The impression I got in my comp and writing classes was that 'science fiction' already HAD plenty of disdain pointed at it by comp and writing teachers. (I had a creative writing seminar that started with the teacher saying "I will not accept or grade any genre fiction" which he later specifically defined as 'romance, science fiction, or fantasy'.) Speculative fiction is, at least in the classes I've taken, what teachers recommend people use to describe their work if they're trying to be taken seriously rather than shelved under 'genre'.
I didn't know that Heinlein came up with the term. That's interesting (especially since these days I can't stand almost anything of his, so I have to give him some credit.)
The science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem said (throughout his life) that if humans suddenly woke up with no literature or memory of what had passed before, the first thing we would start writing would be speculations on what the future holds, which is, in essence, science fiction. Good science fiction should be about what tomorrow will be like, if what's going on today keeps going on in some direction. Some of the most interesting feminist fiction -- Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale" or Marge Piercy's "He, She, It" or Sheri Tepper's "Grass" -- is science fiction. They call it 'speculative fiction' to avoid being accused of genre writing.
What the article is requesting is a different type of science fiction, in my opinion: fiction that is about science itself. I loved reading George Smith's "Venus Equilateral" (as an example) because it was a technical exploration of a future in which we were living the same way humans currently live: competing, cooperating or fighting, inventing, only in space stations, using an entirely tube-based technology. It was a vision of the future that would make an engineer smile, as people put together increasingly technical workarounds to fix problems they needed to overcome (which always produced new and unforseen problems, that the next set of stories would deal with) all based on vacuum-tube technology. To Smith, and to other writers at the time, particularly Heinlein and Asimov, the future looked like it was all based on increasingly sophisticated vacuum tubes. (Tube-based learning systems show up in Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer", as I recall.)
Actually, while I'm on about it: Asimov cheated, as regards hard science, by waving his hands and making up 'positronics' that drove his robots' brains, but his work wasn't essentially about robotics, it was about how humans dealt with what they had created. Smith and early Heinlein was very much about the extension of then-cutting-edge technology far into the future, and how that affected people.
Anyway. Good fiction should be about what could happen and how that would change people, whether focusing on individuals or the whole race. Science fiction fits into that.
Dude, if the robots that overthrow humanity are made of LEGOs, my head is going to explode trying to decide how I feel about the situation.
MY LEGO assistant is only smart enough to try and grab rings and feed them into a spotwelder, but even that could be dangerous if the controller (my computer) turns to EEEVILE, as in fru-its of the deviiiiil.
Viacom isn't exactly shameless, and the suit's certainly not ridiculous if they win: they think they can extract more money with this suit than without. I think it'd be funny if Google removed links to any of Viacom's material from their servers. Viacom, like many other people, want Google to push traffic their way, but only under their terms. One can hardly blame them. They want the maximum money possible. So does Google. It's a pushing match that establishes the value of Google's advertising -- because, fundamentally, web search engines are free advertising, and as far as I'm concerned, Google is figuring out ways to generate money by free advertising, that come out of the pockets of the people who are being advertised. They're trying to figure out how to get the free advertising without paying for it. Lawsuits are one of the ways they're trying.
Oh, I don't think it's clear-cut at ALL. They cannot be regarded as acting strictly like a common carrier, because they stand to benefit financially from copyright violation, but even THAT isn't clear because they're benefitting from the side-effect (ad revenue) rather than from the violation itself.
It's a very muddy situation, and that mud is to Google's benefit. But with that (and a lot of stuff I've written elsewhere in this thread) said, it's not clear to me that Google is encouraging copyright violation or representing YouTube as a clearinghouse for copyrighted material.
This does bring up a question about common carrier status, though: if Google is required to analyze what YouTube is showing and remove copyright violating material from it, do they have to similarly analyze every little webpage for copyright violations against other websites or all the books in the world? If so, does the phone company have to start analyzing phone calls for when I play copyrighted music over the phone to a friend? I would argue no, in the latter case, because the phone company does not directly benefit from copyright violation per se, just from the call. YouTube is directly benefitting from the copyright violating material, because it's not available elsewhere (legally.) In only one of the cases are the service and data tied together. However, the web page thing is, again, in the middle.
