In addition to what FooAtWFU already nailed dead-on: because the Eee is a PC. You know, fully unlocked and runs anything that you could run on a PC.
This isn't about ideology wars. It's purely pragmatic. I want to do stuff like load Eclipse on it, and type code while on the train. Or any other program that I already know from the PC. Even if a PDA sorta-equivalent exists, maybe I can't be arsed to learn it, when I already have a perfectly good program that I'm familiar with.
In that vein, I plan to buy an Eee for mom (once I can actually find one in stock that is), and pack whatever programs she uses to process her photos on it. I never got into the whole digital photo thing, but she seems to have, big time, and methinks it would make a nice birthday present if she could take it with her on the road. Roll that around in your head. Not some "well, it sorta almost does the same thing if you learn the totally different interface" kind of thing, but the exact same that she already knows and is comfortable with.
I want to be able to plug whatever PC peripherals I have around into it. Like, for example, the Wacom tablet. (It's a damn good wireless, battery-less, ball-less and led-less mouse. And the stylus is nice for graphics too.)
Basically, if you can live with the restricted selection of software that PDAs typically have, more power to you. I won't try to convert you. But some of us would rather have a small PC than a PDA. Different class of tool, really.
sw155kn1f3 already answred that, so I won't repeat that. But just to clarify what we're talking about, there are two meanings of the word "addiction".
1. The popular usage, which just means "compulsion". You're considered an addict by society if you have a compulsion to do something, to the extent of it interfering with your life.
2. The physiological addiction, which just means that the brain chemistry compensated in the opposite direction.
The two are not really synonimous. You can be considered an "addict" to stuff which does not, in fact, cause any brain changes. And conversely your brain can have changed a bit, but not yet past the fuzzy border where it overrides your judgment and will power.
In this case, the perfect example is "alcohol tolerance". If you built up alcohol tolerance, medically your brain has already begun to compensate for alcohol. It's (a little) physiological addiction. But if it doesn't yet cause you to compulsive drinking, it gets named just "alcohol tolerance", not "alcohol addiction."
The first meaning has a (somewhat arbitrary) threshhold. Below it, you're not considered an addict yet, above it, you are. Meaning #2 is really just a continuum. You can (and do) have slight changes in brain chemistry long before society considers you an addict, and it can go even worse long after it does.
We're, in a nutshell, talking about meaning #2: changes in brain chemistry.
A single beer won't cause anyone to consider you an alcoholic. That much you're right. But it already gave your brain a jolt in one direction, and it already started compensating in the other. Your brain chemistry already changed a little, and it might cause slight differences in how signals are processed up there. And, yes, it can take two weeks or more for that compensating effect to decay back to negligible.
Except that if your brain actually fully compensates, there would be no negative effects.
It actually works that way, to a point, yes. If you drink lots and regularly, you build up "alcohol tolerance". I.e., small quantities of alcohol which would make someone else tipsy, just get you back to the baseline. It compensated all right.
The problem is that that compensated state remains so even when you're sober. That's how eventually DT happens. The brain chemistry is "compensated" to work right with a lot of alcohol in the system. Without that alcohol, however, you're fucked up and can even die.
It's, if you will, like compensating for pushing a wardrobe to the right. Hard. So you compensate by slanting it to the left. When that force is applied, congrats, the components cancel out and the wardrobe stays like that. But when that force isn't applied any more, now it falls over to the the left.
That's in a nutshell how you die of DT. It's not the alcohol that kills you, it's the lack of alcohol. At that point your brain has changed so much to keep working when marinated in alcohol, that eventually it became unable to function without it.
That incidentally, also has the following implication for the post-alcohol-impairment I was talking about. It's easy to think "bah, I'm resistant to alcohol. Why, I only even start feeling a little warm after the fourth pint." Congrats, if you're at that point, your brain's equilibrium is now already waay off center. You _will_ have decreased brain power even when alcohol has left your system. In fact, _because_ all alcohol has left your system.
Anyway, it is wrong to just look at the effect of alcohol on your ability to think; the smartest people are not necessarily the ones that successfully reproduce. Modest alcohol consumption seems to have positive effects even today, and until a century ago, alcoholic beverages were pretty much the only ones that were safe to drink.
I couldn't care less, actually. Equally, a couple of century ago, mercury was the only known treatment for syphilis. It doesn't mean we should keep doing that. Nowadays we have better ways to deal with that.
Similarly, nowadays we know how to filter and disinfect water. So whatever need for alcohol might have existed, doesn't exist any more.
Smoking also seems to have a complex mix of risks and benefits, both to the individual and society. I'm glad smoking is banned in public places, but I think anybody who wants to smoke should be allowed to do so and have to live with the consequences.
I'm not proposing to ban either alcohol or tobacco. If you want to nuke your brain, be my guest. I wouldn't even stop you from hanging yourself or playing russian roulette. If you want to, by all means, go ahead.
I'm _only_ saying "don't be surprised if it affects your IQ", really. But if you can live with that, go ahead and drink yourself silly, for all I care:)
Because if you keep perturbing a self-tuning biological system in one direction, it will start compensating in the other direction. That's how physiological addiction happens.
E.g., smoking a cigarette makes you feel better, among other things, because it blocks MAO-B. So basically your normal "reward" pathways in the brain get unbalanced by blocking the part which pulls your mood back down to the baseline. But _very_ soon the brain chemistry starts to compensate by producing more MAO-B. Oops. Now you feel shitty without a cigarette, and eventually you need them even to get you back to the baseline.
Alcohol works much the same, and is a pretty addictive thing.
Now drinking a couple of beers a day won't give you Delirium Tremens when you're sober. But that's just a matter of nuances. Your brain chemistry hasn't deviated _that_ far from the baseline, but it has deviated a little anyway, if it regularly has to compensate for alcohol intoxication. So, yes, you won't be as impaired as someone who's gotten to the delirium tremens point, but you'll be a little impaired anyway.
Actually, the summary is kinda misleading in that it doesn't say that they actually discovered an _inverse_ correlation. The _less_ beer you drink, the more likely you are to have your work published in some peer reviewed journal.
So basically what it says is: altered states won't actually make you more creative. Or at least not alcohol and not in science.
So basically put down the bong, lay off the booze, and get some honest sober work done, if you're in science. Maybe being drunk and/or stoned off your arse works for arts, I wouldn't know, you may stick to that myth for now. But if you want to discover the next particle, apparently nothing beats having the neurons working normally, without other crap interfering with your synapses and clouding your judgment.
Can't say it's that surprising, really. I can even imagine how if you're, say a painter, you could get the colourful vision for your next painting while you're on acid. But science is less about crazy ideas and more about maths, evaluating those ideas based on critical cause->effect thinking, and the like. And it's getting more abstract by the year. And I can tell you first hand, that at least being drunk (no idea about other altered states) doesn't really help you with maths and logic. _Maybe_ being too drunk to draw a straight line helps when painting some modern art stuff, but not with science.
I'm actually not missing those points, I chose just to not discuss them this time. The "video games" topic is large enough to write a whole tome about. Which would be a bit counter-productive on Slashdot, since by the time I'd be ready with it all, this would be last year's story. So the less relevant parts get left out.
Actually, let me qualify "less relevant": less relevant for the point I was trying to make.
Yes, it's obvious that you're playing games for fun. Otherwise you would do something else. No argument there.
The point I was trying to make, though, was merely "why are the non-gamers scared of us, and why do snake-oil vendors peddle bogus diseases and bogus remedies?" Not why _you_ are playing games. Just why the average, stereotypical mom/grandma sitting in the other room is going "where did we go wrong? Maybe I should put him on funny pills?" Different problem, really:)
Well, seriously, you don't need to assume a conspiracy here. (There might still be one, but it's not needed to explain it. Occam's Razor, if you will. Or Hanlon's Razor.)
The way it works is sorta like this:
1. Most humans are herd animals, and educated to be very "us vs them" at it. And have layers upon layers of mental tricks to rationalize anything they personally do as the Right Thing. See, cognitive dissonance, for example.
So when Mr X goes to the pub and yakks about the latest football game, it not only gives him a much needed feeling of belonging to some group, it also provides a circle-jerk reinforcement of the idea that any sane male would naturally feel an urge to go to the pub and yakk about football. So if Mr Y wants to go play WoW instead, there must be something awfully wrong with him.
(And just so I don't piss off only the football fans, the same happens in reverse too. If John goes to the pub instead of doing the latest raid with us, there must be something awfully wrong with him. And if Tom is running OpenBSD instead of coming to our LUG meetings, and quotes Theo de Raad all the time instead of worshipping Linus like the rest of us, well, I'd be careful around him, if you know what I mean. Etc.)
At any rate, people can be very distrustful of anything that is not one of "us", and doubly so of anyone or anything that challenges the rationalizations and excuses that that "us" group is built on.
That incidentally means that anything new will invariably be met with such distrust. Society has had generations of building up a status quo, and lots of unwritten rules and roles for its members. Real Men do this, Real Women do that, Real Old Geezers do that other thing, and everyone is happy that they don't have to think much about it. Everyone else is doing the same things, so it must be the right, God-given way. And then this new group comes by and goes and reads comics instead, or watches TV, or listens to this newfangled heavy metal, or whatever.
I'm not kidding. Each of those has been the new thing at some point, and were demonized and presented as some dangerous influence on the youth at some point. Games are just the newest instance of some people who just don't want to fit their traditional roles in this big "us" group, and it makes everyone else uneasy. Why would they want to do that instead of watching the sacred football game on TV, like everyone else? How we forget that not so far in the past it was watching TV (instead of going and yakking outside) that was the newfangled TV addiction that was making everyone else uneasy.
So, anyway, we have a bunch of gamers and a large majority which doesn't understand them, and (to various extents) is made uneasy by them. They don't care that you don't watch ads or don't buy enough golf clubs, but they do get worried that you chose to not be a part of their group.
2. There's the kind of people who just want some publicity, or to sell you something. Whether it's a new drug, or their expensive psychotherapy fees, or the idea of electing them to Congress. Make no mistake, these don't care about what else you buy either. They just care about selling their own snake oil to enough people, and if you're not a buyer, well, then maybe you'd make a good bogeyman instead.
And that uneasy majority from #1 is a perfectly willing buyer for that snake oil. Especially one packed as, basically, "yes, it's scientifically proven: it's perfectly normal to be part of _your_ group and do the things _you_ do. And as you were suspecting, it's everyone else that are fucked-up in the head." That's what that majority wanted to hear.
3. It also doesn't help that we have a whole game industry trying hard to amplify the symptoms, if they can't actually make their games more "addictive".
We have limited save points. (My personal record was having to grind 10 hours before I found the next save point in a game.) We have 40-man raids that take a whole night to finish, and where if you quit suddenly, you've just piss
1. Well, I might even join you in damning the Concorde, if it weren't for one small detail: after it was built, everyone decided that they'd rather not have supersonic stuff flying overhead and being very loud. Which limited the possible routes for the Concorde massively, and thus hit their demand _hard_. You know, since you're moaning about lack of demand for them, now you know why.
So "commercially viable" is a bit mis-leading, when the only thing that made it non-viable was "not in my back yard" regulations against it. You can make _anything_ non-viable that way. Heck, pass the same kind of legislation for mobile phone masts (and God knows the "electrosensitives" try to) and it will make mobile telephony a non-viable business overnight.
