Slashdot Mirror

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

From Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D., as quoted in I, Robot. In Robots and Empire (ch. 63), the "Zeroth Law" is extrapolated, and the other Three Laws modified accordingly:

A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Unlike the Three Laws, however, the Zeroth Law is not a fundamental part of positronic robotic engineering, is not part of all positronic robots, and, in fact, requires a very sophisticated robot to even accept it.

Asimov claimed that the Three Laws were originated by John W. Campbell in a conversation they had on December 23, 1940. Campbell in turn maintained that he picked them out of Asimov's stories and discussions, and that his role was merely to state them explicitly.

The Three Laws did not appear in Asimov's first two robot stories, "Robbie" and "Reason", but the First Law was stated in Asimov's third robot story "Liar!", which also featured the first appearance of robopsychologist Susan Calvin. (When "Robbie" and "Reason" were included in I, Robot, they were updated to mention the existence of the first law and first two laws, respectively.) Yet there was a hint of the three laws in "Robbie", in which Robbie's owner states that "He can't help being faithful, loving, and kind. He's a machine - made so." The first story to explicitly state the Three Laws was "Runaround", which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Information borrowed liberally from the Isaac Asimov FAQ.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
  
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams
  
• Life, the Universe and Everything, by Douglas Adams
  
• Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
  
• Foundation & Empire, by Isaac Asimov
  
• Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
  
• I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
  
• The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester
  
• The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
  
• Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
  
• Ubik, by Philip K. Dick
  
• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
  
• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
  
• Dune, by Frank Herbert
  
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller
  
• The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
  
• Hyperion/The Fall Of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
  
• A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
  
• A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
  

Be sure to take a look at the The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List for more recommendations

I was surprised that Asimov's three laws of robotics were not included in the list. They had such an impact on future s-f stories about robots or A.I.

Dan Simmons even coined the word asimotif (quote from the french edition) in his book "Endymion".

For those who have never heard of these laws, here they are :

The 1940 Laws of Robotics

First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law:
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If you want to see how Asimov dealt with these, I suggest reading "I, Robot", a little old but still interesting.

I read all of Niven's books, then nearly everything Asimov had ever penned,

We need more information here, if someone has some please post.

1. How can this be a felony, this is a civil matter. They should be sueing for damages.

Free86 takes the code that the X Consortium has developed and changes it in such a way as to make it x86 native

Thats what they did originally. Lately, they've started applying useful patches to the clients and libraries from outside sources that may or may not every get into TOG's X(tm). For example, XFree includes the xterm patches from here, added the essential XPM library, and beefed up Xaw to make it almost usable. Check out the release notes for more details.

Even more recently, they've started to tackle the key features that hold X back, like font handling and transparency. Check the mailing list archive for the most recent developments.

Beavis, what the hell are you talking about? TVT bought WaxTrax in 92. Wax Trax History/Discography page Nothing Records was formed after Reznor's difficulties with TVT, not when he signed. NIN FAQ regarding Nothing Records And this is moderated to 5 - Informative?

As one of the original X applications, I'm sure that xterm has suffered a lot from bloat, maybe even more than xclock and xload. :)

Ever look at the xterm source? Right there at the beginning of main.c is this wonderful comment:

* W A R N I N G
*
* If you think you know what all of this code is doing, you are
* probably very mistaken. There be serious and nasty dragons here.
*
* This client is *not* to be taken as an example of how to write X
* Toolkit applications. It is in need of a substantial rewrite,
* ideally to create a generic tty widget with several different parsing
* widgets so that you can plug 'em together any way you want. Don't
* hold your breath, though....

When I frist saw that a couple of years ago, I immediately switched to rxvt.

...Only, http://www.clark.net/pub/mjr/pubs/otpfaq/ does not exist and produces a 404. Someone is out there destroying the information needed to pin the bastards down! I bet it is part of that one world order thingy that I've been hearing so much about!
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com

I'll be wearing a "Byte Me" sweatshirt, so I shouldn't be easy to miss.

Cheers,

Mark

I was unable to locate any information about ZoneAlarm (zonelabs.com dns server seems to be down), and google wasn't much help finding info either. So I don't know if this is the type of thing you're looking for.

I use snort as a basic IDS. It's very flexible, and you can configure it in a variety of ways depending on your needs. Personally, I have it setup to discard packet data and simply log to syslog. I also have a small prog watch the snort output and manipulate ipfw (FreeBSD) accordingly. So basically, after a particular ip trips snort too often during a period of time, the system automatically drops all packets from that ip for 5 minutes or so.

Hope this helps a little.

My fraggle ego is just fine, thank you.

