I visited the museum a few years back. It had some very interesting stuff, including a pretty good introductory film and a number of nifty gadgets like tesla coils, viscosity pumps, etc. Unfortunately, the staff was not very technically knowledgable and made a large number of mistakes while trying to describe the physics behind the toys. The one who led my tour was completely lacking in fluid dynamics or gas dynamics theory, while being very well versed in the conspiracy theories. I found myself bored and annoyed while standing 15 feet from a 20,000 volt ball of lightning, which isn't an easy task.
The museum also has a large selection of books and papers available, including the usual selection of books involving ufo's, cold fusion and 200 mpg cars (build your own! plans only $15.99!), not to mention "reactionless rocket engines" which were going to revolutionize space travel. This particular authors technique was actually laughable. I spent a pretty good sum of money there, and every 'technical paper' which claimed to expose frauds perpetuated by modern science turned out to be either a complete misapplication of the relevant theory or the result of a generally negligible assumption that the author's high school level phyics course neglected to include, but which was large in the particular case he examined. All in all very disappointing, because many of the people are obviously intelligent and motivated to advance science; they just aren't educated enough to be taken seriously. Their sensationalist material looks very much like exciting science when taken at face value, but unfortunately is factually incorrect in every case I've seen.
I had a lot of fun there, though, despite the low quality of some of the exhibitors. It was cheap if you didn't buy souvenirs, the exhibits themselves were excellent, and the publications were at the very least interesting. A good way to spend half a weekend, if you are so inclined. Just don't assume the authors have discoved an unknown, fundamental secret of nature, especially if a more general theory will explain their experimental results. Remember, written down != true.
DVDs are five-inch wide discs that, in this application, hold full-length motion pictures. They are the latest technology for private home viewing of recorded motion pictures. This technology drastically improves the clarity and overall quality of a motion picture shown on a television or computer screen.
Now, I don't know about y'all, but I don't own any dvd's larger than 4.75 inches. Does that mean that they aren't covered by this ruling? Anyone know?
If the link you showed was to Werdna's bio, and your intent was to attack his credibility ad hominem, you failed. At least, if people followed the link and actually read about the man who has spoken so eloquently here today.
Read all the way to the bottom- the guy you pointed us to has a BS in engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science from a very good school, as well as a law degree. And it looks like he's handled some very interesting patent cases, in addition to his aforementioned hooters trademark case. He's "been there, done that" in the computer industry, creating a classic video game series, and he contributes to the open source community. Yet you only felt compelled to list the single bullet on a three page bio that could conceivably be considered derogatory? I think you are dealing with some serious intellectual integrity issues here. What you did is similar to someone linking to your web page and mocking your interest in bestial sexuality.
If I was in a position to need legal advice from someone regarding intellectual property, I think I would be in good hands with this man. If I am looking for information about xml or the mating habits of camels I might ask you.
Thank you, Dr. Greenberg, for taking your time to try to help us understand a complicated issue. It is a shame some of the obviously highly intelligent people here are incapable of extending simple courtesies into their internet discourse; this could be a great site.
I don't hate Katz. I am, however, extremely frustrated by his lack of insight, which imho reflects upon the entire Slashdot community.
I come to Slashdot almost every day. I started coming here when I became overwhelmingly frustrated by seeing conventional media outlets pander to the masses. I would read a newspaper and see a statement by a politician or marketing exec, then do the math and find that he was talking out of his ass; on Slashdot, this behavior is immediately corrected by hundreds of posts explaining in excruciating detail why such and such is blatantly incorrect. I like to read posts by people who know what they are talking about; I have a couple of dozen user pages bookmarked just so I can see what they think on exciting issues. Since I happen to know things about some issues, and have imho well defined, rational arguments to support most of my political and social philosophies, I therefore enjoy posting when I see the opportunity; I can identify with what Jon must feel, because I have had some searing AC replies which have hurt me deeply while at the same time enjoying a greater number of buoying emails. From the relatively few negative emails I have received, and the emotional trauma associated with those particulars, I can tell you that if I received the hundreds of negative replies that Katz has received, I would have moved on long ago. For this he has my utmost respect.
Jon Katz' hellmouth series was initially a major point of interest to me; I had seen both sides of the high school popularity wars and was profoundly moved by some of the insights revealed there. He immediately jumped out at me as a "deep thinker", someone whose ideas were good and therefore someone whose opinion mattered. I cared what he said. After the first hellmouth, I waited impatiently for more wisdom, because I crave insight. I wanted to read the words of someone I respected, expand them and argue against them to achieve a higher level of comprehension. Unfortunately, such gems were rare. Not non-existent, but sporadic and inadequate.
In the months since his first posts, I have become abjectly bored with his work. I have not seen anything which really made me think, nothing which makes me run to the library and delve into the wisdom of the ages, the way posts by amphigory or kintanon or fable2112 or countless others routinely do. I have to say that Katz has neither challenged my beliefs nor caused me to think in anything other than a cursory manner in at lest several months- and if this is true for other Slashdot users, who possibly come here for the same reasons as me, then that could explain a lot of the hostility. When a smart person is expecting stimulating conversation, and receives nothing but shallow blather, hostility is a natural result.
I think that a lot of the hostility currently reserved for Katz would be reduced if he were really as profound of a thinker as he presumes himself to be. If he were Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell or Ayn Rand, people would respond differently--because regardless of whether or they agreed with what he was saying, the content which would come with the posting would provide fertile grounds for argument. As it is, people read a 3000 word essay and come away with only one thought: "What did I waste my time with that for? I could have received equally eloquent commentary from the editorial staff of the small town newspaper." The lack of intellectual substance leads to ad hominem attacks against the author due to sheer exasperation.
I think Katz could be better. I know he has written good stuff; I think he just needs to take a little bit more time preparing his work, making it truly profound instead of the mass of tepidity it is today. If he does this, then I think his problems will solve themselves. That is, if Slashdot would just do away with AC posting...
I guess another solution would be for someone better to start posting to Slashdot; that way we could get our intellectual fixes somewhere else and Katz could be our Spice Girls, good for a few minutes of entertainment but nothing requiring deep reflection. (You listening, David Brin? I doubt it; after the way Slashdot treated you the last time you posted something I wouldn't listen to us either... Neal?/. got you at least one fan, how about giving back? Anyone else? Please?)
...would be to develop some kind of device that could be placed near the oil-slicked areas to keep the seals and penguins from trying to swim in the poisoned water in the first place. Something like the nifty black box that keeps mice from wanting to live in my basement. It probably couldn't be done in time for these particular birds, but you could save their children.
I would personally like to help these penguins, but I don't think sending money or knitting sweaters will help much; this spill seems relatively small from the reports and should be old news long before the sweater I knit gets to Australia. The best way to help is to pay attention to which environmental groups gave money to the rangers on day one, and/or sent people to help clean up, and reimburse them for their diligence. Or put your EE/biology skills to good use and design a better beeper, and make saving them cost less the next time around.
actually you may be right about the minimum number- I am not a professional investor. I remembered the 1/16th thing from a book on investing I read a few months ago. I should have added a disclaimer, and would have except that the darned pie smelled so good:). Is temporary insanity a legitimate plea on slashdot? Anyway the argument holds regardless of what the unit of measure is... when you halve the accuracy of the measurement, you double the error, and the error works for you or against you depending on whether the tick is up or down. Since it is usually up, it is generally a Good Thing if you own stock before the split. This really is not that difficult of a concept...
The point I am making is that if the stock splits, 1/16 of movement in post-split share terms is as valuable to you as 1/8 in original-share-space. Splitting twice, 1/16 becomes 1/4th. Splitting three times, 1/16th of post split share becomes like moving 1/2 originally... and it is somewhat easier to move 1/16th than 1/2. This multiplication factor is cumulative over time, and saying it doesn't happen is foolish and ignorant. It isn't primarily day traders who make money from this, since people who own stock before the split make more money than people who hang on to it for 2 minutes. Splitting is good, and makes money, or the rich guys wouldn't do it.
Kootch- why put a link to your homepage on/. if you are going to protect it with a password? Am I missing something fundamental?
This is very inaccurate. A stock split is good for the stockholders for several reasons.
First off, the smallest amount of change that can occur in a stock is 1/16 of a dollar- called a "teenie" in wall-street speak. Think about what this means- originally there were 60 million RH shares, now there are 120. If the stock moves at the minimum possible delta, you make twice as much money when the stock has split. It doesn't sound like much, but once it has split 2:1 four times you are talking rounding up (or down) a whole dollar/original share every time the price moves. That's a lot of capitalization on a technicality.
Another reason the price matters is that many people are shallow enough to think that since RHAT is going for 236 and MSFT is at 110, RHAT is overvalued. They don't always look to see that there are 5.174 billion microsoft shares out there, compared to the 60 million rhats. (because msft has split a dozen times or more)People are more likely to buy 50 shares at 75 than 50 shares at 250- that is just human nature.
I can surely think of more reasons, but my office is starting a Christmas party and if I don't run I will miss the apple pie... yumm...
