a store in Paris, you can charge him $3 for a loaf, while charging Mr. Indian in New Delhi $0.10. Legal. Hell, if you're Amazon.com you can charge totally different prices for Star Trek box sets and other DVDs depending on what region you're selling them to. Legal (grrrr).
But for services, it is different. You can charge your clients whatever you please. You can even forbid them (legal?) from disclosing the rates they're getting to anyone else. You can do pro bono work and charge nothing at all.
So what is software? A product or a service? I guess it depends. It can be a pretty grey area, bit I guess when licensing is involved it becomes a service, and so Microsoft and others can then charge whatever they please.
But the ethical issues just don't go away. Why is it OK to charge A US company, say, $10,000 for a 100 user site license, a US school $2,000 for the same, and a Kenyan school $100? Why not charge $100 to everyone? Is it fair to gouge US companies, just because they can afford it? Microsoft hasn't made hundreds of billions in profit over the years for no reason.
So I guess my question is, why do the laws and ethics of differential (and disrcriminatory) pricing only apply to traditional products and not to services (like law and medicine) or hybrids like software?
I'm not as informed as I should be on this topic, but as a consumer I have to say that in my opinion it doesn't make much sense to tell a company, whether Microsoft or any other, what features or services they cannot offer. To me, it makes much more sense to tell them what they must offer.
I know this is a little upside down compared to other parts of the legal system, and that counterintuitive element is probably one reason why the issue is sticky. For example, in the realm of personal conduct, the law works better when it tells people what they can't do (you can't hurt other people) instead of what they can do (Conduct Code Article 2,334,202 (a)(iv): you may brush your teeth with either your left or right hand).
But with the Microsoft situation, it's different. I think it hurts consumers when you tell Microsoft they can't bundle office and media player and IE and whatever other functionality in with the operating system. I'm a consumer, and I would like those things bundled. So I don't think it is necessarily a good thing for the courts to tell Microsoft "you can't include this or that feature with Windows." But I think the court definitely should be able to say, "you must provide documentation and APIs and whatever else to make your stuff interoperable with other company's products and services." That makes much more sense to me.
Basically, it levels the playing field not be crippling Microsoft, but instead by enabling others to better get a toe in.
In principle, I don't think it is fair to cripple the more-able just for the sake of making things fair for the less-able. When I was a kid in Michigan we had 'accelerated' gradeschool classes for gifted kids in math and whatnot. Then during the political correctness craze they got shut down for being 'unfair' to other kids. Maybe it has since changed back, I'm not sure.
It's basically the Harrison Bergeron Principle (after the 1961 Kurt Vonnegut short story). In that story, "equality has been achieved by handicapping the most intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society down to the level of the lowest common denominator." [wikipedia]. The point is, that is the wrong approach. While I may not be Microsoft's biggest fan, I think it is the wrong approach with Microsoft as well.
Man, oh man, did you pick the wrong target to wave the rhetorical flag at! You better believe I practice what I preach. I'm an anthropologist and have been living and working in developing countries for 20 years, where I can see the damage land minds do to children every day. I'm in the Middle East right now, working to try to help clean up the mess our asshat administration has made over the last 6 years.
And as for being to blame for the current administration, I voted for Gore in 2000 only because I didn't want Nader to help give Bush the election, and Kerry in 2004 for the same reason. Not that the Democrats are much more than Republicans in liberal clothing, but I'm a pragmatist, not a blind idealist.
I was going through this thread, wondering who the sick people are who actually work on barbaric weapon systems like mines, and lo and behold a deveoper actually posts! Well now here is my chance to ask you, you fucking sick son of a btich: how do you even sleep at night?
You contributed to the development of land mines. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself. There's no making a mine 'safe'.
They do reduce civilian casualties
Obviously you get your data from the DOD. Your statement makes bullshit seem as honest as mash potatoes and gravy. Cluster bomb 'mines' are bright yellow and above ground and they are still killing thousands of civilians, mostly children, a year in Afghanistan [ref. John Pilger, BBC] alone, not to mention actual land mines. Their use is absolutely unconscionable, and it is a profound indication of the savagery of human civilization that we even allow them to exist at all. If I were president, their manufacture and use by the United States would very quickly become illegal.
