Is this how corporations will respond when we have the technology to have a microwave sized device that can build almost any consumer object under the control of a computer?
Nope, they'll immediately ensure they buy up all the raw materials ownership - metals, ores, quarries.. Your replicators have to have some input material.
You're missing one major point: raw materials. Sure, I can have an AI and some hardware that can create anything I want. But where does it get the right atoms from to make it?
This is why the physical world will always be different from virtual worlds like Second Life - whoever controls the resources will be able to charge what they like for them.
I don't know how it works now, but if I recall correctly the big change that happened when CDDB became Gracenote was that they started insisting on a fee to be paid by application developers wishing to write code that would connect to their database. You would need some kind of unique developer key to connect, which cost money. This immediately meant that all the open source software that was previously able to use CDDB was suddenly without an information source for some of their functionality. It took some time for freedb to be set up with servers that could handle the required load, and for all the end-user application software to be able to redirect to those servers. This is the fundamental reason why a lot of people got very upset with Gracenote, because there was a time when all the information freely submitted to CDDB was unusable, as none of the pieces of OSS that people were using were able to access the data.
So, you may not pay money yourself, but that doesn't mean that money is not changing hands in order for you to be able to use that feature.
Re: incident with the taxi driver. I had a massive argument a few weeks back with people I would normally regard to be reasonable thinkers about the shooting incident. Basically they were all the same - "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" kind of thing. But this guy was shot, dead, for no reason! I'm glad I'm not the only person who can see how this could be a problem.
What I want to know is what the other party is doing with their trademark. If they built an email service, and had millions of people relying on it, I'd understand, but if the trademark owner isn't doing anything with the name, I'd say give it to google. I hope the court takes into consideration the confusion this will bring to all these people with email addresses, and takes a look at the few, if any people who are currently confused because of the original trademark holder.
The other company uses the name for a web-based email client. They registered the name in 2002. Much as I like Google, they're in the wrong this time.
the god argument is special because it cannot be falsified.
Actually, it's not special at all - it's one of many hundreds of arguments that could be made which can't be immediately falsified but no-one (or very few people, hopefully!) believes..
An above post gave the example of saying something like "The universe was created by a mound of purple jelly" which is just as unfalsifiable. So there's nothing special about the god argument.
That missing audio input socket is a real pain - I don't understand it since it's not like it would take up a mass of real estate in the case. That's the biggest problem I have with my Mac mini - I bought it as a general desktop appliance but I can't use it for video conferencing via e.g. Yahoo messenger because I can't plug a mic in.. Didn't even occur to me to check the specs for it, I just assumed it was a basic thing.
I'm currently looking at USB microphones and a USB hub.. looks like that's the only solution here.
Is anyone else using the Solaris/SPARC Firefox release? With every version up to and including 1.0 I've had severe problems when typing into the browser, either into the URL bar or HTML form entries. It seems to be in some kind of "advanced text entry" mode whereby hitting one key straight after another will do funny things - for example hitting "co" quickly produces a copyright symbol, not what I want if I'm going to a.com or.co.uk URL!
Similarly, typing "th" produces a Greek symbol (teta?), and the space bar just plain won't work unless I leave a gap of about two seconds between characters, which I find quite hard since I type very quickly..
This doesn't happen in any other Solaris app for me, by the way, so I don't think it's a Solaris setting - sounds like something has been turned on in Firefox that I don't want. It would be nice if there was a good way to turn it off.
I've actually had to type this message in xemacs and then paste it into the browser because of this problem.
This gesture is actually anti-French if you go back far enough. The story goes something like this: at the Battle of Agincourt, the English were beating the French due to their superior longbow technology. The two fingers in question are essential for using a bow, so the French used to cut those fingers off any Englishman they captured. In return, uncaptured Englishmen would show the fingers to the French as a threatening gesture and to show that they still had them..
Country-specific domains might be the answer here - you don't need an international (com, net etc) domain suffix for a stable email address. In the UK we have.uk run by Nominet who seem far more clued up than Verisign.
I'm sure there is a.us domain somewhere even if no-one uses it;)
As for the rest of your post, you said nothing I hadn't already thought about. What you failed to do is address MY point, that it is irresponsible to make these claims with what is essentially NO proof.
So how responsible is it to ignore a potential danger? Surely the right thing to do here is to assess the risk. If there is any risk, however small, you have to make that information available to the public. This scientist has weighed all the available evidence, and has decided that yes, there is just enough information available now (where there wasn't 5 years ago) to make it clear that this could be a real problem. He's not saying that there is conclusive proof (in fact quite the opposite, I think), but he's saying there is enough evidence about to warrant caution.
That, to me, is the responsible approach in this case.
You assume that fewer people will smoke under prohibition.
