> What I am questioning is WHY a "beginning bio class" at a "junior college" would be doing that with a virus.
To modify a bacterium's DNA, of course. You can do that with either a virus or a plasmid. When you splice your gene into this "vector" and then infect the target bacterium, your custom gene will be inserted into the cell's DNA. This way you can "knock out" a gene to find out what it does, or insert a fluorescent tag for tracking a particular cell line.
The procedures for doing this are pretty standard, so if you can follow a recipe you can do it. Go to your university library and look for biotech laboratory manuals. Everything is spelled out there; the reagents, concentrations, and step by step instructions. Very little thinking required.
My guess would be that the thickness difference would be mostly in the interconnections between neurons. An intelligent person would be able to form abstractions faster and to thereby reduce the number of connections. A person with less intelligence would have more connections because he is not thinking about stuff, he is just absorbing it, so all that redundant connectivity piles up and thickens the cortex. It would probably also make thinking harder; with too many associations any search would produce a mind-boggling amount of data.
> Quite right. This is true of a great many things. You have the ability to not pay, > but I'd argue that it's not a wise tack to take.
I have not yet heard your argument. All I have heard is the statement that "it is not a wise tack to take". How about explaining why you think so?
> It's also apparent that we have radically different definitions of "sucker".
sucker = "a person easily cheated or taken in; dupe; simpleton" (Webster's; #4 among other meanings irrelevant in this context) Since when you pay for things you already get free you give something for nothing, I would fit that under the category of being cheated. You might argue that the giving was in the spirit of charity, in which case I would simply change my evaluation to "simpleton", since most people who give charity have not thought hard enough about its consequences nor its message.
> Also, paying for software is not paying for "nothing."
Let me rephrase that: "paying for free software is paying for nothing". If you still have difficulty understanding this, compare the situation when you have paid with the situation where you have not. In either case, you have the software, so clearly you are not paying for it. You may be paying for something else, the community goodwill, the developer's friendship, or whatever else you want to acquire, but it certainly is not the software itself.
> To me, this is a distinctly suboptimal solution.
Depends on what you are trying to optimize, does it not? I am optimizing for value accrued to me, and after seeing that, my rationale should become chrystal clear. You probably will say that it is a bad goal, but that is a different debate.
> You have a weird definition of "justice".
I use it because it fits. If you know a better word, feel free to suggest it. Yes, to some degree I do
> warp the definitions
but it I do so for utility rather than deception. I am more than happy to define my terms. Words are, after all, only a tool of communication; as long as both parties can agree on a definition, communication takes place. You might object to me calling it justice, so feel free to substitute it with sdfouiythhh and apply my definition to it. The important part is that I consider it to be the supreme moral good.
> you warp the definitions so that you can feel good (or, at least, not bad) about your actions
It matters little what words you use to describe your actions. It is the meaning that matters, and the meaning is very clear to me. I feel good about my actions because I know they are right, no matter how you define the words used to describe it. Even if you force me to describe them as "vile and despicable", doing so would merely change the meaning of those words in my mind to mean the good things I intend to say. Language is a tool of communication. The words matter little; their meaning is the only thing that matters.
> No; this is not at all correct. Price != value. They are certainly correlated, but not isomorphic.
Very well; I'll rephrase: price is the declared value. Declared by the seller as the value he wants to receive for his item in a fair trade. If the buyer disagrees, bargaining begins until a compromise can be reached in valuation. Remember that value is specific to the valuer, and therefore differs from person to person; there is no such thing as an absolute value of a thing. Every time you ask after a value of a thing, you must also ask "to whom, and for what?"
> Love is free; is it worthless? You even have to put forth effort to keep it going!
You have just answered your own question. Love is most definitely not free. It is given for a reason, and what you get, you pay for dearly, in like coin. You might not explicitly list "you owe me $100 worth of kisses", but in that situation you would certainly be thinking something vaguely like it. Love is about fairness too; if you give more love than you get back, after a time you would be left feeling resen
> So long as someone (or a group of someones) is supporting the development, the code will get written.
But that someone does not have to be you, does it? As long as there are enough suckers willing to pay, there is no need for you to do so.
> The optimal solution here is for users to pay some money to projects they wish to use.
No; the optimal solution here is to wait until the programmers just start to starve from lack of money, and only then to give them any. And then, only enough to keep them alive. They would be grateful enough no matter how much you give them. This way you would expend the minimum amount of your own money for maximum effect, while having bled to the bone all those suckers who kept paying for nothing.