I think you are a festering piece of shit for contributing to something so purely malevolent and destructive, something with no redeeming qualities of any kind whatsoever, something which has no purpose beyond sickening, barbaric cruelty. And while it's probably futile considering that you come from the, "I got to FIRE ROCKETS! Super cool!" school of retardation, I sincerely hope it haunts you until the day you die.
The new Superman Returns video game has an interesting take on addressing this problem (dunno if it'll work): Metropolis has a health rating, not superman, and gameplay is based on making choices about how best for superman to use his powers to help the most people. I think the example the developers gave was that there is simultaneously a burning building with people who have to be rescued and some giant robot tearing up downtown. What do you do? The answer in the game is that you pick up a fire engine and zip it over to the burning building and let them deal with a problem they can handle while you go off and sort out the giant robot.
We'll have to see whether or not it works, but at least it's more in line with th superman character. Superman could easily be boring as a character for storytelling purposes if all he did was fight one bad guy after another. But when he is forced to choose, well, that is what makes things interesting. The thing that makes superman beloved isn't that he's strong or fast or bulletproof, it's that he can choose among options that will make a difference. In real life, we rarely have any choice at all because we are pretty much powerless most of the time. Superman isn't helpless like most people are (for all intents and purposes) in real life, and so he has the power to make choices. The harder those choices are, the more interesting it is to follow along.
the same is basically true in any story for any hero. The difference is that in most classic stories the hero isn't super strong or super fast, but is just a normal person - an unlikely character - who rises to the challenge after the power to make a difference through their choices and actions is thrust upon them (think Indiana Jones).
People are simply afraid of what they don't know or don't understand. In the absence of information or explanation, it is often wise to assume the worst - indeed, doing so helped our ancestors survive, which is why such behavior is now instinctive.
The article doesn't explain how this works at all. Maybe that don't know? Perhaps ultrasound stimulates hormone production or adult stem cells or something like that?
Yay! Let's mod all the management-bashing posts +5 Insightful!
Seriously, this hyperbolic Dilbertization of management is silly. Yes, plenty of organizations have poor decision-makers in place. But that does not make managers inherently evil or useless.
I am an anthropologist now, but you might be surprised to hear that my undregrad degree is in management. That doesn't automatically make me a good manager, but it means that I can easily tell the difference between good management and bad management. I don't know how many engineers posting in this thread have management experience, but I'll just quickly give the other side of the coin (with less hyperbole):
Management is about one thing: making decisions, and taking responsibility for them. That is the entirety of management's function. This function is undertaken to whatever purpose is outlined by the organization. Want to build a space shuttle? Management's job is not to design it or build it, management's job is to make the decisions about how finite resources can be directed to achieve the stated purpose with an optimal balance of speed, efficiency, cost, and risk.
The challenge lies in the fact that resources are always finite. If they weren't, there would be no need to decide between options at all. Managers rely on information in order to get their jobs done, and that information comes from their units of production - such as engineering teams, programmers, architects, physicists, or whoever else happens to be a cog in the machine. Software is just one small part of that entire process, but it's a tricky one because there are a lot of uncertainties. That makes the information that comes to management - how much will it cost, how long will it take, how fast will it run, how well will it work, etc - less reliable than information that comes from, say, a steel contractor.
Some managers are better than others at getting the information they require from their units of production. And of course some managers are better than others at using the information they get, since information is never perfect and always contains uncertainties.
Obviously software engineers have a tough time with managers, but just so you're aware, managers have an equally negative sterotypical characterization of software engineers: as individuals or teams that are notorious for providing poor-quality management information, partly as a consequence of the nature of their work, and partly as a consequence of abysmal communication and interpersonal skills. I repeat: this is a sterotype. It is true no more or less often than the negative stereotypes of brainless, clueless Bad Guy managers.
I see an awful lot of, "our idiot managers don't understand anything about the work we do." Fair enough. But it is equally clear that an awful lot of software engineers don't understand anything about what management does. And they would do well to try to learn a little bit, because it will improve the infomation they deliver to management and thereby improve not only the relationship but the final result as well.
I think you hit the main point this article missed: it's all about the data.
