What if someone were to port LiViD to run on a WinBlows machine and play a DVD on it for the court?
What if a version of LiViD were available for BeOS, Mac OS, OS/2 (good luck finding video drivers), etc.?
Would the MPAA have to concede that their problem is with LiViD (and the DeCSS code that makes it work)? That would lead to an ugly (and maybe unwinnable) stance that, in spite of a lack of lisencing agreement, the purchaser of a DVD can only run their (legally purchased) DVD on "authorized" software. Or, would the MPAA say that the DVD should only be played on Windows (and whatever othe OS's can run the things), tying their entertainment product (which might be construed as data, but not software) to particular OS's? That would lead to an ugly (and maybe unwinnable) stance that, in spite of a lack of lisencing agreement, the purchaser of a DVD can only run their (legally purchased) DVD on "authorized" operating systems.
The MPAA may have deep pockets, but couldn't this do a major end-run around their whole "piracy" claim?
I first read Drexler's Engines of Creation back when it first came out (1987?) and I figured that he had some way cool ideas, but the implementiation of his ideas were a lot further away than he projected. I am most pleased to discover that I was wrong. The next decade or so is looking more and more intersting all the time.
I'm studying for a metallurgy and materials engineering degree now, and I'm seeing even more possibilities and opportunities and possibilities than I did way back when.
"Mechanical" computer memory would be non-volatile and you wouldn't have to worry about those pesky electrons tunnelling.
Metals and alloys could be made immensely stronger because of the lack of grain boundries and vacancies.
Mass produced antibiotics could be manufactured on demand.
Think of the public health issues that a "smart" water filter could clear up in thrid world countries.
I've also seen a number of "but itcould be used as a weapon" type posts here; so what? Throughout human history, every technology has been used as a weapon. In The Axemaker's Gift, James Burke (Connections) and Robert Ornstein argue that every invention since the stone knife has had the potential of being used to make people's lives better or worse; nontech is no different and, given the materialistic culture that surrounds Sandia (i.e. the U.S.), chances are pretty good that pumping out weapons will be a low priority compared to things that can make them some quick cash. Never underestimate the power of human greed...
Actually, I would think this to be useful for all movies. Way back when (when it was first released), I had to sit in the 4th or 5th row of the movie theater to get the full IMAX-style perception of motion from the snowspeeder cruising over the hills scene in Empire Strikes Back. Imagine being able to do that at home (on VHS of course). None of the neck strain from the ping-pong spectator situation that happens in the close-in seating.
Oh, all right, the adult movie potential intrigues me too...
Scanning the physical makeup of the human brain may work fine, up to a point, but I'm betting that the process will not be able to capture "consciousness" so easily. In Concsiousness Explained and, to a lesser degree, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett argues (pretty convincingly IMHO) that consciousness is not a single "thing", but rather the illusion created when a multitude of parallel-processed "agents" vie for priority; the "thought" presented by the most successful agent is the one that gets used/applied. And even that is misleading since this is an ongoing process; those thoughts are constantly adjusted, tweaked, and even abandoned as these agents keep updating and making new connections. (Note: these "agents" are not conscious or selective or anything that the name might imply; they are simply an anthropomorphism to describe the neural connections and how they compare to other connections in response to stimuli.)
On the other hand, I think this will happen, just not as a simple physical "scan". A computer based "brain" would be a fertile and expansive breeding ground for memes, so the memes that drive this sort of research will keep digging until they find a way... (See The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (didn't Katz review this last year?))
On the SF side, John Varley has touched on this concept in a quite a few stories, but the one that deals with the "Live or Memorex" question best would be The Ophiuchi Hotline. Good read, like the rest of his stuff, and a summary of his "Eight Worlds" stuff.
Lack of design is definitely the problem; I've seen ostensible six-month projects that didn't have their requirements defined and signed off until month seven, and the project ran 18 months and 8 times the projected cost.
When I first started working in this industry (mid 80s), I saw a cartoon that summed this up best; two guys are at a desk and the first one tells the second, "You start coding, I'll go find out what the user wants..."
Actually, NASA has kinda bought it; their current plans are built around a "Mars Reference Mission", which is more grandiose than Zubrin's "Mars Direct" approach, but a great deal smaller than NASA's original "Battlestar Galactica" idea. (The fact that they originally wanted $150+ billion and the "Mars Reference" only runs $30 to $40 billion makes it a lot easier to sell. Too bad NASA is still trying to tie the mission down to the Shuttle program...)
