"There is no political solution to our troubled evolution."
No political system can solve the problem of broken values. Let's suppose we actually had a revolution. How would you go about making a better system, given the population with which we have to work? Can you imagine anything like the rational debate of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 happening in the age of sound bites? Can you even imagine reasonable compromise anymore? And even if you could get a bunch of reasonable people together to design a new system, how would you get the general population to accept its legitimacy?
The problem is in ourselves. Our current political system could be fixed if we had the will to do it. We don't. Things will get worse - a series of crises, followed by collapse. In an earlier time a person could get on a boat, sail to a new land and start over. If that were still possible, I'd be on that boat. But there is nowhere left to go.
I'm 57, and started programming at 16. Lately I've been getting paid to write Java client and server code. Most universities had no undergraduate computer science degree when I went to school. There were no software patents when I was young. And we liked it.
Things used to be different, and the reason why they were different is because the type of knowledge that was valuable in IT was a deep understanding of how and why things work, and especially how to work around the limitations of early computers. That kind of knowledge could only be acquired through experience. Today the kind of knowledge that's valued is facility with new languages and frameworks. Some of this can be acquired by reading the normal documentation, but some is buried in wikis and forum postings, and some is only achieved through trial and error. Many of the modern tools are very much moving targets, so that even detailed knowledge of differences between versions, and compatibilities of different versions of different tools becomes important in a programmer's ability to maximize the utility of these tools.
So experience is still important, but now it is a very specialized kind of experience, which manifests itself as lists of buzzwords in job postings. And we've all seen postings requiring more years of experience in some new technology than is actually possible. Employers are still looking for people who already know the tools, but for new tools, the only advantage of forty years of experience is perhaps being able to learn them faster. The poorly documented stuff still requires lots of digging and trial and error to master, regardless of years of general experience. (As it happens, in my case this is mostly sauce for the goose.)
With respect to hardware, modern software developers are somewhat comparable to a mega-millions lottery winner. Many of the limitations of the hardware of my youth are simply gone. The limitations of today are mostly software defined. Java too verbose for you? Use scala or python. Maven doesn't do what you want? Write a plugin. Security concerns? Run in a virtual machine. It's all just software, and increasingly open source. But like a lottery winner, today's developers don't always spend their wealth wisely.
The questions I'd pose to the language and tool builders is: are you trying to make an alpha programmer more productive, or are you trying to make an average programmer as productive as an alpha programmer? (Assuming, of course, that you're not just doing it for the joy of hacking.) As hardware gets better, software developers in general need to view the target platform as the human mind, because that is where the limitations of the present and future lie. Never mind the hardware, what level of understanding is required to use the software?
I agree that we need to get back to a production economy, but I don't see why it shouldn't be built on robotic factories. It does imply that the masses would need to have an ownership stake in the factories, which sounds like a supposedly debunked economic theory. But if robots can manufacture things more efficiently, wouldn't it make more sense to modify our economic system to take advantage of it?
The other thing we need to do economically is to create pervasive incentives for sustainability, and not just with regard to energy. Corporations which focus on quarterly profits are leading us (have led us?) over a cliff.
I would like to see a lot more economists thinking outside the box of the ideologies of the twentieth century. I can't imagine that information theory and the internet don't have something new to teach us about economics. My second worst fear for the current crisis is that we somehow manage to go back to business as usual (the worst fear being total collapse of civilization). I voted for change, and damnit, I want change!
The general philosophical problem here is to what extent packets sent and received on the internet constitute public speech vs. the extent to which they are extensions of the private thoughts of the user. We already know that search engine queries reveal an enormous amount about what a user is thinking. We (at least many Slashdotters) also know how the internet can at times feel like an extension of our brains. But if all of our internet accesses were put in the public domain (and associated with our real-life identity), we would very soon begin to treat internet access more like public speech.
The question is whether people should be able to use the internet as a brain extension. My feeling is that this has enough value that it ought to be not only allowed, but encouraged. I think people should at least be able operate with one or more identities which are explicitly designated as anonymous. It would then be up to server administrators to determine what access would be allowed to an anonymous identity. This is similar to the current state of things, except that I would add explicit legal protection for anonymous identities as an extension of the right to privacy. I think I would draw the line at anonymous monetary transactions, as these have too much potential for abuse. That is not to say that all monetary transactions should be in the public domain, but that I have no objections to record-keeping requirements for monetary transactions, and making them subject to a reasonable discovery process.
As a practical matter, guaranteed privacy of internet accesses appears to at least involve multiple hops through a large number of random nodes, or is impossible, depending on your assumptions. Encryption, when the server supports it, helps with hiding the nature of accesses as they cross the internet, but guarantees nothing about how much information may be logged on the server side. Because of the practical difficulty of achieving privacy on the internet, I do think it needs legal protection. That wouldn't make privacy any easier to assure technically, but would provide some legal recourse if someone's privacy is violated.
For the people who think there should be no anonymity on the internet, I'd ask you to consider how you'd feel about technology that can read your thoughts directly from your brain. Because that's not far off. I do think that privacy will be virtually eliminated someday, and that sentient beings can exist happily without it, but we aren't ready for that yet. And anyway that's not the same thing as the government having access to your thoughts while you don't have access to theirs.
Phage therapy involves a lot of labor in isolating a non-symbiotic phage for a particular bacterial strain, and then growing enough of them to give the patient a dose that will not be negated by their immune system. To really be practical, this process would need to be automated.
