Yes but, if it is true that multiple files hash to the same MD5 (reduced bit size). Then without a second+ matching bit of information you could be fooled by a file with the same MD5. If you did not know what the proper file size was say.
But it would be hard certainly to get an audio file with digraded sound to match MD5 number. But then again. You could just keep adding noise and checking the MD5 number till you tuned in on the MD5 result.
What you do is use several tumblers to the lock. Maybe an MD5sum, the file size (much harder to get both the same) and maybe a simple checksum of some appropriate algorithm. It becomes probably practically impossible to get all three to agree.
The problem and the opportunity is to get the proper check information out on what good resources are. Here PGP might be useful to encrytpt and or sign the list of good checks or some other means of authentication. But then would a list of such information might be thought of as illegal and someone publishing that information might have some trouble.
Good ideas can catch on like wild fire. P2P networking is one of them. Give a large network of computers, utilizing those computers to implement the network is a way of making that network scalable, robust, disaster tolerant as opposed to the Single Server (or farm of servers) sourcing a service model. We know the limits of that and ways to scale that, but when one network connection goes down or one server or one router, that service can be disabled. The P2P model matches the way the internet was designed, to be able to take alternative routes if needed, to be up even if a whole city is taken out in a nuclear disaster. (it was the ARPA net after all).
After all it was Universities and research facilities that started using and evolving the technologies, and hobbyist using dail up FIDO nets that have all converged to the Web. Which has now passed into the Corporate world. The P2P networks are that experimental frontier for the next big design.
So I think that the current use of P2P technology is the alpha and beta testing of this next evolution which will I believe be the first step of the next big paridigm shift in network and systems design. So lets get in on the Grind Floor shall we.
The consequences of decisions about who is accountable and to what extent can have very subtle and far reaching effects. Often times very different from the original spirit or intent. Take for example the 'accountablilty' of medical doctors which has translated to a multi billion dollar (my supposition) for lawyers talking juries into large awards which translates into higher malpractice premiums (as well as stock market problems causing increased premiums, probably the acutal reason for the rise), causing Doctors all over the country to begin to stop offering service altogether. There were no Obie/Gynie docs practicing in Florida as I remember and another group just about a week ago.
This is the result of the idea that they are accountable and that accountability translates to litigation and the eventual colapse of the system. There may be a principle here of the cure being worse than the disease. We don't live in a riskless society nor should we expect to or everything will grind to a halt. We have to moderate that litigious behavior to all get along and have an environment and system that works.
That being said one naturally has the right to defend oneself. If you have a bus and a passenger gets on the bus and that passenger is not identifable as a malicous person. Is the bus driver responsible for that persons maliciousness?
If that person starts firing out the window (with a silencer so the bus driver does not know it is happening, is the bus driver responsible or is the malicous person? If you were on the street and being fired upon, could you fire back in defense? In some States if you have a permit for a gun, maybe. But if in your firing back you hit someone else or damage the bus, you would probably be responsible.
I think it simplistic to place the blame and responsibility on the bus driver entirely as new viruses come up all the time, for each one found new ones that take advantage of new exploits appear. Is it the admin or the system designers fault that the system is exploited? How much protection do you need? How current do your patches and upgrades and lockdowns have to be to not be accountable? You see there is a sliding slope here. From the lawyers point of view, if there is any damage someone with money is accountable, unless there is protection from law or precedence this new fields of litigation could much harm.
The cuprit of course is the one that wrote and/or fielded the virus. They are the one accountable. They are the ones we should identified and held accountable. They are the ones that do the anonyomous damage and as we move networked computers further into our physical life in cars and elevators and microwaves, actual damage and injury will happen because of this insane virus writing behavior. Lets identify where the problem really is and address that.
Well I think it is a wonderful way to privatize the re-distribution of wealth.
A wealth individual paying for a trip feeds money into the pockets of the thousands of workers making the parts that go into the ships and refine the fuel and... Could be a good way to redistribute the wealth, unlike the Lotteries with take it from the poor and feed it to polititians.
