Maybe you can spend the whole day without reflexively preening your hair or scratching an itch. I think most of us can't.
Anyway, when can we get "thought macro" controlled devices? We already wired up monkeys, rats, humans to control devices by thought. Now lets come up with something that can be safe for long term that achieves something similar.
My point is the testing is different and of a different standard. Whether card makers really care or not, in my experience their graphics cards are flakier than a stick of say Kingston RAM.
Secondly if math goes wrong in a video card it doesn't usually cause the game to crash since it's mainly _output_, what you claim is about the same as saying a rendering/shading fault in your monitor will cause your game to crash.
As for RAM that's mainly for video cards - see GDDR2, GDDR3, GDDR4 etc.
"I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later"
How about a nice game of American checkers/English draughts...
0) AGP performance sucks for this 1) How sure are you that they test video ram well enough to use for that purpose? Some people might not notice a few display artifacts due to video ram having one bit stuck at zero or one, but for swap that's not good. 2) Just buy more _real_ ram, nowadays for normal usage, I recommend setting a small swap partition, that's only purpose is to tell you that you're running out of ram (by making the machine more sluggish). Set the swap too big and you have the entire machine running from swap which nowadays is about as good as powering the machine off abruptly (since that's what everyone does rather than wait weeks or more). Hard drives are too many magnitudes slower than real RAM for users to want to recreate the "Drum memory" era. Who sets their ssh and tcp timeouts to 1 month?;)
3) If you need more ram than the old machine can get you, buy a new machine, the last I checked PC hardware is cheap, they're amongst the cheapest things in the world for the technology and materials you get. Use the old machine for something else or give it away.
Wow. Good thing they have these procedures. Why fire someone for buying a plant for his school and giving students watches he made?
And it's amazing how screwed up the thinking is: "Some say the teachers themselves are to blame - their union contract requires a hearing before any tenured employee can be fired."
What next? The citizens are to be blamed - the Constitution requires due process before any citizen can be thrown in jail?
As far as I can see, the hearings just aren't happening often enough. So whose fault is that?
"We should be starting to get the ethics sorted out now."
Yeah. As the power we have increases, we should be spending more and more thought into whether we should do something, rather than blindly just doing the first possible thing without considering the long term consequences.
After all, just because we don't/shouldn't do something now, doesn't necessarily mean that we can't/shouldn't do it later.
And it is also true that if we do some things now, it could stop us from doing lots of other things later (like living:) ).
People can already create custom viruses for less than USD1 million. If the costs drop lower and we don't have the ethical, social, legal etc safeguards in, bad things WILL happen (as it is, I think that one is too late already, but that doesn't mean we should give up thinking about other stuff).
"Which is number one, how do you know you're doing the "Right" research right now?"
I'd say that's what your brains and conscience are for.
Fact is as technology improves the possibilities and choices increase "exponentially", while the resources don't increase quite as rapidly.
I can think of many things to do given current technology, but I can't do them all, and some things are just unsafe at the moment (and some may probably be unsafe for a very very long time), and some things are plain evil (believe me, there are lots of evil research paths you can take with current tech levels).
Refusing to admit that there is good and bad research is silly.
And thinking that doing such things now instead of later is a good idea is naive or even stupid, especially when the likes of Monsanto et all have shown what they really intend to do with such things vs what they use to justify their actions - "feed/heal/save the world". Sure the "ant" scientists doing the research might be thinking they're doing something good (or just in denial), but take a step back, look at what those Hives are doing in the "big picture" sometime.
If they do away with gene patents and similar stuff then I _might_ be more assured that they're not out to screw everyone else.
As it is, I'm going to assume that they'll stake out future possible areas of human improvement and patent as much of it as they can, and woe be to those who happen to just mutate in an "infringing way" (or get infected by a virus that modifies you similarly), or those who sign up for "enhancements" and just want to have kids. Talk about "unauthorised _reproduction_ of intellectual property" and "signing away your first born".
Maybe such research would be good in a different time. But now is a bad time. Try something else, like a cure for malaria or a vaccine for dengue fever or one of the myriad other diseases out there.