> This is a modest, compromise amount, causing the greatest good in the short- and long-terms
You are still in the free software mode of thought. In my mind, no good ever comes from giving charity, and I would not consider it good to sponsor a project that is being given away for free. (And no, I would not beg people for money for my own free projects either) The greatest good you can do is justice, which is to trade value for equal value. By setting the software's price at zero, they have declared it worthless, and by not paying them I am simply fulfilling our contract. Remember, the price of the seller's wares is determined by his estimation of their worth, not mine. My own estimation simply determines whether he makes the sale or not, and just as I would not insist on paying more for my groceries when hungry, I would consider it fair and just to pay the seller the price he is asking. Neither would I consider myself under any further obligation. The free software fanatics are under the delusion that I would accept their implicit open-ended contract that states that I am required to pay for their software with some unspecified (read "unlimited") amount of work for done them. A businessman scorns implicit contracts, and will equally scorn any idea of obligation after a transaction is complete, seeing it as only fair and just. Likewise, I would never help any free software projects because of some obligation I feel toward "the community". If I do help someone, it will be on my own initiative, for fun or out of curiousity, and I would be most vehement in disabusing any free software communists of the idea that I would even consider following their vile implicit open-ended service contract.
> Sadly, it seems that the corporate world (and most of the average user world too) > is only too happy to sacrifice long-term gain for short-term gain.
You should consider that it may be because they are right. Communism always dies in the long run. It died in the Soviet Union, and it will die in the free software world even faster since, as is frequently bemoaned, there is no way to force people to write software for nothing. Slavery can not exist without the slavedriver's whip and, while the communist state can employ force to keep people in line, the free software fanatics can only whine, and without much effect.
> For a business that uses OpenBSD code, it would just make good business sense to > support the project at a fraction of what it would cost to develop the same code > in-house.
I disagree. If the company pays the OpenBSD team, the code gets written, but if it does not pay, the code still gets written. As long as the OpenBSD team is writing code without requiring payment, it makes far more sense for the company to not pay. After all, what's the point? Only in the free software world is there that "giving back" mentality. In the business world, nobody pays for what they already get free.
Now, if OpenBSD team stopped development due to financial difficulties, would it make sense for a business to pay them to resume? Perhaps. But a typical manager would make a different choice; he would hire in-house programmers to fork the project and continue development without sharing the source. A good manager does not give away what he dearly paid for.
> It is ridiculous that Sun wouldn't even cover the travel expenses > of an OpenBSD developer to go their conference
Why would Sun want to go out of their way to have a competitor come to their conference?
When you record a lecture, you are only postponing having to think about what the professor is saying. Effectively you are moving the lesson to another hour, while wasting the one you are in. Every lecture has some point to it, and the student should understand it instead of blindly recording everything he hears. If you listen to what the professor is saying, you will see what he is trying to tell you, and find out that it is usually just a few simple concepts. Then you will discover that in most cases you will not need notes at all, and convert your notebook into a reference manual rather than a textbook, which, after all, you have already bought.
In the business world, if you create something valuable, you get paid for it. If you have enough customers, you'll be rich. In the OSS world you give away everything you make, and have to beg for sustenance. Do you want to be a businessman or a beggar? Take your pick!
Clearly, Toad is practicing crop rotation, letting the weeds replenish the soil. Similarly, the government is recognizing that sexual prudery and hedonism alternate every generation and that pretty soon the prudes in congress will die off and be replaced with more liberal-minded people. Then we'll rotate the plots and.xxx will become the backbone of the economy.
> Personally I would really like to see similar competitions against default-installs of some other OSes
This is absolutely irrelevant. A secure OS is secure regardless of how many insecure OSes there are. Security is an absolute measurement; can you hack the box or not? If you pass it, you are secure, if you don't then you are not.
Excuse me, but if your OS can be rooted in 30 minutes from a local account, you have no business calling it secure. UNIX is supposed to have multiple local accounts and still be secure with them all running. If you close down every network port on a machine and say "come get me now", that's really not saying much. I, for one, would really like to know how he managed to get root from a local account, so I can verify I don't have the same problem on my server, which really does have ssh access to more than one person.