I think it comes down to what the service represents itself as providing.
>The USPS doesn't know and has no way of knowing the contents of your package,
I can't tell you how many packages I've received, taped together with "this package was opened and searched" stickers on the outside...
Anyway. I'm not saying that Google is *exactly* like the USPS, but the analogy isn't bad. It's also similar to TV stations, yes. It's somewhere in the middle. Google is presenting the material, like the TV, but their customers are providing the material, like the USPS. The point of the OP was that Google shouldn't be 'absolved of wrongdoing' and my point is that Google itself is providing a venue for presentation of materials, and aggressively marketing that venue. As such they're not doing anything wrong. However, they benefit from contributors who provide copyrighted material, so it's in their interest to follow the law on copyright as little as they can. They do a cost/benefit analysis and chart a course that provides the best popularity/liability ratio. I'll bet Google has analysts who have calculated how long to leave a copyrighted bit of material up after receiving a takedown notice, such that they will maximize eyeballs while staying within legal parameters, and have probably coded this into an automated routine.
This gets into issues of intent to violate the law, much the way Napster did: if you advertise or represent your company's services on behalf of illegal actions, it makes sense to hold you responsible. If your company is being used for illegal actions without your knowledge, you shouldn't be responsible. In this case, Google benefits from its services being used illegally, but it's not apparent to me that they make any effort at all to encourage such use. (While, on the other hand, it would actually be against their interest to vigorously discourage such use.)
The problem is that copyright law is binary: either you're violating or you're not. I think Google is in an area between clearly responsible (like TV stations) and clearly not responsible (like the USPS) in the same way Napster was. At that point, what it comes down to is how the company represents its intents, which determines how it fits into the violating/not violating law realm.
The USPS is actively soliciting customers -- witness their sponsorship of the US Postal Team in the Tour de France for six years. They don't care what the customers send: they just want the customers' money. YouTube, in contrast, isn't to *MY* knowledge spending millions of dollars on high-profile sports teams to solicit customers. They just have a space where people can put videos. They don't care what people upload: they just want viewers' eyeballs. It so happens that copyrighted material gets a lot of eyeballs. Posting copyrighted material is illegal, and the posters shouldn't be doing it, and YouTube has a legal responsibility to remove it as soon as they can. But I don't see any evidence that YouTube is actively soliciting copyrighted material, any more or less than the USPS does. YouTube isn't selling copyrighted material. If they, or my ISP, or the Postal Service, did that, it'd be clearly illegal. YouTube is making money off the illegal use of copyrighted material, but so is the USPS if I'm sending mix tapes to friends. Where's the difference?
>In most cases I believe the court would even hold that as long as you weren't selling the CD's to your friends, that you are certainly able to share your music with them for personal use.
So explain why P2P/filesharing seems to be conviction-worthy? All a filesharer does is share music with friends for personal use.
My understanding of copyright law -- although I'm no lawyer -- is that you can't copy copyrighted material because you don't have the copyright, whether you own a copy of the material or not. No copyright: no copying, not for yourself, not for friends, not for strangers, not for sale, not for giving away. I think that's a lousy law, but my understanding is that's the law.
When I send mix CD's full of copyrighted material via USPS to my friends, USPS is using those copyrighted works to make money and doing so without permission. Does that absolve the USPS of wrong-doing?
I was reading a book about some early aviation firsts, and they had a story about two brothers who set an early record of something like 36 hours aloft. They refuelled by having a truck with jerrycans of gas drive along the runway, while one brother was out on the landing gear grabbing them off the truck and heaving them into the plane. THEN he got to pour them into the tank, which was located in front of the windshield. Even better, was relashing the valve clearances *while the engine was running*. (Which isn't as unusual as it sounds: the early Ford 427 engines also had valve adjustment done with the engine idling, which SUCKED, lemme tell you what.) So, using a UAV sounds like a vastly safer and more pleasant experience.