With on-demand and TIVO and cheap storage (750GB drives are under $250 - that's 100+ DVDs), DVDs and other plastic discs are going to become relics just like CDs are quickly giving way to files you download and store on an iPod or equivalent device.
It took the huge success of iPod and iTunes together to finally push.mp3 players out of the doldrums and into the mass market because of all the RIAA bullsh*t, but now the horse is out of the barn. The market is finally starting to realize that it isn't the record or tape or disc that really has value (despite all the fancy packaging), it's really just about the music. And that's just data.
The disconnect between content and storage media has finally gathered momentum, and by the time HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have their kinks worked out that disconnect will be complete. That's the main reason I don't see 100 million consumers adopting one or the other of the HD formats. As the iPod clearly shows us, having thousands of plastic discs around just doesn't make much sense anymore given the patently superior storage technologies now available to us.
This is all fantastic news, of course, and the foundation is doing wonderful things. Still, I have to question their priorities: diseases/health as the targets of of their efforts.
I am an anthropologist and I have spent my entire career working in developing countries, and health issues are definitely secondary to other more fundamental issues, such as education and infrastructure. Just look at developed western countries: healthcare is widely available, and malaria, typhoid, polio, and AIDS - while present and terrible - are nevertheless manageable problems. But when you don't have clean water to drink or food to eat, when you can't read or write because there are no schools, no roads, and no electricity, then poor health complete unavoidable.
So it seems to me that spending billions to improve the health (and healthcare) or those without enough food or water is, to use an apt analogy, treating the symptoms and not the cause of the problem.
Bill may have good reasons for this, I don't know. It is possible that basic services such as infrastructure, education, and healthcare are things he wishes to leave governments responsible for, and his foundation may instead be focused primarily on scientific research. Fair enough. But if was ME, I would use those billions to do what USAID and other development organizations have failed to do: stop funneling money into corrupt governments and start spending it on initiatives with tangible outputs for local communities. I'd start by making sure that every citizen on Earth had access to clean water. That is a readily achievable goal, especially when you consider that USAID has spent over a trillion dollars in the last 50 years on foreign aid.
Well that would land you square in the lap of the clueless majority then...congrats...fitting in is the most important thing in the world...
Your post is largely incoherent, but if I'm not mistaken I detect sarcasm and an accusation that, like the 'majority' of people I am 'clueless' about the PATRIOT Act. In which case, I refer you to this statement from the ACLU:
"For centuries, common law has required that the government can't go into your property without telling you, and must therefore give you notice before it executes a search. That "knock and announce" principle has long been recognized as a part of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Patriot Act, however, unconstitutionally amends the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to allow the government to conduct searches without notifying the subjects, at least until long after the search has been executed. This means that the government can enter a house, apartment or office with a search warrant when the occupants are away, search through their property, take photographs, and in some cases even seize property - and not tell them until later.
Notice is a crucial check on the government's power because it forces the authorities to operate in the open, and allows the subject of searches to protect their Fourth Amendment rights. For example, it allows them to point out irregularities in a warrant, such as the fact that the police are at the wrong address, or that the scope of the warrant is being exceeded (for example, by rifling through dresser drawers in a search for a stolen car). Search warrants often contain limits on what may be searched, but when the searching officers have complete and unsupervised discretion over a search, a property owner cannot defend his or her rights.
Finally, this new "sneak and peek" power can be applied as part of normal criminal investigations; it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism or collecting foreign intelligence."
"immature... in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact."
I'm not sure if that's the world's best definition of immaturity, since its corollary would suggest that maturity is defind by predictability, having balance of priorities (what does that mean?), and not overreacting (does that mean reacting appropriately - how do you define appropriate?).
I hate to reduce things to an argument over definitions, but this stuff seems a little fruity to me. I think a simpler definition of maturity is a willingness to accept responsibility for oneself and for others. By that definition, then we definitely do see a lot of immature, i.e.: irresponsible, behavior among adults - probably because irresponsibility no longer gets you eaten by lions and tigers and bears the way it did for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
But this guy is definitely right about the value of maintaining mental elasticity as an adult. My grandfather is a good example. He was a prof at a big university and has always had an amazingly agile and adaptive mind. And today I got an email from him of some pictures he took on his digital camera that he doctored in photoshop. Th guy is 86 years old. Email went mainstream when he was in his late 70s, for God's sake.
