Price isn't the issue. If soimething costs too much you don't buy it. But that doesn't give you the right to steal it (and yes, aquiring copyright material without the copyright holder's consent is theft).
I'm amazed and disgusted that morality is based on price.
Hlack market economies create violence. All of them. They have no real choice. The reason is simple: no recourse to the law.
What do you do if you buy a bottle rum at a liqour store and find out it's nothing but water? You call the police and have that jackass arrested for selling bogus merchandice.
What do you do if you buy some weed from a dealer and it turns out to be catnip and oregano? Call the cops? Last person I heard about that did that was arrested. No. You either live with the fact that you got ripped off or you shoot the sonofabitch.
Because the sale, puirchase and distribution of pot, or any other illegal drug, requires that the manufacturers/growers, distributors, sellers and end consumers all operate outside the law. This leaves them only one recourse when things go bad. This also leaves them no choice in how to deal with conflicts of any kind.
If legalized and sold through normal sales channels, drugstores (hey, that's a catchy name) drug-related violence will drop like a stone. If you can call the cops because that jackass at the corner pharmacy cuts his stock of Vantage Ultra Gold Columbian with catnip then you don't have to shoot him for it. If he knows that he can call the coips because you passed a bad check he knows he dowsn't have to shoot you for trying not to pay.
It's like the liqour business durring prohibition, or the porn industry when it was illegal to make blue movies, or like prostitution is right now. When you make something that people want illegal, you create a lawless subculture that is infested with violence.
Too bad your memory is not as good as your math. The P60, P66 and early P75 chips had the math problems. They were cleard up before the introduction of the P90.
Considering that the whiole of "the mind" is contained within the brain the question is moot. Once you have a brain, no matter if it is boligical, mechanical, electronic or a software simulation, you have a mind. Provided the silly thing works.
The real question is: at what point does a artificial brain have enough complexity to create a mind?
Actually, they are only using the Air India jet to make sure everything will actually fit inside the real jet before they bother shipping it all over the place. Sort of like those shoe-size things they use in shoe stores.
I've got four of the old beasts and they all work like champs. The oldest is about 15 years old and apart from a missing keycap it is in perfect working order. Best keyboards money can buy.
Addenda, but not wholesale revokation. Realitivity explains physics in realms where Newtonian physics fails. It does not require new laws that contradict the existing laws.
And remember, the list does not say "anything containing any of these points is automatically false", and he deliberately states that valid scientific discoveries may contain serveral voilations and still be valid.
If a discovery violates one or more "rules" but has a body of verifiable evidence then the discovery can be further tested to see if it's true.
The rule about "ancient wisdom" is only valid if you can't test the ideas expressed. There is no scinetifically verifiable evidence to suggest that a opper bracelett will help your arthritis. But there is scientifically verifiable evidence that says that asprin, a drug used for thousands of years) can reduce pain.
Freedom of speech is a bitch, isn't it? Freedom of speech means that I am going to hear/read/see things that I find offensive (like your little hissy-fit) and you are going to see/read/hear things that you find offensive (like me mocking you). But that's the price we pay for the ability to speak our minds.
There have always been and shall always be those who abuse the system, who push the limits too far. But does that mean we have to give up our rights and freedoms because of these assholes? You woiuld surrender your freedoms that easily?
No, they are losers for not bothering to take the time to do their job. You want a gun in the house? Put a trigger lock on that bastard and lock up the ammunition so little Billy doesn't accidently kill his baby sister. Want to keep poisonous household chemicals around? Keep them locked away from small, courious hands. Want to have a network in the house? Make sure that your kids can't use it in ways that you think will harm them. Don't know how to do that? Bug a geek friend or hire a geek to set it up for you. It's not even hard to lock a PC off of the Net with a home router.
We should be giving them the tools to deal with nastiness and worse.
