I vaguely rememember a line from the Cassini Division, by Ken McLeod. The protagonist is about to wipe out a posthumanist colony that has been threatening earth for a while, but seems to be making some sort of peace offering.
A conversation occurs that goes, "this would have been like a group of chimpanzees wiping out the first humans," to which the protagonists responded "considering what happened to the chimpanzees, they probably should have."
The irony is that with nanotechnology, longevity, and the like, sexual desire itself could be considered another artifact, a relic. After all, organisms only have sex because they are mortal. Couldn't we reengineer our libidos to be built around, say, work, or travel, or nothing, or anything?
I've always been intrigued by the completely malleable sexuality depicted in Samuel Delany's "Triton," where you could have you object of sexual desire changed by an elective medical procedure.
But perhaps the reality is that they kept the dong in there to reassure everyone "oh, making you a cyborg won't take away your sexuality." Because we still use transhumanism as a way of fantasizing about our current, human desires. Like most science fiction, it says more about the present than it does about the future.
I'm not a RATM fan (forchissakes, I listen to Merzbow and Morton Feldman) but the very link you posted indicates that they didn't approve of the booting of Napster users by their management and that they apologized for their management agency's behaviour.
Implying hypocrisy on their part is deeply unfair.
I agree with this 95% - but I think a hardware/software metaphor isn't too stretched here. There are some "levels of analysis" that are more effective at the software/mind/thought/personality level, and some that are more effective at the endocrinology/neurology/physical health level.
But one place, among many, that the metaphor breaks down in that there's a less graceful degradation in computer technology. A broken computer just doesn't work; there's only a limited range in which hardware problems will appear as system behaviour problems. A body which is having "problems" will still apparently continue to operate the same for quite some time, especially for very subtle things like concentration, attention, mental energy, etc. Because the brain and body degrade more gracefully, it's harder to distinguish between high-level and low-level causes for issues.
There's a split here between those who look for moral explanations, and those who look for explanations in substrata.
I'd try changing diet and habits like caffiene first. Attentive mechanisms in the brain are neurochemical, like everything else in the brain. I know it's a horrifying idea for some, but the fact is that we are physical, material beings, and our minds and personalities are products of that physicality. If those basic changes don't help, then it's appropriate to look at self-help or personality-based issues. But all the self-help in the world won't do a bit of good if you're going against hardware.
Of course you can apply for a job in China. And you'll get paid pennies on the dollar for what you'd get paid here for the same job. Assuming, of course, that your Mandarin or Cantonese is passable.
In my own professional life, I travelled to work with IT service providers and software developers throughout Latin America. There is nothing about Gnome or many other such software projects that could not have been done in South America, except for the fact that it usually just happens up north first, and that much software that gets widely adopted is that which is done in English.
Remember: the "virtual" nature of software is such that it is a far easier sector to develop for minimal capital than, say, aerospace (where Brazil also has a competitive industry) or biotech. All you need is access to a computer. You don't need a supercomputer to develop Linux applications, desktop suites, widgets, etc. And most anyone who has access to a university has access to a computer lab in Latin America. Perhaps an iteration behind in architecture, but it's still there. You'll get more mileage out of correlating the contributions of those countries with the size of their literate populations than correlating them with their proximity to the US.
I don't know whether Miguel had a home PC or not. I know people who were using CAD software in the late 80's in Mexico and Brazil, though, and developing 3rd party applications for them. I know that the Brazilian industrial design sector is pretty heavily IT-focused and based.
But the fact is that Brazil is also a center of computer hardware production, partially due to somewhat protectionist trade policies that create high tarriffs on imports for goods that are manufactured domestically. Dell and IBM both have production facilities in Brazil, and 68% of Brazil's PC's are produced domestically. This is not true for Mexico: while I believe that HP may have a final assembly unit in Mexico, for the most part Mexico imports its hardware from the US. This means, to some extent, that there's a stronger "native" computer culture in South America than in Mexico.
Now, the fact is that renumeration is going to be better for skilled people if they move to the US, and that's exactly what happens: if they can get work in the US, whether they are from Mexico or South America, they will move there. That's the flip side of the outsourcing element, of course: the difference is that it's far, far easier for capital to cross borders than it is for labor. GM and Ford are free to move jobs across the border where wages are lower, but Mexicans are far less free to move up north (legally) to where wages are better. This had been less true in the IT industry before the outsourcing trend began, but this is also beginning to happen in IT.