Zubrin's new book, Entering Space is also a good read, critically analyzing all the "Why bother?" type questions about missions to Mars and space exploration in general...
``This is not what Catholics would understand as confession. Confession cannot be done by telephone, e-mail or proxy,'' a church spokesman told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in Thursday's editions.
500 some years ago, Martin Luther posted, on the door of the local church, a list of things he thought were really gronked up with the way the church was doing things. He had intended it to lead to a discussion with church officials; instead, it was the trigger that lead to Protestantism. The irony here is that one of the things he was protesting was the church's use "indulgences"; pay (cash) for your penance before you sin. No priest needed, thanks for praying, here's your change and thanks for shopping at Piety 'r' Us. Now the same church is protesting a variation on the same theme.
Here's a thought; how long before someone gets into the page and sets it up to respond to various "sins" in more interesting ways...
Forgive me, uh, father, for I have sinned. I've had impure thoughts about farm animals..."
WHAT?!? My GOD man, you are going straight to Hell!!!
Actually, the name "joystick" was coined during WWI. It was a completely unsubtle reference to the control stick which, in the earliest planes, was an unadorned rod that stuck up between the pilots legs. I don't think she's that far off the mark...
My Prob and Stat teacher (this was many years ago) told us a cautionary tale about data sources. It seems that a telephone poll was taken asking who the respondent favored in the upcoming presidential election. The republican cantidate (can't remember his name) was favored by such a high margin that the election day newspapers published him as winning while the votes were still being counted, then found out that the other guy had actually won (again, the name escapes me). This was at a time when telephones were expensive as hell and only the affluent (i.e. republicans) had them.
Now an on-line study of web-sites indicates McCain and Bradley leading. Does this mean anything? Probably not, since people that sponsor and run political web-sites are not indicative of the general population's tastes.
Last spring, the FCC shut down at least one local (Denver) "pirate" FM station that broadcast out of a van for eight or ten hours a day, and I could swear that I read a newspaper article around that same time that stated that this was part of a "nation-wide crackdown" on unlicensed stations. Now the FCC is sucking up all this great PR for giving back what they took away less than a year ago?!?
I'm looking forward to this (if it happens), 'cause the FM dial in the Denver metro area is owned by three (count 'em) corporate giants who firmly believe in wedging as much commercial and self-promotion time as they can between the five song playlist for each of their different "formats".
Ironically, the only decent station in town now is the year old KVCU, an AM college station run by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The irony is that the only reason that they're available to the public is because the FCC decided that Jacor was over their limit and had to throw one back, so they (Jacor) donated the least marketable station to CU.
That's enough ranting for now; time to switch to decaf.
Back in the dark ages (mid to late 80's), I spent waaay too much time on local BBS's and found that this problem tended to surface only on boards that took themselves too seriously. Eventually, my interest waned and I found myself logging on to only a couple boards with a distinctly humorous outlook. While people would still post h-mail, they would get ignored by the general populace and eventually either lose interest, or (better yet) calm down and joined the "community".
Come to think of it, some years before that I was involved in a couple APA's and, in a similar manner, I lost interest in the stuffy ones and devoted my efforts to one that spent as much time laughing at itself as others... Hmmm, maybe I'm just conflict-aversive.
That's just swell, but just because these disks can be recycled doesn't mean they will be recycled.
Any thermoplastic (as opposed to thermosets and elastomers) can theoretically be recycled, but only a few types are inexpensive to recycle and plentiful enough to justify the infrastructure needed to collect them (like the plastic used in "butter container and milk bottle"). So unless someone knows a recycling plant that will take in my stack of AOL coasters, I think I'll assume this to be "marketing" rather than "fact".
One the one hand, yes, there is a high potential for abuse. But that could be said of any new technology (think about how many times your life has been at risk because some chowderhead in the next lane is talking on his cell phone instead of driving). And futting around toggling genes on/off strikes me as being like toggling bits in an address register; you better be damn sure that you know exactly what that bit affects before trying it...
On the other hand, is this something we can afford to ignore, or put on a shelf until we're more "responsible"? My grandmother has diabetes; if someone finds the "off" switch for this (or any other) genetic disorder, do we tell her, "Sorry Grammy, we could just give this one shot and fix you up, but theres's a risk of people changing their hair color so you'll just have to stick to the insulin."
