Whenever I hear of new memory technologies just over the horizon, I remember what i was told in my Data Processing 100 class lo, these many years ago: silicon memory and magnetic drives were "obsolescent technology" that just couldn't meet "the demands of the future". But there were many exciting new technologies just over the horizon, like "bubble memory" and "Fifth Generation Computers" that could program themselves.
Turns out it is always cheaper and more practical to improve what you have instead of adopting something new and unproven. I guess that's why hard drive arrays are no longer the size of washing machines, and hold 1,000 times what the old ones used to. So before I get all excited about this nano stuff, I want to know how it's going to be better than silicon will be ten years from now.
Then again, maybe domain names will be much more useful than they are today. Think about it: there are a lot of possible domain names. I'm too lazy to prove it, but I'm pretty sure there's enough possible and reasonable domain names so that everybody can have one. So now who needs all those un-memorizable phone numbers? You wanna call me? Just dial V-O-M-A-C-T, and you'll get routed to the appropriate device to communicate with me. Well yeah, phones will have to have more keys, but you'll need those anyway to send me text messages.
Actually, I just don't let my computer know who I am. When Windows asks for my name during installation (the nerve!), I make one up. So my pseudonym might show up in the metadata, but not my real name.
Exweeze me...but the draft does not require "that a person who disagrees with the policy of his government risk his life for the policies he disagrees with". To the contrary, a draft would give you an unambiguous way of saying "no" to that policy by refusing to submit to it. You cannot be made a member of the military against your will. Yes, you may be tried by a civilian court for your refusal, but that's what civil disobedience is all about. You can "opt out" of the draft. It was this kind of resistance that was a big factor in ending the Vietnam War. Of course, it takes some guts.
While predictions of this sort are notoriously risky, I'll venture to say that the era of mass warfare conducted by huge mobilized citizen-armies that began with Napoleon is over. Massed armies are nothing but targets for today's battlefield weaponry. Of course, soldiers are still needed, but in much smaller numbers than before.
But our army is stretched very thin today, even given the much smaller manpower demand of modern warfare. One reason for this is that the present administration has been injudicious in its use of military force; the invasion of Iraq was a waste of lives and resources. More importantly, it leaves us vulnerable if a serious crisis erupts elsewhere. Who do we send if the North Koreans go really bugnuts? What do we throw into the scales if an Islamicist revolution in Pakistan seizes that country's nuclear depots? And remember that Iran has nuclear potential, and a very unstable political situation.
Solutions for the military manpower problem are not, in principle, difficult, and I don't think they will require a draft: use pay incentives to recruit a few more divisions, and stop throwing them at non-problems. Keep back some reserves at all times.
You might "start out as an officer" if you went through ROTC in school--but then you are apt to wind up as a platoon commander (average life expectancy in serious combat=about 3 femtoseconds). Technicians are, at best, Warrant Officers. You're more likely to wind up making corporal (after you graduate basic training).
If they really need techs, what the military should do is hire more civilian contractors, and I do hope they go that route instead of drafting them. It's hard to coerce people into being smart. But then "smart" and "army" are two words that comprise an oxymoron when they occur in the same sentence. Believe me, I've been there.
If the military were to hire computer specialists, they would have to pay them the going rate. Considering the potential hazards inherent in operating near combat zones or in countries where Americans are profoundly disliked and where accommodations are of lesser quality than even the average geek's pad, the required incentive might be considerably more than the going rate. It's much cheaper to draft geeks and pay them whatever a buck private gets these days.
Exporting high tech jobs is not the same thing as the exodus of manufacturing jobs that took place several decades ago. Manufacturing labor is a ubiquitous commodity, and it makes sense to buy it at the cheapest possible price. If you can make widgets cheaper in China than the US, then everybody wins: the Chinese get some hard cash (and an industrial base), while we get cheap widgets. "But what about the poor American factory worker?", you ask. Well, they didn't exactly starve to death in droves, did they? They got other jobs, collected unemployment, or retired. They could do that because we retained a strong economy that could continue to support them in one way or another. And they told their kids to go to college and become computer scientists.
The export of tech work is an entirely different kettle of fish. The problem with this practice is that it often does not make good business sense to do it. It's a management fad that is yet another manifestation of the awesome capacity for stupid decisions on the part of the numbnuts who run our large corporations.
