He may have brains, but he believe in an alternative history of Fomenko - Ancient Greece never existed and so on.;) Brains you say? Infected with something...
The way things are progressing, 10 years from now people will be buying things (including games and music) in virtual reality malls. At least that's what the Japanese National Institute of Science and Technology Policy thinks. And since the accuracy of their past 30-year forecasts was, on average, 60-70%, you should at least listen.
Really, I am amazed at how little people know about the future.
Sorry for being too harsh. You are simply not up-to-date with the reality of the 21st century.
The thing is that children today are a liability, not an asset. First, from a survival point of view it would make more sense to invest everything you would otherwise spend on raising kids. That would make for a decent pension. Second, as much as it may be a surprise to you, technology will continue to develop, making human caretakers obsolete.
My genes are as good or maybe better than the next guy's, but I'm not so egotistical that I consider only my genes to be suitible for passing on to the next generation. Well, why do genes need passing anyway? Why not simply use anti-aging treatments when they become available and continue to live? If your genes are so good, just keep on living.
Who will call the ambulance for you when you have your heart attack, for instance? Well, a wearable wireless health monitor, I guess. I mean it doesn't take a technophilic gadget freak to know about that stuff - it's hardly a secret that these things exist and many companies plan to bring them to market in 2006-2007.
Who will bathe and feed you when you break a leg? A robot, may be? Or you will do it yourself using an exoskeleton.
Instead plan on needing another human being, or two, or three to be there for you like you're there for them now. Crazy shit. Are you planning to survive a nuclear war or a asteroid impact? Do you also keep pigs and a cow in your house "just in case"? We have these things called "society" and "technology". You don't need to exploit kids to live when you are old (assuming you will actually become biologically old and not have your aging stopped and reversed using biotechnology).
Sheesh, some people seem to live in a cave. How do they even access Internet there?
Yes, mindless pointless surfing may feel like a dangerous addiction sometimes. But look at it another way - web surfing is a valuable information consumption strategy. You need to stumble on new things and what better way to do it than to surf the web?
Of course, sometimes this really is useless, but I think it's more because you are tired, but don't want to go to bed than because you are addicted. Remember how people mindlessly browse TV channels, loiter about in a mall, etc. Yes, this is not productive, but the reason is usually simply that they can't find anything better to do.
Aren't you tired of repeating the same tired (and, what is even worse, false) argument?
Japanese technology foresight project run by NISTEP has the average accuracy rate of around 60-70% for its 1st, 2nd and 3rd reports (1970, 1975, 1980). The reports predict technological developments for the next 30 years.
Now it would be insanely great if every illiterate luddite posting right now on Slashdot about how predictions are worthless and always wrong would just familiarise himself with actual work being done in the field of predicting the future, not with retarded news coverage of the tabloids. If you don't even make an effort to understand which predictions are good and which are bad (and which experts, and which methodologies, etc.), then you have no right to demand accuracy.
Really, people, sometimes you look like you don't have any IQ at all...
DRM is bad, but it's not so bad when hardware also plays open content. I don't really mind that much having DRM installed on my computer (though I don't think I have any yet) as long as I can run unsigned software. As long as I can run unsigned software, I can get content in open formats from P2P and play it.
Could you tell me what software you use for reading/reference/etc. I haven't been up to date with the software - still use an old version of iSilo on my Palm E2. Thanks in advance.
One thought. Having established that you are crazy, how crazy you must be to think that transporting Bibles into a communist country is a good example of the usefulness of this technology?
Seriously, this example is almost as contrived as the whole idea of a hydrogen-inflated GPS guided unmanned rectangular raft.
USSR was still operating under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when France was invaded, and on continental europe only France stood against the Axis
You may be forgetting Poland. In that Poland refused to allow Soviet support for Czechoslovakia, which meant that France didn't support Czechoslovakia either. Meaning that noone resisted Hitler until it was too late. Only later did Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact become necessary.
Do you know of any single example where Stalin silenced a person (either directly, or where the action can clearly be traced back to Stalin) simply for reasons of disagreement?
Because there is evidence that Stalin encouraged criticism, free thinking and open expression of ideas. Such evidence comes, for example, from people who worked with Stalin, journalists from publications such as "Red Star", high-level officials and other similar sources.
Please do not let the myths that you were told to believe in to influence your worldview as strongly.
Every investor diversifies (except for total morons). And there has been no "smart" investors found, who can consistently (as opposed to randomly) outperform the market.
Stupid cnelzie likes to think he is smarter than all other investors. He likes to think that he knows something noone else does. Ha-ha.