Phages are specific, which is a disadvantage economically, as another poster noted. But specificity is an advantage medically, as it means you don't need to wipe out all of the "good bacteria" along with the bad. This is particularly important when the bad bacteria are antibiotic resistant and are in competition with the good bacteria.
An enlightened society would be developing both antibiotic and phage therapies. But then, an enlightened society would be different from ours in so many ways.
This is my favorite argument against IP. The purpose of property ownership as a concept is to prevent disputes over scarce resources, or at least to provide non-violent means of resolving such disputes. And the reason for avoiding disputes, particularly violent disputes, is that they waste resources and increase scarcity. There have been exceptions in the evolutionary history of our species, where war was an effective means of reducing scarcity, by reducing the population, or creating less competition for women. But modern warfare, as deadly as it can be, is usually more effective at destroying resources and infrastructure than lives, and thus usually creates more scarcity.
If one imagines a world where most energy comes from renewable sources, where robots do most of the physical labor, and machine intelligence is capable of most of the jobs in our "service economy", much of real property ownership could also become dysfunctional. There would be no justification for a relatively few owners of the robots and intelligent machines to have a right to be enriched by the rest of the population. And in any case, how would the rest of the population afford the fruits of production when there are no jobs?
"Knowledge and beliefs" probably was too narrow a description. What I'm trying to get at is that your exact brain state is not necessary for your sense of "self". It obviously changes somewhat from moment to moment, and somewhat more during sleep. And it can be affected by drugs or a blow to the head. But none of these things generally creates a sense of becoming a different person. You may be aware that you've changed a belief or acquired new knowledge, and yet maintain that you are the same "self". But if you change enough, I don't think it is really unreasonable to say that you are not the same "self" as at the beginning of the changes. In particular, if one could live for 500 years without becoming stagnant at some point, the cumulative changes would be such that you would have little more mental relationship to your original "self" than to some other random person.
Leaving the semantics of "self" aside, when you say you want to live for at least 500 years, what is it that you want to preserve for that time? Continuity of awareness? But sleep interrupts that fairly regularly. Ever have the experience of waking up from a deep sleep and not knowing who you are for a second? Then your memories come flooding back and you accept the resulting person as "you". But over 500 years many of those memories will be lost. So the memories were not necessary for "you" to exist. What is necessary is for you to keep believing that you are the "same" person each day when you awake.
What I wonder is whether we are so fixated on this notion of a singular self that we are missing the potential of a plural self, that is, a "self" composed of multiple people. I think many religions attempt to be this, but are limited by the lack of precision in their dogma, as well as their goals being oriented toward some kind of afterlife instead of this life. With modern information technology and some more practical goal, a group of people could dedicate themselves over several generations to accomplishing the goal. For example, suppose the goal was to establish an independent human colony on Mars. Imagine a group of people not just working together, but dedicating their very "selves" to that purpose (the way some people dedicate themselves to religion). Some would become scientists working on various aspects of the problem. Some would follow other walks of life, in which they would also contribute to the goal economically or politically. Others would recruit new members, teach, or manage knowledge or otherwise ensure the continuity of the plural "self".
Some problems in science already could be said to have a plural self dedicated to their solution. But they are largely composed of only scientists, who have to rely on people outside their plural self for funding and support. As a "self", they are rather limited in self-awareness, just as primitive man might have been.
On the one hand, I empathize completely with your desire to live 500 years or more, if for no other reason, simply to satisfy my curiosity about what the future will bring.
On the other hand, many of the people now living into their 80's and 90's have lives I would not want to live, and not just due to the state of their health. A lot of old people live their last years in the past, never embracing anything new. Many live in abject fear of anything resembling change. So when we say we desire extreme longevity, it is very important to qualify that. What we really want is a much extended vital adulthood.
But consider this: after 500 years of learning, relationships, and general experience, in what sense (other than legal and historical) could you consider yourself to be the same person? You will have forgotten more than you remember even if you if are the smartest person in the world after 500 years. What I think is that when it comes down to it, the only thing that would really make you the same person is that you believe that you are.
The founders of the world's ancient religions attempted to preserve their cherished beliefs through their teachings and writings. Over time that information has been corrupted and forked so many times that the essences of their beliefs probably have been lost. But today, if you have a truth to tell, you can tell it to future generations with excellent fidelity. This raises the question: is there anything you know now that someone 500 years from now would find novel and relevant?
We humans generally have a very narrow conception of "self". We are constantly changing both physically and mentally, and yet most of us wake each day thinking of ourselves as being the "same" as were the day before. We think of others as necessarily being other "selves". For the most part, we treat "myself" as a binary property - I am myself, and you are not myself. I think that is very narrow and limiting thinking, given our current and future technology for storing and manipulating information. I think of "self" more in terms of a bundle of knowledge and beliefs, which can exist in multiple places (or people) and times. I like to think that this is what some misunderstood founder of an ancient religion meant by "eternal life".
Whether there is a man in the loop or not, this is a dangerous development for the future of democracy. The ability to project force with fewer people in control means that it becomes easier to have a smaller military force of elites, who can be more easily controlled by an undemocratic government. With the U.S. government in particular, we already see in Iraq and Afghanistan a movement toward using private mercenaries. Without these mercenaries, the current level of force could not be maintained without a draft.
Now no one wants to be drafted, but a draft does have the advantage of populating the military with a broad cross-section of society. Such a force would be much less likely to tolerate being used to suppress a popular revolution if the government which commands them should go rogue. With mercenaries, and especially with mercenaries whose force is multiplied through robotic systems, you have a force motivated by money rather than allegiance to the Constitution.
