It isn't going to help much, because people will simply misuse and foolishly exploit whatever you invent. In fact an increase in technological ability simply means FASTER DESTRUCTION unless we utilize the agency we have more wisely. I understand the skepticism, and I don't particularly claim that some miraculous advance in our moral faculties seems immediately apparent. I simply relate what is necessary. Nature does not require that which is easily attained, nor even possible, yet the dictates of necessity are absolute. Accommodate them, rise to meet them, or perish.
That's what this is. Reputation? Please don't make me laugh! Its all about shit talk and riling people up. This is the Age of Disinformation folks, get used to it.
They never believed it could be a general problem which would threaten all people. They never imagined that ALL THE FORESTS OF THE EARTH could be stripped away; yet in 100 years that will be the case, no forest will remain. No, they could not imagine such a future. Nor is it likely we can really imagine the future which awaits us either, that arises from the path we are on. Good or bad, it is largely beyond our experience or appreciation.
We can fall back on basic wisdom though, "waste not, want not" and keeping something in reserve for another day. All of our most fundamental lessons tell us that we need to up our game, a LOT. My fundamental point is just that technology is not salvation. Anyone who places their money there, and neglects moral and spiritual development, is deluded.
But it was primitive agricultural tech, supported only be primitive manufacturing, materials, etc. which fundamentally created those population limits (along with a lack of sanitation and the technology to achieve that). It is telling that the greatest ecological catastrophes were the result of high population densities. Iraq was once a fertile land, but is now mostly desert. Once populations reach a certain level, bad things happen. Technology, particularly in its modern form, is quite good at generating those populations.
And this leads to the question, why do we need so many people? Can we not ask this kind of question and seek a wise and moral answer, and learn to act on it? Perhaps not, but such is the need.
I do not mean 'hand wavy new age mumbo-jumbo'. I mean moral maturity and what are truly defined by the words 'virtue' and 'wisdom' in their most fundamental forms. Not the laughable pap sold to the masses by cheap preachermen, but a real deep and abiding thoughtfulness.
You may call this impossible, and who will really refute that judgment, but to do so is to declare the issue of humanity's future closed, and not in a good way.
And you have stated the other hand. Now, in the gripping hand, its inevitable that we will do something bad to ourselves, so where exactly is the out? One one hand technological progress is vital, and on the other it dooms us utterly.
Again, the solution MUST BE social and 'spiritual' in nature. Mankind, as constituted, cannot simply continue to 'progress'. We either grow up, or we die. There ARE no other choices.
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." --Albert Einstein
This is an overly simplistic analysis. We wouldn't have the severe ecological problems we have today if it were not for advanced technology. While earlier civilizations had, sometimes locally catastrophic, impacts on the environment they were never anywhere close to drastically altering the overall carbon budget or nitrogen budget of the biosphere as we are today. Nor did they pose anything like the challenges represented by biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.
While its not crazy to suggest that technical progress can solve many of the issues we have today, FUNDAMENTALLY the problems aren't technical or scientific and so these kinds of solutions can have but a limited impact. Its MORE reasonable to imagine that the march of technology will present ever greater challenges and that the pace of these challenges will increase, whilst our ability to advance socially and morally has not really changed at all (I think there is such progress, but it is fundamentally unaffected by technology).
Thus it would be far more rational to argue that we are increasingly losing control of our impact on the world and that these conditions are likely to spiral out of control, or else be replaced with even MORE intractable problems we may not even be fully capable of imagining today. People 200 years ago couldn't even really imagine air pollution or global warming for example.
It's not really that much more expensive, as mature engineers aren't really more expensive than programmers, are a lot more effective, and the debug cycle is a lot faster when it's designed in at the front.
Dude, I worked in this industry. Its FUCKING INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE. Like on the order of 100x more expensive than writing line-of-business commercial software. A 10 line subroutine can EASILY require 100 hours of engineering and testing to meet spec. Everything has to be written out in some sort of design document beforehand, every requirement flowed down to lines of code that cover it, documented test cases that cover each requirement, total coverage of all possible inputs at every call boundary, etc.
