Didn't Asimov have a story about that? The robot reasoned that he was smarter than the humans so it was impossible for the humans to have built him. He created a religion with an unknown creator and basically locked the humans out of the control room....
The airforce has a philosophy that they follow with their stealth jets. Yeah, you could still throw enough bullets into the sky to take one down, but it's an awefully big sky. Now take that up another hundred miles or so and you end up with an absolutely huge sky. So far to date, even with the massive amount of derelict and broken down satellites in orbit, there has been exactly one verified impact event.
This is hardly the first time tools have been dropped, and it won't be the last.
Most likely they aren't 'testing' security to determine a rating. They are probably looking at architecture, design, rigorousness of developement process, and source code (if available). I imagine they see having the source code available as a negative for Linux simply because it gives would be attackers much more information about the system than is otherwise available. Combine that with the fact that the Open Source process isn't as complete as it could be and it's not at all suprising it recieved the rating that it did.
First, companies don't export things illegally often because it gets noticed very quickly and the fines and punishments are quite severe. Secondly, companies (even large ones) do get investigated and fined when they illegally export technology. Just last year ITT Corporation was fined $100 million for exporting night vision goggles to China.
Investigations of large corporations are actually pretty routine, the most common punishment being that the company or department is banned from bidding on government projects for a year or two. That might not seem like much of a punishment, but it can destroy the cash flow of a large defense contractor.
Windmills don't have that luxury, so often are working at RPM's that are not optimum. This method (if it works) widens the optimum range.
Close but not quite what they're getting at. What they're doing is increasing/decreasing the resistance to keep the windmill in the optimum RPM range over a larger range of wind speeds. So at 5 mph, the blades might spin at 20 rpm and generate 2 MW. At 15 mph, with the new system the blades still spin at 20 rpm, but now generate 5 MW. As oposed to traditional generators, where it would be spinning at 30 rpm and only generating 3 MW.
Whether something is a black hole or not is not determined by mass but by density. In theory, if you can sqeeze the mass into a small enough volume it will collapse into a black hole. No one ever said that any produced black hole will destroy the solar system, let alone impact the galaxy.
The worst case senario is the blackhole spirals through the Earths crust for the next few hundred thousand years, hardly ever absorbing any matter because of its extremely small size. Even if it were to eventually absorb all the matter of the Earth you would have a black hold smaller than the head of a pin, going around the exact same orbit with the exact same amount of gravitational attraction that the earth had.
Of course, this ignores the fact that such a small black hole will almost instantaniously evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation. It also ignores the fact that most likely the LHC is an order of magnitude too weak to produce the micro black holes at all. Finally, it ignores the fact that neutron stars exist. If the LHC is powerful enough to produce a stable black hole, then cosmic rays hitting neutron stars are too. After a few million years we wouldn't have neutron stars as they would all be converted to black holes.
The point is, there are lots of reasons that the LHC won't destroy the Earth. Not having enough mass to produce a black hole isn't one of them.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
I am 99.9% positive that Card was very clear that Anton was gay. I'd have to go back and look for that extra.1% but I don't really feel like it. Also, when I first read those stories it was before the extent of Card's Homophobic tendencies were know, at least to me. In fact, it was what inspired me to go out and see just what his political views were, which was how I came to find out just how bigoted the man is.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It isn't so much about 'preachy-ness' as it is about 'propaganda-ness'. In the Shadow series, for instance, we have the homosexual character of Anton. He is not in any way evil, Card doesn't ask us to fear or hate him as you might expect from a right wing writer.
Instead (and arguably worse), when we are first introduced to Anton we are asked to pity him. He is given a ludicrously strong cognitive dissonance to ham handedly symbolize the dissonance that Card assumes the man must have because of his lifestyle. He is utterly lonely and unhappy, and it is heavily implied that he has considered suicide as the only option to end his suffering.
Later in the story, Anton has *gasp* married. No, not to a man, but to a woman. In fact he is going to be a father. He is happy, talkative, and engaging. He mentions in passing that his homosexual tendancies have made his marriage harder but that with work they are able to get through it and live a full and happy life.
In my opinion, this is a more disgusting attack on gay rights than any violent diatrabe could ever be.