Last night I was reading a book called Eclectic Geology. It was published in 1888 (I believe) -- before the 1906 San Fran earthquake, anyway. So they discuss *everything* from basic chemistry up to planets and orbits, although since they didn't know about radioactivity they had a lot of trouble explaining stuff like volcanoes, the sun, and the like. But what I did find interesting is they said there were over 15,000 planets, and went on to list the eight major ones (since this was before Pluto was known) with the proviso that they didn't have any reasonable way to draw a dividing line between the major planets and the 15,000 minor planets. So, at least at that point, *everything* was a planet if it was going around the sun.
A lot of political commentators have made the case that what many people see as an enormous increase of power in the executive branch, was very specifically a result of people from the Nixon Administration, when serious curbs were put on the power of the Presidency, trying to reverse those curbs and restore the office back to its previous power.
To put this another way: they *liked* what Nixon was doing, and want Dubya to be able to do the same thing. It's always good to be the dictator's friend, especially if you're responsible for the dictator having more power.
I entirely agree with you: it's not particularly helpful. My point is that in a lot of cases that's all you're going to get, and in many cases that's all you *can* get, because that's all they can give you. In my case, I can tell you a little about *why* GIMP doesn't work for me, but not a lot -- and I use it a fair bit and do some programming. My girlfriend tries it and says "I don't understand it" and refuses to use it anymore. My brother tries it and says "I can't find anything I want to do" and refuses to use it anymore. So, the only data you get from them is 'it sucks' because their return type is boolean. My return type might be int: it's unclear to me which window is active, it's hard for me to find crop, stuff like that. Programmers, especially ones that have worked with graphics, return floats: they can tell *exactly* what's going on and what they'd rather do, and are liable to go off and DO it, make that modification, build GimpShop. But the problem remains: when you have users that A. don't do UI design, and B. are busy doing their jobs rather than analyzing the tool they use to do their jobs, it's very unlikely you'll get more than 'this sucks.' Which sucks.
I know people who spend money on Mac OSX. I know companies who spend money on Windows. I do not know a single person who has spent money -- as in paid more than the hardware cost -- for Windows. (In fact, I only know of one person, my mother, who has a legitimate copy of Windows on the computer, out of maybe a dozen Windows users I have as friends.)
That's a really good response, but at the same time it shows why so many people like Apple interfaces. It isn't even slightly helpful to rant about "wild-assed" and "geek developed UI's" because it doesn't help you figure out what the problem is to fix them -- but it isn't the user's job to analyze the problems. Nobody's paying the user to do that, and most users don't have any background in it. They just know it doesn't work: they don't know why. I've been using linux only for several years, and mostly linux since the '90's and I know the GIMP UI doesn't work. I don't know why. I can't tell someone why. All I can say is that when I use Photoshop, it's easier than GIMP. *THAT* is why competent companies pay professional people, who have education and experience, to design graphic interfaces that do, in fact, work. That illustrates a fundamental problem with most open-source: there isn't usually anyone who has the background to figure out how to make things work, involved in the process. There are just programmers, who make UI's that do exactly what they want, and users, who get UI's that don't do what they want.
I take it you haven't taught many third-graders how to spell, then.
To put it another way: just because *you* think it's harder to learn calculus than how to spell -- which, for you, it is -- does not mean that a third-grader finds learning to spell easier than an eleventh-grader finds learning calculus. I've seen first-graders who did not appear to be able to reliably distinguish the difference between 'p' and 'q'.
It's nice to know what shape a molecule is. It would be even nicer to be able to make a molecule in a particular shape. If you map an enzyme's active site -- its topology, charge distribution over the surface, possibility for organometallic or hydrogen bonding -- you have a much better chance of finding some interesting analog to the enzyme's substrate that'll make the system do something new. Even better, you could take an existing molecule that you *want*, and form an enzyme surface so that two cheap molecules, exposed to your new enzyme surface, will find it thermodynamically favorable to become the molecule you want, and suddenly you're in a very profitable business: you can breed chemical engineering factories rather than having to build them.
