That depends on how seriously you want to hold to the axiom that "all men are created equal"
(I think this will be one of the fundamental choices we face as a society - do you allow discrimination based on uncontrollable birthrights or do you waive any liabilities a person is born with and only allow them to be judged by their actions/risks after birth)
Isn't addiction the result of the brain learning too well that getting a certain stimulus triggers the pleasure/reward sensation? It's only a "mistake" when the stimulus turns out to be a false positive. The same "addicted" reaction to a drug that short-circuits the reward sensation might cause a person to acquire and maintain very good habits for needed nutrients or acquiring resources. It's a tradeoff between locking in behaviors that consistently produce rewards and the risk that you are locking in slowly self-destructive behaviors that only seemed to be a reward. A person who can break addictions easily may also tend to randomly stop doing useful, rewarding things.
Someday perhaps scientists will finally rebel against the awful state of science journalism.
They already did... but nobody reported it.
(and thus the rise of the Greenpeace-style publicity stunts to gain attention... which inevitably leads to a conflict of interest between "what's the consensus view" and "which interpretation will most easily get attention"... which leads to over-playing their hand, losing credibility and getting pwned by lobby groups... which leads to the science-issue debate becoming a shouting match of dueling dogmas... which leads to an awful state of science journalism)
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Authoritarian rule does not require total censorship - it just requires that most people be willing to tolerate it and be a little afraid of the consequences of opposing it. The Internet has the potential to be the ultimate tool of authoritarian rule because you can log communication and networks of friends, research a person's thinking and map out who the opinion-shapers are within any troublesome clique. A small percentage may be knowledgeable enough to evade, but they can be quickly marginalized and will be ignored by the general population.
That having been said, I don't think it's going to have a future that is as simple as "free" vs "authoritarian". Rather, I think both extremes will converge towards a sort "managed" society where there will be areas of free expression and areas of authoritarian-like rule, with a rather blurry, shifting line of what is and isn't "criminal" behavior.
For all the times that people say they aren't interested in running, it would be amusing to find out if there is any way a person really can be elected against their will?:)
(in some parliamentary governments, there is a quaint little tradition of dragging the "speaker" of the house to their chair because in the old days, nobody really wanted to be the one designated to deliver the demands and decisions of the people to the king)
There was a pointed editorial years ago in Science magazine that pretty much nailed the fate of the Space Station: a white elephant that consumes all resources, desperately trying to justify the last white elephant (space shuttles) instead of cutting losses and focusing on value for money. The focus of NASA should have been on new and creative ways to get things into orbit and back cheaply - a wide variety of competing small projects rather than one megaproject that becomes an intractable money sink because it can't be allowed to fail. A side effect of lots of high-risk tests is that all sorts of scientific payloads and probes could have had a shot at getting into space.
Someone with a subscription needs to tag this story Vaporware.
I'm not sure which would be worse... to nukem (is that a verb?) or to "Master of Orion 3"-em (wonderful ambition but painfully dull to play).
Spore seems like one of those projects that, if it remains vapor too long, should spark some "Linus of gaming" to start an open-source take on the whole thing. What I love about the concept of Spore is that its so modular - add some standards and it should be possible to share all the bits and pieces of art and simulation between entirely different games. Imagine importing a spore model into an RPG or a FPS and having instant art? It feels like it should open the floodgates on a whole new generation of collaborative game/world design.
I agree... but you really need a good catchy word for "cannot have all possible states represented even if you harnessed every grain of sand in the universe".
According to one of the talks, a Spore world is about an 80K data structure when compressed. 2^640000 is a really big number. My fuzzy back-of-the-napkin count gives something like 2^240 hydrogen atoms in the universe. I think hard math either needs to learn to share the word infinite or it had better file a trademark:)
Everything I've seen about Spore has only given me good vibes... except for the fear in the back of my mind that it will be chopped up and priced out of my tax bracket if they taste the buzz. If anything I think the buzz may have grown too great for Spore - that it can't possibly live up to the expectations that people are developing.
