One nice trick Apple discovered is to have the users be non-root, yet still administrative. (Did you hear that, Lindows?) They did this by creating tools that run as root, but which require authentication to run.
Ahh, that's a fantastic idea. Foolproof.
Downloading email attachment to/home/joeblow/attachments.....done. [~/attachments]$ ls -l -rwxr--r-- 1 joeblow joeblow 124 Apr 11 16:30 virus_scan.sh [~/attachments]$./virus_scan.sh This utility requires a root password to run. Password: ***********
Linux is teh gay! 0wnx0r3d! su: running as root rmdir: removing directory,/bin rmdir: removing directory,/boot rmdir: removing directory,/dev rmdir: removing directory,/etc rmdir: removing directory,/home rmdir: removing directory,/lib rmdir: removing directory,/mnt rmdir: removing directory,/opt rmdir: removing directory,/proc rmdir: removing directory,/root rmdir: removing directory,/sbin rmdir: removing directory,/tmp rmdir: removing directory,/usr rmdir: removing directory,/var [~/attachments]$ ls -l ls: command not found. /home/joeblow/attachments: No such file or directory
Education is the key, not restrictive code. Most users are used to getting instructions from their computers, a la Clippy, F1, FAQs, tooltips, etc. Why is it then unreasonable for them to not know the difference between legitimate instructions from their computers and malicious ones? After all, context is everything in determining who's instructions to follow, and context doesn't exist without an experience base. It's not that people refuse to learn about computers; it's just that they are overwhelmed by them and give up easily. The people educating them slip into techspeak and they glaze over. The reason security is such an issue is that computers (and internet-related products in particular) were taking giant leaps forward when the public was still taking tiny steps.
*Thanks, stratjakt, for the script writer's editorial comment on Linux.
In the fall, when I came back to school, I had no choice but to pay the $... too many people on the network to propagate viruses and worms and other badness.
I hate to be the one who told you that money was wasted, but just about every college campus in the country offers some sort of anti-virus software to the students free of charge. It costs the school less to purchase a campus-wide site license than it does to clean up after several thousand messy Microsoft PCs, all on wide-open university ethernet.
If your school does not offer this, you really need to call the computing center and complain. More college students have computers now than televisions, and you know that the vast majority of them are MS-installed GatewayDellCompaqs purchased by Mom and Dad. This service is an absolute necessity.
What does Joe User do when he upgrades his computer? He goes to the Dell website, chooses a bunch of features, and orders a new one. When it comes to the operating system, he has (basically) three choices: 1. He can pay the $50 and get, preinstalled, the operating system that works with 90% of the software titles he will ever come into contact with and are available on the shelf at Best Buy, is the same thing everyone else he knows uses, and comes with (included) support. 2. He can *not* pay the $50 and get an unfamiliar operating system with no 1-800 number for support, the software for which must for the most part be downloaded (which is also unfamiliar territory), and no one else he knows uses. 3. He can get a blank computer and take a chance that someone he knows not only knows how to install a flavor of Linux, but can keep answering his questions as he learns how to use a new operating system. Or he can try it on his own, but with no 1-800 number to call, all the Linux help is online, which he can't get to without his computer.
At that point, it's not about price. It's about perceived value*. And for Joe, the choice is pretty clear. Pay the man the $50.
*Obviously, the real value is much different. But Joe doesn't care about free (as in ideas), or "security", or standards compliance, or any of the other things that get Slashdotters' rile up. He just wants to use what he's comfortable with, and unfortunately, Joe learned to use a computer in a Microsft-centric world. Anything else is just a cheap knock-off.
The only way to enable true competition would be to force Microsoft to open up all of their windows API's, and allow the emerging of an open source Windows.
That's a nice pipe dream, but you're forgetting that Windows is running on about 98% of the world's computers. Microsoft practices Security Through Obscurity* to a large extent; the only reason more holes aren't found and exploited is that the source code is unavailable (notwithstanding the recent leak, which was for old code anyway). If MS were forced to open their APIs to the public, the computers of the world would be brought to their knees in a matter of hours. Microsft just does not have the solid codebase from which to start an Open-Source Model operating system.
*Most Open-Source softwares also practice STO, in that they are not all that secure, but they are only used on a small percentage of the world's machines. The ones that *are* widely used, like Apache or OpenSSH, are an exception. But if all open source software had the widespread use of Microsoft software, security issues would be just as pressing as they are now. (Although, truly secure software is also a nice pipe dream, but that's a topic for another discussion.)
In Milwaukee, the stoplights are fitted with an infrared system where the stoplight recognizes the approaching ambulance/fire truck and turns green for it. Other communities are looking into similar devices.
If an anti-speeding system was installed, it would obviously be overridden by the emergency vehicle system.
In fact, why are there even music videos? I don't care how an artist looks. And I won't buy a CD from an artist just because "they're hot".
Ahh, but that is what distinguishes you from a large segment of the music-buying population. The record companies are not looking for new talented artists. They are looking for marketability, and nothing sells faster than sex.
Well said, sir. That was a very lucid explanation of the buyer's options.
The RIAA doesn't seem to get it. But the RIAA is made up of lots of people who are highly skilled at marketing and general business practices. They may not be ethical, but they are highly trained, highly skilled, highly paid, and very good at what they do. So what's missing from this equation?
What's missing is the fact that for the RIAA, it's not about money anymore. It's about power.
The RIAA is basically a middleman between the artist and the consumer, and they are providing services to both. Before we get all cynical about the way it really works, let's take a look at how it *should* work. The middleman spends time and money hunting for talented musicians that they think the consumers would like to hear. They take on a certain amount of risk by funding the artists' recording sessions and the production of their album. When the consumer purchases the music, the middleman gets a cut of the sales for the services they provided, both to the artist (upfront funding) and to the consumer (scouting for talent). The artist would have had a hard time getting their music marketed and exposed without the middleman, and the consumer would have had a harder time finding music they liked without someone helping them scout. The cost of the CD is compensation to the artist plus payment for services rendered by the middleman.
Now, let's look at how it really works. The RIAA is in this business to make money, and the corporate culture is such that if you don't make more money this year than you did last year, you are a failure. So they try their best to minimize risk. The only way they can do that is to guarantee that the artists they choose sell well. That means they need to embark on a marketing blitz and create an atmosphere where the public wants to hear the artist's music, even if it's not very good. So now the artists that make them the most money are a) not really making their own music, since they're just making what the public will buy and b) artifically turned into stars overnight. Naturally, the RIAA doesn't do this to musicians who won't follow their devious plan; the scouting is not for musical talent as much as it is for marketability.
Suddenly, it becomes a power struggle between the RIAA and the consumers. The consumers are struggling to find good music, but everywhere they turn--radio, television, magazines, advertisements, record stores--they are bombarded with these artificially created stars. Most of them just give in and like what they are told to like. Why do people clamor for these artificially created stars (and I think everyone on Slashdot knows the types of artists I'm referring to)? Because "everyone else likes them." They're popular because they're popular; such is the recursive nature of celebrity. The RIAA discovered that they only have to artificially plant a few seeds, using their immense leverage, and things will become popular automatically.*
Ahh, but here's the crux of it. The internet, and the bottom-up everyman philosophy behind it, is ruining the RIAA's position. People can scout for artists themselves now, and it doesn't cost them much money. They can read lots of independent reviews of artists and never come into contact with the RIAA's propoganda. The amount of information a consumer can get on a large number of artists is exponentially higher than it was in the past. The consumer recognizes that the middleman he has come to depend on is not doing its job, and the consumer quietly removes the RIAA from the equation. Now, either the RIAA has to start doing things the hard way (actually scouting for talent that will be popular on its own merits, thus *earning* their cut of music sales), or it can label the consumer the bad guy and try to get legislation passed that will preserve its lofty perch. Copyright infringment is not the issue here; offer for sale something worth selling, and people will buy it. If you make it more desirable for them to purchase it than to steal it, they
However, I'd expect to see an X2 prize being offered to get to LEO after this.
Actually, the next project Peter Diamandis is working on related to this is called the X-Prize Cup, i.e., the Rocket Races. Every year there will be an airshow (spaceshow?) in a yet-to-be-determined city where people who have built X-Prize-style suborbital craft can compete. Prizes will likely be in several categories, like Most Altitude, Longest Downrange Distance, Most Velocity, Largest Payload to 100km, etc. And since the competition will happen every year, this will give the crafts' designers and builders a chance to improve their designs.
The X-Prize was designed to foster a space tourism industry. The X-Prize Cup is designed to create innovation and growth in the private space arena. It will eventually lead to orbital flights.
The hope is that the rise of private companies that aren't tied to NASA politics will be able to eventually replicate the work done on the DC-X and actually get some real progress on cheap orbital launches rather than the technology of the month approach NASA's been dumping money down the last 20 years.