So who wants to enlist first? Yeah, me neither. But we better vote wisely while we still can.
It's a mistake to assume that information, particularly information assembled from a multitude of sources (such as an EHR) can be owned. Any system which purports to give you "ownership" of your EHR is also giving you a false sense of security. Nevertheless, some kind of access control is imperative for EHR's, both for reading and writing. But it needs to be flexible enough to avoid impeding the sharing of information about a particular patient between potentially many caregivers for that patient. A system that does not provide this flexibility will be routinely circumvented, or will fail. The system that will succeed is the one which improves on current practice.
This is not just a technological issue but a legal one as well. In the long run the best legal strategy may be to focus on the abuse of information, rather than how someone comes to possess it. And I'm thinking that for most types of information, having the information would not constitute abuse.
Paravirtualization is a way to leverage device drivers in the host OS. Device drivers are usually written for Windows first, and sometimes, for Windows only. As long as this remains the case, Microsoft can take as long as it needs to produce a Windows-hosted paravirtualization that will compete effectively (and unfairly) with Xen. The hypervisor must ultimately control the I/O devices, one way or the other. Even with some future hardware support for virtualized I/O devices, the hypervisor must at least manage which guest OS gets which device, even if the device driver resides in the guest.
The move toward virtualization presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break Microsoft's grip on the OS. The way to do that is to create open standards for hypervisor interfaces, particularly for embedding device drivers in the hypervisor. Politically, the stakeholders who need to be involved, but do not appear to be, are the PC manufacturers. They have the clout it will take to get device manufacturers to produce device drivers for a new open standard for hypervisor device drivers. What they stand to gain is the ability to at least free themselves from Microsoft's grip on the desktop, and perhaps also to encourage competition in hypervisor products, so that Microsoft is not simply replaced by another monopoly. Just as these manufacturers have some choice in BIOS implementations, they could also have a choice of hypervisor implementations. This would provide many more opportunities for product differentiation.
I call on vendors of both open and closed source virtualization products, and PC manufacturers to start making some open standards now. Otherwise you are going to end up with Microsoft calling the shots - again.
Repeating my comment from a related article yesterday:
Virtualisation is a double-edged sword for Microsoft. On the one hand, they surely must fear it, probably even more than Vista falling flat on its face. Virtualisation is the most profound threat to their monopoly that they have ever faced. Virtualisation opens the doors for competition in operating systems, and the possibility for real innovation in a field that has stagnated for at least two decades. The tipping point is device drivers. If a (non-Microsoft) Virtual Machine Monitor becomes popular enough that device vendors find it advantageous to develop (or make it possible to develop) drivers at the VMM level instead of for Windows, then Windows becomes the walking dead.
On the other hand, virtualisation can potentially free Microsoft from years of subservience to backwards compatibility. Applications could run happily in "Windows compatibility mode", and Microsoft would once again be free to "innovate" (probably by copying Apple again). Naturally this works best if Microsoft actually has a monopoly on the VMM, which they can be expected to pursue with all vigor in the next few years. That is a battle that the open source community should be more concerned about than Windows vs. Linux, both of which should become legacy operating systems in 5-6 years.
Virtualisation is a double-edged sword for Microsoft. On the one hand, they surely must fear it, probably even more than Vista falling flat on its face. Virtualisation is the most profound threat to their monopoly that they have ever faced. Virtualisation opens the doors for competition in operating systems, and the possibility for real innovation in a field that has stagnated for at least two decades. The tipping point is device drivers. If a (non-Microsoft) Virtual Machine Monitor becomes popular enough that device vendors find it advantageous to develop (or make it possible to develop) drivers at the VMM level instead of for Windows, then Windows becomes the walking dead.
On the other hand, virtualisation can potentially free Microsoft from years of subservience to backwards compatibility. Applications could run happily in "Windows compatibility mode", and Microsoft would once again be free to "innovate" (probably by copying Apple again). Naturally this works best if Microsoft actually has a monopoly on the VMM, which they can be expected to pursue with all vigor in the next few years. That is a battle that the open source community should be more concerned about than Windows vs. Linux, both of which should become legacy operating systems in 5-6 years.
Well, here's a hint: There was another major character in the movie whose story shows you what Book was, and what happened to him that he became Shepherd Book. In some sense, the whole movie is about the life of Shepherd Book.
Recording companies are basically advertising companies bundled with venture capital. These functions ought to be separate. There ought to be venture capital firms that specialize in funding musicians. And there could also be advertising agencies that specialize in promoting musicians. The musicians would form startup companies and use shares as currency, just like in tech. They would pay for advertising just like any other company, instead of selling their souls to record companies.
Boycotts of the music industry are doomed to failure. But if the most talented artists began starting their own companies, that would really change things.
Yes, hierarchies are good, and we certainly are used to working with them. The problem is that the typical filesystem provides only one hierarchy. But that hierarchy is used for multiple purposes. Most often we think of it as the means for locating a particular file, but it is also used to group files for access control or backup purposes, for example.
The logical, hierarchical view that I use to organize my files so that I can find them often is not the way I would organize them for viewing or applying access controls. While I can set and view access control on individual files, that is not as convenient as having a hierarchy specifically dedicated as an access control view of the files. With such a hierarchy, I could mostly eliminate the need to set access controls on individual files, and instead set them on directories (assuming that the access controls are inherited by the files in a directory).
