I can't work at a diamond store, lock-up the diamonds in a safe, and then throw away the key so that the store own can't get to his own property
The owner of the city of San Francisco network isn't the mayor or some manager in the city administration, those are only the administrators. The true owner of that network is the people of San Francisco.
Your analogy would be like this: is it right for an employee to refuse to tell the combination to the safe in the diamond store to some unknown persons on a phone conference?
Terry Childs wasn't denying access to the owner or to the legitimate users of the network, he was denying access to a bunch of incompetent managers.
in this day and age violence is acceptable (to a degree) and excusable (for "punishment"), but nudity and sexuality are considered threatening and abusive
It's strange how people jump to the conclusion that any exposure to sex would be so traumatic to children, without any proof at all. The simple fact is that children aren't interested in sex, for most of them sex would be one of those boring subjects that adults are so strangely interested in. There are much worse things than sex.
In my own experience, one of the most traumatic subjects I remember from my childhood was religion. I came from a Lutheran family but my teacher in first grade was Catholic and she told us about eternal punishment in Hell. She showed us a picture I had never seen before, of a man tortured to death nailed to a wooden cross.
I knew what a crucifix meant but I had never been to a Catholic church and wasn't aware of the exquisite level of graphical detail that Catholics use to represent the suffering of Christ.
I went crying to my home, my mother asked what had happened and I told her. Next day she went to the director to request that the teacher be prohibited from mentioning religion in class.
To this day I see Catholics as people obsessed with suffering and torture, it's reasonable to say I have been traumatized for life by being exposed to religion at the age of six.
Clock speed has reached the ultimate physical limit, light speed.
If you take a measuring tape to a motherboard and do some math, you'll see that once we got past a few GHz there's no way a bit can go from one chip to the other within one clock cycle.
The result of that is that chips need local caches and pipelines, etc, until the complexity starts digging into the performance. And power consumption skyrockets.
Elon Musk made a fortune with PayPal and could easily have retired to a private island. Instead he re-invested his fortune into Tesla and Space-X -- two companies which, IMHO, are pretty awesome
I fully agree with that, and I must wonder at the similarity between Elon Musk and Mark Shuttleworth.
Two South African guys who made a fortune in a computer related company only to spend a lot of it on space related stuff. Shuttleworth was one of the first people to pay $20 million to be a space tourist.
send people on a more leisurely trip without jamming them in like cattle and shoving them through airports
What you are thinking about is available on most jet flights and is called "First Class". Well, you do have to go through airports, but at least they let you out of the plane while the others are required to "please stay seated".
the big corporations now can have fast servers, with fast speeds, while the small business and individuals can not afford speed, offering slower services
I have no idea why people hold to this meme that big corporations can afford things the smaller ones cannot.
That old joke about the salesman that says "I lose a few dollars in every item I sell but make up for it in quantity" is just a joke.
Big corporations need to hold down costs as much or probably even more than smaller companies. If they don't turn a profit their losses accumulate much quicker.
I think the path should be something like LOGO, then BASIC, then Pascal or C.
I would start with Python, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the next 2035 years, don't you think the tech of 4045 will be cooler than the tech of 2035?
Not necessarily. I know of at least one ancient technology that was still cooler than what they could do 1700 years later.
When they wanted to build a bridge over the Gardon river in France in 1740 they followed the same design that the Romans had built. The new bridge was an expansion of the lowest line of arches of the ancient aqueduct.
I've been there and it's weird to see the obviously newer stonework following exactly the same lines as the old weather-worn stones the Romans laid.
A few month ago, I sat in a pub watching (live) an Astronaut operating on the internals of the Hubble Space Telescope. On my phone. We live in te goddamn future!
Your future is happening 40 years after I sat at my home watching (live) an Astronaut walking on the Moon.
I would gladly exchange all the cellphones in the world for being able to walk on the moon.
Then Ebert is really against 3D because of how much darker the picture is, when normal movies are already projected too darkly half the time.
Blame the "digital" mania on that. Films used to be exactly that, films made of some plastic through which a *strong* light was passed.
