The trouble is that the effect is correlated with the 33-day rotation of the solar core. If varying rates of nuclear decay affected cancer rates -- which they could -- the problem with measuring it is the speed with which cancer progresses. Since we can't detect cancer the moment a cell goes rogue, any variability in oncogenesis rates over a 33-day period would be lost in the statistical noise.
If you do figure out a way to detect oncogenesis that precisely, you'll be too busy curing cancer to worry much about solar neutrino flux.
If anything, it sounds like our estimates of the Earth's age may be too young, not too old. Pending, of course, confirmation that the results aren't the result of an error in statistical analysis.
We don't have more than a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works, or even what consciousness is.
People say this a lot, and I don't understand why. Our understanding of how the brain works is a good deal more than rudimentary. The advances we've made in understanding the brain on both the large and small scales in just the last five years are breathtaking. Our understanding is a long way from complete, but Kurzweil is correct at least to the extent that our understanding is significant and appears to be growing at an accelerating rate. It may not be accelerating as fast as he expects, but keeping up with new developments in neurology at even a cursory level is quite challenging. The main difficulty we face at present in implementing the structures we do understand in silicon is the lack of adequate parallelism in current computing hardware, not our understanding of the relevant neural structures.
As for consciousness, unless you believe in some kind of pre-scientific vitalism, a reasonable working assumption is that it is an emergent property of brain-like structures. Unless and until we discover otherwise, there is no reason to wait for an understanding of consciousness to begin working on replicating the functionality of the brain. Quite likely, the attempt to replicate the brain will reveal more about consciousness than idle philosophical inquiries. Those so inclined might want to settle on a definition of consciousness before trying to figure out how it works.
The IBM PC first appeared in 1981. It was not until 1986 that the first PC virus appeared. It was not until many years after that before malware aimed at theft of data -- as opposed to mere vandalism -- became widespread. There's often a lag between the existence of a gaping security hole and the day when someone finally drives the first of many Mack trucks through it.
I would argue that there is an evolutionary advantage to the brain being structured, because this is consistent with structured encoding in DNA. The encoding in DNA will tend to be structured because this minimises the use of energy and other resources.
That's certainly true, as far as it goes. But the structure of the brain is not explicitly coded in the DNA. One of the energy-conserving features of complex organisms is that their gross structure is an emergent phenomenon, much the same way that, for example, the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set emerges from a very simple iterative equation. Reverse-engineering the brain is thus a bit like taking a rendering of the Mandelbrot set and trying to deduce the original equation. Starting from DNA is like taking the equation and trying to predict the value of an arbitrary point on the complex plane. Both are intractable problems; the latter may be undecidable as well.
Mind you, I think strong AI is possible. I just think that successfully reverse-engineering the human brain is one of the least likely ways for us to get there.
Bad analogy. The problem is less like getting a compiler to compile itself as it is like getting the compiler to autonomously design a new compiler and present the operator with standards docs.
But with sufficient organization, groups of humans can work on systems of comparable complexity to a human brain.
This basically assumes that the problem can be broken into independent sub-problems with interfaces whose complexity does not exceed the understanding of the humans responsible for them, neither of which is at all certain. The sheer number of interconnections in the brain (10^15) does at least raise the possibility that the current human population, devoted in its entirety to the task, is not currently sufficient even if the problem can be broken into arbitrarily small chunks.
First off, Ray Kurzweil doesn't want to die. That's a preoccupation that a lot of people have (including one of his critics, Rudy Rucker, who has written whole books hoping to find immortality in the fourth dimension), and it leads them to some pretty fantastic conjectures from time to time. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you keep the proverbial grain of salt handy. Modern chemistry and its not insignificant contributions to our vastly expanded lifespans arose from the alchemical search for immortality. Alchemy was bullshit, of course, but the incidental discoveries of alchemists on the way to their illusory elixir of life paved the way for the real science to follow and build upon after it had ejected the dross.
And secondly, I don't think it's entirely implausible that we can eventually design hardware and software that will match and exceed the performance of the human brain. Our brains, after all, are the end product of evolution, and like pretty much every other part of our bodies, an accumulation of kludges that were just good enough to get passed to the next generation (or not bad enough not to get passed on). It's also implemented using hardware so unreliable that it wouldn't function at all if it wasn't constantly repairing itself, and even then, no matter how well you treat it, it irreparably craps out after about 75 years. And it still doesn't work all that well -- ever seen the long chain of train wrecks that is the history of human civilization? We might be able to engineer something that works a lot better. Granted, it's not going to be by deriving simulated human brains from a copy of the human genome. More likely, it will be very much unlike the way biological brains work.