I'm not so sure about the whole 'tied to one piece of hardware' bit, but Google is definitely proving that the industry is shifting from a product emphasis to a service emphasis. And as one previous poster pointed out, privacy is probably the biggest concern there.
My question is, what kind of services qualify for government snooping? Sure, if you use a service that involves storing your files on, say, Google's servers, well then government agencies can just demand that Google provide your info to them. But what if a company just provides a service to connect you to your own storage servers? Would that change things?
We need to undertstand where the boundaries lie on personal property. Take the brick-and-mortar analogy: if you own your home, nobody is supposed to be able to just come in a rifle through your stuff (I think the PATRIOT Act changes that, actually, but be that as it may), whereas if you rent an apartment you have far less protection. Even if you own an apartment inside a building, I doubt you get the same protections as if you own the land as well. The parallels to owning/renting/leasing servers are obvious. Are there any folks out there who know about the legality involved?
So, should we all be running file servers off our home PCs and just using service providers to access our own actual server via whatever device we're using, or is it enough to own one that's running at your web hosting company?
Slashdot Mirror
HOLY bitch slapping, Batman! Ouch, that one got handed down hard.
I happen to agree that we have our priorities upside down. Dope is bad, but sweatshops are OK? It doesn't make any sense. But none of this is relevant to my earlier point, which is that we must decide as a society what is morally and legally wrong and assign culpability and bring justice to ALL parties involved. It's up to us to demand reason ble legislation from our government, and we're doing a pretty shite job of that.
I'm sure plantation owners in 19th Century South Carolina would have said the same thing. Your qualifications about the immorality of the situation do indeed prevent the above quote from being a totally asinine statement, but you're hanging on by your fingernails. You agree that what is occuring is morally wrong. That would make it a moral offense, if not an actual crime under the law. How, then, can perpetrators of an offense be 'part of the problem' but 'certainly not the cause'? That's like saying crack dealers are 'part of the problem' but 'certainly not the cause' since it is drug lords in banana republics that make the stuff. The drug lords can point the fingers right back at the dealers and say the same thing. And they can both say that the people who buy crack are the real cause of the problem.
There are a lot of causal agents in the case of both sweatshops and drugs. It is easy to fall back on the old adage that when everybody is guilty, nobody is guilty. But the truth is that when everybody is guilty, then EVERYBODY IS GUILTY.
The solution? Hold the people responsible who you can get your hands on. That's what we do with drugs. We bust users, bust dealers, and bust producers. With sweatshops, we need to bust the people we can get ahold of. In this case, that means creating legislation to make it illegal for American companies or any company that sells products in America to use sweatshop labor. And then bust offenders like Nike and Apple.
Passion (emotion, affect) is the prioritizer of reasoning that allows it to respond effectively (sometimes in real time) to the relevant aspects of situations. Without the guidance of emotion, no common-sense reasoning engine would be powerful enough, no matter how parallel it was, to process all of the ramifications of situations and come up with relevant and useful and communicable and actionable conclusions.
I think you mean that emotions are the source of values, and reasoning is dependent upon values. No emotions = no values = no contextual singificance = no reasoning = no intelligence. Without values, everything is lost in an abstraction of insignificance.
Data and Spock, to continue your example, if they were truly emotionless, would have no logical basis upon which to consider a person more important than a pair of shoes, and would therefore be unable to prioritize (i.e.: value) one over the other in any situation. The result would be functional paralysis in which they would, of logical necessity, devote equal attention (i.e.: processing power) to every detectable object/variable in sensory range. Since in our physical reality that range is effectively infinite, and since processing power is finite, they would be unable to function.
Values would need to be assigned arbitrarily by a external source in order to form the basis of a contextual system of significance, such as that which humans build up over a lifetime of experiences.
Something interesting: as I understand it, autistic people often have difficulty assigning 'appropriate' value to the objects they interact with because their emotional circuitry is abnormal, and so, for example, a person is not necessarily more significant to them than a can of soda, and the result can be indecision, confusion, and accompanying fear and anxiety especially in unfamiliar or complex environments with foreign stimuli, resulting in a general a lack of functional intelligence.