There's plenty of stuff that you can be sure would do some good that isn't done yet, and plenty more neutral stuff.
Just look at what Monsanto and the rest do and tell me that more good will come out of it than bad. They always say things like "we're going to feed/heal/save the world" with this, but when you look at what they actually do, they are lying (or not telling the full truth).
There are zillions of things that are possible to research. Given the limited resources we have, there are far better things to spend it on than this.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it should be done yet. Perhaps it should be done much later. Or perhaps it shouldn't be done at all.
Example of stuff that shouldn't be done for a long time (if ever) - say there's technology to give everyone the power to kill everyone else (give everyone an antimatter power supply). If there are billions of people what are the odds of someone deciding to just kill everyone else? Your options would be extinction or restraining lots of people against their will.
Maybe in the future this hybrid thing would be good, but I find it hard to believe that people would do much good with this right _now_.
There are plenty of inventions in the past that we would have done better without.
As more and more things become possible, we should start really thinking hard on what our priorities should be. Assuming that the free market will take care of it all is foolishness.
While you may not be able to disprove all instances of "Nolan Ryans" if something is claimed about a particular "Nolan Ryan" something might be able to be proved.
However the evidence is unlikely to be "scientific proof" but more of "legal proof" since if "Nolan Ryan" made an appearance 50 years ago, you cannot "reproduce" that incident in a scientific experiment. You can only go by testimony of witnesses.
Now if it is claimed that that an invisible "Nolan Ryan" does interact on a daily basis with various somewhat unreliable witnesses then figuring out whether that's superstition or fact gets a bit messier.
" Otherwise you've got a police-state situation where people are permanently incarcerated merely on the suspicion of having material that they're not revealing... and if that becomes reality then the use of truecrypt will be the least of your worries"
They don't have to suspect everyone, they only have to suspect the _very_few_ who have truecrypt.
We're all within 48 hours from Guantanamo Bay. The USA/CIA has kidnapped people in other countries (e.g. Italy) officially without the consent of those countries.
I may be wrong but Truecrypt only supports 2 such volumes per volume. So they'll just ask you for both keys for every volume.
"completely undetectable use of truecrypt via a bootable cdrom"
If you can hide that cdrom so well, you might as well put the data on the cdrom (or USB drive) and hide it. If you do it well enough, even if they find it they may be interrogating someone else instead;).
The statement from wikipedia is irrelevant to the "plausible deniability" problem.
The last I checked: 1) Truecrypt is not a default install on any popular operating system 2) The container requires Truecrypt software to work.
And so if in UK (or other countries with similar laws, like mine) they ever find truecrypt software in your possession, you'll be in for a very long interrogation. If you can hide the truecrypt software so well that nobody else can find it, then your need for truecrypt is quite low isn't it?
Whereas as I mentioned before, what I call plausible deniability is if a popular operating system by _default_ includes a big random file (or two) and crypto tools that might or might not decrypt it.
1) I didn't put the big random file there (the distro did) 2) I didn't put the tools there (the distro did) 3) Crypto keys? Whazzat? You mean these? (Holds up physical keychain) 4) "Move along now"
Another thing: you have to be very careful about backups if you do use encryption and you do update the encrypted stuff once in a while. If people have access to the backed up container file even if it's encrypted they could compare them and if they find differences you have a problem.
Lastly, as far as I can tell, I don't use any crypto stuff, so don't take my advice on it.
The gov thug comes and says "Ah you're using Truecrypt, we know about that cool feature they mention in their website, so hand us all keys".
And if you're stupid you go "Uh I only have one key".
Then: a) If you're not telling the truth, you're in deep shit. b) If you're telling the truth, you're in deeper shit, since there's no key #2 to give them.
Think Truecrypt is so great now? Truecrypt's "plausible deniability" feature is crap.
What I call plausible deniability would be if a very popular linux distro ALWAYS generated a 100MB (or 2% of diskspace, whichever is larger up, to a max of say 1GB) file full of random stuff and plonked it on the filesytem, and it always included encryption tools by default.
Would normal users be willing to pay the price of the "wasted" space and time?
Some studies show that coffee can help reduce the progression of Alzheimer's.