I mean, yes, theoretically it would be great if all of this was done in every piece of software, but software's PURPOSE is to be flexible and quickly and efficiently implement functions in a way that can be modified without exorbitant cost. If you force things to the level of safety of flight critical software then you might as well literally build dedicated silicon for everything, because it will be cheaper.
The truth is software will probably never achieve this kind of level of reliability and security in general. It just isn't worth it. Even safety critical software needs to be cheaper than that. If we want the functionality and convenience of embedding software in cars, airplanes, etc then we better be willing to accept the consequences. The only alternative is likely automated software development performed entirely by AIs, but I doubt that will fix the problem either. There's always some guy that can make the smarter AI that can figure out the security hole in the software your dumber one wrote.
lol, how would a flow chart add to that effort? A DFD might, a sequence diagram perhaps, but flow charts just aren't that good at describing, well, anything really. If its complex stateful logic, then generally you end up with a massive and unreadable mess. If there is any parallel anything going on then its utterly useless. There's a very limited sweet spot for flow charts, but at this point structured/oo/functional language constructs have largely obviated the pressing need to describe limited chunks of control flow. Its really just easier to code it and see it.
I remember using fairly early UML modeling tools back in the early 2000's, but there were earlier incarnations of the concept. TBH I never found UML all that compelling. It has some uses, but truthfully a well-written description of some software and API documentation is far handier than any amount of UML.
Yeah, now I remember that Mindstorm programming thing. It was kind of interesting, but again you couldn't push it too far. You could write maybe a modest sized program that way, at best. For the intended purpose it was reasonably well-suited, but I'd note that people quickly outgrew it as well. The other thing to note with Mindstorm was that is was purely a single-threaded and very linear kind of a thing. That put some pretty heavy constraints on what you could actually do with it.
I mean, we have had UML now for going on 15 years. You can CERTAINLY generate code and other artifacts from some types of UML diagrams. None of these is all that much like a flowchart, and frankly flowcharts are essentially dead AFAIK. They really only ever worked well, if they ever did, on fairly straightforward procedural code. Back in the bad old days before Structured Programming and then OOP it wasn't all that uncommon to see people using them, but that was mainly because even fairly straightforward linear code was hard to understand when it was written in FORTRAN or COBOL. Such charts have little relevance in modern OO/functional coding where linear control flow is really not an issue.
I think we used a Harris H/500 minicomputer and connected via VT100's wired through a Gandalf box into a baseband network. Actually I'm not sure they even taught anything else back then, except maybe COBOL if you were a business major, LOL. I guess there must have been some sort of Assembler courses perhaps? FORTRAN was pretty much the language of choice in those days, but within 5 years (this was 1981) C was dominant. I think I took a Pascal class in about '83.
Often the question if there's some sort of client for the local API or not. Obviously if its just a web service, which most are, then its probably not hard to create one, but most people just want plug-n-play. So I'd say the firewall that limits traffic to only the IP of the cloud service, both ways, makes sense. You may need to tweak it now and then as the provider changes IPs perhaps, but it should generally work.
That's an overgeneralization. It also doesn't take into account that there are a LOT of possibilities that are short of 'you can just access the whole internet'. Any Firewall can restrict outgoing traffic to specific destinations. It can restrict incoming connections equally. It can force a login through a proxy, which can thwart any backdoor. More sophisticated devices can recognize malicious behavior and put a stop to it. There's plenty that can be done.
Yeah, that's true of course. The problem is most devices envisage remote operation, and for many it CAN make sense. Quite a lot of them also expect to be able to push data up into the cloud for whatever reasons. Many also perform remote updates. It would of course be perfectly reasonable to allow devices to designate a single external point of contact which they can initiate, and obviously your firewall/LAN setup can easily deal with that. That will still leave some potential vectors for attack, but they would require considerably more effort, not something a botnet that spreads automatically would be able to muster.
ALL you need are some CONVENTIONS. Every firewall that isn't utterly worthless already blocks ALL outgoing traffic. IoT devices should, by convention, expose their API on a specific and otherwise not typical port. This port can simply always be blocked, ALWAYS ALWAYS blocked on the firewall. Now, when you need to have some specific access from somewhere, then the firewall could act as an authenticating proxy, removing the need for IoT vendors to actually grok security (which is literally a hopeless hope, they never will). Assuming your wireless network is adequately secured, so that nothing gets on it that you don't want there, you should be pretty set. Further conventions could relegate all IoT devices to a separate specific VLAN, etc. The key point is, all the devices need to do is adhere to some VERY simple conventions that even half-assed software vendors can adhere to.