Not gonna happen. As evidenced by other replies I can tell you that people are far too lazy and incompitent to ever do this. This approach takes too much work. It also means that people have to actually think, and we all know that that is the one thing that more people hate beyond all other things.
A gree with you 100% on all points. I just don't see the lazy bastards in our world ever going long with it. They don't want to spend the time, energy or thought on giving their kids the tools to handle life. That's too much work, too much time that they'd rather spend sitting around Starbucks in their SUVs pretending to not be married with kids while their little darlings play unsupervised at the public library after being abandoned there like the poor little match girl (my wife has some serious horror stories about that kind of thing).
You don't need Internet access to get an education. And you certainly don't need it in your dorm room. They could close all access to the outside world from everywhere but the computer labs if they felt like being mean about it. And it would still be their right to do so. They own the pipes. And that's what matters here.
As long as it's the school's network they can say what yiou can use it for and how much is fair for you to use. Use of the school's network is a priveledge, not a right.
The space shuttle program was supposed to have been abandoned a decade ago, but boeing and lockheed(each making 500 million a year off the shuttle) have such a strong lobby that any plans for a replacement are doomed to failure.
Funny, I thought the shuttle program was still in place because NASA didn't have the money to replace the aging, and badly designed fleet. For all that Boeing and Lockheed makes on the current fleet, imagine how much they would make on a new fleet.
What of fuel cells and alternative power sources?
These things take money and time to research and develope. Fuel cells will not jump out of the woodwork and run our cars. We got lucky with gasoline as it was relatively cheap to extract and refine and it converts to a lot of energy when burned.
As long as people are making millions off current technology, and as long as the holders and controlers of that technology are in power, nothing will get done.
Not quite. As long as the current technology solves the problems people want solved it will stay around. Take a look at all of the technologies that have died in the last hundred years. Where's that 8-track tape deck that used to be in every car? How about wire recorders? Steam powered trains (outside of museums and tourist spits)? gear-drive dental tools? etc...
If the government would give Ford and GM some r&d money, you would be surprised how fast a fuel cell (or equivalent) automobile would appear.
They already do. Shitloads of money. The government pours massive ammouints of money into all kinds of high tech/new technology projects (or didn't you notice the whole Internet thing?).
Just look how long its taking our military to abandon large pieces of artillery and slow tanks in favor of a more mobile force. Things in place become immovable. Its basic physics.
Until very recently the tank did the job needed of it. It is only within the last decade that our military needs have changed so much that tanks are no longer the best answer. But do lighter fighting vehicles just jump out of the woodwork ready to go? No. They tike time and money to design. Lots of money and lots of time. You screw up the design of a fighting vehicle and you have screwed your army into the ground.
You are not completely wrong, but your reasoning is too simplistic.
I would rather that we were in Africa than in Iraq. If we are going to rationalize our useless war with Iraq by claiming that we're doing it for their own good, we should be willing to do the same for nations not sitting on giant oil reserves.
Looking through the Syndicated section I see a total lack of concern for safety. Mailmen with rocket pack but no helmets or flight suits. Space hospitals with no failsafe systems. etc... Amazing.
Hands up, everyone one who bothered to read the article. That's what, six of you? Wonderful.
The article states that Sony and Nintendo are also working on arcade versions of their systems. Is anyone crying doom and gloom over this and claiming that Sony and Nintendo are idiots who must be desperate? No? Okay, why is (almost) everyoine saying that about Microsoft?
Do I need to even ask? No. I don't. It's the typical unthinking knee-jerk "M$ is a bunch of stupid poopy-heads and Bill Gate$ eats babies!" panty twsiting that goes on here every time a article about Microsoft gets posted.
Is the arcade scene dead? In the USA it pretty much is. But it's alive and well in Japan, the one market where the XBox is not doing well at all. The arcade scene is good enough in Japan that Sony and Nintendo also think it's an idea worth looking into.