Yes, an Indian programmer will work for less than an American programmer. So if you add up the hourly labor cost of the same project as done by Indian and by American programmers, the Indian sum will be smaller. That's simple arithmetic, and even a CEO can do it. The problem is that it's not that simple! Here, in no particular order, are some of the reasons not to outsource:
Outsiders don't have access to the information that's been accumulated inside an organization that pertains to its business. Sure, the outsourcer can make a special effort to impart that knowledge, but that's difficult and seldom completely successful. It's even less likely to be successful if you have to rely on telephone conversations and videoconferencing to communicate. This lack of "institutional" knowledge often impairs the quality of the product.
Outsiders do what they are told. If you tell them to do something stupid, they will do it. Insiders have a stake in the future of the company, and unless you've hired a bunch of jellyfish, they will let you know if you give them stupid directions.
In the course of working on your project, the programmers will acquire a lot of knowledge about it. If they are outside contractors, they will probably go away once the project is done, and that knowledge evaporates. The next batch of contractors gets to learn all over again. And good luck if you need enhancements or maintenance.
Outside contractors have no incentive to be creative. They don't innovate. They get paid to do a specific job, not to find ways to do that job more quickly--or eliminate it altogether. So while you might get what you pay for, you will never get more.
That last item is, to me, the most crucial reason why indiscriminate outsourcing (whether it be to Silicon Valley or to India) is a Very Bad Thing. We Americans are, in effect, destroying the intellectual climate that has made us world leaders in high tech innovation. To have the kind of creativity that has driven the wave of innovation in American technology since the 1950s, you need a critical mass of inventive people, and you need them more or less in the same place so that they can work together.
What the numbnuts are doing when they export our high tech jobs is obtaining a cheap short term solution that has a very high long term cost: they are eating the seed corn. People like that should be defenestrated.
By the way, this is not an anti-Indian rant. It's not their fault! In fact, a lot of the brilliant people who made our technological leadership possible were immigrants from all over the world. Moreover, I'm not saying that outsourcing never makes sense. There are definitely instances when it makes a lot of sense to outsource a project (say, when you want to do something once, and it takes expertise you don't have and don't really need to acquire). No, this is an anti-executive numbnut rant. These submorons
Shhh! If Bill starts paying attention to this, how much longer do you think we will we be allowed to build our own computers? How can Bill resist plugging such a big loophole in his grand plan to tax all computing?
Perhaps, MS is planning right now how to apply pressure to Intel and AMD to force them to include a copy of Windows with every CPU. Why not? It's a logical extension of what MS does to computer makers.
We must keep quiet, and hide under the rug. Perhaps THEY won't notice us...
One thing I got out of this translation was an intense aversion to the word "volumetric". It now gives me hives. Doesn't "volumetric" have something to do with measuring volume? Perhaps it sounds more sophisticated than "3-D" to the translator.
No, there's nothing, absolutely nothing we can do. Obviously, the naifs at Verisign haven't realized how BAD we are at typing. I think it's very likely that their service will be DELUGED with requests for non-existent URLs...OVERWHELMED even, to the point where we may experience a DENIAL OF this uniquely useful SERVICE. Alas.
No. The point is quite simple, but evidently beyond the grasp of many posting comments here: assertions require argument. The absence of argument does not prove an assertion false, but does entitle you to ignore the assertion. Discussion of the truth or falsity of mere assertions is just noise.
Close, but I don't think that's a genuine paradox. Let's set up a test of the assertion that this is a form of the "Liar Paradox".
Let's assume that the glasses always work--let's assume that they always detect every lie. Now suppose you put on a pair of these specs and ask the the CEO, "Do believe that your glasses always work?". He answers "Yes!" --and the glasses emit a loud beep to indicate falsehood. Is that a paradox?
I don't think so. Given the hypothesis that the glasses always work, it is nevertheless possible that the CEO should believe that they do not work, and was consequently lying when the answered "Yes". In fact, if the operating assumption is true, then he MUST be lying. But that's not a paradox--that's just another lying CEO.
If the CEO were to answer "No" in reply to the question, and the glasses beep, then the CEO would also be lying--he knows he's got a good thing, but the government has paid him to shut up. Still no paradox.