I do see what you are saying and I don't disagree with you... my comment was partly sincere reaction, partly poking fun at my own sensitivity. Nationalism and global communities are a strange mix, especially when talking about local battles involving multinational companies trying to create unified laws across countries. I just found it interesting how an innocent synopsis could evoke such a variety of emotions just by identifying a nation... I assume from the surprisingly high modding that I wasn't the only one who was struck by it.
It always bothers me when I see a patriotic rallying cry that points out the pain to "Americans". Are you saying it wouldn't be so bad/unethical if the companies were harming non-Americans?
Opening new forms of communication is always going to result a wild rush of memes, propaganda and fetishes until the culture adapts, whether its porn, religion, radical hatred or lolcats.
On in the contrary, my experience has been that you should just take the math. Everything else - computer science, physics, even a lot of biology these days is just an application of math. You can pick up the details of any of these fields pretty quickly and make yourself useful if you are have a strong understanding of the underlying patterns and logic math teaches.
(then again, it may just be that any education adds discipline to thinking and that once you have that, you can learn on your own throughout life)
They haven't stopped coding, they just code in a higher language - just as C can take care of all that dirty assembler for you, a human coder can take care of all that dirty C. You just sit back, watch the code flow past, filter it and nudge it in the directions you need it to go. It's bleeding edge technology, it's just the system requirements are a little steep for most of us to assemble - give it a few decades and I'm sure we'll all be coding this way:)
I think there is very little in our world that a person from 1907 couldn't wrap their heads around pretty fast once they get past the noise and flashing lights. Assuming we don't trip into a new dark age of disenlightenment and/or nuke ourselves silly between now and 2107, I think we'd recognize everything we would see even if we talked about it in quaint, incomplete, antique analogies. We would be like a person looking at email and saying "oh, that's just a fancy telegraph to the home".
Personally I think it's about time that literacy was seen as more than simply the ability to read words: you need to be a part of the knowledge, not just a consumer of it. More schools should start having assignments that read "research topic X and write a wikipedia article on it". Then if its good, load it up, not dump it in the trash as school essays always are.
My feeling is that any economy built upon intellectual property is a house of cards. Sooner or later, someone just decides not to play. They simply declare themselves as rich as you are. It's like a bubble market: it only has value as long as everyone buys into the delusion that it has value... then it goes "pop!".
If a country with all the manufacturing infrastructure and a country with all the legal IP rights to that tech have a conflict, is there really any doubt who wins?
In "The Five Doctors", the High Council offered the Master a full cycle of new regenerations in return for his help. Thus the canon has established the technology exists in the Whoverse to continue on beyond twelve regenerations (not that the Master was having that much trouble stretching out his regenerations anyway).
umm... "Evolution" by means of natural selection describes the rise of new species. The emergence of antibiotic resistance is not a creation of a new species, just the spread of a single gene. This is the "natural selection" part and personally I would say "evolution" wouldn't be the right word to use when studying it, no anti-science conspiracy needed.
Whatever happened to selling a product on the merits of the product? Just for fun, watch a run of ads and ask how many ads now show a product being used in a way that is legal, possible under the laws of physics and by human beings. It's so silly that most products aren't even products, they're sold as fantasies irrelevant to what they are actually used for.
The "Open Source Graphic Drivers - They Don't Kill Kittens" talk was very entertaining, but was it any good? There was a fairly lengthy debate in the halls afterwards over whether it was productive or not to rant about ATI and Nvidia.
Yes, it got across the point that the video card vendors are not playing nice, but is whining about it going to get the community anywhere? I'd have liked to have seen a counter-presentation from the vendors listing their concerns in their own words and what is required for them to feel safe releasing the required documentation. What can people do to effectively apply polite preasure? What system assemblers should be leading the charge to change the minds of card vendors?