Won't stop all problems, but it would make a damned good start.
Sorry, but this doesn't explain actual observations! It may be that some sort of modified gravity is a partial answer, but the mass distribution in galaxy clusters, and possibly other places as well, simply isn't explained by a non-physical effect.
You CAN do that in Google Sheets, which has some quite advanced features (though it also is somewhat more clunky to do some fairly routine things).
I'm not sure what Excel has though vs what Calc has. In calc you can use VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP (and there are a couple other flavors too) and you can use those with rectangular data ranges. The result is PRETTY flexible in many respects, BUT you definitely lack things like subqueries, or even the ability to do searches on more than one column value or complex sorting. Generally you just have to create some additional columns that contain the data you need in the right format, but it can be a pain.
I'd definitely vote for more powerful capabilities in this area though. A lot of stuff is POSSIBLE, but even a lot of relatively easy stuff to describe is HARD to implement.
That's quite possible. I haven't had to do that. Like I said elsewhere on this topic, I have LOTS of fun problems with LO Writer, but at a BASIC level of doing simple small stuff that is probably 99% of what people do, its reasonably good. I just wish it would go beyond that because the alternatives are pretty expensive.
Yes, it works if the document is simple. If its not very simply laid out, forget it, LO makes an utter hash of larger documents that have frames or tables in them. It gets close, but close is not good enough when it leaves off whole chunks of text, overflows text outside of tables, cuts things off, etc. Again, its a matter of degree. If you print out your 3 page resume with a page header, a couple headings, a bullet list, and one or two customized styles, its fine. Tell it to reflow text around a frame with a mixture of text and an embedded table, and you're out of luck.
Slashdot Mirror
It was wrecked by 1000's of years of over irrigation.
I never claimed any plan or desire to 'eliminate' anyone. You invented that idea, not me.
It isn't going to help much, because people will simply misuse and foolishly exploit whatever you invent. In fact an increase in technological ability simply means FASTER DESTRUCTION unless we utilize the agency we have more wisely. I understand the skepticism, and I don't particularly claim that some miraculous advance in our moral faculties seems immediately apparent. I simply relate what is necessary. Nature does not require that which is easily attained, nor even possible, yet the dictates of necessity are absolute. Accommodate them, rise to meet them, or perish.
This is a solved problem.
That's what this is. Reputation? Please don't make me laugh! Its all about shit talk and riling people up. This is the Age of Disinformation folks, get used to it.
They never believed it could be a general problem which would threaten all people. They never imagined that ALL THE FORESTS OF THE EARTH could be stripped away; yet in 100 years that will be the case, no forest will remain. No, they could not imagine such a future. Nor is it likely we can really imagine the future which awaits us either, that arises from the path we are on. Good or bad, it is largely beyond our experience or appreciation.
We can fall back on basic wisdom though, "waste not, want not" and keeping something in reserve for another day. All of our most fundamental lessons tell us that we need to up our game, a LOT. My fundamental point is just that technology is not salvation. Anyone who places their money there, and neglects moral and spiritual development, is deluded.
But it was primitive agricultural tech, supported only be primitive manufacturing, materials, etc. which fundamentally created those population limits (along with a lack of sanitation and the technology to achieve that). It is telling that the greatest ecological catastrophes were the result of high population densities. Iraq was once a fertile land, but is now mostly desert. Once populations reach a certain level, bad things happen. Technology, particularly in its modern form, is quite good at generating those populations.
And this leads to the question, why do we need so many people? Can we not ask this kind of question and seek a wise and moral answer, and learn to act on it? Perhaps not, but such is the need.
I do not mean 'hand wavy new age mumbo-jumbo'. I mean moral maturity and what are truly defined by the words 'virtue' and 'wisdom' in their most fundamental forms. Not the laughable pap sold to the masses by cheap preachermen, but a real deep and abiding thoughtfulness.