I'm not a pro-Microsoft nutjob. They do lots of things that piss me off (XP is a disgrace, Media Player 9 is evil beyond compare, MS Bob was a joke, I dislike their embrace and extend policy) but this automatic anti-MS spew is laughable at best and sadly pathetic at worste.
By now most of you mods have decided to mod me down as a troll. But take a momet to think about this. Are we doing ourselves any favors by acting like jackasses every time Microsoft does something?
I remember when video games were a dime per game and you got five balls for your dime in a pinball machine. Hell, I remember when arcades were pinball machines and a few mechanical games! No digital games at all. None.
I love how every move made by MS in regards to the XBOx is greeted with such knee-jerk tripe like "I smell desperation in the XBox division...".
Pray tell me, how does MS looking into other, extremely high profit, markets smell like desperation? Smells more like the Great White Shark of Redmond has smelled blood in the water to me.
The basic problem here is that the entire email system used on the Internet is broken. The system needs to be replaced with something better. A new protocol that does not allow for open relays and other untrusted systems. I don't have the technical skills to tell you how the system needs to be changed. I'm a user, not a coder.
I don't know which is worse, the number of "Sign me up, dude!" posts, or the cheap price you all have for selling your soul to corporate America. It's like those Tufts students who let spammers use their email accounts for $20.00 a month.
What amazes me about America is NOT that we seem to be a nation of whores, but that we are a nation of cheap whores.
I've been on cable for four years and I've had very few issues at all. Fewer than my DSL using friends, even. This may be a local phenomenon resulting from the fact that while my local cable company knows what they are doing, the local phone company is full of clueless nitwits. YMMV.
I take it the mods either have not read any of Niven's work or just don't like me.
1: Organ Banks are the subject of many of Niven's works. The concept that we might become nothing but raw material for organ harvesting is the central theme to some of his best work.
2: Halo takes place on a ring world (a small one, but one just the same) and Jerry Pournell has talked about Mr. Niven and Halo several times in his "Chaos Mannor" collumn.
Don't mod someone down because you don't know what the hell they are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Price isn't the issue. If soimething costs too much you don't buy it. But that doesn't give you the right to steal it (and yes, aquiring copyright material without the copyright holder's consent is theft).
I'm amazed and disgusted that morality is based on price.
Honest. I apologize for the horrible spelling in that post. That was worse than normal. :(
Do you?
Hlack market economies create violence. All of them. They have no real choice. The reason is simple: no recourse to the law.
What do you do if you buy a bottle rum at a liqour store and find out it's nothing but water? You call the police and have that jackass arrested for selling bogus merchandice.
What do you do if you buy some weed from a dealer and it turns out to be catnip and oregano? Call the cops? Last person I heard about that did that was arrested. No. You either live with the fact that you got ripped off or you shoot the sonofabitch.
Because the sale, puirchase and distribution of pot, or any other illegal drug, requires that the manufacturers/growers, distributors, sellers and end consumers all operate outside the law. This leaves them only one recourse when things go bad. This also leaves them no choice in how to deal with conflicts of any kind.
If legalized and sold through normal sales channels, drugstores (hey, that's a catchy name) drug-related violence will drop like a stone. If you can call the cops because that jackass at the corner pharmacy cuts his stock of Vantage Ultra Gold Columbian with catnip then you don't have to shoot him for it. If he knows that he can call the coips because you passed a bad check he knows he dowsn't have to shoot you for trying not to pay.
It's like the liqour business durring prohibition, or the porn industry when it was illegal to make blue movies, or like prostitution is right now. When you make something that people want illegal, you create a lawless subculture that is infested with violence.
Too bad your memory is not as good as your math. The P60, P66 and early P75 chips had the math problems. They were cleard up before the introduction of the P90.
Considering that the whiole of "the mind" is contained within the brain the question is moot. Once you have a brain, no matter if it is boligical, mechanical, electronic or a software simulation, you have a mind. Provided the silly thing works.