This poses a problem, similar to the (unstated) problem posed by the molecular printers in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age: what happens when this sort of stuff starts to become widely available and people start engineering enzymes or instructing their printers to produce, say, heroin, or TNT? With molecular printers, presumably the first versions would only be able to produce structural stuff: printing bicycles, not martinis. But if we get to the point where we can design enzymes for a desired substrate -> product reaction, we have a real problem because it's all wet chemistry and there isn't an obvious hardware/firmware way to block people making anything their inventive, twisted little minds can come up with.
Mind you, I think that's great. I miss the days where I could order almost any chemical I wanted without having to wade through masses of paperwork, tracking, and laws intended to ban any drug analog that might have pharma activity. But it is going to have some very exciting side-effects.
Bike racers of both sexes do it without stopping, and often without even pulling down their shorts. So do runners. I was helping with the Leadville 100, an ultramarathon 100 miles long, and can't tell you how often I saw people running and suddenly they were leaving wet footprints. At least bike racers (usually) have the civility to pull out of the paceline and let fly so you don't get a faceful of urine. And for that matter, it's better drafting someone who is taking a leak than someone who hit the pavement in an earlier crash, coz having bloody flecks from the guy ahead of you start appearing on your jersey makes you think about what you must be breathing...
Oh, I'm sure this could never POSSIBLY go wrong. The mind *boggles*. But it'll make for some great disaster movies, where Bruce Willis has to hack his way through a bulkhead to cut the wires for the autopilot before Boeing Jon can fly the remote-hijacked plane to Norway where all the passengers would, um, well, have something awful happen involving blonde women and glaciers.
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The impression I got in my comp and writing classes was that 'science fiction' already HAD plenty of disdain pointed at it by comp and writing teachers. (I had a creative writing seminar that started with the teacher saying "I will not accept or grade any genre fiction" which he later specifically defined as 'romance, science fiction, or fantasy'.) Speculative fiction is, at least in the classes I've taken, what teachers recommend people use to describe their work if they're trying to be taken seriously rather than shelved under 'genre'.
I didn't know that Heinlein came up with the term. That's interesting (especially since these days I can't stand almost anything of his, so I have to give him some credit.)
The plus side is we can wipe out LEGO skynet or the Series 200 Terminator easily by spraying them with gasoline and watching them dissolve.
The minus side is we'll've run out of gasoline by that time.
Ride bikes. You're not just saving the environment: you're helping fight off the LEGO-based destruction of humanity.
The science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem said (throughout his life) that if humans suddenly woke up with no literature or memory of what had passed before, the first thing we would start writing would be speculations on what the future holds, which is, in essence, science fiction. Good science fiction should be about what tomorrow will be like, if what's going on today keeps going on in some direction. Some of the most interesting feminist fiction -- Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale" or Marge Piercy's "He, She, It" or Sheri Tepper's "Grass" -- is science fiction. They call it 'speculative fiction' to avoid being accused of genre writing.
What the article is requesting is a different type of science fiction, in my opinion: fiction that is about science itself. I loved reading George Smith's "Venus Equilateral" (as an example) because it was a technical exploration of a future in which we were living the same way humans currently live: competing, cooperating or fighting, inventing, only in space stations, using an entirely tube-based technology. It was a vision of the future that would make an engineer smile, as people put together increasingly technical workarounds to fix problems they needed to overcome (which always produced new and unforseen problems, that the next set of stories would deal with) all based on vacuum-tube technology. To Smith, and to other writers at the time, particularly Heinlein and Asimov, the future looked like it was all based on increasingly sophisticated vacuum tubes. (Tube-based learning systems show up in Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer", as I recall.)
Actually, while I'm on about it: Asimov cheated, as regards hard science, by waving his hands and making up 'positronics' that drove his robots' brains, but his work wasn't essentially about robotics, it was about how humans dealt with what they had created. Smith and early Heinlein was very much about the extension of then-cutting-edge technology far into the future, and how that affected people.
Anyway. Good fiction should be about what could happen and how that would change people, whether focusing on individuals or the whole race. Science fiction fits into that.