Whoa, new meaning to "picking your nose"; I like the blue one, but I really need something that can filter on esters...
But seriously, imagine a smoke detector that could distinguish between cigarette smoke, wood/paper smoke (from a fireplace), smoke from a grease fire, etc. How about a "is this really sanitary?" sensor for a house-cleaning 'bot? For that matter, I would think that hospitals could use something that keys off of olafactory cues. What about a Mars Rover type robot (assuming we ever relearn the landing-on-Mars trick) that sniffs for water vapor (as in ice deposits) or other potential "life" indicators while it's poking at rocks? Heck, I could probably use a device to warn me that I've gotten carried away with the after-shave before a date...
When I was your age, back in the 90's, we had to ship finished code on the release date, and the help desk took the heat for any bugs that the users found. Then UCITA got passed and now you guys don't have a thing to worry about. I mean, you can ship stuff that doesn't even load, then plug a looped message into the help desk line saying, "Thank you for purchasing our product. We appreciate your money, but in buying our product, you have agreed to the terms of the license and therefore have no right to complain (see paragraph 432b, p58). Thanks, and have a nice day." Not only that, but the help desk call costs them as much as the product, so even if they do manage to return the software, they end up losing money. In my day, we had to actually listen to the users. And fix bugs instead of telling them to wait for the next release. Now they can't even give the software away, let alone re-sell it. You kids just have it too damn easy...
"At the core of this strategy are Microsoft's plans, announced today, to assemble the first Internet-based platform of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS), which will power new products and services and incorporate such features and capabilities as a new user interface, natural language processing, application development approach, schema and new file system -- all of which have been in development."
Yesterday, rumors start that the DoJ is considering splitting up M$ into three parts; one for OS, one for Apps, and one for Internet. Today M$ announces that they have a whole new direction that they've already been working on that sounds to me like it involves further integration of W2K with M$ Office and IE.
(think "Bambi-eyes"): "Gosh, you can't break us up now! Our entire business strategy is built on developing an integrated whole! You'll put us out of business and destroy the software industry!"
If plan A was to walk away from the DoJ study unscathed, this must be plan B...
That was like reading my horoscope and finding it specific and right! I took the MB years ago and came up INTJ (heavy on the I, near the middle NTJ), and the description was disturbingly close to the mark.
On the other hand, it may not mean that much; I'm working on my non-CS degree at Colorado School of Mines right now and last semester the school paper ran a comparison of Mines students' MBTIs against the "general population" and it shows that all us engineer wannabes (of which >5% are pursuing a CS degree) are twice as likely to be ISTJs or five times as likely to be INTJs. In other words, the MBTI is revealing geekness, not necessarily computer geekness...
Some time ago (30-40 years?), the American legal system made a major paradigm shift from judgment-based (common law) to rules-based (statuatory law). What has been showing up ever since is that the legal system can't keep up! Every new "rule" leads to more loop-holes, requiring more rules creating more loop-holes, etc. With something as rapidly changing as technology, this problem is exacerbated to the point that even the techies can't keep up with anything beyond their own niche.
How much has the OS market changed in the two months since the M$ FoF was handed down? How much more will it change before the DoJ decides what to do about Ball and Co? How much of that decision will be applicable/relevant by the time it gets implemented? Does it really matter if the lawyers "get" the technology when the rules that they have to apply are as obsolete as a 386?
For starters, I did a network helpdesk gig back in the mid 80's, and if I hadn't laughed (discreetly) at the ignorance of the users, I would have ended up in a rubber room writing obscenities on the walls with a crayon. I was well aware that, dropped unprepared into their job, I would have floundered and done stupid things and so on, but that wasn't really relevant.
Once, I asked a user to power off her terminal, count five, and power it back on. The phone clunks down onto the desk, I hear footsteps moving away, two minutes later footsteps come back, she picks up the phone and tells me its done. I re-aquired her device, confirmed that she was back in session, hung up, then fell out of my chair laughing. She, like most of my callers, worked for a freight company and when I told her to power down the terminal, she had done just that; she had gone back to the circuit box and powered down the entire building (the "terminal" building from a trucker's perspective). (And yes, I started refering to it as a "computer display" from then on...)
Therein lies my first point; help desk people either laugh at these things or go seriously postal.