And drinking coffee is associated with a reduced risk of developing alcohol related liver cirrhosis.
I don't drink coffee regularly - I find even a single cup affects me too much.
If you are a regular coffee drinker, you should watch out for headaches that result from caffeine withdrawal - e.g. you stop taking coffee for two or so days and you get this big headache.
Regarding big advances, it's no point being too advanced - go look up Douglas Engelbart.
Transitors were definitely important.
I think synthetic polymers were a great invention too. "Plastics":).
Which brings us to one of the most important things of the 20th century - oil and lots of it.
BTW airconditioning is also pretty important to me since I live in a tropical climate (hot and humid). No airconditioning = very little work gets done in an entire skyscraper (and it's shutdown the servers time). It's not so simple to say "stick to using fans and spread the city out more...".
Truecrypt's plausible deniability is worthless or even dangerous.
If you have Truecrypt installed it just means you're going to rot in jail till you can either: 1) Convince the police that some random file you have that they are interested in is not encrypted. 2) Decrypt the file somehow (even if it wasn't encrypted in the first place;) ).
You'd be better off downloading some legal porn (or something similarly frowned on but legal) and encrypt sets of them (without truecrypt) and write down the keys somewhere so you never forget or lose it. Then if the Gov says "hand over the keys" you hand over the keys, rather than say "I have no keys".
A Gov like that is going to presume you're guilty of something.
The access times are from semi random searches for benchmarks of flash drives out there.
My guess is that's because of the flash drive controllers and the block read limitations.
But if you get a better controller or more controllers and do lots of nifty tricks you can get much better access times. Which is what might have been done in the demoed product mentioned in the article. I'd like to know what tricks they did though, maybe it only works that well in the demo scenario.
Perhaps you're right and the interface overhead is more significant (no idea though). Whatever it is, a real drive will also have similar overheads whether it's USB or ATA or SAS or SCSI. Whatever AMD says about their chips isn't so relevant.
The last I checked most drivers for winxp work for win2k. They didn't change the driver model drastically (Windows isn't like Linux where devs break the API/ABI regularly) the network/graphics drivers are often described as "win2k/xp".
The only software so far that I have _experienced_ that works on winxp but not win2k is Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger (e.g. their XP only MSN messenger).
IMO that requirement is artificial (just another Microsoft "nudge" to get people off Win2K). Basically I searched for MSN Messenger, downloaded the latest version from MS's official website, and found that if you're using Win2K the website gives you a "slightly" out of date version of MSN Messenger 7.0 which doesn't work with the current instant messaging servers. However, another brief search and you can find a link to a Microsoft page which provides a slightly newer version of MSN Messenger 7.0 which does work (it's not the same as the XP version which is nearly twice the size...). Go figure...
As for Vista, the wise thing is to wait some more and see what happens.
Nope that's the soviet russia style meme - where in Soviet russia "B does A" in contrast to "A does B".
Soviet russia would be "in soviet russia the bullet bites you".
Whereas: In Repressive Burma, it's not just the blog that's removed... (unsaid: they remove the blogger too). In Repressive Burma, it's not just your home directory that goes up in smoke... (unsaid: your home does too).
Anyway, I think it sucks and someone should come up with a better meme:).
In Repressive Burma, the "printer on fire" takes a different meaning;).
In Repressive Burma, its not just your connection that dies.
Anyway, most of the soldiers doing the killing are probably the usual "just following orders" type, you have to find a way to switch their mode to: "WTF am I doing, I'm being the bad guy now!".
Given the similarity in thinking of most of these sorts, if you find the right trigger I bet they'd all switch about the same time. The big bad bosses will still have their cadre of loyalists, but their power would be greatly diminished.
Just make sure there's a decent transition plan otherwise you'd be swapping for another bad one;).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you can spend the whole day without reflexively preening your hair or scratching an itch. I think most of us can't.
Anyway, when can we get "thought macro" controlled devices? We already wired up monkeys, rats, humans to control devices by thought. Now lets come up with something that can be safe for long term that achieves something similar.
My point is the testing is different and of a different standard. Whether card makers really care or not, in my experience their graphics cards are flakier than a stick of say Kingston RAM.