This isn't that revolutionary an idea. There is a scheme that was presented in the 50's or 60's, maybe earlier using cards with holes that could be cut or not. Pass a knitting needle through the holes for the attributes you want and shake and the cards that are logical "and" of your search criteria fall on the floor. A truly parallel associative memory. You idea sounds like a variant of this 'prior art'. But a good idea none the less.
Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 1
*s* well there are bad students, too.
Educational Truths:
Tests are learning experiences.
The lesson taught is never the lesson learned.
You can teach your spouse anything. (dont even try).
Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 1
It is a students responsiblity to get the most out of class, often that means the student has to ask questions. If the students dont ask questions then they leave the teaching information and direction up to the instructor. It is also true that the classroom is only one leg of the teaching experience and is provided to elucidate the material, give it structure and context that is hard to get from the serial form of a textbook. That is why there is studying and textbooks.
The classroom is a place where you can ask those questions that come up in your studies. A textbook with an intellegent table of contents if you will. Students don't see it that way too frequently.
Too many students, sadly, think you dont need to read or study the material, that they know it all or dont care because all they want is the grade, the credential. (That of course is not true in Law or Medical school where the amount of learning is of a different order that other disicplines but probably shouldn't be.) These students will get a job but many will fail in the real world compared to what they could have done if they had not passed up the opportunity.
There may be some dictators in class. Sometimes they are teachers, and in out of control Lower schools, it can be students. But it doesnt have to be that way, is not always that way, and most likely shouldn't be that way.
If you look at it from the other side. Standing there looking at a classroom of students, each with a different idea about what they are there for, what they want to get out of the class, and what they are willing to do to get that.
Actually, if you really want to learn something, teach it. I think that is the primary value of study groups in law school and should be view as a necessary part of the education that is designed to go deep and stick for more than a semester.
Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 1
Additionally, writing a calculator is an interesting task. You can do it and get it to work certainly. But if you write a calculator tool that can be extended and expanded well that is a much different deeper problem. If find programs that just do what they are told to be very boring and short sighted. Just look at all the different ways people have designed Cars. Essentially the same problem and all the myriad of different ways to do it. Design a car factory its more fun.
Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ey theres the rub. Especially for beginning classes which have students with a wide range of experience and apptitude and context. There is a tendency to try to bring everyone along and that pace can be slow and boring. The answer it to take each problem and extend it to its logical conclusion. Like maybe the hello world and design it to ask you for your language and respond in that language, which gets into some graphics programming when you go into the Japanese, Chinese, arabic...sanscrit etc.. And to make it configurable for adding new languages, possibly alien languages yet to be discovered. Designing that extensible framework would be a challenge.
Another example is an general ledger reporting system I had to write, in Fortran for a major bank years ago. Well you could get more boring, so I wrote a compiler and turned over the cost center wrappup language to the user to let them design what the system actually did. I after all did not want to be involved in the accounting, just the tool to do it.
I guess the other important point to learning (and teaching) is attitude. Take what you find and go deeper, ravage it and make it yours and new and better. And it will driver your instructor crazy, but with a smile. If he does not push your boundries, push his, gently and with a smile.
Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well as a teacher, Thats true, it is up to the instructor to make the information at least digestible. I have two counter views however.
The classroom is a society and as such the student has a responsibilty to allow other students the opportunity to be interested, not distracted and get the benefit of the lecture. If anyone is slamming away at a laptop in class it is a distraction, or if they have a CD player going with headphones that can be heard 10 feet away, that is a distraction. If that is the case then assuming attendence is not mandetory that student should behave or not show.
The second observation I have is that some but not all students that seem to feel that they know the material, don't. You point about knowing C is a good example. No self respecting college level course teaches just C, or C++ or whatever. What is being taught is programming, or data structures or Object Oriented Paradigm, or some cluster of ideas, but never just a language. As I have observed in my day job, knowing a language has little to do with intellegent approaches to structuring and solving problems in way that is efficient, maintainable and re-usable. These are the other things that are taught along with say a language being taught.