I've not been able to figure out why flash RAID setups aren't more popular in portable devices. 10 4GB flash disks in a RAID would give you what, 20GB drive space with 100Mb/s bandwidth. Not bad for memory that doesn't have any moving parts and doesn't vanish without power. And a 'drive' like that would be about the size of a typical laptop network adapter card. I'm guessing cost is the main problem?
To take the above example, where twins got the same birthday cards, the explanation could simply be that the givers arrived at the same choice which was the result of unconscious responses to patterns too complex or subtle to be detected consciously.
Applying this idea to more general ESP/psychic stuff, I suspect that a large part of the intuitions and insights we get are unconscious responses to stimuli in our environment. Everyone has experienced the sorts of coincidences that defy explanation, such as suddenly having an old song pop into your head for the first time in 10 years and then hearing it an hour later on the radio.
Does this mean you're psychic? No. The explanation may be quite ordinary: information travels rapidly through our physical environment and leaves imprints on the patterns all around us. For simple and obvious patterns, such as for example such as hearing a car horn honk and garbage cans falling over in the distance, and then seeing a cat with a puffed up tail racing by, our brains have no trouble modeling the patterns of the environment in our minds and deducing from the available data what actually took place in reality.
But as the patterns become more complex, more subtle, and as effects diffuse in time and space away from their causes, more and more noise creeps into the chaotic system and our conscious minds have a harder and harder time modeling what's going on and drawing any accurate conclusions. But we should not allow ourselves to presume that it is impossible to perform such modeling and extract meaningful information from the extremely complex environment around us in ways well beyond our ordinary human capacities - even just using normal sensory means: audio, visual, olafactory, temperature, and tactile information.
Mammalian intelligence has evolved over millennia to produce creatures with varying degrees world-modeling and pattern recognition capability. One could argue that humans are the most intelligent of all mammals in many respects. But it is egotistical hubris to think we have reached the limit of what is possible. A vastly more intelligent being would be able to observe the environment and reach conclusions that would appear to us to be totally indistinguishable from being psychic, just as from a dog's perspective the human capacity for anticipation must seem magical. Indeed, anticipation is perhaps the most singularly defining quality of human intelligence.
My suspicion is that we all here and there get unconscious glimmers, via our intuitions and gut-feelings, of what it would be like to be much more intelligent than we actually are. I think that probably goes a long way towards explaining our everyday experiences of ESP and telepathy.
However, if you escape from the assumption that he's some fancy biological being, then things change completely. In my mind, Superman is a being composed of energy. His appearance is just a convenient form, a shell. Kryptonian technology seems to be advanced enough for this to be plausible, and it also rids us of the unlikely coincidence that Kryptonians and humans happen to look exactly the same.
Composed of energy and manipulating forces, all of Superman's powers become plausible - as energy, flight makes sense, speed makes sense, and strength could be the transmutation of energy into forces. With Kryptonian technology, it might be possible to create force fields of two dimensions (planes, or surfaces) or three dimensions (volumes, or zones), which you could also view as curving space. Then things like lifting a car by its bumper would make sense, whereas with human phyics you'd just rip the bumper of. And as for lifting continents, if the force required to lift a continent was applied to an area the size of your hand it would pass through any known substance as easily as we pass through air. Strength-by-force-field is the only thing that makes any sense.
Kryptonite also makes more sense with Superman as an energy being. Maybe it gives off some weird particles that interfer with Superman's ability to transmute energy into gravitons or other force particles. Superman being solar-powered makes better sense this way too. And obviously heat vision, x-ray vision, and flying at cose to the speed of light make more sense for an energy being than for a material being.
Well, that's my uberdorkiness binge for the day.
The job of government is to sustain an environment of maximum competition. That does NOT mean ZERO regulation. It means appropriate regulation.
Think of a biological analogy: why do you suppose sharks don't eat one another? Because if they did, you'd very quickly just end up with one big fat shark who happen to be the toughest, meanest, biggest monster in the sea. As it happens, that doesn't serve the interests of survival of genes very well, and so sharks have evolved to have 'boundaries', or 'rules' for their behavior, one important on of which is: do not eat other sharks of the same species. This rule is not hard and fast, and the analogy is not perfect, but the point is made nevertheless.