Secondly if math goes wrong in a video card it doesn't usually cause the game to crash since it's mainly _output_, what you claim is about the same as saying a rendering/shading fault in your monitor will cause your game to crash.
As for RAM that's mainly for video cards - see GDDR2, GDDR3, GDDR4 etc.
"I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later"
How about a nice game of American checkers/English draughts...
Turn off hotmail?
:).
Sure
0) AGP performance sucks for this ;)
1) How sure are you that they test video ram well enough to use for that purpose? Some people might not notice a few display artifacts due to video ram having one bit stuck at zero or one, but for swap that's not good.
2) Just buy more _real_ ram, nowadays for normal usage, I recommend setting a small swap partition, that's only purpose is to tell you that you're running out of ram (by making the machine more sluggish). Set the swap too big and you have the entire machine running from swap which nowadays is about as good as powering the machine off abruptly (since that's what everyone does rather than wait weeks or more). Hard drives are too many magnitudes slower than real RAM for users to want to recreate the "Drum memory" era. Who sets their ssh and tcp timeouts to 1 month?
3) If you need more ram than the old machine can get you, buy a new machine, the last I checked PC hardware is cheap, they're amongst the cheapest things in the world for the technology and materials you get. Use the old machine for something else or give it away.
And some people were so sure that "spy squirrels" in Iran were not for real :).
Wow. Good thing they have these procedures. Why fire someone for buying a plant for his school and giving students watches he made?
And it's amazing how screwed up the thinking is: "Some say the teachers themselves are to blame - their union contract requires a hearing before any tenured employee can be fired."
What next? The citizens are to be blamed - the Constitution requires due process before any citizen can be thrown in jail?
As far as I can see, the hearings just aren't happening often enough. So whose fault is that?
"We should be starting to get the ethics sorted out now."
:) ).
Yeah. As the power we have increases, we should be spending more and more thought into whether we should do something, rather than blindly just doing the first possible thing without considering the long term consequences.
After all, just because we don't/shouldn't do something now, doesn't necessarily mean that we can't/shouldn't do it later.
And it is also true that if we do some things now, it could stop us from doing lots of other things later (like living
People can already create custom viruses for less than USD1 million. If the costs drop lower and we don't have the ethical, social, legal etc safeguards in, bad things WILL happen (as it is, I think that one is too late already, but that doesn't mean we should give up thinking about other stuff).
"Which is number one, how do you know you're doing the "Right" research right now?"
I'd say that's what your brains and conscience are for.
Fact is as technology improves the possibilities and choices increase "exponentially", while the resources don't increase quite as rapidly.
I can think of many things to do given current technology, but I can't do them all, and some things are just unsafe at the moment (and some may probably be unsafe for a very very long time), and some things are plain evil (believe me, there are lots of evil research paths you can take with current tech levels).
Refusing to admit that there is good and bad research is silly.
And thinking that doing such things now instead of later is a good idea is naive or even stupid, especially when the likes of Monsanto et all have shown what they really intend to do with such things vs what they use to justify their actions - "feed/heal/save the world". Sure the "ant" scientists doing the research might be thinking they're doing something good (or just in denial), but take a step back, look at what those Hives are doing in the "big picture" sometime.
If they do away with gene patents and similar stuff then I _might_ be more assured that they're not out to screw everyone else.
As it is, I'm going to assume that they'll stake out future possible areas of human improvement and patent as much of it as they can, and woe be to those who happen to just mutate in an "infringing way" (or get infected by a virus that modifies you similarly), or those who sign up for "enhancements" and just want to have kids. Talk about "unauthorised _reproduction_ of intellectual property" and "signing away your first born".
Maybe such research would be good in a different time. But now is a bad time. Try something else, like a cure for malaria or a vaccine for dengue fever or one of the myriad other diseases out there.
There's plenty of stuff that you can be sure would do some good that isn't done yet, and plenty more neutral stuff.
Just look at what Monsanto and the rest do and tell me that more good will come out of it than bad. They always say things like "we're going to feed/heal/save the world" with this, but when you look at what they actually do, they are lying (or not telling the full truth).
