I agree everyone should be able to earn a liveable wage, but what constitutes a liveable wage varies enormously around the world. Also what counts as a dramatic improvement in living conditions, health care, sanitation, working conditions, etc can also vary enormously.
My wife is Chinese. Her sister and her sister's husband probably earn around $350 a month between them. That's a pretty decent middle class wage in China, they consider themselves to be fairly well off compared to most of their family. I've stayed there a few times, so I know what living conditions are like for skilled office workers in China. My wife used to be one.
The fact is, their standard of living is way below what we'd consider to be acceptable in the west, but it's leaps and bounds above the average in that country.
Of course free trade should also be fair trade. But what's fair in one country isn't necesserily even attainable for most people in another, and you can't improve conditions in a country by denying them the opportunity to compete internationaly for work.
Since when were 3rd world counties banned from having economies?
America has done astoundingly well through free trade. The fact is that, like Britain a few hundred years ago, you're very good at it. Opening up free trade with Japan (which you did at gun point, I might add) is a great example of free trade's win-win effects. Sure your car makers got a cick up the butt in the 70s, but they deserved it, and you've still got a vibrant car indurstry. Sure most toys are now made in China, but who wants to pack card board boxes with floppy bunnies every day anyway? Your economy and technology has always advanced fast enough to more than compensate.
Your economy, and therefore every enfranchised citizen, has benefited enormously from your access to other countries resources, markets, and even labour force. It was only a matter of time before the newest industry - IT - matured to the point that it became more internationaly integrated.
For a country that prides itself on it's own freedoms, and despite the overwhelmingly positive record of the US on the international stage, I'm afraid many Americans still seem very unwilling to allow that other human beings have any right to fair treatment at all.
>I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the moon landings were faked, for >example, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things.
My favourites are the 'pictures of alien moon bases'. Many of these prove to be blowups of astronomical JPG files. The compression algorithm used in the JPG format introduces artificial distortions in the details of images, so it's not surprising they find all sorts of weird looking shapes when they magnify the pictures.
>The only similarity between the problems of AI and Single-atom positioning in nanotechnology is >that they are both problems which we have seen nature solve, which gives us hope that we too >will one day solve them.
Well you're obviously aware of some discoveries I'm not. I'd love to see a reference for a natural process capable of constructing arbitrary assemplies of atoms. Nature's full of processes and structures that will produce only specific product structures or narrow classes of structures, but arbitrary possitioning of single atoms, regardless of the element or possition?
This is the crux of the problem. Drexler is making handwaving claims that this will be doable, without actualy coming up with a concrete explanation of how it could be done.
Absent even a theory of how to do something, claiming that it's doable is not exactly very scientific. Drexler writes specualtions about what may be possible, but offers only vague speculation about actualy doing it.
>This is the same sort of plausible sounding arguments that have been used to "prove" (in my >lifetime) that we will never detect planets around other stars,.... etc....
I see this argument all the time and it's totaly falacious. In my lifetime scientists have claimed that artificial inteligences will be so far superior to human inteligences that they will rule the world for us. When would this occur by? Well according to some 1960s AI pioneers, we'd be ruled by AIs by the 1980s.
Meanwhile in 2003 we're still waiting for someone to even come up with a very rough architecture for building even a simplistic geenral purpose AI, let alone start the practical work of programming one. The same goes for nanotechnology. It's all handwaving, the nano pundits can't put forward any kind of actual theoretical design for a universal contsructor.
Think of it this way. we're much better a building human scale robots, computers and machinery than nano scale ones. therefore a human scale or bigger universal constructor should be many orders of magnitudes easier to make than a nano scale one. Whn wa sthe last time you saw plans for a fully automated, compuetr controlled, humanless factory capable of creating any product, including a copy of itself?
never, precisely. If we can't build one at all, or even come up with rough plans for one, what makes anyone think a nano scale version is any more practical?
For a start, the article itself isn't as negative about.NET as the slashdot post blurb implies. Yet another example of a slashdot post missleading us about the article beign referenced.