Actually my choice of "smoking was banned" was not quite what I meant to say - a better choice of words would have been something like "if the dangers of smoking had been made apparent back in the 60s, rather than being covered up by the tobacco manufacturers". See, a lot of people did not get access to information relating to smoking being harmful and that may just have swayed some of them. I'm sure fewer people smoke in western countries today than did back then, due to more information being available about the side effects.
The analogy I want to draw is that, just as with smoking, we have a bunch of people saying "Oh, I will go ahead and do it anyway because the evidence is not strong enough yet" while we have a government scientist saying "well, in the last few years there has been at least a tiny amount of evidence that it might be harmful, so I'm recommending caution for now.."
As with smoking, I'm sure that public demand will cause most people to ignore the scientific advice, but at least on this issue we've been clearly warned.
On no account am I recommending a ban on mobile phones, by the way, I don't want anyone to misinterpret my original post in that way.
Show me something SUBSTANTIVE (this study is not)before you make chicken little claims. It's the responsible thing to do.
It's not quite as easy as that. If you're a government scientific advisor, you need to give warnings before absolute proof is known, because if it later turns out that there really is harm, you could have prevented a catastrophe. If there is any chance of harm, it will be happening right now to kids - should we take that chance? This guy has to make that call, which is not an easy decision either way when there is so little evidence.
Smoking might be a good example of this - the arguments I'm hearing now remind me of similar arguments made 50 years ago about smoking "Oh, the studies aren't conclusive so it's all just scaremongering" etc.. However it's clear that if smoking had been banned a long time ago, fewer people would have died as a result.
If you read the article, this guy is saying that he thought the same as you 5 years ago, in that there were no conclusive studies and he saw no need for alarm. He's saying that the fact there are now 4 studies which appear to show some harm implies that he needs to make it clear to people that we could indeed have a problem, and the sensible thing to do is to restrict usage for those people most vulnerable (under-8s) until we can prove it conclusively one way or the other.
This seems to me to be a far more responsible approach than to stick your head in the sand and say "Nope, not proved 100% conclusively, can't be true.. come back when you know for certain". How responsible would it be to let a whole generation of kids grow up with an increased risk of brain tumours?
Well, covergence didn't/hasn't happen with mobile phones - they still have their own prefix set.
As long as the pricing might be different for people calling different types of numbers, it makes sense to have a different prefix so that you know whether or not you're likely to be charged more/less for the call.
According to the rules of the Clay Institute, any purported proof must survive two years of academic scrutiny before the prize can be collected. A recent example of a proof that did not survive even this long was a five-page paper presented by M. J. Dunwoody in April 2002 (MathWorld news story, April 18, 2002), which was quickly found to be fundamentally flawed.
Welcome to Slashdot, the home of dreadful analogies. I think this one is amongst the worst I've seen though.
I'm struggling to understand how the following two are in any way related:
1. Borrowing an object for free, for which the only catch is that you have to give the Library some form of ID to give them a fighting chance of recovering the physical object you borrowed in the event that you decide not to return it.
2. Paying a company to transport you from one place to another, and complaining that they require proof of your identity in order to do so.
Note: I'm not arguing on either side here, I just think the analogy is appalling. I chose to reply rather than to mod down.
The problem here is when you have been a specialist in your industry for a while. Eventually you reach a point where you are one of the best X people in your specific area, and thus command a high premium at that job. However, when put up against the mass of people more generally qualified for a more general job, you don't have any additional skills to compete with since your specialist skills are no longer relevant.
Not only does this mean you'll get paid less doing a job outside of your specialist area, it means that you may even have a problem finding employment, especially if you're slightly older and competing against college graduates who would work for a lower pay packet.
The Euro aside, the anti-science stuff is something I have a hard time swallowing. I'm fed up of our increasing hatred of anything designated "scientific", despite the fact that the modern world would not exist without technology. The Green policy leaflet is essentially saying "science is bad, back to nature" (not in as many words, but between the lines) and I hate that with a vengeance. It's just stupid and ill-informed.
As with all things the truth is somewhere in the middle - science brings us benefits but we should not ignore the environmental effects. A balance is the right way forward.
You're right, in that I'm not an economist or a banker so I won't argue on those grounds as I'll lose:)
My main reason for approving of the Euro is a philosophical one - the UKIP/BNP/Tories use it as a crutch for their xenophobic/reactionary policies. I'm opposed to those, and I believe that adopting the Euro will help to eliminate some of the social differences we have with the rest of the world, and help to prevent us from becoming more insular like the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, they'll immediately ensure they buy up all the raw materials ownership - metals, ores, quarries.. Your replicators have to have some input material.
Q.