For products it is not legal to charge two customers different prices without some approved mechanism (like coupons). Mr. White comes in and buys a loaf of bread for $1, then Mr. Black comes in and it's suddenly $2. Illegal. Now if Mr. French comes into a store in Paris, you can charge him $3 for a loaf, while charging Mr. Indian in New Delhi $0.10. Legal. Hell, if you're Amazon.com you can charge totally different prices for Star Trek box sets and other DVDs depending on what region you're selling them to. Legal (grrrr).
But for services, it is different. You can charge your clients whatever you please. You can even forbid them (legal?) from disclosing the rates they're getting to anyone else. You can do pro bono work and charge nothing at all.
So what is software? A product or a service? I guess it depends. It can be a pretty grey area, bit I guess when licensing is involved it becomes a service, and so Microsoft and others can then charge whatever they please.
But the ethical issues just don't go away. Why is it OK to charge A US company, say, $10,000 for a 100 user site license, a US school $2,000 for the same, and a Kenyan school $100? Why not charge $100 to everyone? Is it fair to gouge US companies, just because they can afford it? Microsoft hasn't made hundreds of billions in profit over the years for no reason.
So I guess my question is, why do the laws and ethics of differential (and disrcriminatory) pricing only apply to traditional products and not to services (like law and medicine) or hybrids like software?
I know this is a little upside down compared to other parts of the legal system, and that counterintuitive element is probably one reason why the issue is sticky. For example, in the realm of personal conduct, the law works better when it tells people what they can't do (you can't hurt other people) instead of what they can do (Conduct Code Article 2,334,202 (a)(iv): you may brush your teeth with either your left or right hand).
But with the Microsoft situation, it's different. I think it hurts consumers when you tell Microsoft they can't bundle office and media player and IE and whatever other functionality in with the operating system. I'm a consumer, and I would like those things bundled. So I don't think it is necessarily a good thing for the courts to tell Microsoft "you can't include this or that feature with Windows." But I think the court definitely should be able to say, "you must provide documentation and APIs and whatever else to make your stuff interoperable with other company's products and services." That makes much more sense to me.
Basically, it levels the playing field not be crippling Microsoft, but instead by enabling others to better get a toe in.
In principle, I don't think it is fair to cripple the more-able just for the sake of making things fair for the less-able. When I was a kid in Michigan we had 'accelerated' gradeschool classes for gifted kids in math and whatnot. Then during the political correctness craze they got shut down for being 'unfair' to other kids. Maybe it has since changed back, I'm not sure.
It's basically the Harrison Bergeron Principle (after the 1961 Kurt Vonnegut short story). In that story, "equality has been achieved by handicapping the most intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society down to the level of the lowest common denominator." [wikipedia]. The point is, that is the wrong approach. While I may not be Microsoft's biggest fan, I think it is the wrong approach with Microsoft as well.
And as for being to blame for the current administration, I voted for Gore in 2000 only because I didn't want Nader to help give Bush the election, and Kerry in 2004 for the same reason. Not that the Democrats are much more than Republicans in liberal clothing, but I'm a pragmatist, not a blind idealist.
You contributed to the development of land mines. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself. There's no making a mine 'safe'.
They do reduce civilian casualties
Obviously you get your data from the DOD. Your statement makes bullshit seem as honest as mash potatoes and gravy. Cluster bomb 'mines' are bright yellow and above ground and they are still killing thousands of civilians, mostly children, a year in Afghanistan [ref. John Pilger, BBC] alone, not to mention actual land mines. Their use is absolutely unconscionable, and it is a profound indication of the savagery of human civilization that we even allow them to exist at all. If I were president, their manufacture and use by the United States would very quickly become illegal.
I think you are a festering piece of shit for contributing to something so purely malevolent and destructive, something with no redeeming qualities of any kind whatsoever, something which has no purpose beyond sickening, barbaric cruelty. And while it's probably futile considering that you come from the, "I got to FIRE ROCKETS! Super cool!" school of retardation, I sincerely hope it haunts you until the day you die.