Re:What do I read first?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I would recommend reading all of the Ender stories first, then going back and reading the Bean stories second. While the two series are remarkably consistent; the Bean stories will change the way you think about the Ender stories. You realize that the monolithic messiah figures of the Ender stories are nothing of the sort, that their destiny is intertwined with that of all the other characters, major and minor.
On the other hand, Card has recently pressented himself as a bigotted asshat in regards to homosexual rights (I'm sure there will be other posts in this article that will link to the relevant information). So if you really want my advice; don't lend him more of a voice by purchasing his books. It's a hard decision, for myself included. I have been a huge fan of the series since I read Ender's game in middle school, but I will not be purchasing any more books of the series; it just doesn't feel right to support someone whose views clash so violently with my own.
space travel (Earth will be crowded we need to make a few colonies)
There is no way that colonization of any kind is going to alleviate overpopulation.
Let's say that you have only a million too many people living on earth. Lets even grant you a bunch of space elevators on the assumption that they can be made to work (yes, there are launching systems that could theoretically put more payload into orbit but the elevator is the only one gaining much traction at the moment). If you assume that each elevator can take 1000 people (extremely generous) up once every three days (without any downtime), you would still need to have about 8 of them just to get your million people into orbit in one years time.
Meanwhile, the population of the earth has increased by a hundred million people.
See the problem there? If population growth stays anywhere near current levels, it would take nearly a thousand space elevators just to get the 'excess' into orbit. Overpopulation can only be controlled through massive, and forced, population controls. Even then there's no garauntee. If there is even a small subculture that is willing to ignore whatever sanctions you have against having children, that subculture can only grow over the generations because the children will have grown up learning those values.
You know how you charge something, sign for it and no one looks at or cares about the signiture. There's a reason for that. Credit Card companies have figured out that verifying identity is impossible. Instead they try to verify by transaction by looking at the recent pattern of purchases for signs of theft.
Instead of trying to identify incoming virusses, they should be focusing on removal tools and monitoring. Watch the processes for unnusual behavior and flag the user if something is detected, then actually get rid of the virus if the user agrees with the analysis. Granted, unusual behavior is a pretty vaguely defined concept, but that seems a lot more adaptable to new threats than the current methods.
If you can prove that you didn't know about the patent when you created the product
Actually, you need to prove that you performed due dilligence to avoid a multiplication of damages. It isn't enough to pretend that patents don't exist; the courts aren't quite that stupid (yet).
Anyone with physical access to secure computers knows exactly what secret and top secret mean. Everyone has been through the briefings and knows exactly what is and isn't secure, and what can and can't be hooked up to the open net. Even more, everyone knows exactly what the fines and punishment are for violating those rules, treason is still taken quite seriously in this country.
Unless you're arguing for actual intrigue, (as in get hired by a defense contractor, get your clearance, then purposefully break the security rules) the idea of someone 'helpfully' hooking a computer into the net is a lot less likely than you would think. This isn't Initech software we're talking about, there aren't uninformed secretaries or IT people wandering around secure labs; classified information is highly sensitive and the poeple with access to it know that.
First and formost, neither candidate is trying to remove private insurance from the table. If you don't like the government insurance, you can continue to pay into a private one. Secondly, what incentive do doctors and hospitals have to cut costs the way things are now. Either insurance covers the procedure in which case it doesn't matter how expensive it is or insurance doesn't cover the procedure and the patient either can't or won't pay for it.
Finally, you say that the government isn't about protecting people's rights anymore. That may or may not be true, I don't pretend to have all the answers. But I will say this, there are some people that believe even the laziest freeloader has a right to food on his plate, a roof over his head, and necissary medical care. In my opinion, that's what the argument for 'spread the wealth' is all about; it's not about giving people a free ride or robbing the rich and giving to the poor. It's about protecting everyone's right to at least the chance of a good life, even if you do think they're a lazy SOB.
As far as the military aspects are concerned (which I'm willing to bet are the majority of the cases), it's not about who does and doesn't have the technologies. It's about the possibility of vulnerabilities being discovered and taken advantage of by our present and future enemies (in other words everyone).