The case in which we assume the glasses don't work is uninteresting, since any combination of statements and resultant beeps would be meaningless.
To make a paradox out of this, we'd have to change the story slightly. Let's suppose that instead of lie/truth detectors, the glasses are actualy true/false detectors: that is, they beep each and every time someone says something false in the wearer's presence--it doesn't matter what the speaker believes. Now if the CEO says "The glasses work" and the glasses beep, that's a "Liar" paradox. It's interesting in that it doesn't involve the obvious self-reference of "This sentence is false", but a bit dodgy in that it requires you to imagine some pretty far-out glasses.
Credit cards work because the companies cover the losses (for the most part). It's cheaper to cover losses than to prevent them. These watches and whatever else comes in the future will probably work the same.
I beg to differ -- credit card companies don't cover the costs of fraud we do. It's part of the cost of doing business for the merchants who accept credit cards, and it gets passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices.
My wife had all her credit cards stolen a few years back (never leave your purse unattended in a grocery cart...) Within a couple of hours, somebody charged $8,000 worth of electronics at the local Best Buy. Obviously, the work of professionals. We reported the theft, and it didn't cost us anything directly. What I found interesting was that nobody seemed to care--not the store, not the credit card company, and least of all the cops. (Even though the store told us they had a video of the perpetrators.) That's when I figured out who really pays the cost of those thefts. Why bother going after thieves when you've got the people who are being robbed convinced somebody else is paying the price?
Don't forget that you can use the HD's heat to spin the platter in the first place. You start the whole thing up by shaking the iPod or PDA a couple of times.
The only known disadvantage to this technology is that it causes your body's entropy to increase, thus making you age faster--and decreasing your IQ.
Yeah, and back in the nineteenth century, management didn't know how to run a weaving machine or shovel coal into a boiler. Knowing how--or being able--to do "real work" doesn't have anything to do with having power. "Knowledge workers" don't have any more power than the factory workers or laborers did during the industrial revolution. At best, they comfort themselves with the illusion of power. Sorry.
The reason why XML is widely used today for a multitude of purposes (e.g., data interchange between otherwise incompatible systems, configuration files, technical documents, command protocols that communicate with servers, etc. etc.) and why it will be used for even more stuff in the future is that it is centered on a very simple and powerful idea: self-documenting data. That is, the data is structured by internal markers that give information about the type of information contained in each logical element of the data stream (or file). Naturally, the XML geeks are doing everything they can to complicate this simple idea, but I digress...
Because XML files are structured, self-documenting text files that correspond to a formal definition (I know DTDs aren't technically required for "well-formed" XML, but you really don't want to do that), you can rely on your data being usable without making assumptions about the type of systems that will use it (OS is irrelevant, applications can have front and back ends that understand XML). Moreover, this compatibility isn't going to go away: it's just pure text--we will always be able to read it.
I have no idea whether the databases of the future will store their data in XML form or not. I'm not a database expert, but I suspect there are more efficient ways of storing and searching information than in huge chunks of tagged text. However, while a database that stores its data in a rigid table format may be quicker and more compact, it cannot preserve the richness of meta-information contained in an XML tagging system. If you put your XML into a traditional database, you won't be able to take advantage of being able to make searches based on information in the tags.
Be that as it may, the the fact remains that you will at least be able to feed your database XML, and get XML out of it. That means that the XML front end will parse the XML input data, and will be able to figure out how to organize your data in its innards based on the information provided by the XML tags in the data you give it. When you make a query (probably formatted as XML by the query software), the data will be returned as XML using the tag scheme specified in your DTD.
Another consideration is that you can store much more information about your data with an XML tagging scheme than you can with any database format--and you can communicate that information when you send your data to someone else, because the metadata is part of the data. I work with huge texts (technical manuals, actually) and I heartily welcome the flexibility and usefulness of being able to identify parts of that text based on any criteria that are meaningful to me or the consumer of the data.
Comparing Dread Empire's Fall (DEF) to the execrable Honor Harrington series is a low blow indeed. But I think maybe the reviewer was in a bad mood when he read this book--he seems to have missed a lot of the subtleties. Or perhaps he should read more slowly.