You're missing one major point: raw materials. Sure, I can have an AI and some hardware that can create anything I want. But where does it get the right atoms from to make it?
This is why the physical world will always be different from virtual worlds like Second Life - whoever controls the resources will be able to charge what they like for them.
Q.
I don't know how it works now, but if I recall correctly the big change that happened when CDDB became Gracenote was that they started insisting on a fee to be paid by application developers wishing to write code that would connect to their database. You would need some kind of unique developer key to connect, which cost money. This immediately meant that all the open source software that was previously able to use CDDB was suddenly without an information source for some of their functionality. It took some time for freedb to be set up with servers that could handle the required load, and for all the end-user application software to be able to redirect to those servers. This is the fundamental reason why a lot of people got very upset with Gracenote, because there was a time when all the information freely submitted to CDDB was unusable, as none of the pieces of OSS that people were using were able to access the data.
So, you may not pay money yourself, but that doesn't mean that money is not changing hands in order for you to be able to use that feature.
Q.
Re: incident with the taxi driver. I had a massive argument a few weeks back with people I would normally regard to be reasonable thinkers about the shooting incident. Basically they were all the same - "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" kind of thing. But this guy was shot, dead, for no reason! I'm glad I'm not the only person who can see how this could be a problem.
Q.
the levels of undetected plagiarism are quite low
Just a quick question - how do you measure levels of "undetected plagiarism"..? Enquiring minds want to know.
Q.
What I want to know is what the other party is doing with their trademark. If they built an email service, and had millions of people relying on it, I'd understand, but if the trademark owner isn't doing anything with the name, I'd say give it to google. I hope the court takes into consideration the confusion this will bring to all these people with email addresses, and takes a look at the few, if any people who are currently confused because of the original trademark holder.
The other company uses the name for a web-based email client. They registered the name in 2002. Much as I like Google, they're in the wrong this time.
Q.
its still beta. i'm sure the things will improve by the time they do the release version.
Um, when did Google last actually move from beta to release on anything..? Did I miss something?
Q.
But I have "Dark Side Of The Moon" on my iPod.. does that count? :)
Q.
the god argument is special because it cannot be falsified.
Actually, it's not special at all - it's one of many hundreds of arguments that could be made which can't be immediately falsified but no-one (or very few people, hopefully!) believes..
An above post gave the example of saying something like "The universe was created by a mound of purple jelly" which is just as unfalsifiable. So there's nothing special about the god argument.
Q.
That missing audio input socket is a real pain - I don't understand it since it's not like it would take up a mass of real estate in the case. That's the biggest problem I have with my Mac mini - I bought it as a general desktop appliance but I can't use it for video conferencing via e.g. Yahoo messenger because I can't plug a mic in.. Didn't even occur to me to check the specs for it, I just assumed it was a basic thing.
I'm currently looking at USB microphones and a USB hub.. looks like that's the only solution here.
Q.
Is anyone else using the Solaris/SPARC Firefox release? With every version up to and including 1.0 I've had severe problems when typing into the browser, either into the URL bar or HTML form entries. It seems to be in some kind of "advanced text entry" mode whereby hitting one key straight after another will do funny things - for example hitting "co" quickly produces a copyright symbol, not what I want if I'm going to a .com or .co.uk URL!
Similarly, typing "th" produces a Greek symbol (teta?), and the space bar just plain won't work unless I leave a gap of about two seconds between characters, which I find quite hard since I type very quickly..
This doesn't happen in any other Solaris app for me, by the way, so I don't think it's a Solaris setting - sounds like something has been turned on in Firefox that I don't want. It would be nice if there was a good way to turn it off.
I've actually had to type this message in xemacs and then paste it into the browser because of this problem.
Q.
This gesture is actually anti-French if you go back far enough. The story goes something like this: at the Battle of Agincourt, the English were beating the French due to their superior longbow technology. The two fingers in question are essential for using a bow, so the French used to cut those fingers off any Englishman they captured. In return, uncaptured Englishmen would show the fingers to the French as a threatening gesture and to show that they still had them..
Q.
Country-specific domains might be the answer here - you don't need an international (com, net etc) domain suffix for a stable email address. In the UK we have .uk run by Nominet who seem far more clued up than Verisign.
.us domain somewhere even if no-one uses it ;)
I'm sure there is a
Q.
As for the rest of your post, you said nothing I hadn't already thought about. What you failed to do is address MY point, that it is irresponsible to make these claims with what is essentially NO proof.
So how responsible is it to ignore a potential danger? Surely the right thing to do here is to assess the risk. If there is any risk, however small, you have to make that information available to the public. This scientist has weighed all the available evidence, and has decided that yes, there is just enough information available now (where there wasn't 5 years ago) to make it clear that this could be a real problem. He's not saying that there is conclusive proof (in fact quite the opposite, I think), but he's saying there is enough evidence about to warrant caution.