Likewise, I might often find a use for a separate hierarchy for backup purposes, perhaps organized by a combination of time and project. (In fact, organizing files by modification time might often be useful just for finding them.) So I might have a file path, "/2005/July/email/personal", for example.
Besides the fact that there are not enough of them, the other problem with hierarchies is that it takes mental effort to invent one that is appropriate for a particular task. Most of the hierarchies we use in everyday life are either natural or invented by someone else. Most of us will invent hierarchies only when it becomes obvious that the alternative is chaos.
TFA says it was unusual that the protons from the CME got to earth as fast as they did, and says it's a mystery how they got accelerated.
My question is: were the protons actually accelerated? Were they more energetic when they arrived here than normal?
Maybe the solar explosion warped space in such a way that the protons didn't have to travel as far. Or maybe some other spacial distubance caused both the explosion and the proton effect.
Some of you already know what carbon sequestration is. For the rest, there's Google.
Unlike some other forms of carbon sequestration, where you have the possibility of catastrophic release of the sequestered carbon, diamonds would be essentially permanent.
Yeah, not too practical, even with this advance. But who knows how far it will go? Maybe we could stop global warming and fix the potholes in the roads for good.
This prediction amounts to saying that, all other things being equal, increased bandwidth to the home will favor thin clients or appliances over general-purpose computers. But other things are highly unlikely to remain equal. Imagine what the commodity microprocessor will be capable of in ten years. Or a graphics board. Or a neural induction interface.
Combine those advances with increased bandwidth, and you can imagine IRC without the typing, but rather with audio/video interaction, perhaps with 3D avatars synthesized from audio/video/neural monitoring of participants. And chat rooms that can be virtual manifestions of real world locations, or completely virtual environments that look just as real.
Applications such as that need vast amounts of local bandwidth and computing power, as well as low latencies.
Some people think the capabilities of artificial intelligence will expand with increasing hardware capability. If that is so, even AI may have made some progress in ten years. And that could make software as we know it today pretty much obsolete.
Not that there won't still be spam. It will just be subliminal...
Boycotts. Not enough people who care to have any appreciable effect on the revenue of most offending corporations.
Contacting your representative. +3 Funny
The trick is to make people other than software engineers actually care about this issue. I suggest the best way to raise awareness is for software engineers to refuse to write code for a day. (I suspect for any randomly picked day, that was a day most of us weren't going to write any code anyway. Am I right?) The intent to do this should be widely publicized beforehand. On the chosen day, lots of people like Lessig and Stallman (maybe not Stallman himself; I said like Stallman:-) should be available to brief the press.
If it doesn't work the first time, rinse and repeat, say maybe once a month?
Why should they care about your boycott, even if it were hugely successful, if their new business model is extortion by patent rather than selling products?
The system is broken. If Kodak can game the system to make money, then it seems they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do just that.
A more effective protest would be for software developers to refuse to write code. We could start out small with a one day protest to get some media attention. Most programmers wouldn't lose their jobs over that. If nothing happens, make it one day a month.
I'm sure someone out there will come up with a better name for our movement, but let me throw out:
The singularity implies enough computational power to simulate everything around us, including us. Maybe it has already happened.
Maybe we are all characters in a game being played by The Gates. Our goal is to keep The Gates from winning. That would explain our (in some ways) irrational desire to keep one of our own from ruling the world.
I mean, look around: most other identifiable socio-political groups want one of their own to rule the world. As geeks, what's our problem? Abolute power corrupts absolutely? Do you really think The Gates would do a worse job than those in charge now (especially if he weren't distracted by us nipping at his heels)?
If the dems lose this election, they ought to disband the party. The 2000 election should never have been as close as it was, and now that everyone can see what Bush really stands for, this election shouldn't be close either.
I could see something like a New Democratic Party, just like the old Democratic party, only with competent people running the campaigns. IMHO, the biggest mistake the Democrats make is trying to make rational arguments to people who are not rational. They need to learn to appeal to emotion, religion, fear, and hatred.
Ok, I'm a little bitter, and Democrats have a lot of other faults. But when Kerry said in his convention speech that he believes in science, it struck me that that, more than anything else, is what distinguishes him from Bush.
Science and rational thought need a serious modding up in the world, and the people who believe in it need to hang together until it happens. We can always split into Socialists and Libertarians later.
Suppose we picked up a signal from some ET and that there was no doubt, scientifically speaking, that it came from ETI. At least half the world doesn't believe in science, so if you're hoping that some of the more narrow-minded religions in the world are going to suddenly snap out of their narrow mindedness, I wouldn't count on it. Just look at the amount of scientific evidence they already manage to ignore or discount. Probably several new and conflicting religions would be founded by people claiming to have found some "divine" interpretation of the ET's message.
Maybe you're hoping the ETs could tell us something that would advance our technology. Given how many of us subscribe to irrational world views, it seems to me that would be damned irresponsible of them. Sort of like throwing gasoline on a fire.
My bet is the first communication detected from an ETI will be a question, something they want to know, or something they want to make sure we know before they say anything else. If our world was enlightened enough to support broadcasting to the stars, rather than just listening, I think we'd ask a question. Asking a question implies you've developed the patience to wait for a reply, which, for light-speed communication at least, is a lot of patience!
Slashdot Mirror
"There is no political solution
to our troubled evolution."
