the distribution is not even. I've found complete idiots at some top schools, but I've also found smart people who are able to capitalize on the name of their institution to get interesting research problems to work on. That's almost definitely not exclusive to Ivy+, but is probably harder to find once you go down the ladder from places like Penn State and Illinois and GT, and 'flagship' institutions.
And that works fine for law-abiding folks who take their responsibility to keep the data in. But I bet you even one of them forgot to take his phone out of his pocket before walking through the magic door. Imaging if the forgetting was intentional.
Bottom line is that you need to have people you trust accessing your systems, and if you can't guarantee that (which you probably can't), then you need warm bodies looking over their shoulders, etc etc. Sucks, but if you're that serious about data security, then you've got to make the effort to prevent these low-hanging fruit attacks that are possible now that a gigabyte is the size of your thumbnail and not the size of a filing cabinet.
The point is that the extra physical buttons are confusing. Turning them off in software won't fix that. Kinda like having a whole bunch of GUI buttons with arcane labels that don't do anything when clicked.
That said, my biased opinion is that just like people have to learn to read, which is not a natural skill you're preprogrammed with at birth, they'll have to learn to type and to negotiate the UI conventions that we've settled on in the last 20+ years of GUI-based computers. And for that, standardization to what's already here is probably better.
My pre-information age grandfather, who trained and worked as an electronics engineer btw, had a similar problem upon first encountering a VCR remote. The first stage was confusion, the last stage was acceptance, but somewhere in the middle (before he got used to the thing) he came up with the idea of marketing slip-covers for VCR remotes that had a few windows on them so you could press the PLAY, STOP, and FF/REWIND, without having all those extra buttons in the way to confuse you. Doesn't make sense for remotes, because they're all sorts of different shapes and styles, but it might make sense in this application, since most keyboards are about the same size. If you block out everything except the letters, space, and backspace, you can use a normal commodity keyboard and reduce confusion.
The fact is that it's very easy to cause lots and lots of trouble and hurt/kill a lot of people with relatively little sophistication or effort. I'd go into details of some observations I make as a private citizen living and going about my business in a nameless American city, but I really *don't* want to give anyone ideas (or get a visit from men in dark glasses). This leads me to the following contradictions:
Given how easy it is to cause trouble, the biggest thing that saves lives is that most people from the part of the world under discussion who adhere to the religious interpretation of interest are too stupid to learn to fly airplanes. However, the few who aren't too stupid can cause an awful mess, as evidenced by 9/11.
Until we get better at figuring out who those people are in a way that doesn't erode our liberties more than getting body scanned, everyone's gotta be under threat of being searched, though I will emphatically agree that we can probably safely skip the 80-year-old grandmothers with nail clippers.
The nice thing about being in the US is that the legal speed limit on most highways is about 60mph, and the illegal speed limit on most back roads is about 60mph, so the number of minutes you need to get somewhere approximately equals the distance in miles. And that's probably why rural Canadians like their miles too.
I'm not saying it's a stupid question to ask, my point is that many (most?) philosophy types who describe themselves with as philosophers and not as mathematicians are trying to make very fine distinctions using plain English alone, without the benefit of the notational convenience afforded by modern mathematics. Thus, gobbeldygook that mixes the symbolic relationships being analyzed right in with the narrative of the proof instead of separating the two out with formalized notation.
The problem with making software try to guess what you are thinking is that even humans are bad at guessing what you are thinking. That's why mathematics itself has a formal language and notation, so that unambiguous communication of ideas can take place. My worry is that this sort of "feature" will fool people into thinking they've accomplished something when all they have is gibberish that runs and makes pretty pictures.
I remember in college I took a philosophy course, and one of the readings in the text went into a very length "freeform language" discussion of what the meaning if "is" is. This went on for paragraphs and I stopped before it ended because it made me go cross-eyed trying to figure out if this "is" is is as in identical with or is as in has the attribute of.
Then I took a course in abstract algebra, where the first two weeks was spent learning the formal language of mathematics and mathematical proofs. Suddenly there was all sorts of helpful notation, like "=" \in, \subset, etc, which turns that page-long gobbeldygook the philosophy department tries to pass off as rational thought irrelevant and laughable.
The same principle applies to graphical programming languages too, by the way. You can sit all day clicking at a Simulink or LabView diagram making sure the lines go where they're supposed to, and the little metronome icon is where it's supposed to be. And it even works for the controls equivalent of "what's the area of a square with side 1", but the moment you try to do anything complicated with it, it all goes to hell, and that's why things like Simulink and LabView let you insert "code blocks" which are written in a plain, simple, and unambiguous declarative programming language, by the way. But none of this stops people who can't even spell "static int foo=1337;" from claiming that they are programmers when all they do is click at pictures all day without realizing how hobbled they are.