Don't get me wrong, I am very excited about the things NASA has accomplished and can still accomplish. They are doing great things. But the problem with their approach is that every new vehicle is a revolution, not an evolution. The best way to develop new technologies has always been to take a design that already works and tweak it slightly for your own purposes, making it a little better in the process. Unfortunately, NASA can't do that because their funding has the lifespan of a politician's term in office.
Don't believe everything you read. Paul Allen is a big sponsor of SpaceShipOne... Not Bill Gates so far as I know. Also, I'd hardly say that SpaceShipOne crashed. It has a successful flight and had an incident with the landing gear that was cabable of being repaired. And during that flight, SpaceShipOne became the first ever privately funded plane/spaceship to break the sound barrier. SO what, they had a landing gear issue. Earlier in flight they lit up a rocket engine after being dropped from a jet at 47,000 feet.
You're right, it was Paul Allen, not Bill Gates. And the "crash" was just a landing gear strut buckling on landing. No big deal. The part and the problem were fixed in a matter of days.
In my opinion, Burt Rutan is not that interested in the $10 million. I think he's taking his sweet time about it because he would like to start a space tourism company once the craft is fully qualified. After all, that's the other half of the X-Prize: not just to build the hardware, but to also build an infrastructure for the space tourism industry and make some money. Create a generation of barnstormers (spacestormers?) who will tweak and adjust their craft and slowly, evolutionarily, bring about cheap and reliable access to space. Not every vehicle has to be a revolutionary new multi-billion-dollar NASA design. It's the bottom-up approach to space.
What do you base this on? The fact that in a lot of these lawsuits there is a verdict and damages are paid? Circular logic, methinks.
No, I base this on the facts of the case, as I mentioned. Let's take the case you mentioned in your cynical comment, "but how could she have known the coffee was hot, the poor dear?", since it was making fun of an incredibly well-known "frivolous" lawsuit, in which Mrs. Stella Liebeck spilled coffee on her lap in February of 1992 and won a $2.7 million settlement from The McDonald's Corporation.
This case was settled in 1994, but remains the poster case for frivolous lawsuits. The main point of this case was that McDonald's had known for years that it's coffee was significantly hotter than other resturaunts. They also knew that it caused severe burns when spilled, and did nothing to correct it because it cut down on the number of free refills given (it took longer for people to drink each cup because they had to wait for it to cool). No "reasonable person" would expect a cup of coffee to cause 3rd degree burns when spilled, but that's exactly what it did. Mrs. Liebeck required skin grafts and retained permanent scars from the incident. When she tried to settle with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses, McDonald's offered her $800. She sued them. During the trial, it was discovered that McDonalds had over 700 claims from people burned by their coffee between 1982 and 1992, and some had third-degree burns similar to Liebeck's. Based on the evidence that McDonald's knew the danger and continued the practice anyway, the jury awarded Mrs. Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages. Punitive damages were later reduced to $480,000 even though the trial judge called McDonald's actions reckless, callous, and willful.
References for the above facts are here, and on the pages quoted there.
And as for the hairdryer, you're right. One poorly made hairdryer on a wet counter (which is a perfectly reasonable place to put it, since bathrooms tend to be moist) is not grounds for a lawsuit. However, if the same company made all their hairdryers that way, and knew it hurt people, and still did nothing about it, that *would* be grounds for a lawsuit. Someone has to be the first person to come forward and say, "this hairdryer hurt me when I set it down in a reasonable place." If they win, they get labeled "suit-happy" and written off by a cynical populace who needs soundbytes to fill their day.
Yes, there are frivolous lawsuits. Yes, there are sympathetic juries who try to set an example. Yes, there are obvious abuses of the system. But please don't assume the system is rife with them because of a few isolated and well-publicized cases.
Or maybe you're just another idiot who's a fan of industry supported "science". Either way, I'd say you can be fairly safely disregarded and ignored.
It took you an awfully long time to ignore me, as long as your post was.
Perhaps you didn't read my previousposts, so I will link them again here for your convenience. I am not simply trying to be obtuse. I'm just trying to give people with their heads stuck in the sand (or maybe the rainforest) the idea that environmentalism is really not about what they think it's about.
Environmentalism is not about saving the planet, or saving the ecosystem, or even preserving the species living here. It's about preserving our way of life, and the moment the environmentalists realise that the better they will be at helping the cause. Stop and think about the big picture for a moment: there is absolutely nothing we as a species could do to this planet that it would not survive. We could clearcut all the rainforests, we could pollute the oceans until they turn a deep butterscotch color, we could nuke every last inch of land, we could even set up rockets on the moon to push it out of orbit and have it crash somewhere in the Pacific. None of these things would end life on the planet. Something would survive, and given a few million years, would evolve into a new, distinct ecosystem. We wouldn't be here, of course, but the planet wouldn't care.
That's the thing about these precious species that we are so keen on saving: they haven't been here very long. There were others here before them, and there will be others here after them. It's that big "Circle of Life" that Disney made a bundle off of, but on an evolutionary time scale. What is saving the dolphins going to do for the planet? Nothing. They're just one in a very long line of aquatic mammals, evolutionarily speaking. However, it will do quite a bit for our way of life, since we do so enjoy watching them swim. Reducing pollutants in our atmosphere -- and thus the greenhouse effect -- will not halt the planet's life cycle: it's survived warm periods before, and it can do it again. We want to reduce pollutants because it will make a day at the beach, well, hell.
If only we humans were not burdened with a conscience. Then we could live out our lives here on the earth and not worry about what we're doing to it. The other species aren't worried.
For god's sake! THIS IS AN APRIL'S FOOL. Ditto may be an expert in chaos theory, but the content of the article makes no sense whatsoever to any trained scientist. The whole blood-sucking thing is hilarious (and an attempt to help the reader understand that this is an April's fool).
Once again, people who have nothing better to do than to trick their friends with April Fool's jokes refuse to accept anything printed, published, posted, or spoken on the 1st day in April as truth.
Hate to pop your bubble, but there is nothing April Fool's about the article. It is genuine. What may suprise you is that these news items have been around for much longer. This is really very old news, but we saw it because it was a slow news day at the Economist on Monday.
USA: where the stupid can sue the manufacturer for using a product in a stupid way.
No, you're just being cynical and stupid. Lawsuit abuse is really not nearly as rampant as the media would like you to believe, and if you get right down into the details of each case, it turns out that the vast majority of these lawsuits are justified. It's just easier to leave out important details; it makes for a better soundbyte.
As for the "using in a stupid way", that's what warning labels are for. The people who win successful lawsuits against companies for using their products in unadvertised ways usually have very good reason to do so (hypothetical example: a hair dryer that has loose wires and arcs electricity when sitting on a wet countertop -- the hair dryers are not supposed to do that).
Cynicism leads only to misconceptions and FUD. Lighten up.
Is there any place on earth that will remain pure and not affected by human destruction through its greed for knowledge?
Wait a minute. Pure? As is what sense? Pure is a thoroughly human contrivance. Humans are part of the Earth's ecosystem; we evolved here. Therefore, in order for the Earth's ecosystem to be "impurified" it would have to be contaminated by something outside the ecosystem. That's not us, nor is it anything we could possibly do. Do we shame a dog for crapping on the grass? After all, it's destroying the ecosystem through its greed for food.
Humans are not separate from the Earth. They are part of the ecosystem, and cannot "ruin" it. See my previousposts.
Environmentalists just can't see the big picture.
Re:The REAL security problem in '04
on
Gates on Winsecurity
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well said, sir.
Microsoft is constantly lauded by the press and the business world alike for bringing computers to the masses. A chicken in every pot and a Windows license in every home. And while that is a commendable feat, helping to spur the absolutely exponential growth of the internet and computing in general in the last few years, no one stopped to ask if the masses were ready for all this computing at their fingertips. Computers are powerful devices, and are becoming ever moreso with increased use of broadband internet. The potential for a computer to do serious damage is great, when the right person (or perhaps the wrong person, depending on your perspective) is doing it. The problem right now is that the computer companies are doing exactly what every business in our capitalist society *should* be doing with a home appliance: trying to make money. That, above all else, drives their product creation and marketing. The problem with this line of thinking for computers, which are more than just appliances, is there is no responsibility or accountability for consumer ignorance. Yet.
Consider other home appliances: stoves, televisions, water heaters, automatic litter box cleaners. None of these things require a license to operate. Why? Because although they may be dangerous if used improperly, they don't really pose an immediate danger to other people; just the person operating the device. Since we as a nation believe that people should take responsibility for their own uses of these devices, only product warning labels, owner's manuals, and occasionally tech support are offered as education.
Now consider devices that truly do pose an immediate danger to other people: automobiles. Because we are all driving on roads with *other people* and are a potential danger to them, we as a nation decided that drivers needed to be licensed in order to drive, i.e., there is a mandatory level of education needed before people are allowed to use the device.