I have somehow accidentally moderated a few posts as offtopic. I don't know how this occurred; my conjecture is that I scrolled the list with my wheel mouse. I am posting here so my moderation is cancelled. My apologies to those who were raped by my clumsiness! I did mean for #25 to be rated up, oh well.
In my personal experience, Netscape is the best free industrial strength browser for windows. I definitely prefer it to IE5 for several reasons. Before you get excited and hit the flame button, read all of the paragraphs below.
I prefer netscape to ie because imho netscape loads faster, does a much better job of rendering pages, and is much more stable.
I see a lot of comments regarding the fact that Netscape is slow to load, as opposed to ie, which is fast. To those people, I propose a challenge: remove ie from the windows shell, and then evaluate again. The first thing you will notice is that Windows loads 8-10 seconds faster (on a k6-3 450, 192 MB). The only reason I can think of for this is that Windows is already loading IE when it boots up... 'launching' IE simply shows it on your screen. The equivalent function in netscape would be to open the messenger, then click "New Navigator Window". Instantaneous. MS is fooling you into thinking that ie is fast by hiding the real time it takes to load. (I am probably betraying my ignorance of how it works; feel free to correct me. I am an engineer, not a programmer.) The second thing you notice is that Netscape loads much faster; I would go so far as to say twice as fast. I would be very interested to know why this is, since my computer should not be resource limited in this situation.
The only real evidence I have that netscape renders faster is anecdotal; I had always used Netscape on my NT box at work (PII 300), until the network people decided to only allow IE5 to access the proxy servers(I don't know how they did this, but we recieved a message saying to switch to ie, then netscape stopped working). Forced to switch, I immediately noticed that anything I did on the network was slowed- pages that used to take 3 seconds to d/l and render (i.e. a slashdot page with 150 comments) now gave me time to go get coffee. Since this happened overnight, I am pretty sure that the browser was the culprit.
I have also seen a lot of comments saying how unstable Netscape is. I have noticed this on my home computer as well- sort of. Once again, I don't think this is Netscape's fault. My evidence is more interesting this time: I had a nice, stable environment on my machine, with netscape 4.7 and ie5 beta that my Diamond video card installed for me; one day I got bored and decided to upgrade to the new version. Upon upgrading, Netscape suddenly started crashing. Literally every time I accessed a java applet in a seperate window. I changed nothing in my netscape configuration- only my ie setup, yet what was affected was netscape. I removed IE5, reinstalled windows and netscape, and now everything works well again. I haven't had netscape crash since.
I am not a linux bigot, or even a MS hater- in fact I have been accused of being a MS lackey on this list more than once. My preferred windows browser is actually opera, except it isn't free and I dislike the MDI. I have used Netscape on linux (mandrake 5.1) and unix (IRIX 6.2), and it sucks on both; linux much worse than irix. In fact, the lack of a good linux web browser is keeping me from using linux for anything other than a cheap terminal server when I need to access an sgi from my pc... maybe I will try again when mozilla gets up and running. Or opera. But on Windows it is and has always been superior to IE, and you are fooling yourself if you say it isn't out of some sense of egalitarianism or generosity to MS.
To borrow Neal Stephenson's OS metaphor and apply it to browsers, the point I have been trying to make here is that if having a Toyota in your garage causes your Ford to run poorly, one answer would be to sell the Toyota. If your garage is currently unable to hold a Toyota and you have a rusty old pickup, it might be better to try and fix the pickup rather than inviting a product of dubious integrity into your home. Or maybe you should buy a porsche from the guys over at Opera.
There is a Carl Sandburg poem that I have hanging on my cubicle wall; it pretty much sums up what you are trying to say. I use it to remind me that power is not eternal. The subjects of an empire must be eternally vigilant if they want their empire to last eternally; a lot of things can happen to destroy it.
Anyway it goes something like this; I am reciting from memory since I am not near my cube right now:
It has happened before; Strong men put up a city, and got a nation together, and paid singers to sing, and women to warble: This is the greatest city, the greatest nation, Nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang, and the strong men listened, And paid the singers well, and felt good about it all, There were rats and lizards who listened. And the only listeners left, now, are the rats and the lizards.
And there are crows, crying: "Caw! Caw!" Bringing mud and sticks, building a nest On the doors where the panels were cedar And the strips on the panels were gold And the golden girls came singing, "We are the greatest city, the greatest nation, Nothing like us ever was.
Now having said this, I do not believe that the Chinese space program poses a serious threat to the American empire. China will not be a serious military threat for at least 25 years, assuming that no great disaster occurs here and no technological leap occurs there. The future of mankind lies in space, and the more people we have sticking their heads up there the better it will be for all of our (grand?) children.
The absolute best thing that could happen would be that a competitive space industry based upon the pursuit of the profit motive would spring up overnight, launching us into the true space age. IMHO, of course, but I would like to walk on Mars someday and I don't see it happening in an era of socialized space exploration.
(btw, I went to an American school and I understood your translation of "land of islam". Most other people I have just asked in an impromptu poll knew as well... most even correctly identified Saladin, Kerbogha, and Kulavan.)
How much of the purchase price of a new CD do you think the artist gets? And how much goes to the record company and the various middle-men?
Not nearly enough. Something like 40-50 cents... I am acutely aware of this because nearly all of my favorite bands have been royally screwed by their record companies in the past few years. If you get bored, look up what EMI records did to Marillion just in time for their 1997 US tour...
But realize I am not defending the middlemen. I am defending my ability to have the kind of music I like, made and produced by the few people who can do it. I have demanding musical tastes; perhaps a hundred virtuoso musicians in the entire world meet my rigorous standards. But since I take music so seriously, since my musical collection makes such a significant contribution to my happiness, a lot would be missing from my life if John Petrucci had not bothered to learn to play the guitar. Even if he had, I would never have heard him if 'Pull Me Under' wasn't played on KSHE-95; and I am sure that KSHE would not have played them if they hadn't recieved a free cd from the record company.
Still, I realize that the RIAA is an evil organization. My fiance' was a radio DJ for (several) Colorado rock stations, and tells stories about being forced to play only songs on the official playlists; simply an example of the RIAA misusing its powers to crush non-member recording groups by not allowing them airtime. I remember one particular instance she was literally forced to recite a list of good things about the new Green Day single, even though she hated it, so that it would sell well. If she didn't, the record company would have refused to pay "maintenance fees" to the station, and she would have lost her job. Any organization that would cause Green Day and the Spice Girls to become cultural icons obviously has serious issues.
Because I enjoy music that is not exactly popular in this country, I usually have to order CD's directly from bands I find in obscure clubs by word of mouth. If I get really lucky, CDNOW will help me. I hate this! I hate walking down the aisles at Best Buy and finding nothing of enough merit to pay for. But killing copyright laws won't solve that; instead of being filled with crap, the shelves would become empty. Or, more likely, RIAA would find starving musicians of mediocre talent and use their music anyway, thereby achieving the same dominance as today except royalty-free.
In a perfect world, every penny I spend to get my latest fix would go straight to the musicians. People who made good music would be rich then whether they sold 50,000 copies or 6 million copies... but the solution articulated in the article is comparable to industrial murder, regardless of what 'philosophical' viewpoint you take. You have to be very naive to believe that people who are forced to work day jobs because they give away their music, will make the same quality music as people who are allowed to concentrate on their art by copyrighting it, selling it and becoming as wealthy as possible.
Scudder
PS. good web page Greg- you might want to check out The Gathering, a Dutch prog metal band. Their female lead vocalist is tremendous, with strong, ethereal vocals, and the band itself is reminiscent of Rush/Yes... very powerful and deft guitar work. Start with Nighttime Birds or Mandylion.
And to the fifty people who replied to tell me that eternal copyright laws were bad: notice I never said that. My post was simply directed at the particular section of the article that discussed "giving back to society". Directed at what looked to me like a blatant appeal to get something for nothing...
Thank you for taking the time to write a very insightful post. I just want to take a minute to point out one thing that you overlooked; basically, that no amendment should be necessary, because the Constitution as it stands already forbids anything that your proposed amendment would prohibit.
The Constitution is designed as a framework for the Federal government. It explicitly states the powers and responsibilities of said government; the government cannot do anything that is not described therein. The Bill of Rights is tacked on at the end simply to ensure that no possible interpretation of the constitution could ever possibly infringe upon certain rights; but, those rights are not necessarily the only ones we have.
IIRC many of the signers of the constitution were strongly against having a Bill of Rights at all, because they knew that people would eventually acquire the meme that the Bill was an absolute statement of what rights they possess, instead of an assertion to a set of principles of which the Bill was a mere subset. Witness the people who claim the second amendment as an impediment to gun control for an excellent example of people who just don't "get" America.
In my first paragraph I say 'should be' instead of 'is' necessary because so many of these people exist. It may in the future become necessary to place more of the individual freedoms that seemed so apparent to our forefathers into concrete, to prevent people who subconsciously or consciously attack freedom from succeeding.
Heh. Yes, I realize that may have been overextending an over-used metaphor, but it was based on something that happened to someone I worked with a few years back... let me explain.