He obviously meant the total monetary value of copyrights, since copyright is not really countable ("I own 27 copyrights").
The post above is copyrighted. The monetary value of these rights is exactly zero.
I hereby dedicate this post to public domain (some argue that there is no legal way to do it, so I just grant everyone an unequivocal, transferrable, non-terminable license to use the above post in any way possible, explicitly allowing NOT crediting the author, i.e. me).
By doing that I lose exactly zero dollars/euros/yens/rubles.
Preach? It's totally logical for anti-democratic American establishment to brainwash people into believing that the US has the best democracy. If a thief managed to persuade you 100% that he respects private property, it would no longer make sense to charge him with theft.
It does take some independent learning for someone to understand how evil, undemocratic and inhumane the current Western system is, but it can be done. Once it's done, there is nothing funny about it.
Yes, it was me, who questioned it. I hope that it stimulated some discussion and that the article will be improved. However, I am afraid that more serious problems still persist in many articles. Yes, fact checking is great and wikipedians can be forced to add references and back their claims, but the basic problem is what is being added in the first place.
You shouldn't start an encyclopedia article with a tabloid story. You shouldn't start an article with your politically biased beliefs. Most articles evolve, whereas I'd rather see them designed and implemented.
It's not that I don't believe in incremental improvement, it's just that for a variety of reasons many articles remain for too long a time in a suboptimal state. Once there aren't any obvious problems, people will stop actively improving the article.
And the stupid biased people with tons of free time are really annoying. In another example, there are dozens of morons, who feel it their duty to add unjustified pseudoscientific claims to the article about article Uncanny Valley, which never was all that solid a theory anyway. They want to have their point of view included, which is almost (but not quite) as bad as modern balanced journalism.
People complain about Firefox "live bookmarks" and rightly so. It's crap.
Opera, on the other hand, has an almost perfect implementation of RSS. It is integrated with mail and news in the Opera M2, so RSS items are treated just like e-mail. You have unread and read items, you can use filters (including smart filters), you can do with RSS almost everything you do with e-mail.
You can set up smart filters that would bring together Usenet news, items from your mailing lists, RSS items from a number of sites. It's trivially easy.
You can use RSS from a lot of different sources to monitor unique and rare news. You can subscribe to Yahoo/Google searches, news searches, delicious and technorati/feedster feeds, etc. If you have unique information needs, it's hard to beat RSS.
You can also use a bunch of innovative services such as BuildMyFeed that allow you to get RSS from sites that don't support it. How cool is that?
Or, if you like to, you can also crap like tagclouds and other stuff to really push the envelope with infoconsumption.
But personally I am just happy that I can easily get what I want where I want and when I want. Much better than visiting dozens of websites each day.
P.S. RSS is also a great tool for NOT keeping up with the news. Since you know that you have all those news available in your mail reader, you don't have to check them right now. For example, I no longer need to check Slashdot or something else compulsively. I can just open it whenever I have some time to kill, look through 50+ items, open the ones I am interested in and ignore the rest. No browsing needed for that.
Many wikipedians seem to be getting a hardon each time there is a tinyest "fact" not included in their beloved collection of wisdom. They then race to be the first to create an article about that item, no matter, how outlandish.
Consider this article about Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. An infamous UK tabloid The Sun has published a story alleging that Stalin ordered a creation of human-monkey supersoldier hybrids. The story was reprinted by someone else, then by someone else, then by someone else. It was reprinted in several Russian tabloids (with reference to The Sun), which apparently was enough for some other Western newspapers to pretend that "published in Russian newspapers" is proof of something.
Now we have some moron eager to copy-paste the content of all those articles into Wikipedia. And noone pays any attention. Other users just copyedit the story, fixing commas and other shit. Now Wikipedia does have official policies on Verifiability and Reliable sources, apparently written by some competent people. But who cares about policies? It's like a policy against trolling on Slashdot, totally unrealistic and unenforceable.
Then people who also contribute to articles about Kabbalah, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Holy Spirit, Fingering (sexual act) and Cannabis (drug) join in. Yeah, like I would trust them to report on human-monkey supersoldiers.
And this goes on an on. Yes, there are mechanisms in place to fix this sort of situation, but the problem is that like in real life playing by the rules takes too much effort. And only crazies can afford to spend the time. People who add wacky stuff to Wikipedia become proficient at superficially respecting the rules, while pushing their agenda (i.e. include all sorts of crazy stuff in Wikipedia). People who are rational usually have other things to do with their time and will just go away.