When personal computers were first introduced, they fell into the first category above. Each unit was separate. If you didn't read the manual and fried your hard disk, that was your problem. However, as we network more and more, and desktop environments such as Windows and Zero Install try to blur the line between working on your own machine and working as part of a network, computers are migrating into the second category. We're all driving on the proverbial internet highway. Now, if you are a clueless user who clicks every attachment in emails and forgets to install security patches, you are endangering the livelyhoods (if not the lives) of other people on the network. Even the responsible people can still be hammered: you can't tell me that mail servers running OS X are not slowed down by the deluge of emails from Windows boxes still running SoBig and MyDoom. No one is immune, and it translates to lost revenues for everybody.
So what do we do to fix it? Do we mandate that computer companies educate their customers? No. That would be like asking car companies to teach their customers how to drive. How about the ISPs? Nope. They're just the toll booth operators. TThe problem is standards: the world of personal computers sprang up absolutely overnight, from a standards compiance point of view. Automobiles have had over 90 years with the same basic premise (gas, brake, clutch, steering wheel, internal combustion engine), and they have been refined to be compatible with each other. Take one driver's education course, and you can drive any car built. They can all run on the same fuel. They all fit on the same roads (current SUV trend notwithstanding). All of them have at least some interchangable parts. Yet there are dozens of car companies, each with its own set of designers and engineers. Computers sprang up so fast, with a new technological revolution every week, that standards compiance hardly had time to ask, "what the hell just happened?" As it is, we have several major operating systems, none of which run the same software (they all req
Television's line-up is becoming more and more dumbed down with reality shows and the like. This alienates the more "enlightened" viewers who want more participation in their entertainment than just pushing buttons on a remote control.
These shows are being created by large media companies, whose sole purpose in life is to make money. They have armies of marketers, demographic analysts, and programming executives at their disposal, who are all highly intelligent, highly paid, and very good at what they do. So what does this mean? It means the majority of people watching TV enjoy watching what's on. If not, it wouldn't be on for very long. Quality has nothing to do with it.
I used to be really frustruated with the TV shows offered until I came to the realization that I was not the majority. The TV shows being aired are not for me. They are for the 90 percenters; the people who watch TV all the time, and are thrilled with most of it. Once I realized that the TV executives didn't care about my viewing habits, since the inexpensive crap they were spewing out was being watched (and enjoyed) by millions, a certain Zen-like calm came over me. There are no intellegent, original, well-produced shows on television because people like me (and, judging by this thread, the majority of Slashdot) are a small fraction of TV viewers. We don't have enough sway to warrant producing such clever television.
Once this realization hit me, I stopped trying to find something good on television. I just stopped caring about the TV feed. Instead, I turned to the internet to find out which shows are more to my liking, and then I went out and rented/bought the DVDs or downloaded the episodes (if they're not on DVD, or the rental store doesn't carry them). I dropped out of the TV executives' line of sight, but they didn't even notice; they were busy raking in cash because their sponsors bought ad slots on "Joe Millionaire," which is apparently watched by millions every week. I'm just not one of those millions.
Anyone who buys into this arguement, but also rejects the notion that violent films and videogames have a causal effect leading to violent behavior, is a hypocrite. Not everyone reading or posting to slashdot has uniform beliefs, but the rejection games-leads-to-violence theory is a regular slashdot theme....
> In order to afford the expensive "car-toys" on their shows and commercials, they offer them credit and bankruptcy help. Hmm. And we wonder why the country's average personal debt load is so frighteningly high. They are pushing a culture of borrowing and short term vision for immediate gratification.
Personally, I believe those ads air because of the target audience. Maybe they serve to reinforce a behavior, but in all likelyhood the behavior already existed.
Ahh, the eternal chicken-and-egg debate.
Do the commercials we watch on television shape our perception of things and cause us to create a "culture of borrowing and short term vision"? Or are they merely reflecting the culture that's already there in order to target a demographic?
Do the violent video games we market alter our perception (and/or acceptance) of violence and cause it to be more prevalent in our society? Or are they merely reflecting tastes in an already-violent society in order to sell more copies?
These are excellent questions, for which there are no easy answers. The parent used both sides of the argument on two separate issues (violent video games cause a violent society, but instant-gratification commercials don't create an instant-gratification society). The grandparent, however, made one of the most insightful and common-sense comments on commercials and advertising I have read in a long while, without delving into cause and effect. Well said, my good sir.
I don't mind watching some relevant, NON-REDUNDANT commercials, since I know that pays the bills. But a lot of the cable channels, with few commercials in their collective pool (*cough* Sci-Fi *cough* Comedy Central *cough*) show the same annoying commercials about Zentrax-3 over and over and over.
Unfortunately, the commercials that sell the most products are not the ones that are clever, or funny, or insightful. They are the ones you remember. And if showing the same damn commercial twice every commercial break makes you (the consumer) remember it, then so be it.
Hmmm... while we're on the subject of commercials in cable television...
What I would like to know is why there are commercial breaks in media I am paying for. So I send my $50 to the cable company every month like a good little consumer, and in return they send me approximately 75 channels, only three of which I watch with any regularity (Comedy Central, TCM, and The History Channel), and every ten minutes I am assaulted with loud, obnoxious commercials who paid for the privilege of being shown. Let's look at the economics involved here: making these shows and maintaining the cable network is not cheap. If we completely eliminated commercial sponsors and covered the cost of cable with subscriptions, we would be paying several hundred dollars a month each to subsidize creation of crap. So we obviously can't eliminate the commercials--that would be too risky, financially, for the cable company. However, those commercial advertisers are paying many millions to have their ads seen. I imagine the ratio of "income due to subscriptions" to "income due to advertisers" is quite low.
So here's what I propose: let's turn basic cable into a free service, like network TV and radio. Eliminate the need for subscription charges. The networks could charge more for their advertising slots, since the audience would be bigger, and their revenues would even out. In fact, they might even rise. Just about every building in the country is wired for cable, even if the people living/working in it do not subscribe, so just open up the lines. People who aren't wired could pay an installation fee to get their house wired, or a very small fee to wire it themselves and then have a tech come out and connect them to the neighborhood hub. Wow. Now suddenly the cable networks are in direct competition with CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and the like, and must entice viewers with quality programming. The more viewers they have, the more they can charge for their advertising slots. Everybody wins.
Ahh, but I'm forgetting one thing: such a change would require a new business model from the media companies. Looking at the fiasco with other forms of free media (P2P, anyone?) we can clearly see that the media companies are heading into the 21st Century kicking and screaming, dragging people into court before they'll change their comfortable business model. Such mind-set changes are not possible until something drastic happens.
Terraforming other planets is fun, but first we really need to terraform Earth. Between desertification, global warming, overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, slash&burn traditional farming, chemically-enhanced modern farming, genetic engineering of plants, moving species between ecological niches, sooting up the polar regions in ways that reduce the planet's albedo, and a lot of other things those pesky primates have been up to, this planet is becoming significantly less Earth-like.
Ah, but by definition, one can't terraform Earth.
terraform, tr.v.
To transform (a landscape) on another planet into one having the characteristics of landscapes on Earth.
Last time I checked, Earth wasn't "another planet." However, if you are meaning terraforming in the more general sense of "man-made changes in the landscape" then, yes, we are already terraforming Earth. We are changing the composition of its atmosphere, diverting its waterways, moving its stone, and (many contend) raising its temperature.
So many people in this board are talking about how we have messed up this planet, and can't be trusted with another one. At the risk of sounding industrialist (and therefore Republican, which seems to be a bad thing on/.), why is it that people think the planet is in trouble? This hunk of rock floating out in space is hardly dying. It has survived ice ages, tectonic plate movement, floods, fires, storms, droughts, floods, and even other relatively large hunks of rock slamming into it at millions of miles an hour. Yet, through all of this, it has managed to stay a planet. And it stayed teeming with life through all of it. Absolutely teeming. Microbes live 25 miles underground in solid rock, for crying out loud, and entire ecosystems live (and thrive) in the perpetual boiling dark of undersea volcanic vents, completely cut off from other ecosystems. These are hardly what we'd call hospitable environments.
No, my friends, the planet is not in danger. Nothing we could possibly do to it will ever even make it itch a little. What is truly in danger is our way of life. What we are destroying is the ecosystem we have become accustomed to. Species die out all the time. They get replaced with new ones. This has been going on for billions of years, long before we were even a spark of tool usage in some clever chimp's head. We don't strive to save species because they are critical to the survival of this and that. We save them because we like them. If every animal on the endangered species list went extinct, would the planet really notice? Not really. Life would go on. In a few millions years, other species would arrive. We'd be pretty bummed about it, though, 'cause those white tigers are adorable.
However, if there is life on Mars (and I'm an optimist about such things) then it has existed on Mars for millions, perhaps billions, of years, evolving quite independently of Earth's life. The amount we could learn from such life is immeasureable (even if it's only in fossil form). All of Earth's life is extremely similar, from a genetic point of view. Surely we all know the old adage, "one data point doth not a trend make"? Having a second data point (Mars) would really strengthen our own understanding of ourselves, and life in general. In that sense, I think terraforming would be a great loss to the scientific community, tantamount to outlawing microscopes, or something similarly absurd (and Gary Larson-esque: I can see the man in the trenchcoat in the dark alley.... "Wanna buy a microscope?").