The fact is that the.NET is a developer thing, not realy an application thing. This automaticaly means it's goign to take several years longer than an application level technology to make an impact because all those developers need to get skilled up before they can even begin developing the apps.
Microsoft's own apps are only just barely beginning to integrate the core.NET technology of the.NET VM and the associated web services and XML capabilities it enables. The core Longhorn services are all being built on.NET so anyone who thinks it's time to Microsoft to move on from.NET fundamentaly has no clue about Microsoft's development strategy.
The best comparrison is probably Java. How logn did it take before Java rocked the world, er, well some of us are still waiting for it. Actual it did have a big impact in some areas, but generaly not the areas it was orriginaly aimed at. Where are all the Java thin clients now? Perhaps the same will happen with.NET and it's ultimate destiny may lead it in different directions than Microsoft or anyone else can currently imagine. If Mono realy takes off, that could be one of the catalysts for disruptive technological change.
Simon Hibbs
Re:Orwell's vision was true!
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
According to Andrei Sakharov, although the books were supposedly illegal in the USSR, they were actualy printed by the communist party in small quantities and circulated to select members, not as warnings but essentialy as 'how-to' manuals.
Good grief, giving people too much freedom is just as dangerous as giving them too much democracy. They might elect [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/n ewsmakers/1952981.stm]the wrong people![/url]
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people," - Kissinger
That's depends very much on the thing you're testing. Samples of 100 were not sufficient to have any statistical validity in the context of the TV shows.
>2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress >his or her work.
Well, a member of the secret scientific establishment brotherhood would say that, wouldn't he?
I'd like to add another tell-tale sign:
8. The scientific study was funded or conducted under the auspices of a media company.
Recently in the UK we've had a number of TV documentaries about controversial theories. One was an investigation into homeopathic medicine. The other was into the idea that otherwise very mild diseases might lead to obesity. In both cases the TV company funded a small scale test.
The problem was that the tests involved only about 100 subjects, far too small to have any statistical validity whatsoever. They said so in the show, but is that enough? Several people I've talked to afterwards recieved the impression that the tests in the show proved something.
Far from promoting an understanding of science, the shows succeeded in missleading the public not only as to the validity of the theories under examination, but also as to the value of such small scale tests.
I've never come across this kind of thing in the UK before, is this happening on TV in other countries too?
Their pricing may be a lot less than MPEG-4, but it's almost identical to the pricing already announced by realnetworks for their proprietary audio and video codecs.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and who was screamig about Real's pricing? I can't see a proprietary solution effectively competing with MPEG in the consumer market, so it's probably the only way they can make headway.
I have recently become very annoyed with the way I am storing information. I've realised that I have four parallel, similar, yet completely independent methods for cataloguing information. One is the file system - directories containing documents, images, etc on various subjects. The second is the Favourites list in my web browser, containing links to web sites on various subjects. The third is my email contact list, containing groups of contacts in various categories. The fourth is my mailbox hierarchy, containing archives of emails on various subjects.
What I realy need isn't a way to help store one category of information, but a single unified way to store all related information together, by subject. All my documents, emails, web links and addresses relevent to a particular customer, for example.
I don't realy need a search tool (although they're always a nice function to have), I need a way to keep everything together and easily accessible.
Let's suppose that the next version of Word runs on the.NEt framework. Lets suppose that Ximian manages to produce a compatible open source version of the.NET framework.
>Crichton dismisses computer games as "the hula hoops of the '80s", saying "already >there are indications that the mania for twitch games may be fading."
To be fair to Crichton, he was basicaly right for about 10 years. It wasn't untill Doom and the orriginal PLay Station that computer games were noticed by the mass market and became more than children's toys, or a specialist niche hobby.
I haven't read the book, but I'd like to know how long the reviewer thinks the book remained relevent? Anything over a decade would be pretty impressive.
I see nothing wrong whatever with accepting a counter offer. After all, it's not all that uncommon for people to start a new job, and then find for various reasons they don't like the job/working environemnt/management style, or whatever and leaving soon anyway.