Walter Jon Williams is something of a chameleon as an author. In fact, he seems to have challenged himself to write each of his books in a different style. If you were to pick up a copy of Hardwired, Aristoi, and Day of Atonement with the covers ripped off, I don't think you'd guess that all three books were written by the same author. Not only are Williams' books usually set in different universes, but his writing style changes to match the setting.
DEF is Williams doing High Space Opera. He uses all the familiar tropes, and cliches, and he does it quite consciously. Indeed, on one level this is a parody of the genre. Doesn't it strike you as slightly funny that the captain of a mighty space dreadnought should devote its entire resources to producing a winning football team? That the Evil Insectoid Aliens (actually, I thought they were kinda like squids--but hey, anything with more than 2 arms is equivalent to an insectoid) pull off their coup de main by holding a sports festival and then rounding up the participants? --It had me ROFL.
And there are surprises hidden underneath the well-worn space opera trappings. The plot isn't as simple as the reviewer seems to think. Yes, you should have a good idea by mid-book that Sula is a shady Lady. But this is precisely what I thought was so clever about Williams' portrayal of this character: you think you know what Sula did (I'm going to try to stay away from spoilers)...but the full impact of it doesn't hit you until Williams actually takes you to the scene of the crime (in a flashback scene). At least, that was the effect of the narrative on me: I felt very different about Sula at the end of the book than I did three fourths of the way through. Williams gives you an intellectual understanding of Lady Sula early on, but it is only when you witness the act and then understand her motivation for fighting like a demon during the space battle that you feel the emotional impact. And frankly, it sent shivers down my spine. Lady Sula is scary!
At the end, Our Hero receives a little note from Sula. It says something like, "I'm coming to meet you now. We are destined to be together, and we are going to make an irresistible team". If you have read the book, what did you feel when you read that note? I felt spooky...and I felt pity for Our Hero. Compared to her, he's a naif. He's hamburger to her meat-grinder.
I'm dying to read the follow-on books not because I want to see if the Good Guys defeat the Evil Insectoid Aliens (come on!), but whether Our Hero survives Lady Sula.
I don't think we're going to get very far arguing about whether nanotech is possible or not. In the most trivial sense, sure anything's possible if it's not logically impossible.
Perhaps the question we ought to ask is whether machinelike nanotech such as Drexler envisions is likely. Is this tech a good bet--is it something we should invest money in? Personally, I wouldn't buy any stock in Drexler Inc. until he builds (or publishes plans for) a prototype that convincingly demonstrates that such nanomachines are not only possible, but practical. So how far beyond mere arm-waving has Drexler gotten? What has he done except publish academic papers that enthusiastically describe something that would be really neat, if it turns out to be practical? For that matter, suppose someone gave him a bunch of money. Exactly what would he do with it? What would be his research program, what specific engineering problems would he work to solve? I haven't heard anything of this sort from Drexler...but then I haven't been following his papers. If someone would like to enlighten me, I would be grateful.
Not at all. Any scientist calling himself other than a Christian would have had no career in Galileo's lifetime (in Europe, that is). Such was the nature of the times.
Maybe. But would a significant number of scientists in Europe in the Sixteenth Century have wanted to call themselves something else? Heck, it was revolutionary enough to call yourself a Protestant, why go to extremes and consider atheism? We see the past through the filter of the present, and make assumptions on that basis that often don't bear careful scrutiny. Think of how often "God" comes up in the writings of people like John Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and Descartes. And it's not just pious protestations--the Deity was crucial to their systematic thinking.
I was reacting against what I took to be an ill-considered blanket statement that: "...historically, Christianity always seems to come up on the losing side.". It's as though Christianity or the Church had some kind of anti-scientific programme that they have been following for the last 2K years. It's just not so, and I think you agree.
As for disagreements between science and Christianity...I'm of the opinion that there can be none. (Yes, I know, both sides will now converge and pummel me into jelly.) Certainly, the Roman Church had no real stake in opposing the Copernican view, and if they indeed persecuted Galileo solely for advocating this view, then they were behaving with an unlikely degree of stupidity and shortsightedness. Do you really think that they were that stupid? Personally, I always try to be skeptical when I am tempted to think of my enemies as being stupid to a statistically unlikely degree. It's the kind of think one wants to believe...but you don't get any smarter by just believing what makes you feel good.