The fundamental problem, which I think smart and optimistic guys like Ray Kurzweil are particularly prone to forgetting, is that it may not be possible for a mind to understand a mind of equal complexity, i.e., humans may lack the necessary intelligence to duplicate their own intelligence. That will force us back on genetic algorithms to evolve AI, leading to an end product that will likely be just as badly undesigned as natural brains. Worse, it will do little to advance our understanding of how minds work: if we can't reverse-engineer our own brains, we probably won't be able to reverse-engineer even more sophisticated artificial minds, nor will they be able to reverse-engineer themselves. (We can hope that they could reverse-engineer us, and then explain it to us in terms we can understand, if such terms exist, but that takes us so far out on a conjectural limb that I can see Ray Kurzweil from here.)
Anyway, there's room for bold conjectures. That doesn't mean that when Kurzweil completely fails to understand the way molecular biology works that we shouldn't call bullshit on it, but we shouldn't be entirely hostile to futurist speculation. By nature, most of it will be bullshit, but a lot of progress in unexpected areas has been made in the pursuit of mirages (alchemy leading to chemistry, astrology leading to astronomy), and explaining (or discovering) why a conjecture is bullshit is a beneficial exercise in and of itself.
Moreover, your bias against the truthfulness and honesty and moral integrity of company executives seems to be about the same as the bias against pornstars and sexually active women you want to call people out on.
You're absolutely right. I've plainly allowed the global economic collapse caused by truthful, honest, and morally upright company executives to sway my judgment and lead me into the entirely unjustified view that they might also be capable of lesser sins.
The most likely explanation that seems consistent with the facts in my mind is that he sought out her company by inviting her as one of his staff on business trips and hoped something would happen [...]
For an executive to pursue a romantic relationship with a subordinate -- whether it proceeds to harassment or not -- is inappropriate to begin with, not least because it can lead to nasty messes like this, in addition to the plethora of less dramatic ethical lapses that often arise from such situations. It would be grounds for termination for much lower-ranking managers; for a CEO, it shows an appalling lack of judgment.
It looks to me like you have a pretty weird mind about what it means to smear someone.
Dude, you used "porn star" three times in that paragraph, and then made the assertion that the plaintiff is sexually active in the present tense. What are you, Hurd's attorney?
I don't suppose that anyone has considered the possibility that this story and others like it are the result of a concerted effort by Mr. Hurd (and his rather influential allies) to rehabilitate his image by smearing his accuser? I mean, it's not like the method is unheard of (cf. practically every rape trial) or that misconduct by the executives of companies large and small, sexual and otherwise, is exactly a rarity. Moreover, there's a pretty vast disparity in the ability of these two individuals to pump their version of events in the tech and financial press.
I'm also going to guess that, given the immense liability risks involved, that the HP board probably based their decision on more than just Hurd's browser history.
So Microsoft decided to stop pouring money into something that it can't sell and which competes with products it can sell, and that will likely be completed anyway for free by people it doesn't have to pay.
Well, color me shocked. Here I was, thinking Microsoft was a charity, and now I find them acting like a notoriously cynical and rapacious megacorporation. Who'da thunk it?
NASA's problem is that Spirit and Opportunity lasted so ridiculously long past their stated mission that merely exceeding expectations by a reasonable engineering design factor now looks like newsworthy incompetence.
It's not just the rovers. Despite some genuinely newsworthy fuckups, when NASA gets it right -- which is most of the time -- they usually do a stellar job, pun intended. A fair number of NASA probes have lasted decades beyond their primary mission and continue to produce useful data. Voyager I, for example, is still transmitting thirty-three years after its launch.
Some people have just got to have their government incompetence stories even when the government is being unbelievably competent.
You just described a mixed economy having a central bank that controls the money supply, not capitalism. The United States has never had capitalism, only a mixed economy. This leads always to monopolies and corporate manipulation with government. Please explain how a corporation could establish itself as a monopoly without the legal use of force, i.e. government.
In some cases, it's possible for a dominant player to simply buy up all of the available raw materials. In others, especially manufacturers and distributors of a large range of products, it is possible for them to establish contracts with retailers making the availability of their products contingent upon the retailers agreeing not to carry competitors' products. There are a variety of ways to compete in ways that don't involve offering better products or lower prices by manipulating the supply chain.
But generally, they do it by filling the power vacuum left by a weak government. You end up -- as we did in the late 19th and early 20th century -- with large corporations paying their employees with scrip and having them live in company towns under the watchful eye of private security forces that ensure obedience through the threat of destitution or, in the case of organized resistance, through large-scale violence. Of course, this is often inefficient, so the next move is for corporations to gain control of the government using bribes, campaign contributions, and electoral fraud to establish a publicly-funded enforcement arm and to pass legislation erecting such high barriers to entry that competition is impossible, as was the case with the Big Three automakers until we let the Japanese in.
You'll object that this is exactly what you're talking about, monopoly through government, but you're missing the point. Once private enterprises become powerful enough to substantially influence and co-opt the government, the distinction between government and business ceases to exist. Excepting only some of the mid-20th century European dictatorships, it is always business that subverts the government, not government subverting business.