But I digress. Here we are arguing about whether or not we should be terraforming another planet, and we can't even manage to get a computer and a robot arm on the planet's surface reliably. Crawl before you can walk, eh? Let's work on getting hardware in orbit cheaply and reliably, and *then* we can talk about massive public works projects on other planets.
I wonder if they contacted John Carmak about this...
They would have, but Carmack is busy trying to get to space. No wonder Doom 3 hasn't been released yet.
Re:Polluting other planets
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Melting Europa
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...she feared that we were given this planet and we've made a mess of it.
Once and for all: it's not the planet that needs saving. There is absolutely nothing we could do to this planet that it will not survive. Let's launch every nuke we have and destroy every square inch of land on this rock. Some life will survive, and it will grow and evolve and be dominant. It won't be us, of course, but it will be life. Life was here long, long before we were, and you can bet it wasn't all in "natural ecological harmony." The whole place is one giant unstable system, what with all the species competing with, and eating, each other. The current ecosystem will not survive for long, but the beauty of it is that a new, different ecosystem will take its place. And this has happened, millions of times, all over the planet, even before we got here.
No, folks, what needs saving is not the planet, but our way of life. For example, if we want to continue driving around, we'll need to use something other than fossil fuels. Once they run out, we'll have to wait another 50 million years or so to get some more. I don't have that long. My point here is that it's not the planet that's in trouble. Long after we're dead and gone, the planet will still be here, merrily producing life.
...we shouldn't mess up God's plans with Mars by stomping all over it with our oversized space boots.
So what are God's plans for Mars? "Look but don't touch?" I can't find that anywhere in the Bible. (Probably because the Bible was written by people* for whom the Earth was the entire universe. They had no concept of standing on another world in that time.) I can, however, find Genesis 1:28, "God blessed them; and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'" I can only assume that by "earth" the writer of Genesis meant "universe," since the Earth was the boundary for human habitation at the time.
Guess what, we humans, as a race, own everything in the solar system.
I wouldn't say we own it, persay, but we certainly seem to be the only creatures who have the ability to reach most of it. And, frankly, I rather like the idea of spreading the human race around a bit. It's fairly clear that one of these days we're going to obliterate ourselves, and it would be nice if the planet-wide extinction didn't take all of the human race with it. Keep in mind, however, that that's coming from a purely selfish need to continue the human race. The planet, or even the solar system, would be quite content without us. Life will continue.
Boy, am I going to get flamed into oblivion for this one. "I remember when I had good karma..."
*Yes, you fundamentalist bastards, you heard me: written by people. Inspired, of course, but still written by people. People with agendas.
What do you mean, this isn't news? I've been waiting for someone to develop serious technology for a landing on Europa for quite some time now. Given that Europa is one big ocean and is the single most likely place in our solar system to find life (present planet excepted, of course) it's about time we thought about going there.
Now, the hippie spin on the word "radioactive"... you're right. That's not news. People have been fearing the words "nuclear", "reaction", "radioactive", and "atomic" for many years now. Any damage that might be done to the surrounding area because of a failure would be absolutely insignificant on a planetary, or even regional, scale. Just because the media have taught us to fear and hate anything with the word "nuclear" in it is no reason not to trust the technology.
NASA has been using Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) for decades on planetary probes and manned missions. The basic premise is this: a container holds some radioactive heavy metal, such as plutonium. Because the metal is decaying, it generates a bunch of heat. That heat is used with thermoelectric generators to create electricity, and the leftover heat (since the reaction is not not that efficient) is used in other ways, like keeping the astronauts warm. But here's the kicker: an RTG has never, ever failed on a space mission. Not once. It's been flown hundreds of times. (Missions using RTGs have failed, but the RTGs themselves performed flawlessly every time.) Just because it's "nuclear" doesn't mean it's Chernobyl.
It's also my rallying cry, and FWIW, I have degrees in both Electrical and Software Engineering and enough experience doing both that I think my opinions may have some validity.
Your opinions do have some validity, and I understand that computers should work as advertised without much tinkering. The problem is, they don't. When was the last time you created a document in MS Word with styles and automatic formatting without arguing with the program, losing data to backwards compatibility issues, redoing things manually, or just spending time hunting for the options in the hidden "Personalized Menus"? And, by the way, documents with styles is really the only thing separating Word from Notepad. I really wish it worked.
Saying that users just need to learn more arcane bits of knowledge (come on, mounting a USB device just to get at some pictures? Are you serious!) just to do trivial tasks completely misses that point.
No, it doesn't. Asking computer makers to write stupid popups, autostarts, helpful paperclips and continuous hardware scans in the background completely misses the point. There's no way to include absolutely every contingency in every operating system. Is it really too difficult to ask a user to plug in a camera, open a file browser, go to the menus and select "Connect Storage Device," and choose "USB Camera" in the selection box? If the user can't handle that, then they shouldn't have passed the second grade. And without having to worry about autodetecting a thousand possible hardware configurations, the software developers can concentrate on far more important tasks, like security or solid GUI design.
Having things work out of the box is great. Something to strive for. But what I was talking about was an entirely different level of ignorance. I'm talking about the people who don't know how to look on the hard disk for a file they downloaded off the internet, and refuse to learn because "it's just gone." I'm talking about users who plug their cameras into the USB slot, and when nothing happens, give up and complain that "computers suck." Yes, these people exist, and yes, they are extremely frustruating to work with. But they should not be catered to. As you said before, computers are here to make life easier. But computers, in order to make life easier, must be used as tools. They are not autonomous butlers yet. Tools take a certain amount of skill and knowledge to use properly. Any idiot can hit things with a hammer, but someone who knows his tool will know that hitting the nail while it's perpendicular to the board and not choking up on the handle both give better results than random whacking.
I have nothing against striving for elegance and simplicity in design. I applaud designers who struggle to maintain consistency of metaphor and aesthetic. But we cannot cater to the lowest common denominator. People don't sit down in their cars, cry out "Take me to the grocery store!" and expect it to happen (yet). They shouldn't expect the same from their computers.
I am an Aerospace Engineering student with one degree already under my belt and one more on the way. Computers are just a tool for me, not a career. I would love for them to work all the time, but I don't place all the responsibility for thinking on the computer makers; a certain amount of learning must take place before I can use computers as effective tools. The desktop masses haven't discovered that yet, because they're being told otherwise by Microsoft and Apple (and AOL, to a certain extent). "This new computer/OS/program is easier than ever! You won't have to think at all!"
I'd like to see the day when the free software community can provide not only the code for a smashing game engine (come on, surely you can replicate the unreal!), but also the work of convincing voice actors, motion-capture animators, map designers, plot authors that could write a reasonably well selling book and patient texture designers.
Ahh, but the beauty of F/OSS is that it concentrates on specificity, not generality. A F/OSS project concentrates on doing one thing, doing it very, very well, and letting others build on top of it. Consider the OS itself: there's one group who works on the kernel, another few groups who work on base utilities, another few who work on desktops, and another few who work on applications. Since each group is concentrating on only their small slice, each component is rock solid, but because everything they do is available to everyone else, it all works together nicely.
For game design, all the F/OSS community really has to do is create a fully extensible, well documented, rock solid, fast game engine that they offer to the world. Then small, start-up game companies (those who don't have the money to license a big engine or write their own) can spend more time creating a good game-- plots, characters, level design, etc., and leave the coding to someone else. Most of the money that gets poured into games goes into getting them to work, not the design. Free the game companies from having to worry about that, and we will end up with higher quality games that *gasp* run on any platform!
The biggest problem with all of this "ease of use" crap that Microsoft and Macintosh are spewing into the advertising arena is that your average user now wants their computer to be a toaster. They want to have one big red button on the front, and when they push it, the computer reads their minds and does whatever they want it to do. Obviously, with a machine as complex as a computer, this is beyond impossible. What Linux distros need to do is get away from convincing people that computers are easy to use, and instead convince them that they are easy to LEARN. No newbie is going to be able to do anything effectively right out of the box, no matter what OS s/he is using. There is a certain learning curve that must be overcome first. However, by convincing said user that the interface is consistent in design and solid in metaphor will help them to overcome their confusion. (Current GUI designs and metaphors are riddled with inconsistencies and flaws -- but that's a comment for another post.)
"I don't care how it works, I just want it to work!" is the rallying cry of most home desktop users. To continue the toaster metaphor, that's fine if you're talking about the convection of the heating coils and the molecular processes of crisping bread. The users *don't* need to know that stuff. However, they *do* need to know that they have to choose a darkness setting before they start toasting, and many users are confusing the first level of knowledge with the second. The first level would be knowing how to compile programs from scratch. General users don't need to know how to do that. But the second level of knowledge would be knowing how to mount a USB device to/mnt/digitalcamera and copy the pictures from there to/home/user/digitalcamerapics (all within a graphical file browser, of course).