In the spring-summer of 1993, the Mississippi river flooded viciously in what was called at the time "The Flood of the Century". Much of the city was damaged, with many areas completely underwater. The national guard was called in for damage control, and huge sandbag levies were built to protect subdivisions from the relentless waves.
After the floods had receded, most of the southern part of the city was without water; what few stations survived had to work at 100+%capacity(1) to meet demand. The reason for this was that a number of pumping stations on the Mississippi had been flooded out, the equipment destroyed, when the water rose.
I worked at the time for a small (5-15 person) construction company who fixed water and wastewater treatment plants. We basically went in and yanked out the old equipment and brought the new equipment in by crane or helicopter, installing it as quickly as possible.
The new equipment we were installing consisted of (gross generalization) huge stainless steel tanks; usually the steel was 3/8" to 1/2" thick. We used a sort of industrial nailgun(2) to drive giant rivets into these tanks, then attached a pair of 4 foot rivet pliars to fasten them tight. Anyway one day a grunt (3) got careless with the rivet gun, and put a 3 inch blue steel rivet through the fleshy part of his left hand...
We found him almost a half hour later, because there were only 4 of us there that day and we were working in a different part of the station. The station was generally so loud we had to wear earplugs constantly. He was lying passed out in a pool of blood, with his hand pinned to the tank, his whole body suspended a foot from the ground. EMS had to drill through the rivet with a huge makita drill to get his hand free... i guess the good part of it was that by drilling the rivet away, they cauterized the wound. heh.
The moral of this story is, be careful what kind of tool you use to perform tasks. They might backfire.
(1) Pumping stations normally operate at 25-50% of maximum capacity to extend parts life. They can usually go to 130% or so of rated capP. Some of the equipment we replaced had been in use since 1925
(2) Normal nailguns use.22 rifle blanks for power; this one used 7 mm 'mauser' rifle shells.
So let me get this straight: authors, artists, and other people with unique talents spend their lives sweating over typewriters or playing music in shitty bars, and you want to take the fruits of their labors without payment? After they sacrifice their lives to hone their skills and abilities, betting everything on the of chance that they could become successful in an unforgiving field? Bah. I guess you have never been in a situation where your next meal depends on the royalties from a novel... or a song... or a program.
A society based on your give-back principle would be a very gray society... No one would bother producing anything new. You can't say "give me" without giving back- in this case, paying the people who produce for you the things you enjoy.
Don't assume libertarians are naive because we think hammers are better than rifles for pounding nails. Some problems may require drastic solutions, but this isn't one of them. I find it ironic that on a site dominated by Linux enthusiasts, people constantly post in favor of industry regulation; justifying it by claiming Microsoft as an example of a market failure! Talk about pulling wool over your own eyes to make your hands invisible...
To be honest, I don't care what Microsoft wants. I expect that they want to make money; so do I. So do you. If they pursue this interest in a way that harms us, such as by destroying companies we admire, they anger and alienate us and shatter what fragile loyalty remains. They can only do this so long before the reaction reaches critical mass.
The best way to handle Microsoft is to write better code. The rest will fall into place. The worst thing that could happen right now would be for the DOJ to go AT&T on M$; it could paralyze the most vital industry we have left in this country.
To get more on-topic: Vote against Al Gore. Vote against George Bush. Vote for the parties who care more about seeing their ideals in action than about getting into office. Keep America free.
If 3dfx was primarily motivated by their marketing department, they would have used 32 bit color on their voodoo3. Instead, they used 24 because you don't really need 32 bit. Granted that 32 bit produces slightly better image quality; given a choice between 2 cards at $125 that will do 85 fps (Q1 demo1) on a k6-3 450 at 800x600, one being a 24 bit card and one being a 32 bit card, I would choose the 32. But even today, almost a year after I bought my Voodoo3 3000, you have to spend $200+ to get similar peformance at 32 bit. And to be honest, I can't tell the difference between 24 bit color on my machine and 32 bit color on my sister's new p3 550 gateway box (on my.22 19" monitor). My eyes are pretty bad, but still...
If 3dfx was primarily motivated by their marketing department, they would have also made 32 and 64 mb versions of the card as well, even though the increase in performance would have been negligible- just to sell more cards at a higher price. They didn't. Unlike some video card companies I might mention, they did the math and determined what the maximum memory required would be, then built the card. By building a little card and cranking up the real technology, they gave me a card that doubled the framerate I could get otherwise. Without tricking me. Without telling me that the V3 would make the net go faster.
A definition of an engineer is "Person who uses technology to solve problems". This is as true in computers as it is in any other field. Auto engineers trade horsepower and cabin size for fuel economy; aero engineers doing cfd neglect certain terms in order to get 'viscous' solutions in weeks instead of years. I happen to have a lot of respect for the engineers at 3dfx because they were honest about the capabilities of their product; anyone can put all the bells and whistles on and charge you a fortune. Engineering occurs when you start adding constraints, forcing engineers to make design choices, and then have the integrity to state the limitations instead of hiding them.
Thanks 3DFX.
(Now if they would just fix the alt-tab bug in gl quake...)
Before you call UNcle Sam disinterested, recognize that if a government has the power to ensure privacy, it has the power to take it away.
The first law of bureaucracy states that bureaucratic entities expand their powers to the maximum carrying capacity of the organization they control. By stating this law in the form of a single proposition and applying it to the government of a society by a bureaucratic government, and then taking the limit to infinity, we easily see that entrusting the government with any power eventually results in conceding to them complete power- and thus complete forfeiture of individual control. Thus if you concede to the government the power to protect privacy, you will eventually lose ALL privacy. It may take generations, or at least many years, but it will happen.
I value my privacy, and I am sure that you do as well. Because of this, I think it is safe to assume that this is not a solution any of us would like to see implemented. What, then, is to be done about gross offenders such as Intel and Real Audio? If we don't enact stifling restrictions like the EU 'privacy' laws, who will protect us from these wild beasts, the darker side of capitalism?
I say we can protect ourselves. We are in control here- no matter what the fool propagandists tell you, it is the individual consumers who make the leviathans like Intel able to put id's on their chips. Without a continuous revenue stream, corporations die. No matter how large, no matter how entrenched. The one thing corporations value is your dollar bills. The solution is so incredibly simple... Because capitalism works. Because if Real Audio is really afraid that people will take issue with their inclusion of monitoring software, there is no way in hell that they will include it- unless they receive more net profit through the addition than without it.
I will never buy an Intel processor. I will never own a copy of any Real Networks software. I have already taken steps to ensure that no one at my location will have Real Networks software installed (3000+ seats) because of the security concerns involved; hopefully we will be buying Athlon processors with our future workstations as well. If a few million other people do the same, then every future PHB who looks at a software algorithm for approval will shudder at the thought of infringing upon my privacy and yours.
I am glad to see that you welcome Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler as Christian Scientists, hundreds of years after their deaths. Their contributions to mankinds knowledge should make all Christians proud, (including you and me). I can't help but find it ironic, however, that they were all branded heretics by the Church while they were alive; Galileo was even faced with the option of burning at the stake or renouncing his ideas. Would you have supported him then? Heh.
Charles Darwin lived to see himself hated by religious extremists, to the point that they tried to outlaw the very consideration of his theories. For the simple crime of describing the world as God created it, instead of as people in Kansas wish it were, he watched his name become synonymous with evil. He lived to see himself become a fundamental barrier between Christianity and reality, between people who think and people who blindly follow the men in black cloth. Yet you seem proud to have him as a Christian. Strange.
Read about the 'Pascal's wager' argument to find out why he was a christian. You might be surprised...
IMHO Christians are their own worst enemies when confronting issues of science. How better to lose credibility in the face of the not-yet-converted or the converted-but-questioning but to deny the existence of something that obviously happens? The Church did this when they branded Galileo a heretic in 1633; they did it with Darwin and again now with the recent Kansan stance on evolution. The people who do this are either fools, or charlatans intent on destroying the church proper.
A small note to any men of the church who are listening: Religion must be flexible enough to account for revolutions in thought, or else it will lose ground amongst the intelligentsia. Once this happens, there are only 2 means of recourse: violently hiding the truth, as with Galileo et al., or fading into obscurity/being absorbed into cults that are flexible, as happened with most pre-christian pagan cults. Science is your friend, because Science is man's best estimate of The Truth, and religion seeks to provide Truth for the people. Denying one piece of Truth makes even the most fundamental canonical propositions suspect.
Final cheap shot(that exemplifies my point completely): "To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin" -Cardinal Belleramine
Now one of 3 things happened here, based on this quote and the fact that the Cardinal can be assumed to be stating the official position of the Church (and therefore God). Either 1) Jesus as we think of him is a fraud (unlikely imho), 2) God changed his mind based on reading Galileo's paper (even less likely), 3) Some poor shephard fucked up when he wrote down the original text in the bible. (Pretty likely) Unfortunately, certain members of the church were too stupid to consider this an option, and caused a good man to be incarcerated for life. And caused an unfathomable amount of damage to their own cause, by sickening hundreds and thousands of people for all eternity.