If you get to a place where you think that it is not worth listening to someone teaching on your subject then you have stopped learning. Or better yet you can start that next process of learning by comparing what you hear with that you know and make those critical observations about how it should have been done. Much of my work has been just that, reverse engineering other peoples ideas about how something should have been done.
Opportunities are now, not later. Find the fault line to split the diamond in one blow.
"I am a software engineer but I'd be ashamed to show my face at a mechanical or civil engineer convention - the buildings and machines they
make don't blow up all the time, repeatedly, for no reason at all."
Well sounds like you must be programming in C++ or some other related debacle. Thats what OOPS is useful for. Intellegent, staged, ADTesque design which reduces complexity and allows more stable control of development. But then this takes experience to understand and to sucessfully implement.
"The fact is, in Software Engineering if you are over 30 you had better be in management or a legacy maintenance program like me with
Clipper, or you're out."
Being in mid 55's and with a BS and MSCS in CS I take issue with that statement. I also teach which deepens and strengthens my skills, not to mention the credentials. I have been in the same position 26 years, although I was part of an outsource arrangement but same job, same desk.
I think you are right about the Poet part, only in the sense that creativity and insight is important for the design process, all methodologies aside.
But I am not in management and the company I work for recogizes the value of experieced tech and provides a technical career path. Would that more companies understood this as more efficient than techno management as the only path to a career.
I find that experience, broad experience, makes your job more efficient, you more productive, you more an asset to a company than young, buzz word weilding, wet behind the ear, techno pups. But they have to cut their I teeth somewhere. But better under the watchful eye of a seasoned white beard. Like lawyers, all the courtroom stuff is taught on the job after school. Something company executives are dimly aware of.
Furthermore, the proper way to preserve musical recordings like 78 rpm records is to preserve the means of playing those records.
For example. 78 rpm record players are still readily available, they just take some work to find. Putting these recordings on P2P
networks for anyone to download just denies descendants of the original artists of those recordings their rightful royalties.
Well unfortuneatly playing records on an old 78 turntable, degrades the media. I don't think that this degredation was an integral part of the sale of the music. I would assume that the music is what was sold, it was just sold on a particular media, as we can buy the same song on record, cd, mp3... It is the music that gets the royalties not the media.
"If you are talking about preservation then the proper way to preserve musical recordings like 78 rpm records is to preserve the means of playing those records."
Then this is preservation of the antique experience more than preservation of the music.
And where is copyright lifetime in all of this? Aren't some things in the public domain? Bono legislation aside.
Yes, the government or at least some in power do fake things for personal reasons. The latest is Bush and, for heaven's sake, Christmas cards. Scamming his friends and supporters by getting the US Postal Service to erroneously postmark his cards as though they were coming from Crawford TX when they were in fact postmarked physically in Austin. They actually got someone to go to Crawford and borrow the postmark and take it to Austin to postmark the personal XMas cards.
I heard the story on NPR of someone who thought it curious that 1 million Christmas cards could be processed in such a small town. After many people not talking (the coverup) she tracked down the truth.
It is also mentioned at the bottom of this article http://www.comedyusa.com/charade.html.
So questioning, questionable things is good. But the size and scope of the Moon trips I think suggest that they did happen. You should be able to focus a telescope up and see the McDonald wrappers left around by the crews.
Fantasy and Science fiction share in one grand theme and that seperates it from regular fiction. That is that environment is a character. Usually an extension of an idea taken into the future or blown up to emense proportions like tyrnany as in the Star Wars or bureaucracy as in Brazil or plague as in Andromeda Strain or artificial intellegence as in The Forbin Project and AI.. and what the concequences and/or peoples reactions to it and its reaction to them. This is as opposed to the Character development of the Novel.
You of course can combine both, but without the environment as character you don't have the genre.