We don't need to make computers less difficult, persay, we just need to take away the stigmatism surrounding learning anything new. No highly complex machine will ever be useable right out of the box with no prior knowledge or instruction. Not Microsoft, not Macintosh, not Linux, not even your PDA. But sadly, consumers will continue to want that, since the advertisments that sold them their $800 toasters convinced them that's the way it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, that's a fantastic idea. Foolproof.
Education is the key, not restrictive code. Most users are used to getting instructions from their computers, a la Clippy, F1, FAQs, tooltips, etc. Why is it then unreasonable for them to not know the difference between legitimate instructions from their computers and malicious ones? After all, context is everything in determining who's instructions to follow, and context doesn't exist without an experience base. It's not that people refuse to learn about computers; it's just that they are overwhelmed by them and give up easily. The people educating them slip into techspeak and they glaze over. The reason security is such an issue is that computers (and internet-related products in particular) were taking giant leaps forward when the public was still taking tiny steps.
*Thanks, stratjakt, for the script writer's editorial comment on Linux.
In the fall, when I came back to school, I had no choice but to pay the $... too many people on the network to propagate viruses and worms and other badness.
I hate to be the one who told you that money was wasted, but just about every college campus in the country offers some sort of anti-virus software to the students free of charge. It costs the school less to purchase a campus-wide site license than it does to clean up after several thousand messy Microsoft PCs, all on wide-open university ethernet.
If your school does not offer this, you really need to call the computing center and complain. More college students have computers now than televisions, and you know that the vast majority of them are MS-installed GatewayDellCompaqs purchased by Mom and Dad. This service is an absolute necessity.
Linux is free. Let Microsoft try to copy that.
Ahh, but they do. Every day.
What does Joe User do when he upgrades his computer? He goes to the Dell website, chooses a bunch of features, and orders a new one. When it comes to the operating system, he has (basically) three choices:
1. He can pay the $50 and get, preinstalled, the operating system that works with 90% of the software titles he will ever come into contact with and are available on the shelf at Best Buy, is the same thing everyone else he knows uses, and comes with (included) support.
2. He can *not* pay the $50 and get an unfamiliar operating system with no 1-800 number for support, the software for which must for the most part be downloaded (which is also unfamiliar territory), and no one else he knows uses.
3. He can get a blank computer and take a chance that someone he knows not only knows how to install a flavor of Linux, but can keep answering his questions as he learns how to use a new operating system. Or he can try it on his own, but with no 1-800 number to call, all the Linux help is online, which he can't get to without his computer.
At that point, it's not about price. It's about perceived value*. And for Joe, the choice is pretty clear. Pay the man the $50.
*Obviously, the real value is much different. But Joe doesn't care about free (as in ideas), or "security", or standards compliance, or any of the other things that get Slashdotters' rile up. He just wants to use what he's comfortable with, and unfortunately, Joe learned to use a computer in a Microsft-centric world. Anything else is just a cheap knock-off.
The only way to enable true competition would be to force Microsoft to open up all of their windows API's, and allow the emerging of an open source Windows.
That's a nice pipe dream, but you're forgetting that Windows is running on about 98% of the world's computers. Microsoft practices Security Through Obscurity* to a large extent; the only reason more holes aren't found and exploited is that the source code is unavailable (notwithstanding the recent leak, which was for old code anyway). If MS were forced to open their APIs to the public, the computers of the world would be brought to their knees in a matter of hours. Microsft just does not have the solid codebase from which to start an Open-Source Model operating system.
*Most Open-Source softwares also practice STO, in that they are not all that secure, but they are only used on a small percentage of the world's machines. The ones that *are* widely used, like Apache or OpenSSH, are an exception. But if all open source software had the widespread use of Microsoft software, security issues would be just as pressing as they are now. (Although, truly secure software is also a nice pipe dream, but that's a topic for another discussion.)
In Milwaukee, the stoplights are fitted with an infrared system where the stoplight recognizes the approaching ambulance/fire truck and turns green for it. Other communities are looking into similar devices.
If an anti-speeding system was installed, it would obviously be overridden by the emergency vehicle system.
In fact, why are there even music videos? I don't care how an artist looks. And I won't buy a CD from an artist just because "they're hot".
Ahh, but that is what distinguishes you from a large segment of the music-buying population. The record companies are not looking for new talented artists. They are looking for marketability, and nothing sells faster than sex.
Well said, sir. That was a very lucid explanation of the buyer's options.
The RIAA doesn't seem to get it. But the RIAA is made up of lots of people who are highly skilled at marketing and general business practices. They may not be ethical, but they are highly trained, highly skilled, highly paid, and very good at what they do. So what's missing from this equation?
What's missing is the fact that for the RIAA, it's not about money anymore. It's about power.
The RIAA is basically a middleman between the artist and the consumer, and they are providing services to both. Before we get all cynical about the way it really works, let's take a look at how it *should* work. The middleman spends time and money hunting for talented musicians that they think the consumers would like to hear. They take on a certain amount of risk by funding the artists' recording sessions and the production of their album. When the consumer purchases the music, the middleman gets a cut of the sales for the services they provided, both to the artist (upfront funding) and to the consumer (scouting for talent). The artist would have had a hard time getting their music marketed and exposed without the middleman, and the consumer would have had a harder time finding music they liked without someone helping them scout. The cost of the CD is compensation to the artist plus payment for services rendered by the middleman.
Now, let's look at how it really works. The RIAA is in this business to make money, and the corporate culture is such that if you don't make more money this year than you did last year, you are a failure. So they try their best to minimize risk. The only way they can do that is to guarantee that the artists they choose sell well. That means they need to embark on a marketing blitz and create an atmosphere where the public wants to hear the artist's music, even if it's not very good. So now the artists that make them the most money are a) not really making their own music, since they're just making what the public will buy and b) artifically turned into stars overnight. Naturally, the RIAA doesn't do this to musicians who won't follow their devious plan; the scouting is not for musical talent as much as it is for marketability.
Suddenly, it becomes a power struggle between the RIAA and the consumers. The consumers are struggling to find good music, but everywhere they turn--radio, television, magazines, advertisements, record stores--they are bombarded with these artificially created stars. Most of them just give in and like what they are told to like. Why do people clamor for these artificially created stars (and I think everyone on Slashdot knows the types of artists I'm referring to)? Because "everyone else likes them." They're popular because they're popular; such is the recursive nature of celebrity. The RIAA discovered that they only have to artificially plant a few seeds, using their immense leverage, and things will become popular automatically.*
Ahh, but here's the crux of it. The internet, and the bottom-up everyman philosophy behind it, is ruining the RIAA's position. People can scout for artists themselves now, and it doesn't cost them much money. They can read lots of independent reviews of artists and never come into contact with the RIAA's propoganda. The amount of information a consumer can get on a large number of artists is exponentially higher than it was in the past. The consumer recognizes that the middleman he has come to depend on is not doing its job, and the consumer quietly removes the RIAA from the equation. Now, either the RIAA has to start doing things the hard way (actually scouting for talent that will be popular on its own merits, thus *earning* their cut of music sales), or it can label the consumer the bad guy and try to get legislation passed that will preserve its lofty perch. Copyright infringment is not the issue here; offer for sale something worth selling, and people will buy it. If you make it more desirable for them to purchase it than to steal it, they
However, I'd expect to see an X2 prize being offered to get to LEO after this.
Actually, the next project Peter Diamandis is working on related to this is called the X-Prize Cup, i.e., the Rocket Races. Every year there will be an airshow (spaceshow?) in a yet-to-be-determined city where people who have built X-Prize-style suborbital craft can compete. Prizes will likely be in several categories, like Most Altitude, Longest Downrange Distance, Most Velocity, Largest Payload to 100km, etc. And since the competition will happen every year, this will give the crafts' designers and builders a chance to improve their designs.
The X-Prize was designed to foster a space tourism industry. The X-Prize Cup is designed to create innovation and growth in the private space arena. It will eventually lead to orbital flights.
The hope is that the rise of private companies that aren't tied to NASA politics will be able to eventually replicate the work done on the DC-X and actually get some real progress on cheap orbital launches rather than the technology of the month approach NASA's been dumping money down the last 20 years.
Don't get me wrong, I am very excited about the things NASA has accomplished and can still accomplish. They are doing great things. But the problem with their approach is that every new vehicle is a revolution, not an evolution. The best way to develop new technologies has always been to take a design that already works and tweak it slightly for your own purposes, making it a little better in the process. Unfortunately, NASA can't do that because their funding has the lifespan of a politician's term in office.
Don't believe everything you read. Paul Allen is a big sponsor of SpaceShipOne... Not Bill Gates so far as I know. Also, I'd hardly say that SpaceShipOne crashed. It has a successful flight and had an incident with the landing gear that was cabable of being repaired. And during that flight, SpaceShipOne became the first ever privately funded plane/spaceship to break the sound barrier. SO what, they had a landing gear issue. Earlier in flight they lit up a rocket engine after being dropped from a jet at 47,000 feet.
