Technology Topics

There are people, like Ray Kurzweil, who believe that it will be inevitable for humans to start merging with our own technology in order to improve our capabilities. Ever since humans existed we created tools, even before we started calling these tools "technology", and it was always essentially an extension of ourselves which allows us to do more with less therefore growing our capabilities.

Technology is neutral, by all means. It is how we used it that matters. However:

Fact 1: Technology is becoming more and more powerful at rates nobody seems to be fully aware off.

Fact 2: Some humans ARE using technology in evil ways.

Fact 3: When technology gains a certain amount of autonomy it can use itself.

Observation: The ultimate challenge of humanity in 21st century may be to stay in control of its own progress or be devoured by it.

Question:

What do you get if you combine googlebot, which scans the entire internet (which is close to all knowledge humanity possesses)

This might come as a shock to you, but Google is unfair.

Yeah, a real shock.

They're using GNU/Linux heavily. They even have an in-house version of Ubuntu, but when they release software it is proprietary. Why, exactly, is Picasa non-free for example? What do they get out of it? It is free of charge anyway. May it be the precious algorithms they use in the code? Yeah right. And so what if they feel they have trade secrets in there. It is still unfair. GNU/Linux has plenty of cool code in it and it is still successful. I would dare to say that Picasa would be even more popular if it was Free Software!

gOS is really starting to make inroads and while it is based on Free Software (it's a GNU/Linux distro that uses an Enlightenment window manager) it has one rather worrisome issue - it is too dependable on one company, the mighty Google and its online applications.

So in this whole "Software as a Service" craze hosted but proprietary applications are getting seriously entrenched. What is seen as an upside is that it blurs the lines between operating systems which ends up helping GNU/Linux and also that it doesn't really require user to run proprietary software on his client machine.

AMD did not release free drivers for GNU/Linux. AMD did not release any new source code. They merely released specifications based on which Free Software developers can create drivers without the cost of reverse engineering. While this is progress compared to where we were, I am really thinking it is not a reason to be really happy and feeling all warm about AMD all of a sudden. Not if we believe that when we buy a piece of hardware we are entitled to everything that will make it work including everything that will show us how it works.

In other words, it is AMDs duty to release both specifications and free drivers for their cards. It is the ONLY ethical and fair thing to do. So to be happy that they released specs is like a chained man being happy for having its one arm being unchained even though the other is still tight under lock. It just doesn't make sense.