Dude, if the robots that overthrow humanity are made of LEGOs, my head is going to explode trying to decide how I feel about the situation.
MY LEGO assistant is only smart enough to try and grab rings and feed them into a spotwelder, but even that could be dangerous if the controller (my computer) turns to EEEVILE, as in fru-its of the deviiiiil.
Viacom isn't exactly shameless, and the suit's certainly not ridiculous if they win: they think they can extract more money with this suit than without. I think it'd be funny if Google removed links to any of Viacom's material from their servers. Viacom, like many other people, want Google to push traffic their way, but only under their terms. One can hardly blame them. They want the maximum money possible. So does Google. It's a pushing match that establishes the value of Google's advertising -- because, fundamentally, web search engines are free advertising, and as far as I'm concerned, Google is figuring out ways to generate money by free advertising, that come out of the pockets of the people who are being advertised. They're trying to figure out how to get the free advertising without paying for it. Lawsuits are one of the ways they're trying.
Oh, I don't think it's clear-cut at ALL. They cannot be regarded as acting strictly like a common carrier, because they stand to benefit financially from copyright violation, but even THAT isn't clear because they're benefitting from the side-effect (ad revenue) rather than from the violation itself.
It's a very muddy situation, and that mud is to Google's benefit. But with that (and a lot of stuff I've written elsewhere in this thread) said, it's not clear to me that Google is encouraging copyright violation or representing YouTube as a clearinghouse for copyrighted material.
This does bring up a question about common carrier status, though: if Google is required to analyze what YouTube is showing and remove copyright violating material from it, do they have to similarly analyze every little webpage for copyright violations against other websites or all the books in the world? If so, does the phone company have to start analyzing phone calls for when I play copyrighted music over the phone to a friend? I would argue no, in the latter case, because the phone company does not directly benefit from copyright violation per se, just from the call. YouTube is directly benefitting from the copyright violating material, because it's not available elsewhere (legally.) In only one of the cases are the service and data tied together. However, the web page thing is, again, in the middle.
I think it comes down to what the service represents itself as providing.
>The USPS doesn't know and has no way of knowing the contents of your package,
I can't tell you how many packages I've received, taped together with "this package was opened and searched" stickers on the outside...
Anyway. I'm not saying that Google is *exactly* like the USPS, but the analogy isn't bad. It's also similar to TV stations, yes. It's somewhere in the middle. Google is presenting the material, like the TV, but their customers are providing the material, like the USPS.
The point of the OP was that Google shouldn't be 'absolved of wrongdoing' and my point is that Google itself is providing a venue for presentation of materials, and aggressively marketing that venue. As such they're not doing anything wrong. However, they benefit from contributors who provide copyrighted material, so it's in their interest to follow the law on copyright as little as they can. They do a cost/benefit analysis and chart a course that provides the best popularity/liability ratio. I'll bet Google has analysts who have calculated how long to leave a copyrighted bit of material up after receiving a takedown notice, such that they will maximize eyeballs while staying within legal parameters, and have probably coded this into an automated routine.
This gets into issues of intent to violate the law, much the way Napster did: if you advertise or represent your company's services on behalf of illegal actions, it makes sense to hold you responsible. If your company is being used for illegal actions without your knowledge, you shouldn't be responsible. In this case, Google benefits from its services being used illegally, but it's not apparent to me that they make any effort at all to encourage such use. (While, on the other hand, it would actually be against their interest to vigorously discourage such use.)
The problem is that copyright law is binary: either you're violating or you're not. I think Google is in an area between clearly responsible (like TV stations) and clearly not responsible (like the USPS) in the same way Napster was. At that point, what it comes down to is how the company represents its intents, which determines how it fits into the violating/not violating law realm.
The USPS is actively soliciting customers -- witness their sponsorship of the US Postal Team in the Tour de France for six years. They don't care what the customers send: they just want the customers' money.
YouTube, in contrast, isn't to *MY* knowledge spending millions of dollars on high-profile sports teams to solicit customers. They just have a space where people can put videos. They don't care what people upload: they just want viewers' eyeballs.