Then you are deeply misguided. The US/Mexico border is far less porous, from this perspective, than you imagine. Miguel's education was in no sense a product of the proximity of the US - he went to UNAM, if I recall, a school which resembles the upper-tier universities of most Latin American countries.
Brazil and Argentina both are also patched in - relatively poor, but relatively modern and well-educated. Brazil is the birthplace of Conectiva, among other things.
I really don't get where you get your impressions from. Have you spent any significant time in a work environment outside the US?
There's a number of ways to categorize what makes someone in the "working" class and what doesn't.
One is to observe that even someone on welfare in the US has a higher standard of living than many people who work 70 hours a week in much of the Third World - and that this is a consequence of the incredible difference in purchasing power and wage power between, say, the US and Indonesia. After all, we buy their labor to produce shoes and clothes that we buy at a tiny fraction of our own labor costs - that differential is a "privilege"/advantage that anyone in the US enjoys. Meanwhile, the cost for first-world-produced goods and services remains extremely high for much of the 3rd world (a Uruguayan friend of mine laments how a single GameCube game costs half the entire monthly salary of his wife, a biologist at a Uruguayan university.)
However, another way to look at it is alienation of labor - do you own the fruits of your own work? By this more classic Marxist description, even some 6-figure earning people are "working" class. Other metrics like this are whether one owns one's home, or how many paychecks away from homelessness one is. The capital-gains model is one of these ideas: when one's wealth and power comes from "ownership of the means of production," then one can be thought of as in the ruling/upper classes.
And another way is more cultural, dealing with type of work: a plumber making over 100K a year is considered by some more working-class than a low/mid-level manager making 60K a year in a small company, and both are considered "lower" than a college professor making 45K a year. There's an idea called "cultural capital" that expresses the idea that certain types of work have a cachet that isn't reflected in the amount of money they earn.
I wonder how many of the countries to which jobs are being outsourced have public health coverage, retirement, and higher education? The fact that these costs are born by employers and workers makes the per-capita costs of workers higher in the US.
I think it is morally right to share music. I think trying to treat copies of recordings as alienable goods is an "ontological" crime. I believe that the legal superstructure should adapt to the non-abusive realities of human nature, not vice-versa.
So, now you've met two people who believe it is morally right. I believe it is the moral obligation of the music industry to find a more viable profit model (even if it means lower profits) than to try to discourage people from sharing.
And no, freedom of expression does not include the freedom to break into my private sphere and make noises during RotK.
Anyway, in both this case and in the "fire" case, there's a difference between speech as the expression of an idea and any given utterance - the utterance of the word "fire" is an act which generates a false alarm; it isn't the content of the speech which is really at issue, it's the performance of the speech-act. Likewise with hate speech - in which there's a speech act by which one is directly and imminently threatening someone else; it's the act of imminent threat that is the subject of enforcement, not the content of the speech to create the threat.
What if I want to refuse to store criticisms of the People's Republic of China on my hard drive? Or criticisms of G.W. Bush or Bill Clinton? If I find a mechanism of discerning the content on my system and becoming selective about it, then so can the people who wish to squelch the speech to begin with.
Truly free, truly anonymous speech, if speech is understood as any text or image or sound that can possibly be stored or transmitted, whether it is secrets vital to national security, pornography, slander, libel, copyright violations, or my recipe for waffles, does really demand, in this case, that someone risk hosting materials they might find detestable.
Otherwise, it's like saying "I support your right to live, but I'm not going to pull you out of the water while you're drowning." At best, the "support" is just so many words - it's really support for "nice" speech.
The question is this: if you can technologically censor some speech, you are technologically capable of censoring any speech. If you can find a way to determine what's on your hard drive, you can be held accountable for it - and freenet's entire raison d'etre as a failsafe protection for free speech is destroyed.
In other words, one of the costs of ensuring free speech on FreeNet for Chinese dissidents is that it also gives a channel for child pornography and snuff films.
Also, there's a big gray zone when it comes to child pornography. The production of child pornography is clearly the exploitation of children. However, is documentation of a criminal act also criminal? Are all depictions of the sexual acts of or with children criminal? Should books like "Lolita," or dramas like "Romeo and Juliet," which describe relationships and sexuality with or between minors, be rightlly censored? Most of our ancestors before the 18th century or so were bearing children by the age 15 - do we want to treat their journals and love letters as kiddie porn? (I do believe there's a line between pornography and literary portrayal, but that line can at some places become blurry, and Nabokov is one of those places.)