Oh, and look up what 'oxymoron' actually means, please.
Ben Bova has a couple of great books dealing with just that. Try Privateers or the sequel Empire Builders; both well illustrate the idea that a well-meaning treaty "is just a scrap of paper" when there is no effective deterrant to aggression. And they provide a shocking demonstration of what will happen to America if our leadership continues to handle space exploration as they are today.
Plus both are shameless plugs for free enterprise, in space and elsewhere. Read them!
Understand that the purpose of literature is to depict a characteristic of human nature, to 'define the human experience'. Contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison do this by analyzing the way people live, think, and treat each other today, or at unique times in the past; Alabama during the pre-civil rights era, for instance, or London during a WW2 air raid. They make projections, approximations to their concept of the myriad faces of humanity, based on snapshots of characters and actions. The best manage to create lasting impressions and characters who become in themselves metaphors for life, feelings, or personalities. Hamlet. John Wayne. Al Bundy. Nehemiah Scudder.
Science fiction is unique in that it not only tries to show what is, but what will be and what could be. Heinlein imho was the best at this, because his stories almost never dealt directly with technology; instead, they dealt with minor adjustments in the fabric of society, and then extrapolation to reveal fundamental truths about his estimation of the human experience based on what changes and what stays the same. Taking the partial derivatives of society with respect to its constituent elements, if you will. Like solving a PDE, exact solutions are sparse; authors are forced to make assumptions and invent initial and boundary conditions to achieve any results whatsoever. Living on imported air deep within an underground chamber, as in Mistress; Life from the eyes of a man with no human prejudice (); delta-perspective in people who lived exceedingly long lives, versus the ephemerals who lived normal lives ( Methuselah, et al). The way I view the world has changed 100% in the past 3 years; i have gone from being a Christian fundamentalist, quasi-authoritarian to an ardent libertarian, based on comparatively few life experiences. How can I even imagine what I would think with that kind of perspective? RAH tried. imho he did a pretty good job; iyho, he failed. Perspective again.
The protagonists were females in most of Heinlein's better books. Friday, which you mentioned, was one of these. These females were always: smart, beautiful, brave, strong, and passionate. They can shoot with both hands, cook almost as well as their husbands, usually fly aircraft and sometimes program computers. They can talk philosophy, enjoy sex and advanced mathematics as well as flaunting their sexuality, even to the extent of *gasp* bearing children. Mind you, these were mostly written in a day where women were depicted as frail, weak creatures wearing aprons and house slippers; many years before the popular acceptance of womens liberation. How does this make RAH a sexist? I will grant you that some women will feel threatened by this description of women as living goddesses. But RAH wasn't writing about them; remember, one of his wives was a voluptuous redheaded Olympic swimmer with an advanced degree in Aeronautical engineering. He was writing about her.
And also recognize that Friday killed most of the men who raped her (and many who didn't). Violently, brutally, tearing them to pieces with her polished fighting skills. She married one of them, years later; but in spite of, not because, he raped her. And marriage in that civilization was a fundamentally different concept than marriage in ours, so you can't really compare the two except to say that they are spelled the same and involve consensual sharing of life experiences among mature adults.
To get back on topic, Neal Stephenson did a tremendous job with Snow Crash by depicting what he thinks life in America would be like if us libertarian-anarchists have our way... I was actually forced to recognize that things could be worse in a free-er country. The organized crime aspect was very astute, and I literally rofl'd at the first mention of General Jim. The ending left me exceedingly empty as well; while probably more accurate than what I have become adjusted to in this era of conflict resolution, it wasn't exactly what I'd hoped for. I have a number of questions I would love to ask NS, btw. HINT HINT.
when a democratic society has certain necessary features.
The fundamental reason democracy works better than tyranny is that the best solution for any given problem is more likely to come from the minds of 250 million individuals than from one. No matter how smart the tyrant is, the odds are seriously balanced such that someone else in the masses has had an experience or an insight that makes his opinion on the issue at least equally relevant.
However, there are also 249,999,999 people in that mass who don't know the best solution. Therefore the one person who knows must be free to speak his mind, and the others must have the minimum level of intelligence necessary to recognize his contribution. This is critical because the main thing masses are good at is shouting loudly; quality of thought, not quantity, is the key to successful democracy.
Microsoft's online democracy tried to emulate this successful paradigm, and came very close; apparently IK was a pretty good match for GK when assisted by the other panelists, powerful computers, and the lack of time constraints. Unfortunately, the system was flawed in such a way that the voice of reason was not heard from at a critical time... and the match was lost. Democracy qua Microsoft fails miserably.
A better test of democracy qua Democracy as an allegory for our civilization would have been Gary Kasperov vs. the World in a multi-competition consisting of Chess, Backgammon, Parcheesi, and Quake. Possibly with some other skills such as metalworking, water skiing, lion taming or French cooking thrown in. While GK may be the greatest chessmaster in the world, I have a feeling Thresh is a better cook.
IANA climatologist, I have been wondering about something for a long time. Every mass media scare story I see about global warming eventually focuses on one thing: coastal cities sinking into the ocean, killing millions of people. Pictures of people surfing amongst the skyscrapers of Miami, Boston, and New York, etc. It seems to be accepted that when global warming occurs, the oceans will rise. Now, my question is: Why!
The polar ice caps are made of ice. Huge chunks of ice, with a few rocks and other miscellaneous debris thrown in. The vast majority of these ice blocks are underwater, which means that when they melt, they will probably lose at least as much ice to the ocean from beneath the sea as from above. Since ice has a lower specific density than water, the net effect will be that there will be less liquid volume in the ocean after the ice melts. If this is correct, then the oceans will recede. (Confirm this yourself by dropping a bunch of ice cubes in a cup of warm water and measuring the water level before and after they melt.)
Can someone in this forum please explain to me why I am wrong? I know that the obviously intelligent and well-funded environmentalists would never lie to me about the effects or causes of global warming, so...
Gattaca is not a movie about genetic engineering, any more than it was a movie about solar power, space travel or music appreciation. Gattaca is a classic romantic fiction; Andrew Niccol takes a simple theme, the idea of a society stratified by poor genetic engineering practices, and uses it as a tool to highlight the fundamental truth that the human spirit is far more important than the combination of amino acids in your bones. Genetic engineering itself is just a prop, like the impeccably tailored suits and the spiral staircase. The fact that the director could not accomplish his goal of showing its lack of importance without it does not make it the central idea in the movie.
Niccol wanted to show that a human being can accomplish nothing in life without a dream, without a goal. Jude Law's perfect character demonstrates this remarkably well: an incredibly refined thoroughbred, born with every advantage, incinerates himself at the very instant of the in-valid's greatest achievement. He had no goal but to be better than his fellow men, and he was psychologically destroyed because he was beaten. How well this contrasts to the unhealthy, disadvantaged boy who dreams of conquering space!
"What level of imperfection can be tolerated in a Gattaca employee?" the genetically engineered brother asks the Mission Director. "Nothing that would have kept you out". Tremendous! The bully, the antagonist who was born strong and made bold by his proud parents, told that his weak and frail brother had dared to achieve greatness while he himself had settled for a menial job as an enforcer. How about the girl who was born nearly perfect, an inch from achieving her dream, but held down because she believes that the Fates are alive in her genes? Her punishment for mysticism was that she would never step inside a spacecraft, never see the rings of Saturn or the sands of Mars. But the broken, miserable, snot-nosed boy would, because he believed in himself and was willing to pay the full price for life.
What Niccol unfortunately did not show well in Gattaca is what an engineered human with his own supply of veriditas would be capable of. Because the points that made Ethan Hawke such a magnificent character could easily be possessed by anyone. Imagine a high school football team with a front line averaging 240 lbs of solid muscle and a minimum I.Q. of 155. The genetically engineered star linebacker goes to Berkeley and studies Aeronautical Engineering, graduates with honors and goes on to start his own private space company. In the other world, the one we live in today, he is a fat idiot who gets an athletic scholarship to UT Knoxville, spends his college football career date-raping sorority girls, graduates with a PE degrees and spends the rest of his life drinking beer and belching. Selling used cars, maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
I visited the museum a few years back. It had some very interesting stuff, including a pretty good introductory film and a number of nifty gadgets like tesla coils, viscosity pumps, etc. Unfortunately, the staff was not very technically knowledgable and made a large number of mistakes while trying to describe the physics behind the toys. The one who led my tour was completely lacking in fluid dynamics or gas dynamics theory, while being very well versed in the conspiracy theories. I found myself bored and annoyed while standing 15 feet from a 20,000 volt ball of lightning, which isn't an easy task.
