Anyone who's seen photomicrographs of IC chips has probably had a similar unsettling thought, looking down on a city from an airplane window. Self-similarity is practically everywhere you look, even in our own creations.
If they found large-scale double-helix structures in space, I'd pretty much shit my drawers. Then I'd start a religion around it and make big bucks.
Agreed, it's a shame that when good people do good things under the auspices of religion, they're tarred with the same brush as the Rick Warrens and other pop-media Pharisees. To me, that's just another argument in favor of abandoning the religious trappings altogether.
Good people will do good things without religion. Bad people will do bad things in spite of religion. When good people do bad things, though, you can often find religious influence behind it.
I can't speak for anyone in a militia movement, but I think you'll find that your local ACLU chapter follows the national organization's policy, in that they stand up for almost all of the Bill of Rights except for the Second Amendment. I mentioned the Nevada chapter because they've repudiated the national organization in that respect.
But I'm sure you're more interested in inciting a flame war than in finding out the truth.
As someone who likes to support organizations both financially and physically, I don't know your beef with my support.
The devil's in the details. What does your church, and its larger governing body, do with your support? Tell Africans that HIV is spread through holes in condoms? Buy millions of dollars' worth of airtime to convince voters in California that civil rights are a matter for popular referendum? Attack public school boards like a bacteriophage, injecting antiscientific horseshit into the curriculum? My beef isn't with you, per se, but with the fact that I have to spend money to counteract what your church does with the money you give it. Unless you're a member of a Zen Buddhist congregation, they're probably using your funds to impose their beliefs on my life.
Hey, I'd rather support the Planetary Society and Mars Society instead of all those groups I mentioned, and you might even prefer that, too. Instead, I have to pay the FFRF, ALA, and various science-education lobbyists to keep fighting battles that should've ended 500 years ago.
As an ugly American, I really can't make judgment calls on the activities of various groups in Africa. I don't live in Africa. From a distance, it seems that by spreading supestition, FUD, and general nonsense about the evils of family planning, mainstream Christianity is actively trying to ensure that Africa remains the church's own private client state for centuries to come.
While I see only negative influence from religious interests on the progress of humanity, my comment explicitly allows for disagreement on what charities and interest groups to support. The larger point, which I think you would agree with, is that when you feel exasperated with the state of things, it can be therapeutic to force yourself to look beyond your immediate interests and give some help to others who are working to improve the situations you're upset about. Spread some cash around to delegate your angst, in other words.:-P
I find that it's easier to avoid taking other peoples' idiocy to heart when I can pay various non-profit organizations to deal with it on my behalf. Some recent favorites include:
There are plenty of other worthy causes; those are just the ones on my list this year. Think about it this way: the God-botherers contribute a full 10% of their income, pre-tax, to try to drag civilization back into the Middle Ages. What's the best you can do?
I seriously doubt it. Training and doctrine makes the difference, not equipment. The US military is still undefeatable in a fair fight. Destroying the Iranian air force would cost us the same 24 hours+pocket change that the Iraqi air force cost us.
Of course, the real war only begins when we "win."
Very true, you can't forget the essentially-equivalent effect of media censorship versus government censorship. However, the topic at hand concerns individual bloggers being punished for speech on the Web.
I think what he's saying is that governments who drive subversive speech underground aren't really doing themselves, or their citizens, any favors. Ideas don't need sunlight to grow.
Look at the US's case. We don't criminalize any speech, really, except kiddie porn and direct incitements to violence. (The McCain-Feingold campaign funding law is an arguable subject but there it's funding and timing, not content as such, that is involved.) So any nutcase with a chip on his shoulder can propagate the most outlandish, hateful tripe you could imagine. Things that would get him prosecuted in much of the EU, or executed in China.
What happens as a result? Not a damn thing. The resulting cacophony of dissidence just raises the "noise floor" of popular discourse. No radical point of view gains any more traction than it would have if it were aggressively suppressed by the government; if anything, we've become a more conservative nation since the Internet gave the nutcases their soapbox.
Suppressing speech is always pointless at best, and more likely counterproductive.
And in response to those who think local schools shouldn't be allowed to set their own educational agendas because they are "inbred, God-fearing fools" (I paraphrase), why the hell not?
It's not OK for little Johnny to grow up ignorant of basic biological principles because he had the bad fortune to be born in Kansas.
What makes you so certain you are right?
A staggering preponderance of peer-reviewed scientific evidence.