That, to me, is the responsible approach in this case.
Q.
You assume that fewer people will smoke under prohibition.
Actually my choice of "smoking was banned" was not quite what I meant to say - a better choice of words would have been something like "if the dangers of smoking had been made apparent back in the 60s, rather than being covered up by the tobacco manufacturers". See, a lot of people did not get access to information relating to smoking being harmful and that may just have swayed some of them. I'm sure fewer people smoke in western countries today than did back then, due to more information being available about the side effects.
The analogy I want to draw is that, just as with smoking, we have a bunch of people saying "Oh, I will go ahead and do it anyway because the evidence is not strong enough yet" while we have a government scientist saying "well, in the last few years there has been at least a tiny amount of evidence that it might be harmful, so I'm recommending caution for now.."
As with smoking, I'm sure that public demand will cause most people to ignore the scientific advice, but at least on this issue we've been clearly warned.
On no account am I recommending a ban on mobile phones, by the way, I don't want anyone to misinterpret my original post in that way.
Q.
Show me something SUBSTANTIVE (this study is not)before you make chicken little claims. It's the responsible thing to do.
It's not quite as easy as that. If you're a government scientific advisor, you need to give warnings before absolute proof is known, because if it later turns out that there really is harm, you could have prevented a catastrophe. If there is any chance of harm, it will be happening right now to kids - should we take that chance? This guy has to make that call, which is not an easy decision either way when there is so little evidence.
Smoking might be a good example of this - the arguments I'm hearing now remind me of similar arguments made 50 years ago about smoking "Oh, the studies aren't conclusive so it's all just scaremongering" etc.. However it's clear that if smoking had been banned a long time ago, fewer people would have died as a result.
If you read the article, this guy is saying that he thought the same as you 5 years ago, in that there were no conclusive studies and he saw no need for alarm. He's saying that the fact there are now 4 studies which appear to show some harm implies that he needs to make it clear to people that we could indeed have a problem, and the sensible thing to do is to restrict usage for those people most vulnerable (under-8s) until we can prove it conclusively one way or the other.
This seems to me to be a far more responsible approach than to stick your head in the sand and say "Nope, not proved 100% conclusively, can't be true.. come back when you know for certain". How responsible would it be to let a whole generation of kids grow up with an increased risk of brain tumours?
Q.
"I IsNot an English major."
:)
Yes! Ali G has prior art
Q.
Well, covergence didn't/hasn't happen with mobile phones - they still have their own prefix set.
As long as the pricing might be different for people calling different types of numbers, it makes sense to have a different prefix so that you know whether or not you're likely to be charged more/less for the call.
Q.
Q.
Some people would argue that this has already happened..
Q.
You have to show ID to check out a library book.
Welcome to Slashdot, the home of dreadful analogies. I think this one is amongst the worst I've seen though.
I'm struggling to understand how the following two are in any way related:
1. Borrowing an object for free, for which the only catch is that you have to give the Library some form of ID to give them a fighting chance of recovering the physical object you borrowed in the event that you decide not to return it.
2. Paying a company to transport you from one place to another, and complaining that they require proof of your identity in order to do so.
Note: I'm not arguing on either side here, I just think the analogy is appalling. I chose to reply rather than to mod down.
Q.
The problem here is when you have been a specialist in your industry for a while. Eventually you reach a point where you are one of the best X people in your specific area, and thus command a high premium at that job. However, when put up against the mass of people more generally qualified for a more general job, you don't have any additional skills to compete with since your specialist skills are no longer relevant.
Not only does this mean you'll get paid less doing a job outside of your specialist area, it means that you may even have a problem finding employment, especially if you're slightly older and competing against college graduates who would work for a lower pay packet.
Q.
The Euro aside, the anti-science stuff is something I have a hard time swallowing. I'm fed up of our increasing hatred of anything designated "scientific", despite the fact that the modern world would not exist without technology. The Green policy leaflet is essentially saying "science is bad, back to nature" (not in as many words, but between the lines) and I hate that with a vengeance. It's just stupid and ill-informed.
As with all things the truth is somewhere in the middle - science brings us benefits but we should not ignore the environmental effects. A balance is the right way forward.
Q.
You're right, in that I'm not an economist or a banker so I won't argue on those grounds as I'll lose :)
My main reason for approving of the Euro is a philosophical one - the UKIP/BNP/Tories use it as a crutch for their xenophobic/reactionary policies. I'm opposed to those, and I believe that adopting the Euro will help to eliminate some of the social differences we have with the rest of the world, and help to prevent us from becoming more insular like the US.
Q.