There are zillions of things that are possible to research. Given the limited resources we have, there are far better things to spend it on than this.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it should be done yet. Perhaps it should be done much later. Or perhaps it shouldn't be done at all.
Example of stuff that shouldn't be done for a long time (if ever) - say there's technology to give everyone the power to kill everyone else (give everyone an antimatter power supply). If there are billions of people what are the odds of someone deciding to just kill everyone else? Your options would be extinction or restraining lots of people against their will.
Maybe in the future this hybrid thing would be good, but I find it hard to believe that people would do much good with this right _now_.
There are plenty of inventions in the past that we would have done better without.
As more and more things become possible, we should start really thinking hard on what our priorities should be. Assuming that the free market will take care of it all is foolishness.
While you may not be able to disprove all instances of "Nolan Ryans" if something is claimed about a particular "Nolan Ryan" something might be able to be proved.
However the evidence is unlikely to be "scientific proof" but more of "legal proof" since if "Nolan Ryan" made an appearance 50 years ago, you cannot "reproduce" that incident in a scientific experiment. You can only go by testimony of witnesses.
Now if it is claimed that that an invisible "Nolan Ryan" does interact on a daily basis with various somewhat unreliable witnesses then figuring out whether that's superstition or fact gets a bit messier.
I believe the bootloader only runs for a short while so maybe they can use emulation for running the bootloader stuff safely.
Then switch to "native" once you hit the kernel stuff etc.
Probably a lot more work tho.
" Otherwise you've got a police-state situation where people are permanently incarcerated merely on the suspicion of having material that they're not revealing ... and if that becomes reality then the use of truecrypt will be the least of your worries"
;).
They don't have to suspect everyone, they only have to suspect the _very_few_ who have truecrypt.
We're all within 48 hours from Guantanamo Bay. The USA/CIA has kidnapped people in other countries (e.g. Italy) officially without the consent of those countries.
I may be wrong but Truecrypt only supports 2 such volumes per volume. So they'll just ask you for both keys for every volume.
"completely undetectable use of truecrypt via a bootable cdrom"
If you can hide that cdrom so well, you might as well put the data on the cdrom (or USB drive) and hide it. If you do it well enough, even if they find it they may be interrogating someone else instead
The statement from wikipedia is irrelevant to the "plausible deniability" problem.
The last I checked:
1) Truecrypt is not a default install on any popular operating system
2) The container requires Truecrypt software to work.
And so if in UK (or other countries with similar laws, like mine) they ever find truecrypt software in your possession, you'll be in for a very long interrogation. If you can hide the truecrypt software so well that nobody else can find it, then your need for truecrypt is quite low isn't it?
Whereas as I mentioned before, what I call plausible deniability is if a popular operating system by _default_ includes a big random file (or two) and crypto tools that might or might not decrypt it.
1) I didn't put the big random file there (the distro did)
2) I didn't put the tools there (the distro did)
3) Crypto keys? Whazzat? You mean these? (Holds up physical keychain)
4) "Move along now"
Another thing: you have to be very careful about backups if you do use encryption and you do update the encrypted stuff once in a while. If people have access to the backed up container file even if it's encrypted they could compare them and if they find differences you have a problem.
Lastly, as far as I can tell, I don't use any crypto stuff, so don't take my advice on it.
I didn't expect to have to explain in detail how stupid it was but anyway:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314757&cid=20826495
You miss my point totally.
The gov thug comes and says "Ah you're using Truecrypt, we know about that cool feature they mention in their website, so hand us all keys".
And if you're stupid you go "Uh I only have one key".
Then:
a) If you're not telling the truth, you're in deep shit.
b) If you're telling the truth, you're in deeper shit, since there's no key #2 to give them.
Think Truecrypt is so great now? Truecrypt's "plausible deniability" feature is crap.
What I call plausible deniability would be if a very popular linux distro ALWAYS generated a 100MB (or 2% of diskspace, whichever is larger up, to a max of say 1GB) file full of random stuff and plonked it on the filesytem, and it always included encryption tools by default.
Would normal users be willing to pay the price of the "wasted" space and time?
