People seem to be slanging off Negreponte as being overly protective of his invention. According to the article, he isn't. He is in the education business, and happy that a side effect of his initiative is that cheap laptops are becoming available. He is not in the business of flogging laptops. He has technical concerns about apples-with-oranges comparisons.
I suspect he expects his initiative to fail. Not for lack of merit, but simply the gross inadequacy of the decision makers in most countries. Bribery is the norm in international trade, and the need to appear powerful must be near universal among politicians. Microsoft is powerful, Linux is not. So go where the power is. Additionally, ' branding ' works in all societies. He will not be expecting a kiddies book ending here.
Re:Welcome to the world of modern research ...
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
I'm not a mathematician, but a retired scientist. The sardonic 'Welcome' is quite justified. However, there is nothing modern about the 'trust' problem. Science has long been subject to a need to use trust. But it is a sceptical trust, and wants issues verified. The nastiest example I know of is Piltdown Man. There the skull and jaw evidence tended to be kept away from the verification process and a fraud existed for 40 years.
I have twice produced results (as a chemist) that could not be verified. In both cases, once a different reagent bottle was used, the reaction failed. So scientific truth tends to build with time, or be falsified suddenly. It is naive to accept anything as immediately true. Would you take the initial reports on a new Miracle Drug as being reliable? Yep, but only if death was the alternative, and not always then.
Mathematical proofs have now got so long and complex that they are joining the real world. They are provisionally proven. It does not matter whether verification awaits an Honours class each with weeks to devote to a fraction of the written proof, or programmer(s) who not only write independent code, but use a different processor. I do not see either of those as being quick processes. But in both cases, it helps to have the proof segmented, so that the most fragile parts are tested first. I would agree that code should have a broad algorithm and more detailed pseudocode available. Source code welcome, but really of use only to show where the bug occurred. I've read and read code that I know has a bug, and not been able to find it. Reading code isn't verification, but it does permit falsification.
And since truth is not a boolean, I'd welcome suggestions on what constitutes a handy label for the various truth status of propositions. For instance:
Piltdown true: The Establishment believes it, but some mavericks have cogently argued otherwise. Can someone please clear the doubts, or else bury it again.
I won't define a 'One-bottle true' status. I actually believed those reactions worked reliably. I had spectra to prove it.
I'd guess that the object of the research was to see how an office based 'platoon' acted under battlefield stress. Answer. They stuff up even simple operations. This has major implications for preparing people for the real thing. No point in having 50 panic trained pilots if the other 5000 on the aircraft carrier cannot enter simple logistic requests.
In terms of moral balance, which would you rather have. Soldiers dying because the war instructions were designed in peacetime for peacetime, or 10 shaky guys who belong to a group that prides itself on looking death in the eye and sneering, but somewhat better logistic support
Now the elephant experiment. That seems just plain stupid. There would be some justification if the experimenters were locked in the same enclosure as the elephant. The object then is to achieve Darwinian elimination of highly educated wastrels. It would seem easier and cheaper just to have the experimenters on acid, all together on a small island with elephant guns.
But the Chinese have not announced their plans. Testosterone is a remarkably heavy molecule. If they cunningly send Chinese women to the moon, then than halves the weight.
Course, they'd have to be careful that none of them were blond.
I visited because I couldn't believe "Dozier" wasn't fake. I speak British English. The Oxford Dictionary gives: dozy
adjective (dozier, doziest) 1 feeling drowsy and lazy. 2 Brit. informal not alert; stupid.
So I thought, "They gotta be kidding, right. This is fair warning" OK. They are serious. So if their claim could be valid (they are experts compared to me), then is it legal to for my virus checker to look over their HTML. I'm responsible for my servants I think. Ignorance is no excuse.
Basically you are right. But politicians in New Zealand get elected every 3 years, so 5 is way too big a number. Setting a standard of 1 years warning would allow civil servants to advise politicians that there will be problems if an urgent update is needed. It is a matter of priorities. There was just 5 months warning of the DST change. (Department of Internal Affairs news release of 30/4/2007) In comparison, you can look up the NZ Ministry of Education website and get school term dates out to 2011. Term dates really matter. (Too many mum's stamping their feet could trigger an earthquake.)
If it isn't all that important to New Zealand, why should Debian exaggerate the importance.
The UN is somewhat corrupt, but that is not why I'd oppose them running it. Nor because they are political at heart. Look up the Whaling Commission on Wikipedia as an example. The key problem is they are country oriented.