The museum also has a large selection of books and papers available, including the usual selection of books involving ufo's, cold fusion and 200 mpg cars (build your own! plans only $15.99!), not to mention "reactionless rocket engines" which were going to revolutionize space travel. This particular authors technique was actually laughable. I spent a pretty good sum of money there, and every 'technical paper' which claimed to expose frauds perpetuated by modern science turned out to be either a complete misapplication of the relevant theory or the result of a generally negligible assumption that the author's high school level phyics course neglected to include, but which was large in the particular case he examined. All in all very disappointing, because many of the people are obviously intelligent and motivated to advance science; they just aren't educated enough to be taken seriously. Their sensationalist material looks very much like exciting science when taken at face value, but unfortunately is factually incorrect in every case I've seen.
I had a lot of fun there, though, despite the low quality of some of the exhibitors. It was cheap if you didn't buy souvenirs, the exhibits themselves were excellent, and the publications were at the very least interesting. A good way to spend half a weekend, if you are so inclined. Just don't assume the authors have discoved an unknown, fundamental secret of nature, especially if a more general theory will explain their experimental results. Remember, written down != true.
In the official ruling, it was thus stated:
Facts
DVDs are five-inch wide discs that, in this application, hold full-length motion pictures. They are the latest technology for private home viewing of recorded motion pictures. This technology drastically improves the clarity and overall quality of a motion picture shown on a television or computer screen.
Now, I don't know about y'all, but I don't own any dvd's larger than 4.75 inches. Does that mean that they aren't covered by this ruling? Anyone know?
Rev Neh
If the link you showed was to Werdna's bio, and your intent was to attack his credibility ad hominem, you failed. At least, if people followed the link and actually read about the man who has spoken so eloquently here today.
Read all the way to the bottom- the guy you pointed us to has a BS in engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science from a very good school, as well as a law degree. And it looks like he's handled some very interesting patent cases, in addition to his aforementioned hooters trademark case. He's "been there, done that" in the computer industry, creating a classic video game series, and he contributes to the open source community. Yet you only felt compelled to list the single bullet on a three page bio that could conceivably be considered derogatory? I think you are dealing with some serious intellectual integrity issues here. What you did is similar to someone linking to your web page and mocking your interest in bestial sexuality.
If I was in a position to need legal advice from someone regarding intellectual property, I think I would be in good hands with this man. If I am looking for information about xml or the mating habits of camels I might ask you.
Thank you, Dr. Greenberg, for taking your time to try to help us understand a complicated issue. It is a shame some of the obviously highly intelligent people here are incapable of extending simple courtesies into their internet discourse; this could be a great site.
Rev. Neh
I don't hate Katz. I am, however, extremely frustrated by his lack of insight, which imho reflects upon the entire Slashdot community.
/. got you at least one fan, how about giving back? Anyone else? Please?)
I come to Slashdot almost every day. I started coming here when I became overwhelmingly frustrated by seeing conventional media outlets pander to the masses. I would read a newspaper and see a statement by a politician or marketing exec, then do the math and find that he was talking out of his ass; on Slashdot, this behavior is immediately corrected by hundreds of posts explaining in excruciating detail why such and such is blatantly incorrect. I like to read posts by people who know what they are talking about; I have a couple of dozen user pages bookmarked just so I can see what they think on exciting issues. Since I happen to know things about some issues, and have imho well defined, rational arguments to support most of my political and social philosophies, I therefore enjoy posting when I see the opportunity; I can identify with what Jon must feel, because I have had some searing AC replies which have hurt me deeply while at the same time enjoying a greater number of buoying emails. From the relatively few negative emails I have received, and the emotional trauma associated with those particulars, I can tell you that if I received the hundreds of negative replies that Katz has received, I would have moved on long ago. For this he has my utmost respect.
Jon Katz' hellmouth series was initially a major point of interest to me; I had seen both sides of the high school popularity wars and was profoundly moved by some of the insights revealed there. He immediately jumped out at me as a "deep thinker", someone whose ideas were good and therefore someone whose opinion mattered. I cared what he said. After the first hellmouth, I waited impatiently for more wisdom, because I crave insight. I wanted to read the words of someone I respected, expand them and argue against them to achieve a higher level of comprehension. Unfortunately, such gems were rare. Not non-existent, but sporadic and inadequate.
In the months since his first posts, I have become abjectly bored with his work. I have not seen anything which really made me think, nothing which makes me run to the library and delve into the wisdom of the ages, the way posts by amphigory or kintanon or fable2112 or countless others routinely do. I have to say that Katz has neither challenged my beliefs nor caused me to think in anything other than a cursory manner in at lest several months- and if this is true for other Slashdot users, who possibly come here for the same reasons as me, then that could explain a lot of the hostility. When a smart person is expecting stimulating conversation, and receives nothing but shallow blather, hostility is a natural result.
I think that a lot of the hostility currently reserved for Katz would be reduced if he were really as profound of a thinker as he presumes himself to be. If he were Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell or Ayn Rand, people would respond differently--because regardless of whether or they agreed with what he was saying, the content which would come with the posting would provide fertile grounds for argument. As it is, people read a 3000 word essay and come away with only one thought: "What did I waste my time with that for? I could have received equally eloquent commentary from the editorial staff of the small town newspaper." The lack of intellectual substance leads to ad hominem attacks against the author due to sheer exasperation.
I think Katz could be better. I know he has written good stuff; I think he just needs to take a little bit more time preparing his work, making it truly profound instead of the mass of tepidity it is today. If he does this, then I think his problems will solve themselves. That is, if Slashdot would just do away with AC posting...
I guess another solution would be for someone better to start posting to Slashdot; that way we could get our intellectual fixes somewhere else and Katz could be our Spice Girls, good for a few minutes of entertainment but nothing requiring deep reflection. (You listening, David Brin? I doubt it; after the way Slashdot treated you the last time you posted something I wouldn't listen to us either... Neal?
Rev. Nehemiah
...would be to develop some kind of device that could be placed near the oil-slicked areas to keep the seals and penguins from trying to swim in the poisoned water in the first place. Something like the nifty black box that keeps mice from wanting to live in my basement. It probably couldn't be done in time for these particular birds, but you could save their children.
I would personally like to help these penguins, but I don't think sending money or knitting sweaters will help much; this spill seems relatively small from the reports and should be old news long before the sweater I knit gets to Australia. The best way to help is to pay attention to which environmental groups gave money to the rangers on day one, and/or sent people to help clean up, and reimburse them for their diligence. Or put your EE/biology skills to good use and design a better beeper, and make saving them cost less the next time around.
Rev. Neh
actually you may be right about the minimum number- I am not a professional investor. I remembered the 1/16th thing from a book on investing I read a few months ago. I should have added a disclaimer, and would have except that the darned pie smelled so good :). Is temporary insanity a legitimate plea on slashdot? Anyway the argument holds regardless of what the unit of measure is... when you halve the accuracy of the measurement, you double the error, and the error works for you or against you depending on whether the tick is up or down. Since it is usually up, it is generally a Good Thing if you own stock before the split. This really is not that difficult of a concept...
/. if you are going to protect it with a password? Am I missing something fundamental?
The point I am making is that if the stock splits, 1/16 of movement in post-split share terms is as valuable to you as 1/8 in original-share-space. Splitting twice, 1/16 becomes 1/4th. Splitting three times, 1/16th of post split share becomes like moving 1/2 originally... and it is somewhat easier to move 1/16th than 1/2. This multiplication factor is cumulative over time, and saying it doesn't happen is foolish and ignorant. It isn't primarily day traders who make money from this, since people who own stock before the split make more money than people who hang on to it for 2 minutes. Splitting is good, and makes money, or the rich guys wouldn't do it.
Kootch- why put a link to your homepage on
Rev. Nehemiah
This is very inaccurate. A stock split is good for the stockholders for several reasons.
First off, the smallest amount of change that can occur in a stock is 1/16 of a dollar- called a "teenie" in wall-street speak. Think about what this means- originally there were 60 million RH shares, now there are 120. If the stock moves at the minimum possible delta, you make twice as much money when the stock has split. It doesn't sound like much, but once it has split 2:1 four times you are talking rounding up (or down) a whole dollar/original share every time the price moves. That's a lot of capitalization on a technicality.
Another reason the price matters is that many people are shallow enough to think that since RHAT is going for 236 and MSFT is at 110, RHAT is overvalued. They don't always look to see that there are 5.174 billion microsoft shares out there, compared to the 60 million rhats. (because msft has split a dozen times or more)People are more likely to buy 50 shares at 75 than 50 shares at 250- that is just human nature.
I can surely think of more reasons, but my office is starting a Christmas party and if I don't run I will miss the apple pie... yumm...
Rev. Nehemiah
I have somehow accidentally moderated a few posts as offtopic. I don't know how this occurred; my conjecture is that I scrolled the list with my wheel mouse. I am posting here so my moderation is cancelled. My apologies to those who were raped by my clumsiness! I did mean for #25 to be rated up, oh well.
1 (Offtopic) Re:Mars probe failsafes (99/12/04/1111243-103, 4 points left)
-1 (Offtopic) Re:Sure.. (99/12/04/1111243-110, 3 points left)
+1 (Insightful) Re:However... (99/12/04/1111243-25, 2 points left)
-1 (Offtopic) Good idea! (99/12/04/1111243-81, 1 points left)
sorry all.
scudder
In my personal experience, Netscape is the best free industrial strength browser for windows. I definitely prefer it to IE5 for several reasons. Before you get excited and hit the flame button, read all of the paragraphs below.