Bad Sci Fi is agenda laden and preachy while good Sci Fi is more balanced and agenda's are hidden and seductive. Certainly they are a soap box and of course the best Science Fiction is the one that I agree with the authors agenda.
(Or at least that is the view I came away with from my Social Science Fiction course in college *s*, ah those required fill courses, ya gotta love em).
Russia has its politics and budgets too. Throw in a struggling economy and you have some reasons why they might be balking on payments. They just anounced too that they will not be providing the Soluz life boats in the near future. (article in Aviation Week).
We may get a choice, Russian participation in the space program or security for their stockpiles of weapons grade neuclear material. You choose.
I submit that as stated by another comment that the analysis is programming, just in maybe a graphical language if your using something like UML. It is just a high level language and it is a programmer/architect that uses it. This is not different that what goes on now.
You then have the step from design to implementation. Which is done now by programmers and in some cases automatically generated by code generators.
It is valuable to have a high level language for design, but to use that same language for detailed design, down to what the deferent yeild calculations for each form of stock, bond, CD.. would make that high level design a haywire nightmare. Not easily understood, not easily changed. The most efficient means for translating that last step is people.
There is the issue too of what happens when all the programmers go away, and the automatic tool breaks, or a new need is found that it does not do? What then? We are really talking about a IT ecology which requires all level alive and well for the continued health of the whole system.
It is through the continued 'different approaches' that we have progressed. Our new ideas and pardigms have come from these. We are part of that evolutionary process.
I lament the growth of so many "easy to use" GUI based product where people can loose site of the entire process, loose site of what the implications of what they do are. This will cause people to use tools in ways that are inefficient and inapproriate because they haven't a clue whats really going on. So bottom line, your suggestion I think is self defeating.
Slashdot Mirror
good points.
Yes but, if it is true that multiple files hash to the same MD5 (reduced bit size). Then without a second+ matching bit of information you could be fooled by a file with the same MD5. If you did not know what the proper file size was say.
But it would be hard certainly to get an audio file with digraded sound to match MD5 number. But then again. You could just keep adding noise and checking the MD5 number till you tuned in on the MD5 result.
What you do is use several tumblers to the lock. Maybe an MD5sum, the file size (much harder to get both the same) and maybe a simple checksum of some appropriate algorithm. It becomes probably practically impossible to get all three to agree.
The problem and the opportunity is to get the proper check information out on what good resources are. Here PGP might be useful to encrytpt and or sign the list of good checks or some other means of authentication. But then would a list of such information might be thought of as illegal and someone publishing that information might have some trouble.
Good ideas can catch on like wild fire. P2P networking is one of them. Give a large network of computers, utilizing those computers to implement the network is a way of making that network scalable, robust, disaster tolerant as opposed to the Single Server (or farm of servers) sourcing a service model. We know the limits of that and ways to scale that, but when one network connection goes down or one server or one router, that service can be disabled. The P2P model matches the way the internet was designed, to be able to take alternative routes if needed, to be up even if a whole city is taken out in a nuclear disaster. (it was the ARPA net after all).
After all it was Universities and research facilities that started using and evolving the technologies, and hobbyist using dail up FIDO nets that have all converged to the Web. Which has now passed into the Corporate world. The P2P networks are that experimental frontier for the next big design.
So I think that the current use of P2P technology is the alpha and beta testing of this next evolution which will I believe be the first step of the next big paridigm shift in network and systems design. So lets get in on the Grind Floor shall we.
The consequences of decisions about who is accountable and to what extent can have very subtle and far reaching effects. Often times very different from the original spirit or intent. Take for example the 'accountablilty' of medical doctors which has translated to a multi billion dollar (my supposition) for lawyers talking juries into large awards which translates into higher malpractice premiums (as well as stock market problems causing increased premiums, probably the acutal reason for the rise), causing Doctors all over the country to begin to stop offering service altogether. There were no Obie/Gynie docs practicing in Florida as I remember and another group just about a week ago.
