My friend Zane is hiring a programmer in Austin.
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In preparation for the formal announcment and code release at the end of this month, the Lyceum team is running a public test intallation of the code. Check it out:
The front page explains everything. Basically, sign up for a blog (or several), write posts, adjust settings, comment on other people’s blogs, and then send bug reports to lyceum-bugs AT lists DOT ibiblio DOT org.
For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.
Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored works with Pope Benedict and John Paul II, said that he was “perplexed and alarmed . . . This is wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican’s image.” A pope’s words should be available to all free of charge, he said, and to “cash in in this way surrounds the clergy with the odour of money”.
Publishers will have to negotiate a levy of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of the cover price of any book or publication “containing the Pope’s words”. Those who infringe the copyright face legal action and a higher levy of 15 per cent.
I’ve read and enjoyed one of Ray Kurzweil’s books (this one). He is a futurist and often gets a lot of flak about how wild his predictions are. That’s how futurists make money I guess.
I think I am more likely to agree with some of his predictions than the next person though — a lot of his predictions are based on the model that technology creeps up on us very iteratively; one day you are dialing up to a BBS at 1400 baud, and and the next thing you know, a decade later 80% of your social time is on Instant Messenger.
Anyway I was just reading this interview with Kurzweil and thought that this quote was particularly amazing/funny/absurd:
I’m very confident that over the next decade we’ll largely eliminate the diseases that kill 95 percent of people today. We’ve identified a dozen or so aging processes, and we have strategies for reversing them all. I believe that within 10 years we’ll produce a mouse that doesn’t age, and we’ll translate that into human therapies within another five to 10 years after that.
95%? 10 years? Come on Ray. Don’t get me wrong, once a few key technologies really get rolling — nanotech, gene therapy, etc — then I think we are going to see some amazing advances. But as far as I can tell, those things will only begin to really get rolling in about 10 years.
On the other hand, Kurzweil spends all of his time researching this stuff so maybe he knows something I don’t. On the other hand, maybe he thinks about it so much that he has an exaggerated sense of how close the technology is to being scalable in a lab/commercial context.
Stopping disease, aging, and, ultimately, death, is something Kurzweil talks about a lot.
Do you think that someday there’ll be legal limits on how long people can live?
Not if I have anything to say about it. But there’s a very powerful “death-ist” need. People really have it deeply ingrained. Life is short. You can’t live forever. The only things that are certain are death and taxes. We have this whole so-called normal lifecycle; certain things happen at certain ages. We’ve rationalized death, which in my view is a profound tragedy and a tremendous loss of knowledge and expertise. And we have rationalized it as a good thing. I guess if there’s nothing you can do about it, the best thing you can do is rationalize it, but there will be things that we can do about it.
I have a book coming out in the fall, Fantastic Voyage. And in it I say that right now we have the means to slow down aging to such an extent that even baby boomers like myself can remain healthy and vital long enough for the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, at which point we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains.
You look like you’re in good shape.
Well, I take this very seriously. I’m very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests—memory and sensory acuity and response times—it had me at age 40. I’m 56.
What do you do to slow the aging process?
I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I’m really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it’s good to be natural. I don’t think it’s good because biological evolution is not on our side.
It’s in the interest of our species for people past child-rearing age not to stick around, at least in an era of scarcity, and our biological program hasn’t changed since we lived in an era of scarcity. We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, “Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow.” These are all programs that need to be changed. [snip]
Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines?
Well, ultimately, there’s going to be very little difference between a guy who’s 120 and a guy who’s 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we’ll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It’s not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we’ll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.
Google Answers is a service where a research request can be posted with a price, and then people on the web can do the research and submit the results. A while back I thought I would give Google Answers a try, mostly to see how the process went, but also because I was genuinely curious about this question:
Where is the “bottom” in the stock market? I realize that it is basically all driven by hype, psychology, etc now, but in theory, what is being traded? Why would/should a corporation’s performance theoretically affect the value of it’s [sic] share [sic]? is it something to do with what happens if the corporation dissolved [sic]?
You can see the entry and the responses it generated here.
When I got the first response, I had basically full confidence in what elids said. elids seemed reasonably knowledgable, and was certainly very confident and enthusastic. Then elwtee comes on the scene and shakes everything up with a completely different answer! elwtee seems just as knowledgable and self-assured as elids!
It makes me wonder about who these two people are, what their motivations are, and what they do with their time. Keep in mind that these were both left as comments to the question and not submitted as answers, so they aren’t in it for the money.
This could be really neat. From Surfin’ Safari:
Karelia Software is working on an exciting new app that uses WebKit: Sandvox. This web authoring tool is shaping up to be rather spiffy and elegant. But they need your help. There’s a couple of bugs in WebKit which are impeding their progress and that they’d really like fixed soon. So they are generously offering bounties for fixes.