You're right, it was Paul Allen, not Bill Gates. And the "crash" was just a landing gear strut buckling on landing. No big deal. The part and the problem were fixed in a matter of days.
In my opinion, Burt Rutan is not that interested in the $10 million. I think he's taking his sweet time about it because he would like to start a space tourism company once the craft is fully qualified. After all, that's the other half of the X-Prize: not just to build the hardware, but to also build an infrastructure for the space tourism industry and make some money. Create a generation of barnstormers (spacestormers?) who will tweak and adjust their craft and slowly, evolutionarily, bring about cheap and reliable access to space. Not every vehicle has to be a revolutionary new multi-billion-dollar NASA design. It's the bottom-up approach to space.
What do you base this on? The fact that in a lot of these lawsuits there is a verdict and damages are paid? Circular logic, methinks.
No, I base this on the facts of the case, as I mentioned. Let's take the case you mentioned in your cynical comment, "but how could she have known the coffee was hot, the poor dear?", since it was making fun of an incredibly well-known "frivolous" lawsuit, in which Mrs. Stella Liebeck spilled coffee on her lap in February of 1992 and won a $2.7 million settlement from The McDonald's Corporation.
This case was settled in 1994, but remains the poster case for frivolous lawsuits. The main point of this case was that McDonald's had known for years that it's coffee was significantly hotter than other resturaunts. They also knew that it caused severe burns when spilled, and did nothing to correct it because it cut down on the number of free refills given (it took longer for people to drink each cup because they had to wait for it to cool). No "reasonable person" would expect a cup of coffee to cause 3rd degree burns when spilled, but that's exactly what it did. Mrs. Liebeck required skin grafts and retained permanent scars from the incident. When she tried to settle with McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses, McDonald's offered her $800. She sued them. During the trial, it was discovered that McDonalds had over 700 claims from people burned by their coffee between 1982 and 1992, and some had third-degree burns similar to Liebeck's. Based on the evidence that McDonald's knew the danger and continued the practice anyway, the jury awarded Mrs. Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages. Punitive damages were later reduced to $480,000 even though the trial judge called McDonald's actions reckless, callous, and willful.
References for the above facts are here, and on the pages quoted there.
And as for the hairdryer, you're right. One poorly made hairdryer on a wet counter (which is a perfectly reasonable place to put it, since bathrooms tend to be moist) is not grounds for a lawsuit. However, if the same company made all their hairdryers that way, and knew it hurt people, and still did nothing about it, that *would* be grounds for a lawsuit. Someone has to be the first person to come forward and say, "this hairdryer hurt me when I set it down in a reasonable place." If they win, they get labeled "suit-happy" and written off by a cynical populace who needs soundbytes to fill their day.
Yes, there are frivolous lawsuits. Yes, there are sympathetic juries who try to set an example. Yes, there are obvious abuses of the system. But please don't assume the system is rife with them because of a few isolated and well-publicized cases.
Or maybe you're just another idiot who's a fan of industry supported "science". Either way, I'd say you can be fairly safely disregarded and ignored.
It took you an awfully long time to ignore me, as long as your post was.
Perhaps you didn't read my previous posts, so I will link them again here for your convenience. I am not simply trying to be obtuse. I'm just trying to give people with their heads stuck in the sand (or maybe the rainforest) the idea that environmentalism is really not about what they think it's about.
Environmentalism is not about saving the planet, or saving the ecosystem, or even preserving the species living here. It's about preserving our way of life, and the moment the environmentalists realise that the better they will be at helping the cause. Stop and think about the big picture for a moment: there is absolutely nothing we as a species could do to this planet that it would not survive. We could clearcut all the rainforests, we could pollute the oceans until they turn a deep butterscotch color, we could nuke every last inch of land, we could even set up rockets on the moon to push it out of orbit and have it crash somewhere in the Pacific. None of these things would end life on the planet. Something would survive, and given a few million years, would evolve into a new, distinct ecosystem. We wouldn't be here, of course, but the planet wouldn't care.
That's the thing about these precious species that we are so keen on saving: they haven't been here very long. There were others here before them, and there will be others here after them. It's that big "Circle of Life" that Disney made a bundle off of, but on an evolutionary time scale. What is saving the dolphins going to do for the planet? Nothing. They're just one in a very long line of aquatic mammals, evolutionarily speaking. However, it will do quite a bit for our way of life, since we do so enjoy watching them swim. Reducing pollutants in our atmosphere -- and thus the greenhouse effect -- will not halt the planet's life cycle: it's survived warm periods before, and it can do it again. We want to reduce pollutants because it will make a day at the beach, well, hell.
If only we humans were not burdened with a conscience. Then we could live out our lives here on the earth and not worry about what we're doing to it. The other species aren't worried.
For god's sake! THIS IS AN APRIL'S FOOL. Ditto may be an expert in chaos theory, but the content of the article makes no sense whatsoever to any trained scientist. The whole blood-sucking thing is hilarious (and an attempt to help the reader understand that this is an April's fool).
Once again, people who have nothing better to do than to trick their friends with April Fool's jokes refuse to accept anything printed, published, posted, or spoken on the 1st day in April as truth.
Hate to pop your bubble, but there is nothing April Fool's about the article. It is genuine. What may suprise you is that these news items have been around for much longer. This is really very old news, but we saw it because it was a slow news day at the Economist on Monday.
BBC News: Biologial Computer Born (June 2, 1999)
TechExtreme.com: Chaotic Computing (March 23, 2001)
Or perhaps you're just trolling, and I fell for it...
USA: where the stupid can sue the manufacturer for using a product in a stupid way.
No, you're just being cynical and stupid. Lawsuit abuse is really not nearly as rampant as the media would like you to believe, and if you get right down into the details of each case, it turns out that the vast majority of these lawsuits are justified. It's just easier to leave out important details; it makes for a better soundbyte.
As for the "using in a stupid way", that's what warning labels are for. The people who win successful lawsuits against companies for using their products in unadvertised ways usually have very good reason to do so (hypothetical example: a hair dryer that has loose wires and arcs electricity when sitting on a wet countertop -- the hair dryers are not supposed to do that).
Cynicism leads only to misconceptions and FUD. Lighten up.
Is there any place on earth that will remain pure and not affected by human destruction through its greed for knowledge?
Wait a minute. Pure? As is what sense? Pure is a thoroughly human contrivance. Humans are part of the Earth's ecosystem; we evolved here. Therefore, in order for the Earth's ecosystem to be "impurified" it would have to be contaminated by something outside the ecosystem. That's not us, nor is it anything we could possibly do. Do we shame a dog for crapping on the grass? After all, it's destroying the ecosystem through its greed for food.
Humans are not separate from the Earth. They are part of the ecosystem, and cannot "ruin" it. See my previous posts.
Environmentalists just can't see the big picture.
Well said, sir.
Microsoft is constantly lauded by the press and the business world alike for bringing computers to the masses. A chicken in every pot and a Windows license in every home. And while that is a commendable feat, helping to spur the absolutely exponential growth of the internet and computing in general in the last few years, no one stopped to ask if the masses were ready for all this computing at their fingertips. Computers are powerful devices, and are becoming ever moreso with increased use of broadband internet. The potential for a computer to do serious damage is great, when the right person (or perhaps the wrong person, depending on your perspective) is doing it. The problem right now is that the computer companies are doing exactly what every business in our capitalist society *should* be doing with a home appliance: trying to make money. That, above all else, drives their product creation and marketing. The problem with this line of thinking for computers, which are more than just appliances, is there is no responsibility or accountability for consumer ignorance. Yet.
Consider other home appliances: stoves, televisions, water heaters, automatic litter box cleaners. None of these things require a license to operate. Why? Because although they may be dangerous if used improperly, they don't really pose an immediate danger to other people; just the person operating the device. Since we as a nation believe that people should take responsibility for their own uses of these devices, only product warning labels, owner's manuals, and occasionally tech support are offered as education.
Now consider devices that truly do pose an immediate danger to other people: automobiles. Because we are all driving on roads with *other people* and are a potential danger to them, we as a nation decided that drivers needed to be licensed in order to drive, i.e., there is a mandatory level of education needed before people are allowed to use the device.
When personal computers were first introduced, they fell into the first category above. Each unit was separate. If you didn't read the manual and fried your hard disk, that was your problem. However, as we network more and more, and desktop environments such as Windows and Zero Install try to blur the line between working on your own machine and working as part of a network, computers are migrating into the second category. We're all driving on the proverbial internet highway. Now, if you are a clueless user who clicks every attachment in emails and forgets to install security patches, you are endangering the livelyhoods (if not the lives) of other people on the network. Even the responsible people can still be hammered: you can't tell me that mail servers running OS X are not slowed down by the deluge of emails from Windows boxes still running SoBig and MyDoom. No one is immune, and it translates to lost revenues for everybody.