This is the result of the idea that they are accountable and that accountability translates to litigation and the eventual colapse of the system. There may be a principle here of the cure being worse than the disease. We don't live in a riskless society nor should we expect to or everything will grind to a halt. We have to moderate that litigious behavior to all get along and have an environment and system that works.
That being said one naturally has the right to defend oneself. If you have a bus and a passenger gets on the bus and that passenger is not identifable as a malicous person. Is the bus driver responsible for that persons maliciousness?
If that person starts firing out the window (with a silencer so the bus driver does not know it is happening, is the bus driver responsible or is the malicous person? If you were on the street and being fired upon, could you fire back in defense? In some States if you have a permit for a gun, maybe. But if in your firing back you hit someone else or damage the bus, you would probably be responsible.
I think it simplistic to place the blame and responsibility on the bus driver entirely as new viruses come up all the time, for each one found new ones that take advantage of new exploits appear. Is it the admin or the system designers fault that the system is exploited? How much protection do you need? How current do your patches and upgrades and lockdowns have to be to not be accountable? You see there is a sliding slope here. From the lawyers point of view, if there is any damage someone with money is accountable, unless there is protection from law or precedence this new fields of litigation could much harm.
The cuprit of course is the one that wrote and/or fielded the virus. They are the one accountable. They are the ones we should identified and held accountable. They are the ones that do the anonyomous damage and as we move networked computers further into our physical life in cars and elevators and microwaves, actual damage and injury will happen because of this insane virus writing behavior. Lets identify where the problem really is and address that.
Well I think it is a wonderful way to privatize the re-distribution of wealth.
... Could be a good way to redistribute the wealth, unlike the Lotteries with take it from the poor and feed it to polititians.
A wealth individual paying for a trip feeds money into the pockets of the thousands of workers making the parts that go into the ships and refine the fuel and
Go Space tourism..
A link with references, McBee was one of those systems.
http://www.computer.org/annals/punchedcards.htm
Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway.
...
Life following fiction following fiction
This isn't that revolutionary an idea. There is a scheme that was presented in the 50's or 60's, maybe earlier using cards with holes that could be cut or not. Pass a knitting needle through the holes for the attributes you want and shake and the cards that are logical "and" of your search criteria fall on the floor. A truly parallel associative memory. You idea sounds like a variant of this 'prior art'. But a good idea none the less.
*s* well there are bad students, too.
Educational Truths:
Tests are learning experiences.
The lesson taught is never the lesson learned.
You can teach your spouse anything. (dont even try).
It is a students responsiblity to get the most out of class, often that means the student has to ask questions. If the students dont ask questions then they leave the teaching information and direction up to the instructor. It is also true that the classroom is only one leg of the teaching experience and is provided to elucidate the material, give it structure and context that is hard to get from the serial form of a textbook. That is why there is studying and textbooks.
The classroom is a place where you can ask those questions that come up in your studies. A textbook with an intellegent table of contents if you will. Students don't see it that way too frequently.
Too many students, sadly, think you dont need to read or study the material, that they know it all or dont care because all they want is the grade, the credential. (That of course is not true in Law or Medical school where the amount of learning is of a different order that other disicplines but probably shouldn't be.) These students will get a job but many will fail in the real world compared to what they could have done if they had not passed up the opportunity.
There may be some dictators in class. Sometimes they are teachers, and in out of control Lower schools, it can be students. But it doesnt have to be that way, is not always that way, and most likely shouldn't be that way.
If you look at it from the other side. Standing there looking at a classroom of students, each with a different idea about what they are there for, what they want to get out of the class, and what they are willing to do to get that.
Actually, if you really want to learn something, teach it. I think that is the primary value of study groups in law school and should be view as a necessary part of the education that is designed to go deep and stick for more than a semester.