Why expose yourself, and your potential new employer to that risk if you like your current job? It's a streightforward case of prefering to be loyal to your current employer, when there's no longer any good case to leave.
>Ever notice that the Empire people are always humans?
How do we know? Storm troopers are almost always seen with helmets on. However we do have some clues. Storm troopers are stupid, easily lead, feckless and can't hit the broad side of a barn with a blaster from 50 paces. Obviously most of them are Gungans!
I went to university and studied computing, specialising in real-time and industrial controll applications development. The key skills it gave me are programming and understanding how operating systems are designed and how they function. I've found this an excelent basis from which to build a career as a system admin and systems implementation engineer.
Even if you're not principaly a programmer, you need programming skills to write custom scripts and queries. If you know how operating systems and applications are engineered, you've got a big headstart at figuring out what's going wrong when something breaks down.
Simon Hibbs
Re:Another factor?
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Well, as we know from the excelent classic film "Daleks - Invasion Earth", a planetary magnetic field is essential to preserve indiginous life forms from conquest by Dalek forces.
How this important factor has been overlooked by so-called serious scientists is a mystery to me.
Rights most definitely are earned. They are an artificial product of our arbitrary moral and legal framework.
>I haven't had to earn my right to speak freely, to vote, or any other >rights I have as a citizen of my country. You don't have to earn the right to distribute >software either.
You haven't earned those right, others have earned them for you. In the war or independence, the civil war, both world wars, and any number of legal and civil right battles fought over the last few hundred years. _You_ have done jack shit, but others have shedblood sweat and tears, and I think it would be reasonable to expect just a little bit of humility and respect for them.
Look at the animal world. Animals in the wild have no rights and no obligations. We have a moral and social sense. Our morality and social consensus for acceptable behaviour come from within us, they are not objective facts imposed on us by the world.
>I'm surprised no-one (that I'm aware of) has
>proposed a 'bundled' portable HTML file format
>that would be non-proprietry, vendor neutral,
>and immune to problems like the Skylarov case.
HTML Mail has already be mentioned as a form of this, but I agree that a compressed, packaged HTML bundle format would be usefull.
Somethign like this already exists, and has for almost a decade. It's a hypertext file format with embedded graphics, including click-maps, that is fully searchable and indexable. I've seen it used for electronic magazines distributed by email, and it's automaticaly supported by all Windows PCs. It's the Microsoft Help file format.
(Ok, I'm sorry... please don't lynch me. I surrender allready!).
>Type may be innocuous, but the extension says "execute me", so when
>the "integrated" IE engine gets ahold of it, the malicious content
>is automatically executed.
>If you routinely browse with Internet Explorer or read mail with
>Outlook, keep in mind that any web page you visit or any email you
>open can take over your computer, steal sensitive files, destroy
>your machine, anything.
I like Slashdot lots, and read it pretty much every time I have net access (most work days +).
Still, it saddens me that poorly considered, or even deliberately missleading rants like this still slip through as editorial content.
I'd like to see a macro-scale implementation of
this. Where are the servos that move the arms?
What about power distribution and controll
signaling? How are these attached to the arms,
and how do you make sure the power, signaling
and servo attachments don't get in the way?
If you've already manufactured all the parts and
laid them out in a perfect pattern on the two
surfaces, why not do all the assembly at that
stage? Surely this level of assembly is the
simples step in the manufacture process? So
simple that it's completely unnecessery.
Slashdot Mirror
"To me C is dead. Except for the JIT!"
So let's get a bit of perspective here. All he's saying is that HE doesn't code in C much anymore.
Portraying his statement as a "Peace in our time" or "End of History" style pronouncement is ludicrous.
Simon Hibbs
I agree everyone should be able to earn a liveable wage, but what constitutes a liveable wage varies enormously around the world. Also what counts as a dramatic improvement in living conditions, health care, sanitation, working conditions, etc can also vary enormously.