The real question is: at what point does a artificial brain have enough complexity to create a mind?
Actually, they are only using the Air India jet to make sure everything will actually fit inside the real jet before they bother shipping it all over the place. Sort of like those shoe-size things they use in shoe stores.
And who is going to pay for those S.W.A.T. team lasers?
I've got four of the old beasts and they all work like champs. The oldest is about 15 years old and apart from a missing keycap it is in perfect working order. Best keyboards money can buy.
Addenda, but not wholesale revokation. Realitivity explains physics in realms where Newtonian physics fails. It does not require new laws that contradict the existing laws.
And remember, the list does not say "anything containing any of these points is automatically false", and he deliberately states that valid scientific discoveries may contain serveral voilations and still be valid.
If a discovery violates one or more "rules" but has a body of verifiable evidence then the discovery can be further tested to see if it's true.
The rule about "ancient wisdom" is only valid if you can't test the ideas expressed. There is no scinetifically verifiable evidence to suggest that a opper bracelett will help your arthritis. But there is scientifically verifiable evidence that says that asprin, a drug used for thousands of years) can reduce pain.
Freedom of speech is a bitch, isn't it? Freedom of speech means that I am going to hear/read/see things that I find offensive (like your little hissy-fit) and you are going to see/read/hear things that you find offensive (like me mocking you). But that's the price we pay for the ability to speak our minds.
There have always been and shall always be those who abuse the system, who push the limits too far. But does that mean we have to give up our rights and freedoms because of these assholes? You woiuld surrender your freedoms that easily?
No, they are losers for not bothering to take the time to do their job. You want a gun in the house? Put a trigger lock on that bastard and lock up the ammunition so little Billy doesn't accidently kill his baby sister. Want to keep poisonous household chemicals around? Keep them locked away from small, courious hands. Want to have a network in the house? Make sure that your kids can't use it in ways that you think will harm them. Don't know how to do that? Bug a geek friend or hire a geek to set it up for you. It's not even hard to lock a PC off of the Net with a home router.
Not gonna happen. As evidenced by other replies I can tell you that people are far too lazy and incompitent to ever do this. This approach takes too much work. It also means that people have to actually think, and we all know that that is the one thing that more people hate beyond all other things.
A gree with you 100% on all points. I just don't see the lazy bastards in our world ever going long with it. They don't want to spend the time, energy or thought on giving their kids the tools to handle life. That's too much work, too much time that they'd rather spend sitting around Starbucks in their SUVs pretending to not be married with kids while their little darlings play unsupervised at the public library after being abandoned there like the poor little match girl (my wife has some serious horror stories about that kind of thing).
But I digress...
Buy your distros on CD. Or, talk to the Uni about having an on-campus server that mirrors them for everyone whio wants them.
2GB is more than enough for educational use. I had a 5GB a month cap for two years and I only once used over 50% of that.
You don't need Internet access to get an education. And you certainly don't need it in your dorm room. They could close all access to the outside world from everywhere but the computer labs if they felt like being mean about it. And it would still be their right to do so. They own the pipes. And that's what matters here.
As long as it's the school's network they can say what yiou can use it for and how much is fair for you to use. Use of the school's network is a priveledge, not a right.
Funny, I thought the shuttle program was still in place because NASA didn't have the money to replace the aging, and badly designed fleet. For all that Boeing and Lockheed makes on the current fleet, imagine how much they would make on a new fleet.
What of fuel cells and alternative power sources?
These things take money and time to research and develope. Fuel cells will not jump out of the woodwork and run our cars. We got lucky with gasoline as it was relatively cheap to extract and refine and it converts to a lot of energy when burned.
As long as people are making millions off current technology, and as long as the holders and controlers of that technology are in power, nothing will get done.
Not quite. As long as the current technology solves the problems people want solved it will stay around. Take a look at all of the technologies that have died in the last hundred years. Where's that 8-track tape deck that used to be in every car? How about wire recorders? Steam powered trains (outside of museums and tourist spits)? gear-drive dental tools? etc...