Or have you heard about those brownouts in the USA some years back? That was government regulation making it commercially non-viable to build new power plants there. There you go.
2. At any rate, you'll _also_ notice that noone else is even trying to build supersonic passenger planes any more. Partially because of the same problem, but anyway: it's a bit funny to single out the Concorde program, when noone else is doing any better either.
It's a bit like sneering at the USA for not having cold-fusion power-plants yet. We don't have it either, but let's not let that get in the way of a good sneer.
3. Even if they end up used for supersonic transportation, that would be just trying to overcome the regulation problem mentioned in point 1. You know, sorta like making an air route to link two cities, if you can't get approval to build a railroad between them. Insisting that they stick with the problem where regulation made it non-viable, is pretty stupid, _if_ a different approach is more viable.
4. But that's probably irrelevant anyway, since they'll probably be used as a rich guy's penis-size... err... status-symbol roller coaster. I.e., it's a different product, for a different market. Exactly how's it relevant whether they make a supersonic plane first? It's a bit like saying, "bah, before you try to make a 4 core CPU, show me you can make a fusion power plant first." I mean, hello? How's one relevant to the other?
5. But even that is less relevant, once you've pinned the blame on lack of demand. Because that's what you blame, right at the start. Well, here's the funny part: giving up on markets that lack demand, and doing the stuff where there is a demand instead, is what capitalism is all about. You know, going all the way back to Adam Smith, that's the whole idea. If there's not enough demand for home-grown English wine, but there's a demand for wool, cut down that vineyard and raise sheep instead.
So asking that they stay in a market that lacks demand, solves what? Exactly what would they prove? That they have no economic sense?
Call me a cynic, but based on the experience of some places I worked for, it might just end up something like this:
1. What maybe started along the lines that you described, then has to go through controlling or purchasing or such, which in a lot of places have their job judged and measured by how much they saved. If they saved 10,000$ at the cost of making everyone else spend 1,000,000$ in workarounds and lost productivity, they're doing their job right. So someone will go "auugh, why should we pay a few bucks more on very secure drives, when we could get ordinary ones at a bulk discount? Look, there are these drives with fingerprint scanner for half the price. That's secure, right?" (See the vulnerability linked even on Slashdot recently.)
2. Someone else (or in some organizations the same) will have to make sure it's one of the approved suppliers. Ideally this would mean those who have a good track record of reliability, quality, etc. In practice, it'll mean one of (A) whoever pays more bribe, or (B) the boss's wife's or cousin's supplies company, created just to siphon some money off such purchases. If it's a state agency, stuff like pork barrel, political favours and lobbies have something to do with it too.
Since this _should_ be in conflict with #1 and is exactly the kind of thing that #1 is supposed to catch, sometimes they split the bribe, sometimes they trade favours, and sometimes inventive discounts are used. Like we'll price the USB sticks at $1000 each, give you a 50% discount, and let you show that you've done your job right by negotiating a whole $500 discount per drive.
3. Some IT department has been given thoroughly counter-productive goals, like only keeping the computers or the network running, but no mention of actually providing a service to the rest of the organization. So suddenly the users are their sworn enemies, the filthy pests that keep using and screwing their preciouss computers and network. They'll do their best to contain, thwart and plain old inconvenience those users at every step. So the "secure" setup for those drives will be just an exercise in making it as inconvenient to use as possible, to teach those pesky lusers a lesson.
And indeed the users do learn a lesson: that if you want to get your job done at all, you have to do your own unauthorized workarounds. There goes most of security out the window right there.
Alternately, the IT department has also been on the shit end of #1, and is underfunded and staffed with the cheapest monkeys who can sorta bang on a keyboard, and don't fling too much feces at the screen. So they'll configure something which they think is right, but is not.
Yet another alternative is that a lax PHB can't be bothered to actually organize IT, and some BOFH personality types feel free to override everything and do what _they_ please. I've seen it happen. Stuff like production servers configured without XA support for _years_, just because the relevant BOFH thought that's a buzzword and it runs just as well without it anyway, plus it saves him the bother of installing the relevant libraries on all servers. So he _lied_ to the team for years that they have a feature that they didn't actually have.
And not only I can see all three happening with security too, I've _seen_ it happen with security features too.
4. Some PHB will figure out that it's not really an "enterprise" drive unless it has the organization's logo on it. In fact, that that's what makes anything properly enterprise.
Some frustrated users that have been on the shit end of #3 too often, will begin just printing and gluing makeshift logos to their own USB sticks, rather than put up with Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services again. Noone will be any wiser.
Or maybe it's even simpler than that. Remember that we're talking only February sales here, not year long.
Traditionally almost all games were released for Christmas or Easter, with almost nothing released in between. February was probably the worst hit, because anything that couldn't make it for a Christmas release (meaning usually it couldn't even make it to the main menu, because otherwise it would have been released anyway for that all-important Christmas buying season) was delayed all the way until Easter. So, you know, sales peaked at Christmas, gradually slid downwards all through January, and February was when us addicts started getting shaky hands and glazed eyes because of withdrawal syndrome, as nothing was released at all in that month.
And then after Easter another drought came, with maybe 1 or 2 games released in all the months until Christmas, if at all.
And for a while the situation got only worse each year.
That seems to have changed in the last year, as some publishers either (A) rushed to fill that void where millions of gamers were just begging for something to blow their money on, or (B) rushed to have their console released before the other guys' consoles, or god knows what other reasons. At any rate, there have actually been new games released in between those two sacrosanct dates.
So comparing only February can paint a highly misleading picture. It's comparing what used to be the low tide point, to a situation which is a lot more averaged. It doesn't necessarily mean that the whole year's total will rise proportionally. It can just as well mean that the peaks for Easter and Christmas will also be lower. (And a bunch of self-styled pundits will rush to proclaim a new video game market crash, illustrated by their comparing only December to the previous year's December.)
There has been this story a long time ago, in a galaxy far a... err... on Slashdot, in which one reasonably intelligent human couldn't pass an impromptu Turing test. Someone had put his IM handle on a list of sexbots, and from there people just would not accept that he's _not_ a bot. Some stuff asked could have pretty much been the subject of a philosophy paper, and a simple "no idea, I've never thought about that" didn't seem to satisfy the questioner.
Your own questions, well, at least two out of three, I have no idea how I'd give a good answer to those.
- What does sex feel like? Well, I have had sex, but fuck me if I know how to describe a sensation. It's like having to describe "red" or "sweet".
- What did it feel when his mother died? Heck if I know, mine didn't.
Now probably I could think of some wise-arse pseudo-answer, given a little time. But if someone came up with something like that out of nowhere, as part of some misguided attempt to see if I'm a bot... I'd probably fail that Turing test.
Basically I'm not arguing your point that it becomes impossible to pass for a bot, if the human knows he's doing a Turing test. You're right. What I'm adding is that often it becomes impossible to pass even for a human. The question quickly get so contrived that it's not even possible to give a simple answer. There are things where there is no real answer, just possible pseuo-answers (ranging from "I don't know" to doing a whole pseudo-philosophical rant on the topic), and it's a toss whether the interviewer will accept your particular pseudo-answer. Someone determined enough might only accept one of the possible pseudo-answers (so if your "shared" experience or way to describe it doesn't _exactly_ match his, you lost) or none at all.
Do you have any idea how medical research works? You can't ethically use humans, so you find a model organism and hope it's close enough that your results apply to humans. I can't say that that research is good, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of experimental design.
Actually, I do have some idea. And yes, I could also tell you what was the purpose of each of the western experiments I listed.
The point wasn't that Western research is all silly. The point is that you can make anything sound silly, or outright deranged, if you quote selected bits out of context, apply some heavy-handed spin to it, and do it for an audience that's more interested in validating their own xenophobic delusions than in critically thinking about that experiment.
Actually, leaving that out of the summary doesn't just make it sound more ridiculous, it's suspiciously xenophobic. It singles out Japan as doing wacky science. You know, unlike us Europeans or you Americans.
Bit of a reality check:
1. Western companies routinely pay for dubious research that pushes their own agenda. Probably more rabbits and rats smoked tobacco because of tobacco companies trying to prove that smoking is harmless, than because of all other research combined. (And if they want to present test-tube whale babies as ridiculous research, then, hello? Smoking rabbits? When was the last documented time a rabbit just naturally rolled a tobacco leaf and smoked it?)
Or mice were shaved and exposed to UV-B so they'd die of cancer, in an experiment that tried to prove that drinking coffee is good for you in that aspect. Gee, I wonder who the sponsor was there. (And again, seriously, when was the last time a mouse shaved and went to get a tan on his own?)
Anti-depressant companies routinely publish studies where their MAO uptake inhibitors are the best thing since Eden, and routinely junk studies where for various forms of depression other stuff works even better. Yoghurt manufacturers publish studies after studies in which their bacteria are the best thing that could live in your intestine... if they only got past that pesky acid in your stomach. Etc.
2. Western corporate PR routinely carpet-bombs the media with even more bizarre and ridiculous pseudo-science. Scientist discovers formula for the best day to take a vacation! (It doesn't even add the same units and stuff, and it's sponsored by a travel company which runs a promotion for flights in that months. Go figure.) Scientists say: In the future all women will have huge breasts and all men will have huge dicks! (Except it wasn't as much science, as an essay paid for by a magazine.) Scientists discover: Cocoa contains valuable enzymes so chocolate is good for you! (Except they don't exist in chocolate. And it was sponsored by Mars.) Etc.
Still think Japan's actual research in wales looks ridiculous compared to _that_ kind of garbage?
3. If it sounds ridiculous just because it tries to do genetic stuff with wales _and_ cows, I humbly propose the following list of stuff done by the West and China. And that's just off the top of my head. You don't even need to try hard to spin any of them as ridiculous.
- Crossing jellyfish and rabbits to get glow-in-the-dark rabbits.
- Ditto for pigs.
- Ditto to get coloured glow-in-the-dark sperm. (I wonder why the porn industry didn't already jump on that idea. Imagine a bukkake in the dark, where each shot glows a different colour;)
- Getting genes from insects or arachnids into goats, so they'd produce silk strands in their milk.
- Getting mammal-speciffic proteins into fungi, so they'd produce renet. (Actually used by the cheese industry.)
- Making a human embryo with two mothers and a father.
Etc.
I mean, if anyone wants to look at Japan's research as "hur hur hur, Beavis, where in the nature would a whale fuck a cow?"... then, by the same token, heh, exactly when was the last time when a horny spider impregnated a goat? And do female rabbits in heat routinely get their bones jumped by jellyfish? And exactly how would a baby with two mothers and a father happen naturally? It's actually impossible even with two fathers and a mother, but it's at least the kind of thing which some people would believe as an urban legend. But two mothers and a father? Exactly what perverted act would those two women need to do, so the egg of one ends up merged with the egg of the other, before the guy impregnates the result?
Or, I dunno, we could accept that just because taking stuff out of context can make it sound funny, it doesn't mean there can't be a legitimate purpose to doing that kind of research.