My wife is Chinese. Her sister and her sister's husband probably earn around $350 a month between them. That's a pretty decent middle class wage in China, they consider themselves to be fairly well off compared to most of their family. I've stayed there a few times, so I know what living conditions are like for skilled office workers in China. My wife used to be one.
The fact is, their standard of living is way below what we'd consider to be acceptable in the west, but it's leaps and bounds above the average in that country.
Of course free trade should also be fair trade. But what's fair in one country isn't necesserily even attainable for most people in another, and you can't improve conditions in a country by denying them the opportunity to compete internationaly for work.
Simon Hibbs
Since when were 3rd world counties banned from having economies?
America has done astoundingly well through free trade. The fact is that, like Britain a few hundred years ago, you're very good at it. Opening up free trade with Japan (which you did at gun point, I might add) is a great example of free trade's win-win effects. Sure your car makers got a cick up the butt in the 70s, but they deserved it, and you've still got a vibrant car indurstry. Sure most toys are now made in China, but who wants to pack card board boxes with floppy bunnies every day anyway? Your economy and technology has always advanced fast enough to more than compensate.
Your economy, and therefore every enfranchised citizen, has benefited enormously from your access to other countries resources, markets, and even labour force. It was only a matter of time before the newest industry - IT - matured to the point that it became more internationaly integrated.
For a country that prides itself on it's own freedoms, and despite the overwhelmingly positive record of the US on the international stage, I'm afraid many Americans still seem very unwilling to allow that other human beings have any right to fair treatment at all.
Simon Hibbs, London.
>I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the moon landings were faked, for
>example, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things.
My favourites are the 'pictures of alien moon bases'. Many of these prove to be blowups of astronomical JPG files. The compression algorithm used in the JPG format introduces artificial distortions in the details of images, so it's not surprising they find all sorts of weird looking shapes when they magnify the pictures.
Simon Hibbs
>The only similarity between the problems of AI and Single-atom positioning in nanotechnology is
>that they are both problems which we have seen nature solve, which gives us hope that we too
>will one day solve them.
Well you're obviously aware of some discoveries I'm not. I'd love to see a reference for a natural process capable of constructing arbitrary assemplies of atoms. Nature's full of processes and structures that will produce only specific product structures or narrow classes of structures, but arbitrary possitioning of single atoms, regardless of the element or possition?
This is the crux of the problem. Drexler is making handwaving claims that this will be doable, without actualy coming up with a concrete explanation of how it could be done.
Absent even a theory of how to do something, claiming that it's doable is not exactly very scientific. Drexler writes specualtions about what may be possible, but offers only vague speculation about actualy doing it.
Simon Hibbs
>This is the same sort of plausible sounding arguments that have been used to "prove" (in my
>lifetime) that we will never detect planets around other stars,.... etc....
I see this argument all the time and it's totaly falacious. In my lifetime scientists have claimed that artificial inteligences will be so far superior to human inteligences that they will rule the world for us. When would this occur by? Well according to some 1960s AI pioneers, we'd be ruled by AIs by the 1980s.
Meanwhile in 2003 we're still waiting for someone to even come up with a very rough architecture for building even a simplistic geenral purpose AI, let alone start the practical work of programming one. The same goes for nanotechnology. It's all handwaving, the nano pundits can't put forward any kind of actual theoretical design for a universal contsructor.
Think of it this way. we're much better a building human scale robots, computers and machinery than nano scale ones. therefore a human scale or bigger universal constructor should be many orders of magnitudes easier to make than a nano scale one. Whn wa sthe last time you saw plans for a fully automated, compuetr controlled, humanless factory capable of creating any product, including a copy of itself?
never, precisely. If we can't build one at all, or even come up with rough plans for one, what makes anyone think a nano scale version is any more practical?
Simon Hibbs
For a start, the article itself isn't as negative about .NET as the slashdot post blurb implies. Yet another example of a slashdot post missleading us about the article beign referenced.