No, you've got it all wrong. If she'd won the primary, McCain would have won, and everyone could go on blaming Republicans. This whole incompetent Dem in office is throwing a wrench into the whole works.
Anything else is either going to be much slower (perl, python, Ruby) or much more dangerous (C, C++).
You know, I never quite figured out what this 'dangerous' thing meant when talking about C or C++. Yes, there's nothing stopping you from going *(int*)NULL = 1337;,
but programmers are supposed to be intelligent detail-oriented people who after a few years of training can instinctively and deliberately avoid bugs both the subtle and the egregious without wasting time that is supposedly saved by higher-level languages like Java that do everything for you including tying your shoes for you in the morning.
Key calculations for the design of the first implosion-type atomic bomb, which involved solving nonlinear three-dimensional differential equations to make sure the little booms that caused the big boom reached the core at the same time were solved by punching octal code into paper tape and running it on a mechanical computer.
It took me 12 years of school, 4 years of college, and 2+ years of grad school to get to the point where I kinda understand what statistics *actually* means. And that's the thing: mathematics and probability are so high up the hierarchy of constructed thought that it probably does take about that much time to *really* understand this stuff in a way that you can use it. I don't know how realistic it is to expect that everyone will have the attention span to get to that point when you can have a roof over your head, food on the table, and two cars in your garage, and some measure of self-satisfaction and self-determination in this world without an extra 6+ years of schooling after highschool to get that extra 30% of understanding.
And one part of math that people with an inclination toward central planning should understand is elementary feedback control and dynamics.
It might make people realize that the finiteness of resources will cause population/resource consumption/etc to equilibrate out at a naturally sustainable level magically and without the need to impose a breathing tax:-).
What's the rule? The antenna has to be 1/4 the wavelength of light at the oscillator's frequency? So you either smelt more metal to make a bigger antenna or you smelt yourself a vacuum pump to make a vacuum tube oscillator/amplifier:-)
This is a cool project and all, but I have to challenge the premise that civilization can collapse to a level where all technology is gone but detailed technical knowledge survives.
Several tens if not hundreds of thousands of people graduate from college with engineering degrees every year in the US alone. This has been going on for many decades, which means that in the US alone, there are literally millions if not tens of millions of scientists and engineers, many with decades of experience in their professional lives as well as bits and pieces of technical know-how picked up from hobbies and idle curiosity. These people don't all live within one lethal radius. They're spread out all over a big-ass country. Their tools (lathes, mills, computers, smelters, furnaces, etc) are also spread out over a big-ass country. And that's just "post-industrial" America I'm talking about. People with technical know-how and technology and machinery are spread out all over the planet.
Any end to civilization that takes out *all* technological capability would have to be a planet-wide event that would necessarily take out the geeks as well. Otherwise, if a giant meteor takes out North America, European, Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian engineers would just move in and do the rebuilding with Brazilian or Indian or Chinese or European-made equipment.
Yeah, but we're talking about industrial controllers here, not a small copy shop. At where I work, the standing policy is that if it controls a piece of moving machinery, it's behind an air gap. No exceptions. It doesn't prevent malicious individuals with physical access to the system from doing bad things, but it takes away a whole set of headaches about network security out of the picture entirely.
Cop walking the beat sees series of poorly xeroxed flyers affixed to several utility poles in neighborhood:
Vandalize Joe's Deli for being a capitalist pigdog! Contact Karl for organizing information.
Does the local police department be proactive, investigating Karl and reporting this issue to Joe, a private businessman?
Or does it wait for Joe to find his window busted?
Now what if the sign were just as poorly xeroxed, Karl just as big of a troublemaker, but the sign said "Protest" instead of "Vandalize"?
Where do you draw the line? It's a hard question to answer in a free society that also demands security, and given how much expensive and dangerous toys mining companies have in their possession, and how certain environmental "activists" and "protesters" like to carry tire irons and bold cutters in their arsenal of free speech, where do you draw the line now?
Just something to thing about before accusing your fellow Americans of being fascists and capitalist pigdogs.
Not just learning either. I sometimes find myself plotting data in MATLAB just to print it out and take a ruler and pencil to it if I don't feel like spending 5 minutes tweaking a recursive least squares filter to reject outliers that I can see with my own eyeballs.
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the distribution is not even. I've found complete idiots at some top schools, but I've also found smart people who are able to capitalize on the name of their institution to get interesting research problems to work on. That's almost definitely not exclusive to Ivy+, but is probably harder to find once you go down the ladder from places like Penn State and Illinois and GT, and 'flagship' institutions.
when the feds bust down the door to her house because you've been dialing out of her basement.