So what do we do to fix it? Do we mandate that computer companies educate their customers? No. That would be like asking car companies to teach their customers how to drive. How about the ISPs? Nope. They're just the toll booth operators. TThe problem is standards: the world of personal computers sprang up absolutely overnight, from a standards compiance point of view. Automobiles have had over 90 years with the same basic premise (gas, brake, clutch, steering wheel, internal combustion engine), and they have been refined to be compatible with each other. Take one driver's education course, and you can drive any car built. They can all run on the same fuel. They all fit on the same roads (current SUV trend notwithstanding). All of them have at least some interchangable parts. Yet there are dozens of car companies, each with its own set of designers and engineers. Computers sprang up so fast, with a new technological revolution every week, that standards compiance hardly had time to ask, "what the hell just happened?" As it is, we have several major operating systems, none of which run the same software (they all req
Television's line-up is becoming more and more dumbed down with reality shows and the like. This alienates the more "enlightened" viewers who want more participation in their entertainment than just pushing buttons on a remote control.
These shows are being created by large media companies, whose sole purpose in life is to make money. They have armies of marketers, demographic analysts, and programming executives at their disposal, who are all highly intelligent, highly paid, and very good at what they do. So what does this mean? It means the majority of people watching TV enjoy watching what's on. If not, it wouldn't be on for very long. Quality has nothing to do with it.
I used to be really frustruated with the TV shows offered until I came to the realization that I was not the majority. The TV shows being aired are not for me. They are for the 90 percenters; the people who watch TV all the time, and are thrilled with most of it. Once I realized that the TV executives didn't care about my viewing habits, since the inexpensive crap they were spewing out was being watched (and enjoyed) by millions, a certain Zen-like calm came over me. There are no intellegent, original, well-produced shows on television because people like me (and, judging by this thread, the majority of Slashdot) are a small fraction of TV viewers. We don't have enough sway to warrant producing such clever television.
Once this realization hit me, I stopped trying to find something good on television. I just stopped caring about the TV feed. Instead, I turned to the internet to find out which shows are more to my liking, and then I went out and rented/bought the DVDs or downloaded the episodes (if they're not on DVD, or the rental store doesn't carry them). I dropped out of the TV executives' line of sight, but they didn't even notice; they were busy raking in cash because their sponsors bought ad slots on "Joe Millionaire," which is apparently watched by millions every week. I'm just not one of those millions.
Anyone who buys into this arguement, but also rejects the notion that violent films and videogames have a causal effect leading to violent behavior, is a hypocrite. Not everyone reading or posting to slashdot has uniform beliefs, but the rejection games-leads-to-violence theory is a regular slashdot theme....
> In order to afford the expensive "car-toys" on their shows and commercials, they offer them credit and bankruptcy help. Hmm. And we wonder why the country's average personal debt load is so frighteningly high. They are pushing a culture of borrowing and short term vision for immediate gratification.
Personally, I believe those ads air because of the target audience. Maybe they serve to reinforce a behavior, but in all likelyhood the behavior already existed.
Ahh, the eternal chicken-and-egg debate.
Do the commercials we watch on television shape our perception of things and cause us to create a "culture of borrowing and short term vision"? Or are they merely reflecting the culture that's already there in order to target a demographic?
Do the violent video games we market alter our perception (and/or acceptance) of violence and cause it to be more prevalent in our society? Or are they merely reflecting tastes in an already-violent society in order to sell more copies?
These are excellent questions, for which there are no easy answers. The parent used both sides of the argument on two separate issues (violent video games cause a violent society, but instant-gratification commercials don't create an instant-gratification society). The grandparent, however, made one of the most insightful and common-sense comments on commercials and advertising I have read in a long while, without delving into cause and effect. Well said, my good sir.
I don't mind watching some relevant, NON-REDUNDANT commercials, since I know that pays the bills. But a lot of the cable channels, with few commercials in their collective pool (*cough* Sci-Fi *cough* Comedy Central *cough*) show the same annoying commercials about Zentrax-3 over and over and over.
Unfortunately, the commercials that sell the most products are not the ones that are clever, or funny, or insightful. They are the ones you remember. And if showing the same damn commercial twice every commercial break makes you (the consumer) remember it, then so be it.
Hmmm... while we're on the subject of commercials in cable television...
What I would like to know is why there are commercial breaks in media I am paying for. So I send my $50 to the cable company every month like a good little consumer, and in return they send me approximately 75 channels, only three of which I watch with any regularity (Comedy Central, TCM, and The History Channel), and every ten minutes I am assaulted with loud, obnoxious commercials who paid for the privilege of being shown. Let's look at the economics involved here: making these shows and maintaining the cable network is not cheap. If we completely eliminated commercial sponsors and covered the cost of cable with subscriptions, we would be paying several hundred dollars a month each to subsidize creation of crap. So we obviously can't eliminate the commercials--that would be too risky, financially, for the cable company. However, those commercial advertisers are paying many millions to have their ads seen. I imagine the ratio of "income due to subscriptions" to "income due to advertisers" is quite low.
So here's what I propose: let's turn basic cable into a free service, like network TV and radio. Eliminate the need for subscription charges. The networks could charge more for their advertising slots, since the audience would be bigger, and their revenues would even out. In fact, they might even rise. Just about every building in the country is wired for cable, even if the people living/working in it do not subscribe, so just open up the lines. People who aren't wired could pay an installation fee to get their house wired, or a very small fee to wire it themselves and then have a tech come out and connect them to the neighborhood hub. Wow. Now suddenly the cable networks are in direct competition with CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and the like, and must entice viewers with quality programming. The more viewers they have, the more they can charge for their advertising slots. Everybody wins.
Ahh, but I'm forgetting one thing: such a change would require a new business model from the media companies. Looking at the fiasco with other forms of free media (P2P, anyone?) we can clearly see that the media companies are heading into the 21st Century kicking and screaming, dragging people into court before they'll change their comfortable business model. Such mind-set changes are not possible until something drastic happens.
Terraforming other planets is fun, but first we really need to terraform Earth. Between desertification, global warming, overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, slash&burn traditional farming, chemically-enhanced modern farming, genetic engineering of plants, moving species between ecological niches, sooting up the polar regions in ways that reduce the planet's albedo, and a lot of other things those pesky primates have been up to, this planet is becoming significantly less Earth-like.
/.), why is it that people think the planet is in trouble? This hunk of rock floating out in space is hardly dying. It has survived ice ages, tectonic plate movement, floods, fires, storms, droughts, floods, and even other relatively large hunks of rock slamming into it at millions of miles an hour. Yet, through all of this, it has managed to stay a planet. And it stayed teeming with life through all of it. Absolutely teeming. Microbes live 25 miles underground in solid rock, for crying out loud, and entire ecosystems live (and thrive) in the perpetual boiling dark of undersea volcanic vents, completely cut off from other ecosystems. These are hardly what we'd call hospitable environments.
Ah, but by definition, one can't terraform Earth.
terraform, tr.v.
To transform (a landscape) on another planet into one having the characteristics of landscapes on Earth.
Last time I checked, Earth wasn't "another planet." However, if you are meaning terraforming in the more general sense of "man-made changes in the landscape" then, yes, we are already terraforming Earth. We are changing the composition of its atmosphere, diverting its waterways, moving its stone, and (many contend) raising its temperature.
So many people in this board are talking about how we have messed up this planet, and can't be trusted with another one. At the risk of sounding industrialist (and therefore Republican, which seems to be a bad thing on
No, my friends, the planet is not in danger. Nothing we could possibly do to it will ever even make it itch a little. What is truly in danger is our way of life. What we are destroying is the ecosystem we have become accustomed to. Species die out all the time. They get replaced with new ones. This has been going on for billions of years, long before we were even a spark of tool usage in some clever chimp's head. We don't strive to save species because they are critical to the survival of this and that. We save them because we like them. If every animal on the endangered species list went extinct, would the planet really notice? Not really. Life would go on. In a few millions years, other species would arrive. We'd be pretty bummed about it, though, 'cause those white tigers are adorable.
However, if there is life on Mars (and I'm an optimist about such things) then it has existed on Mars for millions, perhaps billions, of years, evolving quite independently of Earth's life. The amount we could learn from such life is immeasureable (even if it's only in fossil form). All of Earth's life is extremely similar, from a genetic point of view. Surely we all know the old adage, "one data point doth not a trend make"? Having a second data point (Mars) would really strengthen our own understanding of ourselves, and life in general. In that sense, I think terraforming would be a great loss to the scientific community, tantamount to outlawing microscopes, or something similarly absurd (and Gary Larson-esque: I can see the man in the trenchcoat in the dark alley.... "Wanna buy a microscope?").
But I digress. Here we are arguing about whether or not we should be terraforming another planet, and we can't even manage to get a computer and a robot arm on the planet's surface reliably. Crawl before you can walk, eh? Let's work on getting hardware in orbit cheaply and reliably, and *then* we can talk about massive public works projects on other planets.