Pork usually refers to projects that can't even begin to justify themselves on a national-infrastructure basis, like the proverbial "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska that would have served a handful of isolated, specific citizens at a cost to the rest of many millions of dollars.
I don't think anyone considers major interstate highway and bridge maintenance to be pork.
Even the multi-touch is not new, I was using military hardware in 1995 that did this.
On the one-in-a-thousand chance that your entire post isn't one long exercise in juvenile puffery, you could do the world a big favor by elaborating on this. Right now, other vendors aren't able to use multi-touch because Apple has patented it out the wazoo. If their patent(s) could be invalidated by prior art dating back to 1995, that would be great for everyone else.
It almost sounds to me as if you feel programmers should just build off UDP to achieve what they want from TCP. Looking through your arguments it looks as if your reasoning is because most applications use TCP then have to recreate various functions of TCP to work correctly anyway. So they should just use UDP to begin with [and build the other bits in thier application]?
Opinions will vary, just read the thread. It wasn't too long ago that anyone challenging the supremacy of TCP/IP for any and all networking applications would have been modded down to -1, Heretic.
From the application developer's perspective, TCP maintains connections on your behalf. What's a connection, you ask? Simply a remembered state ("I'm talking to host X on port Y") with a bunch of buffers associated with it to guarantee reliable delivery of the data you send to host X. Outgoing data is kept around until the remote host sends an ack back saying it got it OK. If the ack doesn't arrive within a certain amount of time, typically measured in thousands of milliseconds, TCP helpfully retransmits your data. The reverse happens on the receive side; because outgoing packets are sequence-numbered by the transmitter, duplicated or out-of-order packets can be thrown away (if duplicated) or buffered up until the missing packets arrive to fill in the gap (if out-of-order delivery is detected).
What's wrong with that? Not a thing, if your application is synchronously sending and receiving chunks of text or linear pieces of binary data between two hosts.
The thing is, that's not a good description of what most of the Internet's publicly-visible applications do anymore. If you're streaming VoIP, music, or video, you don't want to stall the stream for thousands of milliseconds if a single packet gets lost. The application already has to maintain its own media buffers to hide latency from the user, and it may be able to synthesize missing VoIP frames from context, drop video frames when necessary (and compensate by adjusting timing), or whatever. If you're running a game server, the client physics is already doing prediction and interpolation to hide latency and packet loss, so when a packet gets lost, it's a case of "It's gone, dude, let it go."
Similarly, if you're running BitTorrent or something else that amounts to a peer-to-peer file system, you're already using your own high-level protocol to assemble file images from disparate, potentially out-of-order fragments. You probably want to be able to determine your own strategies for acknowledging packet delivery, abandoning or punishing uncooperative peers, and managing peer traffic volume.
TCP brings essentially no value to the table in any of these situations. It's going to fanatically deliver that data to you, even if it has to retry 10 times and choke back a megabyte of traffic to maintain packet order. It'll get that data to you, even if you don't need it anymore.
So yeah, conceptually, you'll end up using UDP to emulate a lot of the semantics of TCP, but in practice what you do as the application developer is probably quite different than what TCP would do on your behalf. Applications nowadays are more distributed, less synchronous, and more latency-sensitive than they were back in the 1980s when Unix-heads used the terms "file" and "stream" more or less interchangeably.
There is nothing wrong with TCP/IP -- it's a hell of a nice piece of engineering, in fact. So was the Apple II. The world moves on.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who's seen photomicrographs of IC chips has probably had a similar unsettling thought, looking down on a city from an airplane window. Self-similarity is practically everywhere you look, even in our own creations.
If they found large-scale double-helix structures in space, I'd pretty much shit my drawers. Then I'd start a religion around it and make big bucks.
Rubbish, yourself. That's like dying in a sudden, fiery car wreck because you didn't think you needed to bother with a seat belt.
No, but it can keep overpopulation (and other ills) from destroying every last vestige of civilization.
The dinosaurs died because they insisted on "fixing problems here on Earth first."
Agreed, it's a shame that when good people do good things under the auspices of religion, they're tarred with the same brush as the Rick Warrens and other pop-media Pharisees. To me, that's just another argument in favor of abandoning the religious trappings altogether.
Good people will do good things without religion. Bad people will do bad things in spite of religion. When good people do bad things, though, you can often find religious influence behind it.