I prefer netscape to ie because imho netscape loads faster, does a much better job of rendering pages, and is much more stable.
I see a lot of comments regarding the fact that Netscape is slow to load, as opposed to ie, which is fast. To those people, I propose a challenge: remove ie from the windows shell, and then evaluate again. The first thing you will notice is that Windows loads 8-10 seconds faster (on a k6-3 450, 192 MB). The only reason I can think of for this is that Windows is already loading IE when it boots up... 'launching' IE simply shows it on your screen. The equivalent function in netscape would be to open the messenger, then click "New Navigator Window". Instantaneous. MS is fooling you into thinking that ie is fast by hiding the real time it takes to load. (I am probably betraying my ignorance of how it works; feel free to correct me. I am an engineer, not a programmer.) The second thing you notice is that Netscape loads much faster; I would go so far as to say twice as fast. I would be very interested to know why this is, since my computer should not be resource limited in this situation.
The only real evidence I have that netscape renders faster is anecdotal; I had always used Netscape on my NT box at work (PII 300), until the network people decided to only allow IE5 to access the proxy servers(I don't know how they did this, but we recieved a message saying to switch to ie, then netscape stopped working). Forced to switch, I immediately noticed that anything I did on the network was slowed- pages that used to take 3 seconds to d/l and render (i.e. a slashdot page with 150 comments) now gave me time to go get coffee. Since this happened overnight, I am pretty sure that the browser was the culprit.
I have also seen a lot of comments saying how unstable Netscape is. I have noticed this on my home computer as well- sort of. Once again, I don't think this is Netscape's fault. My evidence is more interesting this time: I had a nice, stable environment on my machine, with netscape 4.7 and ie5 beta that my Diamond video card installed for me; one day I got bored and decided to upgrade to the new version. Upon upgrading, Netscape suddenly started crashing. Literally every time I accessed a java applet in a seperate window. I changed nothing in my netscape configuration- only my ie setup, yet what was affected was netscape. I removed IE5, reinstalled windows and netscape, and now everything works well again. I haven't had netscape crash since.
I am not a linux bigot, or even a MS hater- in fact I have been accused of being a MS lackey on this list more than once. My preferred windows browser is actually opera, except it isn't free and I dislike the MDI. I have used Netscape on linux (mandrake 5.1) and unix (IRIX 6.2), and it sucks on both; linux much worse than irix. In fact, the lack of a good linux web browser is keeping me from using linux for anything other than a cheap terminal server when I need to access an sgi from my pc... maybe I will try again when mozilla gets up and running. Or opera. But on Windows it is and has always been superior to IE, and you are fooling yourself if you say it isn't out of some sense of egalitarianism or generosity to MS.
To borrow Neal Stephenson's OS metaphor and apply it to browsers, the point I have been trying to make here is that if having a Toyota in your garage causes your Ford to run poorly, one answer would be to sell the Toyota. If your garage is currently unable to hold a Toyota and you have a rusty old pickup, it might be better to try and fix the pickup rather than inviting a product of dubious integrity into your home. Or maybe you should buy a porsche from the guys over at Opera.
Scudder
There is a Carl Sandburg poem that I have hanging on my cubicle wall; it pretty much sums up what you are trying to say. I use it to remind me that power is not eternal. The subjects of an empire must be eternally vigilant if they want their empire to last eternally; a lot of things can happen to destroy it.
Anyway it goes something like this; I am reciting from memory since I am not near my cube right now:
It has happened before;
Strong men put up a city, and got a nation together,
and paid singers to sing, and women to warble:
This is the greatest city, the greatest nation,
Nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang, and the strong men listened,
And paid the singers well, and felt good about it all,
There were rats and lizards who listened.
And the only listeners left, now, are the rats and the lizards.
And there are crows, crying: "Caw! Caw!"
Bringing mud and sticks, building a nest
On the doors where the panels were cedar
And the strips on the panels were gold
And the golden girls came singing,
"We are the greatest city, the greatest nation,
Nothing like us ever was.
Now having said this, I do not believe that the Chinese space program poses a serious threat to the American empire. China will not be a serious military threat for at least 25 years, assuming that no great disaster occurs here and no technological leap occurs there. The future of mankind lies in space, and the more people we have sticking their heads up there the better it will be for all of our (grand?) children.
The absolute best thing that could happen would be that a competitive space industry based upon the pursuit of the profit motive would spring up overnight, launching us into the true space age. IMHO, of course, but I would like to walk on Mars someday and I don't see it happening in an era of socialized space exploration.
(btw, I went to an American school and I understood your translation of "land of islam". Most other people I have just asked in an impromptu poll knew as well... most even correctly identified Saladin, Kerbogha, and Kulavan.)
Scudder
How much of the purchase price of a new CD do you think the artist gets? And how much goes to the record company and the various middle-men?
Not nearly enough. Something like 40-50 cents... I am acutely aware of this because nearly all of my favorite bands have been royally screwed by their record companies in the past few years. If you get bored, look up what EMI records did to Marillion just in time for their 1997 US tour...
But realize I am not defending the middlemen. I am defending my ability to have the kind of music I like, made and produced by the few people who can do it. I have demanding musical tastes; perhaps a hundred virtuoso musicians in the entire world meet my rigorous standards. But since I take music so seriously, since my musical collection makes such a significant contribution to my happiness, a lot would be missing from my life if John Petrucci had not bothered to learn to play the guitar. Even if he had, I would never have heard him if 'Pull Me Under' wasn't played on KSHE-95; and I am sure that KSHE would not have played them if they hadn't recieved a free cd from the record company.
Still, I realize that the RIAA is an evil organization. My fiance' was a radio DJ for (several) Colorado rock stations, and tells stories about being forced to play only songs on the official playlists; simply an example of the RIAA misusing its powers to crush non-member recording groups by not allowing them airtime. I remember one particular instance she was literally forced to recite a list of good things about the new Green Day single, even though she hated it, so that it would sell well. If she didn't, the record company would have refused to pay "maintenance fees" to the station, and she would have lost her job. Any organization that would cause Green Day and the Spice Girls to become cultural icons obviously has serious issues.
Because I enjoy music that is not exactly popular in this country, I usually have to order CD's directly from bands I find in obscure clubs by word of mouth. If I get really lucky, CDNOW will help me. I hate this! I hate walking down the aisles at Best Buy and finding nothing of enough merit to pay for. But killing copyright laws won't solve that; instead of being filled with crap, the shelves would become empty. Or, more likely, RIAA would find starving musicians of mediocre talent and use their music anyway, thereby achieving the same dominance as today except royalty-free.
In a perfect world, every penny I spend to get my latest fix would go straight to the musicians. People who made good music would be rich then whether they sold 50,000 copies or 6 million copies... but the solution articulated in the article is comparable to industrial murder, regardless of what 'philosophical' viewpoint you take. You have to be very naive to believe that people who are forced to work day jobs because they give away their music, will make the same quality music as people who are allowed to concentrate on their art by copyrighting it, selling it and becoming as wealthy as possible.
Scudder
PS. good web page Greg- you might want to check out The Gathering, a Dutch prog metal band. Their female lead vocalist is tremendous, with strong, ethereal vocals, and the band itself is reminiscent of Rush/Yes... very powerful and deft guitar work. Start with Nighttime Birds or Mandylion.
And to the fifty people who replied to tell me that eternal copyright laws were bad: notice I never said that. My post was simply directed at the particular section of the article that discussed "giving back to society". Directed at what looked to me like a blatant appeal to get something for nothing...
Thank you for taking the time to write a very insightful post. I just want to take a minute to point out one thing that you overlooked; basically, that no amendment should be necessary, because the Constitution as it stands already forbids anything that your proposed amendment would prohibit.
The Constitution is designed as a framework for the Federal government. It explicitly states the powers and responsibilities of said government; the government cannot do anything that is not described therein. The Bill of Rights is tacked on at the end simply to ensure that no possible interpretation of the constitution could ever possibly infringe upon certain rights; but, those rights are not necessarily the only ones we have.
IIRC many of the signers of the constitution were strongly against having a Bill of Rights at all, because they knew that people would eventually acquire the meme that the Bill was an absolute statement of what rights they possess, instead of an assertion to a set of principles of which the Bill was a mere subset. Witness the people who claim the second amendment as an impediment to gun control for an excellent example of people who just don't "get" America.
In my first paragraph I say 'should be' instead of 'is' necessary because so many of these people exist. It may in the future become necessary to place more of the individual freedoms that seemed so apparent to our forefathers into concrete, to prevent people who subconsciously or consciously attack freedom from succeeding.
Scudder
Anyone know where I can read a copy of this speech without having to pay RealNetworks to look at my hard drive?
Heh. Yes, I realize that may have been overextending an over-used metaphor, but it was based on something that happened to someone I worked with a few years back... let me explain.
.22 rifle blanks for power; this one used 7 mm 'mauser' rifle shells.