Pfft, if you think that's bad vapourware: The Jews had been waiting for their messiah long before Jesus was even born. As far as I know, they still haven't gotten it. But presumably it's gonna happen real soon now, as soon as God irons out the last couple of bugs;)
(And no, Jesus wasn't it, since he didn't actually do what the Jews' messiah was supposed to do. Then again, I guess it wouldn't be the first time when the actual released product doesn't even resemble what the marketing hype told you to expect;)
Katyushas aren't as much demolition stuff, as rocket artillery. Think somewhat like the MLRS. They can put a hell of a lot of warheads in a relatively small area in a short time. It can make even trained soldiers shit their pants, aside from the shrapnel that was already mentioned.
Even the oldest version of it was considered useful enough in WW2 so Stalin built whole divisions of it, and that was little more than some rails on a truck. Also the soldiers seemed to like them enough that in the rush into Berlin, they even improvised launch rails out of dismantled railroad/tram rails when they couldn't bring the real thing over destroyed bridges and bombed streets.
So I'd be a lot less dismissive of something which _is_ a proven military weapon, and that even the USA builds and fields an equivalent of. Just because it's not demolishing whole skyscrapers, it doesn't make it any less scary. Especially when used as a terror weapon against civilians.
Plus, let's put it into perspective. The western world makes a huge media fuss even when some incompetent wannabe terrorist gets a sack of nails in his car and sets it on fire. (And then it burns peacefully.) Or about some pipe bombs. So let's not go "Calling those things rockets or spending money to intercept them is ludicrous" when someone else gets an artillery barrage.
I bet that even if one guy threw a grenade in your home town you'd be a lot less dismissive. Or look at the panic when some guy shoots a dozen classmates. And both cases are disproportionately less destruction than a Katyusha does.
Even briefer: terror isn't just about demolishing buildings. If it were, we wouldn't even have heard of Columbine, nor the Anthrax letters, nor that Tokyo Sarin incident, nor a lot of other such stuff which didn't even scratch a building's paint.
Ah, the smart-arse non-sequiturs
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Hacking a Pacemaker
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Ah, the smart-arse non-sequiturs. How I missed those. So let's demolish them one by one, then. And maybe then we'll see some actual thought process instead.
Tell you what: Have fun with your dumb fixed-rate 75 bpm pacemaker, but don't expect to be running up any stairs anytime soon.
So basically you're telling me that you have to have an external thing strapped to your chest, full time, for it deal with that? I thought they were programmed by a cardiologist once, and left on their own afterwards.
Because sticking a JTAG connector through someones chest is fairly painful. You're welcome to experiment on yourself to confirm this.
_If_ any model needs it to be done that often, there _are_ ways to have things sticking out of someone's skin (think: dental implants) or have an electrode go out to right under the skin (think: some hearing implants.) So, you know, they require contact or near contact to work at all.
Also, it's not a WiFi interface. It's a short-range (it goes through your chest, and water absorbs radio waves like crazy), custom, wireless interface.
That still doesn't excuse its being an insecure protocol. If the only thing it has going for its security is that it's a custom proprietary protocol, then at best it's "security by obscurity." I.e., an antipattern by any other name.
It basically is, genius. Or do you want it so contact-based that they have to shoot a couple of amps through your chest in order to make the pacemaker respond ? Hint: Think of a vital organ that's very, very close to the pacemaker and reacts very badly to having current shot through it.
Again, there are ways to place electrodes for that, so they don't involve shooting a couple of amps through the chest.
So, basically, to wrap this up: I don't know what your qualifications are, but security is obviously not one of them. You can tell that when someone starts stringing straw men, non-sequiturs and a few other fallacies as why they didn't and shouldn't think about security. Whether it's about pacemakers or "why XSS vulnerabilities are overhyped and inevitable, and you shouldn't ask me to learn to encode strings" types, it's the same basic phenomenon.
At the end of the day, I still don't see why those things shouldn't be more secure. And I still don't see how your arguments have anything to do with security. No, it doesn't have to be fixed rate to be secure. No, you don't need to shoot a few amps through someone's chest. Etc. You just need to spend some time designing and reviewing it for security too, which is where most people fail. In all domains, so I'm not just picking on pacemakers. Pretty much invariably the failure isn't that security is impossible, it's that it didn't occur to anyone to even think (much) about it.
I mean, seriously, it didn't take me more than 5 minutes to think up solutions to those issues you raise, and I'm not even claiming to be the smartest guy around. I'm sure you or the companies manufacturing them too can come up with even better ones. But for that to happen, you have to snap out of the reflex of defending insecure designs as inevitable and impossible to change. You just need to devote some honest thinking and research to security too. That's all.
Or even shorter, as I was saying: it's that fatalism that's the problem. Too many people are too quick to throw both hands up and accept that everything is hackable anyway, rather than even try to do better.
The funny thing is, you're not going to just transfer money at the speed of light. Sorry.
Money is just something that mediates transfers of goods, so to speak. You can buy something from Japan for dollars, only because Japan then plans to (eventually) buy something back from you and pay with those dollars.
If you can't sell as much stuff as you buy, the value of your coin drops until you reach equilibrium. It's a kind of supply and demand. And if you don't sell anything, the value of your money is exactly zero.
If I'm a colony and you're another country dealing with me, the only reason why you'd want my money (let's call them Tau Ceti Credits) is if you can buy anything with them. Otherwise you'll sell your stuff on Earth for Euros or US dollars. At least you can buy something with those.
Or if I'm paying in an Earth-based currency, without sending anything tangible, then effectively an Earth-based government is letting me print their money and inflate their economy. If I can just send you US dollars without earning those dollars by selling stuff to Earth, then effectively the US government lets me "print" (or electronically create out of nothing) an endless supply of US dollars. No matter how you want to organize it, effectively then US government pays the price for that uranium you're sending me.
They might even do it if it's an american colony, but nevertheless, it's not as much trade, it's just a government paying for uranium to be sent to their colony. And then we can even forget about the part about paying what it's worth when it arrives. Since it's the government buying uranium to send to the colony, then it can jolly well pay the price at the moment of buying it. There we go. We just bypassed the whole problem of price fluctuations and who pays interest to whom.
The moment it's a trade is when you send me some uranium, but then can spend the Tau Ceti Credits on something that my colony produces. And there you run into the same problem I was describing anyway.
I mean, sure, you know I'm buying X tons of uranium per year, you won the contract for that, you know I'll pay when it arrives. Nice. The flow in that direction is solved. But that's the trivial half of the problem. The flow in the opposite direction is still not solved, though. You're still faced with the issue of what do you buy from me with those Tau Ceti Credits. But anything your order from me now, you'll get in 36 years. How do you know what to buy from that colony? Can you predict the demand and the prices on _Earth_ in 36 years from now? That is the hard half problem.
Actually, that's just a travelling colony so to speak, with the added cost of being able to also bring it all back.
I mean, take the two following scenario:
1. We send a bloody huge colony ship there, and it all stays there. Then all it sends back are some smaller container ships with the ore they want to export.
2. We send a bloody huge colony ship there. But on the way back we have to carry the ore _and_ the same bloody huge colony ship, with all the people and the life support and everything.
Scenario 2 doesn't just involve hauling a lot more weight on the way back (hence bigger engines, more fuel, etc), but also hauling a bigger ship on the way there. Since, you know, it has to also have some space for the ore.
But at the very least, that way back is what really sucks. The same big colony ship which would normally be a one-way trip, now has to do the trip back too.
I also don't think it solves the problem of fluctuating prices. In fact, methinks it makes it worse. Let's look at two scenarios again. Let's say, Tau Ceti in both cases, and as I was saying, an average of half the speed of light for the whole trip, just as example values.
1. Ordering a shipment of unobtanium from a colony. You send a radio signal, it takes 12 years to get there, it takes the container ships 24 years to come here. Total: 36 years.
2. Your corporation-ship "sails" off to find unobtanium on Tau Ceti. The ship takes 24 years to get there, and another 24 years to come back. Total: 48 years.
In the second case, you now have to predict what the prices will be in 48 years from now.
And the whole point was that extrapolation of current trends sometimes doesn't cut it. You can look at the steadily increasing price for some resource over a whole century, and think "man, this thing will be worth a fortune in 48 years." Then you come back and discover that somewhere in the middle of that interval, someone discovered something that made your resource dirt cheap.
Think cloth and the introduction of the powered looms in the 19'th century. You could look at a graph of the prices throughout the 18'th century and think, "man, by 1848, the prices will be sky high. Let's buy the biggest container ships available and go bring some cloth from Tau Ceti." And you'd be wrong, because by the middle of the 19'th century, the price had dropped a lot.
Or look at Aluminium. In 1884 it was selected as the material for the capstone of the Washington Monument because it was a very expensive metal, more expensive than silver. An ounce of it cost more than a worker's daily wage. In just 2 years after that, and actually before that monument was finished, a new production process hit and caused the price of aluminium to collapse. It's just the kind of thing I'm talking about. That was a forecast for the next four years: that when the monument is finished, aluminium would still be, pretty much, a precious metal and a whole capstone made of it would be a thing that makes people go, "wow!" It only took 2 years for that to turn out wrong.
And nowadays it's a bit over a dollar per _pound_. So by the same comparison with a worker's wage, what was once worth a whole day's work, nowadays won't even hire someone for a minute. (Going by the federal minimum wage, anyway.) How's that for a price drop?
That kind of attitude is the problem
on
Hacking a Pacemaker
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, sad to say and please don't take it as an offense, it's that kind of attitude that's the cause of half the problems today. Products are made by engineers couldn't care less about security, with their budget dictated by a boss who couldn't care less about security, and end up configured by users who couldn't care less about security. Because they all operate under that assumption that if it's even remotely related to computers or electronics, it can be hacked anyway, so why bother?
Well, no, there are ways to prevent that.
Let's start with the simplest: you can't remote-hack a computer which isn't connected to the net. Pull your network cable out of the computer and that's it, you can't be hacked by some guy in China any more.
Of course, you don't want to do that to your home computer, but we're talking pacemakers and the like. Why _does_ a pacemaker need a WiFi interface anyway? No, seriously. It's not like you want the users to surf for porn and post to Slashdot on their pacemakers. It's not even an appliance, as far as the user is concerned, it's a standalone device like their computer chair or the windshield wipers on their car. You have no freaking need for those to be networked, in any form or shape.
And here's an even more sobering thought: even if you wanted some control from outside, you're near your pacemaker the whole time. In fact, it's inside you. There's no time when you're on the other side of the town than your pacemaker is. So even if you're one of the die-hards that can argue with a straight face why you might need to log in to your fridge from work, the same doesn't apply to pacemakers. You're near it all the time. Any interface to it or from it can be contact-based just as well.
Second, even if you do want it networked, there _are_ ways to minimize bugs drastically. Code _can_ be proven correct, test cases can cover the code to ridiculous extents, and the thing can be riddled with pre- and post-condition checks right in the code and be able to fail safely to its normal offline mode. Yes, it's damn expensive to do that to something the size of Vista. But we're talking a pacemaker. It's just not the same number of lines of code. (Or if it does have millions of lines of code, maybe you just need to fire the guy who programmed it;)
More importantly, we already do _both_ of those for life-and-death systems like flight control systems on airplanes or brake computers on cars. They're both built and reviewed to be as good as bulletproof, _and_ not wired to talk to the outside world, unless one physically plugs in a special connector and a special computer into it. You don't want a car's brakes to be hijacked by wireless by the guy in the next car, so you just don't give them a wireless connection. Do you see any reason why we wouldn't apply the same thinking to a pacemaker? It's even more likely to kill than hijacking someone's brakes. There is no airbag to save you when your pacemaker fails.
