Interesting idea. But rather than simply throwing in the towel, how about doing it in a more directed way. Surely censorware can be cracked. Rather than infantile stuff like DOS and defacing web pages, how about "liberating" those points of control by disabling the censorware? In the same way, RIAA, DMCA, and UCITA may need similar tactics. The spread of the deCSS code is a good start. (But we as a community must take care NEVER to pirate a DVD, or we lose our whole argument on this one.) By the same token, to counter UCITA we need to add some sort of shrinkwrap-like addition to the GPL, so that our software gets the same "protection" as Microsoft's, but our ethics can remain unchanged. I also suspect we may need a new set of protocols so we can go back underground now that the old ones have been co-opted by DotCom and the ilk. Some way to get below the radar screen and keep information moving. What's "AUP"?
I read and enjoyed ENM, and felt that it did a fairly good job of skirting around pseudoscience. There seems to be a terrible tendancy to invoke either Quantum Mechanics or Chaos Theory whenever we get to something that seems fuzzy or hard/imprecise to analyze.
I keep an open mind, but personally, I'm beginning to believe that consciousness isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some of the most interesting insights might be coming from current robotics work, where interlinked simple systems are starting to show complex behavior. This concept also shows up in some psychological theories.
Another nagging thought concerns dogs. These puppies have spent thousands of years evolving as companions for people - and they are remarkably well adapted, emotionally. With brains considered much less complex than the humans', and generally not considered conscious, they mirror our emotional responses to an amazing degree.
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of...
on
The Truth
·
· Score: 1
Agnes Nutter, Witch
I'll have to agree, clearly much better than the Diskworld books, of which I've read a few. The seamless melding of the absurd into reality makes it one of my all-time favorites. To some extent, though you probably can't carry this comparison too far, Diskworld kind of reminds me of Xanth. (Piers Anthony)
With the current deCSS brouhaha, there are several Supreme Court - worthy aspects:
1: Jurisdiction questions on the Internet 2: Common carrier vs publisher aspect of ISPs 3: Defining the lines between copyright and fair use in the electronic/Internet age
IMHO these are all issues worth arguing there. But also IMHO, deCSS is not the case to take them there, because we have no/few friends on this one. We're too likely to lose, because money is often more important than justice in the legal system, and that sets some bad precedents.
What type of case would you like to see take these issues to the Supreme Court?
Of course there will be a need for L3 cache. You're right that L1 and L2 together will have a high hit rate, but consider the raw speed and the growing performance disparity between processor cycle times and DRAM full random (RAS cycle) access time.
There are two perspectives on this. First off, the CPU stalls during the miss, while fresh data is coming in at DRAM access rates. Even with DRAM speeding up, we're still talking at least 50 cycles of a 1GHz processor spent doing nothing
From another perspective, let's pretend a 100MHz CPU does 1 memory fetch every 10 nS. With a 90% hit-rate cache, the becomes approximately 1 miss every 100 nS, or a 10 MHz frequency at the main memory. This is actually pretty decent and sustainable for today's memory, counting a full RAS access and some amount of burst length.
Speed the same CPU to 1 GHz and you're kicking requests out to main memory every 10 nS, or at a 100 MHz frequence. This is clearly beyond today's technology. So either the CPU spends an incredible amount of time stalled, or the cache hit rate needs to be boosted. (or the memory sped up, but that's inconsistant with "cheap", which is the watchword for main memory.)
A given cache is usually as "big" as it can be for a given performance. So making L1 or L2 bigger isn't an option, because it either becomes slower or falls of the chip. (which also makes it slower.) So you add another level of cache. Hence the L3.
Remember when the 386 had no cache? Then we added L1 off-chip. Then the 486 added L1 on-chip. Then we added L2 off-chip. Then Intel made the first Celerons, with no L2. Remember the FLOP sound those made?
L3 is a logical step to take, and it's just about time. My new K6-3 at home uses the 1MB L2 cache on the motherboard as an L3. There have been benchmarks that show that it does make a performance improvement.
With Athlon, AMD has carried the competition to Intel's doorstep. This is the idea. This is what the marketplace is supposed to do. We are supposed to be the beneficiaries.
So I wonder when mainstream PC makers will quit considering AMD to be the cheapo alternative and realize that, at least for the present, they are the performance leaders.