Also, "kiddie porn" has extended to include pictures of kids taking a bath that were deemed just a little too sensual by some photo clerk, who brought them to a judge and got an indictment. Guess what: pictures of one's wife or husband as a minor can be treated as child pornography! There's a level of hysteria on the topic which has clouded the subject, and the desire to protect children from sex has become, in itself, a source for real censorship. And one that I'm sure the PRC would happily take advantage of while pursuing dissidents.
Now if I could only find a book as good to introduce me to Common Lisp.
What's wrong with the Paul Graham books on LISP? On Lisp can even be downloaded for free, and ANSI Common Lisp is a great introduction to the language.
Gattaca cost about $36,000,000 to make. Not chump-change, but Star Trek: Nemesis cost almost twice as much - $70,000,000; Erin Brokovich cost $51 million, for comparison.
ST: Nemesis has grossed $97.5 million already. Gattaca has made less than $20 million since it came out in 1997. Battlefield Earth grossed more than Gattaca did (although, with a $70 million price tag, it at least had the decency to lose money, too.) And you wonder why they don't make challenging SF, and keep milking the franchises dry?
I thought Gattaca was everything that cinematic SF should be - a reflection on the effects of speculated technology on human endeavour, with a good, character-driven story that avoided melodrama. Like much good SF, it was both about our time and not about our time - and the cinematography was a delight.
If people only voted for people they agreed with 100%, every election would be a dead tie - because everyone would just write themselves in. Politics is essentially the art of compromise, of scratching someone else's back so that they'll scratch yours. It's about building coalitions, not about lock-step conformity with ideals. It isn't about arguing about who is "right" - politics aren't about right or wrong, they're about competing interests and visions and directions.
So, yes, I'd unashamedly vote for someone whose policies I agreed with 70% of the time who was a viable candidate, over someone I agreed with 99% of the time who wasn't, if they were running against someone like Bush who I agree with maybe 10% of the time.
Fans don't not watch anything. It's their nature. They'll watch. It takes forever for fans to break their franchise-addictions, while they so often fail to give truly good new material their support.
Pardon me if I sound bitter. The fact all the Star Wars and Star Trek movies made gallons of money, and that Gattaca lost money, tells me that SF fans deserve every bit of misery they get.
Slashdot Mirror
I vaguely rememember a line from the Cassini Division, by Ken McLeod. The protagonist is about to wipe out a posthumanist colony that has been threatening earth for a while, but seems to be making some sort of peace offering.
A conversation occurs that goes, "this would have been like a group of chimpanzees wiping out the first humans," to which the protagonists responded "considering what happened to the chimpanzees, they probably should have."
The irony is that with nanotechnology, longevity, and the like, sexual desire itself could be considered another artifact, a relic. After all, organisms only have sex because they are mortal. Couldn't we reengineer our libidos to be built around, say, work, or travel, or nothing, or anything?
I've always been intrigued by the completely malleable sexuality depicted in Samuel Delany's "Triton," where you could have you object of sexual desire changed by an elective medical procedure.
But perhaps the reality is that they kept the dong in there to reassure everyone "oh, making you a cyborg won't take away your sexuality." Because we still use transhumanism as a way of fantasizing about our current, human desires. Like most science fiction, it says more about the present than it does about the future.
I'm not a RATM fan (forchissakes, I listen to Merzbow and Morton Feldman) but the very link you posted indicates that they didn't approve of the booting of Napster users by their management and that they apologized for their management agency's behaviour.
Implying hypocrisy on their part is deeply unfair.
The extra irony, of course, is that neither Mexico nor Portugal have very good teams.
I agree with this 95% - but I think a hardware/software metaphor isn't too stretched here. There are some "levels of analysis" that are more effective at the software/mind/thought/personality level, and some that are more effective at the endocrinology/neurology/physical health level.
But one place, among many, that the metaphor breaks down in that there's a less graceful degradation in computer technology. A broken computer just doesn't work; there's only a limited range in which hardware problems will appear as system behaviour problems. A body which is having "problems" will still apparently continue to operate the same for quite some time, especially for very subtle things like concentration, attention, mental energy, etc. Because the brain and body degrade more gracefully, it's harder to distinguish between high-level and low-level causes for issues.
There's a split here between those who look for moral explanations, and those who look for explanations in substrata.
I'd try changing diet and habits like caffiene first. Attentive mechanisms in the brain are neurochemical, like everything else in the brain. I know it's a horrifying idea for some, but the fact is that we are physical, material beings, and our minds and personalities are products of that physicality. If those basic changes don't help, then it's appropriate to look at self-help or personality-based issues. But all the self-help in the world won't do a bit of good if you're going against hardware.
