By "contact" he probably means "irrefutable evidence of life", as in, for example, we find ourselves hearing radio transmissions (not necessarily directed outward, but incidental to technological life). The impact on society would be tremendous even without physical or two-way contact. Just knowing someone else is out there is disruptive.
All the greybeards have these sorts of stories, but not this specific tale. Working at MSU physics lab, about once a week I would take two or three trays of punch cards, with no sequence numbers (that would have taken up 8 precious columns) over to the data center to be read in by a simple 2-4 card JCL code. I would mark the tops of the decks with a big "X" and the date, no worries.
One day the printout came back with a simple JCL error, so I went to pick up the deck planning to resubmit it. As they brought the boxes forward they dumped them all over the floor, as I stood there watching. Ooops.
Of course, they had actually taken an old set of cards and dumped them, this was my second time being involved in a prank while working with data centers. The first time, I was the pranker, so I had it coming.
Another story involves a pranker feedback loop. Using SimScript back in the day, punch cards with turnarounds measured in hours.
Student gets his printout back and finds the report includes a printed line "Eat my shorts". He rifles through his card deck, and finds a card that his buddy had slipped in. Running the card through the punch, he adds the words "... you scum sucking pig" and inserts it into the suspected pranker's submitted deck.
Cue lunch. The Sargent from data center window comes to our lunch table to tell the original pranker (now the prankee) that they killed his job after it printed a several foot high stack of "Eat my shorts you scum sucking pig" (oops, forgot to look for programming loops before just dropping the card into the deck). He is to report to the Commander at 2PM to explain himself.
Original prankee falls all over himself apologizing, promises to go with the original pranker to explain, lots of recrimination, etc. Sargent, having stood there silently, finally interrupts to note that they really only printed a few pages, and this abuse of government equipment need not go any higher.
Lessons learned? (1) Do NOT prank carelessly. (2) If you must prank, keep the sysops in the loop.
Seems to me that a good noise-adding printer wrapped around an encrypted message could be a very interesting way to use USPS for secure communications. Or does NSA want to open physical mail AND solve the Captcha problem just to read my notes to my Family?
It's a standard TypeI-TypeII error matrix, just tell me the rates of innocents who die because we failed to execute a criminal vs the rates of innocents we kill because we execute them. My earlier comment points to this, we have people who would kill a gazillion innocent prisoners to get one guilty man, conversely we have people who would let criminals take a gazillion innocent lives to keep from executing one innocent prisoner. The 0-1's of the world cannot event discuss how big a gazillion is, they are pegged to the meter extremes and cannot be part of a rational argument.
Yeah, that worked real well with the Irish (Australia) and the French (Devil's Island). The real argument is whether we think all criminals can be redeemed. The belief in universal redemption sure worked well for the Catholic Church. Like abortion, this is an argument between two 0-1 parties with no middle ground. So take it elsewhere.
The Trajectory Division once suggested an acronym for a project that was called Reverse Azimuth Trajectories For Undetectable China Kills, those were the days.
Ahhh, the nobility of subsistence farming co-existing with industrial productivity. I personally love community supported agriculture (CSAs) and the produce they provide, but I do not think we can count on a 7-9B person planet existing on this track for long. And Game of Thrones level existence is way post-collapse, if we continue to rely on paleofuels to power our farms (fertilizers, planting, reaping, delivery to market), how much of that can be converted to alcohol and nuclear?
I was torn whether to mod this up or reply to it. In the end, the point I thought needed making was that the post-scarcity economy we all seem to be celebrating is about to run into the peak-resources problem. Unless an author talks both, they are a blind philosopher describing an elephant.
He was NOT an arm of government, so 5th amendment does not apply. Maybe he should have packed heat into the school and gone all Columbine on them. Fek that.
Sorry to have to tell ya, democracies bigger than a few hundred have to evolve into representative democracies, and if they are really to survive they need to move to representative republics. At best.
All you can hope for is that the oligarchy believes as you do, and if they don't they are hopefully held in check by a Constitution. Of course, they know that, so they work to modify the rules in their favor. Freedom is a transitory state, like childhood, and you should enjoy it while you can.
I'll bet this is why I can re-read a (fiction) book two days after I finish it and still find it interesting and fun. Not surprising (I remember the story), but interesting and fun because I am really reading it for the writing. Am I screwed or what?
Linux is in my future because I am tired of upgrading hardware just so I can run bloatware. But then, I don't use my computer for entertainment, I use it for work (which means I am VPN to a real linux cluster and only use local machine for email and browser, except for those nasty printer drivers and scanner drivers and music and CD burning and (hmmmmm, never mind)).
So my hardware can't handle Windoze next upgrade and my bank account can't handle a hardware upgrade. Adios.
Religion provides a sense of community (just like going to a football game does, but not seasonal). A sense of community makes one live longer and happier. So a sense of community is good.