The second point is more of a rant; The help desk is there to solve problems, not teach! I have been working IT for sixteen years now (mainframe and PC) and I have never seen a company (or even heard of one) that made more than a token effort at training their people on how to use the PC's and such that get dropped on their desks. While I can forgive someone for not knowing what a general protection fault is, I find it appalling that no one ever takes the time to show a new user, "This is the power switch for the monitor, this is the power switch for the computer itself, this is the mouse and moving it around makes that arrow move around, see?" Etc...
In a nutshell, laughter is a way of dealing with a frustrating and often unrewarding job. If that offends Mr. Kurtz, well, life can be pretty unfair...
Sure, his V2 rockets made things ugly in London for a while, but they were his first steps towards things like the Saturn V that put man on the moon (and Skylab on Australia).
Other potential geeks in non-computer fields that I haven't heard mentioned: - Watson and Crick (DNA) - Jaques-Yves Cousteau (scuba) - John A. Roebling (wire rope and the Brooklyn Bridge)
And how about Martin Luther and Thomas Paine and all the others that have used the free exchange of ideas to challenge and eventually change what the Powers That Be can get away with?
It's late, and likely no-one will be reading this, but I feel strongly enough about this to rant anyway...
First, a look at the arguments against: 1) It's too expensive... This may or may not be true, depending on the very subjective evaluation of what is and is not "too" expensive, but keep in mind that the "Mars Direct" approach that is currently being suggested would cost $10 to $20 billion (spread out over a roughly 10 year program), rather than the $150+ billion that NASA was asking for just a few years ago (NASA wanted a space station and a huge "Battlestart Galactica" ship to make the trip). In other words, Bill Gates could pay for such a trip out-of-pocket and hardly put a dent in his reserves. This is too expensive? (Read Zubrin's "Case for Mars" and "Entering Space" for more on this.) 2) We should clean up things here first... The basic assumption for this argument has always appeared to me that prosperity is a zero-sum game; if this were true, then there'd be six billion humans trying to feed themselves from a handful of fruit trees in the Olduvai Gorge. People are now living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than any generation previous; the perception of the world being an inch from disaster is a construct of polititians and others who want money and/or power that they haven't earned. Yes people are starving, but that is the result of bad politics, not lack of food (challenge: find a situation where where a population was starving in a country with a free press and a representative government; good luck). Prosperity reduces population growth, reduces pollution, inproves health and longevity, and grows and grows and grows, so long as people are willing to try new things. A beefed up COMMERCIAL space program (I'll save the "Kill NASA Now" rant for another time) would create prosperity, and while it wouldn't directly help Yugoslavians and such, it might pave the way governmental changes that would; that's how we won the cold war. (Suggested reading: "Ecoscam", "Apacolypse Not", "The Greatest Resource" or, for fun, "All the Trouble in the World", the latter by P.J. O'Rourke and I don't remember the others.) 3) We can do science with robots/telescopes/etc. This has an element of truth to it. (Isn't the Mars Polar Lander due to arrive Friday?) But this is (to me, at least) like saying "Why go skiing, when you can just watch the latest Warren Miller film?" My response is that a) these are not mutually exclusive activities and one can actually enhance the other, and b) I'd rather be DOING something than watch it being done. (This is why I'm in the middle of my junior year in a Materials Engineering program and planning on bailing on a lucrative but unrewarding 15 year career working on/with computers.)
The "for" arguments are varied (see Robert Zubrin's books for detailed analysis of pretty much all that I've seen discussed here), but the most compelling IMHO is the challenge. Americans are, for the most part, malcontents or the children of malcontents, who came here to get away from problems and/or start some new ones. (Yes, there are exceptions to this; forgive me for a generalization.) We, as a country, thrive on these challenges. This is what we are about. Not "Mom and Apple Pie", we're about finding new and (hopefully) better ways to do things, thumbing our collective nose at anyone who says "It can't be done", and occaisionally stubbing our toes on an unavoidable truth. We need a capital "C" Challenge to keep our edge and push ourselves further. If we ignore this opportunity, we will become a nation of whiners, couch-potatoes and... hmmmm...
My overly (and overtly) patriotic tone at the end there does not mean I think that Mars is something that should be done exclusively by and for Americans; I perceive America as a collection of ideas that are not constrained by geographical borders. Anyone who has the desire and will to explore and take risks and challenge assumptions should be involved...