Supporters of true laissez faire don't claim that it is magical.
Sure they do. They claim that people with enormous power and wealth will never be corrupt, and that once corrupted, they will not self-organize to increase their power and use it to subvert the entire social system to their benefit. They argue, just as the communists did, that human nature magically disappears in the face of anarchy, but of course only their new ideological anarchy: the original anarchy from which humans emerged at the dawn of history was apparently the wrong kind of anarchy to produce utopia. Those old humans were short-sighted, greedy, and instinctively driven to seek power over their fellows, but the new [insert bullshit ideology here] humans are all honest, fair, freedom-loving altruists who only want to put in a character-building day at an honest trade in exchange for a chance to compete in a free market.
If that isn't magical thinking, I don't know what is.
Contrast that with supporters of state control and increased regulation. To them, the government can fix anything.
On the contrary, we do not. But we do believe -- with the history of human civilization as an admittedly imperfect but encouraging example -- that democratic government can fix much, much more than either anarchism or the kind of feudal state pursued by emotionally stunted armchair ideologues drunk on the lie that grown-ups can have whatever they want, whenever they want it, if only the mean old government would just let the good-hearted bankers and industrialists pour their coffers into the streets to the adulation of an eternally grateful mass of ordinary working men.
The default behavior of human beings is to lie, steal, and kill whenever it seems to be to their advantage and there is no organized social structure to corral petty st
Unregulated markets tend to function more like a cartel than a true open market. Limiting choices and competition instead of enhancing it.
And that, ultimately, is the fly in every variety of libertarian laissez faire capitalist ointment: wealth is a competitive advantage. Even allowing for a certain fraction of businesses that fail due to bad decisions, success builds on success until there are only a few players left. Then the rational decision for those players is to simply divide up the market and fix prices rather than compete, and cooperate to ensure that the barriers to entry are too high for any new competition to arise. Nor does it get any better if those few players actually compete with each other, as the end product is inevitably a single victor, i.e., a monopoly.
Capitalism just isn't self-sustaining. It's great while it's racing toward equilibrium, but once it gets there, it's like any other system that's reached equilibrium: incapable of doing any good. For capitalism to work -- as with perpetual motion machines -- there has to be an occasional input of energy from the outside. In the case of capitalism, that's trust-busting and various less dramatic forms of regulation. Without that, you have an ever-shrinking number of companies leveraging their ever-increasing power to charge more and more for less and less. It's not that the market is a bad thing or that capitalism is unworkable, it's just that it's not a magical cornucopia. Like every other vast human endeavor, it needs to be properly managed, and just as there is such a thing as too much management, there is also such a thing as too little.
So the time frame is only over 5 years? Cars can and do last longer than that.
No kidding. I've never kept one for less than ten years, with the exception of a couple of used cars that were already more than fifteen years old when I got them. My experience is that buying new cars is almost always a losing proposition anyway. You generally get more miles for the dollar out of a good used car, especially if you can do the routine maintenance yourself, which is hardly rocket science.
...it requires considerable self-discipline. If you don't have that, you can't effectively self-educate, which is one reason why we have universities. A major component of the necessary self-discipline involves studying things that don't immediately interest you, recognizing that you don't necessarily know what you need to know. Universities force that sort of thing on you. It's tough -- especially for young people -- because it involves something akin to respect for authority, though not in quite the way that phrase is normally used. It's more a matter of recognizing that experts who have spent their whole lives mastering a particular subject have a broad view of the subject that the beginner does not and cannot have, and that to know the value and utility of a particular area of knowledge, you have to have a thorough knowledge of the larger context in which it fits. Relatively few people have the necessary mental attitude, so again, we have universities.
None of this is new. So free lectures are available online? Big deal. Lectures are a relatively minor component of a university education. Their main function is to provide an overview of facts and concepts that the students then pursue more deeply and thoroughly outside of class. (A transcript of a semester worth of lectures is dwarfed by the content of the accompanying textbooks.) If you emerge from a university well-educated, it's because you self-educated. The faculty is there to guide you to areas that you might have missed on your own, and the grading system exists to apply the necessary reward/punishment structure for students who as yet lack the motivation and self-discipline to pursue the work for its own sake.
The overwhelming majority of the information you need is in books. You can get many of them free from a decent library, and used textbooks are dirt cheap off campus when the new editions come out every year or two -- if you're self-educating, you don't have to participate in the pricey new edition scam, after all.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice that some universities are sharing their lectures, and I am by no means opposed to self-education: I'm an autodidact, and I've done quite well for myself. But self-education is hard, and most people aren't cut out for it. And all of the resources you need have been available since well before the integrated circuit. If you think you can do it, and you're prepared to bust your ass doing it, then go out and do it. If, however, you think the availability of online lectures has been the critical missing component, you'd better just hunt for financial aid and get into a college somewhere.