We'll have to see whether or not it works, but at least it's more in line with th superman character. Superman could easily be boring as a character for storytelling purposes if all he did was fight one bad guy after another. But when he is forced to choose, well, that is what makes things interesting. The thing that makes superman beloved isn't that he's strong or fast or bulletproof, it's that he can choose among options that will make a difference. In real life, we rarely have any choice at all because we are pretty much powerless most of the time. Superman isn't helpless like most people are (for all intents and purposes) in real life, and so he has the power to make choices. The harder those choices are, the more interesting it is to follow along.
the same is basically true in any story for any hero. The difference is that in most classic stories the hero isn't super strong or super fast, but is just a normal person - an unlikely character - who rises to the challenge after the power to make a difference through their choices and actions is thrust upon them (think Indiana Jones).
Can anybody explain to us when "within-an-inch" GPS technology became available, as well as how and possibly why?
People are simply afraid of what they don't know or don't understand. In the absence of information or explanation, it is often wise to assume the worst - indeed, doing so helped our ancestors survive, which is why such behavior is now instinctive.
In 10 years I've not clicked on a single ad on Slashdot, unless it was by accident.
The article doesn't explain how this works at all. Maybe that don't know? Perhaps ultrasound stimulates hormone production or adult stem cells or something like that?
Seriously, this hyperbolic Dilbertization of management is silly. Yes, plenty of organizations have poor decision-makers in place. But that does not make managers inherently evil or useless.
I am an anthropologist now, but you might be surprised to hear that my undregrad degree is in management. That doesn't automatically make me a good manager, but it means that I can easily tell the difference between good management and bad management. I don't know how many engineers posting in this thread have management experience, but I'll just quickly give the other side of the coin (with less hyperbole):
Management is about one thing: making decisions, and taking responsibility for them. That is the entirety of management's function. This function is undertaken to whatever purpose is outlined by the organization. Want to build a space shuttle? Management's job is not to design it or build it, management's job is to make the decisions about how finite resources can be directed to achieve the stated purpose with an optimal balance of speed, efficiency, cost, and risk.
The challenge lies in the fact that resources are always finite. If they weren't, there would be no need to decide between options at all. Managers rely on information in order to get their jobs done, and that information comes from their units of production - such as engineering teams, programmers, architects, physicists, or whoever else happens to be a cog in the machine. Software is just one small part of that entire process, but it's a tricky one because there are a lot of uncertainties. That makes the information that comes to management - how much will it cost, how long will it take, how fast will it run, how well will it work, etc - less reliable than information that comes from, say, a steel contractor.
Some managers are better than others at getting the information they require from their units of production. And of course some managers are better than others at using the information they get, since information is never perfect and always contains uncertainties.
Obviously software engineers have a tough time with managers, but just so you're aware, managers have an equally negative sterotypical characterization of software engineers: as individuals or teams that are notorious for providing poor-quality management information, partly as a consequence of the nature of their work, and partly as a consequence of abysmal communication and interpersonal skills. I repeat: this is a sterotype. It is true no more or less often than the negative stereotypes of brainless, clueless Bad Guy managers.
I see an awful lot of, "our idiot managers don't understand anything about the work we do." Fair enough. But it is equally clear that an awful lot of software engineers don't understand anything about what management does. And they would do well to try to learn a little bit, because it will improve the infomation they deliver to management and thereby improve not only the relationship but the final result as well.
Thanks!
With on-demand and TIVO and cheap storage (750GB drives are under $250 - that's 100+ DVDs), DVDs and other plastic discs are going to become relics just like CDs are quickly giving way to files you download and store on an iPod or equivalent device.
It took the huge success of iPod and iTunes together to finally push .mp3 players out of the doldrums and into the mass market because of all the RIAA bullsh*t, but now the horse is out of the barn. The market is finally starting to realize that it isn't the record or tape or disc that really has value (despite all the fancy packaging), it's really just about the music. And that's just data.
The disconnect between content and storage media has finally gathered momentum, and by the time HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have their kinks worked out that disconnect will be complete. That's the main reason I don't see 100 million consumers adopting one or the other of the HD formats. As the iPod clearly shows us, having thousands of plastic discs around just doesn't make much sense anymore given the patently superior storage technologies now available to us.