Some studies show that coffee can help reduce the progression of Alzheimer's.
And drinking coffee is associated with a reduced risk of developing alcohol related liver cirrhosis.
I don't drink coffee regularly - I find even a single cup affects me too much.
If you are a regular coffee drinker, you should watch out for headaches that result from caffeine withdrawal - e.g. you stop taking coffee for two or so days and you get this big headache.
But I'm not a doctor.
Regarding big advances, it's no point being too advanced - go look up Douglas Engelbart.
:).
Transitors were definitely important.
I think synthetic polymers were a great invention too. "Plastics"
Which brings us to one of the most important things of the 20th century - oil and lots of it.
BTW airconditioning is also pretty important to me since I live in a tropical climate (hot and humid). No airconditioning = very little work gets done in an entire skyscraper (and it's shutdown the servers time). It's not so simple to say "stick to using fans and spread the city out more...".
Truecrypt's plausible deniability is worthless or even dangerous.
;) ).
If you have Truecrypt installed it just means you're going to rot in jail till you can either:
1) Convince the police that some random file you have that they are interested in is not encrypted.
2) Decrypt the file somehow (even if it wasn't encrypted in the first place
You'd be better off downloading some legal porn (or something similarly frowned on but legal) and encrypt sets of them (without truecrypt) and write down the keys somewhere so you never forget or lose it. Then if the Gov says "hand over the keys" you hand over the keys, rather than say "I have no keys".
A Gov like that is going to presume you're guilty of something.
The access times are from semi random searches for benchmarks of flash drives out there.
My guess is that's because of the flash drive controllers and the block read limitations.
But if you get a better controller or more controllers and do lots of nifty tricks you can get much better access times. Which is what might have been done in the demoed product mentioned in the article. I'd like to know what tricks they did though, maybe it only works that well in the demo scenario.
Perhaps you're right and the interface overhead is more significant (no idea though). Whatever it is, a real drive will also have similar overheads whether it's USB or ATA or SAS or SCSI. Whatever AMD says about their chips isn't so relevant.
The last I checked most drivers for winxp work for win2k. They didn't change the driver model drastically (Windows isn't like Linux where devs break the API/ABI regularly) the network/graphics drivers are often described as "win2k/xp".
The only software so far that I have _experienced_ that works on winxp but not win2k is Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger (e.g. their XP only MSN messenger).
IMO that requirement is artificial (just another Microsoft "nudge" to get people off Win2K). Basically I searched for MSN Messenger, downloaded the latest version from MS's official website, and found that if you're using Win2K the website gives you a "slightly" out of date version of MSN Messenger 7.0 which doesn't work with the current instant messaging servers. However, another brief search and you can find a link to a Microsoft page which provides a slightly newer version of MSN Messenger 7.0 which does work (it's not the same as the XP version which is nearly twice the size...). Go figure...
As for Vista, the wise thing is to wait some more and see what happens.
Nope that's the soviet russia style meme - where in Soviet russia "B does A" in contrast to "A does B".
:).
;).
Soviet russia would be "in soviet russia the bullet bites you".
Whereas:
In Repressive Burma, it's not just the blog that's removed... (unsaid: they remove the blogger too).
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your home directory that goes up in smoke... (unsaid: your home does too).
Anyway, I think it sucks and someone should come up with a better meme
In Repressive Burma, the "printer on fire" takes a different meaning
In Repressive Burma, its not just your connection that dies.
;).
Anyway, most of the soldiers doing the killing are probably the usual "just following orders" type, you have to find a way to switch their mode to: "WTF am I doing, I'm being the bad guy now!".
Given the similarity in thinking of most of these sorts, if you find the right trigger I bet they'd all switch about the same time. The big bad bosses will still have their cadre of loyalists, but their power would be greatly diminished.
Just make sure there's a decent transition plan otherwise you'd be swapping for another bad one
"get a little much-needed perspective on what real censorship looks like."
Yeah, and instead of going "see it's not so bad here" we should go "we better ensure this sort of thing won't happen".
The pointy bits were to represent the same PHB thinking that came up with the "first sat should be a sphere" because "earth is a sphere".