No one likes a democracy controlled by those with the most money. But how about encyclopedia controlled by those with the most free time?
Yes, you can buy an obsolete computer as cheaply as for 50$. So what? Are you saying that anyone making 5$/day should not get a computer that costs $1000? Did you forget the original point? I'll remind you then - it was that many families already see the value in education and access to a computer for their children.
Obviously not anyone bought a computer that expensive, but enough did to suggest that may be, just may be people getting a computer for their kids will not be immediately thinking about how much they can sell it for.
The fact is that $100 for these kids is worth 200 days of work if you follow 50 cent/day wage they get for 12-14 hours of work (according to this but I've heard of even less...).
There are countries where people get paid 5$/day (e.g. Russia today), but many people still managed to pay 1000$ for a desktop computer so that their kids can stay competitive.
Regardless, this is an extremely complex topic. Education is sitting in the middle of all other issues and you can't oversimplify it like Mr. Negroponte does with his OLPC program. Even to list the areas that would affect this development would probably take me 30-60 minutes. It's just so complex.
But. If someone can get from governments some money for a sexy project and get some kids some laptops, I am all for it. Certainly, it won't do any harm.
Was there a report "produced cooperatively by... industry associations from Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States", that was "used by the semiconductor industry as a planning tool to determine how best to spend research and development money for new technology" promise you flying cars and Jupiter missions? Or may be super-intelligent computers?
What do I hear? There was no such report? You got your predictions from tabloids, popular newspapers and Hollywood movies? Or may be you even weren't born when those things were promised and are just a teenage cry-baby? I thought so.
Now that we have annoying whining dorks out of this discussion, the rest of us can actually exchange intelligent ideas and opinions about development of nanotechnology.
Slashdot Mirror
He may have brains, but he believe in an alternative history of Fomenko - Ancient Greece never existed and so on. ;) Brains you say? Infected with something...
I am not trying to use a slippery slope fallacy here, but isn't it obvious that everything starts small?
Stupid.
The way things are progressing, 10 years from now people will be buying things (including games and music) in virtual reality malls. At least that's what the Japanese National Institute of Science and Technology Policy thinks. And since the accuracy of their past 30-year forecasts was, on average, 60-70%, you should at least listen.
Really, I am amazed at how little people know about the future.
Sorry for being too harsh. You are simply not up-to-date with the reality of the 21st century.
The thing is that children today are a liability, not an asset. First, from a survival point of view it would make more sense to invest everything you would otherwise spend on raising kids. That would make for a decent pension. Second, as much as it may be a surprise to you, technology will continue to develop, making human caretakers obsolete.
My genes are as good or maybe better than the next guy's, but I'm not so egotistical that I consider only my genes to be suitible for passing on to the next generation.
Well, why do genes need passing anyway? Why not simply use anti-aging treatments when they become available and continue to live? If your genes are so good, just keep on living.
Who will call the ambulance for you when you have your heart attack, for instance?
Well, a wearable wireless health monitor, I guess. I mean it doesn't take a technophilic gadget freak to know about that stuff - it's hardly a secret that these things exist and many companies plan to bring them to market in 2006-2007.
Who will bathe and feed you when you break a leg?
A robot, may be? Or you will do it yourself using an exoskeleton.
Instead plan on needing another human being, or two, or three to be there for you like you're there for them now.
Crazy shit. Are you planning to survive a nuclear war or a asteroid impact? Do you also keep pigs and a cow in your house "just in case"? We have these things called "society" and "technology". You don't need to exploit kids to live when you are old (assuming you will actually become biologically old and not have your aging stopped and reversed using biotechnology).
Sheesh, some people seem to live in a cave. How do they even access Internet there?
Yes, mindless pointless surfing may feel like a dangerous addiction sometimes. But look at it another way - web surfing is a valuable information consumption strategy. You need to stumble on new things and what better way to do it than to surf the web?
Of course, sometimes this really is useless, but I think it's more because you are tired, but don't want to go to bed than because you are addicted. Remember how people mindlessly browse TV channels, loiter about in a mall, etc. Yes, this is not productive, but the reason is usually simply that they can't find anything better to do.
Are you an animal or what? Do you feel incomplete? Why do you think you MUST find a mate?
You are not your genes, you are not your instincts, you are a intelligent being with free will. Act accordingly and not like you have Toxoplasma.
Aren't you tired of repeating the same tired (and, what is even worse, false) argument?