With digital projectors, where light passes through an LCD, that light must be dimmer because the blacks would be washed out, no LCD has as much contrast as film.
Just because they chose to focus on physical mastery over themselves, then managed to get a sweet gig making millions of dollars doing something fun doesn't make them "morons."
What makes them morons is the fact that their definition of "fun" is throwing a ball at a hoop. They are just lucky that there are millions of other morons who consider it fun to watch them playing.
Someone who considers it fun to hunt for the Higgs Boson certainly has a much more evolved brain, because so much more reasoning is needed for that.
As for making millions of dollars, who cares? If you think you need millions of dollars that's because you don't really think what you're doing right now is "fun". Personally, I would like to have millions of dollars, but if I had to live the life of a professional athlete to get them, I would say "no, thanks".
It's better because it works at a lower level of consciousness. The p300 seems to be the result of some part of the brain saying "hey, check this!", it detects anything that seems unusual in some way. Then other parts of the brain check why it's unusual.
If it's found to be dangerous in some form the body prepares to flee or fight, by injecting hormones in the blood stream that prepare the muscles for action. It's only at this later point that traditional polygraphs operate, they detect the increased sweating and pressure level caused by this fight-or-flight response.
The p300 test could be misused, it should be used only for finding data for further investigation, not as a confession of guilt. But at least it's better than traditional polygraph truth detection in that it seems to be intrinsically more difficult to defeat.
saying that the p300 "measures" entropy in the brain is pseudoscience of the highest order
I'm no expert in electroencephalography, but a Google search seems to return a number of papers from reputable universities.
I didn't say the p300 measures entropy in the brain, I said the p300 seems to be a result of the brain measuring entropy in the information it receives from outside. The human brain has to have some mechanism to measure entropy in information, otherwise we wouldn't behave as we do.
Measuring information entropy is a survival trait. It's what makes us (and all other animals, BTW) behave in an "alarm based" way. Detecting unusual things allows us to escape from predators, find food, and avoid accidents without the need to be constantly evaluating every little unimportant detail around us.
In case my sarcasm detector is giving a false positive, the answer is you don't need adaptive optics for a mirror diameter of 30 cm or less, because at those sizes you get more blurring from diffraction than from atmospheric effects.
Computers only help out in crazy high level classes where you have to start doing things like matrix manipulations, etc.
I don't know where you studied, but I studied basic matrix operations like calculating determinants and inverting matrices in high school in Brazil. More advanced operations, like calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors, came in my first year in college.
In our modern life technology is very important for learning any subject. Even in social studies you can benefit from tools like search engines. Blogs and discussion groups help you communicate ideas. You cannot have a face to face discussion with someone from the other side of the world, but technology will enrich your life by allowing you to meet different ideas and concepts.
When I come to think of it, there's only one group that wouldn't benefit from the facilities in communications that our modern technology brings us: the religious fanatics.
would they even need cooling if it weren't for the people?
Yes, they would. Thermal management is a big issue in any spacecraft, manned or not. There's no air to remove heat, everything has to be radiated away. However, if you make the surfaces able to radiate as much heat as possible this also means they will absorb as much heat when sunshine hits them.
1. Made the hubble servicable by robots.
Believe me, I've been doing this for a quarter of a century, a robot able to do maintenance in space is the wet dream of any spacecraft operator. Many satellites have failed because some trivial component failed, if it were simple or cheap to do it, space maintenance robots would be high on the priority list of the industry.
The advantage of #2 is that instead of putting up a cutting-edge telescope and making it last 20 years, you just put up a pretty nice one, and make it last 5 years
This goes against what's being done in spaceflight. Commercial or scientific, manned or not, all space equipment is always designed to last as long as possible.
Launch cost is such a big part of any mission that it makes sense to make equipment last longer in space. The difference in cost between a spacecraft that lasts 5 years and one that lasts 20 years is a small fraction of the cost of one launch, not to mention the three extra launches that would be needed.