So what I'm saying is: let's all stop and think twice before shrugging and dismissing security as impossible anyway. Sometimes it's very feasible to make it bulletproof, and, really, it has no excuse to not be so.
Well, that may even be insightful -- in a wishful thinking kind of way, because nanotech won't work like you assume -- but it still solves the wrong problem entirely.
(And even then it doesn't necessarily solve it completely. A colony of robots can still spend most of its energy and resources just repairing the robots and building new ones, so that cost can still remain. Or worse yet, it may need more goods sent from Earth than some colonists would, because such robots would presumably be high tech and require lots of energy and a lot of different factories to produce. So it might still be cheaper to send a 20km ship full of colonists, which only need a couple of farms to live there.)
But, anyway, the thrust of TFA isn't "how do you build a colony for your people", but rather "how the F-word _do_ you make a profit out of it? Is interstellar trade even viable?" Even with robots, and without having to pay the crew or the producers anything because they're robots, you still face some non-trivial problems there.
E.g., ok, you put an order for, say, uranium from that far far colony. How do you know that you'll even still need it by the time you get it? How do you know that the price will still be OK?
If your colony is at, say, 10.5 light years away on Epsilon Eridani, or 12 light years away on Tau Ceti, and if you travel at half the speed of light average (accelerate to nearly C half the distance, then decelerate the other half), that's 31.5 and 36 light years respectively from the moment you sent the order by radio to the moment it lands on Earth. (10.5 or 12 years respectively for your signal to get there, 21 and 24 respectively for the ship to travel here.) That is, if they already have the mine and the surplus of that resource and everything. Otherwise you might have to wait more.
For farther away colonies, even more.
Historically there have been massive changes in demand within less time. Cloth went from a massive money-maker good to being "meh" to being outsourced to third world countries to produce. Coal was once _the_ fuel for any navy, and sometimes even (explicit or implied) military threat was used to open up markets to buy it from and coaling stations. (See Perry's expedition to Japan.) It took less than 30 years for everyone to switch to oil in their ships, and coal became of much less importance. Or once whale oil was the main lighting fuel, then some guy goes and discovers the light bulb. Grain was _the_ thing to have for millenia, and the wealth and military power of, say, Poland throughout the middle ages was based on being able to produce and export lots of it. Buggrit. Then it took less than a century for the bottom to fall off _that_ market, and nowadays the only countries which still have an agriculture are those who subsidize it. Etc.
It becomes even funnier if you want to build a colony for the explicit purpose of getting some goods from there. Let's say unobtanium wishalloy is the latest rage, you spot some unobtanium in the spectral line of a far away star, and plan to make a living out of it. Now you have the round trip increased by building those robots and waiting for that ship to get there, build the colony, get mining, and some time after 50 years or so you get your first shipment of it even for the nearest stars.
Will it still be needed? Will your company even still exist after so much time? What bank will give you a loan for that kind of thing?
And will your investors want your head rolling for that? Today's capitalism is obsessed by short term results, and thinks in quarters and years. (Maybe even justifiedly so.) Proposing to blow a huge chunk of money, with compound interest (one way or another: even if you have the money and don't take the loan, it must be judged against the interest you'd get if you just put that money in a bank and started _getting_ interest on it) on something which _might_ make you the big bucks in 50 years, will get Wall Street screaming for blood.
Well, ironically, a large part of that can be blamed on the press too. There's this whole bombardment of stories telling Joe Sixpack that science is a clique of self-appointed arse clowns. In no particular order:
1. The lone researcher vs the evil establisment stories, like in TFA. Invariably the establishment is evil, you know. Well, these stories are just ammo then for the quacks, who are invariably all too eager to present themselves as that oppressed underdog.
2. PR-sponsored and -wrote "breakthrough" stories, the sillier and more contradictory the better. "Chocolate is good for you! Cocoa beans have valuable enzymes!" (Yes, but they're no longer present in chocolate.) "Wine is even better!" "No it's not!" "Scientists prove: Beer is better than both!!!" Etc. If you can't distinguish those from real science, and Joe Sixpack can't, it looks like "science" is just a bunch of guys saying contradictory things and telling you one day that X is good, and the next that Y is bad. That what passes for bulletproof science one day, is disproved the next day, so you might as well ignore the whole clown posse.
3. Probably the most damaging: the fucked-up idea of journalistic impartiality. See, the idea is that impartiality means presenting two conflicting views as equals, without taking sides. So if you run a story about, say, why vaccines are good, you have to also find a quack or two to go, "no they're not!!! They cause autism!!! They kill your immune system!!! Buy our 100% natural and hollistic snake oil instead!!!" And present the two as equal. It's not that one of them is bogus, it's that it's a "controversy", see. Taking sides and telling people which one is backed by solid evidence, well, that would violate that impartiality.
This creates a false image of, well, everything being equal and equally unproved and dubious. Everything is a controversy. The Nobel prize winner in that corner of the ring is just about as likely to be right or wrong, as the quack with the fake diploma bought on the internet in the other corner. So you can take your own pick. If you want to believe the earth is flat, go ahead, even that is probably a controversy.
"Question is, is there another way to tell the stories that isn't so formulaic and that doesn't give such an incorrect impression?"
Actually, there is a way: just stick to reporting, don't turn it into an entertaining story. We're talking science, FFS, not the Hero's Journey archetype. It's not about the everyman who discovers his calling and ends up single-handedly fighting the super-villain, it's about a more mundane process where basically they're all on the same side.
But science is boring for most people. There's really two kinds of stories that you can make out of it, that anyone outside that profession will read. (And those inside that profession already have the relevant peer-reviewed journals instead.)
A) It's a BREAKTHROUGH!!!
B) The Hero's Journey in disguise. The lone maverick who slays the dragon. (Except sometimes the climactic confrontation hasn't happened yet, so you're left to infer it.)
And unfortunately both end up used by the journos as ammo against the real science. TFA already thrashes B, so let's just say that bogus A is what PR carpet-bombs the media with.
So other than banning science completely from the non-peer-reviewed media, I can't see how that's solvable.
Or if you were merely asking if it's possible to make it entertaining without being a case of lone heroes versus tyrannical super-villains... well, maybe. But consider this: the current generation of storytellers can't even tell any story except the Hero's Journey. We could live without it very well until, IIRC, the 60's, but then all of a sudden everyone had to obey the monomyth to the letter. And if two movies are the same length, they have to have their first turning point in exactly the same minute.
So incidentally for whole classes of movies, once you figured out who's protagonist, who's antagonist, etc, you can know in advance what will happen... and in exactly what minute of the movie.
Unfortunately, ever since, that structure has been hammered into the heads of every single story teller or screenplay writer. There are course, workshops, and the knowledge that Hollywood will chuck your manuscript in the garbage bin if it doesn't fit the mold to the letter. Not many people still know how to write any other kinds of stories any more.
1. Let's start with the easy stuff first, with the ibuprofen and opiates and whatnot.
For a starter, your organism is already good at dealing with stuff that doesn't belong there. The liver alone gets rid of maybe three quarters of the medicines ever invented. Infinitesimal doses of even some pretty toxic stuff don't really get to do much damage or addiction or whatever, before they're neutralized or filtered out.
But for what you ask, pretty much you just have to make the following distinction:
A) Those who don't cause addiction, i.e., the over-the-counter stuff, well, those don't matter. The organism doesn't compensate in the other direction for those, or not for long. But if you're worried anyway, read on, the reason to not worry is:
B) Those which do cause addiction... well, those don't matter either when measured in parts per trillion.
Physiological addiction is when the body adjusts in the other direction. E.g., a cigarette makes you feel good, among other things, because it inhibits MAO-B, which is to say: works much the same as antidepressant medication. But your body gradually adjusts by producing _more_ MAO-B to get back to the normal baseline. Due to this adjustment, now you feel shitty without them, and eventually you need your smoke even just to get where a non-smoker is without them. That's addiction.
Well, the reason you don't need to worry about those is that your body adjust gradually towards a point that's proportional to the perturbation. If you perturb the system by 0.00000001% in one direction, the "correction" will be at most 0.00000001% in the other direction. If at all.
2. Antibiotics have been around long before humans knew about them. In fact, long before humans even existed. Penicillin, the first discovered antibiotic, is produced naturally by a fungus. (And conversely a bunch of bacteria kill fungi.)
Traces of penicillin were present almost everywhere, if nothing else, because rain got it everywhere. And yet superbugs didn't happen before humans got into antibiotics. Probably evolving the relevant mutations was more of a disadvantage when you _weren't_ on top of a penicillinum patch.
At any rate, to get back to something a bit more certain, infinitesimal traces of antibiotics in the water or in your body, don't create much of an evolutionary pressure. Bacteria _can_ survive one or two broken penicillin-binding proteins, for example because a freak accident made them meet a penicillin-type mollecule in the water. Heck, they lose some now and then even just to C14 decay, plus other natural causes. They'll just produce more of those proteins. That's what they have ribosomes for.
The moment when evolution happens is when there's a clear advantage in having a particular mutation. This typically means having a high chance of ending up dead without it. E.g., when you take antibiotics for a pneumonia, the concentrations there are high enough that a heck of a lot of "unprotected" bacteria just die. That's one heck of a natural selection of those who do have defenses. By contrast, being slightly inconvenienced, and only rarely, by traces of antibiotics in water, doesn't quite count as an evolutionary pressure.
Well, how about this pragmatic distinction, then: "You may patent an exact description of the solution, but you may not patent the problem or the goal." It seems to me like that alone would weed out half the bogus patents in the USA.
So basically, just as an example of that idea:
- The exact building plans of a machine that predicts heart attacks, is describing the solution, and thus is patentable.
"Predicting heart attacks" is, however, a problem not a solution. It's a goal, not the means to reach it. It gives you no exact steps to take and exact mechanism to build to solve that.
"Predicting heart attacks" might be a part of the solution to another problem, but nevertheless that part is described as a goal, not as a way to solve it.
- As far as I'm concerned, you can even patent an exact algorithm that solves the programming problem of your choice, provided that you supply ample documentation as to how it does that, and why it works. (After all, that was the whole idea behind patents in the first place.)
You may not patent the problem or goal of that algorithm. So stuff like patenting "showing an applet on a page" should have never been patentable.
- You _can_ patent a way to produce a chemical. Heck, I'll allow even a gene or a protein, to pick some of the most maligned examples. Go ahead. If you know how to produce MCR-B in a vat, go ahead and patent it. But, bear with me, there's a "but" there.
But you cannot patent the general goal of interacting with a given mollecule. You can patent a gene, or rather a way of producing it, but you can't do something as silly as forbid someone to interact with it in any form of shape. You don't "own" the gene, you just own one method to synthesise it. If someone figures out a completely different medicine that interacts with the same protein or DNA strand, you can't lock them out.
Etc.