I wonder if they contacted John Carmak about this...
They would have, but Carmack is busy trying to get to space. No wonder Doom 3 hasn't been released yet.
...she feared that we were given this planet and we've made a mess of it.
...we shouldn't mess up God's plans with Mars by stomping all over it with our oversized space boots.
Once and for all: it's not the planet that needs saving. There is absolutely nothing we could do to this planet that it will not survive. Let's launch every nuke we have and destroy every square inch of land on this rock. Some life will survive, and it will grow and evolve and be dominant. It won't be us, of course, but it will be life. Life was here long, long before we were, and you can bet it wasn't all in "natural ecological harmony." The whole place is one giant unstable system, what with all the species competing with, and eating, each other. The current ecosystem will not survive for long, but the beauty of it is that a new, different ecosystem will take its place. And this has happened, millions of times, all over the planet, even before we got here.
No, folks, what needs saving is not the planet, but our way of life. For example, if we want to continue driving around, we'll need to use something other than fossil fuels. Once they run out, we'll have to wait another 50 million years or so to get some more. I don't have that long. My point here is that it's not the planet that's in trouble. Long after we're dead and gone, the planet will still be here, merrily producing life.
So what are God's plans for Mars? "Look but don't touch?" I can't find that anywhere in the Bible. (Probably because the Bible was written by people* for whom the Earth was the entire universe. They had no concept of standing on another world in that time.) I can, however, find Genesis 1:28, "God blessed them; and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'" I can only assume that by "earth" the writer of Genesis meant "universe," since the Earth was the boundary for human habitation at the time.
Guess what, we humans, as a race, own everything in the solar system.
I wouldn't say we own it, persay, but we certainly seem to be the only creatures who have the ability to reach most of it. And, frankly, I rather like the idea of spreading the human race around a bit. It's fairly clear that one of these days we're going to obliterate ourselves, and it would be nice if the planet-wide extinction didn't take all of the human race with it. Keep in mind, however, that that's coming from a purely selfish need to continue the human race. The planet, or even the solar system, would be quite content without us. Life will continue.
Boy, am I going to get flamed into oblivion for this one. "I remember when I had good karma..."
*Yes, you fundamentalist bastards, you heard me: written by people. Inspired, of course, but still written by people. People with agendas.
This isn't news.
... you're right. That's not news. People have been fearing the words "nuclear", "reaction", "radioactive", and "atomic" for many years now. Any damage that might be done to the surrounding area because of a failure would be absolutely insignificant on a planetary, or even regional, scale. Just because the media have taught us to fear and hate anything with the word "nuclear" in it is no reason not to trust the technology.
What do you mean, this isn't news? I've been waiting for someone to develop serious technology for a landing on Europa for quite some time now. Given that Europa is one big ocean and is the single most likely place in our solar system to find life (present planet excepted, of course) it's about time we thought about going there.
Now, the hippie spin on the word "radioactive"
NASA has been using Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) for decades on planetary probes and manned missions. The basic premise is this: a container holds some radioactive heavy metal, such as plutonium. Because the metal is decaying, it generates a bunch of heat. That heat is used with thermoelectric generators to create electricity, and the leftover heat (since the reaction is not not that efficient) is used in other ways, like keeping the astronauts warm. But here's the kicker: an RTG has never, ever failed on a space mission. Not once. It's been flown hundreds of times. (Missions using RTGs have failed, but the RTGs themselves performed flawlessly every time.) Just because it's "nuclear" doesn't mean it's Chernobyl.
It's also my rallying cry, and FWIW, I have degrees in both Electrical and Software Engineering and enough experience doing both that I think my opinions may have some validity.
Your opinions do have some validity, and I understand that computers should work as advertised without much tinkering. The problem is, they don't. When was the last time you created a document in MS Word with styles and automatic formatting without arguing with the program, losing data to backwards compatibility issues, redoing things manually, or just spending time hunting for the options in the hidden "Personalized Menus"? And, by the way, documents with styles is really the only thing separating Word from Notepad. I really wish it worked.
Saying that users just need to learn more arcane bits of knowledge (come on, mounting a USB device just to get at some pictures? Are you serious!) just to do trivial tasks completely misses that point.
No, it doesn't. Asking computer makers to write stupid popups, autostarts, helpful paperclips and continuous hardware scans in the background completely misses the point. There's no way to include absolutely every contingency in every operating system. Is it really too difficult to ask a user to plug in a camera, open a file browser, go to the menus and select "Connect Storage Device," and choose "USB Camera" in the selection box? If the user can't handle that, then they shouldn't have passed the second grade. And without having to worry about autodetecting a thousand possible hardware configurations, the software developers can concentrate on far more important tasks, like security or solid GUI design.
Having things work out of the box is great. Something to strive for. But what I was talking about was an entirely different level of ignorance. I'm talking about the people who don't know how to look on the hard disk for a file they downloaded off the internet, and refuse to learn because "it's just gone." I'm talking about users who plug their cameras into the USB slot, and when nothing happens, give up and complain that "computers suck." Yes, these people exist, and yes, they are extremely frustruating to work with. But they should not be catered to. As you said before, computers are here to make life easier. But computers, in order to make life easier, must be used as tools. They are not autonomous butlers yet. Tools take a certain amount of skill and knowledge to use properly. Any idiot can hit things with a hammer, but someone who knows his tool will know that hitting the nail while it's perpendicular to the board and not choking up on the handle both give better results than random whacking.
I have nothing against striving for elegance and simplicity in design. I applaud designers who struggle to maintain consistency of metaphor and aesthetic. But we cannot cater to the lowest common denominator. People don't sit down in their cars, cry out "Take me to the grocery store!" and expect it to happen (yet). They shouldn't expect the same from their computers.
I am an Aerospace Engineering student with one degree already under my belt and one more on the way. Computers are just a tool for me, not a career. I would love for them to work all the time, but I don't place all the responsibility for thinking on the computer makers; a certain amount of learning must take place before I can use computers as effective tools. The desktop masses haven't discovered that yet, because they're being told otherwise by Microsoft and Apple (and AOL, to a certain extent). "This new computer/OS/program is easier than ever! You won't have to think at all!"
I'd like to see the day when the free software community can provide not only the code for a smashing game engine (come on, surely you can replicate the unreal!), but also the work of convincing voice actors, motion-capture animators, map designers, plot authors that could write a reasonably well selling book and patient texture designers.
Ahh, but the beauty of F/OSS is that it concentrates on specificity, not generality. A F/OSS project concentrates on doing one thing, doing it very, very well, and letting others build on top of it. Consider the OS itself: there's one group who works on the kernel, another few groups who work on base utilities, another few who work on desktops, and another few who work on applications. Since each group is concentrating on only their small slice, each component is rock solid, but because everything they do is available to everyone else, it all works together nicely.
For game design, all the F/OSS community really has to do is create a fully extensible, well documented, rock solid, fast game engine that they offer to the world. Then small, start-up game companies (those who don't have the money to license a big engine or write their own) can spend more time creating a good game-- plots, characters, level design, etc., and leave the coding to someone else. Most of the money that gets poured into games goes into getting them to work, not the design. Free the game companies from having to worry about that, and we will end up with higher quality games that *gasp* run on any platform!
The biggest problem with all of this "ease of use" crap that Microsoft and Macintosh are spewing into the advertising arena is that your average user now wants their computer to be a toaster. They want to have one big red button on the front, and when they push it, the computer reads their minds and does whatever they want it to do. Obviously, with a machine as complex as a computer, this is beyond impossible. What Linux distros need to do is get away from convincing people that computers are easy to use, and instead convince them that they are easy to LEARN. No newbie is going to be able to do anything effectively right out of the box, no matter what OS s/he is using. There is a certain learning curve that must be overcome first. However, by convincing said user that the interface is consistent in design and solid in metaphor will help them to overcome their confusion. (Current GUI designs and metaphors are riddled with inconsistencies and flaws -- but that's a comment for another post.)
/mnt/digitalcamera and copy the pictures from there to /home/user/digitalcamerapics (all within a graphical file browser, of course).
"I don't care how it works, I just want it to work!" is the rallying cry of most home desktop users. To continue the toaster metaphor, that's fine if you're talking about the convection of the heating coils and the molecular processes of crisping bread. The users *don't* need to know that stuff. However, they *do* need to know that they have to choose a darkness setting before they start toasting, and many users are confusing the first level of knowledge with the second. The first level would be knowing how to compile programs from scratch. General users don't need to know how to do that. But the second level of knowledge would be knowing how to mount a USB device to
We don't need to make computers less difficult, persay, we just need to take away the stigmatism surrounding learning anything new. No highly complex machine will ever be useable right out of the box with no prior knowledge or instruction. Not Microsoft, not Macintosh, not Linux, not even your PDA. But sadly, consumers will continue to want that, since the advertisments that sold them their $800 toasters convinced them that's the way it should be.
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