The Internet provides a false sense of community. So, IF this virtual-community makes one live longer and happier, then it is a good substitute for religion. I think Slashdot readers get a great deal of community from Slashdot, for example, and I hope (as one) that it results in a longer and happier life (after controlling for lack of exercise, etc. in my models).
I would say that physics is clearly a subset of mathematics, which is to say we can pose even simple questions that are outside of physical reality. And, no, the imaginary number i is not what I have in mind. But the fact that there is absolutely NO object in existence that needs the full value of pi suggests that the universe (and the physics thereof) is a subset of mathematics. And P not equal NP may fall into the same crack, which is to say that the universe is too small (and granular) to contain the NP problems that make P not equal to NP.
So, on the one hand we have climate scientists who warn us that global warming is going to make life difficult if not impossible in short order. On the other hand we have political and behavioral scientists who warn us that people cannot be rational and that political solutions won't solve the problem (like renewables or giving up paleofuels) or that they cannot be implemented (who wants to tell the Chinese and the Indians that they don't get to move up to Western levels of consumption?).
So which scientists do YOU believe?
Planning Commissions (PCs) and planning and zoning are where we wrest control from politicians who are beholding to money and developers. But PCs have to fight to use that limited power against people who make money by ignoring the science. The local planning commission should have stopped issuing permits to build or upgrade based on those old reports.
If we really start to pay for data flow then a 4Gigabit daily movie habit gets real expensive, both in infrastructure and in cost (when paying per-bit downloaded). But only Polyanna could pretend that we won't have to eventually pay for big data downloads (the same non-functioning thinkers who thought making health care cheaper for the individual would automatically make more health care available).
Maybe they want to use it for launching and landing 3/4 scale radio control toys? I mean really, there must be close to a hundred million youtubing video-kings who could create a better video of the sinking of an aircraft carrier than the Iranians would get from blowing this up. But it would make a good flyby target if you had an air force that needed to practice attacking a carrier, but again, unless it shoots back you'd be better off with a good video game. But for now, I'll watch this space.
The creationists have a valid argument IF we are talking about a Friday night beer brawl over whose football team is better. But we are not. We are talking about whether the universe is closed, open, or balanced. Is it 13.7B years old or is the current expansion 13.8B years old?
If you want to argue that the earth is 6,000 years old, go talk to the "Last Thursdians", the Hindus and all those other nonsense mythologies. Myths make great themes for movies, but I would not want my heart surgeon or bridge-designer acting on those myths. The Creationists are fundamentally different from the others because they bring their arguments to places where actions are developed, and that makes them dangerous.
Could I just suggest that there be a website where I could post a photo of an object I hoped to sell, and if no-one commented within a reasonable time then I could point at that post as a valid defense if some git wanted to do this to my tiny little business. I would suggest 2.7 minutes, but I don't like this sort of stuff. But it would be fun to argue in court that the other guy's attorneys had a "duty of care" to be monitoring this site 24x7 (at the other guys expense, I might add). Of course, the current standard duty of care is imposed in the other direction even though the supporting search process is way stoopid. Let's start to use real-time for what it's really worth.
Of course, this plan would never work because the rent-seekers among us have more money, and thereby more access to the legal system, than the rest of us. That is, the rest of us put together.
Cory Doctorow (Pirate Cinema), you are my new god of IP stupidity. Must read for all of us, never mind the nit-pickers among us.
Given the bandwidth and bugs I sometimes wish Firefox had an HTML1.0 only setting... but then I read quickly and I don't have the patience to sit through long videos. Certainly don't need embedded videos and most images. But a switch that let me see HTML5 as if it were HTML3 or HTML1 would be helpful.
Throughout my long career supporting decision makers I have always contended that "action defines truth".
So, if I am on top of a tall building, the science of gravity is "settled" in that I would not step off the top expecting to hover like Wiley Coyote. In that sense, then settled is a function of the importance of the decision I am making. So, is the science of evolution settled? With respect to actions that allow bacteria to evolve yes, and I use that "settled" state to inform actions regarding overuse of antibiotics. But I seldom make decisions that need to know if Neanderthals could interbreed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens, so that science need not be considered settled.
Global warming? Of course it is not "settled". But I do note, and act on, the fact that insurance companies are adjusting rates to reflect the new risks that global warming has introduced (see FL and wind insurance, see MN and house insurance rates). So it is settled in that sense.
Beginning of life? Not a scientific question, this is all about where a life deserves protection at the expense of another. Because I believe in the sovereignty of the individual (don't force me to donate my spare kidney, thank you very much), there really is no scientifically answerable question. But there the "settle3d" question is removed from the table by the sovereignty question.