When you die, your writings and works are the only thing left of you. They are the only way for someone to try to dig deeper into your mind and build up an understanding of your true character.
Thanks, but I don't owe that to anyone. Period. The very thought of someone having unrestricted access to my private writings makes me feel physically ill. And it's not because I have any unusual skeletons in my closet, it's because that access would be a total violation of my personal boundaries. You're welcome to what I choose to share while I'm alive, and I share quite a bit, but I don't belong to you or anyone else. Quite frankly, I like the idea that I'll be completely erased by death. Having spent my entire life with claims placed upon me by family, employers, government agencies, creditors, and countless social organizations, it is no small comfort to know that something will escape the insatiable demands of my fellow man.
Once my team and I 'bought in' to using it, it became a marvelous tool.
Almost everything works well if everyone involved "buys in". Technical history (and politics, religion, hobbies, etc.) is littered with cult followings that coalesced around one thing or another that failed to catch on with the general public.
Success depends on either everyone buying in, which almost never happens, OR cases where the product/service works well for its users without everyone else having to use it. Email and the web are rare examples of the former; the enormous variety of mail clients and web browsers are examples of latter.
But ahead of it's time. Like handing someone from 1980 a smart phone.
The overwhelming majority of the public doesn't have smart phones and isn't terribly interested in them. But they are wildly successful in their niche precisely because you can have an iPhone and still call your grandmother's rotary dial land line phone.
I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so.
Personally, I prefer to phrase my sentences so that they don't begin with those words. I think it's technically correct to leave them uncapitalized because troff, for example, is an uncapitalized proper noun from a case-sensitive environment, but it's really jarring to non-technical readers and makes it harder to visually register the beginning of the sentence even if you're expecting it.
And really, the producers of the information want it to be expensive. They want their reward back for their work.
More than that, they want to be rewarded perpetually for work they did once, which is why it strikes so many people as basically unfair, or at least anomalous. If I pay you to put a new roof on my house, I pay you once for a few days' work, at until I need you to come back in fifteen or twenty years to do it again. Another roofer can do my neighbor's roof without having to pay you for having roofed my house first. And so it goes with most jobs: you get paid for the work you do. With information, you get paid for all time for having done some work at some point in the past.
Nice work if you can get it, I guess.
The system of artificial scarcity we call intellectual property rights was created because, unlike roofs, information is cheap and easy to duplicate, and without that artificial scarcity, creators of useful information would get paid so little that they'd find something less useful but more profitable to do. Unfortunately, it's been carried to such an extreme -- in large part because of the transferability of those privileges -- that entire industries now make billions of work they haven't done at all, while the actual creators, by and large, still get paid jack. What has changed with recent technological advances isn't so much the cost of duplicating data, which was already cheap as dirt, but the emergence of the possibility of eliminating the distribution cartels that screw the creators and gouge the consumers.
Aside from a few exceptional cases, that possibility remains theoretical. Instead of information wanting to be free, the dominant force at work is that people want all they can get, and those who already have a bunch are in a good position to take more, with minimal recompense, from the rest of us. Which is nothing new.
It would cause a ripple for a while, like it has with MySQL, but trust me, in time - we'll have found another FOSS solution.
I'd say that Oracle's acquisition of MySQL has done a lot more than cause a ripple. If I wasn't already dependent on it, I wouldn't even consider it for future development, and I am eagerly waiting for one of the forks to a) mature, and b) develop enough of a track record to risk depending on it for the long term, or c) to settle on one or more alternatives such as Postgres and/or some of the so-called NoSQL solutions. The situation with Java isn't as bad, as Java has a base of users (and the enormous anchor of IBM's investment in Java solutions) that is orders of magnitude greater than MySQL, so the leverage Oracle can exert is greatly reduced, but it's still a concern.
Forks -- if you're going to build the necessary developer infrastructure around them and properly support and maintain them -- take time and, more often than not, money. And as a user, transitioning from one ordinary version to another is often expensive, never mind transitioning to a forked version that, more often than not, involves significant changes from the original trunk, MySQL and its descendants being a particularly illustrative example. It's not the end of the world, but it is often a very big deal.
At the end of the day, if an open source project you depend on is maintained by a for-profit company, and the project is sufficiently valuable, someone will eventually come along and buy its maintainer. And if the project is cutting into the bottom line of the buyer, as was the case with MySQL and Oracle, you can be sure that the new owner will make the change as disruptive as possible. It's a basic vulnerability that is built into the commercialization of Open Source. Whether it's a significant risk with any particular project will vary, of course, but it's always there, and the ability to fork is not a panacea.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is that the effect is correlated with the 33-day rotation of the solar core. If varying rates of nuclear decay affected cancer rates -- which they could -- the problem with measuring it is the speed with which cancer progresses. Since we can't detect cancer the moment a cell goes rogue, any variability in oncogenesis rates over a 33-day period would be lost in the statistical noise.