Take cryptography used to encrypt radio traffic for the Air Force; yeah, we believe that the encryption would be nearly impossible to break. But given a working piece of hardware, if a vulnerability exists, it will be found. Not to mention the fact that you don't need to intercept communications to wreak havoc. With working hardware it may be possible to determine the best jamming or spoofing strategy.
Also can anyone actually explain why we should be bailing out these banks in the first place?
One word: externalities.
Having the largest banks in the world fail affects much more than just the banking industry, especially in our credit driven economy. Yeah, the banks need to be punished and the free market is very good at punishment when you screw up as badly as the banks have. However, the effects of the bank failures are too detrimental for us to allow it to happen.
Even with the bailout bill passed, there are people who have seen their savings drop 50% or more in value. Businesses that were run perfectly competently and ethically have failed because of a lack of available credit. Our economy relies on banks; when banks close, when people can't trust banks with their money, and when banks can't trust other banks with their money, our economy suffers greatly.
Every single issue you raised can be disabled very quickly and easily in Vista with about 30 seconds of searching. Appearance really shouldn't be an issue, you can make almost everything look just like XP or even Windows95 if you want to. If you're going to complain about Vista, complain about obnoxious (though undoubtably good in the long run) UAC. Or about the lack of quality drivers (not really Microsoft's fault but they should really be pressuring the hardware manufacturers more).
I've had Vista on a new laptop for about a month now. The only things that haven't worked as well or better than XP are my HP printer drivers wouldn't work with the default settings, and a very specific, very old, custom piece of software wouldn't install. I'm not saying it's perfect, far from it; but it really doesn't deserve to get picked on because people are too lazy to change settings they don't like.
Testing the speed of thought based on reaction times reminds me how back in the day they used to test IQ by figuring out how many different colors you could see or frequencies you could hear. The logic being that these things are rooted in the brain and therefore must be a direct measurement of the brains power.
I think a more accurate discription would be that the speed of electrical signals in the brain peaks at 39. We don't even know how that relates to the actual rates of cognition (or even if there is such a thing).
I think that it's meant to mean, 'if you find yourself in a situation where you feel you must use violence, you have been or are being incompetent'. In other words, you've either done something wrong in the past or you aren't seeing all your current options.
While I see your point, Asimov meant to take it even further. Your interpetation implies that violence can be an acceptable solution to a problem. Asimov is saying that it never is, and if you think it is a valid solution, you're not seeing the whole picture.
I would think that they would have to take the size of your building into account. If you house 100 people and 1 or two get arrested each year, that very well could be normal for your neighborhood and have nothing to do with the owner of the building.
Now consider that a place like myspace or facebook has hundreds of thousands of users, the vaste majority of which are 100% legitimate. In my opinion, it would be unnacceptable to pull the plug on those sites because of what a few idiotic kids did in their free time.
What about your statement couldn't be said about an ATM?
My god, I paid my mortgage online the other week, and yes, I trusted not only that my payment would get there, but that it would be right amount, that it wouldn't be eavesdropped on, that an confirmation number would be enough to defend myself if the bank claims never to have recieved it.
If I can trust 20% of my income in an online transaction, I should sure as hell be able to vote securely and anonomously. The fact that I can't isn't a failure of the idea, it's a failure of the implementation. If we can put a color touchscreen monitor on the voting machines (why? I have no idea) we can surely instal a printer to print out a reciept for each voter, that can be dropped in the ballot box on the way out.
Doesn't Smart Home already have this kind of thing, only profesionally developed and tested? I was under the impression that they supported things that were flexible enough that you could do pretty much anything with it.
If you absolutely need to develope it yourself, how about making it web enabled. Then it could be accessed from any web enabled phone. You'd have to implement a certain amount of security of course, don't want some jackass next door turning your lights on and off during the middle of the night.
I was thinking the same thing. For 29 Million, you probably get a requirements document, a feasibility study to see if the idea is even workable, and maybe a high level architecture. If you hire a small, agile company (read: 'cheap') you might get some kind of small, proof of concept for one or two small parts of the system with the highest risk of failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Asimov have a story about that? The robot reasoned that he was smarter than the humans so it was impossible for the humans to have built him. He created a religion with an unknown creator and basically locked the humans out of the control room. ...