.NET is a developer thing, not realy an application thing. This automaticaly means it's goign to take several years longer than an application level technology to make an impact because all those developers need to get skilled up before they can even begin developing the apps.
.NET technology of the .NET VM and the associated web services and XML capabilities it enables. The core Longhorn services are all being built on .NET so anyone who thinks it's time to Microsoft to move on from .NET fundamentaly has no clue about Microsoft's development strategy.
.NET and it's ultimate destiny may lead it in different directions than Microsoft or anyone else can currently imagine. If Mono realy takes off, that could be one of the catalysts for disruptive technological change.
The fact is that the
Microsoft's own apps are only just barely beginning to integrate the core
The best comparrison is probably Java. How logn did it take before Java rocked the world, er, well some of us are still waiting for it. Actual it did have a big impact in some areas, but generaly not the areas it was orriginaly aimed at. Where are all the Java thin clients now? Perhaps the same will happen with
Simon Hibbs
According to Andrei Sakharov, although the books were supposedly illegal in the USSR, they were actualy printed by the communist party in small quantities and circulated to select members, not as warnings but essentialy as 'how-to' manuals.
Simon Hibbs
Good grief, giving people too much freedom is just as dangerous as giving them too much democracy. They might elect [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/n ewsmakers/1952981.stm]the wrong people![/url]
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people," - Kissinger
Somebody wake me up when it's worth reading Slashdot again...
Si
That's depends very much on the thing you're testing. Samples of 100 were not sufficient to have any statistical validity in the context of the TV shows.
Simon Hibbs
Warning sign number 2
>2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress
>his or her work.
Well, a member of the secret scientific establishment brotherhood would say that, wouldn't he?
I'd like to add another tell-tale sign
8. The scientific study was funded or conducted under the auspices of a media company.
Recently in the UK we've had a number of TV documentaries about controversial theories. One was an investigation into homeopathic medicine. The other was into the idea that otherwise very mild diseases might lead to obesity. In both cases the TV company funded a small scale test.
The problem was that the tests involved only about 100 subjects, far too small to have any statistical validity whatsoever. They said so in the show, but is that enough? Several people I've talked to afterwards recieved the impression that the tests in the show proved something.
Far from promoting an understanding of science, the shows succeeded in missleading the public not only as to the validity of the theories under examination, but also as to the value of such small scale tests.
I've never come across this kind of thing in the UK before, is this happening on TV in other countries too?
Simon Hibbs
Their pricing may be a lot less than MPEG-4, but it's almost identical to the pricing already announced by realnetworks for their proprietary audio and video codecs.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and who was screamig about Real's pricing? I can't see a proprietary solution effectively competing with MPEG in the consumer market, so it's probably the only way they can make headway.
Simon Hibbs
I have recently become very annoyed with the way I am storing information. I've realised that I have four parallel, similar, yet completely independent methods for cataloguing information. One is the file system - directories containing documents, images, etc on various subjects. The second is the Favourites list in my web browser, containing links to web sites on various subjects. The third is my email contact list, containing groups of contacts in various categories. The fourth is my mailbox hierarchy, containing archives of emails on various subjects.
What I realy need isn't a way to help store one category of information, but a single unified way to store all related information together, by subject. All my documents, emails, web links and addresses relevent to a particular customer, for example.
I don't realy need a search tool (although they're always a nice function to have), I need a way to keep everything together and easily accessible.
Simon Hibbs
Let's suppose that the next version of Word runs on the .NEt framework. Lets suppose that Ximian manages to produce a compatible open source version of the .NET framework.
It's only a matter of time...
Simon Hibbs
>Crichton dismisses computer games as "the hula hoops of the '80s", saying "already
>there are indications that the mania for twitch games may be fading."
To be fair to Crichton, he was basicaly right for about 10 years. It wasn't untill Doom and the orriginal PLay Station that computer games were noticed by the mass market and became more than children's toys, or a specialist niche hobby.
I haven't read the book, but I'd like to know how long the reviewer thinks the book remained relevent? Anything over a decade would be pretty impressive.