Of course you can apply for a job in China. And you'll get paid pennies on the dollar for what you'd get paid here for the same job. Assuming, of course, that your Mandarin or Cantonese is passable.
In my own professional life, I travelled to work with IT service providers and software developers throughout Latin America. There is nothing about Gnome or many other such software projects that could not have been done in South America, except for the fact that it usually just happens up north first, and that much software that gets widely adopted is that which is done in English.
Remember: the "virtual" nature of software is such that it is a far easier sector to develop for minimal capital than, say, aerospace (where Brazil also has a competitive industry) or biotech. All you need is access to a computer. You don't need a supercomputer to develop Linux applications, desktop suites, widgets, etc. And most anyone who has access to a university has access to a computer lab in Latin America. Perhaps an iteration behind in architecture, but it's still there. You'll get more mileage out of correlating the contributions of those countries with the size of their literate populations than correlating them with their proximity to the US.
I don't know whether Miguel had a home PC or not. I know people who were using CAD software in the late 80's in Mexico and Brazil, though, and developing 3rd party applications for them. I know that the Brazilian industrial design sector is pretty heavily IT-focused and based.
But the fact is that Brazil is also a center of computer hardware production, partially due to somewhat protectionist trade policies that create high tarriffs on imports for goods that are manufactured domestically. Dell and IBM both have production facilities in Brazil, and 68% of Brazil's PC's are produced domestically. This is not true for Mexico: while I believe that HP may have a final assembly unit in Mexico, for the most part Mexico imports its hardware from the US. This means, to some extent, that there's a stronger "native" computer culture in South America than in Mexico.
Now, the fact is that renumeration is going to be better for skilled people if they move to the US, and that's exactly what happens: if they can get work in the US, whether they are from Mexico or South America, they will move there. That's the flip side of the outsourcing element, of course: the difference is that it's far, far easier for capital to cross borders than it is for labor. GM and Ford are free to move jobs across the border where wages are lower, but Mexicans are far less free to move up north (legally) to where wages are better. This had been less true in the IT industry before the outsourcing trend began, but this is also beginning to happen in IT.
Brazil and Argentina both are also patched in - relatively poor, but relatively modern and well-educated. Brazil is the birthplace of Conectiva, among other things.
I really don't get where you get your impressions from. Have you spent any significant time in a work environment outside the US?
Depends. Are the doctors taking $28K also? Are they paying back medical school loans?
There's a number of ways to categorize what makes someone in the "working" class and what doesn't.
One is to observe that even someone on welfare in the US has a higher standard of living than many people who work 70 hours a week in much of the Third World - and that this is a consequence of the incredible difference in purchasing power and wage power between, say, the US and Indonesia. After all, we buy their labor to produce shoes and clothes that we buy at a tiny fraction of our own labor costs - that differential is a "privilege"/advantage that anyone in the US enjoys. Meanwhile, the cost for first-world-produced goods and services remains extremely high for much of the 3rd world (a Uruguayan friend of mine laments how a single GameCube game costs half the entire monthly salary of his wife, a biologist at a Uruguayan university.)
However, another way to look at it is alienation of labor - do you own the fruits of your own work? By this more classic Marxist description, even some 6-figure earning people are "working" class. Other metrics like this are whether one owns one's home, or how many paychecks away from homelessness one is. The capital-gains model is one of these ideas: when one's wealth and power comes from "ownership of the means of production," then one can be thought of as in the ruling/upper classes.
And another way is more cultural, dealing with type of work: a plumber making over 100K a year is considered by some more working-class than a low/mid-level manager making 60K a year in a small company, and both are considered "lower" than a college professor making 45K a year. There's an idea called "cultural capital" that expresses the idea that certain types of work have a cachet that isn't reflected in the amount of money they earn.
I wonder how many of the countries to which jobs are being outsourced have public health coverage, retirement, and higher education? The fact that these costs are born by employers and workers makes the per-capita costs of workers higher in the US.
The hard part is finding an idiot who's smart enough to pay you.
Or stupid enough.
I think it is morally right to share music. I think trying to treat copies of recordings as alienable goods is an "ontological" crime. I believe that the legal superstructure should adapt to the non-abusive realities of human nature, not vice-versa.
So, now you've met two people who believe it is morally right. I believe it is the moral obligation of the music industry to find a more viable profit model (even if it means lower profits) than to try to discourage people from sharing.