No political system can solve the problem of broken values. Let's suppose we actually had a revolution. How would you go about making a better system, given the population with which we have to work? Can you imagine anything like the rational debate of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 happening in the age of sound bites? Can you even imagine reasonable compromise anymore? And even if you could get a bunch of reasonable people together to design a new system, how would you get the general population to accept its legitimacy?
The problem is in ourselves. Our current political system could be fixed if we had the will to do it. We don't. Things will get worse - a series of crises, followed by collapse. In an earlier time a person could get on a boat, sail to a new land and start over. If that were still possible, I'd be on that boat. But there is nowhere left to go.
I'm 57, and started programming at 16. Lately I've been getting paid to write Java client and server code. Most universities had no undergraduate computer science degree when I went to school. There were no software patents when I was young. And we liked it.
Things used to be different, and the reason why they were different is because the type of knowledge that was valuable in IT was a deep understanding of how and why things work, and especially how to work around the limitations of early computers. That kind of knowledge could only be acquired through experience. Today the kind of knowledge that's valued is facility with new languages and frameworks. Some of this can be acquired by reading the normal documentation, but some is buried in wikis and forum postings, and some is only achieved through trial and error. Many of the modern tools are very much moving targets, so that even detailed knowledge of differences between versions, and compatibilities of different versions of different tools becomes important in a programmer's ability to maximize the utility of these tools.
So experience is still important, but now it is a very specialized kind of experience, which manifests itself as lists of buzzwords in job postings. And we've all seen postings requiring more years of experience in some new technology than is actually possible. Employers are still looking for people who already know the tools, but for new tools, the only advantage of forty years of experience is perhaps being able to learn them faster. The poorly documented stuff still requires lots of digging and trial and error to master, regardless of years of general experience. (As it happens, in my case this is mostly sauce for the goose.)
With respect to hardware, modern software developers are somewhat comparable to a mega-millions lottery winner. Many of the limitations of the hardware of my youth are simply gone. The limitations of today are mostly software defined. Java too verbose for you? Use scala or python. Maven doesn't do what you want? Write a plugin. Security concerns? Run in a virtual machine. It's all just software, and increasingly open source. But like a lottery winner, today's developers don't always spend their wealth wisely.
The questions I'd pose to the language and tool builders is: are you trying to make an alpha programmer more productive, or are you trying to make an average programmer as productive as an alpha programmer? (Assuming, of course, that you're not just doing it for the joy of hacking.) As hardware gets better, software developers in general need to view the target platform as the human mind, because that is where the limitations of the present and future lie. Never mind the hardware, what level of understanding is required to use the software?
I agree that we need to get back to a production economy, but I don't see why it shouldn't be built on robotic factories. It does imply that the masses would need to have an ownership stake in the factories, which sounds like a supposedly debunked economic theory. But if robots can manufacture things more efficiently, wouldn't it make more sense to modify our economic system to take advantage of it?
The other thing we need to do economically is to create pervasive incentives for sustainability, and not just with regard to energy. Corporations which focus on quarterly profits are leading us (have led us?) over a cliff.
I would like to see a lot more economists thinking outside the box of the ideologies of the twentieth century. I can't imagine that information theory and the internet don't have something new to teach us about economics. My second worst fear for the current crisis is that we somehow manage to go back to business as usual (the worst fear being total collapse of civilization). I voted for change, and damnit, I want change!
The general philosophical problem here is to what extent packets sent and received on the internet constitute public speech vs. the extent to which they are extensions of the private thoughts of the user. We already know that search engine queries reveal an enormous amount about what a user is thinking. We (at least many Slashdotters) also know how the internet can at times feel like an extension of our brains. But if all of our internet accesses were put in the public domain (and associated with our real-life identity), we would very soon begin to treat internet access more like public speech.
The question is whether people should be able to use the internet as a brain extension. My feeling is that this has enough value that it ought to be not only allowed, but encouraged. I think people should at least be able operate with one or more identities which are explicitly designated as anonymous. It would then be up to server administrators to determine what access would be allowed to an anonymous identity. This is similar to the current state of things, except that I would add explicit legal protection for anonymous identities as an extension of the right to privacy. I think I would draw the line at anonymous monetary transactions, as these have too much potential for abuse. That is not to say that all monetary transactions should be in the public domain, but that I have no objections to record-keeping requirements for monetary transactions, and making them subject to a reasonable discovery process.
As a practical matter, guaranteed privacy of internet accesses appears to at least involve multiple hops through a large number of random nodes, or is impossible, depending on your assumptions. Encryption, when the server supports it, helps with hiding the nature of accesses as they cross the internet, but guarantees nothing about how much information may be logged on the server side. Because of the practical difficulty of achieving privacy on the internet, I do think it needs legal protection. That wouldn't make privacy any easier to assure technically, but would provide some legal recourse if someone's privacy is violated.
For the people who think there should be no anonymity on the internet, I'd ask you to consider how you'd feel about technology that can read your thoughts directly from your brain. Because that's not far off. I do think that privacy will be virtually eliminated someday, and that sentient beings can exist happily without it, but we aren't ready for that yet. And anyway that's not the same thing as the government having access to your thoughts while you don't have access to theirs.
Phage therapy involves a lot of labor in isolating a non-symbiotic phage for a particular bacterial strain, and then growing enough of them to give the patient a dose that will not be negated by their immune system. To really be practical, this process would need to be automated.