If the government would give Ford and GM some r&d money, you would be surprised how fast a fuel cell (or equivalent) automobile would appear.
They already do. Shitloads of money. The government pours massive ammouints of money into all kinds of high tech/new technology projects (or didn't you notice the whole Internet thing?).
Just look how long its taking our military to abandon large pieces of artillery and slow tanks in favor of a more mobile force. Things in place become immovable. Its basic physics.
Until very recently the tank did the job needed of it. It is only within the last decade that our military needs have changed so much that tanks are no longer the best answer. But do lighter fighting vehicles just jump out of the woodwork ready to go? No. They tike time and money to design. Lots of money and lots of time. You screw up the design of a fighting vehicle and you have screwed your army into the ground.
You are not completely wrong, but your reasoning is too simplistic.
I would rather that we were in Africa than in Iraq. If we are going to rationalize our useless war with Iraq by claiming that we're doing it for their own good, we should be willing to do the same for nations not sitting on giant oil reserves.
Looking through the Syndicated section I see a total lack of concern for safety. Mailmen with rocket pack but no helmets or flight suits. Space hospitals with no failsafe systems. etc... Amazing.
The article states that Sony and Nintendo are also working on arcade versions of their systems. Is anyone crying doom and gloom over this and claiming that Sony and Nintendo are idiots who must be desperate? No? Okay, why is (almost) everyoine saying that about Microsoft?
Do I need to even ask? No. I don't. It's the typical unthinking knee-jerk "M$ is a bunch of stupid poopy-heads and Bill Gate$ eats babies!" panty twsiting that goes on here every time a article about Microsoft gets posted.
Is the arcade scene dead? In the USA it pretty much is. But it's alive and well in Japan, the one market where the XBox is not doing well at all. The arcade scene is good enough in Japan that Sony and Nintendo also think it's an idea worth looking into.
I'm not a pro-Microsoft nutjob. They do lots of things that piss me off (XP is a disgrace, Media Player 9 is evil beyond compare, MS Bob was a joke, I dislike their embrace and extend policy) but this automatic anti-MS spew is laughable at best and sadly pathetic at worste.
By now most of you mods have decided to mod me down as a troll. But take a momet to think about this. Are we doing ourselves any favors by acting like jackasses every time Microsoft does something?
I remember when video games were a dime per game and you got five balls for your dime in a pinball machine. Hell, I remember when arcades were pinball machines and a few mechanical games! No digital games at all. None.
Pray tell me, how does MS looking into other, extremely high profit, markets smell like desperation? Smells more like the Great White Shark of Redmond has smelled blood in the water to me.
The basic problem here is that the entire email system used on the Internet is broken. The system needs to be replaced with something better. A new protocol that does not allow for open relays and other untrusted systems. I don't have the technical skills to tell you how the system needs to be changed. I'm a user, not a coder.
I don't know which is worse, the number of "Sign me up, dude!" posts, or the cheap price you all have for selling your soul to corporate America. It's like those Tufts students who let spammers use their email accounts for $20.00 a month.
What amazes me about America is NOT that we seem to be a nation of whores, but that we are a nation of cheap whores.
I've been on cable for four years and I've had very few issues at all. Fewer than my DSL using friends, even. This may be a local phenomenon resulting from the fact that while my local cable company knows what they are doing, the local phone company is full of clueless nitwits. YMMV.
I take it the mods either have not read any of Niven's work or just don't like me.
1: Organ Banks are the subject of many of Niven's works. The concept that we might become nothing but raw material for organ harvesting is the central theme to some of his best work.
2: Halo takes place on a ring world (a small one, but one just the same) and Jerry Pournell has talked about Mr. Niven and Halo several times in his "Chaos Mannor" collumn.
Don't mod someone down because you don't know what the hell they are talking about.