In the spring-summer of 1993, the Mississippi river flooded viciously in what was called at the time "The Flood of the Century". Much of the city was damaged, with many areas completely underwater. The national guard was called in for damage control, and huge sandbag levies were built to protect subdivisions from the relentless waves.
After the floods had receded, most of the southern part of the city was without water; what few stations survived had to work at 100+%capacity(1) to meet demand. The reason for this was that a number of pumping stations on the Mississippi had been flooded out, the equipment destroyed, when the water rose.
I worked at the time for a small (5-15 person) construction company who fixed water and wastewater treatment plants. We basically went in and yanked out the old equipment and brought the new equipment in by crane or helicopter, installing it as quickly as possible.
The new equipment we were installing consisted of (gross generalization) huge stainless steel tanks; usually the steel was 3/8" to 1/2" thick. We used a sort of industrial nailgun(2) to drive giant rivets into these tanks, then attached a pair of 4 foot rivet pliars to fasten them tight. Anyway one day a grunt (3) got careless with the rivet gun, and put a 3 inch blue steel rivet through the fleshy part of his left hand...
We found him almost a half hour later, because there were only 4 of us there that day and we were working in a different part of the station. The station was generally so loud we had to wear earplugs constantly. He was lying passed out in a pool of blood, with his hand pinned to the tank, his whole body suspended a foot from the ground. EMS had to drill through the rivet with a huge makita drill to get his hand free... i guess the good part of it was that by drilling the rivet away, they cauterized the wound. heh.
The moral of this story is, be careful what kind of tool you use to perform tasks. They might backfire.
(1) Pumping stations normally operate at 25-50% of maximum capacity to extend parts life. They can usually go to 130% or so of rated capP. Some of the equipment we replaced had been in use since 1925
(2) Normal nailguns use
(3) Day laborer, hired from a temp agency
Scudder
So let me get this straight: authors, artists, and other people with unique talents spend their lives sweating over typewriters or playing music in shitty bars, and you want to take the fruits of their labors without payment? After they sacrifice their lives to hone their skills and abilities, betting everything on the of chance that they could become successful in an unforgiving field? Bah. I guess you have never been in a situation where your next meal depends on the royalties from a novel... or a song... or a program.
A society based on your give-back principle would be a very gray society... No one would bother producing anything new. You can't say "give me" without giving back- in this case, paying the people who produce for you the things you enjoy.
Scudder
Don't assume libertarians are naive because we think hammers are better than rifles for pounding nails. Some problems may require drastic solutions, but this isn't one of them. I find it ironic that on a site dominated by Linux enthusiasts, people constantly post in favor of industry regulation; justifying it by claiming Microsoft as an example of a market failure! Talk about pulling wool over your own eyes to make your hands invisible...
To be honest, I don't care what Microsoft wants. I expect that they want to make money; so do I. So do you. If they pursue this interest in a way that harms us, such as by destroying companies we admire, they anger and alienate us and shatter what fragile loyalty remains. They can only do this so long before the reaction reaches critical mass.
The best way to handle Microsoft is to write better code. The rest will fall into place. The worst thing that could happen right now would be for the DOJ to go AT&T on M$; it could paralyze the most vital industry we have left in this country.
To get more on-topic: Vote against Al Gore. Vote against George Bush. Vote for the parties who care more about seeing their ideals in action than about getting into office. Keep America free.
Scudder
If 3dfx was primarily motivated by their marketing department, they would have used 32 bit color on their voodoo3. Instead, they used 24 because you don't really need 32 bit. Granted that 32 bit produces slightly better image quality; given a choice between 2 cards at $125 that will do 85 fps (Q1 demo1) on a k6-3 450 at 800x600, one being a 24 bit card and one being a 32 bit card, I would choose the 32. But even today, almost a year after I bought my Voodoo3 3000, you have to spend $200+ to get similar peformance at 32 bit. And to be honest, I can't tell the difference between 24 bit color on my machine and 32 bit color on my sister's new p3 550 gateway box (on my .22 19" monitor). My eyes are pretty bad, but still...
If 3dfx was primarily motivated by their marketing department, they would have also made 32 and 64 mb versions of the card as well, even though the increase in performance would have been negligible- just to sell more cards at a higher price. They didn't. Unlike some video card companies I might mention, they did the math and determined what the maximum memory required would be, then built the card. By building a little card and cranking up the real technology, they gave me a card that doubled the framerate I could get otherwise. Without tricking me. Without telling me that the V3 would make the net go faster.
A definition of an engineer is "Person who uses technology to solve problems". This is as true in computers as it is in any other field. Auto engineers trade horsepower and cabin size for fuel economy; aero engineers doing cfd neglect certain terms in order to get 'viscous' solutions in weeks instead of years. I happen to have a lot of respect for the engineers at 3dfx because they were honest about the capabilities of their product; anyone can put all the bells and whistles on and charge you a fortune. Engineering occurs when you start adding constraints, forcing engineers to make design choices, and then have the integrity to state the limitations instead of hiding them.
Thanks 3DFX.
(Now if they would just fix the alt-tab bug in gl quake...)
Before you call UNcle Sam disinterested, recognize that if a government has the power to ensure privacy, it has the power to take it away.
The first law of bureaucracy states that bureaucratic entities expand their powers to the maximum carrying capacity of the organization they control. By stating this law in the form of a single proposition and applying it to the government of a society by a bureaucratic government, and then taking the limit to infinity, we easily see that entrusting the government with any power eventually results in conceding to them complete power- and thus complete forfeiture of individual control. Thus if you concede to the government the power to protect privacy, you will eventually lose ALL privacy. It may take generations, or at least many years, but it will happen.
I value my privacy, and I am sure that you do as well. Because of this, I think it is safe to assume that this is not a solution any of us would like to see implemented. What, then, is to be done about gross offenders such as Intel and Real Audio? If we don't enact stifling restrictions like the EU 'privacy' laws, who will protect us from these wild beasts, the darker side of capitalism?
I say we can protect ourselves. We are in control here- no matter what the fool propagandists tell you, it is the individual consumers who make the leviathans like Intel able to put id's on their chips. Without a continuous revenue stream, corporations die. No matter how large, no matter how entrenched. The one thing corporations value is your dollar bills. The solution is so incredibly simple... Because capitalism works. Because if Real Audio is really afraid that people will take issue with their inclusion of monitoring software, there is no way in hell that they will include it- unless they receive more net profit through the addition than without it.
I will never buy an Intel processor. I will never own a copy of any Real Networks software. I have already taken steps to ensure that no one at my location will have Real Networks software installed (3000+ seats) because of the security concerns involved; hopefully we will be buying Athlon processors with our future workstations as well. If a few million other people do the same, then every future PHB who looks at a software algorithm for approval will shudder at the thought of infringing upon my privacy and yours.
Scudder
I am glad to see that you welcome Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler as Christian Scientists, hundreds of years after their deaths. Their contributions to mankinds knowledge should make all Christians proud, (including you and me). I can't help but find it ironic, however, that they were all branded heretics by the Church while they were alive; Galileo was even faced with the option of burning at the stake or renouncing his ideas. Would you have supported him then? Heh.
Charles Darwin lived to see himself hated by religious extremists, to the point that they tried to outlaw the very consideration of his theories. For the simple crime of describing the world as God created it, instead of as people in Kansas wish it were, he watched his name become synonymous with evil. He lived to see himself become a fundamental barrier between Christianity and reality, between people who think and people who blindly follow the men in black cloth. Yet you seem proud to have him as a Christian. Strange.
Read about the 'Pascal's wager' argument to find out why he was a christian. You might be surprised...
IMHO Christians are their own worst enemies when confronting issues of science. How better to lose credibility in the face of the not-yet-converted or the converted-but-questioning but to deny the existence of something that obviously happens? The Church did this when they branded Galileo a heretic in 1633; they did it with Darwin and again now with the recent Kansan stance on evolution. The people who do this are either fools, or charlatans intent on destroying the church proper.
A small note to any men of the church who are listening: Religion must be flexible enough to account for revolutions in thought, or else it will lose ground amongst the intelligentsia. Once this happens, there are only 2 means of recourse: violently hiding the truth, as with Galileo et al., or fading into obscurity/being absorbed into cults that are flexible, as happened with most pre-christian pagan cults. Science is your friend, because Science is man's best estimate of The Truth, and religion seeks to provide Truth for the people. Denying one piece of Truth makes even the most fundamental canonical propositions suspect.
Final cheap shot(that exemplifies my point completely): "To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin"
-Cardinal Belleramine
Now one of 3 things happened here, based on this quote and the fact that the Cardinal can be assumed to be stating the official position of the Church (and therefore God). Either 1) Jesus as we think of him is a fraud (unlikely imho), 2) God changed his mind based on reading Galileo's paper (even less likely), 3) Some poor shephard fucked up when he wrote down the original text in the bible. (Pretty likely) Unfortunately, certain members of the church were too stupid to consider this an option, and caused a good man to be incarcerated for life. And caused an unfathomable amount of damage to their own cause, by sickening hundreds and thousands of people for all eternity.