Phages are specific, which is a disadvantage economically, as another poster noted. But specificity is an advantage medically, as it means you don't need to wipe out all of the "good bacteria" along with the bad. This is particularly important when the bad bacteria are antibiotic resistant and are in competition with the good bacteria.
An enlightened society would be developing both antibiotic and phage therapies. But then, an enlightened society would be different from ours in so many ways.
This is my favorite argument against IP. The purpose of property ownership as a concept is to prevent disputes over scarce resources, or at least to provide non-violent means of resolving such disputes. And the reason for avoiding disputes, particularly violent disputes, is that they waste resources and increase scarcity. There have been exceptions in the evolutionary history of our species, where war was an effective means of reducing scarcity, by reducing the population, or creating less competition for women. But modern warfare, as deadly as it can be, is usually more effective at destroying resources and infrastructure than lives, and thus usually creates more scarcity.
If one imagines a world where most energy comes from renewable sources, where robots do most of the physical labor, and machine intelligence is capable of most of the jobs in our "service economy", much of real property ownership could also become dysfunctional. There would be no justification for a relatively few owners of the robots and intelligent machines to have a right to be enriched by the rest of the population. And in any case, how would the rest of the population afford the fruits of production when there are no jobs?
"Knowledge and beliefs" probably was too narrow a description. What I'm trying to get at is that your exact brain state is not necessary for your sense of "self". It obviously changes somewhat from moment to moment, and somewhat more during sleep. And it can be affected by drugs or a blow to the head. But none of these things generally creates a sense of becoming a different person. You may be aware that you've changed a belief or acquired new knowledge, and yet maintain that you are the same "self". But if you change enough, I don't think it is really unreasonable to say that you are not the same "self" as at the beginning of the changes. In particular, if one could live for 500 years without becoming stagnant at some point, the cumulative changes would be such that you would have little more mental relationship to your original "self" than to some other random person.
Leaving the semantics of "self" aside, when you say you want to live for at least 500 years, what is it that you want to preserve for that time? Continuity of awareness? But sleep interrupts that fairly regularly. Ever have the experience of waking up from a deep sleep and not knowing who you are for a second? Then your memories come flooding back and you accept the resulting person as "you". But over 500 years many of those memories will be lost. So the memories were not necessary for "you" to exist. What is necessary is for you to keep believing that you are the "same" person each day when you awake.
What I wonder is whether we are so fixated on this notion of a singular self that we are missing the potential of a plural self, that is, a "self" composed of multiple people. I think many religions attempt to be this, but are limited by the lack of precision in their dogma, as well as their goals being oriented toward some kind of afterlife instead of this life. With modern information technology and some more practical goal, a group of people could dedicate themselves over several generations to accomplishing the goal. For example, suppose the goal was to establish an independent human colony on Mars. Imagine a group of people not just working together, but dedicating their very "selves" to that purpose (the way some people dedicate themselves to religion). Some would become scientists working on various aspects of the problem. Some would follow other walks of life, in which they would also contribute to the goal economically or politically. Others would recruit new members, teach, or manage knowledge or otherwise ensure the continuity of the plural "self".
Some problems in science already could be said to have a plural self dedicated to their solution. But they are largely composed of only scientists, who have to rely on people outside their plural self for funding and support. As a "self", they are rather limited in self-awareness, just as primitive man might have been.
On the one hand, I empathize completely with your desire to live 500 years or more, if for no other reason, simply to satisfy my curiosity about what the future will bring.
On the other hand, many of the people now living into their 80's and 90's have lives I would not want to live, and not just due to the state of their health. A lot of old people live their last years in the past, never embracing anything new. Many live in abject fear of anything resembling change. So when we say we desire extreme longevity, it is very important to qualify that. What we really want is a much extended vital adulthood.
But consider this: after 500 years of learning, relationships, and general experience, in what sense (other than legal and historical) could you consider yourself to be the same person? You will have forgotten more than you remember even if you if are the smartest person in the world after 500 years. What I think is that when it comes down to it, the only thing that would really make you the same person is that you believe that you are.
The founders of the world's ancient religions attempted to preserve their cherished beliefs through their teachings and writings. Over time that information has been corrupted and forked so many times that the essences of their beliefs probably have been lost. But today, if you have a truth to tell, you can tell it to future generations with excellent fidelity. This raises the question: is there anything you know now that someone 500 years from now would find novel and relevant?
We humans generally have a very narrow conception of "self". We are constantly changing both physically and mentally, and yet most of us wake each day thinking of ourselves as being the "same" as were the day before. We think of others as necessarily being other "selves". For the most part, we treat "myself" as a binary property - I am myself, and you are not myself. I think that is very narrow and limiting thinking, given our current and future technology for storing and manipulating information. I think of "self" more in terms of a bundle of knowledge and beliefs, which can exist in multiple places (or people) and times. I like to think that this is what some misunderstood founder of an ancient religion meant by "eternal life".
Whether there is a man in the loop or not, this is a dangerous development for the future of democracy. The ability to project force with fewer people in control means that it becomes easier to have a smaller military force of elites, who can be more easily controlled by an undemocratic government. With the U.S. government in particular, we already see in Iraq and Afghanistan a movement toward using private mercenaries. Without these mercenaries, the current level of force could not be maintained without a draft.
Now no one wants to be drafted, but a draft does have the advantage of populating the military with a broad cross-section of society. Such a force would be much less likely to tolerate being used to suppress a popular revolution if the government which commands them should go rogue. With mercenaries, and especially with mercenaries whose force is multiplied through robotic systems, you have a force motivated by money rather than allegiance to the Constitution.