And that works fine for law-abiding folks who take their responsibility to keep the data in. But I bet you even one of them forgot to take his phone out of his pocket before walking through the magic door. Imaging if the forgetting was intentional.
Bottom line is that you need to have people you trust accessing your systems, and if you can't guarantee that (which you probably can't), then you need warm bodies looking over their shoulders, etc etc. Sucks, but if you're that serious about data security, then you've got to make the effort to prevent these low-hanging fruit attacks that are possible now that a gigabyte is the size of your thumbnail and not the size of a filing cabinet.
The point is that the extra physical buttons are confusing. Turning them off in software won't fix that. Kinda like having a whole bunch of GUI buttons with arcane labels that don't do anything when clicked.
That said, my biased opinion is that just like people have to learn to read, which is not a natural skill you're preprogrammed with at birth, they'll have to learn to type and to negotiate the UI conventions that we've settled on in the last 20+ years of GUI-based computers. And for that, standardization to what's already here is probably better.
My pre-information age grandfather, who trained and worked as an electronics engineer btw, had a similar problem upon first encountering a VCR remote. The first stage was confusion, the last stage was acceptance, but somewhere in the middle (before he got used to the thing) he came up with the idea of marketing slip-covers for VCR remotes that had a few windows on them so you could press the PLAY, STOP, and FF/REWIND, without having all those extra buttons in the way to confuse you. Doesn't make sense for remotes, because they're all sorts of different shapes and styles, but it might make sense in this application, since most keyboards are about the same size. If you block out everything except the letters, space, and backspace, you can use a normal commodity keyboard and reduce confusion.
Does this comment count as prior art?
The problem will be getting it back down...
Perhaps not, and that's a mystery I'm willing to live with. Also, your literal-mindedness is irritatingly obtuse.
The fact is that it's very easy to cause lots and lots of trouble and hurt/kill a lot of people with relatively little sophistication or effort. I'd go into details of some observations I make as a private citizen living and going about my business in a nameless American city, but I really *don't* want to give anyone ideas (or get a visit from men in dark glasses). This leads me to the following contradictions:
Given how easy it is to cause trouble, the biggest thing that saves lives is that most people from the part of the world under discussion who adhere to the religious interpretation of interest are too stupid to learn to fly airplanes. However, the few who aren't too stupid can cause an awful mess, as evidenced by 9/11.
Until we get better at figuring out who those people are in a way that doesn't erode our liberties more than getting body scanned, everyone's gotta be under threat of being searched, though I will emphatically agree that we can probably safely skip the 80-year-old grandmothers with nail clippers.
The nice thing about being in the US is that the legal speed limit on most highways is about 60mph, and the illegal speed limit on most back roads is about 60mph, so the number of minutes you need to get somewhere approximately equals the distance in miles. And that's probably why rural Canadians like their miles too.
I'm not saying it's a stupid question to ask, my point is that many (most?) philosophy types who describe themselves with as philosophers and not as mathematicians are trying to make very fine distinctions using plain English alone, without the benefit of the notational convenience afforded by modern mathematics. Thus, gobbeldygook that mixes the symbolic relationships being analyzed right in with the narrative of the proof instead of separating the two out with formalized notation.
Mod parent up.
The problem with making software try to guess what you are thinking is that even humans are bad at guessing what you are thinking. That's why mathematics itself has a formal language and notation, so that unambiguous communication of ideas can take place. My worry is that this sort of "feature" will fool people into thinking they've accomplished something when all they have is gibberish that runs and makes pretty pictures.
I remember in college I took a philosophy course, and one of the readings in the text went into a very length "freeform language" discussion of what the meaning if "is" is. This went on for paragraphs and I stopped before it ended because it made me go cross-eyed trying to figure out if this "is" is is as in identical with or is as in has the attribute of.
Then I took a course in abstract algebra, where the first two weeks was spent learning the formal language of mathematics and mathematical proofs. Suddenly there was all sorts of helpful notation, like "=" \in, \subset, etc, which turns that page-long gobbeldygook the philosophy department tries to pass off as rational thought irrelevant and laughable.
The same principle applies to graphical programming languages too, by the way. You can sit all day clicking at a Simulink or LabView diagram making sure the lines go where they're supposed to, and the little metronome icon is where it's supposed to be. And it even works for the controls equivalent of "what's the area of a square with side 1", but the moment you try to do anything complicated with it, it all goes to hell, and that's why things like Simulink and LabView let you insert "code blocks" which are written in a plain, simple, and unambiguous declarative programming language, by the way. But none of this stops people who can't even spell "static int foo=1337;" from claiming that they are programmers when all they do is click at pictures all day without realizing how hobbled they are.