The freedoms we now have on the net exist simply because of a power vacuum. So far, The Powers That Be haven't truly gotten it. Well, the bad news is that they're learning, and they're moving in. The DMCA is one example, and UCITA is another.
With the deCSS decisions, we have just tentatively lost much of our freedom. We sit here and cry about the stupidity and unfairness of the injunctions, and show how, "We shall prevail! The net is just too big for the MPAA!" I fear that's being more than a little optimistic.
First off, we're a tiny minority. Most of the populace is of the "food and entertainment" variety recently alluded to on Technocrat. They won't even GET the point of all of this, let alone support it. As long as they can get to Yahoo, and thence to the latest Pro Wrestling News, they'll be happy.
Second, I SURE wish we'd chosen a different battle than deCSS to begin Freedom of the Net legal wrangling with. Maybe the DCMA is unconstitutional, and maybe it should be turned over. But we should have gotten decisions first against smaller parties with shallower pockets. Then armed with precedent maybe we could have fought the deCSS battle.
As a result of deCSS we now find that:
1: Web sites are responsible for the content they link to.
2: ISPs are responsible for the content posted by their subscribers. In other words, they do not get the "common carrier" benefit accorded to the phone companies. I wouldn't be surprised to see some wrangling so AOL and other big providers can be common carriers, and small ISPs can't.
3: Apparently the Internet isn't 'bigger than any nation,' the way we thought. After all, an action in a California court prompted police action in Europe. This need not even be US bullying, it could be so much as, 'national governments stand together,' especially against something perceived as anarchic as the Internet.
We've REALLY taken it on the chin with deCSS. At the moment, I wouldn't hope to get any reversal of any of this, either. Has anyone talked to the ACLU, yet? At least the ACLU knows how to argue constitutional rights, something we need to demonstrate better.
Prior to this, it sounded like GEForce was going to come out with full Linux support, and it was going to be branded OpenGL. But it also appeared that the drivers would be closed source.
Philosophically, that puts the GEForce at a serious disadvantage relative to Matrox, 3dfx, or ATI.
I'm not joking. Think about what this invention did to get women out of the house and into the world. It let them be full-time participants instead of being cloistered, periodically.
This was mentioned on the memepool. I don't have the link handy, but just take a look at htt://www.memepool.com and it's fairly recent. $15.00 each. I may have to order one before they get shut down, too. I wonder if they'll subpoena their customer list for further pers^H^H^Hrosecution.
We need to grind PGP/GPG further into the Linux infrastructure, perhaps to the point of making it default behavior. That will validate that the package is what was shipped, and not tampered en route. Then we need to have a way to know WHO to trust. Both of these problems have been solved by the PGP/GPG community. Now that the USA is less opposed to encryption, we just need to move them into the infrastructure. It should be the default behavior to give some sort of way to newbie-proof distributions, simply so the inexperienced don't accidentally become disease vectors. Obviously the mechanisms need override capabilities for the experienced. But B.Operator is right, in that even having the source is of little good unless you go through it for the security exposures. Simply getting source and following INSTALL is no more secure than a binary.
...in several responses to my post, I'll tuck this here, instead of under one of them.
The deCSS case could well go to the Supreme Court. It has several interesting features that need to be legally tested.
1: Jurisdiction and the international nature of the Internet.
2: Are ISPs common carriers, content providers, or both, and how is the line of responsibility drawn?
3: How should the rights of Reverse Engineering be defined, especially with respect to the new copyright law?
Perhaps this is a poor case for the Supreme Court, because there are so many factors. It might make for a very muddy decision. Personally, I hope so.
This is NOT a good test case. At the moment, we have NO friends, and are quite likely to lose, no matter what the merits. The reporting I saw on the New York case indicated that the judge was VERY friendly toward the MPAA side. It's easy to believe we could line up the ACLU and Nader's Raiders as friends in fairly short order, but I don't know about their clout. Since encryption is involved, and after all encryption IS a weapon,:-) we might be able to court the NRA. (After all, when encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption.)
We haven't truly come into our own as an organization with CLOUT, largely because we aren't really an organization. But I fear that the time for CLOUT has arrived, perhaps prematurely.
We sufferred a BAD loss in the second deCSS injunction against us:
By upholding the injunction against an ISP for the actions of a subscriber, the court effectively changed ISPs from communication conduits into content providers. I realize that this is a preliminary injunction, but if it stands, the spirit of the Web is in trouble.