Yes, both the problem and the solution are ideas, but they're not the same kind of idea. More importantly, they serve diametrally opposite purposes. Figuring out a solution is good for us all. Even in the worst case scenario where you patent it just to forbid it from being done, after the X years expire, we'll all have your detailed description of the solution. But patenting the problem, like some of the trolls do nowadays, doesn't really help society at all. They're just adding burdens to those who'll actually find a solution. Patenting the problem is nothing more than staking a claim that you want to fleece whoever comes up with the solution. It runs contrary to the whole idea of stimulating research and progress, which is why we have patents in the first place.
Just as a side-note, this is really orthogonal to my other objections to patents, so it doesn't preclude them. Even if under this rule I'd allow an algorithm because it's a solution, not a definition of the problem, I'd still throw out those which implement already existing human processes. Sorry, no patenting the the same thing again with an "in software" strapped onto it. You get the idea. It's just one part of the filter I'd propose, not the whole one.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to what FooAtWFU already nailed dead-on: because the Eee is a PC. You know, fully unlocked and runs anything that you could run on a PC.
This isn't about ideology wars. It's purely pragmatic. I want to do stuff like load Eclipse on it, and type code while on the train. Or any other program that I already know from the PC. Even if a PDA sorta-equivalent exists, maybe I can't be arsed to learn it, when I already have a perfectly good program that I'm familiar with.
In that vein, I plan to buy an Eee for mom (once I can actually find one in stock that is), and pack whatever programs she uses to process her photos on it. I never got into the whole digital photo thing, but she seems to have, big time, and methinks it would make a nice birthday present if she could take it with her on the road. Roll that around in your head. Not some "well, it sorta almost does the same thing if you learn the totally different interface" kind of thing, but the exact same that she already knows and is comfortable with.
I want to be able to plug whatever PC peripherals I have around into it. Like, for example, the Wacom tablet. (It's a damn good wireless, battery-less, ball-less and led-less mouse. And the stylus is nice for graphics too.)
Basically, if you can live with the restricted selection of software that PDAs typically have, more power to you. I won't try to convert you. But some of us would rather have a small PC than a PDA. Different class of tool, really.
sw155kn1f3 already answred that, so I won't repeat that. But just to clarify what we're talking about, there are two meanings of the word "addiction".
1. The popular usage, which just means "compulsion". You're considered an addict by society if you have a compulsion to do something, to the extent of it interfering with your life.
2. The physiological addiction, which just means that the brain chemistry compensated in the opposite direction.
The two are not really synonimous. You can be considered an "addict" to stuff which does not, in fact, cause any brain changes. And conversely your brain can have changed a bit, but not yet past the fuzzy border where it overrides your judgment and will power.
In this case, the perfect example is "alcohol tolerance". If you built up alcohol tolerance, medically your brain has already begun to compensate for alcohol. It's (a little) physiological addiction. But if it doesn't yet cause you to compulsive drinking, it gets named just "alcohol tolerance", not "alcohol addiction."
The first meaning has a (somewhat arbitrary) threshhold. Below it, you're not considered an addict yet, above it, you are. Meaning #2 is really just a continuum. You can (and do) have slight changes in brain chemistry long before society considers you an addict, and it can go even worse long after it does.
We're, in a nutshell, talking about meaning #2: changes in brain chemistry.
A single beer won't cause anyone to consider you an alcoholic. That much you're right. But it already gave your brain a jolt in one direction, and it already started compensating in the other. Your brain chemistry already changed a little, and it might cause slight differences in how signals are processed up there. And, yes, it can take two weeks or more for that compensating effect to decay back to negligible.
It actually works that way, to a point, yes. If you drink lots and regularly, you build up "alcohol tolerance". I.e., small quantities of alcohol which would make someone else tipsy, just get you back to the baseline. It compensated all right.
The problem is that that compensated state remains so even when you're sober. That's how eventually DT happens. The brain chemistry is "compensated" to work right with a lot of alcohol in the system. Without that alcohol, however, you're fucked up and can even die.
It's, if you will, like compensating for pushing a wardrobe to the right. Hard. So you compensate by slanting it to the left. When that force is applied, congrats, the components cancel out and the wardrobe stays like that. But when that force isn't applied any more, now it falls over to the the left.
That's in a nutshell how you die of DT. It's not the alcohol that kills you, it's the lack of alcohol. At that point your brain has changed so much to keep working when marinated in alcohol, that eventually it became unable to function without it.
That incidentally, also has the following implication for the post-alcohol-impairment I was talking about. It's easy to think "bah, I'm resistant to alcohol. Why, I only even start feeling a little warm after the fourth pint." Congrats, if you're at that point, your brain's equilibrium is now already waay off center. You _will_ have decreased brain power even when alcohol has left your system. In fact, _because_ all alcohol has left your system.
I couldn't care less, actually. Equally, a couple of century ago, mercury was the only known treatment for syphilis. It doesn't mean we should keep doing that. Nowadays we have better ways to deal with that.
Similarly, nowadays we know how to filter and disinfect water. So whatever need for alcohol might have existed, doesn't exist any more.
I'm not proposing to ban either alcohol or tobacco. If you want to nuke your brain, be my guest. I wouldn't even stop you from hanging yourself or playing russian roulette. If you want to, by all means, go ahead.
I'm _only_ saying "don't be surprised if it affects your IQ", really. But if you can live with that, go ahead and drink yourself silly, for all I care
Because if you keep perturbing a self-tuning biological system in one direction, it will start compensating in the other direction. That's how physiological addiction happens.
E.g., smoking a cigarette makes you feel better, among other things, because it blocks MAO-B. So basically your normal "reward" pathways in the brain get unbalanced by blocking the part which pulls your mood back down to the baseline. But _very_ soon the brain chemistry starts to compensate by producing more MAO-B. Oops. Now you feel shitty without a cigarette, and eventually you need them even to get you back to the baseline.
Alcohol works much the same, and is a pretty addictive thing.
Now drinking a couple of beers a day won't give you Delirium Tremens when you're sober. But that's just a matter of nuances. Your brain chemistry hasn't deviated _that_ far from the baseline, but it has deviated a little anyway, if it regularly has to compensate for alcohol intoxication. So, yes, you won't be as impaired as someone who's gotten to the delirium tremens point, but you'll be a little impaired anyway.
Actually, the summary is kinda misleading in that it doesn't say that they actually discovered an _inverse_ correlation. The _less_ beer you drink, the more likely you are to have your work published in some peer reviewed journal.
So basically what it says is: altered states won't actually make you more creative. Or at least not alcohol and not in science.
So basically put down the bong, lay off the booze, and get some honest sober work done, if you're in science. Maybe being drunk and/or stoned off your arse works for arts, I wouldn't know, you may stick to that myth for now. But if you want to discover the next particle, apparently nothing beats having the neurons working normally, without other crap interfering with your synapses and clouding your judgment.
Can't say it's that surprising, really. I can even imagine how if you're, say a painter, you could get the colourful vision for your next painting while you're on acid. But science is less about crazy ideas and more about maths, evaluating those ideas based on critical cause->effect thinking, and the like. And it's getting more abstract by the year. And I can tell you first hand, that at least being drunk (no idea about other altered states) doesn't really help you with maths and logic. _Maybe_ being too drunk to draw a straight line helps when painting some modern art stuff, but not with science.
I'm actually not missing those points, I chose just to not discuss them this time. The "video games" topic is large enough to write a whole tome about. Which would be a bit counter-productive on Slashdot, since by the time I'd be ready with it all, this would be last year's story. So the less relevant parts get left out.
:)
Actually, let me qualify "less relevant": less relevant for the point I was trying to make.
Yes, it's obvious that you're playing games for fun. Otherwise you would do something else. No argument there.
The point I was trying to make, though, was merely "why are the non-gamers scared of us, and why do snake-oil vendors peddle bogus diseases and bogus remedies?" Not why _you_ are playing games. Just why the average, stereotypical mom/grandma sitting in the other room is going "where did we go wrong? Maybe I should put him on funny pills?" Different problem, really
Well, seriously, you don't need to assume a conspiracy here. (There might still be one, but it's not needed to explain it. Occam's Razor, if you will. Or Hanlon's Razor.)
The way it works is sorta like this:
1. Most humans are herd animals, and educated to be very "us vs them" at it. And have layers upon layers of mental tricks to rationalize anything they personally do as the Right Thing. See, cognitive dissonance, for example.
So when Mr X goes to the pub and yakks about the latest football game, it not only gives him a much needed feeling of belonging to some group, it also provides a circle-jerk reinforcement of the idea that any sane male would naturally feel an urge to go to the pub and yakk about football. So if Mr Y wants to go play WoW instead, there must be something awfully wrong with him.
(And just so I don't piss off only the football fans, the same happens in reverse too. If John goes to the pub instead of doing the latest raid with us, there must be something awfully wrong with him. And if Tom is running OpenBSD instead of coming to our LUG meetings, and quotes Theo de Raad all the time instead of worshipping Linus like the rest of us, well, I'd be careful around him, if you know what I mean. Etc.)
At any rate, people can be very distrustful of anything that is not one of "us", and doubly so of anyone or anything that challenges the rationalizations and excuses that that "us" group is built on.
That incidentally means that anything new will invariably be met with such distrust. Society has had generations of building up a status quo, and lots of unwritten rules and roles for its members. Real Men do this, Real Women do that, Real Old Geezers do that other thing, and everyone is happy that they don't have to think much about it. Everyone else is doing the same things, so it must be the right, God-given way. And then this new group comes by and goes and reads comics instead, or watches TV, or listens to this newfangled heavy metal, or whatever.
I'm not kidding. Each of those has been the new thing at some point, and were demonized and presented as some dangerous influence on the youth at some point. Games are just the newest instance of some people who just don't want to fit their traditional roles in this big "us" group, and it makes everyone else uneasy. Why would they want to do that instead of watching the sacred football game on TV, like everyone else? How we forget that not so far in the past it was watching TV (instead of going and yakking outside) that was the newfangled TV addiction that was making everyone else uneasy.
So, anyway, we have a bunch of gamers and a large majority which doesn't understand them, and (to various extents) is made uneasy by them. They don't care that you don't watch ads or don't buy enough golf clubs, but they do get worried that you chose to not be a part of their group.
2. There's the kind of people who just want some publicity, or to sell you something. Whether it's a new drug, or their expensive psychotherapy fees, or the idea of electing them to Congress. Make no mistake, these don't care about what else you buy either. They just care about selling their own snake oil to enough people, and if you're not a buyer, well, then maybe you'd make a good bogeyman instead.
And that uneasy majority from #1 is a perfectly willing buyer for that snake oil. Especially one packed as, basically, "yes, it's scientifically proven: it's perfectly normal to be part of _your_ group and do the things _you_ do. And as you were suspecting, it's everyone else that are fucked-up in the head." That's what that majority wanted to hear.
3. It also doesn't help that we have a whole game industry trying hard to amplify the symptoms, if they can't actually make their games more "addictive".
We have limited save points. (My personal record was having to grind 10 hours before I found the next save point in a game.) We have 40-man raids that take a whole night to finish, and where if you quit suddenly, you've just piss
1. Well, I might even join you in damning the Concorde, if it weren't for one small detail: after it was built, everyone decided that they'd rather not have supersonic stuff flying overhead and being very loud. Which limited the possible routes for the Concorde massively, and thus hit their demand _hard_. You know, since you're moaning about lack of demand for them, now you know why.