If you do figure out a way to detect oncogenesis that precisely, you'll be too busy curing cancer to worry much about solar neutrino flux.
If anything, it sounds like our estimates of the Earth's age may be too young, not too old. Pending, of course, confirmation that the results aren't the result of an error in statistical analysis.
We don't have more than a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works, or even what consciousness is.
People say this a lot, and I don't understand why. Our understanding of how the brain works is a good deal more than rudimentary. The advances we've made in understanding the brain on both the large and small scales in just the last five years are breathtaking. Our understanding is a long way from complete, but Kurzweil is correct at least to the extent that our understanding is significant and appears to be growing at an accelerating rate. It may not be accelerating as fast as he expects, but keeping up with new developments in neurology at even a cursory level is quite challenging. The main difficulty we face at present in implementing the structures we do understand in silicon is the lack of adequate parallelism in current computing hardware, not our understanding of the relevant neural structures.
As for consciousness, unless you believe in some kind of pre-scientific vitalism, a reasonable working assumption is that it is an emergent property of brain-like structures. Unless and until we discover otherwise, there is no reason to wait for an understanding of consciousness to begin working on replicating the functionality of the brain. Quite likely, the attempt to replicate the brain will reveal more about consciousness than idle philosophical inquiries. Those so inclined might want to settle on a definition of consciousness before trying to figure out how it works.
The IBM PC first appeared in 1981. It was not until 1986 that the first PC virus appeared. It was not until many years after that before malware aimed at theft of data -- as opposed to mere vandalism -- became widespread. There's often a lag between the existence of a gaping security hole and the day when someone finally drives the first of many Mack trucks through it.
I would argue that there is an evolutionary advantage to the brain being structured, because this is consistent with structured encoding in DNA. The encoding in DNA will tend to be structured because this minimises the use of energy and other resources.
That's certainly true, as far as it goes. But the structure of the brain is not explicitly coded in the DNA. One of the energy-conserving features of complex organisms is that their gross structure is an emergent phenomenon, much the same way that, for example, the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set emerges from a very simple iterative equation. Reverse-engineering the brain is thus a bit like taking a rendering of the Mandelbrot set and trying to deduce the original equation. Starting from DNA is like taking the equation and trying to predict the value of an arbitrary point on the complex plane. Both are intractable problems; the latter may be undecidable as well.
Mind you, I think strong AI is possible. I just think that successfully reverse-engineering the human brain is one of the least likely ways for us to get there.
We have self hosting programming languages.
Bad analogy. The problem is less like getting a compiler to compile itself as it is like getting the compiler to autonomously design a new compiler and present the operator with standards docs.
But with sufficient organization, groups of humans can work on systems of comparable complexity to a human brain.
This basically assumes that the problem can be broken into independent sub-problems with interfaces whose complexity does not exceed the understanding of the humans responsible for them, neither of which is at all certain. The sheer number of interconnections in the brain (10^15) does at least raise the possibility that the current human population, devoted in its entirety to the task, is not currently sufficient even if the problem can be broken into arbitrarily small chunks.
First off, Ray Kurzweil doesn't want to die. That's a preoccupation that a lot of people have (including one of his critics, Rudy Rucker, who has written whole books hoping to find immortality in the fourth dimension), and it leads them to some pretty fantastic conjectures from time to time. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you keep the proverbial grain of salt handy. Modern chemistry and its not insignificant contributions to our vastly expanded lifespans arose from the alchemical search for immortality. Alchemy was bullshit, of course, but the incidental discoveries of alchemists on the way to their illusory elixir of life paved the way for the real science to follow and build upon after it had ejected the dross.
And secondly, I don't think it's entirely implausible that we can eventually design hardware and software that will match and exceed the performance of the human brain. Our brains, after all, are the end product of evolution, and like pretty much every other part of our bodies, an accumulation of kludges that were just good enough to get passed to the next generation (or not bad enough not to get passed on). It's also implemented using hardware so unreliable that it wouldn't function at all if it wasn't constantly repairing itself, and even then, no matter how well you treat it, it irreparably craps out after about 75 years. And it still doesn't work all that well -- ever seen the long chain of train wrecks that is the history of human civilization? We might be able to engineer something that works a lot better. Granted, it's not going to be by deriving simulated human brains from a copy of the human genome. More likely, it will be very much unlike the way biological brains work.
The fundamental problem, which I think smart and optimistic guys like Ray Kurzweil are particularly prone to forgetting, is that it may not be possible for a mind to understand a mind of equal complexity, i.e., humans may lack the necessary intelligence to duplicate their own intelligence. That will force us back on genetic algorithms to evolve AI, leading to an end product that will likely be just as badly undesigned as natural brains. Worse, it will do little to advance our understanding of how minds work: if we can't reverse-engineer our own brains, we probably won't be able to reverse-engineer even more sophisticated artificial minds, nor will they be able to reverse-engineer themselves. (We can hope that they could reverse-engineer us, and then explain it to us in terms we can understand, if such terms exist, but that takes us so far out on a conjectural limb that I can see Ray Kurzweil from here.)