My final point? Arguing about when scie3nce is settled in the absence of an actionable question makes as much sense as arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Slashdot Mirror
By "contact" he probably means "irrefutable evidence of life", as in, for example, we find ourselves hearing radio transmissions (not necessarily directed outward, but incidental to technological life). The impact on society would be tremendous even without physical or two-way contact. Just knowing someone else is out there is disruptive.
One day the printout came back with a simple JCL error, so I went to pick up the deck planning to resubmit it. As they brought the boxes forward they dumped them all over the floor, as I stood there watching. Ooops.
Of course, they had actually taken an old set of cards and dumped them, this was my second time being involved in a prank while working with data centers. The first time, I was the pranker, so I had it coming.
Another story involves a pranker feedback loop. Using SimScript back in the day, punch cards with turnarounds measured in hours.
Student gets his printout back and finds the report includes a printed line "Eat my shorts". He rifles through his card deck, and finds a card that his buddy had slipped in. Running the card through the punch, he adds the words "... you scum sucking pig" and inserts it into the suspected pranker's submitted deck.
Cue lunch. The Sargent from data center window comes to our lunch table to tell the original pranker (now the prankee) that they killed his job after it printed a several foot high stack of "Eat my shorts you scum sucking pig" (oops, forgot to look for programming loops before just dropping the card into the deck). He is to report to the Commander at 2PM to explain himself.
Original prankee falls all over himself apologizing, promises to go with the original pranker to explain, lots of recrimination, etc. Sargent, having stood there silently, finally interrupts to note that they really only printed a few pages, and this abuse of government equipment need not go any higher.
Lessons learned? (1) Do NOT prank carelessly. (2) If you must prank, keep the sysops in the loop.
Seems to me that a good noise-adding printer wrapped around an encrypted message could be a very interesting way to use USPS for secure communications. Or does NSA want to open physical mail AND solve the Captcha problem just to read my notes to my Family?
It's a standard TypeI-TypeII error matrix, just tell me the rates of innocents who die because we failed to execute a criminal vs the rates of innocents we kill because we execute them. My earlier comment points to this, we have people who would kill a gazillion innocent prisoners to get one guilty man, conversely we have people who would let criminals take a gazillion innocent lives to keep from executing one innocent prisoner. The 0-1's of the world cannot event discuss how big a gazillion is, they are pegged to the meter extremes and cannot be part of a rational argument.
Yeah, that worked real well with the Irish (Australia) and the French (Devil's Island). The real argument is whether we think all criminals can be redeemed. The belief in universal redemption sure worked well for the Catholic Church. Like abortion, this is an argument between two 0-1 parties with no middle ground. So take it elsewhere.
The Trajectory Division once suggested an acronym for a project that was called Reverse Azimuth Trajectories For Undetectable China Kills, those were the days.
Ahhh, the nobility of subsistence farming co-existing with industrial productivity. I personally love community supported agriculture (CSAs) and the produce they provide, but I do not think we can count on a 7-9B person planet existing on this track for long. And Game of Thrones level existence is way post-collapse, if we continue to rely on paleofuels to power our farms (fertilizers, planting, reaping, delivery to market), how much of that can be converted to alcohol and nuclear?
And here is the longer version of scarcity+productivity, thanks Immerman!
I was torn whether to mod this up or reply to it. In the end, the point I thought needed making was that the post-scarcity economy we all seem to be celebrating is about to run into the peak-resources problem. Unless an author talks both, they are a blind philosopher describing an elephant.
He was NOT an arm of government, so 5th amendment does not apply. Maybe he should have packed heat into the school and gone all Columbine on them. Fek that.
Sorry to have to tell ya, democracies bigger than a few hundred have to evolve into representative democracies, and if they are really to survive they need to move to representative republics. At best.
All you can hope for is that the oligarchy believes as you do, and if they don't they are hopefully held in check by a Constitution. Of course, they know that, so they work to modify the rules in their favor. Freedom is a transitory state, like childhood, and you should enjoy it while you can.
I'll bet this is why I can re-read a (fiction) book two days after I finish it and still find it interesting and fun. Not surprising (I remember the story), but interesting and fun because I am really reading it for the writing. Am I screwed or what?
Linux is in my future because I am tired of upgrading hardware just so I can run bloatware. But then, I don't use my computer for entertainment, I use it for work (which means I am VPN to a real linux cluster and only use local machine for email and browser, except for those nasty printer drivers and scanner drivers and music and CD burning and (hmmmmm, never mind)). So my hardware can't handle Windoze next upgrade and my bank account can't handle a hardware upgrade. Adios.
Religion provides a sense of community (just like going to a football game does, but not seasonal). A sense of community makes one live longer and happier. So a sense of community is good. The Internet provides a false sense of community. So, IF this virtual-community makes one live longer and happier, then it is a good substitute for religion. I think Slashdot readers get a great deal of community from Slashdot, for example, and I hope (as one) that it results in a longer and happier life (after controlling for lack of exercise, etc. in my models).
