Uh oh... now you've got me worried. What happens when a script kiddie hacks into my fridge and orders a million gallons of ice cream in my name? I suppose if it's a Microsoft Fridge (tm), it's going to need frequent patching. Or I could use an Apple Macintosh Fridge, which will be more secure but hold only a few kinds of food.
Maybe it wouldn't... I suppose household appliances could do their thing with private address space. But I was just trying to make a point, that IP-enabled devices are going to become ever more-widespread, which was one of the implications of this new form-factor. Most of the new gadgets and toys that have it will require IPs for one reason or another, and at least some of them won't be able to do their thing with private addresses (e.g., cell phones).
You know, it's not that hard to buy the food yourself...
No, it isn't, but having your fridge order it and then deliver it will save a lot of time and hassle, so it's going to happen eventually. We've already got home grocery delivery in some areas -- you order your groceries thru the grocery store's web site, then have them deliver it. This is for people like me who find it either too time-consuming or too much of a hassle (or both) to go to the grocery store.
A few people earlier today were wondering why anyone would need IPv6, since IPv4 "obviously has enough address space". Developments like this should pretty clearly demonstrate that that's not the case. It probably won't be too terribly long before even your fridge will need an IP so you can program your refrigerator to know when it needs to order more groceries and the like. And that's just practical applications; toy and game manufacturers are going to go nuts with this.
I'm seeing some people here saying that this baby should have merely been allowed to die, and the parents encouraged to just "have another one". Obviously I can't say for sure, but I'd hazard a guess that most of these people aren't parents. If they were, they'd realize that most parents become deeply emotionally attached to their children very quickly, usually at an early stage in pregnancy, in fact, so it's not as though a six-month-old girl can simply be scrapped and replaced as though she were a defective car.
Here's a more pertinent point: once you start saying that some people are too "physically defective" to live, where would you draw the line? I, for example, am among the most physically health people around -- my mother always said I was "disgustingly healthy". Even so, had I lived in Nazi Germany, I would have been exterminated due to my "physical imperfections" (and no, I'm not Jewish).
Then, on a more personal level, there's my wonderful girlfriend, who's beautiful, incredibly intelligent (IQ in the mid 170s), who graduated from Berkeley with honors, and who spends her time rescuing homeless cats and advocating for social services for autistics (not to mention the ways she's brought joy into my life, in more ways than I can count). She was also born with severe birth defects that required eight or nine major operations over a number of years at a total cost of several million dollars. Was it worth it? I don't even have to wonder about that.
The simple fact of the matter is, you can't tell which human lives are going to be valuable and which ones aren't when the baby is so young. As to the argument of "quantity" -- that you could have saved more babies with those eight organs -- well, let's use your own calculus. Why is it so important to save the maximum number of lives possible, especially considering, as you point out, that making babies isn't exactly a huge challenge? It's not as though human beings are in short supply these days -- far from it. And it's also not as though most people even want babies, considering (for example) that one-third of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion.
I realize this post is a bit meandering, but you'll have to excuse my lack of coherence. There are people responding to this article who are essentially saying that my girlfriend (a slashdotter whom I love with all my heart and plan to marry someday) should be dead because she's "too defective" and repairing those defects wasn't worth the cost or effort. It's hard to write clearly when your emotional response to such comments is interfering so much.
I agree that the Hubble is getting old, but it's still got plenty of useful life left. There's just no way that any current ground-based telescope can get the same kind of data that the Hubble can right now.
A better telescope can certainly be designed now, and NASA should get on the ball with designing and building it -- but that will take some time, and in the meantime, we should keep the Hubble in good repair because it's still a very powerful and useful tool.
This just reminds me, yet again, of how messed up Americans' values are in so many ways, a fact that was first brought to my attention when I went to the United Kingdom (my first trip abroad) back in 1995. Over there, TV is not censored, at least not to the degree that it is here. They leave in nudity, sex, profanity, and all the other stuff. There's very little protest about it because they have a much more mature attitude -- they believe that adults should be allowed to watch whatever they want to watch without having the government tell them whether or not it's OK for them. More importantly, they also believe that if there's a show that has sex, violence, profanity, or anything else they might happen to find offensive, the proper course of action is to change the channel or turn off the set, not to say that nobody else at all should be allowed to see that stuff on TV.
I wish we had that attitude here. As others have said, I find religious junk like "The 700 Club" highly offensive, but I simply don't watch it -- and I don't expect the government to ban it. People who want to see it should be allowed to without government interference, just as people who want to see "Die Hard" uncut should be allowed to without government interference as well.
If I wanted to resell wireless Internet access to a neighbor, I'd just ask him to give me twenty bucks a month or whatever... then, as long as he paid me, I'd add the appropriate MAC to my WiFi's filter set and give the neighbor the WEP password. I don't see the need for any extra software, credit card processing, or anything else like that.