I am an anthropologist and I have spent my entire career working in developing countries, and health issues are definitely secondary to other more fundamental issues, such as education and infrastructure. Just look at developed western countries: healthcare is widely available, and malaria, typhoid, polio, and AIDS - while present and terrible - are nevertheless manageable problems. But when you don't have clean water to drink or food to eat, when you can't read or write because there are no schools, no roads, and no electricity, then poor health complete unavoidable.
So it seems to me that spending billions to improve the health (and healthcare) or those without enough food or water is, to use an apt analogy, treating the symptoms and not the cause of the problem.
Bill may have good reasons for this, I don't know. It is possible that basic services such as infrastructure, education, and healthcare are things he wishes to leave governments responsible for, and his foundation may instead be focused primarily on scientific research. Fair enough. But if was ME, I would use those billions to do what USAID and other development organizations have failed to do: stop funneling money into corrupt governments and start spending it on initiatives with tangible outputs for local communities. I'd start by making sure that every citizen on Earth had access to clean water. That is a readily achievable goal, especially when you consider that USAID has spent over a trillion dollars in the last 50 years on foreign aid.
Your post is largely incoherent, but if I'm not mistaken I detect sarcasm and an accusation that, like the 'majority' of people I am 'clueless' about the PATRIOT Act. In which case, I refer you to this statement from the ACLU:
"For centuries, common law has required that the government can't go into your property without telling you, and must therefore give you notice before it executes a search. That "knock and announce" principle has long been recognized as a part of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Patriot Act, however, unconstitutionally amends the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to allow the government to conduct searches without notifying the subjects, at least until long after the search has been executed. This means that the government can enter a house, apartment or office with a search warrant when the occupants are away, search through their property, take photographs, and in some cases even seize property - and not tell them until later.
Notice is a crucial check on the government's power because it forces the authorities to operate in the open, and allows the subject of searches to protect their Fourth Amendment rights. For example, it allows them to point out irregularities in a warrant, such as the fact that the police are at the wrong address, or that the scope of the warrant is being exceeded (for example, by rifling through dresser drawers in a search for a stolen car). Search warrants often contain limits on what may be searched, but when the searching officers have complete and unsupervised discretion over a search, a property owner cannot defend his or her rights.
Finally, this new "sneak and peek" power can be applied as part of normal criminal investigations; it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism or collecting foreign intelligence."
How's that for clueless?
People still use mousepads?
I'm not sure if that's the world's best definition of immaturity, since its corollary would suggest that maturity is defind by predictability, having balance of priorities (what does that mean?), and not overreacting (does that mean reacting appropriately - how do you define appropriate?).
I hate to reduce things to an argument over definitions, but this stuff seems a little fruity to me. I think a simpler definition of maturity is a willingness to accept responsibility for oneself and for others. By that definition, then we definitely do see a lot of immature, i.e.: irresponsible, behavior among adults - probably because irresponsibility no longer gets you eaten by lions and tigers and bears the way it did for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
But this guy is definitely right about the value of maintaining mental elasticity as an adult. My grandfather is a good example. He was a prof at a big university and has always had an amazingly agile and adaptive mind. And today I got an email from him of some pictures he took on his digital camera that he doctored in photoshop. Th guy is 86 years old. Email went mainstream when he was in his late 70s, for God's sake.
My question is, what kind of services qualify for government snooping? Sure, if you use a service that involves storing your files on, say, Google's servers, well then government agencies can just demand that Google provide your info to them. But what if a company just provides a service to connect you to your own storage servers? Would that change things?
We need to undertstand where the boundaries lie on personal property. Take the brick-and-mortar analogy: if you own your home, nobody is supposed to be able to just come in a rifle through your stuff (I think the PATRIOT Act changes that, actually, but be that as it may), whereas if you rent an apartment you have far less protection. Even if you own an apartment inside a building, I doubt you get the same protections as if you own the land as well. The parallels to owning/renting/leasing servers are obvious. Are there any folks out there who know about the legality involved?
So, should we all be running file servers off our home PCs and just using service providers to access our own actual server via whatever device we're using, or is it enough to own one that's running at your web hosting company?