I can't speak for anyone in a militia movement, but I think you'll find that your local ACLU chapter follows the national organization's policy, in that they stand up for almost all of the Bill of Rights except for the Second Amendment. I mentioned the Nevada chapter because they've repudiated the national organization in that respect.
But I'm sure you're more interested in inciting a flame war than in finding out the truth.
As someone who likes to support organizations both financially and physically, I don't know your beef with my support.
The devil's in the details. What does your church, and its larger governing body, do with your support? Tell Africans that HIV is spread through holes in condoms? Buy millions of dollars' worth of airtime to convince voters in California that civil rights are a matter for popular referendum? Attack public school boards like a bacteriophage, injecting antiscientific horseshit into the curriculum? My beef isn't with you, per se, but with the fact that I have to spend money to counteract what your church does with the money you give it. Unless you're a member of a Zen Buddhist congregation, they're probably using your funds to impose their beliefs on my life.
Hey, I'd rather support the Planetary Society and Mars Society instead of all those groups I mentioned, and you might even prefer that, too. Instead, I have to pay the FFRF, ALA, and various science-education lobbyists to keep fighting battles that should've ended 500 years ago.
As an ugly American, I really can't make judgment calls on the activities of various groups in Africa. I don't live in Africa. From a distance, it seems that by spreading supestition, FUD, and general nonsense about the evils of family planning, mainstream Christianity is actively trying to ensure that Africa remains the church's own private client state for centuries to come.
While I see only negative influence from religious interests on the progress of humanity, my comment explicitly allows for disagreement on what charities and interest groups to support. The larger point, which I think you would agree with, is that when you feel exasperated with the state of things, it can be therapeutic to force yourself to look beyond your immediate interests and give some help to others who are working to improve the situations you're upset about. Spread some cash around to delegate your angst, in other words. :-P
I find that it's easier to avoid taking other peoples' idiocy to heart when I can pay various non-profit organizations to deal with it on my behalf. Some recent favorites include:
The ever-present EFF
The Freedom from Religion Foundation
The American Library Association
The Wikimedia Foundation
The Nevada chapter of the ACLU (which is explicitly pro-Second Amendment, unlike the national body)
There are plenty of other worthy causes; those are just the ones on my list this year. Think about it this way: the God-botherers contribute a full 10% of their income, pre-tax, to try to drag civilization back into the Middle Ages. What's the best you can do?
Um, yeah, he pretty much does. At least all of his more recent ones.
I love Woz to death, but if Jobs gets hit by a bus and they install Woz as chairman/CEO, I will spend my sainted mother's last dime shorting AAPL.
I seriously doubt it. Training and doctrine makes the difference, not equipment. The US military is still undefeatable in a fair fight. Destroying the Iranian air force would cost us the same 24 hours+pocket change that the Iraqi air force cost us.
Of course, the real war only begins when we "win."
Very true, you can't forget the essentially-equivalent effect of media censorship versus government censorship. However, the topic at hand concerns individual bloggers being punished for speech on the Web.
I think what he's saying is that governments who drive subversive speech underground aren't really doing themselves, or their citizens, any favors. Ideas don't need sunlight to grow.
Look at the US's case. We don't criminalize any speech, really, except kiddie porn and direct incitements to violence. (The McCain-Feingold campaign funding law is an arguable subject but there it's funding and timing, not content as such, that is involved.) So any nutcase with a chip on his shoulder can propagate the most outlandish, hateful tripe you could imagine. Things that would get him prosecuted in much of the EU, or executed in China.
What happens as a result? Not a damn thing. The resulting cacophony of dissidence just raises the "noise floor" of popular discourse. No radical point of view gains any more traction than it would have if it were aggressively suppressed by the government; if anything, we've become a more conservative nation since the Internet gave the nutcases their soapbox.
Suppressing speech is always pointless at best, and more likely counterproductive.
And in response to those who think local schools shouldn't be allowed to set their own educational agendas because they are "inbred, God-fearing fools" (I paraphrase), why the hell not?
It's not OK for little Johnny to grow up ignorant of basic biological principles because he had the bad fortune to be born in Kansas.
What makes you so certain you are right?
A staggering preponderance of peer-reviewed scientific evidence.
Even Ultima IV on the Apple II had the sense to precache the next set of tiles in the direction of travel.
Pork usually refers to projects that can't even begin to justify themselves on a national-infrastructure basis, like the proverbial "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska that would have served a handful of isolated, specific citizens at a cost to the rest of many millions of dollars.