(strangely enough, you can support a bazillion devices without problem, but if the graphics driver blows users seem to notice, get cranky and judge the whole OS by it)
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on how seriously you want to hold to the axiom that "all men are created equal"
(I think this will be one of the fundamental choices we face as a society - do you allow discrimination based on uncontrollable birthrights or do you waive any liabilities a person is born with and only allow them to be judged by their actions/risks after birth)
Isn't addiction the result of the brain learning too well that getting a certain stimulus triggers the pleasure/reward sensation? It's only a "mistake" when the stimulus turns out to be a false positive. The same "addicted" reaction to a drug that short-circuits the reward sensation might cause a person to acquire and maintain very good habits for needed nutrients or acquiring resources. It's a tradeoff between locking in behaviors that consistently produce rewards and the risk that you are locking in slowly self-destructive behaviors that only seemed to be a reward. A person who can break addictions easily may also tend to randomly stop doing useful, rewarding things.
Someday perhaps scientists will finally rebel against the awful state of science journalism.
They already did ... but nobody reported it.
(and thus the rise of the Greenpeace-style publicity stunts to gain attention ... which inevitably leads to a conflict of interest between "what's the consensus view" and "which interpretation will most easily get attention" ... which leads to over-playing their hand, losing credibility and getting pwned by lobby groups ... which leads to the science-issue debate becoming a shouting match of dueling dogmas ... which leads to an awful state of science journalism)
Solution: harvest entropy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Authoritarian rule does not require total censorship - it just requires that most people be willing to tolerate it and be a little afraid of the consequences of opposing it. The Internet has the potential to be the ultimate tool of authoritarian rule because you can log communication and networks of friends, research a person's thinking and map out who the opinion-shapers are within any troublesome clique. A small percentage may be knowledgeable enough to evade, but they can be quickly marginalized and will be ignored by the general population.
That having been said, I don't think it's going to have a future that is as simple as "free" vs "authoritarian". Rather, I think both extremes will converge towards a sort "managed" society where there will be areas of free expression and areas of authoritarian-like rule, with a rather blurry, shifting line of what is and isn't "criminal" behavior.
For all the times that people say they aren't interested in running, it would be amusing to find out if there is any way a person really can be elected against their will? :)
(in some parliamentary governments, there is a quaint little tradition of dragging the "speaker" of the house to their chair because in the old days, nobody really wanted to be the one designated to deliver the demands and decisions of the people to the king)
I hope they have good liability insurance.
I'm assuming that its out of the question that this binary star/black-hole system was, at one point, a trinary system?
There was a pointed editorial years ago in Science magazine that pretty much nailed the fate of the Space Station: a white elephant that consumes all resources, desperately trying to justify the last white elephant (space shuttles) instead of cutting losses and focusing on value for money. The focus of NASA should have been on new and creative ways to get things into orbit and back cheaply - a wide variety of competing small projects rather than one megaproject that becomes an intractable money sink because it can't be allowed to fail. A side effect of lots of high-risk tests is that all sorts of scientific payloads and probes could have had a shot at getting into space.
Someone with a subscription needs to tag this story Vaporware.
I'm not sure which would be worse ... to nukem (is that a verb?) or to "Master of Orion 3"-em (wonderful ambition but painfully dull to play).
Spore seems like one of those projects that, if it remains vapor too long, should spark some "Linus of gaming" to start an open-source take on the whole thing. What I love about the concept of Spore is that its so modular - add some standards and it should be possible to share all the bits and pieces of art and simulation between entirely different games. Imagine importing a spore model into an RPG or a FPS and having instant art? It feels like it should open the floodgates on a whole new generation of collaborative game/world design.
The word infinite gets abused quite a bit.
I agree ... but you really need a good catchy word for "cannot have all possible states represented even if you harnessed every grain of sand in the universe".
According to one of the talks, a Spore world is about an 80K data structure when compressed. 2^640000 is a really big number. My fuzzy back-of-the-napkin count gives something like 2^240 hydrogen atoms in the universe. I think hard math either needs to learn to share the word infinite or it had better file a trademark :)
Everything I've seen about Spore has only given me good vibes ... except for the fear in the back of my mind that it will be chopped up and priced out of my tax bracket if they taste the buzz. If anything I think the buzz may have grown too great for Spore - that it can't possibly live up to the expectations that people are developing.