So who wants to enlist first? Yeah, me neither. But we better vote wisely while we still can.
It's a mistake to assume that information, particularly information assembled from a multitude of sources (such as an EHR) can be owned. Any system which purports to give you "ownership" of your EHR is also giving you a false sense of security. Nevertheless, some kind of access control is imperative for EHR's, both for reading and writing. But it needs to be flexible enough to avoid impeding the sharing of information about a particular patient between potentially many caregivers for that patient. A system that does not provide this flexibility will be routinely circumvented, or will fail. The system that will succeed is the one which improves on current practice.
This is not just a technological issue but a legal one as well. In the long run the best legal strategy may be to focus on the abuse of information, rather than how someone comes to possess it. And I'm thinking that for most types of information, having the information would not constitute abuse.
Paravirtualization is a way to leverage device drivers in the host OS. Device drivers are usually written for Windows first, and sometimes, for Windows only. As long as this remains the case, Microsoft can take as long as it needs to produce a Windows-hosted paravirtualization that will compete effectively (and unfairly) with Xen. The hypervisor must ultimately control the I/O devices, one way or the other. Even with some future hardware support for virtualized I/O devices, the hypervisor must at least manage which guest OS gets which device, even if the device driver resides in the guest.
The move toward virtualization presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break Microsoft's grip on the OS. The way to do that is to create open standards for hypervisor interfaces, particularly for embedding device drivers in the hypervisor. Politically, the stakeholders who need to be involved, but do not appear to be, are the PC manufacturers. They have the clout it will take to get device manufacturers to produce device drivers for a new open standard for hypervisor device drivers. What they stand to gain is the ability to at least free themselves from Microsoft's grip on the desktop, and perhaps also to encourage competition in hypervisor products, so that Microsoft is not simply replaced by another monopoly. Just as these manufacturers have some choice in BIOS implementations, they could also have a choice of hypervisor implementations. This would provide many more opportunities for product differentiation.
I call on vendors of both open and closed source virtualization products, and PC manufacturers to start making some open standards now. Otherwise you are going to end up with Microsoft calling the shots - again.
Repeating my comment from a related article yesterday:
Virtualisation is a double-edged sword for Microsoft. On the one hand, they surely must fear it, probably even more than Vista falling flat on its face. Virtualisation is the most profound threat to their monopoly that they have ever faced. Virtualisation opens the doors for competition in operating systems, and the possibility for real innovation in a field that has stagnated for at least two decades. The tipping point is device drivers. If a (non-Microsoft) Virtual Machine Monitor becomes popular enough that device vendors find it advantageous to develop (or make it possible to develop) drivers at the VMM level instead of for Windows, then Windows becomes the walking dead.
On the other hand, virtualisation can potentially free Microsoft from years of subservience to backwards compatibility. Applications could run happily in "Windows compatibility mode", and Microsoft would once again be free to "innovate" (probably by copying Apple again). Naturally this works best if Microsoft actually has a monopoly on the VMM, which they can be expected to pursue with all vigor in the next few years. That is a battle that the open source community should be more concerned about than Windows vs. Linux, both of which should become legacy operating systems in 5-6 years.
Virtualisation is a double-edged sword for Microsoft. On the one hand, they surely must fear it, probably even more than Vista falling flat on its face. Virtualisation is the most profound threat to their monopoly that they have ever faced. Virtualisation opens the doors for competition in operating systems, and the possibility for real innovation in a field that has stagnated for at least two decades. The tipping point is device drivers. If a (non-Microsoft) Virtual Machine Monitor becomes popular enough that device vendors find it advantageous to develop (or make it possible to develop) drivers at the VMM level instead of for Windows, then Windows becomes the walking dead.
On the other hand, virtualisation can potentially free Microsoft from years of subservience to backwards compatibility. Applications could run happily in "Windows compatibility mode", and Microsoft would once again be free to "innovate" (probably by copying Apple again). Naturally this works best if Microsoft actually has a monopoly on the VMM, which they can be expected to pursue with all vigor in the next few years. That is a battle that the open source community should be more concerned about than Windows vs. Linux, both of which should become legacy operating systems in 5-6 years.
Well, here's a hint: There was another major character in the movie whose story shows you what Book was, and what happened to him that he became Shepherd Book. In some sense, the whole movie is about the life of Shepherd Book.
Recording companies are basically advertising companies bundled with venture capital. These functions ought to be separate. There ought to be venture capital firms that specialize in funding musicians. And there could also be advertising agencies that specialize in promoting musicians. The musicians would form startup companies and use shares as currency, just like in tech. They would pay for advertising just like any other company, instead of selling their souls to record companies.
Boycotts of the music industry are doomed to failure. But if the most talented artists began starting their own companies, that would really change things.
Yes, hierarchies are good, and we certainly are used to working with them. The problem is that the typical filesystem provides only one hierarchy. But that hierarchy is used for multiple purposes. Most often we think of it as the means for locating a particular file, but it is also used to group files for access control or backup purposes, for example.
The logical, hierarchical view that I use to organize my files so that I can find them often is not the way I would organize them for viewing or applying access controls. While I can set and view access control on individual files, that is not as convenient as having a hierarchy specifically dedicated as an access control view of the files. With such a hierarchy, I could mostly eliminate the need to set access controls on individual files, and instead set them on directories (assuming that the access controls are inherited by the files in a directory).