• Mitt hjørne av FRAGGLE ROCK!
• Chris's Fraggle Rock page

. . . or did you mean hamstered by our fraggle egos? Hemos, are you reading this one? 8^)

Snort can be used to do network intrusion detection. Combine Snort with this ruleset and you have intrusion detection -way- beyond most anything out there.

Of course, if you're just looking for whether or not someone is probing your host, the aforementioned PortSentry will do quite nicely.

Bruce's main site.
Information on Skipjack
Information on impossible-differential cryptanalysis
Information on attacks unknown to the NSA
About the Windows NSAKEY flap
Probable NSA backdoors
Information on the Blowfish algo
Information on the Twofish algo
Speed comparison of known algos
Speed comparison of the AES candidates
Summary of attacks on various algos
Breaking crypto isn't the best way to beat security. Article 1 Article 2
Information on the Solitare algo
Information on the Yarrow algo
Importance of peer-reviewed crypto
Comments on propriatary encryption
Dismissal of cracking contests
You say you can't break it; well, who the hell are you?"
Twofish team's published papers
David Wagner's published papers
So you wanna become a cryptographer?
Information on side-channel attacks
Information on power-analysis attacks
More information on side-channel attacks
Article on Quantum computing
The problems with the public-key infrastructure
The problem with longer keys
l0phtcrack
Biometrics as keys?

I believe it's The Feeling of Power. The premise of the story, for those who haven't read it, is a society that long forgot arithmetic, entrusting it to calculating machines that the builders no longer understood. Then one lowly calculator builder reverse-engineers the principles of calculation and discovers ways of doing arithmetic without a computer...

Tom's root and boot disk is here.

There's one called Snort that's pretty neat at http://www.clark.net/~roesch/security.ht ml

PortSentry is a port scan detector that can be found at http://www.psionic.com/abacus/portsentry

Northcutt's SHADOW project stuff is at http://www.nswc.navy.mil/ISSEC/CID/

Sinectonalysis has a few libraries for linux. I have no experience with them though ...

For FFT there is fftw and djbfft

the brain's storage of "knowledge" is not a digital structure, so it cannot be measured in bits.

It most certainly is digital. What did you think neurons were? They store 'bits' of data. As well as working as gates and flow controls. The exact workings may not be exactly bit-wise (ie. it may have a few more settings than either on or off), but the general method is certainly broken down on a level that can be described in a digital manner.

The actual amount of data that would be found within the human mind is still quite controversial. The exact number isn't likely to be nailed down until we can mimic the human memory system on a computer, either via Artificial Neural Network or in an advanced form of biological based storage media. If we could mimic the human brain, we'd not only know the answer to this question, but we'd be able to lick the AI problem, too. Also noted... Better organized thoughts than mine. This has a few previous discussions of how large the brain's storage capacity might be.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"

Except for the second law of thermodynamics argument. Humans are not a useable power source; [...] the movie explicitly called us batteries.

It could make sense, if you make up an appropriate backstory:

The humans don't mention it, but the computers are following the Zeroth Law of Robotics -- "A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." (The Matrix steals from everyone else -- why not Asimov?)

So, sometime around 2xxx (I don't remember the time frame of the movie), the computers decide to save humanity from itself and tuck them away in nice little pods. There's no malice intended to humanity as a whole; IIRC, the computers originally make the Matrix utopian. Of course, all the "free-as-in-will, not free-as-in-beer" losers like Morpheus take exception to the pod thing and try to screw everything up for the rest of us.

Now, since the computers have to keep all the humans on life support anyway, why not try to get a little energy back? Sure, it's a net energy loss and it's not the most efficient thing in the world, but hey -- every little bit helps! (Did they say that people were the sole power source of the future? If so, I'll resume lurking.)
--
Ce qui est n'est pas clos, du point de vue le plus essentiel.

I have put together a daemon I call "pidd" which, basically, monitors the number of pids in use and executes scripts in response to the number of free pid slots crossing certain thresholds. E.G. if the system has fewer than 100 pids left, page me, shut down the sendmail daemon, and block all access from the Internet. Obviously you could do fun things like try to determine who was causing the problem by looking at netstat -a and making packet filtering changes that only affect that address/subnet. Whatever you can think of.

For more info see comp.security.unix or grab the tarball, with sample configs plus email and ipfwadm response scripts, at http://www.clark.net/~peterw/pidd.tar.gz

# ls -l pidd.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5483 Mar 4 22:38 pidd.tar.gz
# sum -s pidd.tar.gz
45704 11 pidd.tar.gz

Okay, I also have a random art generation program
written in java at me page at http://www.clark.net/pub/rfinney. It's not as cool as the current topic's; but it's Open Source. It's called "randomart1" and it's interactive. If you don't like the current image, click on touch.
-rfinney