Be serious now. What you really want is "\\d\\a\\t\\a", which can be easily made from your version with the following simple vi command: ":s/\//\/\//g"
I know a better book on the subject
on
Inescapable Data
·
· Score: 1
If you want to read about some really radical ideas about what omnipresent information will do, try Golden Age by John C Wright instead. In the society described there, everyone actually lives in a state called "surface dreaming", where reality and data about it are seamlessly melded so that you can "format" what you see in any way you want, just as you can use a user-stylesheet to custom-render a web page today. (Obviously, these "sense-filters" cause their own share of problems, which the book discusses in depth) There is also another information "channel', called "middle-dreaming" that can be overlayed over that, which contains metadata about what you see. By looking into middle-dreaming you could search an object's history, description, or function. Combine this with mind-reading ("noetic technology"), superfast sentient computers ("sophotechs") to help you communicate, search for, and do things in a fraction of a second, ubiqutous nanotech, and many many other out-of-this world ideas, and it becomes easy to see why you'll love this book.
> You sound like you're going to take your little ball and go home if > the world doesn't immediately twist itself to conform to you.
Why yes. If your application is as unfriendly as mozilla's plugin installation, you can be sure I am not going to use it. While it doesn't hurt me much, it will hurt you if you are selling it. In mozilla's case I'm only complaining because I can't just ditch it and use something else; there is nothing else.
> You make it sound like it's a randomly *changing* string. It's a static name... it's > not like you have to hurry and grab your files before it changes again. If you're having > trouble copying files because the sequence of letters that make up the directory name > doesn't look like a word to you,
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear on this point. The problem is that configuration files under the profile sometimes store paths containing the profile name (like the Inbox path), so if you just copy all your data to a new profile, those paths would be invalid and you would have to reset them. Sure, it can be done, but a user-friendly application would not make a user go through so much trouble.
My nightmare story about trying to install mozilla plugins suddenly comes to mind. Until somebody things good and hard about these problems I wouldn't recommend anyone to write anything in XUL.
You ought to be able to show that code is non-copyrightable if it logically follows from problem specification. If you can show that this code is the one and only way of solving the given problem, then it is obviously "obvious", and is no more copyrightable than "hi, how are you?".
In another stunning example, the patent office is once again proven to be not the receptacle of revolutionary ideas or the catalyst of innovation, but rather the repository of ideas nobody is allowed to think any more. Or needs to.
The problem with everyone having the power to spy on everyone else is that social conformity becomes easier to enforce. All the things society thinks you should not be doing will be logged, pointed out, and punished. No more speeding, doing drugs, or extramarital affairs. But, of course, it won't stop there, the society's views being what they are. It will gradually apply prohibitions on all the other deviant forms of behaviour, like thinking about evolution, learning chemistry, theorizing about physics, or making any other new thing that "scares" people because they don't understand it. So say good bye to science and all technological progress. But people will go even further. It is the little mind's most fervent desire to make all the other minds smaller in order to feel better about its own lack of ability, skill, and achievement. Monitoring can easily be expanded to make sure people aren't "working too hard" and making everyone else look bad. Or, in the opposite extreme, to find out who has any ability whatsoever and put them to work under a slavedriver's whip so that the people in power could laze around day after day watching the supplication of their cringing slaves. Privacy is the only thing standing between us and total social control, which inevitably leads to complete destruction of civilization, since that is what society has always really wanted in their vile little hearts.
I can't help but wonder if people would take Stallman a bit more seriously if he shaved and got a haircut. His appearance might then sufficiently approach the norm to prevent the immediate impression most people would receive upon seeing him: namely that he's an overaged hippie out of his time, out of his place, and out of his mind.
"Prey" is a very bad book to learn about nanotech threats from. However, I would recommend two others:
Crescent City Rhapsody by Kathleen Ann Goonan demonstrates by example the threat of nanoplagues and what they can do. She has other novels in this series dealing with similar subjects, which I also recommend.
Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear has a lot of information about interstellar warfare with nanotechnological weapons.
Sadly, there aren't any more that I've seen. Most authors fall into the same pits as Michael Crichton, as illustrated in "Assemblers of Infinity" and "Blood Music", and seldom "get it" when it comes to the subject of nanotech warfare.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Yes, in 2006 I plan to spend significantly more time gaming than I did in 2006!"?
A modern teenager is unlikely to utter such a sentence. Instead I would expect something like:
"Yeah, I think I gonna game less next year, 'cause o, like, girls, y'know?"
> What I am questioning is WHY a "beginning bio class" at a "junior college" would be doing that with a virus.