It so happens that copyrighted material gets a lot of eyeballs. Posting copyrighted material is illegal, and the posters shouldn't be doing it, and YouTube has a legal responsibility to remove it as soon as they can. But I don't see any evidence that YouTube is actively soliciting copyrighted material, any more or less than the USPS does.
YouTube isn't selling copyrighted material. If they, or my ISP, or the Postal Service, did that, it'd be clearly illegal. YouTube is making money off the illegal use of copyrighted material, but so is the USPS if I'm sending mix tapes to friends. Where's the difference?
>In most cases I believe the court would even hold that as long as you weren't selling the CD's to your friends, that you are certainly able to share your music with them for personal use.
So explain why P2P/filesharing seems to be conviction-worthy? All a filesharer does is share music with friends for personal use.
My understanding of copyright law -- although I'm no lawyer -- is that you can't copy copyrighted material because you don't have the copyright, whether you own a copy of the material or not. No copyright: no copying, not for yourself, not for friends, not for strangers, not for sale, not for giving away. I think that's a lousy law, but my understanding is that's the law.
When I send mix CD's full of copyrighted material via USPS to my friends, USPS is using those copyrighted works to make money and doing so without permission. Does that absolve the USPS of wrong-doing?
Pshaw! This is a *classic* example of a submarine patent!
DAYS?
Lordy.
I feel like I've been through the wringer after 8 *hours* flying left-seat.
Thanks for the correction.
I was reading a book about some early aviation firsts, and they had a story about two brothers who set an early record of something like 36 hours aloft. They refuelled by having a truck with jerrycans of gas drive along the runway, while one brother was out on the landing gear grabbing them off the truck and heaving them into the plane. THEN he got to pour them into the tank, which was located in front of the windshield. Even better, was relashing the valve clearances *while the engine was running*. (Which isn't as unusual as it sounds: the early Ford 427 engines also had valve adjustment done with the engine idling, which SUCKED, lemme tell you what.)
So, using a UAV sounds like a vastly safer and more pleasant experience.
Last night I was reading a book called Eclectic Geology. It was published in 1888 (I believe) -- before the 1906 San Fran earthquake, anyway. So they discuss *everything* from basic chemistry up to planets and orbits, although since they didn't know about radioactivity they had a lot of trouble explaining stuff like volcanoes, the sun, and the like. But what I did find interesting is they said there were over 15,000 planets, and went on to list the eight major ones (since this was before Pluto was known) with the proviso that they didn't have any reasonable way to draw a dividing line between the major planets and the 15,000 minor planets. So, at least at that point, *everything* was a planet if it was going around the sun.
A lot of political commentators have made the case that what many people see as an enormous increase of power in the executive branch, was very specifically a result of people from the Nixon Administration, when serious curbs were put on the power of the Presidency, trying to reverse those curbs and restore the office back to its previous power.
To put this another way: they *liked* what Nixon was doing, and want Dubya to be able to do the same thing.
It's always good to be the dictator's friend, especially if you're responsible for the dictator having more power.
I entirely agree with you: it's not particularly helpful. My point is that in a lot of cases that's all you're going to get, and in many cases that's all you *can* get, because that's all they can give you. In my case, I can tell you a little about *why* GIMP doesn't work for me, but not a lot -- and I use it a fair bit and do some programming. My girlfriend tries it and says "I don't understand it" and refuses to use it anymore. My brother tries it and says "I can't find anything I want to do" and refuses to use it anymore. So, the only data you get from them is 'it sucks' because their return type is boolean. My return type might be int: it's unclear to me which window is active, it's hard for me to find crop, stuff like that. Programmers, especially ones that have worked with graphics, return floats: they can tell *exactly* what's going on and what they'd rather do, and are liable to go off and DO it, make that modification, build GimpShop. But the problem remains: when you have users that A. don't do UI design, and B. are busy doing their jobs rather than analyzing the tool they use to do their jobs, it's very unlikely you'll get more than 'this sucks.' Which sucks.