I started working in the space industry in 1984, the first satellite I worked on then had an 8 years design life, the satellites I'm working on now have a 15 years design life.
This is why it's still important to have humans in the loop.
We will most likely have human-equivalent machine intelligence in a few decades, but at this moment a piece of duct tape in human hands can do miracles that no amount of planning, programming, and design could allow a machine to perform.
Slashdot Mirror
The percentage of people who are harmed by arsenic (100) vs. the percentage of people who are harmed by gluten (small).
The owner of the city of San Francisco network isn't the mayor or some manager in the city administration, those are only the administrators. The true owner of that network is the people of San Francisco.
Your analogy would be like this: is it right for an employee to refuse to tell the combination to the safe in the diamond store to some unknown persons on a phone conference?
Terry Childs wasn't denying access to the owner or to the legitimate users of the network, he was denying access to a bunch of incompetent managers.
It's strange how people jump to the conclusion that any exposure to sex would be so traumatic to children, without any proof at all. The simple fact is that children aren't interested in sex, for most of them sex would be one of those boring subjects that adults are so strangely interested in. There are much worse things than sex.
In my own experience, one of the most traumatic subjects I remember from my childhood was religion. I came from a Lutheran family but my teacher in first grade was Catholic and she told us about eternal punishment in Hell. She showed us a picture I had never seen before, of a man tortured to death nailed to a wooden cross.
I knew what a crucifix meant but I had never been to a Catholic church and wasn't aware of the exquisite level of graphical detail that Catholics use to represent the suffering of Christ.
I went crying to my home, my mother asked what had happened and I told her. Next day she went to the director to request that the teacher be prohibited from mentioning religion in class.
To this day I see Catholics as people obsessed with suffering and torture, it's reasonable to say I have been traumatized for life by being exposed to religion at the age of six.
Clock speed has reached the ultimate physical limit, light speed.
If you take a measuring tape to a motherboard and do some math, you'll see that once we got past a few GHz there's no way a bit can go from one chip to the other within one clock cycle.
The result of that is that chips need local caches and pipelines, etc, until the complexity starts digging into the performance. And power consumption skyrockets.
You see my point? You may have a vision, but I can't see any marketese at all in that...
Tell me about it the next time when you spend $20 million to do something you believe in, wihtout any immediate return.
I fully agree with that, and I must wonder at the similarity between Elon Musk and Mark Shuttleworth.
Two South African guys who made a fortune in a computer related company only to spend a lot of it on space related stuff. Shuttleworth was one of the first people to pay $20 million to be a space tourist.
I'd say it's marketese.
But well, anyhow, it's awesome marketese.
What you are thinking about is available on most jet flights and is called "First Class". Well, you do have to go through airports, but at least they let you out of the plane while the others are required to "please stay seated".
Let me see if I understood. You were looking for a gay experience in Google but couldn't find it, so you used Bing?
I have no idea why people hold to this meme that big corporations can afford things the smaller ones cannot.
That old joke about the salesman that says "I lose a few dollars in every item I sell but make up for it in quantity" is just a joke.
Big corporations need to hold down costs as much or probably even more than smaller companies. If they don't turn a profit their losses accumulate much quicker.
I would start with Python, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
So we should all start reinventing the wheel from zero?
Just to give you an example, many years ago I bought a wonderful book on statistics in a used book store in London.
This book is a classic, everybody who has read it says so. But it's out of print. And still in copyright.
If I knew how to do it, I would gladly pay M. J. Moroney a good price for his book. But it's in copyright and out of print...
Not necessarily. I know of at least one ancient technology that was still cooler than what they could do 1700 years later.
When they wanted to build a bridge over the Gardon river in France in 1740 they followed the same design that the Romans had built. The new bridge was an expansion of the lowest line of arches of the ancient aqueduct.
I've been there and it's weird to see the obviously newer stonework following exactly the same lines as the old weather-worn stones the Romans laid.
Being lawyers, they should look at precedents to realize that "look and feel" isn't "intellectual property".
Your future is happening 40 years after I sat at my home watching (live) an Astronaut walking on the Moon.