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
In the worst case, the Web becomes the realm of the dotcom, and those who brought it into being are banned, or at the very least, tightly leashed and censored by litigation fearing ISPs.
Automation and GUIs are great, as long as the "traditional methods" don't get broken. SMIT on AIX can be great, but some of the/etc stuff doesn't work, any more. Even worse, some of that is still there. So I would say that any GUI config tool should work through existing/etc stuff rather than around it.
RedHat skirts around this issue, a little. The regular/etc stuff is there and works, but it was typically machine generated. The original data is often back in/etc/sysconfig, and if you use linuxconf again later, your changes are ignored and wiped over.
Now that we know the techniques, how about some countermeasures...
Travesty generators have been around for some time, taking random sequences of letters and filtering them into the style of Shakespeare. This makes for something between Shakespeare-sh gibberish and amusing reading.
Imagine something like a travesty generator that can decompose your writing, sentence by sentence. Then, armed with a built-in thesaurus, grammatical rules, etc, it could re-cast your words into someone else's mold.
In other words, scan manifesto A, scan writings of author B, building rulebases of both. Convert manifesto A into style of author B.
I don't believe we have this, but I don't believe it's much of a stretch, either. Kind of a computerized equivalent of cutting the words and letters out of magazines and newspapers, then pasting them back into your own message.
Back in the early 1980's a new fad started in the US. People got their BS in engineering and went straight for an MBA. Then they graduated, and got directly onto the fast track. They never really worked in the trenches, at least not beyond some probationary period, and certainly not putting their heart into it.
Now these people are 'Captains of the industry', and you know what? They're not really comfortable with the underlying technology they're in charge of. They're much more comfortable with business.
As a result, technical competition has been fading during the '90s, and business competition has moved in. Companies don't want to get your business by producing the best products and giving the best service for the price. They want you to have to use their products and services, at their price, because there is no other choice.
This is really what Linux is about. Frustrated tekkies who want to do their best, but are barred by 'business concerns' into mediocre solutions. It began with software, because there was already some appropriate history there, and it is cheap to enter and build on that history. It will be interesting to see where else the paradigm works.
The assumption was that bee wings act like airplane wings. Uner those assumptions, a bee would not be able to fly. Somewhat more recently it was shown that bee wings do not work the same as airplane (or ornithoper) wings. Aside from the flapping thing, there's a basic modal difference.
Airplane and ornithopter (and bird?) wings work on laminar airflow. Try 'too hard' to fly, and you get turbulence above the wing. In other words, a stall.
The bee has a different method of dealing with this. Rather than prevent turbulence, the bee wing uses turbulence, and has a machanism for continually spinning the turbulent vortices off of the wing. In this flight mode, a given size wing has much as 50X more effective lift than in laminar mode.
I'm not sure we can apply this to the whole Linux vs Microsoft thing, other than to say that a new modality changes the whole landscape. But I guess that's what Open Source is all about. In this case, we're the bee.
Compare Childhood's End to Darwin's Radio
on
Childhood's End
·
· Score: 1
Really, they're just about the same book, at least thematically. Punctuated evolution. In Clarke's case, the step was much larger, and he had extraterrestrial midwives. In Bear's case, the step was much more moderate, and the drama of the story was driven by the lack of those midwives.
Another excellent "Evolutionary Step" book is "The Harvest" by Robert Charles Wilson. In this case, however, the step is a sort of evolution by nano-tech absorption. Then this idea leads you back to Greg Bear, with "Blood Music".
I don't like the idea of AOL/Time-Warner owning content and delivery any more than anyone else here. But this isn't the real evil, you have to look a little deeper.
AFAIK, any time you want to get high-speed cable access, the cable company becomes your ISP. With this kind of setup, AOL becomes deadweight - or toast, if you'd prefer that term.
The cable companies seem to feel that they need this exclusive 'ISP+physical access' power if they're to recoup the infrastructure investment needed for widespread broadband access.
But these are the headlights AOL sees coming, and they feel they need to be in the driver's seat, or they'll be crunching under the wheels.
I'm under the impression that ADSL is a bit better. At least Bell Atlantic has a short list of alternate ISPs you can use over their lines. Of course using Bell Atlantic as ISP+physical access appears to be the best deal, so I don't know how much better this "open" arrangement really is.
Moreover, I don't know how to break this deadlock caused by physical infrastructure invesement. But it's holding us all back, until these companies figure out a way.