You may call this impossible, and who will really refute that judgment, but to do so is to declare the issue of humanity's future closed, and not in a good way.
And you have stated the other hand. Now, in the gripping hand, its inevitable that we will do something bad to ourselves, so where exactly is the out? One one hand technological progress is vital, and on the other it dooms us utterly.
Again, the solution MUST BE social and 'spiritual' in nature. Mankind, as constituted, cannot simply continue to 'progress'. We either grow up, or we die. There ARE no other choices.
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
--Albert Einstein
This is an overly simplistic analysis. We wouldn't have the severe ecological problems we have today if it were not for advanced technology. While earlier civilizations had, sometimes locally catastrophic, impacts on the environment they were never anywhere close to drastically altering the overall carbon budget or nitrogen budget of the biosphere as we are today. Nor did they pose anything like the challenges represented by biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.
While its not crazy to suggest that technical progress can solve many of the issues we have today, FUNDAMENTALLY the problems aren't technical or scientific and so these kinds of solutions can have but a limited impact. Its MORE reasonable to imagine that the march of technology will present ever greater challenges and that the pace of these challenges will increase, whilst our ability to advance socially and morally has not really changed at all (I think there is such progress, but it is fundamentally unaffected by technology).
Thus it would be far more rational to argue that we are increasingly losing control of our impact on the world and that these conditions are likely to spiral out of control, or else be replaced with even MORE intractable problems we may not even be fully capable of imagining today. People 200 years ago couldn't even really imagine air pollution or global warming for example.
It's not really that much more expensive, as mature engineers aren't really more expensive than programmers, are a lot more effective, and the debug cycle is a lot faster when it's designed in at the front.
Dude, I worked in this industry. Its FUCKING INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE. Like on the order of 100x more expensive than writing line-of-business commercial software. A 10 line subroutine can EASILY require 100 hours of engineering and testing to meet spec. Everything has to be written out in some sort of design document beforehand, every requirement flowed down to lines of code that cover it, documented test cases that cover each requirement, total coverage of all possible inputs at every call boundary, etc.
I mean, yes, theoretically it would be great if all of this was done in every piece of software, but software's PURPOSE is to be flexible and quickly and efficiently implement functions in a way that can be modified without exorbitant cost. If you force things to the level of safety of flight critical software then you might as well literally build dedicated silicon for everything, because it will be cheaper.
The truth is software will probably never achieve this kind of level of reliability and security in general. It just isn't worth it. Even safety critical software needs to be cheaper than that. If we want the functionality and convenience of embedding software in cars, airplanes, etc then we better be willing to accept the consequences. The only alternative is likely automated software development performed entirely by AIs, but I doubt that will fix the problem either. There's always some guy that can make the smarter AI that can figure out the security hole in the software your dumber one wrote.
lol, how would a flow chart add to that effort? A DFD might, a sequence diagram perhaps, but flow charts just aren't that good at describing, well, anything really. If its complex stateful logic, then generally you end up with a massive and unreadable mess. If there is any parallel anything going on then its utterly useless. There's a very limited sweet spot for flow charts, but at this point structured/oo/functional language constructs have largely obviated the pressing need to describe limited chunks of control flow. Its really just easier to code it and see it.
I remember using fairly early UML modeling tools back in the early 2000's, but there were earlier incarnations of the concept. TBH I never found UML all that compelling. It has some uses, but truthfully a well-written description of some software and API documentation is far handier than any amount of UML.
Yeah, now I remember that Mindstorm programming thing. It was kind of interesting, but again you couldn't push it too far. You could write maybe a modest sized program that way, at best. For the intended purpose it was reasonably well-suited, but I'd note that people quickly outgrew it as well. The other thing to note with Mindstorm was that is was purely a single-threaded and very linear kind of a thing. That put some pretty heavy constraints on what you could actually do with it.
I mean, we have had UML now for going on 15 years. You can CERTAINLY generate code and other artifacts from some types of UML diagrams. None of these is all that much like a flowchart, and frankly flowcharts are essentially dead AFAIK. They really only ever worked well, if they ever did, on fairly straightforward procedural code. Back in the bad old days before Structured Programming and then OOP it wasn't all that uncommon to see people using them, but that was mainly because even fairly straightforward linear code was hard to understand when it was written in FORTRAN or COBOL. Such charts have little relevance in modern OO/functional coding where linear control flow is really not an issue.