I would gladly exchange all the cellphones in the world for being able to walk on the moon.
Blame the "digital" mania on that. Films used to be exactly that, films made of some plastic through which a *strong* light was passed.
With digital projectors, where light passes through an LCD, that light must be dimmer because the blacks would be washed out, no LCD has as much contrast as film.
Bacon coated with cheddar cheese inside a doughnut with ketchup.
What makes them morons is the fact that their definition of "fun" is throwing a ball at a hoop. They are just lucky that there are millions of other morons who consider it fun to watch them playing.
Someone who considers it fun to hunt for the Higgs Boson certainly has a much more evolved brain, because so much more reasoning is needed for that.
As for making millions of dollars, who cares? If you think you need millions of dollars that's because you don't really think what you're doing right now is "fun". Personally, I would like to have millions of dollars, but if I had to live the life of a professional athlete to get them, I would say "no, thanks".
It's better because it works at a lower level of consciousness. The p300 seems to be the result of some part of the brain saying "hey, check this!", it detects anything that seems unusual in some way. Then other parts of the brain check why it's unusual.
If it's found to be dangerous in some form the body prepares to flee or fight, by injecting hormones in the blood stream that prepare the muscles for action. It's only at this later point that traditional polygraphs operate, they detect the increased sweating and pressure level caused by this fight-or-flight response.
The p300 test could be misused, it should be used only for finding data for further investigation, not as a confession of guilt. But at least it's better than traditional polygraph truth detection in that it seems to be intrinsically more difficult to defeat.
I'm no expert in electroencephalography, but a Google search seems to return a number of papers from reputable universities.
I didn't say the p300 measures entropy in the brain, I said the p300 seems to be a result of the brain measuring entropy in the information it receives from outside. The human brain has to have some mechanism to measure entropy in information, otherwise we wouldn't behave as we do.
Measuring information entropy is a survival trait. It's what makes us (and all other animals, BTW) behave in an "alarm based" way. Detecting unusual things allows us to escape from predators, find food, and avoid accidents without the need to be constantly evaluating every little unimportant detail around us.
In case my sarcasm detector is giving a false positive, the answer is you don't need adaptive optics for a mirror diameter of 30 cm or less, because at those sizes you get more blurring from diffraction than from atmospheric effects.
I don't know where you studied, but I studied basic matrix operations like calculating determinants and inverting matrices in high school in Brazil. More advanced operations, like calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors, came in my first year in college.
In our modern life technology is very important for learning any subject. Even in social studies you can benefit from tools like search engines. Blogs and discussion groups help you communicate ideas. You cannot have a face to face discussion with someone from the other side of the world, but technology will enrich your life by allowing you to meet different ideas and concepts.
When I come to think of it, there's only one group that wouldn't benefit from the facilities in communications that our modern technology brings us: the religious fanatics.
Yes, they would. Thermal management is a big issue in any spacecraft, manned or not. There's no air to remove heat, everything has to be radiated away. However, if you make the surfaces able to radiate as much heat as possible this also means they will absorb as much heat when sunshine hits them.
Believe me, I've been doing this for a quarter of a century, a robot able to do maintenance in space is the wet dream of any spacecraft operator. Many satellites have failed because some trivial component failed, if it were simple or cheap to do it, space maintenance robots would be high on the priority list of the industry.
This goes against what's being done in spaceflight. Commercial or scientific, manned or not, all space equipment is always designed to last as long as possible.
Launch cost is such a big part of any mission that it makes sense to make equipment last longer in space. The difference in cost between a spacecraft that lasts 5 years and one that lasts 20 years is a small fraction of the cost of one launch, not to mention the three extra launches that would be needed.
I started working in the space industry in 1984, the first satellite I worked on then had an 8 years design life, the satellites I'm working on now have a 15 years design life.
This is why it's still important to have humans in the loop.
We will most likely have human-equivalent machine intelligence in a few decades, but at this moment a piece of duct tape in human hands can do miracles that no amount of planning, programming, and design could allow a machine to perform.