Simon Hibbs
No registration required :
3 .h tml
o gy /space_drills_010911-1.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-driller-00a
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technol
I see nothing wrong whatever with accepting a counter offer. After all, it's not all that uncommon for people to start a new job, and then find for various reasons they don't like the job/working environemnt/management style, or whatever and leaving soon anyway.
Why expose yourself, and your potential new employer to that risk if you like your current job? It's a streightforward case of prefering to be loyal to your current employer, when there's no longer any good case to leave.
Simon Hibbs
>Ever notice that the Empire people are always humans?
How do we know? Storm troopers are almost always seen with helmets on. However we do have some clues. Storm troopers are stupid, easily lead, feckless and can't hit the broad side of a barn with a blaster from 50 paces. Obviously most of them are Gungans!
Simon Hibbs
I can only speak from my own experience.
I went to university and studied computing, specialising in real-time and industrial controll applications development. The key skills it gave me are programming and understanding how operating systems are designed and how they function. I've found this an excelent basis from which to build a career as a system admin and systems implementation engineer.
Even if you're not principaly a programmer, you need programming skills to write custom scripts and queries. If you know how operating systems and applications are engineered, you've got a big headstart at figuring out what's going wrong when something breaks down.
Simon Hibbs
Well, as we know from the excelent classic film "Daleks - Invasion Earth", a planetary magnetic field is essential to preserve indiginous life forms from conquest by Dalek forces.
How this important factor has been overlooked by so-called serious scientists is a mystery to me.
Simon Hibbs
>Rights aren't earned.
Rights most definitely are earned. They are an artificial product of our arbitrary moral and legal framework.
>I haven't had to earn my right to speak freely, to vote, or any other
>rights I have as a citizen of my country. You don't have to earn the right to distribute
>software either.
You haven't earned those right, others have earned them for you. In the war or independence, the civil war, both world wars, and any number of legal and civil right battles fought over the last few hundred years. _You_ have done jack shit, but others have shedblood sweat and tears, and I think it would be reasonable to expect just a little bit of humility and respect for them.
Look at the animal world. Animals in the wild have no rights and no obligations. We have a moral and social sense. Our morality and social consensus for acceptable behaviour come from within us, they are not objective facts imposed on us by the world.
Simon Hibbs
>I'm surprised no-one (that I'm aware of) has
>proposed a 'bundled' portable HTML file format
>that would be non-proprietry, vendor neutral,
>and immune to problems like the Skylarov case.
HTML Mail has already be mentioned as a form of this, but I agree that a compressed, packaged HTML bundle format would be usefull.
Somethign like this already exists, and has for almost a decade. It's a hypertext file format with embedded graphics, including click-maps, that is fully searchable and indexable. I've seen it used for electronic magazines distributed by email, and it's automaticaly supported by all Windows PCs. It's the Microsoft Help file format.
(Ok, I'm sorry... please don't lynch me. I surrender allready!).
Simon Hibbs
Michael :
>Type may be innocuous, but the extension says "execute me", so when
>the "integrated" IE engine gets ahold of it, the malicious content
>is automatically executed.
>If you routinely browse with Internet Explorer or read mail with
>Outlook, keep in mind that any web page you visit or any email you
>open can take over your computer, steal sensitive files, destroy
>your machine, anything.
I like Slashdot lots, and read it pretty much every time I have net access (most work days +).
Still, it saddens me that poorly considered, or even deliberately missleading rants like this still slip through as editorial content.
For this item : 2/10, must try harder.
Simon Hibbs
Sorry, we're supposed to be impressed?
I'd like to see a macro-scale implementation of
this. Where are the servos that move the arms?
What about power distribution and controll
signaling? How are these attached to the arms,
and how do you make sure the power, signaling
and servo attachments don't get in the way?
If you've already manufactured all the parts and
laid them out in a perfect pattern on the two
surfaces, why not do all the assembly at that
stage? Surely this level of assembly is the
simples step in the manufacture process? So
simple that it's completely unnecessery.
Simon Hibbs