I would say that physics is clearly a subset of mathematics, which is to say we can pose even simple questions that are outside of physical reality. And, no, the imaginary number i is not what I have in mind. But the fact that there is absolutely NO object in existence that needs the full value of pi suggests that the universe (and the physics thereof) is a subset of mathematics. And P not equal NP may fall into the same crack, which is to say that the universe is too small (and granular) to contain the NP problems that make P not equal to NP.
So, on the one hand we have climate scientists who warn us that global warming is going to make life difficult if not impossible in short order. On the other hand we have political and behavioral scientists who warn us that people cannot be rational and that political solutions won't solve the problem (like renewables or giving up paleofuels) or that they cannot be implemented (who wants to tell the Chinese and the Indians that they don't get to move up to Western levels of consumption?). So which scientists do YOU believe?
Planning Commissions (PCs) and planning and zoning are where we wrest control from politicians who are beholding to money and developers. But PCs have to fight to use that limited power against people who make money by ignoring the science. The local planning commission should have stopped issuing permits to build or upgrade based on those old reports.
If we really start to pay for data flow then a 4Gigabit daily movie habit gets real expensive, both in infrastructure and in cost (when paying per-bit downloaded). But only Polyanna could pretend that we won't have to eventually pay for big data downloads (the same non-functioning thinkers who thought making health care cheaper for the individual would automatically make more health care available).
Maybe they want to use it for launching and landing 3/4 scale radio control toys? I mean really, there must be close to a hundred million youtubing video-kings who could create a better video of the sinking of an aircraft carrier than the Iranians would get from blowing this up. But it would make a good flyby target if you had an air force that needed to practice attacking a carrier, but again, unless it shoots back you'd be better off with a good video game. But for now, I'll watch this space.
The creationists have a valid argument IF we are talking about a Friday night beer brawl over whose football team is better. But we are not. We are talking about whether the universe is closed, open, or balanced. Is it 13.7B years old or is the current expansion 13.8B years old?
If you want to argue that the earth is 6,000 years old, go talk to the "Last Thursdians", the Hindus and all those other nonsense mythologies. Myths make great themes for movies, but I would not want my heart surgeon or bridge-designer acting on those myths. The Creationists are fundamentally different from the others because they bring their arguments to places where actions are developed, and that makes them dangerous.
Could I just suggest that there be a website where I could post a photo of an object I hoped to sell, and if no-one commented within a reasonable time then I could point at that post as a valid defense if some git wanted to do this to my tiny little business. I would suggest 2.7 minutes, but I don't like this sort of stuff. But it would be fun to argue in court that the other guy's attorneys had a "duty of care" to be monitoring this site 24x7 (at the other guys expense, I might add). Of course, the current standard duty of care is imposed in the other direction even though the supporting search process is way stoopid. Let's start to use real-time for what it's really worth.
Of course, this plan would never work because the rent-seekers among us have more money, and thereby more access to the legal system, than the rest of us. That is, the rest of us put together.
Cory Doctorow ( Pirate Cinema ), you are my new god of IP stupidity. Must read for all of us, never mind the nit-pickers among us.
Given the bandwidth and bugs I sometimes wish Firefox had an HTML1.0 only setting ... but then I read quickly and I don't have the patience to sit through long videos. Certainly don't need embedded videos and most images. But a switch that let me see HTML5 as if it were HTML3 or HTML1 would be helpful.
Do you know how a professor finds a needle in a haystack? They throw grad students at the haystack till one of them says "ouch".
Throughout my long career supporting decision makers I have always contended that "action defines truth". So, if I am on top of a tall building, the science of gravity is "settled" in that I would not step off the top expecting to hover like Wiley Coyote. In that sense, then settled is a function of the importance of the decision I am making. So, is the science of evolution settled? With respect to actions that allow bacteria to evolve yes, and I use that "settled" state to inform actions regarding overuse of antibiotics. But I seldom make decisions that need to know if Neanderthals could interbreed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens, so that science need not be considered settled. Global warming? Of course it is not "settled". But I do note, and act on, the fact that insurance companies are adjusting rates to reflect the new risks that global warming has introduced (see FL and wind insurance, see MN and house insurance rates). So it is settled in that sense. Beginning of life? Not a scientific question, this is all about where a life deserves protection at the expense of another. Because I believe in the sovereignty of the individual (don't force me to donate my spare kidney, thank you very much), there really is no scientifically answerable question. But there the "settle3d" question is removed from the table by the sovereignty question. My final point? Arguing about when scie3nce is settled in the absence of an actionable question makes as much sense as arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Better be a one-time pad that is NOT generated using any pseudo-random number algorithms or you are toast.