Additionally, writing a calculator is an interesting task. You can do it and get it to work certainly. But if you write a calculator tool that can be extended and expanded well that is a much different deeper problem. If find programs that just do what they are told to be very boring and short sighted. Just look at all the different ways people have designed Cars. Essentially the same problem and all the myriad of different ways to do it. Design a car factory its more fun.
Ey theres the rub. Especially for beginning classes which have students with a wide range of experience and apptitude and context. There is a tendency to try to bring everyone along and that pace can be slow and boring. The answer it to take each problem and extend it to its logical conclusion. Like maybe the hello world and design it to ask you for your language and respond in that language, which gets into some graphics programming when you go into the Japanese, Chinese, arabic...sanscrit etc.. And to make it configurable for adding new languages, possibly alien languages yet to be discovered. Designing that extensible framework would be a challenge.
Another example is an general ledger reporting system I had to write, in Fortran for a major bank years ago. Well you could get more boring, so I wrote a compiler and turned over the cost center wrappup language to the user to let them design what the system actually did. I after all did not want to be involved in the accounting, just the tool to do it.
I guess the other important point to learning (and teaching) is attitude. Take what you find and go deeper, ravage it and make it yours and new and better. And it will driver your instructor crazy, but with a smile. If he does not push your boundries, push his, gently and with a smile.
Well as a teacher, Thats true, it is up to the instructor to make the information at least digestible. I have two counter views however.
The classroom is a society and as such the student has a responsibilty to allow other students the opportunity to be interested, not distracted and get the benefit of the lecture. If anyone is slamming away at a laptop in class it is a distraction, or if they have a CD player going with headphones that can be heard 10 feet away, that is a distraction. If that is the case then assuming attendence is not mandetory that student should behave or not show.
The second observation I have is that some but not all students that seem to feel that they know the material, don't. You point about knowing C is a good example. No self respecting college level course teaches just C, or C++ or whatever. What is being taught is programming, or data structures or Object Oriented Paradigm, or some cluster of ideas, but never just a language. As I have observed in my day job, knowing a language has little to do with intellegent approaches to structuring and solving problems in way that is efficient, maintainable and re-usable. These are the other things that are taught along with say a language being taught.
If you get to a place where you think that it is not worth listening to someone teaching on your subject then you have stopped learning. Or better yet you can start that next process of learning by comparing what you hear with that you know and make those critical observations about how it should have been done. Much of my work has been just that, reverse engineering other peoples ideas about how something should have been done.
Opportunities are now, not later. Find the fault line to split the diamond in one blow.
"I am a software engineer but I'd be ashamed to show my face at a mechanical or civil engineer convention - the buildings and machines they
make don't blow up all the time, repeatedly, for no reason at all."
Well sounds like you must be programming in C++ or some other related debacle. Thats what OOPS is useful for. Intellegent, staged, ADTesque design which reduces complexity and allows more stable control of development. But then this takes experience to understand and to sucessfully implement.
"The fact is, in Software Engineering if you are over 30 you had better be in management or a legacy maintenance program like me with
Clipper, or you're out."
Being in mid 55's and with a BS and MSCS in CS I take issue with that statement. I also teach which deepens and strengthens my skills, not to mention the credentials. I have been in the same position 26 years, although I was part of an outsource arrangement but same job, same desk.
I think you are right about the Poet part, only in the sense that creativity and insight is important for the design process, all methodologies aside.
But I am not in management and the company I work for recogizes the value of experieced tech and provides a technical career path. Would that more companies understood this as more efficient than techno management as the only path to a career.
I find that experience, broad experience, makes your job more efficient, you more productive, you more an asset to a company than young, buzz word weilding, wet behind the ear, techno pups. But they have to cut their I teeth somewhere. But better under the watchful eye of a seasoned white beard. Like lawyers, all the courtroom stuff is taught on the job after school. Something company executives are dimly aware of.
Furthermore, the proper way to preserve musical recordings like 78 rpm records is to preserve the means of playing those records.
... It is the music that gets the royalties not the media.