High performance graphics pretty much require intimate contact between the program and the hardware. A lot of this stuff ends up having to run as root, or suffer performance loss.
Perhaps in the future, better designed hardware will make secure, high performance graphics feasible. It's really more a matter of marketing than technical issues.
But while we're busy treading down this path, don't forget how much NT 4 reliability was 'helped' by moving graphics into the kernel.
For a gaming machine, the security/performance implications are probably OK. But this bears careful watching, and an ongoing assessment of risks.
Since this is/. and we're all supposed to be concerned about software licenses, UCITA, and all of that, I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned what Good Omens had to say about them:
In essence... (this is from years-old memory)
took the software license, and sent it down to the demons in Hell who were responsible for writing the contracts on lost souls. He scrawled one word across it, "LEARN!"
Great book, I hope it can make it onto the screen even half as good, and with the wit intact.
Maybe my wife and I aren't over their shoulders 100% of the time, but we're in and out of the room where the computer is often enough to have a gist of what they're seeing. Besides, I run our web through a proxy, so we can see where the browser's been. As parents, that gives us to talk to our children about what they see, and have a values discussion when they see things we generally disapprove of. Note that that may not necessarily mean an outright ban, but that as their parents, our perspective needs to be included.
You don't need to encrypt the blocking list. You can make things worse by hashing it, instead. Distribute list of hashed site names. Then at the browser, use the same hash on a requested site and match it against the list.
There is no need to be able to decrypt the site list.
Why can't we just start with some lower-tech things like implanted sugar sensors and insulin pumps. Or how about medication dispensors for bipolar disorder, etc. I know there is preliminary work being done with implanted insulin dispensors, and I guess somebody has to be thinking about way out there. Perhaps I wish that a bit more of that intellect would be directed toward making things like the implanted insulin real, sooner.
Greg Bear touches on this with the 'therapied' people in several of his novels, and casts it in a rather Orwellian way. But there is a fine line between fixing a few known chemical disorders and mass population-drugging. Perhaps we need to explore and define that line, publicly. Otherwise no doubt governments, multinationals, NGOs, and whatever other boogymen we dig up will do it for us.
We clearly don't want the educational system in charge of implanted ritalin.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting idea. But rather than simply throwing in the towel, how about doing it in a more directed way. Surely censorware can be cracked. Rather than infantile stuff like DOS and defacing web pages, how about "liberating" those points of control by disabling the censorware? In the same way, RIAA, DMCA, and UCITA may need similar tactics. The spread of the deCSS code is a good start. (But we as a community must take care NEVER to pirate a DVD, or we lose our whole argument on this one.) By the same token, to counter UCITA we need to add some sort of shrinkwrap-like addition to the GPL, so that our software gets the same "protection" as Microsoft's, but our ethics can remain unchanged. I also suspect we may need a new set of protocols so we can go back underground now that the old ones have been co-opted by DotCom and the ilk. Some way to get below the radar screen and keep information moving. What's "AUP"?
I read and enjoyed ENM, and felt that it did a fairly good job of skirting around pseudoscience. There seems to be a terrible tendancy to invoke either Quantum Mechanics or Chaos Theory whenever we get to something that seems fuzzy or hard/imprecise to analyze.
I keep an open mind, but personally, I'm beginning to believe that consciousness isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some of the most interesting insights might be coming from current robotics work, where interlinked simple systems are starting to show complex behavior. This concept also shows up in some psychological theories.
Another nagging thought concerns dogs. These puppies have spent thousands of years evolving as companions for people - and they are remarkably well adapted, emotionally. With brains considered much less complex than the humans', and generally not considered conscious, they mirror our emotional responses to an amazing degree.
Agnes Nutter, Witch
I'll have to agree, clearly much better than the Diskworld books, of which I've read a few. The seamless melding of the absurd into reality makes it one of my all-time favorites. To some extent, though you probably can't carry this comparison too far, Diskworld kind of reminds me of Xanth. (Piers Anthony)
With the current deCSS brouhaha, there are several Supreme Court - worthy aspects:
1: Jurisdiction questions on the Internet
2: Common carrier vs publisher aspect of ISPs
3: Defining the lines between copyright and fair use in the electronic/Internet age
IMHO these are all issues worth arguing there. But also IMHO, deCSS is not the case to take them there, because we have no/few friends on this one. We're too likely to lose, because money is often more important than justice in the legal system, and that sets some bad precedents.