No, you've got it all wrong. If she'd won the primary, McCain would have won, and everyone could go on blaming Republicans. This whole incompetent Dem in office is throwing a wrench into the whole works.
Anything else is either going to be much slower (perl, python, Ruby) or much more dangerous (C, C++).
You know, I never quite figured out what this 'dangerous' thing meant when talking about C or C++. Yes, there's nothing stopping you from going *(int*)NULL = 1337;, but programmers are supposed to be intelligent detail-oriented people who after a few years of training can instinctively and deliberately avoid bugs both the subtle and the egregious without wasting time that is supposedly saved by higher-level languages like Java that do everything for you including tying your shoes for you in the morning.
But the third number is 2, not 3.
Key calculations for the design of the first implosion-type atomic bomb, which involved solving nonlinear three-dimensional differential equations to make sure the little booms that caused the big boom reached the core at the same time were solved by punching octal code into paper tape and running it on a mechanical computer.
In an ideal world, you're right, but...
It took me 12 years of school, 4 years of college, and 2+ years of grad school to get to the point where I kinda understand what statistics *actually* means. And that's the thing: mathematics and probability are so high up the hierarchy of constructed thought that it probably does take about that much time to *really* understand this stuff in a way that you can use it. I don't know how realistic it is to expect that everyone will have the attention span to get to that point when you can have a roof over your head, food on the table, and two cars in your garage, and some measure of self-satisfaction and self-determination in this world without an extra 6+ years of schooling after highschool to get that extra 30% of understanding.
And one part of math that people with an inclination toward central planning should understand is elementary feedback control and dynamics.
:-).
It might make people realize that the finiteness of resources will cause population/resource consumption/etc to equilibrate out at a naturally sustainable level magically and without the need to impose a breathing tax
What's the rule? The antenna has to be 1/4 the wavelength of light at the oscillator's frequency? So you either smelt more metal to make a bigger antenna or you smelt yourself a vacuum pump to make a vacuum tube oscillator/amplifier :-)
If you move it real fast, you can get it to move forward at 0.999999999...9999 seconds per second.
Stick out your tongue and plot tingliness-vs-time in the sand with a stick.
This is a cool project and all, but I have to challenge the premise that civilization can collapse to a level where all technology is gone but detailed technical knowledge survives.
Several tens if not hundreds of thousands of people graduate from college with engineering degrees every year in the US alone. This has been going on for many decades, which means that in the US alone, there are literally millions if not tens of millions of scientists and engineers, many with decades of experience in their professional lives as well as bits and pieces of technical know-how picked up from hobbies and idle curiosity. These people don't all live within one lethal radius. They're spread out all over a big-ass country. Their tools (lathes, mills, computers, smelters, furnaces, etc) are also spread out over a big-ass country. And that's just "post-industrial" America I'm talking about. People with technical know-how and technology and machinery are spread out all over the planet.
Any end to civilization that takes out *all* technological capability would have to be a planet-wide event that would necessarily take out the geeks as well. Otherwise, if a giant meteor takes out North America, European, Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian engineers would just move in and do the rebuilding with Brazilian or Indian or Chinese or European-made equipment.
Yeah, but we're talking about industrial controllers here, not a small copy shop. At where I work, the standing policy is that if it controls a piece of moving machinery, it's behind an air gap. No exceptions. It doesn't prevent malicious individuals with physical access to the system from doing bad things, but it takes away a whole set of headaches about network security out of the picture entirely.
Cop walking the beat sees series of poorly xeroxed flyers affixed to several utility poles in neighborhood:
Vandalize Joe's Deli for being a capitalist pigdog! Contact Karl for organizing information.
Does the local police department be proactive, investigating Karl and reporting this issue to Joe, a private businessman?
Or does it wait for Joe to find his window busted?
Now what if the sign were just as poorly xeroxed, Karl just as big of a troublemaker, but the sign said "Protest" instead of "Vandalize"?
Where do you draw the line? It's a hard question to answer in a free society that also demands security, and given how much expensive and dangerous toys mining companies have in their possession, and how certain environmental "activists" and "protesters" like to carry tire irons and bold cutters in their arsenal of free speech, where do you draw the line now?
Just something to thing about before accusing your fellow Americans of being fascists and capitalist pigdogs.
Not just learning either. I sometimes find myself plotting data in MATLAB just to print it out and take a ruler and pencil to it if I don't feel like spending 5 minutes tweaking a recursive least squares filter to reject outliers that I can see with my own eyeballs.