Likewise, I might often find a use for a separate hierarchy for backup purposes, perhaps organized by a combination of time and project. (In fact, organizing files by modification time might often be useful just for finding them.) So I might have a file path, "/2005/July/email/personal", for example.
Besides the fact that there are not enough of them, the other problem with hierarchies is that it takes mental effort to invent one that is appropriate for a particular task. Most of the hierarchies we use in everyday life are either natural or invented by someone else. Most of us will invent hierarchies only when it becomes obvious that the alternative is chaos.
Yeah, and the Japanese read too much Asimov.
Don't get too comfortable, booby. The universe is going to turn out a lot stranger than you imagine. And we already know it's pretty strange.
TFA says it was unusual that the protons from the CME got to earth as fast as they did, and says it's a mystery how they got accelerated.
My question is: were the protons actually accelerated? Were they more energetic when they arrived here than normal?
Maybe the solar explosion warped space in such a way that the protons didn't have to travel as far. Or maybe some other spacial distubance caused both the explosion and the proton effect.
Some of you already know what carbon sequestration is. For the rest, there's Google.
Unlike some other forms of carbon sequestration, where you have the possibility of catastrophic release of the sequestered carbon, diamonds would be essentially permanent.
Yeah, not too practical, even with this advance. But who knows how far it will go? Maybe we could stop global warming and fix the potholes in the roads for good.
This prediction amounts to saying that, all other things being equal, increased bandwidth to the home will favor thin clients or appliances over general-purpose computers. But other things are highly unlikely to remain equal. Imagine what the commodity microprocessor will be capable of in ten years. Or a graphics board. Or a neural induction interface.
Combine those advances with increased bandwidth, and you can imagine IRC without the typing, but rather with audio/video interaction, perhaps with 3D avatars synthesized from audio/video/neural monitoring of participants. And chat rooms that can be virtual manifestions of real world locations, or completely virtual environments that look just as real.
Applications such as that need vast amounts of local bandwidth and computing power, as well as low latencies.
Some people think the capabilities of artificial intelligence will expand with increasing hardware capability. If that is so, even AI may have made some progress in ten years. And that could make software as we know it today pretty much obsolete.
Not that there won't still be spam. It will just be subliminal...
So you want to protest software patents?
Things that don't work:
The trick is to make people other than software engineers actually care about this issue. I suggest the best way to raise awareness is for software engineers to refuse to write code for a day. (I suspect for any randomly picked day, that was a day most of us weren't going to write any code anyway. Am I right?) The intent to do this should be widely publicized beforehand. On the chosen day, lots of people like Lessig and Stallman (maybe not Stallman himself; I said like Stallman :-) should be available to brief the press.
If it doesn't work the first time, rinse and repeat, say maybe once a month?
The movement needs a name. I suggest:
Software Patents Are Not Kool!
Why should they care about your boycott, even if it were hugely successful, if their new business model is extortion by patent rather than selling products?
The system is broken. If Kodak can game the system to make money, then it seems they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do just that.
A more effective protest would be for software developers to refuse to write code. We could start out small with a one day protest to get some media attention. Most programmers wouldn't lose their jobs over that. If nothing happens, make it one day a month.
I'm sure someone out there will come up with a better name for our movement, but let me throw out:
Software Patents Are Not Kool.
The singularity implies enough computational power to simulate everything around us, including us. Maybe it has already happened.
Maybe we are all characters in a game being played by The Gates. Our goal is to keep The Gates from winning. That would explain our (in some ways) irrational desire to keep one of our own from ruling the world.
I mean, look around: most other identifiable socio-political groups want one of their own to rule the world. As geeks, what's our problem? Abolute power corrupts absolutely? Do you really think The Gates would do a worse job than those in charge now (especially if he weren't distracted by us nipping at his heels)?
Seductive the Dark Side is...
If the dems lose this election, they ought to disband the party. The 2000 election should never have been as close as it was, and now that everyone can see what Bush really stands for, this election shouldn't be close either.
I could see something like a New Democratic Party, just like the old Democratic party, only with competent people running the campaigns. IMHO, the biggest mistake the Democrats make is trying to make rational arguments to people who are not rational. They need to learn to appeal to emotion, religion, fear, and hatred.
Ok, I'm a little bitter, and Democrats have a lot of other faults. But when Kerry said in his convention speech that he believes in science, it struck me that that, more than anything else, is what distinguishes him from Bush.
Science and rational thought need a serious modding up in the world, and the people who believe in it need to hang together until it happens. We can always split into Socialists and Libertarians later.
Suppose we picked up a signal from some ET and that there was no doubt, scientifically speaking, that it came from ETI. At least half the world doesn't believe in science, so if you're hoping that some of the more narrow-minded religions in the world are going to suddenly snap out of their narrow mindedness, I wouldn't count on it. Just look at the amount of scientific evidence they already manage to ignore or discount. Probably several new and conflicting religions would be founded by people claiming to have found some "divine" interpretation of the ET's message.
Maybe you're hoping the ETs could tell us something that would advance our technology. Given how many of us subscribe to irrational world views, it seems to me that would be damned irresponsible of them. Sort of like throwing gasoline on a fire.
My bet is the first communication detected from an ETI will be a question, something they want to know, or something they want to make sure we know before they say anything else. If our world was enlightened enough to support broadcasting to the stars, rather than just listening, I think we'd ask a question. Asking a question implies you've developed the patience to wait for a reply, which, for light-speed communication at least, is a lot of patience!