To modify a bacterium's DNA, of course. You can do that with either a virus or a plasmid. When you splice your gene into this "vector" and then infect the target bacterium, your custom gene will be inserted into the cell's DNA. This way you can "knock out" a gene to find out what it does, or insert a fluorescent tag for tracking a particular cell line.
The procedures for doing this are pretty standard, so if you can follow a recipe you can do it. Go to your university library and look for biotech laboratory manuals. Everything is spelled out there; the reagents, concentrations, and step by step instructions. Very little thinking required.
> I can't fathom why the world's richest man would wait for any period of time before buying something, especially if it's something useful!
Maybe because that's how he stayed rich in the first place: by not giving in to impulse buying.
My guess would be that the thickness difference would be mostly in the interconnections between neurons. An intelligent person would be able to form abstractions faster and to thereby reduce the number of connections. A person with less intelligence would have more connections because he is not thinking about stuff, he is just absorbing it, so all that redundant connectivity piles up and thickens the cortex. It would probably also make thinking harder; with too many associations any search would produce a mind-boggling amount of data.
Boooooo!
> Quite right. This is true of a great many things. You have the ability to not pay,
> but I'd argue that it's not a wise tack to take.
I have not yet heard your argument. All I have heard is the statement that "it is not a wise tack to take". How about explaining why you think so?
> It's also apparent that we have radically different definitions of "sucker".
sucker = "a person easily cheated or taken in; dupe; simpleton" (Webster's; #4 among other meanings irrelevant in this context) Since when you pay for things you already get free you give something for nothing, I would fit that under the category of being cheated. You might argue that the giving was in the spirit of charity, in which case I would simply change my evaluation to "simpleton", since most people who give charity have not thought hard enough about its consequences nor its message.
> Also, paying for software is not paying for "nothing."
Let me rephrase that: "paying for free software is paying for nothing". If you still have difficulty understanding this, compare the situation when you have paid with the situation where you have not. In either case, you have the software, so clearly you are not paying for it. You may be paying for something else, the community goodwill, the developer's friendship, or whatever else you want to acquire, but it certainly is not the software itself.
> To me, this is a distinctly suboptimal solution.
Depends on what you are trying to optimize, does it not? I am optimizing for value accrued to me, and after seeing that, my rationale should become chrystal clear. You probably will say that it is a bad goal, but that is a different debate.
> You have a weird definition of "justice".
I use it because it fits. If you know a better word, feel free to suggest it. Yes, to some degree I do
> warp the definitions
but it I do so for utility rather than deception. I am more than happy to define my terms. Words are, after all, only a tool of communication; as long as both parties can agree on a definition, communication takes place. You might object to me calling it justice, so feel free to substitute it with sdfouiythhh and apply my definition to it. The important part is that I consider it to be the supreme moral good.
> you warp the definitions so that you can feel good (or, at least, not bad) about your actions
It matters little what words you use to describe your actions. It is the meaning that matters, and the meaning is very clear to me. I feel good about my actions because I know they are right, no matter how you define the words used to describe it. Even if you force me to describe them as "vile and despicable", doing so would merely change the meaning of those words in my mind to mean the good things I intend to say. Language is a tool of communication. The words matter little; their meaning is the only thing that matters.
> No; this is not at all correct. Price != value. They are certainly correlated, but not isomorphic.
Very well; I'll rephrase: price is the declared value. Declared by the seller as the value he wants to receive for his item in a fair trade. If the buyer disagrees, bargaining begins until a compromise can be reached in valuation. Remember that value is specific to the valuer, and therefore differs from person to person; there is no such thing as an absolute value of a thing. Every time you ask after a value of a thing, you must also ask "to whom, and for what?"
> Love is free; is it worthless? You even have to put forth effort to keep it going!
You have just answered your own question. Love is most definitely not free. It is given for a reason, and what you get, you pay for dearly, in like coin. You might not explicitly list "you owe me $100 worth of kisses", but in that situation you would certainly be thinking something vaguely like it. Love is about fairness too; if you give more love than you get back, after a time you would be left feeling resen
> So long as someone (or a group of someones) is supporting the development, the code will get written.
But that someone does not have to be you, does it? As long as there are enough suckers willing to pay, there is no need for you to do so.
> The optimal solution here is for users to pay some money to projects they wish to use.