Anyway, there's room for bold conjectures. That doesn't mean that when Kurzweil completely fails to understand the way molecular biology works that we shouldn't call bullshit on it, but we shouldn't be entirely hostile to futurist speculation. By nature, most of it will be bullshit, but a lot of progress in unexpected areas has been made in the pursuit of mirages (alchemy leading to chemistry, astrology leading to astronomy), and explaining (or discovering) why a conjecture is bullshit is a beneficial exercise in and of itself.
(Plus another 3 minutes at the start)
If you want to be invited back to create another simulation, you'd better put more than three minutes into the bootstrapping phase.
Moreover, your bias against the truthfulness and honesty and moral integrity of company executives seems to be about the same as the bias against pornstars and sexually active women you want to call people out on.
You're absolutely right. I've plainly allowed the global economic collapse caused by truthful, honest, and morally upright company executives to sway my judgment and lead me into the entirely unjustified view that they might also be capable of lesser sins.
The most likely explanation that seems consistent with the facts in my mind is that he sought out her company by inviting her as one of his staff on business trips and hoped something would happen [...]
For an executive to pursue a romantic relationship with a subordinate -- whether it proceeds to harassment or not -- is inappropriate to begin with, not least because it can lead to nasty messes like this, in addition to the plethora of less dramatic ethical lapses that often arise from such situations. It would be grounds for termination for much lower-ranking managers; for a CEO, it shows an appalling lack of judgment.
It looks to me like you have a pretty weird mind about what it means to smear someone.
Dude, you used "porn star" three times in that paragraph, and then made the assertion that the plaintiff is sexually active in the present tense. What are you, Hurd's attorney?
I don't suppose that anyone has considered the possibility that this story and others like it are the result of a concerted effort by Mr. Hurd (and his rather influential allies) to rehabilitate his image by smearing his accuser? I mean, it's not like the method is unheard of (cf. practically every rape trial) or that misconduct by the executives of companies large and small, sexual and otherwise, is exactly a rarity. Moreover, there's a pretty vast disparity in the ability of these two individuals to pump their version of events in the tech and financial press.
I'm also going to guess that, given the immense liability risks involved, that the HP board probably based their decision on more than just Hurd's browser history.
So Microsoft decided to stop pouring money into something that it can't sell and which competes with products it can sell, and that will likely be completed anyway for free by people it doesn't have to pay.
Well, color me shocked. Here I was, thinking Microsoft was a charity, and now I find them acting like a notoriously cynical and rapacious megacorporation. Who'da thunk it?
NASA's problem is that Spirit and Opportunity lasted so ridiculously long past their stated mission that merely exceeding expectations by a reasonable engineering design factor now looks like newsworthy incompetence.
It's not just the rovers. Despite some genuinely newsworthy fuckups, when NASA gets it right -- which is most of the time -- they usually do a stellar job, pun intended. A fair number of NASA probes have lasted decades beyond their primary mission and continue to produce useful data. Voyager I, for example, is still transmitting thirty-three years after its launch.
Some people have just got to have their government incompetence stories even when the government is being unbelievably competent.
You just described a mixed economy having a central bank that controls the money supply, not capitalism. The United States has never had capitalism, only a mixed economy. This leads always to monopolies and corporate manipulation with government. Please explain how a corporation could establish itself as a monopoly without the legal use of force, i.e. government.
In some cases, it's possible for a dominant player to simply buy up all of the available raw materials. In others, especially manufacturers and distributors of a large range of products, it is possible for them to establish contracts with retailers making the availability of their products contingent upon the retailers agreeing not to carry competitors' products. There are a variety of ways to compete in ways that don't involve offering better products or lower prices by manipulating the supply chain.
But generally, they do it by filling the power vacuum left by a weak government. You end up -- as we did in the late 19th and early 20th century -- with large corporations paying their employees with scrip and having them live in company towns under the watchful eye of private security forces that ensure obedience through the threat of destitution or, in the case of organized resistance, through large-scale violence. Of course, this is often inefficient, so the next move is for corporations to gain control of the government using bribes, campaign contributions, and electoral fraud to establish a publicly-funded enforcement arm and to pass legislation erecting such high barriers to entry that competition is impossible, as was the case with the Big Three automakers until we let the Japanese in.
You'll object that this is exactly what you're talking about, monopoly through government, but you're missing the point. Once private enterprises become powerful enough to substantially influence and co-opt the government, the distinction between government and business ceases to exist. Excepting only some of the mid-20th century European dictatorships, it is always business that subverts the government, not government subverting business.
Supporters of true laissez faire don't claim that it is magical.