Oh, and look up what 'oxymoron' actually means, please.
Nehemiah Scudder
First Prophet
Ben Bova has a couple of great books dealing with just that. Try Privateers or the sequel Empire Builders ; both well illustrate the idea that a well-meaning treaty "is just a scrap of paper" when there is no effective deterrant to aggression. And they provide a shocking demonstration of what will happen to America if our leadership continues to handle space exploration as they are today.
Plus both are shameless plugs for free enterprise, in space and elsewhere. Read them!
Scudder
1) Start with a large pickle or cucumber. Best size is 6-9 inches in length.
2) Remove the female end of a 10 foot extension cord. Strip the cord to expose the copper wire.
3) Wrap the exposed wire around a 3 inch steel nail, then insert the nails halfway into each opposing end of the pickle.
4) Place pickle on concrete or other non-flammable area. PLug the male end into the wall.
5) Enjoy the brief spectacle of a pickle, glowing bright green with approximately 30 lumens
6) Reset circuit breaker and explain the situation to your landlord and/or fireman
I've done this many times; it is lots of fun. I've had no fires yet, but be careful. Every pickle is different.
Scudder
New DT out today, 26 Oct, btw...
Understand that the purpose of literature is to depict a characteristic of human nature, to 'define the human experience'. Contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison do this by analyzing the way people live, think, and treat each other today, or at unique times in the past; Alabama during the pre-civil rights era, for instance, or London during a WW2 air raid. They make projections, approximations to their concept of the myriad faces of humanity, based on snapshots of characters and actions. The best manage to create lasting impressions and characters who become in themselves metaphors for life, feelings, or personalities. Hamlet. John Wayne. Al Bundy. Nehemiah Scudder.
Science fiction is unique in that it not only tries to show what is, but what will be and what could be. Heinlein imho was the best at this, because his stories almost never dealt directly with technology; instead, they dealt with minor adjustments in the fabric of society, and then extrapolation to reveal fundamental truths about his estimation of the human experience based on what changes and what stays the same. Taking the partial derivatives of society with respect to its constituent elements, if you will. Like solving a PDE, exact solutions are sparse; authors are forced to make assumptions and invent initial and boundary conditions to achieve any results whatsoever. Living on imported air deep within an underground chamber, as in Mistress ; Life from the eyes of a man with no human prejudice (); delta-perspective in people who lived exceedingly long lives, versus the ephemerals who lived normal lives ( Methuselah, et al ). The way I view the world has changed 100% in the past 3 years; i have gone from being a Christian fundamentalist, quasi-authoritarian to an ardent libertarian, based on comparatively few life experiences. How can I even imagine what I would think with that kind of perspective? RAH tried. imho he did a pretty good job; iyho, he failed. Perspective again.
The protagonists were females in most of Heinlein's better books. Friday, which you mentioned, was one of these. These females were always: smart, beautiful, brave, strong, and passionate. They can shoot with both hands, cook almost as well as their husbands, usually fly aircraft and sometimes program computers. They can talk philosophy, enjoy sex and advanced mathematics as well as flaunting their sexuality, even to the extent of *gasp* bearing children. Mind you, these were mostly written in a day where women were depicted as frail, weak creatures wearing aprons and house slippers; many years before the popular acceptance of womens liberation. How does this make RAH a sexist? I will grant you that some women will feel threatened by this description of women as living goddesses. But RAH wasn't writing about them; remember, one of his wives was a voluptuous redheaded Olympic swimmer with an advanced degree in Aeronautical engineering. He was writing about her.
And also recognize that Friday killed most of the men who raped her (and many who didn't). Violently, brutally, tearing them to pieces with her polished fighting skills. She married one of them, years later; but in spite of, not because, he raped her. And marriage in that civilization was a fundamentally different concept than marriage in ours, so you can't really compare the two except to say that they are spelled the same and involve consensual sharing of life experiences among mature adults.
To get back on topic, Neal Stephenson did a tremendous job with Snow Crash by depicting what he thinks life in America would be like if us libertarian-anarchists have our way... I was actually forced to recognize that things could be worse in a free-er country. The organized crime aspect was very astute, and I literally rofl'd at the first mention of General Jim. The ending left me exceedingly empty as well; while probably more accurate than what I have become adjusted to in this era of conflict resolution, it wasn't exactly what I'd hoped for. I have a number of questions I would love to ask NS, btw. HINT HINT.
Nehemiah Scudder
First Prophet
when a democratic society has certain necessary features.
The fundamental reason democracy works better than tyranny is that the best solution for any given problem is more likely to come from the minds of 250 million individuals than from one. No matter how smart the tyrant is, the odds are seriously balanced such that someone else in the masses has had an experience or an insight that makes his opinion on the issue at least equally relevant.
However, there are also 249,999,999 people in that mass who don't know the best solution. Therefore the one person who knows must be free to speak his mind, and the others must have the minimum level of intelligence necessary to recognize his contribution. This is critical because the main thing masses are good at is shouting loudly; quality of thought, not quantity, is the key to successful democracy.
Microsoft's online democracy tried to emulate this successful paradigm, and came very close; apparently IK was a pretty good match for GK when assisted by the other panelists, powerful computers, and the lack of time constraints. Unfortunately, the system was flawed in such a way that the voice of reason was not heard from at a critical time... and the match was lost. Democracy qua Microsoft fails miserably.
A better test of democracy qua Democracy as an allegory for our civilization would have been Gary Kasperov vs. the World in a multi-competition consisting of Chess, Backgammon, Parcheesi, and Quake. Possibly with some other skills such as metalworking, water skiing, lion taming or French cooking thrown in. While GK may be the greatest chessmaster in the world, I have a feeling Thresh is a better cook.
Scudder
IANA climatologist, I have been wondering about something for a long time. Every mass media scare story I see about global warming eventually focuses on one thing: coastal cities sinking into the ocean, killing millions of people. Pictures of people surfing amongst the skyscrapers of Miami, Boston, and New York, etc. It seems to be accepted that when global warming occurs, the oceans will rise. Now, my question is: Why!
The polar ice caps are made of ice. Huge chunks of ice, with a few rocks and other miscellaneous debris thrown in. The vast majority of these ice blocks are underwater, which means that when they melt, they will probably lose at least as much ice to the ocean from beneath the sea as from above. Since ice has a lower specific density than water, the net effect will be that there will be less liquid volume in the ocean after the ice melts. If this is correct, then the oceans will recede. (Confirm this yourself by dropping a bunch of ice cubes in a cup of warm water and measuring the water level before and after they melt.)
Can someone in this forum please explain to me why I am wrong? I know that the obviously intelligent and well-funded environmentalists would never lie to me about the effects or causes of global warming, so...
thanks in advance.
Scudder
Gattaca is not a movie about genetic engineering, any more than it was a movie about solar power, space travel or music appreciation. Gattaca is a classic romantic fiction; Andrew Niccol takes a simple theme, the idea of a society stratified by poor genetic engineering practices, and uses it as a tool to highlight the fundamental truth that the human spirit is far more important than the combination of amino acids in your bones. Genetic engineering itself is just a prop, like the impeccably tailored suits and the spiral staircase. The fact that the director could not accomplish his goal of showing its lack of importance without it does not make it the central idea in the movie.
Niccol wanted to show that a human being can accomplish nothing in life without a dream, without a goal. Jude Law's perfect character demonstrates this remarkably well: an incredibly refined thoroughbred, born with every advantage, incinerates himself at the very instant of the in-valid's greatest achievement. He had no goal but to be better than his fellow men, and he was psychologically destroyed because he was beaten. How well this contrasts to the unhealthy, disadvantaged boy who dreams of conquering space!
"What level of imperfection can be tolerated in a Gattaca employee?" the genetically engineered brother asks the Mission Director. "Nothing that would have kept you out". Tremendous! The bully, the antagonist who was born strong and made bold by his proud parents, told that his weak and frail brother had dared to achieve greatness while he himself had settled for a menial job as an enforcer. How about the girl who was born nearly perfect, an inch from achieving her dream, but held down because she believes that the Fates are alive in her genes? Her punishment for mysticism was that she would never step inside a spacecraft, never see the rings of Saturn or the sands of Mars. But the broken, miserable, snot-nosed boy would, because he believed in himself and was willing to pay the full price for life.
What Niccol unfortunately did not show well in Gattaca is what an engineered human with his own supply of veriditas would be capable of. Because the points that made Ethan Hawke such a magnificent character could easily be possessed by anyone. Imagine a high school football team with a front line averaging 240 lbs of solid muscle and a minimum I.Q. of 155. The genetically engineered star linebacker goes to Berkeley and studies Aeronautical Engineering, graduates with honors and goes on to start his own private space company. In the other world, the one we live in today, he is a fat idiot who gets an athletic scholarship to UT Knoxville, spends his college football career date-raping sorority girls, graduates with a PE degrees and spends the rest of his life drinking beer and belching. Selling used cars, maybe.
Which race of humans would you rather belong to?
Scudder