Christianity. And historically, Christianity always seems to come up on the losing side.
Since most European and American scientists before the twentieth century (and quite a few after) would have called themselves "Christian," this statement seems more than a bit silly; it is certainly demonstrative of a abysmal ignorance of history, science, and Christianity.
Though probably founded more on political than religious grounds, the imbroglio that silenced Galileo was real enough, and had a chilling effect on scientific and philosophical inquiry for a short time (for example, it certainly intimidated Descartes into witholding some scientific papers from publication). However, this attitude was not typical of the Church as a whole for all of its history. At other times, the Church acted to safeguard, compile and disseminate scientific knowledge and to subsidize scholarship and scientific research. Do you think it's an accident that the great universities of the Middle Ages through modern times were religious institutions?
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Turns out it is always cheaper and more practical to improve what you have instead of adopting something new and unproven. I guess that's why hard drive arrays are no longer the size of washing machines, and hold 1,000 times what the old ones used to. So before I get all excited about this nano stuff, I want to know how it's going to be better than silicon will be ten years from now.
Then again, maybe domain names will be much more useful than they are today. Think about it: there are a lot of possible domain names. I'm too lazy to prove it, but I'm pretty sure there's enough possible and reasonable domain names so that everybody can have one. So now who needs all those un-memorizable phone numbers? You wanna call me? Just dial V-O-M-A-C-T, and you'll get routed to the appropriate device to communicate with me. Well yeah, phones will have to have more keys, but you'll need those anyway to send me text messages.
Actually, I just don't let my computer know who I am. When Windows asks for my name during installation (the nerve!), I make one up. So my pseudonym might show up in the metadata, but not my real name.
Was it Robert Heinlein who said, "People get the kind of government they deserve"?
Exweeze me...but the draft does not require "that a person who disagrees with the policy of his government risk his life for the policies he disagrees with". To the contrary, a draft would give you an unambiguous way of saying "no" to that policy by refusing to submit to it. You cannot be made a member of the military against your will. Yes, you may be tried by a civilian court for your refusal, but that's what civil disobedience is all about. You can "opt out" of the draft. It was this kind of resistance that was a big factor in ending the Vietnam War. Of course, it takes some guts.
But our army is stretched very thin today, even given the much smaller manpower demand of modern warfare. One reason for this is that the present administration has been injudicious in its use of military force; the invasion of Iraq was a waste of lives and resources. More importantly, it leaves us vulnerable if a serious crisis erupts elsewhere. Who do we send if the North Koreans go really bugnuts? What do we throw into the scales if an Islamicist revolution in Pakistan seizes that country's nuclear depots? And remember that Iran has nuclear potential, and a very unstable political situation.
Solutions for the military manpower problem are not, in principle, difficult, and I don't think they will require a draft: use pay incentives to recruit a few more divisions, and stop throwing them at non-problems. Keep back some reserves at all times.
It's especially moot if you consider that the military is part of the executive branch. Who enforces the orders of the judicial branch, eh?
You might "start out as an officer" if you went through ROTC in school--but then you are apt to wind up as a platoon commander (average life expectancy in serious combat=about 3 femtoseconds). Technicians are, at best, Warrant Officers. You're more likely to wind up making corporal (after you graduate basic training).
If they really need techs, what the military should do is hire more civilian contractors, and I do hope they go that route instead of drafting them. It's hard to coerce people into being smart. But then "smart" and "army" are two words that comprise an oxymoron when they occur in the same sentence. Believe me, I've been there.
If the military were to hire computer specialists, they would have to pay them the going rate. Considering the potential hazards inherent in operating near combat zones or in countries where Americans are profoundly disliked and where accommodations are of lesser quality than even the average geek's pad, the required incentive might be considerably more than the going rate. It's much cheaper to draft geeks and pay them whatever a buck private gets these days.
Exporting high tech jobs is not the same thing as the exodus of manufacturing jobs that took place several decades ago. Manufacturing labor is a ubiquitous commodity, and it makes sense to buy it at the cheapest possible price. If you can make widgets cheaper in China than the US, then everybody wins: the Chinese get some hard cash (and an industrial base), while we get cheap widgets. "But what about the poor American factory worker?", you ask. Well, they didn't exactly starve to death in droves, did they? They got other jobs, collected unemployment, or retired. They could do that because we retained a strong economy that could continue to support them in one way or another. And they told their kids to go to college and become computer scientists.