I know people who spend money on Mac OSX.
I know companies who spend money on Windows.
I do not know a single person who has spent money -- as in paid more than the hardware cost -- for Windows.
(In fact, I only know of one person, my mother, who has a legitimate copy of Windows on the computer, out of maybe a dozen Windows users I have as friends.)
That's a really good response, but at the same time it shows why so many people like Apple interfaces.
It isn't even slightly helpful to rant about "wild-assed" and "geek developed UI's" because it doesn't help you figure out what the problem is to fix them -- but it isn't the user's job to analyze the problems. Nobody's paying the user to do that, and most users don't have any background in it. They just know it doesn't work: they don't know why. I've been using linux only for several years, and mostly linux since the '90's and I know the GIMP UI doesn't work. I don't know why. I can't tell someone why. All I can say is that when I use Photoshop, it's easier than GIMP.
*THAT* is why competent companies pay professional people, who have education and experience, to design graphic interfaces that do, in fact, work. That illustrates a fundamental problem with most open-source: there isn't usually anyone who has the background to figure out how to make things work, involved in the process. There are just programmers, who make UI's that do exactly what they want, and users, who get UI's that don't do what they want.
At least it'd be, y'know, perky.
>he is responsible for nearly every kind of almost-but-not-quite criminal corporate misconduct in the book and then inventing some.
So, an improvement on our current crop of politicians, then: creative *and* reluctant to blatantly violate laws.
I take it you haven't taught many third-graders how to spell, then.
To put it another way: just because *you* think it's harder to learn calculus than how to spell -- which, for you, it is -- does not mean that a third-grader finds learning to spell easier than an eleventh-grader finds learning calculus. I've seen first-graders who did not appear to be able to reliably distinguish the difference between 'p' and 'q'.
It's nice to know what shape a molecule is. It would be even nicer to be able to make a molecule in a particular shape. If you map an enzyme's active site -- its topology, charge distribution over the surface, possibility for organometallic or hydrogen bonding -- you have a much better chance of finding some interesting analog to the enzyme's substrate that'll make the system do something new. Even better, you could take an existing molecule that you *want*, and form an enzyme surface so that two cheap molecules, exposed to your new enzyme surface, will find it thermodynamically favorable to become the molecule you want, and suddenly you're in a very profitable business: you can breed chemical engineering factories rather than having to build them.
This poses a problem, similar to the (unstated) problem posed by the molecular printers in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age: what happens when this sort of stuff starts to become widely available and people start engineering enzymes or instructing their printers to produce, say, heroin, or TNT? With molecular printers, presumably the first versions would only be able to produce structural stuff: printing bicycles, not martinis. But if we get to the point where we can design enzymes for a desired substrate -> product reaction, we have a real problem because it's all wet chemistry and there isn't an obvious hardware/firmware way to block people making anything their inventive, twisted little minds can come up with.
Mind you, I think that's great. I miss the days where I could order almost any chemical I wanted without having to wade through masses of paperwork, tracking, and laws intended to ban any drug analog that might have pharma activity. But it is going to have some very exciting side-effects.
Bike racers of both sexes do it without stopping, and often without even pulling down their shorts. So do runners. I was helping with the Leadville 100, an ultramarathon 100 miles long, and can't tell you how often I saw people running and suddenly they were leaving wet footprints. At least bike racers (usually) have the civility to pull out of the paceline and let fly so you don't get a faceful of urine. And for that matter, it's better drafting someone who is taking a leak than someone who hit the pavement in an earlier crash, coz having bloody flecks from the guy ahead of you start appearing on your jersey makes you think about what you must be breathing...
Oh, I'm sure this could never POSSIBLY go wrong.
The mind *boggles*.
But it'll make for some great disaster movies, where Bruce Willis has to hack his way through a bulkhead to cut the wires for the autopilot before Boeing Jon can fly the remote-hijacked plane to Norway where all the passengers would, um, well, have something awful happen involving blonde women and glaciers.
rock *on*! Biochemist bonding moment...