I think we used a Harris H/500 minicomputer and connected via VT100's wired through a Gandalf box into a baseband network. Actually I'm not sure they even taught anything else back then, except maybe COBOL if you were a business major, LOL. I guess there must have been some sort of Assembler courses perhaps? FORTRAN was pretty much the language of choice in those days, but within 5 years (this was 1981) C was dominant. I think I took a Pascal class in about '83.
Often the question if there's some sort of client for the local API or not. Obviously if its just a web service, which most are, then its probably not hard to create one, but most people just want plug-n-play. So I'd say the firewall that limits traffic to only the IP of the cloud service, both ways, makes sense. You may need to tweak it now and then as the provider changes IPs perhaps, but it should generally work.
That's an overgeneralization. It also doesn't take into account that there are a LOT of possibilities that are short of 'you can just access the whole internet'. Any Firewall can restrict outgoing traffic to specific destinations. It can restrict incoming connections equally. It can force a login through a proxy, which can thwart any backdoor. More sophisticated devices can recognize malicious behavior and put a stop to it. There's plenty that can be done.
Yeah, that's true of course. The problem is most devices envisage remote operation, and for many it CAN make sense. Quite a lot of them also expect to be able to push data up into the cloud for whatever reasons. Many also perform remote updates. It would of course be perfectly reasonable to allow devices to designate a single external point of contact which they can initiate, and obviously your firewall/LAN setup can easily deal with that. That will still leave some potential vectors for attack, but they would require considerably more effort, not something a botnet that spreads automatically would be able to muster.
ALL you need are some CONVENTIONS. Every firewall that isn't utterly worthless already blocks ALL outgoing traffic. IoT devices should, by convention, expose their API on a specific and otherwise not typical port. This port can simply always be blocked, ALWAYS ALWAYS blocked on the firewall. Now, when you need to have some specific access from somewhere, then the firewall could act as an authenticating proxy, removing the need for IoT vendors to actually grok security (which is literally a hopeless hope, they never will). Assuming your wireless network is adequately secured, so that nothing gets on it that you don't want there, you should be pretty set. Further conventions could relegate all IoT devices to a separate specific VLAN, etc. The key point is, all the devices need to do is adhere to some VERY simple conventions that even half-assed software vendors can adhere to.
Won't stop all problems, but it would make a damned good start.
'Density'? 'Flow'? How is this not matter if it is localized in space time and moves around? It sure as fuck smells like matter to me!
Sorry, but this doesn't explain actual observations! It may be that some sort of modified gravity is a partial answer, but the mass distribution in galaxy clusters, and possibly other places as well, simply isn't explained by a non-physical effect.
You CAN do that in Google Sheets, which has some quite advanced features (though it also is somewhat more clunky to do some fairly routine things).
I'm not sure what Excel has though vs what Calc has. In calc you can use VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP (and there are a couple other flavors too) and you can use those with rectangular data ranges. The result is PRETTY flexible in many respects, BUT you definitely lack things like subqueries, or even the ability to do searches on more than one column value or complex sorting. Generally you just have to create some additional columns that contain the data you need in the right format, but it can be a pain.
I'd definitely vote for more powerful capabilities in this area though. A lot of stuff is POSSIBLE, but even a lot of relatively easy stuff to describe is HARD to implement.
That's quite possible. I haven't had to do that. Like I said elsewhere on this topic, I have LOTS of fun problems with LO Writer, but at a BASIC level of doing simple small stuff that is probably 99% of what people do, its reasonably good. I just wish it would go beyond that because the alternatives are pretty expensive.
Oh, and PDF output, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Yes, it works if the document is simple. If its not very simply laid out, forget it, LO makes an utter hash of larger documents that have frames or tables in them. It gets close, but close is not good enough when it leaves off whole chunks of text, overflows text outside of tables, cuts things off, etc. Again, its a matter of degree. If you print out your 3 page resume with a page header, a couple headings, a bullet list, and one or two customized styles, its fine. Tell it to reflow text around a frame with a mixture of text and an embedded table, and you're out of luck.