Ah ha! Found it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(Asimov)/
The airforce has a philosophy that they follow with their stealth jets. Yeah, you could still throw enough bullets into the sky to take one down, but it's an awefully big sky. Now take that up another hundred miles or so and you end up with an absolutely huge sky. So far to date, even with the massive amount of derelict and broken down satellites in orbit, there has been exactly one verified impact event.
This is hardly the first time tools have been dropped, and it won't be the last.
Most likely they aren't 'testing' security to determine a rating. They are probably looking at architecture, design, rigorousness of developement process, and source code (if available). I imagine they see having the source code available as a negative for Linux simply because it gives would be attackers much more information about the system than is otherwise available. Combine that with the fact that the Open Source process isn't as complete as it could be and it's not at all suprising it recieved the rating that it did.
First, companies don't export things illegally often because it gets noticed very quickly and the fines and punishments are quite severe. Secondly, companies (even large ones) do get investigated and fined when they illegally export technology. Just last year ITT Corporation was fined $100 million for exporting night vision goggles to China.
Investigations of large corporations are actually pretty routine, the most common punishment being that the company or department is banned from bidding on government projects for a year or two. That might not seem like much of a punishment, but it can destroy the cash flow of a large defense contractor.
Windmills don't have that luxury, so often are working at RPM's that are not optimum. This method (if it works) widens the optimum range.
Close but not quite what they're getting at. What they're doing is increasing/decreasing the resistance to keep the windmill in the optimum RPM range over a larger range of wind speeds. So at 5 mph, the blades might spin at 20 rpm and generate 2 MW. At 15 mph, with the new system the blades still spin at 20 rpm, but now generate 5 MW. As oposed to traditional generators, where it would be spinning at 30 rpm and only generating 3 MW.
Whether something is a black hole or not is not determined by mass but by density. In theory, if you can sqeeze the mass into a small enough volume it will collapse into a black hole. No one ever said that any produced black hole will destroy the solar system, let alone impact the galaxy.
The worst case senario is the blackhole spirals through the Earths crust for the next few hundred thousand years, hardly ever absorbing any matter because of its extremely small size. Even if it were to eventually absorb all the matter of the Earth you would have a black hold smaller than the head of a pin, going around the exact same orbit with the exact same amount of gravitational attraction that the earth had.
Of course, this ignores the fact that such a small black hole will almost instantaniously evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation. It also ignores the fact that most likely the LHC is an order of magnitude too weak to produce the micro black holes at all. Finally, it ignores the fact that neutron stars exist. If the LHC is powerful enough to produce a stable black hole, then cosmic rays hitting neutron stars are too. After a few million years we wouldn't have neutron stars as they would all be converted to black holes.
The point is, there are lots of reasons that the LHC won't destroy the Earth. Not having enough mass to produce a black hole isn't one of them.
I am 99.9% positive that Card was very clear that Anton was gay. I'd have to go back and look for that extra .1% but I don't really feel like it. Also, when I first read those stories it was before the extent of Card's Homophobic tendencies were know, at least to me. In fact, it was what inspired me to go out and see just what his political views were, which was how I came to find out just how bigoted the man is.
It isn't so much about 'preachy-ness' as it is about 'propaganda-ness'. In the Shadow series, for instance, we have the homosexual character of Anton. He is not in any way evil, Card doesn't ask us to fear or hate him as you might expect from a right wing writer.
Instead (and arguably worse), when we are first introduced to Anton we are asked to pity him. He is given a ludicrously strong cognitive dissonance to ham handedly symbolize the dissonance that Card assumes the man must have because of his lifestyle. He is utterly lonely and unhappy, and it is heavily implied that he has considered suicide as the only option to end his suffering.
Later in the story, Anton has *gasp* married. No, not to a man, but to a woman. In fact he is going to be a father. He is happy, talkative, and engaging. He mentions in passing that his homosexual tendancies have made his marriage harder but that with work they are able to get through it and live a full and happy life.
In my opinion, this is a more disgusting attack on gay rights than any violent diatrabe could ever be.