For example. 78 rpm record players are still readily available, they just take some work to find. Putting these recordings on P2P
networks for anyone to download just denies descendants of the original artists of those recordings their rightful royalties.
Well unfortuneatly playing records on an old 78 turntable, degrades the media. I don't think that this degredation was an integral part of the sale of the music. I would assume that the music is what was sold, it was just sold on a particular media, as we can buy the same song on record, cd, mp3
"If you are talking about preservation then the proper way to preserve musical recordings like 78 rpm records is to preserve the means of playing those records."
Then this is preservation of the antique experience more than preservation of the music.
And where is copyright lifetime in all of this? Aren't some things in the public domain? Bono legislation aside.
So whats wrong with a standard action movies?
Or this NPR link
w fI d=888396
http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?
Yes, the government or at least some in power do fake things for personal reasons. The latest is Bush and, for heaven's sake, Christmas cards. Scamming his friends and supporters by getting the US Postal Service to erroneously postmark his cards as though they were coming from Crawford TX when they were in fact postmarked physically in Austin. They actually got someone to go to Crawford and borrow the postmark and take it to Austin to postmark the personal XMas cards.
.
I heard the story on NPR of someone who thought it curious that 1 million Christmas cards could be processed in such a small town. After many people not talking (the coverup) she tracked down the truth.
It is also mentioned at the bottom of this article
http://www.comedyusa.com/charade.html
So questioning, questionable things is good. But the size and scope of the Moon trips I think suggest that they did happen. You should be able to focus a telescope up and see the McDonald wrappers left around by the crews.
Fantasy and Science fiction share in one grand theme and that seperates it from regular fiction. That is that environment is a character. Usually an extension of an idea taken into the future or blown up to emense proportions like tyrnany as in the Star Wars or bureaucracy as in Brazil or plague as in Andromeda Strain or artificial intellegence as in The Forbin Project and AI .. and what the concequences and/or peoples reactions to it and its reaction to them. This is as opposed to the Character development of the Novel.
You of course can combine both, but without the environment as character you don't have the genre.
Bad Sci Fi is agenda laden and preachy while good
Sci Fi is more balanced and agenda's are hidden and seductive. Certainly they are a soap box and of course the best Science Fiction is the one that
I agree with the authors agenda.
(Or at least that is the view I came away with from my Social Science Fiction course in college *s*, ah those required fill courses, ya gotta love em).
Russia has its politics and budgets too. Throw in a struggling economy and you have some reasons why they might be balking on payments. They just anounced too that they will not be providing the Soluz life boats in the near future. (article in Aviation Week).
We may get a choice, Russian participation in the space program or security for their stockpiles of weapons grade neuclear material. You choose.
So your suggesting that the network had help breaking .. tell Homeland Security quick.
GUI stands for graphical user interface and is a general term not a package/library name.
I submit that as stated by another comment that the analysis is programming, just in maybe a graphical language if your using something like UML. It is just a high level language and it is a programmer/architect that uses it. This is not different that what goes on now.
..
You then have the step from design to implementation. Which is done now by programmers and in some cases automatically generated by code generators.
It is valuable to have a high level language for design, but to use that same language for detailed design, down to what the deferent yeild calculations for each form of stock, bond, CD
would make that high level design a haywire nightmare. Not easily understood, not easily changed. The most efficient means for translating that last step is people.
There is the issue too of what happens when all the programmers go away, and the automatic tool breaks, or a new need is found that it does not do? What then? We are really talking about a IT ecology which requires all level alive and well for the continued health of the whole system.
It is through the continued 'different approaches' that we have progressed. Our new ideas and pardigms have come from these. We are part of that evolutionary process.
I lament the growth of so many "easy to use" GUI based product where people can loose site of the entire process, loose site of what the implications of what they do are. This will cause people to use tools in ways that are inefficient and inapproriate because they haven't a clue whats really going on. So bottom line, your suggestion I think is self defeating.
My shoe size is 10 1/2 D whats yours?