Can the M-2K software really deliver? Especially in the High School context? I keep thinking about the old adage about "you can't make something idiot proof 'cause idiots are so damn clever" and wondering how long until this software ends up in the hands of a bureaucrat with an agenda (or a quota).
But what really worries me about this article is the way it fights hyperbole with hyperbole.
The media and politicians have been using (and abusing) the vote-less and voice-less youth as scapegoats for some time now, because it sells papers and gains votes. Since critical thinking is not terribly common, few people question assertions by polititions or speculations by media types. Everything we've heard about High Schools in the post-Columbine media feeding frenzy has been exageration, speculation and outright fabrication desing, not to protect "our children", but to sell more deoderant.
From the media, one would think that walking from home room to first period history ranks right up there with playing Russian roulette. But violent crime by youths (20 or younger) has been on a steady decline since the 70's. (Meanwhile, violent crime amongst adults has been steadily escalating at an alarming rate.) The same general trends apply to drug use, alcohol use and so on (down somewhat for younger people, up dramatically for adults). I read a book a couple years ago called "Framing Youth" and the author pointed out that a child was actually safer in school that he/she was at home since deaths from abusive/negligent parents outnumber the school-shooting deaths by a factor of five to one.
But kids are an easy target. It's hard to argue (in our sound-bite based system of public discourse) against anything that will "protect our children", even if it means totally abandoning any pretense of constitutional rights for those kids.
But the same thing is being done here from the other direction.
In 8.3K of text, maybe 500 bytes are verifiable facts, while the rest is speculation. Will this software really be used for "geek-profiling"? Maybe. But maybe not. Will the use of such software further ostracize an already beleagered group? Maybe. Probably even. But we can only speculate at this point.
I have no doubts that the introduction of this software into ANY sort of general use should send strong warning signals to anyone concerned with individual freedom. But the way to address those concerns is with facts; without them, all we can do is bleat like the "protect our children at all costs" types.
Questions I'd like to see answered are things like; How does it work? What checks and balances (if any) will prevent the administrator's biases from coloring both the "evidence" and the interpretation of the results? What sort of accuracy does it claim (and how does it back those up)? How EXACTLY will it be used? Even if it does identify violent tendicies with complete accuracy, will that "evidence" be enough to justify a "preventative" policy when our entire justice system was built on the assumption that "justice" must FOLLOW whatever infraction? (Proving that someone is "capable" of violence is no more proof that they WILL be violent than passing a driver's test proves that the driver WILL follow the speed limit.)
Way back in high school, my journalism teacher said something that has stuck with me since; "Anyone can take an interesting story and make it sound important, but a journalist takes something important and make it interesting." While Mr. Katz has brought up some interesting topics, he seems to miss the important part...
Whoa, almost as wordy as the original article... sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
What if a version of LiViD were available for BeOS, Mac OS, OS/2 (good luck finding video drivers), etc.?
Would the MPAA have to concede that their problem is with LiViD (and the DeCSS code that makes it work)? That would lead to an ugly (and maybe unwinnable) stance that, in spite of a lack of lisencing agreement, the purchaser of a DVD can only run their (legally purchased) DVD on "authorized" software. Or, would the MPAA say that the DVD should only be played on Windows (and whatever othe OS's can run the things), tying their entertainment product (which might be construed as data, but not software) to particular OS's? That would lead to an ugly (and maybe unwinnable) stance that, in spite of a lack of lisencing agreement, the purchaser of a DVD can only run their (legally purchased) DVD on "authorized" operating systems.
The MPAA may have deep pockets, but couldn't this do a major end-run around their whole "piracy" claim?
I'm studying for a metallurgy and materials engineering degree now, and I'm seeing even more possibilities and opportunities and possibilities than I did way back when.
I've also seen a number of "but itcould be used as a weapon" type posts here; so what? Throughout human history, every technology has been used as a weapon. In The Axemaker's Gift, James Burke (Connections) and Robert Ornstein argue that every invention since the stone knife has had the potential of being used to make people's lives better or worse; nontech is no different and, given the materialistic culture that surrounds Sandia (i.e. the U.S.), chances are pretty good that pumping out weapons will be a low priority compared to things that can make them some quick cash. Never underestimate the power of human greed...
Oh, all right, the adult movie potential intrigues me too...