I would recommend reading all of the Ender stories first, then going back and reading the Bean stories second. While the two series are remarkably consistent; the Bean stories will change the way you think about the Ender stories. You realize that the monolithic messiah figures of the Ender stories are nothing of the sort, that their destiny is intertwined with that of all the other characters, major and minor.
On the other hand, Card has recently pressented himself as a bigotted asshat in regards to homosexual rights (I'm sure there will be other posts in this article that will link to the relevant information). So if you really want my advice; don't lend him more of a voice by purchasing his books. It's a hard decision, for myself included. I have been a huge fan of the series since I read Ender's game in middle school, but I will not be purchasing any more books of the series; it just doesn't feel right to support someone whose views clash so violently with my own.
space travel (Earth will be crowded we need to make a few colonies)
There is no way that colonization of any kind is going to alleviate overpopulation.
Let's say that you have only a million too many people living on earth. Lets even grant you a bunch of space elevators on the assumption that they can be made to work (yes, there are launching systems that could theoretically put more payload into orbit but the elevator is the only one gaining much traction at the moment). If you assume that each elevator can take 1000 people (extremely generous) up once every three days (without any downtime), you would still need to have about 8 of them just to get your million people into orbit in one years time.
Meanwhile, the population of the earth has increased by a hundred million people.
See the problem there? If population growth stays anywhere near current levels, it would take nearly a thousand space elevators just to get the 'excess' into orbit. Overpopulation can only be controlled through massive, and forced, population controls. Even then there's no garauntee. If there is even a small subculture that is willing to ignore whatever sanctions you have against having children, that subculture can only grow over the generations because the children will have grown up learning those values.
You know how you charge something, sign for it and no one looks at or cares about the signiture. There's a reason for that. Credit Card companies have figured out that verifying identity is impossible. Instead they try to verify by transaction by looking at the recent pattern of purchases for signs of theft.
Instead of trying to identify incoming virusses, they should be focusing on removal tools and monitoring. Watch the processes for unnusual behavior and flag the user if something is detected, then actually get rid of the virus if the user agrees with the analysis. Granted, unusual behavior is a pretty vaguely defined concept, but that seems a lot more adaptable to new threats than the current methods.
If you can prove that you didn't know about the patent when you created the product
Actually, you need to prove that you performed due dilligence to avoid a multiplication of damages. It isn't enough to pretend that patents don't exist; the courts aren't quite that stupid (yet).
Anyone with physical access to secure computers knows exactly what secret and top secret mean. Everyone has been through the briefings and knows exactly what is and isn't secure, and what can and can't be hooked up to the open net. Even more, everyone knows exactly what the fines and punishment are for violating those rules, treason is still taken quite seriously in this country.
Unless you're arguing for actual intrigue, (as in get hired by a defense contractor, get your clearance, then purposefully break the security rules) the idea of someone 'helpfully' hooking a computer into the net is a lot less likely than you would think. This isn't Initech software we're talking about, there aren't uninformed secretaries or IT people wandering around secure labs; classified information is highly sensitive and the poeple with access to it know that.
First and formost, neither candidate is trying to remove private insurance from the table. If you don't like the government insurance, you can continue to pay into a private one. Secondly, what incentive do doctors and hospitals have to cut costs the way things are now. Either insurance covers the procedure in which case it doesn't matter how expensive it is or insurance doesn't cover the procedure and the patient either can't or won't pay for it.
Finally, you say that the government isn't about protecting people's rights anymore. That may or may not be true, I don't pretend to have all the answers. But I will say this, there are some people that believe even the laziest freeloader has a right to food on his plate, a roof over his head, and necissary medical care. In my opinion, that's what the argument for 'spread the wealth' is all about; it's not about giving people a free ride or robbing the rich and giving to the poor. It's about protecting everyone's right to at least the chance of a good life, even if you do think they're a lazy SOB.
As far as the military aspects are concerned (which I'm willing to bet are the majority of the cases), it's not about who does and doesn't have the technologies. It's about the possibility of vulnerabilities being discovered and taken advantage of by our present and future enemies (in other words everyone).