So "commercially viable" is a bit mis-leading, when the only thing that made it non-viable was "not in my back yard" regulations against it. You can make _anything_ non-viable that way. Heck, pass the same kind of legislation for mobile phone masts (and God knows the "electrosensitives" try to) and it will make mobile telephony a non-viable business overnight.
Or have you heard about those brownouts in the USA some years back? That was government regulation making it commercially non-viable to build new power plants there. There you go.
2. At any rate, you'll _also_ notice that noone else is even trying to build supersonic passenger planes any more. Partially because of the same problem, but anyway: it's a bit funny to single out the Concorde program, when noone else is doing any better either.
It's a bit like sneering at the USA for not having cold-fusion power-plants yet. We don't have it either, but let's not let that get in the way of a good sneer.
3. Even if they end up used for supersonic transportation, that would be just trying to overcome the regulation problem mentioned in point 1. You know, sorta like making an air route to link two cities, if you can't get approval to build a railroad between them. Insisting that they stick with the problem where regulation made it non-viable, is pretty stupid, _if_ a different approach is more viable.
4. But that's probably irrelevant anyway, since they'll probably be used as a rich guy's penis-size... err... status-symbol roller coaster. I.e., it's a different product, for a different market. Exactly how's it relevant whether they make a supersonic plane first? It's a bit like saying, "bah, before you try to make a 4 core CPU, show me you can make a fusion power plant first." I mean, hello? How's one relevant to the other?
5. But even that is less relevant, once you've pinned the blame on lack of demand. Because that's what you blame, right at the start. Well, here's the funny part: giving up on markets that lack demand, and doing the stuff where there is a demand instead, is what capitalism is all about. You know, going all the way back to Adam Smith, that's the whole idea. If there's not enough demand for home-grown English wine, but there's a demand for wool, cut down that vineyard and raise sheep instead.
So asking that they stay in a market that lacks demand, solves what? Exactly what would they prove? That they have no economic sense?
Call me a cynic, but based on the experience of some places I worked for, it might just end up something like this:
1. What maybe started along the lines that you described, then has to go through controlling or purchasing or such, which in a lot of places have their job judged and measured by how much they saved. If they saved 10,000$ at the cost of making everyone else spend 1,000,000$ in workarounds and lost productivity, they're doing their job right. So someone will go "auugh, why should we pay a few bucks more on very secure drives, when we could get ordinary ones at a bulk discount? Look, there are these drives with fingerprint scanner for half the price. That's secure, right?" (See the vulnerability linked even on Slashdot recently.)
2. Someone else (or in some organizations the same) will have to make sure it's one of the approved suppliers. Ideally this would mean those who have a good track record of reliability, quality, etc. In practice, it'll mean one of (A) whoever pays more bribe, or (B) the boss's wife's or cousin's supplies company, created just to siphon some money off such purchases. If it's a state agency, stuff like pork barrel, political favours and lobbies have something to do with it too.
Since this _should_ be in conflict with #1 and is exactly the kind of thing that #1 is supposed to catch, sometimes they split the bribe, sometimes they trade favours, and sometimes inventive discounts are used. Like we'll price the USB sticks at $1000 each, give you a 50% discount, and let you show that you've done your job right by negotiating a whole $500 discount per drive.
3. Some IT department has been given thoroughly counter-productive goals, like only keeping the computers or the network running, but no mention of actually providing a service to the rest of the organization. So suddenly the users are their sworn enemies, the filthy pests that keep using and screwing their preciouss computers and network. They'll do their best to contain, thwart and plain old inconvenience those users at every step. So the "secure" setup for those drives will be just an exercise in making it as inconvenient to use as possible, to teach those pesky lusers a lesson.
And indeed the users do learn a lesson: that if you want to get your job done at all, you have to do your own unauthorized workarounds. There goes most of security out the window right there.
Alternately, the IT department has also been on the shit end of #1, and is underfunded and staffed with the cheapest monkeys who can sorta bang on a keyboard, and don't fling too much feces at the screen. So they'll configure something which they think is right, but is not.
Yet another alternative is that a lax PHB can't be bothered to actually organize IT, and some BOFH personality types feel free to override everything and do what _they_ please. I've seen it happen. Stuff like production servers configured without XA support for _years_, just because the relevant BOFH thought that's a buzzword and it runs just as well without it anyway, plus it saves him the bother of installing the relevant libraries on all servers. So he _lied_ to the team for years that they have a feature that they didn't actually have.
And not only I can see all three happening with security too, I've _seen_ it happen with security features too.
4. Some PHB will figure out that it's not really an "enterprise" drive unless it has the organization's logo on it. In fact, that that's what makes anything properly enterprise.
Some frustrated users that have been on the shit end of #3 too often, will begin just printing and gluing makeshift logos to their own USB sticks, rather than put up with Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services again. Noone will be any wiser.
Etc.
Or maybe it's even simpler than that. Remember that we're talking only February sales here, not year long.
Traditionally almost all games were released for Christmas or Easter, with almost nothing released in between. February was probably the worst hit, because anything that couldn't make it for a Christmas release (meaning usually it couldn't even make it to the main menu, because otherwise it would have been released anyway for that all-important Christmas buying season) was delayed all the way until Easter. So, you know, sales peaked at Christmas, gradually slid downwards all through January, and February was when us addicts started getting shaky hands and glazed eyes because of withdrawal syndrome, as nothing was released at all in that month.
And then after Easter another drought came, with maybe 1 or 2 games released in all the months until Christmas, if at all.
And for a while the situation got only worse each year.
That seems to have changed in the last year, as some publishers either (A) rushed to fill that void where millions of gamers were just begging for something to blow their money on, or (B) rushed to have their console released before the other guys' consoles, or god knows what other reasons. At any rate, there have actually been new games released in between those two sacrosanct dates.
So comparing only February can paint a highly misleading picture. It's comparing what used to be the low tide point, to a situation which is a lot more averaged. It doesn't necessarily mean that the whole year's total will rise proportionally. It can just as well mean that the peaks for Easter and Christmas will also be lower. (And a bunch of self-styled pundits will rush to proclaim a new video game market crash, illustrated by their comparing only December to the previous year's December.)
Eh, the poor guy probably just had to put up with some password policy that says he has to have at least one non-letter character in the password.
There has been this story a long time ago, in a galaxy far a... err... on Slashdot, in which one reasonably intelligent human couldn't pass an impromptu Turing test. Someone had put his IM handle on a list of sexbots, and from there people just would not accept that he's _not_ a bot. Some stuff asked could have pretty much been the subject of a philosophy paper, and a simple "no idea, I've never thought about that" didn't seem to satisfy the questioner.
Your own questions, well, at least two out of three, I have no idea how I'd give a good answer to those.
- What does sex feel like? Well, I have had sex, but fuck me if I know how to describe a sensation. It's like having to describe "red" or "sweet".
- What did it feel when his mother died? Heck if I know, mine didn't.
Now probably I could think of some wise-arse pseudo-answer, given a little time. But if someone came up with something like that out of nowhere, as part of some misguided attempt to see if I'm a bot... I'd probably fail that Turing test.
Basically I'm not arguing your point that it becomes impossible to pass for a bot, if the human knows he's doing a Turing test. You're right. What I'm adding is that often it becomes impossible to pass even for a human. The question quickly get so contrived that it's not even possible to give a simple answer. There are things where there is no real answer, just possible pseuo-answers (ranging from "I don't know" to doing a whole pseudo-philosophical rant on the topic), and it's a toss whether the interviewer will accept your particular pseudo-answer. Someone determined enough might only accept one of the possible pseudo-answers (so if your "shared" experience or way to describe it doesn't _exactly_ match his, you lost) or none at all.
Actually, I do have some idea. And yes, I could also tell you what was the purpose of each of the western experiments I listed.
The point wasn't that Western research is all silly. The point is that you can make anything sound silly, or outright deranged, if you quote selected bits out of context, apply some heavy-handed spin to it, and do it for an audience that's more interested in validating their own xenophobic delusions than in critically thinking about that experiment.
Actually, leaving that out of the summary doesn't just make it sound more ridiculous, it's suspiciously xenophobic. It singles out Japan as doing wacky science. You know, unlike us Europeans or you Americans.
Bit of a reality check:
1. Western companies routinely pay for dubious research that pushes their own agenda. Probably more rabbits and rats smoked tobacco because of tobacco companies trying to prove that smoking is harmless, than because of all other research combined. (And if they want to present test-tube whale babies as ridiculous research, then, hello? Smoking rabbits? When was the last documented time a rabbit just naturally rolled a tobacco leaf and smoked it?)
Or mice were shaved and exposed to UV-B so they'd die of cancer, in an experiment that tried to prove that drinking coffee is good for you in that aspect. Gee, I wonder who the sponsor was there. (And again, seriously, when was the last time a mouse shaved and went to get a tan on his own?)
Anti-depressant companies routinely publish studies where their MAO uptake inhibitors are the best thing since Eden, and routinely junk studies where for various forms of depression other stuff works even better. Yoghurt manufacturers publish studies after studies in which their bacteria are the best thing that could live in your intestine... if they only got past that pesky acid in your stomach. Etc.
2. Western corporate PR routinely carpet-bombs the media with even more bizarre and ridiculous pseudo-science. Scientist discovers formula for the best day to take a vacation! (It doesn't even add the same units and stuff, and it's sponsored by a travel company which runs a promotion for flights in that months. Go figure.) Scientists say: In the future all women will have huge breasts and all men will have huge dicks! (Except it wasn't as much science, as an essay paid for by a magazine.) Scientists discover: Cocoa contains valuable enzymes so chocolate is good for you! (Except they don't exist in chocolate. And it was sponsored by Mars.) Etc.
Still think Japan's actual research in wales looks ridiculous compared to _that_ kind of garbage?
3. If it sounds ridiculous just because it tries to do genetic stuff with wales _and_ cows, I humbly propose the following list of stuff done by the West and China. And that's just off the top of my head. You don't even need to try hard to spin any of them as ridiculous.
- Crossing jellyfish and rabbits to get glow-in-the-dark rabbits.
- Ditto for pigs.
- Ditto to get coloured glow-in-the-dark sperm. (I wonder why the porn industry didn't already jump on that idea. Imagine a bukkake in the dark, where each shot glows a different colour;)
- Getting genes from insects or arachnids into goats, so they'd produce silk strands in their milk.
- Getting mammal-speciffic proteins into fungi, so they'd produce renet. (Actually used by the cheese industry.)
- Making a human embryo with two mothers and a father.
Etc.
I mean, if anyone wants to look at Japan's research as "hur hur hur, Beavis, where in the nature would a whale fuck a cow?"... then, by the same token, heh, exactly when was the last time when a horny spider impregnated a goat? And do female rabbits in heat routinely get their bones jumped by jellyfish? And exactly how would a baby with two mothers and a father happen naturally? It's actually impossible even with two fathers and a mother, but it's at least the kind of thing which some people would believe as an urban legend. But two mothers and a father? Exactly what perverted act would those two women need to do, so the egg of one ends up merged with the egg of the other, before the guy impregnates the result?
Or, I dunno, we could accept that just because taking stuff out of context can make it sound funny, it doesn't mean there can't be a legitimate purpose to doing that kind of research.