Except look at how much money they are offering. $250! They are asking expert developers to put their overhead, expertise, and time into solving another company’s problems. I can’t imagine that these bugs that Apple has not been able to fix yet will take any less than 10 hours for someone to fix. At a modest $100 an hour, they should be offering $1000 minumum per commited bug.
Pat Buchanan wrote this article in Human Events. Some excerpts:
Under Bush II, social spending has exploded to levels LBJ might envy, foreign aid has been doubled, pork-at-every-meal has become the GOP diet of choice, surpluses have vanished, and the deficit is soaring back toward 5% of GDP. Bill Clinton is starting to look like Barry Goldwater.
Both Bushes embraced the “open borders” immigration policy the Wall Street Journal has trumpeted for two decades. Result: We have 10-15 million illegal aliens in our country, among whom gangs like the murderous Mara Salvatrucha are proliferating. Native-born California taxpayers are fleeing the Golden State, as Third World tax consumers pour in. So great is the crisis on the Mexican border even the liberal Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona have declared states of emergency. Meanwhile 35,000 U.S. troops stand guard—on the border of South Korea.
Thus, in March, 2003, Bush, in perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history, invaded an Arab nation that had not attacked us, did not want war with us, and did not threaten us—to strip it of weapons we now know it did not have.
Result: Shia and Kurds have been liberated from Saddam, but Iran has a new ally in southern Iraq, Osama has a new base camp in the Sunni Triangle, the Arab and Islamic world have been radicalized against the United States, and copy-cat killers of Al Qaida have been targeting our remaining allies in Europe and the Middle East: Spain, Britain, Egypt and Jordan. And, lest we forget, 2055 Americans are dead and Walter Reed is filling up.
True to the neoconservative creed, Bush launched a global crusade for democracy that is now bringing ever closer to power Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, and Shia fundamentalists in Baghdad and Basra.
Democratic imperialism is still imperialism. To Arab and Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders.
When Ronald Reagan went home to California, his heirs said, “Goodbye to all that,” and embraced Big Government conservatism, then neoconservatism. If they do not find their way home soon, to the principles of Taft, Goldwater and Reagan, they will perish in the wilderness into which they have led us all.
WikiNews has the story:
The government of Canada is demanding that the United States stop applying duties on Canadian lumber and refund the C$5 billion in duties that has been collected. … a NAFTA panel rejected Washington’s claims justifying those duties, but the U.S. is not abiding by the NAFTA decision.
Canada had asked the WTO for permission to retaliate. Jacqueline LaRocque, a spokeswoman for Canadian Trade Minister Jim Peterson, said that Canada is considering imposing C$5 billion in duties on imports from the U.S. in retaliation. “Canada has wanted to make it very clear that we are not happy with the position of the United States to simply ignore what is a clear NAFTA ruling in Canada’s favor,” Canadian Finance Minister Ralph Goodale was quoted as saying.
The U.S. is still dealing with a 4 billion dollar ruling against it by the WTO relating to its practice of helping large American companies set up “Foreign Sales Corporations” offshore in order to have a competitive edge in Europe. That dispute resulted in the U.S. having to change its laws last year.
Ever see the movie Gattaca? One of my favorites. In the movie, the main character cannot realize his dream to become an astronaut, becuase his genes are sub-par. An op-ed in the Seattle Times discusses the issue, and brings to light a case where a company has already begun researching a genetic correlation with job-related injuries:
A couple of years ago, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway tested the genes of injured workers, without their permission, to try to detect a genetic predisposition to carpal tunnel syndrome. The railway, apparently, was looking for a way to avoid workman’s compensation claims by using an unproven genetic test. Only media coverage and action by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stifled those threats.
Now Google has instant messaging, using the Jabber protocol, for everyone with a gmail account. Your username is your gmail address (the whole thing, with @gmail.com), and the server is talk.gmail.com. This is great news.
Many have said that there is no SSL support. However, there is TLS support. In fact, I could not connect when I had TLS off, even on port 5222, so it seems that it is required. HOORAY.
I checked and ports 5222 (traditional Jabber cleartext port), 5223 (traditional Jabber encrypted port), and port 5224 are open on talk.jabber.org. I didn’t check if any of the other two do or don’t support cleartext.
My setup:
client: Adium
username: mygmailname@gmail.com
server: talk.google.com
port: 5222
TLS: on
UPDATE: I am told that with iChat, port 5223 and “Connect Using SSL” works.
UPDATE: Port 5222 requires TLS, port 5223 requires SSL, and nothing works on 5224.