On the other hand, I think this will happen, just not as a simple physical "scan". A computer based "brain" would be a fertile and expansive breeding ground for memes, so the memes that drive this sort of research will keep digging until they find a way... (See The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (didn't Katz review this last year?))
On the SF side, John Varley has touched on this concept in a quite a few stories, but the one that deals with the "Live or Memorex" question best would be The Ophiuchi Hotline. Good read, like the rest of his stuff, and a summary of his "Eight Worlds" stuff.
When I first started working in this industry (mid 80s), I saw a cartoon that summed this up best; two guys are at a desk and the first one tells the second, "You start coding, I'll go find out what the user wants..."
Zubrin's new book, Entering Space is also a good read, critically analyzing all the "Why bother?" type questions about missions to Mars and space exploration in general...
``This is not what Catholics would understand as confession. Confession cannot be done by telephone, e-mail or proxy,'' a church spokesman told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in Thursday's editions.
500 some years ago, Martin Luther posted, on the door of the local church, a list of things he thought were really gronked up with the way the church was doing things. He had intended it to lead to a discussion with church officials; instead, it was the trigger that lead to Protestantism. The irony here is that one of the things he was protesting was the church's use "indulgences"; pay (cash) for your penance before you sin. No priest needed, thanks for praying, here's your change and thanks for shopping at Piety 'r' Us. Now the same church is protesting a variation on the same theme.
Here's a thought; how long before someone gets into the page and sets it up to respond to various "sins" in more interesting ways...
Forgive me, uh, father, for I have sinned. I've had impure thoughts about farm animals..."
WHAT?!? My GOD man, you are going straight to Hell!!!
Now an on-line study of web-sites indicates McCain and Bradley leading. Does this mean anything? Probably not, since people that sponsor and run political web-sites are not indicative of the general population's tastes.
Besides, if they were really looking, they would have had to mention Harry Browne or one of the other Libertarian types...
I'm looking forward to this (if it happens), 'cause the FM dial in the Denver metro area is owned by three (count 'em) corporate giants who firmly believe in wedging as much commercial and self-promotion time as they can between the five song playlist for each of their different "formats".
Ironically, the only decent station in town now is the year old KVCU, an AM college station run by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The irony is that the only reason that they're available to the public is because the FCC decided that Jacor was over their limit and had to throw one back, so they (Jacor) donated the least marketable station to CU.
That's enough ranting for now; time to switch to decaf.
Come to think of it, some years before that I was involved in a couple APA's and, in a similar manner, I lost interest in the stuffy ones and devoted my efforts to one that spent as much time laughing at itself as others... Hmmm, maybe I'm just conflict-aversive.
Any thermoplastic (as opposed to thermosets and elastomers) can theoretically be recycled, but only a few types are inexpensive to recycle and plentiful enough to justify the infrastructure needed to collect them (like the plastic used in "butter container and milk bottle"). So unless someone knows a recycling plant that will take in my stack of AOL coasters, I think I'll assume this to be "marketing" rather than "fact".
On the other hand, is this something we can afford to ignore, or put on a shelf until we're more "responsible"? My grandmother has diabetes; if someone finds the "off" switch for this (or any other) genetic disorder, do we tell her, "Sorry Grammy, we could just give this one shot and fix you up, but theres's a risk of people changing their hair color so you'll just have to stick to the insulin."
Just a thought...
But seriously, imagine a smoke detector that could distinguish between cigarette smoke, wood/paper smoke (from a fireplace), smoke from a grease fire, etc. How about a "is this really sanitary?" sensor for a house-cleaning 'bot? For that matter, I would think that hospitals could use something that keys off of olafactory cues. What about a Mars Rover type robot (assuming we ever relearn the landing-on-Mars trick) that sniffs for water vapor (as in ice deposits) or other potential "life" indicators while it's poking at rocks? Heck, I could probably use a device to warn me that I've gotten carried away with the after-shave before a date...
Yesterday, rumors start that the DoJ is considering splitting up M$ into three parts; one for OS, one for Apps, and one for Internet. Today M$ announces that they have a whole new direction that they've already been working on that sounds to me like it involves further integration of W2K with M$ Office and IE.
(think "Bambi-eyes"): "Gosh, you can't break us up now! Our entire business strategy is built on developing an integrated whole! You'll put us out of business and destroy the software industry!"