I do see what you are saying and I don't disagree with you ... my comment was partly sincere reaction, partly poking fun at my own sensitivity. Nationalism and global communities are a strange mix, especially when talking about local battles involving multinational companies trying to create unified laws across countries. I just found it interesting how an innocent synopsis could evoke such a variety of emotions just by identifying a nation ... I assume from the surprisingly high modding that I wasn't the only one who was struck by it.
It always bothers me when I see a patriotic rallying cry that points out the pain to "Americans". Are you saying it wouldn't be so bad/unethical if the companies were harming non-Americans?
Opening new forms of communication is always going to result a wild rush of memes, propaganda and fetishes until the culture adapts, whether its porn, religion, radical hatred or lolcats.
On in the contrary, my experience has been that you should just take the math. Everything else - computer science, physics, even a lot of biology these days is just an application of math. You can pick up the details of any of these fields pretty quickly and make yourself useful if you are have a strong understanding of the underlying patterns and logic math teaches.
(then again, it may just be that any education adds discipline to thinking and that once you have that, you can learn on your own throughout life)
They haven't stopped coding, they just code in a higher language - just as C can take care of all that dirty assembler for you, a human coder can take care of all that dirty C. You just sit back, watch the code flow past, filter it and nudge it in the directions you need it to go. It's bleeding edge technology, it's just the system requirements are a little steep for most of us to assemble - give it a few decades and I'm sure we'll all be coding this way :)
Actually physically leaving the planet is a vacation option for the rich. (this one would have to blow the mind of a 1907'er)
Sure, yeah, Completely Inconceivable
I think there is very little in our world that a person from 1907 couldn't wrap their heads around pretty fast once they get past the noise and flashing lights. Assuming we don't trip into a new dark age of disenlightenment and/or nuke ourselves silly between now and 2107, I think we'd recognize everything we would see even if we talked about it in quaint, incomplete, antique analogies. We would be like a person looking at email and saying "oh, that's just a fancy telegraph to the home".
Personally I think it's about time that literacy was seen as more than simply the ability to read words: you need to be a part of the knowledge, not just a consumer of it. More schools should start having assignments that read "research topic X and write a wikipedia article on it". Then if its good, load it up, not dump it in the trash as school essays always are.
My feeling is that any economy built upon intellectual property is a house of cards. Sooner or later, someone just decides not to play. They simply declare themselves as rich as you are. It's like a bubble market: it only has value as long as everyone buys into the delusion that it has value ... then it goes "pop!".
If a country with all the manufacturing infrastructure and a country with all the legal IP rights to that tech have a conflict, is there really any doubt who wins?
In "The Five Doctors", the High Council offered the Master a full cycle of new regenerations in return for his help. Thus the canon has established the technology exists in the Whoverse to continue on beyond twelve regenerations (not that the Master was having that much trouble stretching out his regenerations anyway).
Can I get my geek card stamped please?
umm ... "Evolution" by means of natural selection describes the rise of new species. The emergence of antibiotic resistance is not a creation of a new species, just the spread of a single gene. This is the "natural selection" part and personally I would say "evolution" wouldn't be the right word to use when studying it, no anti-science conspiracy needed.
Whatever happened to selling a product on the merits of the product? Just for fun, watch a run of ads and ask how many ads now show a product being used in a way that is legal, possible under the laws of physics and by human beings. It's so silly that most products aren't even products, they're sold as fantasies irrelevant to what they are actually used for.
In a forum where brain size reigns supreme, I would argue that a certain oracle-of-filesystem-wisdom counts.
The "Open Source Graphic Drivers - They Don't Kill Kittens" talk was very entertaining, but was it any good? There was a fairly lengthy debate in the halls afterwards over whether it was productive or not to rant about ATI and Nvidia.
Yes, it got across the point that the video card vendors are not playing nice, but is whining about it going to get the community anywhere? I'd have liked to have seen a counter-presentation from the vendors listing their concerns in their own words and what is required for them to feel safe releasing the required documentation. What can people do to effectively apply polite preasure? What system assemblers should be leading the charge to change the minds of card vendors?
(strangely enough, you can support a bazillion devices without problem, but if the graphics driver blows users seem to notice, get cranky and judge the whole OS by it)