Sure they do. They claim that people with enormous power and wealth will never be corrupt, and that once corrupted, they will not self-organize to increase their power and use it to subvert the entire social system to their benefit. They argue, just as the communists did, that human nature magically disappears in the face of anarchy, but of course only their new ideological anarchy: the original anarchy from which humans emerged at the dawn of history was apparently the wrong kind of anarchy to produce utopia. Those old humans were short-sighted, greedy, and instinctively driven to seek power over their fellows, but the new [insert bullshit ideology here] humans are all honest, fair, freedom-loving altruists who only want to put in a character-building day at an honest trade in exchange for a chance to compete in a free market.
If that isn't magical thinking, I don't know what is.
Contrast that with supporters of state control and increased regulation. To them, the government can fix anything.
On the contrary, we do not. But we do believe -- with the history of human civilization as an admittedly imperfect but encouraging example -- that democratic government can fix much, much more than either anarchism or the kind of feudal state pursued by emotionally stunted armchair ideologues drunk on the lie that grown-ups can have whatever they want, whenever they want it, if only the mean old government would just let the good-hearted bankers and industrialists pour their coffers into the streets to the adulation of an eternally grateful mass of ordinary working men.
The default behavior of human beings is to lie, steal, and kill whenever it seems to be to their advantage and there is no organized social structure to corral petty st
Unregulated markets tend to function more like a cartel than a true open market. Limiting choices and competition instead of enhancing it.
And that, ultimately, is the fly in every variety of libertarian laissez faire capitalist ointment: wealth is a competitive advantage. Even allowing for a certain fraction of businesses that fail due to bad decisions, success builds on success until there are only a few players left. Then the rational decision for those players is to simply divide up the market and fix prices rather than compete, and cooperate to ensure that the barriers to entry are too high for any new competition to arise. Nor does it get any better if those few players actually compete with each other, as the end product is inevitably a single victor, i.e., a monopoly.
Capitalism just isn't self-sustaining. It's great while it's racing toward equilibrium, but once it gets there, it's like any other system that's reached equilibrium: incapable of doing any good. For capitalism to work -- as with perpetual motion machines -- there has to be an occasional input of energy from the outside. In the case of capitalism, that's trust-busting and various less dramatic forms of regulation. Without that, you have an ever-shrinking number of companies leveraging their ever-increasing power to charge more and more for less and less. It's not that the market is a bad thing or that capitalism is unworkable, it's just that it's not a magical cornucopia. Like every other vast human endeavor, it needs to be properly managed, and just as there is such a thing as too much management, there is also such a thing as too little.
So the time frame is only over 5 years? Cars can and do last longer than that.
No kidding. I've never kept one for less than ten years, with the exception of a couple of used cars that were already more than fifteen years old when I got them. My experience is that buying new cars is almost always a losing proposition anyway. You generally get more miles for the dollar out of a good used car, especially if you can do the routine maintenance yourself, which is hardly rocket science.
...it requires considerable self-discipline. If you don't have that, you can't effectively self-educate, which is one reason why we have universities. A major component of the necessary self-discipline involves studying things that don't immediately interest you, recognizing that you don't necessarily know what you need to know. Universities force that sort of thing on you. It's tough -- especially for young people -- because it involves something akin to respect for authority, though not in quite the way that phrase is normally used. It's more a matter of recognizing that experts who have spent their whole lives mastering a particular subject have a broad view of the subject that the beginner does not and cannot have, and that to know the value and utility of a particular area of knowledge, you have to have a thorough knowledge of the larger context in which it fits. Relatively few people have the necessary mental attitude, so again, we have universities.
None of this is new. So free lectures are available online? Big deal. Lectures are a relatively minor component of a university education. Their main function is to provide an overview of facts and concepts that the students then pursue more deeply and thoroughly outside of class. (A transcript of a semester worth of lectures is dwarfed by the content of the accompanying textbooks.) If you emerge from a university well-educated, it's because you self-educated. The faculty is there to guide you to areas that you might have missed on your own, and the grading system exists to apply the necessary reward/punishment structure for students who as yet lack the motivation and self-discipline to pursue the work for its own sake.
The overwhelming majority of the information you need is in books. You can get many of them free from a decent library, and used textbooks are dirt cheap off campus when the new editions come out every year or two -- if you're self-educating, you don't have to participate in the pricey new edition scam, after all.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice that some universities are sharing their lectures, and I am by no means opposed to self-education: I'm an autodidact, and I've done quite well for myself. But self-education is hard, and most people aren't cut out for it. And all of the resources you need have been available since well before the integrated circuit. If you think you can do it, and you're prepared to bust your ass doing it, then go out and do it. If, however, you think the availability of online lectures has been the critical missing component, you'd better just hunt for financial aid and get into a college somewhere.
When you die, your writings and works are the only thing left of you. They are the only way for someone to try to dig deeper into your mind and build up an understanding of your true character.