No; the optimal solution here is to wait until the programmers just start to starve from lack of money, and only then to give them any. And then, only enough to keep them alive. They would be grateful enough no matter how much you give them. This way you would expend the minimum amount of your own money for maximum effect, while having bled to the bone all those suckers who kept paying for nothing.
> This is a modest, compromise amount, causing the greatest good in the short- and long-terms
You are still in the free software mode of thought. In my mind, no good ever comes from giving charity, and I would not consider it good to sponsor a project that is being given away for free. (And no, I would not beg people for money for my own free projects either) The greatest good you can do is justice, which is to trade value for equal value. By setting the software's price at zero, they have declared it worthless, and by not paying them I am simply fulfilling our contract. Remember, the price of the seller's wares is determined by his estimation of their worth, not mine. My own estimation simply determines whether he makes the sale or not, and just as I would not insist on paying more for my groceries when hungry, I would consider it fair and just to pay the seller the price he is asking. Neither would I consider myself under any further obligation. The free software fanatics are under the delusion that I would accept their implicit open-ended contract that states that I am required to pay for their software with some unspecified (read "unlimited") amount of work for done them. A businessman scorns implicit contracts, and will equally scorn any idea of obligation after a transaction is complete, seeing it as only fair and just. Likewise, I would never help any free software projects because of some obligation I feel toward "the community". If I do help someone, it will be on my own initiative, for fun or out of curiousity, and I would be most vehement in disabusing any free software communists of the idea that I would even consider following their vile implicit open-ended service contract.
> Sadly, it seems that the corporate world (and most of the average user world too)
> is only too happy to sacrifice long-term gain for short-term gain.
You should consider that it may be because they are right. Communism always dies in the long run. It died in the Soviet Union, and it will die in the free software world even faster since, as is frequently bemoaned, there is no way to force people to write software for nothing. Slavery can not exist without the slavedriver's whip and, while the communist state can employ force to keep people in line, the free software fanatics can only whine, and without much effect.
> For a business that uses OpenBSD code, it would just make good business sense to
> support the project at a fraction of what it would cost to develop the same code
> in-house.
I disagree. If the company pays the OpenBSD team, the code gets written, but if it does not pay, the code still gets written. As long as the OpenBSD team is writing code without requiring payment, it makes far more sense for the company to not pay. After all, what's the point? Only in the free software world is there that "giving back" mentality. In the business world, nobody pays for what they already get free.
Now, if OpenBSD team stopped development due to financial difficulties, would it make sense for a business to pay them to resume? Perhaps. But a typical manager would make a different choice; he would hire in-house programmers to fork the project and continue development without sharing the source. A good manager does not give away what he dearly paid for.
> It is ridiculous that Sun wouldn't even cover the travel expenses
> of an OpenBSD developer to go their conference
Why would Sun want to go out of their way to have a competitor come to their conference?
> Sheesh. I remember hearing about cosmic radiation's effect of aging when I was like 4 yrs old. (I just turned 30.)
Man, you must have absorbed quite a dose to age 26 years between reading the article and posting a comment.
When you record a lecture, you are only postponing having to think about what the professor is saying. Effectively you are moving the lesson to another hour, while wasting the one you are in. Every lecture has some point to it, and the student should understand it instead of blindly recording everything he hears. If you listen to what the professor is saying, you will see what he is trying to tell you, and find out that it is usually just a few simple concepts. Then you will discover that in most cases you will not need notes at all, and convert your notebook into a reference manual rather than a textbook, which, after all, you have already bought.
In the business world, if you create something valuable, you get paid for it. If you have enough customers, you'll be rich. In the OSS world you give away everything you make, and have to beg for sustenance. Do you want to be a businessman or a beggar? Take your pick!
Clearly, Toad is practicing crop rotation, letting the weeds replenish the soil. Similarly, the government is recognizing that sexual prudery and hedonism alternate every generation and that pretty soon the prudes in congress will die off and be replaced with more liberal-minded people. Then we'll rotate the plots and .xxx will become the backbone of the economy.
> Personally I would really like to see similar competitions against default-installs of some other OSes
This is absolutely irrelevant. A secure OS is secure regardless of how many insecure OSes there are. Security is an absolute measurement; can you hack the box or not? If you pass it, you are secure, if you don't then you are not.
Excuse me, but if your OS can be rooted in 30 minutes from a local account, you have no business calling it secure. UNIX is supposed to have multiple local accounts and still be secure with them all running. If you close down every network port on a machine and say "come get me now", that's really not saying much. I, for one, would really like to know how he managed to get root from a local account, so I can verify I don't have the same problem on my server, which really does have ssh access to more than one person.