The export of tech work is an entirely different kettle of fish. The problem with this practice is that it often does not make good business sense to do it. It's a management fad that is yet another manifestation of the awesome capacity for stupid decisions on the part of the numbnuts who run our large corporations.
Yes, an Indian programmer will work for less than an American programmer. So if you add up the hourly labor cost of the same project as done by Indian and by American programmers, the Indian sum will be smaller. That's simple arithmetic, and even a CEO can do it. The problem is that it's not that simple! Here, in no particular order, are some of the reasons not to outsource:
That last item is, to me, the most crucial reason why indiscriminate outsourcing (whether it be to Silicon Valley or to India) is a Very Bad Thing. We Americans are, in effect, destroying the intellectual climate that has made us world leaders in high tech innovation. To have the kind of creativity that has driven the wave of innovation in American technology since the 1950s, you need a critical mass of inventive people, and you need them more or less in the same place so that they can work together.
What the numbnuts are doing when they export our high tech jobs is obtaining a cheap short term solution that has a very high long term cost: they are eating the seed corn. People like that should be defenestrated.
By the way, this is not an anti-Indian rant. It's not their fault! In fact, a lot of the brilliant people who made our technological leadership possible were immigrants from all over the world. Moreover, I'm not saying that outsourcing never makes sense. There are definitely instances when it makes a lot of sense to outsource a project (say, when you want to do something once, and it takes expertise you don't have and don't really need to acquire). No, this is an anti-executive numbnut rant. These submorons
Shhh! If Bill starts paying attention to this, how much longer do you think we will we be allowed to build our own computers? How can Bill resist plugging such a big loophole in his grand plan to tax all computing? Perhaps, MS is planning right now how to apply pressure to Intel and AMD to force them to include a copy of Windows with every CPU. Why not? It's a logical extension of what MS does to computer makers. We must keep quiet, and hide under the rug. Perhaps THEY won't notice us...
One thing I got out of this translation was an intense aversion to the word "volumetric". It now gives me hives. Doesn't "volumetric" have something to do with measuring volume? Perhaps it sounds more sophisticated than "3-D" to the translator.
No, there's nothing, absolutely nothing we can do. Obviously, the naifs at Verisign haven't realized how BAD we are at typing. I think it's very likely that their service will be DELUGED with requests for non-existent URLs...OVERWHELMED even, to the point where we may experience a DENIAL OF this uniquely useful SERVICE. Alas.
No. The point is quite simple, but evidently beyond the grasp of many posting comments here: assertions require argument. The absence of argument does not prove an assertion false, but does entitle you to ignore the assertion. Discussion of the truth or falsity of mere assertions is just noise.
Let's assume that the glasses always work--let's assume that they always detect every lie. Now suppose you put on a pair of these specs and ask the the CEO, "Do believe that your glasses always work?". He answers "Yes!" --and the glasses emit a loud beep to indicate falsehood. Is that a paradox?
I don't think so. Given the hypothesis that the glasses always work, it is nevertheless possible that the CEO should believe that they do not work, and was consequently lying when the answered "Yes". In fact, if the operating assumption is true, then he MUST be lying. But that's not a paradox--that's just another lying CEO.
If the CEO were to answer "No" in reply to the question, and the glasses beep, then the CEO would also be lying--he knows he's got a good thing, but the government has paid him to shut up. Still no paradox.
The case in which we assume the glasses don't work is uninteresting, since any combination of statements and resultant beeps would be meaningless.
To make a paradox out of this, we'd have to change the story slightly. Let's suppose that instead of lie/truth detectors, the glasses are actualy true/false detectors: that is, they beep each and every time someone says something false in the wearer's presence--it doesn't matter what the speaker believes. Now if the CEO says "The glasses work" and the glasses beep, that's a "Liar" paradox. It's interesting in that it doesn't involve the obvious self-reference of "This sentence is false", but a bit dodgy in that it requires you to imagine some pretty far-out glasses.
I beg to differ -- credit card companies don't cover the costs of fraud we do. It's part of the cost of doing business for the merchants who accept credit cards, and it gets passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices.