Thanks, but I don't owe that to anyone. Period. The very thought of someone having unrestricted access to my private writings makes me feel physically ill. And it's not because I have any unusual skeletons in my closet, it's because that access would be a total violation of my personal boundaries. You're welcome to what I choose to share while I'm alive, and I share quite a bit, but I don't belong to you or anyone else. Quite frankly, I like the idea that I'll be completely erased by death. Having spent my entire life with claims placed upon me by family, employers, government agencies, creditors, and countless social organizations, it is no small comfort to know that something will escape the insatiable demands of my fellow man.
Once my team and I 'bought in' to using it, it became a marvelous tool.
Almost everything works well if everyone involved "buys in". Technical history (and politics, religion, hobbies, etc.) is littered with cult followings that coalesced around one thing or another that failed to catch on with the general public.
Success depends on either everyone buying in, which almost never happens, OR cases where the product/service works well for its users without everyone else having to use it. Email and the web are rare examples of the former; the enormous variety of mail clients and web browsers are examples of latter.
But ahead of it's time. Like handing someone from 1980 a smart phone.
The overwhelming majority of the public doesn't have smart phones and isn't terribly interested in them. But they are wildly successful in their niche precisely because you can have an iPhone and still call your grandmother's rotary dial land line phone.
I don't use a capital letter for certain technical words (even when they start a sentence), making it both harder to programmatically detect a new sentence and more important to do so.
Personally, I prefer to phrase my sentences so that they don't begin with those words. I think it's technically correct to leave them uncapitalized because troff, for example, is an uncapitalized proper noun from a case-sensitive environment, but it's really jarring to non-technical readers and makes it harder to visually register the beginning of the sentence even if you're expecting it.
...but there can be only one.
"In the past year, [sysadmins'] pay has dropped, and more of their positions are being farmed out to temporary workers."
Sysadmins... and everyone else.
That said, cheers to all the sysadmins out there and thanks for all the hard work!
And really, the producers of the information want it to be expensive. They want their reward back for their work.
More than that, they want to be rewarded perpetually for work they did once, which is why it strikes so many people as basically unfair, or at least anomalous. If I pay you to put a new roof on my house, I pay you once for a few days' work, at until I need you to come back in fifteen or twenty years to do it again. Another roofer can do my neighbor's roof without having to pay you for having roofed my house first. And so it goes with most jobs: you get paid for the work you do. With information, you get paid for all time for having done some work at some point in the past.
Nice work if you can get it, I guess.
The system of artificial scarcity we call intellectual property rights was created because, unlike roofs, information is cheap and easy to duplicate, and without that artificial scarcity, creators of useful information would get paid so little that they'd find something less useful but more profitable to do. Unfortunately, it's been carried to such an extreme -- in large part because of the transferability of those privileges -- that entire industries now make billions of work they haven't done at all, while the actual creators, by and large, still get paid jack. What has changed with recent technological advances isn't so much the cost of duplicating data, which was already cheap as dirt, but the emergence of the possibility of eliminating the distribution cartels that screw the creators and gouge the consumers.
Aside from a few exceptional cases, that possibility remains theoretical. Instead of information wanting to be free, the dominant force at work is that people want all they can get, and those who already have a bunch are in a good position to take more, with minimal recompense, from the rest of us. Which is nothing new.
There's no difference. The common element here is commercialization.
It would cause a ripple for a while, like it has with MySQL, but trust me, in time - we'll have found another FOSS solution.
I'd say that Oracle's acquisition of MySQL has done a lot more than cause a ripple. If I wasn't already dependent on it, I wouldn't even consider it for future development, and I am eagerly waiting for one of the forks to a) mature, and b) develop enough of a track record to risk depending on it for the long term, or c) to settle on one or more alternatives such as Postgres and/or some of the so-called NoSQL solutions. The situation with Java isn't as bad, as Java has a base of users (and the enormous anchor of IBM's investment in Java solutions) that is orders of magnitude greater than MySQL, so the leverage Oracle can exert is greatly reduced, but it's still a concern.
Forks -- if you're going to build the necessary developer infrastructure around them and properly support and maintain them -- take time and, more often than not, money. And as a user, transitioning from one ordinary version to another is often expensive, never mind transitioning to a forked version that, more often than not, involves significant changes from the original trunk, MySQL and its descendants being a particularly illustrative example. It's not the end of the world, but it is often a very big deal.
At the end of the day, if an open source project you depend on is maintained by a for-profit company, and the project is sufficiently valuable, someone will eventually come along and buy its maintainer. And if the project is cutting into the bottom line of the buyer, as was the case with MySQL and Oracle, you can be sure that the new owner will make the change as disruptive as possible. It's a basic vulnerability that is built into the commercialization of Open Source. Whether it's a significant risk with any particular project will vary, of course, but it's always there, and the ability to fork is not a panacea.