I don't think anyone considers major interstate highway and bridge maintenance to be pork.
WTF? Even FR-4 only loses about 1 dB/inch at 8 GHz! Spend the bucks for better board material.
This whole article makes no sense at all. Matching networks are not especially lossy at cellphone frequencies.
If this recession/depression lasts longer than 6 months, the RIAA will not survive the year.
A nice sentiment. The actual headline on Slashdot will read more like, "October 12, 2009: $45 Billion Bailout for Record Labels Approved by Congress."
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
Not much else to say on the subject. If you're using my taxes to purchase those laptops, you don't get to decide what content they can access.
Perhaps you missed the bit about patent law whereby the military get to use whatever they want, whenever they want.
Pretty sure I'm not the one who's in the business of missing things here. :-P
Prior art is prior art, regardless of who developed it.
Even the multi-touch is not new, I was using military hardware in 1995 that did this.
On the one-in-a-thousand chance that your entire post isn't one long exercise in juvenile puffery, you could do the world a big favor by elaborating on this. Right now, other vendors aren't able to use multi-touch because Apple has patented it out the wazoo. If their patent(s) could be invalidated by prior art dating back to 1995, that would be great for everyone else.
Not all of them are trivial Tristan Rocheleau's lock-in amplifier project is not something I'd expect to see from an undergrad.
<shrug> This is why you don't send engineers to negotiate arms-control treaties.
It almost sounds to me as if you feel programmers should just build off UDP to achieve what they want from TCP. Looking through your arguments it looks as if your reasoning is because most applications use TCP then have to recreate various functions of TCP to work correctly anyway. So they should just use UDP to begin with [and build the other bits in thier application]?
Opinions will vary, just read the thread. It wasn't too long ago that anyone challenging the supremacy of TCP/IP for any and all networking applications would have been modded down to -1, Heretic.
From the application developer's perspective, TCP maintains connections on your behalf. What's a connection, you ask? Simply a remembered state ("I'm talking to host X on port Y") with a bunch of buffers associated with it to guarantee reliable delivery of the data you send to host X. Outgoing data is kept around until the remote host sends an ack back saying it got it OK. If the ack doesn't arrive within a certain amount of time, typically measured in thousands of milliseconds, TCP helpfully retransmits your data. The reverse happens on the receive side; because outgoing packets are sequence-numbered by the transmitter, duplicated or out-of-order packets can be thrown away (if duplicated) or buffered up until the missing packets arrive to fill in the gap (if out-of-order delivery is detected).
What's wrong with that? Not a thing, if your application is synchronously sending and receiving chunks of text or linear pieces of binary data between two hosts.
The thing is, that's not a good description of what most of the Internet's publicly-visible applications do anymore. If you're streaming VoIP, music, or video, you don't want to stall the stream for thousands of milliseconds if a single packet gets lost. The application already has to maintain its own media buffers to hide latency from the user, and it may be able to synthesize missing VoIP frames from context, drop video frames when necessary (and compensate by adjusting timing), or whatever. If you're running a game server, the client physics is already doing prediction and interpolation to hide latency and packet loss, so when a packet gets lost, it's a case of "It's gone, dude, let it go."
Similarly, if you're running BitTorrent or something else that amounts to a peer-to-peer file system, you're already using your own high-level protocol to assemble file images from disparate, potentially out-of-order fragments. You probably want to be able to determine your own strategies for acknowledging packet delivery, abandoning or punishing uncooperative peers, and managing peer traffic volume.
TCP brings essentially no value to the table in any of these situations. It's going to fanatically deliver that data to you, even if it has to retry 10 times and choke back a megabyte of traffic to maintain packet order. It'll get that data to you, even if you don't need it anymore.
So yeah, conceptually, you'll end up using UDP to emulate a lot of the semantics of TCP, but in practice what you do as the application developer is probably quite different than what TCP would do on your behalf. Applications nowadays are more distributed, less synchronous, and more latency-sensitive than they were back in the 1980s when Unix-heads used the terms "file" and "stream" more or less interchangeably.
There is nothing wrong with TCP/IP -- it's a hell of a nice piece of engineering, in fact. So was the Apple II. The world moves on.
Don't blame the transport layer for not including session layer functionality (because it shouldn't).
I'm blaming it for including too much of that functionality, in the form of stateful connections.
And I suppose you carry all your water from the well in buckets.
Well, you're already in a state of sin when you treat a packet-switched network like a circuit-switched one. :-P