If plan A was to walk away from the DoJ study unscathed, this must be plan B...
On the other hand, it may not mean that much; I'm working on my non-CS degree at Colorado School of Mines right now and last semester the school paper ran a comparison of Mines students' MBTIs against the "general population" and it shows that all us engineer wannabes (of which >5% are pursuing a CS degree) are twice as likely to be ISTJs or five times as likely to be INTJs. In other words, the MBTI is revealing geekness, not necessarily computer geekness...
How much has the OS market changed in the two months since the M$ FoF was handed down? How much more will it change before the DoJ decides what to do about Ball and Co? How much of that decision will be applicable/relevant by the time it gets implemented? Does it really matter if the lawyers "get" the technology when the rules that they have to apply are as obsolete as a 386?
Once, I asked a user to power off her terminal, count five, and power it back on. The phone clunks down onto the desk, I hear footsteps moving away, two minutes later footsteps come back, she picks up the phone and tells me its done. I re-aquired her device, confirmed that she was back in session, hung up, then fell out of my chair laughing. She, like most of my callers, worked for a freight company and when I told her to power down the terminal, she had done just that; she had gone back to the circuit box and powered down the entire building (the "terminal" building from a trucker's perspective). (And yes, I started refering to it as a "computer display" from then on...)
Therein lies my first point; help desk people either laugh at these things or go seriously postal.
The second point is more of a rant; The help desk is there to solve problems, not teach! I have been working IT for sixteen years now (mainframe and PC) and I have never seen a company (or even heard of one) that made more than a token effort at training their people on how to use the PC's and such that get dropped on their desks. While I can forgive someone for not knowing what a general protection fault is, I find it appalling that no one ever takes the time to show a new user, "This is the power switch for the monitor, this is the power switch for the computer itself, this is the mouse and moving it around makes that arrow move around, see?" Etc...
In a nutshell, laughter is a way of dealing with a frustrating and often unrewarding job. If that offends Mr. Kurtz, well, life can be pretty unfair...
Their entry page shows the date as Saturday, January 1, 192000...
Oops.
Wernher Von Braun?
Sure, his V2 rockets made things ugly in London for a while, but they were his first steps towards things like the Saturn V that put man on the moon (and Skylab on Australia).
Other potential geeks in non-computer fields that I haven't heard mentioned:
- Watson and Crick (DNA)
- Jaques-Yves Cousteau (scuba)
- John A. Roebling (wire rope and the Brooklyn Bridge)
And how about Martin Luther and Thomas Paine and all the others that have used the free exchange of ideas to challenge and eventually change what the Powers That Be can get away with?
It's late, and likely no-one will be reading this, but I feel strongly enough about this to rant anyway...
First, a look at the arguments against:
1) It's too expensive...
This may or may not be true, depending on the very subjective evaluation of what is and is not "too" expensive, but keep in mind that the "Mars Direct" approach that is currently being suggested would cost $10 to $20 billion (spread out over a roughly 10 year program), rather than the $150+ billion that NASA was asking for just a few years ago (NASA wanted a space station and a huge "Battlestart Galactica" ship to make the trip). In other words, Bill Gates could pay for such a trip out-of-pocket and hardly put a dent in his reserves. This is too expensive? (Read Zubrin's "Case for Mars" and "Entering Space" for more on this.)
2) We should clean up things here first...
The basic assumption for this argument has always appeared to me that prosperity is a zero-sum game; if this were true, then there'd be six billion humans trying to feed themselves from a handful of fruit trees in the Olduvai Gorge. People are now living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than any generation previous; the perception of the world being an inch from disaster is a construct of polititians and others who want money and/or power that they haven't earned. Yes people are starving, but that is the result of bad politics, not lack of food (challenge: find a situation where where a population was starving in a country with a free press and a representative government; good luck). Prosperity reduces population growth, reduces pollution, inproves health and longevity, and grows and grows and grows, so long as people are willing to try new things. A beefed up COMMERCIAL space program (I'll save the "Kill NASA Now" rant for another time) would create prosperity, and while it wouldn't directly help Yugoslavians and such, it might pave the way governmental changes that would; that's how we won the cold war. (Suggested reading: "Ecoscam", "Apacolypse Not", "The Greatest Resource" or, for fun, "All the Trouble in the World", the latter by P.J. O'Rourke and I don't remember the others.)