Japanese technology foresight project run by NISTEP has the average accuracy rate of around 60-70% for its 1st, 2nd and 3rd reports (1970, 1975, 1980). The reports predict technological developments for the next 30 years.
Now it would be insanely great if every illiterate luddite posting right now on Slashdot about how predictions are worthless and always wrong would just familiarise himself with actual work being done in the field of predicting the future, not with retarded news coverage of the tabloids. If you don't even make an effort to understand which predictions are good and which are bad (and which experts, and which methodologies, etc.), then you have no right to demand accuracy.
Really, people, sometimes you look like you don't have any IQ at all...
DRM is bad, but it's not so bad when hardware also plays open content. I don't really mind that much having DRM installed on my computer (though I don't think I have any yet) as long as I can run unsigned software. As long as I can run unsigned software, I can get content in open formats from P2P and play it.
Could you tell me what software you use for reading/reference/etc. I haven't been up to date with the software - still use an old version of iSilo on my Palm E2. Thanks in advance.
Well, his username is consistent with him having a broken keyboard.
One thought. Having established that you are crazy, how crazy you must be to think that transporting Bibles into a communist country is a good example of the usefulness of this technology?
Seriously, this example is almost as contrived as the whole idea of a hydrogen-inflated GPS guided unmanned rectangular raft.
USSR was still operating under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when France was invaded, and on continental europe only France stood against the Axis
You may be forgetting Poland. In that Poland refused to allow Soviet support for Czechoslovakia, which meant that France didn't support Czechoslovakia either. Meaning that noone resisted Hitler until it was too late. Only later did Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact become necessary.
Never forget Poland.
Oh, another misguided libertarian... One, who also has no clue about the war of drugs and its goals. How sad.
Do you know of any single example where Stalin silenced a person (either directly, or where the action can clearly be traced back to Stalin) simply for reasons of disagreement?
Because there is evidence that Stalin encouraged criticism, free thinking and open expression of ideas. Such evidence comes, for example, from people who worked with Stalin, journalists from publications such as "Red Star", high-level officials and other similar sources.
Please do not let the myths that you were told to believe in to influence your worldview as strongly.
And your statement is not misinformed?
Every investor diversifies (except for total morons). And there has been no "smart" investors found, who can consistently (as opposed to randomly) outperform the market.
Stupid cnelzie likes to think he is smarter than all other investors. He likes to think that he knows something noone else does. Ha-ha.
it's reasonable for record labels to want to make some money.
Giving corporations the right and the power to "want" something for themselves is bad. You are just creating runaway psycho AIs.
That's no more reasonable than allowing Skynet to want to eliminate some humans. It's stupid and dangerous.
He obviously meant the total monetary value of copyrights, since copyright is not really countable ("I own 27 copyrights").
The post above is copyrighted. The monetary value of these rights is exactly zero.
I hereby dedicate this post to public domain (some argue that there is no legal way to do it, so I just grant everyone an unequivocal, transferrable, non-terminable license to use the above post in any way possible, explicitly allowing NOT crediting the author, i.e. me).
By doing that I lose exactly zero dollars/euros/yens/rubles.
Preach? It's totally logical for anti-democratic American establishment to brainwash people into believing that the US has the best democracy. If a thief managed to persuade you 100% that he respects private property, it would no longer make sense to charge him with theft.
It does take some independent learning for someone to understand how evil, undemocratic and inhumane the current Western system is, but it can be done. Once it's done, there is nothing funny about it.
Yes, it was me, who questioned it. I hope that it stimulated some discussion and that the article will be improved. However, I am afraid that more serious problems still persist in many articles. Yes, fact checking is great and wikipedians can be forced to add references and back their claims, but the basic problem is what is being added in the first place.
You shouldn't start an encyclopedia article with a tabloid story. You shouldn't start an article with your politically biased beliefs. Most articles evolve, whereas I'd rather see them designed and implemented.
It's not that I don't believe in incremental improvement, it's just that for a variety of reasons many articles remain for too long a time in a suboptimal state. Once there aren't any obvious problems, people will stop actively improving the article.
And the stupid biased people with tons of free time are really annoying. In another example, there are dozens of morons, who feel it their duty to add unjustified pseudoscientific claims to the article about article Uncanny Valley, which never was all that solid a theory anyway. They want to have their point of view included, which is almost (but not quite) as bad as modern balanced journalism.
People complain about Firefox "live bookmarks" and rightly so. It's crap.
Opera, on the other hand, has an almost perfect implementation of RSS. It is integrated with mail and news in the Opera M2, so RSS items are treated just like e-mail. You have unread and read items, you can use filters (including smart filters), you can do with RSS almost everything you do with e-mail.