My wife had all her credit cards stolen a few years back (never leave your purse unattended in a grocery cart...) Within a couple of hours, somebody charged $8,000 worth of electronics at the local Best Buy. Obviously, the work of professionals. We reported the theft, and it didn't cost us anything directly. What I found interesting was that nobody seemed to care--not the store, not the credit card company, and least of all the cops. (Even though the store told us they had a video of the perpetrators.) That's when I figured out who really pays the cost of those thefts. Why bother going after thieves when you've got the people who are being robbed convinced somebody else is paying the price?
Don't forget that you can use the HD's heat to spin the platter in the first place. You start the whole thing up by shaking the iPod or PDA a couple of times. The only known disadvantage to this technology is that it causes your body's entropy to increase, thus making you age faster--and decreasing your IQ.
I thought liquidators were a cheap source for getting one of those Aeron chairs my sore butt.
Yeah, and back in the nineteenth century, management didn't know how to run a weaving machine or shovel coal into a boiler. Knowing how--or being able--to do "real work" doesn't have anything to do with having power. "Knowledge workers" don't have any more power than the factory workers or laborers did during the industrial revolution. At best, they comfort themselves with the illusion of power. Sorry.
--and who is John Galt, anyhow?
The reason why XML is widely used today for a multitude of purposes (e.g., data interchange between otherwise incompatible systems, configuration files, technical documents, command protocols that communicate with servers, etc. etc.) and why it will be used for even more stuff in the future is that it is centered on a very simple and powerful idea: self-documenting data. That is, the data is structured by internal markers that give information about the type of information contained in each logical element of the data stream (or file). Naturally, the XML geeks are doing everything they can to complicate this simple idea, but I digress...
Because XML files are structured, self-documenting text files that correspond to a formal definition (I know DTDs aren't technically required for "well-formed" XML, but you really don't want to do that), you can rely on your data being usable without making assumptions about the type of systems that will use it (OS is irrelevant, applications can have front and back ends that understand XML). Moreover, this compatibility isn't going to go away: it's just pure text--we will always be able to read it.
I have no idea whether the databases of the future will store their data in XML form or not. I'm not a database expert, but I suspect there are more efficient ways of storing and searching information than in huge chunks of tagged text. However, while a database that stores its data in a rigid table format may be quicker and more compact, it cannot preserve the richness of meta-information contained in an XML tagging system. If you put your XML into a traditional database, you won't be able to take advantage of being able to make searches based on information in the tags.
Be that as it may, the the fact remains that you will at least be able to feed your database XML, and get XML out of it. That means that the XML front end will parse the XML input data, and will be able to figure out how to organize your data in its innards based on the information provided by the XML tags in the data you give it. When you make a query (probably formatted as XML by the query software), the data will be returned as XML using the tag scheme specified in your DTD.
Another consideration is that you can store much more information about your data with an XML tagging scheme than you can with any database format--and you can communicate that information when you send your data to someone else, because the metadata is part of the data. I work with huge texts (technical manuals, actually) and I heartily welcome the flexibility and usefulness of being able to identify parts of that text based on any criteria that are meaningful to me or the consumer of the data.
Comparing Dread Empire's Fall (DEF) to the execrable Honor Harrington series is a low blow indeed. But I think maybe the reviewer was in a bad mood when he read this book--he seems to have missed a lot of the subtleties. Or perhaps he should read more slowly.
Walter Jon Williams is something of a chameleon as an author. In fact, he seems to have challenged himself to write each of his books in a different style. If you were to pick up a copy of Hardwired, Aristoi, and Day of Atonement with the covers ripped off, I don't think you'd guess that all three books were written by the same author. Not only are Williams' books usually set in different universes, but his writing style changes to match the setting.
DEF is Williams doing High Space Opera. He uses all the familiar tropes, and cliches, and he does it quite consciously. Indeed, on one level this is a parody of the genre. Doesn't it strike you as slightly funny that the captain of a mighty space dreadnought should devote its entire resources to producing a winning football team? That the Evil Insectoid Aliens (actually, I thought they were kinda like squids--but hey, anything with more than 2 arms is equivalent to an insectoid) pull off their coup de main by holding a sports festival and then rounding up the participants? --It had me ROFL.