What type of case would you like to see take these issues to the Supreme Court?
Of course there will be a need for L3 cache. You're right that L1 and L2 together will have a high hit rate, but consider the raw speed and the growing performance disparity between processor cycle times and DRAM full random (RAS cycle) access time.
There are two perspectives on this. First off, the CPU stalls during the miss, while fresh data is coming in at DRAM access rates. Even with DRAM speeding up, we're still talking at least 50 cycles of a 1GHz processor spent doing nothing
From another perspective, let's pretend a 100MHz CPU does 1 memory fetch every 10 nS. With a 90% hit-rate cache, the becomes approximately 1 miss every 100 nS, or a 10 MHz frequency at the main memory. This is actually pretty decent and sustainable for today's memory, counting a full RAS access and some amount of burst length.
Speed the same CPU to 1 GHz and you're kicking requests out to main memory every 10 nS, or at a 100 MHz frequence. This is clearly beyond today's technology. So either the CPU spends an incredible amount of time stalled, or the cache hit rate needs to be boosted. (or the memory sped up, but that's inconsistant with "cheap", which is the watchword for main memory.)
A given cache is usually as "big" as it can be for a given performance. So making L1 or L2 bigger isn't an option, because it either becomes slower or falls of the chip. (which also makes it slower.) So you add another level of cache. Hence the L3.
Remember when the 386 had no cache?
Then we added L1 off-chip.
Then the 486 added L1 on-chip.
Then we added L2 off-chip.
Then Intel made the first Celerons, with no L2. Remember the FLOP sound those made?
L3 is a logical step to take, and it's just about time. My new K6-3 at home uses the 1MB L2 cache on the motherboard as an L3. There have been benchmarks that show that it does make a performance improvement.
With Athlon, AMD has carried the competition to Intel's doorstep. This is the idea. This is what the marketplace is supposed to do. We are supposed to be the beneficiaries.
So I wonder when mainstream PC makers will quit considering AMD to be the cheapo alternative and realize that, at least for the present, they are the performance leaders.
The freedoms we now have on the net exist simply because of a power vacuum. So far, The Powers That Be haven't truly gotten it. Well, the bad news is that they're learning, and they're moving in. The DMCA is one example, and UCITA is another.
With the deCSS decisions, we have just tentatively lost much of our freedom. We sit here and cry about the stupidity and unfairness of the injunctions, and show how, "We shall prevail! The net is just too big for the MPAA!" I fear that's being more than a little optimistic.
First off, we're a tiny minority. Most of the populace is of the "food and entertainment" variety recently alluded to on Technocrat. They won't even GET the point of all of this, let alone support it. As long as they can get to Yahoo, and thence to the latest Pro Wrestling News, they'll be happy.
Second, I SURE wish we'd chosen a different battle than deCSS to begin Freedom of the Net legal wrangling with. Maybe the DCMA is unconstitutional, and maybe it should be turned over. But we should have gotten decisions first against smaller parties with shallower pockets. Then armed with precedent maybe we could have fought the deCSS battle.
As a result of deCSS we now find that:
1: Web sites are responsible for the content they link to.
2: ISPs are responsible for the content posted by their subscribers. In other words, they do not get the "common carrier" benefit accorded to the phone companies. I wouldn't be surprised to see some wrangling so AOL and other big providers can be common carriers, and small ISPs can't.
3: Apparently the Internet isn't 'bigger than any nation,' the way we thought. After all, an action in a California court prompted police action in Europe. This need not even be US bullying, it could be so much as, 'national governments stand together,' especially against something perceived as anarchic as the Internet.
We've REALLY taken it on the chin with deCSS. At the moment, I wouldn't hope to get any reversal of any of this, either. Has anyone talked to the ACLU, yet? At least the ACLU knows how to argue constitutional rights, something we need to demonstrate better.
Prior to this, it sounded like GEForce was going to come out with full Linux support, and it was going to be branded OpenGL. But it also appeared that the drivers would be closed source.
Philosophically, that puts the GEForce at a serious disadvantage relative to Matrox, 3dfx, or ATI.
This may change things. (I hope.)
I'm not joking. Think about what this invention did to get women out of the house and into the world. It let them be full-time participants instead of being cloistered, periodically.