Pfft, if you think that's bad vapourware: The Jews had been waiting for their messiah long before Jesus was even born. As far as I know, they still haven't gotten it. But presumably it's gonna happen real soon now, as soon as God irons out the last couple of bugs ;)
(And no, Jesus wasn't it, since he didn't actually do what the Jews' messiah was supposed to do. Then again, I guess it wouldn't be the first time when the actual released product doesn't even resemble what the marketing hype told you to expect;)
Katyushas aren't as much demolition stuff, as rocket artillery. Think somewhat like the MLRS. They can put a hell of a lot of warheads in a relatively small area in a short time. It can make even trained soldiers shit their pants, aside from the shrapnel that was already mentioned.
Even the oldest version of it was considered useful enough in WW2 so Stalin built whole divisions of it, and that was little more than some rails on a truck. Also the soldiers seemed to like them enough that in the rush into Berlin, they even improvised launch rails out of dismantled railroad/tram rails when they couldn't bring the real thing over destroyed bridges and bombed streets.
So I'd be a lot less dismissive of something which _is_ a proven military weapon, and that even the USA builds and fields an equivalent of. Just because it's not demolishing whole skyscrapers, it doesn't make it any less scary. Especially when used as a terror weapon against civilians.
Plus, let's put it into perspective. The western world makes a huge media fuss even when some incompetent wannabe terrorist gets a sack of nails in his car and sets it on fire. (And then it burns peacefully.) Or about some pipe bombs. So let's not go "Calling those things rockets or spending money to intercept them is ludicrous" when someone else gets an artillery barrage.
I bet that even if one guy threw a grenade in your home town you'd be a lot less dismissive. Or look at the panic when some guy shoots a dozen classmates. And both cases are disproportionately less destruction than a Katyusha does.
Even briefer: terror isn't just about demolishing buildings. If it were, we wouldn't even have heard of Columbine, nor the Anthrax letters, nor that Tokyo Sarin incident, nor a lot of other such stuff which didn't even scratch a building's paint.
So basically you're telling me that you have to have an external thing strapped to your chest, full time, for it deal with that? I thought they were programmed by a cardiologist once, and left on their own afterwards.
_If_ any model needs it to be done that often, there _are_ ways to have things sticking out of someone's skin (think: dental implants) or have an electrode go out to right under the skin (think: some hearing implants.) So, you know, they require contact or near contact to work at all.
That still doesn't excuse its being an insecure protocol. If the only thing it has going for its security is that it's a custom proprietary protocol, then at best it's "security by obscurity." I.e., an antipattern by any other name.
Again, there are ways to place electrodes for that, so they don't involve shooting a couple of amps through the chest.
So, basically, to wrap this up: I don't know what your qualifications are, but security is obviously not one of them. You can tell that when someone starts stringing straw men, non-sequiturs and a few other fallacies as why they didn't and shouldn't think about security. Whether it's about pacemakers or "why XSS vulnerabilities are overhyped and inevitable, and you shouldn't ask me to learn to encode strings" types, it's the same basic phenomenon.
At the end of the day, I still don't see why those things shouldn't be more secure. And I still don't see how your arguments have anything to do with security. No, it doesn't have to be fixed rate to be secure. No, you don't need to shoot a few amps through someone's chest. Etc. You just need to spend some time designing and reviewing it for security too, which is where most people fail. In all domains, so I'm not just picking on pacemakers. Pretty much invariably the failure isn't that security is impossible, it's that it didn't occur to anyone to even think (much) about it.
I mean, seriously, it didn't take me more than 5 minutes to think up solutions to those issues you raise, and I'm not even claiming to be the smartest guy around. I'm sure you or the companies manufacturing them too can come up with even better ones. But for that to happen, you have to snap out of the reflex of defending insecure designs as inevitable and impossible to change. You just need to devote some honest thinking and research to security too. That's all.
Or even shorter, as I was saying: it's that fatalism that's the problem. Too many people are too quick to throw both hands up and accept that everything is hackable anyway, rather than even try to do better.
The funny thing is, you're not going to just transfer money at the speed of light. Sorry.
Money is just something that mediates transfers of goods, so to speak. You can buy something from Japan for dollars, only because Japan then plans to (eventually) buy something back from you and pay with those dollars.
If you can't sell as much stuff as you buy, the value of your coin drops until you reach equilibrium. It's a kind of supply and demand. And if you don't sell anything, the value of your money is exactly zero.
If I'm a colony and you're another country dealing with me, the only reason why you'd want my money (let's call them Tau Ceti Credits) is if you can buy anything with them. Otherwise you'll sell your stuff on Earth for Euros or US dollars. At least you can buy something with those.
Or if I'm paying in an Earth-based currency, without sending anything tangible, then effectively an Earth-based government is letting me print their money and inflate their economy. If I can just send you US dollars without earning those dollars by selling stuff to Earth, then effectively the US government lets me "print" (or electronically create out of nothing) an endless supply of US dollars. No matter how you want to organize it, effectively then US government pays the price for that uranium you're sending me.
They might even do it if it's an american colony, but nevertheless, it's not as much trade, it's just a government paying for uranium to be sent to their colony. And then we can even forget about the part about paying what it's worth when it arrives. Since it's the government buying uranium to send to the colony, then it can jolly well pay the price at the moment of buying it. There we go. We just bypassed the whole problem of price fluctuations and who pays interest to whom.
The moment it's a trade is when you send me some uranium, but then can spend the Tau Ceti Credits on something that my colony produces. And there you run into the same problem I was describing anyway.
I mean, sure, you know I'm buying X tons of uranium per year, you won the contract for that, you know I'll pay when it arrives. Nice. The flow in that direction is solved. But that's the trivial half of the problem. The flow in the opposite direction is still not solved, though. You're still faced with the issue of what do you buy from me with those Tau Ceti Credits. But anything your order from me now, you'll get in 36 years. How do you know what to buy from that colony? Can you predict the demand and the prices on _Earth_ in 36 years from now? That is the hard half problem.
Actually, that's just a travelling colony so to speak, with the added cost of being able to also bring it all back.
I mean, take the two following scenario:
1. We send a bloody huge colony ship there, and it all stays there. Then all it sends back are some smaller container ships with the ore they want to export.
2. We send a bloody huge colony ship there. But on the way back we have to carry the ore _and_ the same bloody huge colony ship, with all the people and the life support and everything.
Scenario 2 doesn't just involve hauling a lot more weight on the way back (hence bigger engines, more fuel, etc), but also hauling a bigger ship on the way there. Since, you know, it has to also have some space for the ore.
But at the very least, that way back is what really sucks. The same big colony ship which would normally be a one-way trip, now has to do the trip back too.
I also don't think it solves the problem of fluctuating prices. In fact, methinks it makes it worse. Let's look at two scenarios again. Let's say, Tau Ceti in both cases, and as I was saying, an average of half the speed of light for the whole trip, just as example values.
1. Ordering a shipment of unobtanium from a colony. You send a radio signal, it takes 12 years to get there, it takes the container ships 24 years to come here. Total: 36 years.
2. Your corporation-ship "sails" off to find unobtanium on Tau Ceti. The ship takes 24 years to get there, and another 24 years to come back. Total: 48 years.
In the second case, you now have to predict what the prices will be in 48 years from now.
And the whole point was that extrapolation of current trends sometimes doesn't cut it. You can look at the steadily increasing price for some resource over a whole century, and think "man, this thing will be worth a fortune in 48 years." Then you come back and discover that somewhere in the middle of that interval, someone discovered something that made your resource dirt cheap.
Think cloth and the introduction of the powered looms in the 19'th century. You could look at a graph of the prices throughout the 18'th century and think, "man, by 1848, the prices will be sky high. Let's buy the biggest container ships available and go bring some cloth from Tau Ceti." And you'd be wrong, because by the middle of the 19'th century, the price had dropped a lot.
Or look at Aluminium. In 1884 it was selected as the material for the capstone of the Washington Monument because it was a very expensive metal, more expensive than silver. An ounce of it cost more than a worker's daily wage. In just 2 years after that, and actually before that monument was finished, a new production process hit and caused the price of aluminium to collapse. It's just the kind of thing I'm talking about. That was a forecast for the next four years: that when the monument is finished, aluminium would still be, pretty much, a precious metal and a whole capstone made of it would be a thing that makes people go, "wow!" It only took 2 years for that to turn out wrong.
And nowadays it's a bit over a dollar per _pound_. So by the same comparison with a worker's wage, what was once worth a whole day's work, nowadays won't even hire someone for a minute. (Going by the federal minimum wage, anyway.) How's that for a price drop?
Well, sad to say and please don't take it as an offense, it's that kind of attitude that's the cause of half the problems today. Products are made by engineers couldn't care less about security, with their budget dictated by a boss who couldn't care less about security, and end up configured by users who couldn't care less about security. Because they all operate under that assumption that if it's even remotely related to computers or electronics, it can be hacked anyway, so why bother?
Well, no, there are ways to prevent that.
Let's start with the simplest: you can't remote-hack a computer which isn't connected to the net. Pull your network cable out of the computer and that's it, you can't be hacked by some guy in China any more.
Of course, you don't want to do that to your home computer, but we're talking pacemakers and the like. Why _does_ a pacemaker need a WiFi interface anyway? No, seriously. It's not like you want the users to surf for porn and post to Slashdot on their pacemakers. It's not even an appliance, as far as the user is concerned, it's a standalone device like their computer chair or the windshield wipers on their car. You have no freaking need for those to be networked, in any form or shape.
And here's an even more sobering thought: even if you wanted some control from outside, you're near your pacemaker the whole time. In fact, it's inside you. There's no time when you're on the other side of the town than your pacemaker is. So even if you're one of the die-hards that can argue with a straight face why you might need to log in to your fridge from work, the same doesn't apply to pacemakers. You're near it all the time. Any interface to it or from it can be contact-based just as well.
Second, even if you do want it networked, there _are_ ways to minimize bugs drastically. Code _can_ be proven correct, test cases can cover the code to ridiculous extents, and the thing can be riddled with pre- and post-condition checks right in the code and be able to fail safely to its normal offline mode. Yes, it's damn expensive to do that to something the size of Vista. But we're talking a pacemaker. It's just not the same number of lines of code. (Or if it does have millions of lines of code, maybe you just need to fire the guy who programmed it;)
More importantly, we already do _both_ of those for life-and-death systems like flight control systems on airplanes or brake computers on cars. They're both built and reviewed to be as good as bulletproof, _and_ not wired to talk to the outside world, unless one physically plugs in a special connector and a special computer into it. You don't want a car's brakes to be hijacked by wireless by the guy in the next car, so you just don't give them a wireless connection. Do you see any reason why we wouldn't apply the same thinking to a pacemaker? It's even more likely to kill than hijacking someone's brakes. There is no airbag to save you when your pacemaker fails.
So what I'm saying is: let's all stop and think twice before shrugging and dismissing security as impossible anyway. Sometimes it's very feasible to make it bulletproof, and, really, it has no excuse to not be so.
Well, that may even be insightful -- in a wishful thinking kind of way, because nanotech won't work like you assume -- but it still solves the wrong problem entirely.