Take cryptography used to encrypt radio traffic for the Air Force; yeah, we believe that the encryption would be nearly impossible to break. But given a working piece of hardware, if a vulnerability exists, it will be found. Not to mention the fact that you don't need to intercept communications to wreak havoc. With working hardware it may be possible to determine the best jamming or spoofing strategy.
Also can anyone actually explain why we should be bailing out these banks in the first place?
One word: externalities.
Having the largest banks in the world fail affects much more than just the banking industry, especially in our credit driven economy. Yeah, the banks need to be punished and the free market is very good at punishment when you screw up as badly as the banks have. However, the effects of the bank failures are too detrimental for us to allow it to happen.
Even with the bailout bill passed, there are people who have seen their savings drop 50% or more in value. Businesses that were run perfectly competently and ethically have failed because of a lack of available credit. Our economy relies on banks; when banks close, when people can't trust banks with their money, and when banks can't trust other banks with their money, our economy suffers greatly.
Every single issue you raised can be disabled very quickly and easily in Vista with about 30 seconds of searching. Appearance really shouldn't be an issue, you can make almost everything look just like XP or even Windows95 if you want to. If you're going to complain about Vista, complain about obnoxious (though undoubtably good in the long run) UAC. Or about the lack of quality drivers (not really Microsoft's fault but they should really be pressuring the hardware manufacturers more).
I've had Vista on a new laptop for about a month now. The only things that haven't worked as well or better than XP are my HP printer drivers wouldn't work with the default settings, and a very specific, very old, custom piece of software wouldn't install. I'm not saying it's perfect, far from it; but it really doesn't deserve to get picked on because people are too lazy to change settings they don't like.
seems to be reasonable cause to me.
Then the police should do their job and get a search warrant.
The serial will work till the end of the month but if you want to get a serial you'll still need to go sign up for one today.
Testing the speed of thought based on reaction times reminds me how back in the day they used to test IQ by figuring out how many different colors you could see or frequencies you could hear. The logic being that these things are rooted in the brain and therefore must be a direct measurement of the brains power.
I think a more accurate discription would be that the speed of electrical signals in the brain peaks at 39. We don't even know how that relates to the actual rates of cognition (or even if there is such a thing).
I think that it's meant to mean, 'if you find yourself in a situation where you feel you must use violence, you have been or are being incompetent'. In other words, you've either done something wrong in the past or you aren't seeing all your current options.
While I see your point, Asimov meant to take it even further. Your interpetation implies that violence can be an acceptable solution to a problem. Asimov is saying that it never is, and if you think it is a valid solution, you're not seeing the whole picture.
I would think that they would have to take the size of your building into account. If you house 100 people and 1 or two get arrested each year, that very well could be normal for your neighborhood and have nothing to do with the owner of the building.
Now consider that a place like myspace or facebook has hundreds of thousands of users, the vaste majority of which are 100% legitimate. In my opinion, it would be unnacceptable to pull the plug on those sites because of what a few idiotic kids did in their free time.
What about your statement couldn't be said about an ATM?
My god, I paid my mortgage online the other week, and yes, I trusted not only that my payment would get there, but that it would be right amount, that it wouldn't be eavesdropped on, that an confirmation number would be enough to defend myself if the bank claims never to have recieved it.
If I can trust 20% of my income in an online transaction, I should sure as hell be able to vote securely and anonomously. The fact that I can't isn't a failure of the idea, it's a failure of the implementation. If we can put a color touchscreen monitor on the voting machines (why? I have no idea) we can surely instal a printer to print out a reciept for each voter, that can be dropped in the ballot box on the way out.
Doesn't Smart Home already have this kind of thing, only profesionally developed and tested? I was under the impression that they supported things that were flexible enough that you could do pretty much anything with it.
If you absolutely need to develope it yourself, how about making it web enabled. Then it could be accessed from any web enabled phone. You'd have to implement a certain amount of security of course, don't want some jackass next door turning your lights on and off during the middle of the night.
I was thinking the same thing. For 29 Million, you probably get a requirements document, a feasibility study to see if the idea is even workable, and maybe a high level architecture. If you hire a small, agile company (read: 'cheap') you might get some kind of small, proof of concept for one or two small parts of the system with the highest risk of failure.