Be serious now. What you really want is "\\d\\a\\t\\a", which can be easily made from your version with the following simple vi command: ":s/\//\/\//g"
If you want to read about some really radical ideas about what omnipresent information will do, try Golden Age by John C Wright instead. In the society described there, everyone actually lives in a state called "surface dreaming", where reality and data about it are seamlessly melded so that you can "format" what you see in any way you want, just as you can use a user-stylesheet to custom-render a web page today. (Obviously, these "sense-filters" cause their own share of problems, which the book discusses in depth) There is also another information "channel', called "middle-dreaming" that can be overlayed over that, which contains metadata about what you see. By looking into middle-dreaming you could search an object's history, description, or function. Combine this with mind-reading ("noetic technology"), superfast sentient computers ("sophotechs") to help you communicate, search for, and do things in a fraction of a second, ubiqutous nanotech, and many many other out-of-this world ideas, and it becomes easy to see why you'll love this book.
Now you can tell whether the cat is dead regardless of whether the cat is dead or not.
> You sound like you're going to take your little ball and go home if
> the world doesn't immediately twist itself to conform to you.
Why yes. If your application is as unfriendly as mozilla's plugin installation, you can be sure I am not going to use it. While it doesn't hurt me much, it will hurt you if you are selling it. In mozilla's case I'm only complaining because I can't just ditch it and use something else; there is nothing else.
> You make it sound like it's a randomly *changing* string. It's a static name... it's
> not like you have to hurry and grab your files before it changes again. If you're having
> trouble copying files because the sequence of letters that make up the directory name
> doesn't look like a word to you,
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear on this point. The problem is that configuration files under the profile sometimes store paths containing the profile name (like the Inbox path), so if you just copy all your data to a new profile, those paths would be invalid and you would have to reset them. Sure, it can be done, but a user-friendly application would not make a user go through so much trouble.
My nightmare story about trying to install mozilla plugins suddenly comes to mind. Until somebody things good and hard about these problems I wouldn't recommend anyone to write anything in XUL.
You ought to be able to show that code is non-copyrightable if it logically follows from problem specification. If you can show that this code is the one and only way of solving the given problem, then it is obviously "obvious", and is no more copyrightable than "hi, how are you?".
Come on! Everybody knows that the constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper.
In another stunning example, the patent office is once again proven to be not the receptacle of revolutionary ideas or the catalyst of innovation, but rather the repository of ideas nobody is allowed to think any more. Or needs to.
The problem with everyone having the power to spy on everyone else is that social conformity becomes easier to enforce. All the things society thinks you should not be doing will be logged, pointed out, and punished. No more speeding, doing drugs, or extramarital affairs. But, of course, it won't stop there, the society's views being what they are. It will gradually apply prohibitions on all the other deviant forms of behaviour, like thinking about evolution, learning chemistry, theorizing about physics, or making any other new thing that "scares" people because they don't understand it. So say good bye to science and all technological progress. But people will go even further. It is the little mind's most fervent desire to make all the other minds smaller in order to feel better about its own lack of ability, skill, and achievement. Monitoring can easily be expanded to make sure people aren't "working too hard" and making everyone else look bad. Or, in the opposite extreme, to find out who has any ability whatsoever and put them to work under a slavedriver's whip so that the people in power could laze around day after day watching the supplication of their cringing slaves. Privacy is the only thing standing between us and total social control, which inevitably leads to complete destruction of civilization, since that is what society has always really wanted in their vile little hearts.
I can't help but wonder if people would take Stallman a bit more seriously if he shaved and got a haircut. His appearance might then sufficiently approach the norm to prevent the immediate impression most people would receive upon seeing him: namely that he's an overaged hippie out of his time, out of his place, and out of his mind.
"Prey" is a very bad book to learn about nanotech threats from. However, I would recommend two others:
Crescent City Rhapsody by Kathleen Ann Goonan demonstrates by example the threat of nanoplagues and what they can do. She has other novels in this series dealing with similar subjects, which I also recommend.
Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear has a lot of information about interstellar warfare with nanotechnological weapons.
Sadly, there aren't any more that I've seen. Most authors fall into the same pits as Michael Crichton, as illustrated in "Assemblers of Infinity" and "Blood Music", and seldom "get it" when it comes to the subject of nanotech warfare.