This was mentioned on the memepool. I don't have the link handy, but just take a look at htt://www.memepool.com and it's fairly recent. $15.00 each. I may have to order one before they get shut down, too. I wonder if they'll subpoena their customer list for further pers^H^H^Hrosecution.
We need to grind PGP/GPG further into the Linux infrastructure, perhaps to the point of making it default behavior. That will validate that the package is what was shipped, and not tampered en route. Then we need to have a way to know WHO to trust. Both of these problems have been solved by the PGP/GPG community. Now that the USA is less opposed to encryption, we just need to move them into the infrastructure. It should be the default behavior to give some sort of way to newbie-proof distributions, simply so the inexperienced don't accidentally become disease vectors. Obviously the mechanisms need override capabilities for the experienced. But B.Operator is right, in that even having the source is of little good unless you go through it for the security exposures. Simply getting source and following INSTALL is no more secure than a binary.
...in several responses to my post, I'll tuck this here, instead of under one of them.
:-) we might be able to court the NRA. (After all, when encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption.)
The deCSS case could well go to the Supreme Court. It has several interesting features that need to be legally tested.
1: Jurisdiction and the international nature of the Internet.
2: Are ISPs common carriers, content providers, or both, and how is the line of responsibility drawn?
3: How should the rights of Reverse Engineering be defined, especially with respect to the new copyright law?
Perhaps this is a poor case for the Supreme Court, because there are so many factors. It might make for a very muddy decision. Personally, I hope so.
This is NOT a good test case. At the moment, we have NO friends, and are quite likely to lose, no matter what the merits. The reporting I saw on the New York case indicated that the judge was VERY friendly toward the MPAA side. It's easy to believe we could line up the ACLU and Nader's Raiders as friends in fairly short order, but I don't know about their clout. Since encryption is involved, and after all encryption IS a weapon,
We haven't truly come into our own as an organization with CLOUT, largely because we aren't really an organization. But I fear that the time for CLOUT has arrived, perhaps prematurely.
We sufferred a BAD loss in the second deCSS injunction against us:
By upholding the injunction against an ISP for the actions of a subscriber, the court effectively changed ISPs from communication conduits into content providers. I realize that this is a preliminary injunction, but if it stands, the spirit of the Web is in trouble.
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
In the worst case, the Web becomes the realm of the dotcom, and those who brought it into being are banned, or at the very least, tightly leashed and censored by litigation fearing ISPs.
Automation and GUIs are great, as long as the "traditional methods" don't get broken. SMIT on AIX can be great, but some of the /etc stuff doesn't work, any more. Even worse, some of that is still there. So I would say that any GUI config tool should work through existing /etc stuff rather than around it.
/etc stuff is there and works, but it was typically machine generated. The original data is often back in /etc/sysconfig, and if you use linuxconf again later, your changes are ignored and wiped over.
RedHat skirts around this issue, a little. The regular
Now that we know the techniques, how about some countermeasures...
Travesty generators have been around for some time, taking random sequences of letters and filtering them into the style of Shakespeare. This makes for something between Shakespeare-sh gibberish and amusing reading.
Imagine something like a travesty generator that can decompose your writing, sentence by sentence. Then, armed with a built-in thesaurus, grammatical rules, etc, it could re-cast your words into someone else's mold.
In other words, scan manifesto A, scan writings of author B, building rulebases of both. Convert manifesto A into style of author B.
I don't believe we have this, but I don't believe it's much of a stretch, either. Kind of a computerized equivalent of cutting the words and letters out of magazines and newspapers, then pasting them back into your own message.
Back in the early 1980's a new fad started in the US. People got their BS in engineering and went straight for an MBA. Then they graduated, and got directly onto the fast track. They never really worked in the trenches, at least not beyond some probationary period, and certainly not putting their heart into it.
Now these people are 'Captains of the industry', and you know what? They're not really comfortable with the underlying technology they're in charge of. They're much more comfortable with business.
As a result, technical competition has been fading during the '90s, and business competition has moved in. Companies don't want to get your business by producing the best products and giving the best service for the price. They want you to have to use their products and services, at their price, because there is no other choice.
This is really what Linux is about. Frustrated tekkies who want to do their best, but are barred by 'business concerns' into mediocre solutions. It began with software, because there was already some appropriate history there, and it is cheap to enter and build on that history. It will be interesting to see where else the paradigm works.