Top level domains should be about routing traffic competently. I do not care if the USSR or Yugoslavia or Aland or the Faroe Islands or Antarctica are countries or not. You have to balance traffic routing as engineering efficiency and some ability to legally control the activities of the users of that domain. If say Tonga (with its nice.to ending) cannot control its users, then it has no function. It is too small to have any traffic relevance.
There is an obvious social utility. By swapping the dangling dice for a 'toddler_on_the_road' image, you could cause a driver to swerve into an oncoming mega truck. These lawyer-free relationship terminations could be called microsoft divorces. Of course you wouldn't be able to get the software direct. It would have to be a Mafia Supplied (MS) killer app.
The toddler image would be best converted into a cubist image after say 3 secs so that forensic work would have difficulty distinguishing jiggling dice from dicing with death.
Sorry. Jiggling dice does mean dicing with death. Shouldn't we allow idiots to embrace Darwin and all his works.
Yes. At Wairakei. So you are quite right. Geothermal power has been around for decades. The NZ plant illustrates a key problem. Geothermal power is a simple heat engine. Either you release an awful lot of steam into the atmosphere along with hydrogen sulphide, arsenic and other geological nasties, or you cool it and warm up a river. Wairakei in New Zealand pumps it into the Waikato River. It does try to alleviate the ecological back-lash by water re-injection. The ecological side effects are a major limit on the plant. (Or were when I visited 20 years ago. I'm out of date.)
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy....
No. Intelligent life is utterly certain, but we are still alone in the universe.
I do not accept that intelligent life forms are too 'intelligent' to come near us. Religion, wander-lust, desperation, navigation bungles. There are lots of reasons for life forms to turn up here. The paradox is real in the sense that there appears to have been plenty of opportunity for someone to have visited. The error must be in the mental framework we have of earth-like planets in lots of places, for millions of years. It cannot be true.
If the universe began as a quantum event, and we in a time twisted way are the observers of the event that creates our particular universe, then we are a necessary event. But according to these quantum theories, (and I'm ignorant of any detail), a successfully created universe is an improbable event. That is, there is only one likely observer per universe.
That 'observer' can be a species, so there are lots of us, but we are all the same. Just one observer.
That is a possible explanation for the paradox. It is not watertight. The observing species should be able in time to spread, lose contact, and then re-discover its relatives. So I also accept that it is likely that the universe has only recently ceased being hostile to life like us.
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to be slanging off Negreponte as being overly protective of his invention. According to the article, he isn't. He is in the education business, and happy that a side effect of his initiative is that cheap laptops are becoming available. He is not in the business of flogging laptops. He has technical concerns about apples-with-oranges comparisons.
I suspect he expects his initiative to fail. Not for lack of merit, but simply the gross inadequacy of the decision makers in most countries. Bribery is the norm in international trade, and the need to appear powerful must be near universal among politicians. Microsoft is powerful, Linux is not. So go where the power is. Additionally, ' branding ' works in all societies. He will not be expecting a kiddies book ending here.
I'm not a mathematician, but a retired scientist. The sardonic 'Welcome' is quite justified. However, there is nothing modern about the 'trust' problem. Science has long been subject to a need to use trust. But it is a sceptical trust, and wants issues verified. The nastiest example I know of is Piltdown Man. There the skull and jaw evidence tended to be kept away from the verification process and a fraud existed for 40 years.
I have twice produced results (as a chemist) that could not be verified. In both cases, once a different reagent bottle was used, the reaction failed. So scientific truth tends to build with time, or be falsified suddenly. It is naive to accept anything as immediately true. Would you take the initial reports on a new Miracle Drug as being reliable? Yep, but only if death was the alternative, and not always then.
Mathematical proofs have now got so long and complex that they are joining the real world. They are provisionally proven. It does not matter whether verification awaits an Honours class each with weeks to devote to a fraction of the written proof, or programmer(s) who not only write independent code, but use a different processor. I do not see either of those as being quick processes. But in both cases, it helps to have the proof segmented, so that the most fragile parts are tested first. I would agree that code should have a broad algorithm and more detailed pseudocode available. Source code welcome, but really of use only to show where the bug occurred. I've read and read code that I know has a bug, and not been able to find it. Reading code isn't verification, but it does permit falsification.
And since truth is not a boolean, I'd welcome suggestions on what constitutes a handy label for the various truth status of propositions. For instance:
Piltdown true: The Establishment believes it, but some mavericks have cogently argued otherwise. Can someone please clear the doubts, or else bury it again.
I won't define a 'One-bottle true' status. I actually believed those reactions worked reliably. I had spectra to prove it.