(And even then it doesn't necessarily solve it completely. A colony of robots can still spend most of its energy and resources just repairing the robots and building new ones, so that cost can still remain. Or worse yet, it may need more goods sent from Earth than some colonists would, because such robots would presumably be high tech and require lots of energy and a lot of different factories to produce. So it might still be cheaper to send a 20km ship full of colonists, which only need a couple of farms to live there.)
But, anyway, the thrust of TFA isn't "how do you build a colony for your people", but rather "how the F-word _do_ you make a profit out of it? Is interstellar trade even viable?" Even with robots, and without having to pay the crew or the producers anything because they're robots, you still face some non-trivial problems there.
E.g., ok, you put an order for, say, uranium from that far far colony. How do you know that you'll even still need it by the time you get it? How do you know that the price will still be OK?
If your colony is at, say, 10.5 light years away on Epsilon Eridani, or 12 light years away on Tau Ceti, and if you travel at half the speed of light average (accelerate to nearly C half the distance, then decelerate the other half), that's 31.5 and 36 light years respectively from the moment you sent the order by radio to the moment it lands on Earth. (10.5 or 12 years respectively for your signal to get there, 21 and 24 respectively for the ship to travel here.) That is, if they already have the mine and the surplus of that resource and everything. Otherwise you might have to wait more.
For farther away colonies, even more.
Historically there have been massive changes in demand within less time. Cloth went from a massive money-maker good to being "meh" to being outsourced to third world countries to produce. Coal was once _the_ fuel for any navy, and sometimes even (explicit or implied) military threat was used to open up markets to buy it from and coaling stations. (See Perry's expedition to Japan.) It took less than 30 years for everyone to switch to oil in their ships, and coal became of much less importance. Or once whale oil was the main lighting fuel, then some guy goes and discovers the light bulb. Grain was _the_ thing to have for millenia, and the wealth and military power of, say, Poland throughout the middle ages was based on being able to produce and export lots of it. Buggrit. Then it took less than a century for the bottom to fall off _that_ market, and nowadays the only countries which still have an agriculture are those who subsidize it. Etc.
It becomes even funnier if you want to build a colony for the explicit purpose of getting some goods from there. Let's say unobtanium wishalloy is the latest rage, you spot some unobtanium in the spectral line of a far away star, and plan to make a living out of it. Now you have the round trip increased by building those robots and waiting for that ship to get there, build the colony, get mining, and some time after 50 years or so you get your first shipment of it even for the nearest stars.
Will it still be needed? Will your company even still exist after so much time? What bank will give you a loan for that kind of thing?
And will your investors want your head rolling for that? Today's capitalism is obsessed by short term results, and thinks in quarters and years. (Maybe even justifiedly so.) Proposing to blow a huge chunk of money, with compound interest (one way or another: even if you have the money and don't take the loan, it must be judged against the interest you'd get if you just put that money in a bank and started _getting_ interest on it) on something which _might_ make you the big bucks in 50 years, will get Wall Street screaming for blood.
Well, ironically, a large part of that can be blamed on the press too. There's this whole bombardment of stories telling Joe Sixpack that science is a clique of self-appointed arse clowns. In no particular order:
1. The lone researcher vs the evil establisment stories, like in TFA. Invariably the establishment is evil, you know. Well, these stories are just ammo then for the quacks, who are invariably all too eager to present themselves as that oppressed underdog.
2. PR-sponsored and -wrote "breakthrough" stories, the sillier and more contradictory the better. "Chocolate is good for you! Cocoa beans have valuable enzymes!" (Yes, but they're no longer present in chocolate.) "Wine is even better!" "No it's not!" "Scientists prove: Beer is better than both!!!" Etc. If you can't distinguish those from real science, and Joe Sixpack can't, it looks like "science" is just a bunch of guys saying contradictory things and telling you one day that X is good, and the next that Y is bad. That what passes for bulletproof science one day, is disproved the next day, so you might as well ignore the whole clown posse.
3. Probably the most damaging: the fucked-up idea of journalistic impartiality. See, the idea is that impartiality means presenting two conflicting views as equals, without taking sides. So if you run a story about, say, why vaccines are good, you have to also find a quack or two to go, "no they're not!!! They cause autism!!! They kill your immune system!!! Buy our 100% natural and hollistic snake oil instead!!!" And present the two as equal. It's not that one of them is bogus, it's that it's a "controversy", see. Taking sides and telling people which one is backed by solid evidence, well, that would violate that impartiality.
This creates a false image of, well, everything being equal and equally unproved and dubious. Everything is a controversy. The Nobel prize winner in that corner of the ring is just about as likely to be right or wrong, as the quack with the fake diploma bought on the internet in the other corner. So you can take your own pick. If you want to believe the earth is flat, go ahead, even that is probably a controversy.
"Question is, is there another way to tell the stories that isn't so formulaic and that doesn't give such an incorrect impression?"
Actually, there is a way: just stick to reporting, don't turn it into an entertaining story. We're talking science, FFS, not the Hero's Journey archetype. It's not about the everyman who discovers his calling and ends up single-handedly fighting the super-villain, it's about a more mundane process where basically they're all on the same side.
But science is boring for most people. There's really two kinds of stories that you can make out of it, that anyone outside that profession will read. (And those inside that profession already have the relevant peer-reviewed journals instead.)
A) It's a BREAKTHROUGH!!!
B) The Hero's Journey in disguise. The lone maverick who slays the dragon. (Except sometimes the climactic confrontation hasn't happened yet, so you're left to infer it.)
And unfortunately both end up used by the journos as ammo against the real science. TFA already thrashes B, so let's just say that bogus A is what PR carpet-bombs the media with.
So other than banning science completely from the non-peer-reviewed media, I can't see how that's solvable.
Or if you were merely asking if it's possible to make it entertaining without being a case of lone heroes versus tyrannical super-villains... well, maybe. But consider this: the current generation of storytellers can't even tell any story except the Hero's Journey. We could live without it very well until, IIRC, the 60's, but then all of a sudden everyone had to obey the monomyth to the letter. And if two movies are the same length, they have to have their first turning point in exactly the same minute.
So incidentally for whole classes of movies, once you figured out who's protagonist, who's antagonist, etc, you can know in advance what will happen... and in exactly what minute of the movie.
Unfortunately, ever since, that structure has been hammered into the heads of every single story teller or screenplay writer. There are course, workshops, and the knowledge that Hollywood will chuck your manuscript in the garbage bin if it doesn't fit the mold to the letter. Not many people still know how to write any other kinds of stories any more.
Well, I wouldn't worry yet:
1. Let's start with the easy stuff first, with the ibuprofen and opiates and whatnot.
For a starter, your organism is already good at dealing with stuff that doesn't belong there. The liver alone gets rid of maybe three quarters of the medicines ever invented. Infinitesimal doses of even some pretty toxic stuff don't really get to do much damage or addiction or whatever, before they're neutralized or filtered out.
But for what you ask, pretty much you just have to make the following distinction:
A) Those who don't cause addiction, i.e., the over-the-counter stuff, well, those don't matter. The organism doesn't compensate in the other direction for those, or not for long. But if you're worried anyway, read on, the reason to not worry is:
B) Those which do cause addiction... well, those don't matter either when measured in parts per trillion.
Physiological addiction is when the body adjusts in the other direction. E.g., a cigarette makes you feel good, among other things, because it inhibits MAO-B, which is to say: works much the same as antidepressant medication. But your body gradually adjusts by producing _more_ MAO-B to get back to the normal baseline. Due to this adjustment, now you feel shitty without them, and eventually you need your smoke even just to get where a non-smoker is without them. That's addiction.
Well, the reason you don't need to worry about those is that your body adjust gradually towards a point that's proportional to the perturbation. If you perturb the system by 0.00000001% in one direction, the "correction" will be at most 0.00000001% in the other direction. If at all.
2. Antibiotics have been around long before humans knew about them. In fact, long before humans even existed. Penicillin, the first discovered antibiotic, is produced naturally by a fungus. (And conversely a bunch of bacteria kill fungi.)
Traces of penicillin were present almost everywhere, if nothing else, because rain got it everywhere. And yet superbugs didn't happen before humans got into antibiotics. Probably evolving the relevant mutations was more of a disadvantage when you _weren't_ on top of a penicillinum patch.
At any rate, to get back to something a bit more certain, infinitesimal traces of antibiotics in the water or in your body, don't create much of an evolutionary pressure. Bacteria _can_ survive one or two broken penicillin-binding proteins, for example because a freak accident made them meet a penicillin-type mollecule in the water. Heck, they lose some now and then even just to C14 decay, plus other natural causes. They'll just produce more of those proteins. That's what they have ribosomes for.
The moment when evolution happens is when there's a clear advantage in having a particular mutation. This typically means having a high chance of ending up dead without it. E.g., when you take antibiotics for a pneumonia, the concentrations there are high enough that a heck of a lot of "unprotected" bacteria just die. That's one heck of a natural selection of those who do have defenses. By contrast, being slightly inconvenienced, and only rarely, by traces of antibiotics in water, doesn't quite count as an evolutionary pressure.
Well, how about this pragmatic distinction, then: "You may patent an exact description of the solution, but you may not patent the problem or the goal." It seems to me like that alone would weed out half the bogus patents in the USA.
So basically, just as an example of that idea:
- The exact building plans of a machine that predicts heart attacks, is describing the solution, and thus is patentable.
"Predicting heart attacks" is, however, a problem not a solution. It's a goal, not the means to reach it. It gives you no exact steps to take and exact mechanism to build to solve that.
"Predicting heart attacks" might be a part of the solution to another problem, but nevertheless that part is described as a goal, not as a way to solve it.
- As far as I'm concerned, you can even patent an exact algorithm that solves the programming problem of your choice, provided that you supply ample documentation as to how it does that, and why it works. (After all, that was the whole idea behind patents in the first place.)
You may not patent the problem or goal of that algorithm. So stuff like patenting "showing an applet on a page" should have never been patentable.
- You _can_ patent a way to produce a chemical. Heck, I'll allow even a gene or a protein, to pick some of the most maligned examples. Go ahead. If you know how to produce MCR-B in a vat, go ahead and patent it. But, bear with me, there's a "but" there.
But you cannot patent the general goal of interacting with a given mollecule. You can patent a gene, or rather a way of producing it, but you can't do something as silly as forbid someone to interact with it in any form of shape. You don't "own" the gene, you just own one method to synthesise it. If someone figures out a completely different medicine that interacts with the same protein or DNA strand, you can't lock them out.
Etc.
Yes, both the problem and the solution are ideas, but they're not the same kind of idea. More importantly, they serve diametrally opposite purposes. Figuring out a solution is good for us all. Even in the worst case scenario where you patent it just to forbid it from being done, after the X years expire, we'll all have your detailed description of the solution. But patenting the problem, like some of the trolls do nowadays, doesn't really help society at all. They're just adding burdens to those who'll actually find a solution. Patenting the problem is nothing more than staking a claim that you want to fleece whoever comes up with the solution. It runs contrary to the whole idea of stimulating research and progress, which is why we have patents in the first place.
Just as a side-note, this is really orthogonal to my other objections to patents, so it doesn't preclude them. Even if under this rule I'd allow an algorithm because it's a solution, not a definition of the problem, I'd still throw out those which implement already existing human processes. Sorry, no patenting the the same thing again with an "in software" strapped onto it. You get the idea. It's just one part of the filter I'd propose, not the whole one.