The assumption was that bee wings act like airplane wings. Uner those assumptions, a bee would not be able to fly. Somewhat more recently it was shown that bee wings do not work the same as airplane (or ornithoper) wings. Aside from the flapping thing, there's a basic modal difference.
Airplane and ornithopter (and bird?) wings work on laminar airflow. Try 'too hard' to fly, and you get turbulence above the wing. In other words, a stall.
The bee has a different method of dealing with this. Rather than prevent turbulence, the bee wing uses turbulence, and has a machanism for continually spinning the turbulent vortices off of the wing. In this flight mode, a given size wing has much as 50X more effective lift than in laminar mode.
I'm not sure we can apply this to the whole Linux vs Microsoft thing, other than to say that a new modality changes the whole landscape. But I guess that's what Open Source is all about. In this case, we're the bee.
Really, they're just about the same book, at least thematically. Punctuated evolution. In Clarke's case, the step was much larger, and he had extraterrestrial midwives. In Bear's case, the step was much more moderate, and the drama of the story was driven by the lack of those midwives.
Another excellent "Evolutionary Step" book is "The Harvest" by Robert Charles Wilson. In this case, however, the step is a sort of evolution by nano-tech absorption. Then this idea leads you back to Greg Bear, with "Blood Music".
I don't like the idea of AOL/Time-Warner owning content and delivery any more than anyone else here. But this isn't the real evil, you have to look a little deeper.
AFAIK, any time you want to get high-speed cable access, the cable company becomes your ISP. With this kind of setup, AOL becomes deadweight - or toast, if you'd prefer that term.
The cable companies seem to feel that they need this exclusive 'ISP+physical access' power if they're to recoup the infrastructure investment needed for widespread broadband access.
But these are the headlights AOL sees coming, and they feel they need to be in the driver's seat, or they'll be crunching under the wheels.
I'm under the impression that ADSL is a bit better. At least Bell Atlantic has a short list of alternate ISPs you can use over their lines. Of course using Bell Atlantic as ISP+physical access appears to be the best deal, so I don't know how much better this "open" arrangement really is.
Moreover, I don't know how to break this deadlock caused by physical infrastructure invesement. But it's holding us all back, until these companies figure out a way.
(Neither cable nor ADSL are available to me.)
High performance graphics pretty much require intimate contact between the program and the hardware. A lot of this stuff ends up having to run as root, or suffer performance loss.
Perhaps in the future, better designed hardware will make secure, high performance graphics feasible. It's really more a matter of marketing than technical issues.
But while we're busy treading down this path, don't forget how much NT 4 reliability was 'helped' by moving graphics into the kernel.
For a gaming machine, the security/performance implications are probably OK. But this bears careful watching, and an ongoing assessment of risks.
Since this is /. and we're all supposed to be concerned about software licenses, UCITA, and all of that, I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned what Good Omens had to say about them:
In essence... (this is from years-old memory)
took the software license, and sent it down to the demons in Hell who were responsible for writing the contracts on lost souls. He scrawled one word across it, "LEARN!"
Great book, I hope it can make it onto the screen even half as good, and with the wit intact.
Maybe my wife and I aren't over their shoulders 100% of the time, but we're in and out of the room where the computer is often enough to have a gist of what they're seeing. Besides, I run our web through a proxy, so we can see where the browser's been. As parents, that gives us to talk to our children about what they see, and have a values discussion when they see things we generally disapprove of. Note that that may not necessarily mean an outright ban, but that as their parents, our perspective needs to be included.
You don't need to encrypt the blocking list. You can make things worse by hashing it, instead. Distribute list of hashed site names. Then at the browser, use the same hash on a requested site and match it against the list.
There is no need to be able to decrypt the site list.
Unfortunately
Why can't we just start with some lower-tech things like implanted sugar sensors and insulin pumps. Or how about medication dispensors for bipolar disorder, etc. I know there is preliminary work being done with implanted insulin dispensors, and I guess somebody has to be thinking about way out there. Perhaps I wish that a bit more of that intellect would be directed toward making things like the implanted insulin real, sooner.
Greg Bear touches on this with the 'therapied' people in several of his novels, and casts it in a rather Orwellian way. But there is a fine line between fixing a few known chemical disorders and mass population-drugging. Perhaps we need to explore and define that line, publicly. Otherwise no doubt governments, multinationals, NGOs, and whatever other boogymen we dig up will do it for us.
We clearly don't want the educational system in charge of implanted ritalin.