I'd guess that the object of the research was to see how an office based 'platoon' acted under battlefield stress. Answer. They stuff up even simple operations. This has major implications for preparing people for the real thing. No point in having 50 panic trained pilots if the other 5000 on the aircraft carrier cannot enter simple logistic requests.
In terms of moral balance, which would you rather have. Soldiers dying because the war instructions were designed in peacetime for peacetime, or 10 shaky guys who belong to a group that prides itself on looking death in the eye and sneering, but somewhat better logistic support
Now the elephant experiment. That seems just plain stupid. There would be some justification if the experimenters were locked in the same enclosure as the elephant. The object then is to achieve Darwinian elimination of highly educated wastrels. It would seem easier and cheaper just to have the experimenters on acid, all together on a small island with elephant guns.
Ok, I'll accept that Delta 4 lifts twice as much.
But the Chinese have not announced their plans. Testosterone is a remarkably heavy molecule. If they cunningly send Chinese women to the moon, then than halves the weight.
Course, they'd have to be careful that none of them were blond.
I visited because I couldn't believe "Dozier" wasn't fake. I speak British English. The Oxford Dictionary gives:
dozy
adjective (dozier, doziest)
1 feeling drowsy and lazy.
2 Brit. informal not alert; stupid.
So I thought, "They gotta be kidding, right. This is fair warning"
OK. They are serious.
So if their claim could be valid (they are experts compared to me), then is it legal to for my virus checker to look over their HTML. I'm responsible for my servants I think. Ignorance is no excuse.
Basically you are right. But politicians in New Zealand get elected every 3 years, so 5 is way too big a number. Setting a standard of 1 years warning would allow civil servants to advise politicians that there will be problems if an urgent update is needed. It is a matter of priorities. There was just 5 months warning of the DST change. (Department of Internal Affairs news release of 30/4/2007) In comparison, you can look up the NZ Ministry of Education website and get school term dates out to 2011. Term dates really matter. (Too many mum's stamping their feet could trigger an earthquake.)
If it isn't all that important to New Zealand, why should Debian exaggerate the importance.
The UN is somewhat corrupt, but that is not why I'd oppose them running it. Nor because they are political at heart. Look up the Whaling Commission on Wikipedia as an example. The key problem is they are country oriented.
.to ending) cannot control its users, then it has no function. It is too small to have any traffic relevance.
Top level domains should be about routing traffic competently. I do not care if the USSR or Yugoslavia or Aland or the Faroe Islands or Antarctica are countries or not. You have to balance traffic routing as engineering efficiency and some ability to legally control the activities of the users of that domain. If say Tonga (with its nice
I'd back engineers any day over the UN.
There is an obvious social utility. By swapping the dangling dice for a 'toddler_on_the_road' image, you could cause a driver to swerve into an oncoming mega truck. These lawyer-free relationship terminations could be called microsoft divorces. Of course you wouldn't be able to get the software direct. It would have to be a Mafia Supplied (MS) killer app.
The toddler image would be best converted into a cubist image after say 3 secs so that forensic work would have difficulty distinguishing jiggling dice from dicing with death.
Sorry. Jiggling dice does mean dicing with death. Shouldn't we allow idiots to embrace Darwin and all his works.
Yes. At Wairakei. So you are quite right. Geothermal power has been around for decades. The NZ plant illustrates a key problem. Geothermal power is a simple heat engine. Either you release an awful lot of steam into the atmosphere along with hydrogen sulphide, arsenic and other geological nasties, or you cool it and warm up a river. Wairakei in New Zealand pumps it into the Waikato River. It does try to alleviate the ecological back-lash by water re-injection. The ecological side effects are a major limit on the plant. (Or were when I visited 20 years ago. I'm out of date.)
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.... No. Intelligent life is utterly certain, but we are still alone in the universe. I do not accept that intelligent life forms are too 'intelligent' to come near us. Religion, wander-lust, desperation, navigation bungles. There are lots of reasons for life forms to turn up here. The paradox is real in the sense that there appears to have been plenty of opportunity for someone to have visited. The error must be in the mental framework we have of earth-like planets in lots of places, for millions of years. It cannot be true. If the universe began as a quantum event, and we in a time twisted way are the observers of the event that creates our particular universe, then we are a necessary event. But according to these quantum theories, (and I'm ignorant of any detail), a successfully created universe is an improbable event. That is, there is only one likely observer per universe. That 'observer' can be a species, so there are lots of us, but we are all the same. Just one observer. That is a possible explanation for the paradox. It is not watertight. The observing species should be able in time to spread, lose contact, and then re-discover its relatives. So I also accept that it is likely that the universe has only recently ceased being hostile to life like us.