And there are surprises hidden underneath the well-worn space opera trappings. The plot isn't as simple as the reviewer seems to think. Yes, you should have a good idea by mid-book that Sula is a shady Lady. But this is precisely what I thought was so clever about Williams' portrayal of this character: you think you know what Sula did (I'm going to try to stay away from spoilers)...but the full impact of it doesn't hit you until Williams actually takes you to the scene of the crime (in a flashback scene). At least, that was the effect of the narrative on me: I felt very different about Sula at the end of the book than I did three fourths of the way through. Williams gives you an intellectual understanding of Lady Sula early on, but it is only when you witness the act and then understand her motivation for fighting like a demon during the space battle that you feel the emotional impact. And frankly, it sent shivers down my spine. Lady Sula is scary!
At the end, Our Hero receives a little note from Sula. It says something like, "I'm coming to meet you now. We are destined to be together, and we are going to make an irresistible team". If you have read the book, what did you feel when you read that note? I felt spooky...and I felt pity for Our Hero. Compared to her, he's a naif. He's hamburger to her meat-grinder.
I'm dying to read the follow-on books not because I want to see if the Good Guys defeat the Evil Insectoid Aliens (come on!), but whether Our Hero survives Lady Sula.
I don't think we're going to get very far arguing about whether nanotech is possible or not. In the most trivial sense, sure anything's possible if it's not logically impossible.
Perhaps the question we ought to ask is whether machinelike nanotech such as Drexler envisions is likely. Is this tech a good bet--is it something we should invest money in? Personally, I wouldn't buy any stock in Drexler Inc. until he builds (or publishes plans for) a prototype that convincingly demonstrates that such nanomachines are not only possible, but practical. So how far beyond mere arm-waving has Drexler gotten? What has he done except publish academic papers that enthusiastically describe something that would be really neat, if it turns out to be practical? For that matter, suppose someone gave him a bunch of money. Exactly what would he do with it? What would be his research program, what specific engineering problems would he work to solve? I haven't heard anything of this sort from Drexler...but then I haven't been following his papers. If someone would like to enlighten me, I would be grateful.
Not at all. Any scientist calling himself other than a Christian would have had no career in Galileo's lifetime (in Europe, that is). Such was the nature of the times.
Maybe. But would a significant number of scientists in Europe in the Sixteenth Century have wanted to call themselves something else? Heck, it was revolutionary enough to call yourself a Protestant, why go to extremes and consider atheism? We see the past through the filter of the present, and make assumptions on that basis that often don't bear careful scrutiny. Think of how often "God" comes up in the writings of people like John Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and Descartes. And it's not just pious protestations--the Deity was crucial to their systematic thinking.
I was reacting against what I took to be an ill-considered blanket statement that: "...historically, Christianity always seems to come up on the losing side.". It's as though Christianity or the Church had some kind of anti-scientific programme that they have been following for the last 2K years. It's just not so, and I think you agree.
As for disagreements between science and Christianity...I'm of the opinion that there can be none. (Yes, I know, both sides will now converge and pummel me into jelly.) Certainly, the Roman Church had no real stake in opposing the Copernican view, and if they indeed persecuted Galileo solely for advocating this view, then they were behaving with an unlikely degree of stupidity and shortsightedness. Do you really think that they were that stupid? Personally, I always try to be skeptical when I am tempted to think of my enemies as being stupid to a statistically unlikely degree. It's the kind of think one wants to believe...but you don't get any smarter by just believing what makes you feel good.
Christianity. And historically, Christianity always seems to come up on the losing side.
Since most European and American scientists before the twentieth century (and quite a few after) would have called themselves "Christian," this statement seems more than a bit silly; it is certainly demonstrative of a abysmal ignorance of history, science, and Christianity.
Though probably founded more on political than religious grounds, the imbroglio that silenced Galileo was real enough, and had a chilling effect on scientific and philosophical inquiry for a short time (for example, it certainly intimidated Descartes into witholding some scientific papers from publication). However, this attitude was not typical of the Church as a whole for all of its history. At other times, the Church acted to safeguard, compile and disseminate scientific knowledge and to subsidize scholarship and scientific research. Do you think it's an accident that the great universities of the Middle Ages through modern times were religious institutions?
Well yes, but they also find fossils in limestone, and that's not usually considered a "fossil fuel".