You can set up smart filters that would bring together Usenet news, items from your mailing lists, RSS items from a number of sites. It's trivially easy.
You can use RSS from a lot of different sources to monitor unique and rare news. You can subscribe to Yahoo/Google searches, news searches, delicious and technorati/feedster feeds, etc. If you have unique information needs, it's hard to beat RSS.
You can also use a bunch of innovative services such as BuildMyFeed that allow you to get RSS from sites that don't support it. How cool is that?
Or, if you like to, you can also crap like tagclouds and other stuff to really push the envelope with infoconsumption.
But personally I am just happy that I can easily get what I want where I want and when I want. Much better than visiting dozens of websites each day.
P.S. RSS is also a great tool for NOT keeping up with the news. Since you know that you have all those news available in your mail reader, you don't have to check them right now. For example, I no longer need to check Slashdot or something else compulsively. I can just open it whenever I have some time to kill, look through 50+ items, open the ones I am interested in and ignore the rest. No browsing needed for that.
Many wikipedians seem to be getting a hardon each time there is a tinyest "fact" not included in their beloved collection of wisdom. They then race to be the first to create an article about that item, no matter, how outlandish.
Consider this article about Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. An infamous UK tabloid The Sun has published a story alleging that Stalin ordered a creation of human-monkey supersoldier hybrids. The story was reprinted by someone else, then by someone else, then by someone else. It was reprinted in several Russian tabloids (with reference to The Sun), which apparently was enough for some other Western newspapers to pretend that "published in Russian newspapers" is proof of something.
Now we have some moron eager to copy-paste the content of all those articles into Wikipedia. And noone pays any attention. Other users just copyedit the story, fixing commas and other shit. Now Wikipedia does have official policies on Verifiability and Reliable sources, apparently written by some competent people. But who cares about policies? It's like a policy against trolling on Slashdot, totally unrealistic and unenforceable.
Then people who also contribute to articles about Kabbalah, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Holy Spirit, Fingering (sexual act) and Cannabis (drug) join in. Yeah, like I would trust them to report on human-monkey supersoldiers.
And this goes on an on. Yes, there are mechanisms in place to fix this sort of situation, but the problem is that like in real life playing by the rules takes too much effort. And only crazies can afford to spend the time. People who add wacky stuff to Wikipedia become proficient at superficially respecting the rules, while pushing their agenda (i.e. include all sorts of crazy stuff in Wikipedia). People who are rational usually have other things to do with their time and will just go away.
No one likes a democracy controlled by those with the most money. But how about encyclopedia controlled by those with the most free time?
Yes, you can buy an obsolete computer as cheaply as for 50$. So what? Are you saying that anyone making 5$/day should not get a computer that costs $1000? Did you forget the original point? I'll remind you then - it was that many families already see the value in education and access to a computer for their children.
Obviously not anyone bought a computer that expensive, but enough did to suggest that may be, just may be people getting a computer for their kids will not be immediately thinking about how much they can sell it for.
I said "managed to pay". Some time ago computers used to cost that much.
The fact is that $100 for these kids is worth 200 days of work if you follow 50 cent/day wage they get for 12-14 hours of work (according to this but I've heard of even less...).
There are countries where people get paid 5$/day (e.g. Russia today), but many people still managed to pay 1000$ for a desktop computer so that their kids can stay competitive.
Regardless, this is an extremely complex topic. Education is sitting in the middle of all other issues and you can't oversimplify it like Mr. Negroponte does with his OLPC program. Even to list the areas that would affect this development would probably take me 30-60 minutes. It's just so complex.
But. If someone can get from governments some money for a sexy project and get some kids some laptops, I am all for it. Certainly, it won't do any harm.
A Big Dork indeed. You may be surprised, but technological predictions are rather reliable and accurate when made properly. It's only when morons insist on believing the most ridiculous pop-culture speculations that they are disappointed.
Was there a report "produced cooperatively by... industry associations from Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States", that was "used by the semiconductor industry as a planning tool to determine how best to spend research and development money for new technology" promise you flying cars and Jupiter missions? Or may be super-intelligent computers?
What do I hear? There was no such report? You got your predictions from tabloids, popular newspapers and Hollywood movies? Or may be you even weren't born when those things were promised and are just a teenage cry-baby? I thought so.
Now that we have annoying whining dorks out of this discussion, the rest of us can actually exchange intelligent ideas and opinions about development of nanotechnology.