3) We can do science with robots/telescopes/etc.
This has an element of truth to it. (Isn't the Mars Polar Lander due to arrive Friday?) But this is (to me, at least) like saying "Why go skiing, when you can just watch the latest Warren Miller film?" My response is that a) these are not mutually exclusive activities and one can actually enhance the other, and b) I'd rather be DOING something than watch it being done. (This is why I'm in the middle of my junior year in a Materials Engineering program and planning on bailing on a lucrative but unrewarding 15 year career working on/with computers.)
The "for" arguments are varied (see Robert Zubrin's books for detailed analysis of pretty much all that I've seen discussed here), but the most compelling IMHO is the challenge. Americans are, for the most part, malcontents or the children of malcontents, who came here to get away from problems and/or start some new ones. (Yes, there are exceptions to this; forgive me for a generalization.) We, as a country, thrive on these challenges. This is what we are about. Not "Mom and Apple Pie", we're about finding new and (hopefully) better ways to do things, thumbing our collective nose at anyone who says "It can't be done", and occaisionally stubbing our toes on an unavoidable truth. We need a capital "C" Challenge to keep our edge and push ourselves further. If we ignore this opportunity, we will become a nation of whiners, couch-potatoes and... hmmmm...
My overly (and overtly) patriotic tone at the end there does not mean I think that Mars is something that should be done exclusively by and for Americans; I perceive America as a collection of ideas that are not constrained by geographical borders. Anyone who has the desire and will to explore and take risks and challenge assumptions should be involved...
Enough...
"Specialization is for insects." - Lazarus Long
Can the M-2K software really deliver? Especially in the High School context? I keep thinking about the old adage about "you can't make something idiot proof 'cause idiots are so damn clever" and wondering how long until this software ends up in the hands of a bureaucrat with an agenda (or a quota).
But what really worries me about this article is the way it fights hyperbole with hyperbole.
The media and politicians have been using (and abusing) the vote-less and voice-less youth as scapegoats for some time now, because it sells papers and gains votes. Since critical thinking is not terribly common, few people question assertions by polititions or speculations by media types. Everything we've heard about High Schools in the post-Columbine media feeding frenzy has been exageration, speculation and outright fabrication desing, not to protect "our children", but to sell more deoderant.
From the media, one would think that walking from home room to first period history ranks right up there with playing Russian roulette. But violent crime by youths (20 or younger) has been on a steady decline since the 70's. (Meanwhile, violent crime amongst adults has been steadily escalating at an alarming rate.) The same general trends apply to drug use, alcohol use and so on (down somewhat for younger people, up dramatically for adults). I read a book a couple years ago called "Framing Youth" and the author pointed out that a child was actually safer in school that he/she was at home since deaths from abusive/negligent parents outnumber the school-shooting deaths by a factor of five to one.
But kids are an easy target. It's hard to argue (in our sound-bite based system of public discourse) against anything that will "protect our children", even if it means totally abandoning any pretense of constitutional rights for those kids.
But the same thing is being done here from the other direction.
In 8.3K of text, maybe 500 bytes are verifiable facts, while the rest is speculation. Will this software really be used for "geek-profiling"? Maybe. But maybe not. Will the use of such software further ostracize an already beleagered group? Maybe. Probably even. But we can only speculate at this point.
I have no doubts that the introduction of this software into ANY sort of general use should send strong warning signals to anyone concerned with individual freedom. But the way to address those concerns is with facts; without them, all we can do is bleat like the "protect our children at all costs" types.
Questions I'd like to see answered are things like; How does it work? What checks and balances (if any) will prevent the administrator's biases from coloring both the "evidence" and the interpretation of the results? What sort of accuracy does it claim (and how does it back those up)? How EXACTLY will it be used? Even if it does identify violent tendicies with complete accuracy, will that "evidence" be enough to justify a "preventative" policy when our entire justice system was built on the assumption that "justice" must FOLLOW whatever infraction? (Proving that someone is "capable" of violence is no more proof that they WILL be violent than passing a driver's test proves that the driver WILL follow the speed limit.)
Way back in high school, my journalism teacher said something that has stuck with me since; "Anyone can take an interesting story and make it sound important, but a journalist takes something important and make it interesting." While Mr. Katz has brought up some interesting topics, he seems to miss the important part...
Whoa, almost as wordy as the original article... sorry.