Games, games, games, games and games.
No, they don't. It was editorial embellishment on the part of the story submitter.
Anyway, in both this case and in the "fire" case, there's a difference between speech as the expression of an idea and any given utterance - the utterance of the word "fire" is an act which generates a false alarm; it isn't the content of the speech which is really at issue, it's the performance of the speech-act. Likewise with hate speech - in which there's a speech act by which one is directly and imminently threatening someone else; it's the act of imminent threat that is the subject of enforcement, not the content of the speech to create the threat.
What if I want to refuse to store criticisms of the People's Republic of China on my hard drive? Or criticisms of G.W. Bush or Bill Clinton? If I find a mechanism of discerning the content on my system and becoming selective about it, then so can the people who wish to squelch the speech to begin with.
Truly free, truly anonymous speech, if speech is understood as any text or image or sound that can possibly be stored or transmitted, whether it is secrets vital to national security, pornography, slander, libel, copyright violations, or my recipe for waffles, does really demand, in this case, that someone risk hosting materials they might find detestable.
Otherwise, it's like saying "I support your right to live, but I'm not going to pull you out of the water while you're drowning." At best, the "support" is just so many words - it's really support for "nice" speech.
The question is this: if you can technologically censor some speech, you are technologically capable of censoring any speech. If you can find a way to determine what's on your hard drive, you can be held accountable for it - and freenet's entire raison d'etre as a failsafe protection for free speech is destroyed.
In other words, one of the costs of ensuring free speech on FreeNet for Chinese dissidents is that it also gives a channel for child pornography and snuff films.
Also, there's a big gray zone when it comes to child pornography. The production of child pornography is clearly the exploitation of children. However, is documentation of a criminal act also criminal? Are all depictions of the sexual acts of or with children criminal? Should books like "Lolita," or dramas like "Romeo and Juliet," which describe relationships and sexuality with or between minors, be rightlly censored? Most of our ancestors before the 18th century or so were bearing children by the age 15 - do we want to treat their journals and love letters as kiddie porn? (I do believe there's a line between pornography and literary portrayal, but that line can at some places become blurry, and Nabokov is one of those places.)
Also, "kiddie porn" has extended to include pictures of kids taking a bath that were deemed just a little too sensual by some photo clerk, who brought them to a judge and got an indictment. Guess what: pictures of one's wife or husband as a minor can be treated as child pornography! There's a level of hysteria on the topic which has clouded the subject, and the desire to protect children from sex has become, in itself, a source for real censorship. And one that I'm sure the PRC would happily take advantage of while pursuing dissidents.
Gattaca cost about $36,000,000 to make. Not chump-change, but Star Trek: Nemesis cost almost twice as much - $70,000,000; Erin Brokovich cost $51 million, for comparison.
ST: Nemesis has grossed $97.5 million already. Gattaca has made less than $20 million since it came out in 1997. Battlefield Earth grossed more than Gattaca did (although, with a $70 million price tag, it at least had the decency to lose money, too.) And you wonder why they don't make challenging SF, and keep milking the franchises dry?
I thought Gattaca was everything that cinematic SF should be - a reflection on the effects of speculated technology on human endeavour, with a good, character-driven story that avoided melodrama. Like much good SF, it was both about our time and not about our time - and the cinematography was a delight.
It doesn't suck. It's the essence of politics.
If people only voted for people they agreed with 100%, every election would be a dead tie - because everyone would just write themselves in. Politics is essentially the art of compromise, of scratching someone else's back so that they'll scratch yours. It's about building coalitions, not about lock-step conformity with ideals. It isn't about arguing about who is "right" - politics aren't about right or wrong, they're about competing interests and visions and directions.
So, yes, I'd unashamedly vote for someone whose policies I agreed with 70% of the time who was a viable candidate, over someone I agreed with 99% of the time who wasn't, if they were running against someone like Bush who I agree with maybe 10% of the time.
Fans don't not watch anything. It's their nature. They'll watch. It takes forever for fans to break their franchise-addictions, while they so often fail to give truly good new material their support.
Pardon me if I sound bitter. The fact all the Star Wars and Star Trek movies made gallons of money, and that Gattaca lost money, tells me that SF fans deserve every bit of misery they get.
Ironically, that was sarcasm.
Well, until I saw this link, I had no idea that Suntory, the major Japanese beverage company, was linked with Pepsi.
Learn something new every day.
My first take was "We are Devo," but there's a much better Japanese Devo-ish phenomenon already.