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Uh oh... now you've got me worried. What happens when a script kiddie hacks into my fridge and orders a million gallons of ice cream in my name? I suppose if it's a Microsoft Fridge (tm), it's going to need frequent patching. Or I could use an Apple Macintosh Fridge, which will be more secure but hold only a few kinds of food.
Maybe it wouldn't... I suppose household appliances could do their thing with private address space. But I was just trying to make a point, that IP-enabled devices are going to become ever more-widespread, which was one of the implications of this new form-factor. Most of the new gadgets and toys that have it will require IPs for one reason or another, and at least some of them won't be able to do their thing with private addresses (e.g., cell phones).
You know, it's not that hard to buy the food yourself...
No, it isn't, but having your fridge order it and then deliver it will save a lot of time and hassle, so it's going to happen eventually. We've already got home grocery delivery in some areas -- you order your groceries thru the grocery store's web site, then have them deliver it. This is for people like me who find it either too time-consuming or too much of a hassle (or both) to go to the grocery store.
A few people earlier today were wondering why anyone would need IPv6, since IPv4 "obviously has enough address space". Developments like this should pretty clearly demonstrate that that's not the case. It probably won't be too terribly long before even your fridge will need an IP so you can program your refrigerator to know when it needs to order more groceries and the like. And that's just practical applications; toy and game manufacturers are going to go nuts with this.
I'm seeing some people here saying that this baby should have merely been allowed to die, and the parents encouraged to just "have another one". Obviously I can't say for sure, but I'd hazard a guess that most of these people aren't parents. If they were, they'd realize that most parents become deeply emotionally attached to their children very quickly, usually at an early stage in pregnancy, in fact, so it's not as though a six-month-old girl can simply be scrapped and replaced as though she were a defective car.
Here's a more pertinent point: once you start saying that some people are too "physically defective" to live, where would you draw the line? I, for example, am among the most physically health people around -- my mother always said I was "disgustingly healthy". Even so, had I lived in Nazi Germany, I would have been exterminated due to my "physical imperfections" (and no, I'm not Jewish).
Then, on a more personal level, there's my wonderful girlfriend, who's beautiful, incredibly intelligent (IQ in the mid 170s), who graduated from Berkeley with honors, and who spends her time rescuing homeless cats and advocating for social services for autistics (not to mention the ways she's brought joy into my life, in more ways than I can count). She was also born with severe birth defects that required eight or nine major operations over a number of years at a total cost of several million dollars. Was it worth it? I don't even have to wonder about that.
The simple fact of the matter is, you can't tell which human lives are going to be valuable and which ones aren't when the baby is so young. As to the argument of "quantity" -- that you could have saved more babies with those eight organs -- well, let's use your own calculus. Why is it so important to save the maximum number of lives possible, especially considering, as you point out, that making babies isn't exactly a huge challenge? It's not as though human beings are in short supply these days -- far from it. And it's also not as though most people even want babies, considering (for example) that one-third of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion.
I realize this post is a bit meandering, but you'll have to excuse my lack of coherence. There are people responding to this article who are essentially saying that my girlfriend (a slashdotter whom I love with all my heart and plan to marry someday) should be dead because she's "too defective" and repairing those defects wasn't worth the cost or effort. It's hard to write clearly when your emotional response to such comments is interfering so much.
I agree that the Hubble is getting old, but it's still got plenty of useful life left. There's just no way that any current ground-based telescope can get the same kind of data that the Hubble can right now.
A better telescope can certainly be designed now, and NASA should get on the ball with designing and building it -- but that will take some time, and in the meantime, we should keep the Hubble in good repair because it's still a very powerful and useful tool.
This just reminds me, yet again, of how messed up Americans' values are in so many ways, a fact that was first brought to my attention when I went to the United Kingdom (my first trip abroad) back in 1995. Over there, TV is not censored, at least not to the degree that it is here. They leave in nudity, sex, profanity, and all the other stuff. There's very little protest about it because they have a much more mature attitude -- they believe that adults should be allowed to watch whatever they want to watch without having the government tell them whether or not it's OK for them. More importantly, they also believe that if there's a show that has sex, violence, profanity, or anything else they might happen to find offensive, the proper course of action is to change the channel or turn off the set, not to say that nobody else at all should be allowed to see that stuff on TV.
I wish we had that attitude here. As others have said, I find religious junk like "The 700 Club" highly offensive, but I simply don't watch it -- and I don't expect the government to ban it. People who want to see it should be allowed to without government interference, just as people who want to see "Die Hard" uncut should be allowed to without government interference as well.
If I wanted to resell wireless Internet access to a neighbor, I'd just ask him to give me twenty bucks a month or whatever... then, as long as he paid me, I'd add the appropriate MAC to my WiFi's filter set and give the neighbor the WEP password. I don't see the need for any extra software, credit card processing, or anything else like that.