Since there's an island of relative sanity here, here I'll respond. As you have implied and others have stated, the surveillance would be kept funded in preference to many other things we may consider more valuable. But there's another thing...
Imagine the aftermath of the next successful terrorist event. The first question to be asked will be, "Why didn't the government stop this?" The answer will carry the next question (demand), "Because we didn't have enough law enforcement capabilities, give us more!" What's missing is reason. I can grant that some level of surveillance, wiretaps, etc is necessary in order to mitigate security threats, but I believe that wholesale surveillance is ineffective in addition to being just plain wrong. Unfortunately we only appear to hear from 2 camps, the Omnipresent Camp (see and hear everything) and the No Surveillance Camp. No (audible) public voices are trying to chart the course to find effective security, acceptable risk, and preserving our privacy and freedom. It's a really delicate balancing act, but in the public forum I don't even think we're trying to find a sweet spot.
But that was really my point. If the goal is to create wealth, anything that "disrupts" the flow of money between the wealth creators and the investors is counter-productive. Any "inefficiency" in that flow impairs the creation of wealth.
Investment doesn't, in and of itself, create wealth. Investment is putting money in the hands of people who CAN create wealth, but don't have enough money to do so on their own. The idea is that the investers should be rewarded for taking the financial gamble, and the people they invested in should be rewarded for having created something valuable.
High Frequency Trading screws them both. High Frequency Trading is anathema to the very concept of investment - and the stock market. We'd all be better off if the HFT people simply went to the races, instead.
You must have a pretty bad connection. My remote X sessions on my LAN are just fine, especially for simple non-graphically-intensive stuff like clicking "File". At work I routinely run Cadence over a network connection, without problems or noticable lags. Even through the VPN over the WAN it's a bit sluggish, but usable. You must have a problem somewhere.
I know who it's intended for, and I agree. I'm more worried about the unintended consequences - like crowding out some of the things that are great about traditional X - like network transparency.
That's a nifty description - transparency. VNC can let you do the work, but it just isn't transparent, at all.
I understand that Wayland is necessarily local, but I strongly suspect that if you were willing to give up performance - and drop back to something more like X - it could do remote, as well. The big thing is the unified access. I know you don't want to run a first-person shooter over the network. Heck, I don't even want to run VLSI CAD tools over the network - but sometimes I have to, and when you need it, you need it.
If the most popular distribution goes local-only, I fear the coming round of popular never-transparent applications running on it. People talk about "too many distributions", which is mostly a red herring, because there is so much in common. But two non-interoperable display technologies is true balkanization - a truly dangerous split.
You mean like the fact that I need to use the same Cadence you're talking about as part of my day job, as well as a whole host of other X-based VLSI CAD applications. Every now and then I need to work from home, and X lets me do that. To be sure, sometimes I use VNC, but sometimes I run the X tools native on my home system, too. Different tasks call for different approaches.
Leaving work out of it, sometimes I just like to run some GUI tools on my server, with the display exported back to my desktop. My server doesn't even have an X server installed.
I strongly suspect that the people who pooh-pooh the networking capabilities of X never got used to using them.
So this may be the biggest reason to root for Kurzweil and his Singularity.
The only reason we can imagine the technology required for "bodily" interstellar travel is because of our fiction. Faced with the real task of doing it, we don't even know where to start with current or near-in technology. The only real start we could make is - start developing more technology with more realistic near-in goals.
Post-Singularity the whole issue is much different. Pack a few Personalities (to keep each other company at the destination) into our shiny new post-Singularity computing system, slow or completely queisce the whole thing so they don't go batty during the trip, and shoot! We've had the necessary technology for THIS kind of interstellar travel since Voyager or maybe even earlier, and we could do much, much better today.
There's a surplus of workers out there. Simply make handling information overload another qualification for the job. People who can otherwise do excellent work, but can't handle a deluge of irrelevant facts can just find a job picking apples at $15/barrel.
I write that with tongue-in-cheek, some sarcasm, and some irony, but unfortunately it may well be THE solution for some employers. Aside from the waste of good workers, part of management's responsibility is setting up a productive working environment. With this solution they may well be casting off workers better able to handle the job desired in favor of workers better able to wade an ocean of irrelevant distractions. The proper working environment would help shield workers from those distractions, allowing better work to be done.
I think I've seen this kind of thing before... squares and octagons instead of circles and elipses. That's right, it was in Superman comics I read as a kid. We live in the Bizarro Galaxy.
Grew up in the area, had friends that (later) went to KSU, was pre-HS at the time.
My father had a friend at work who had a daughter going to KSU. A few days before this got so bad, she called her dad, telling about what she heard from the apartment above. (thin walls, thin floors, cheap college rental) She heard the students there calling all over the US, lining up people to bring in to help with the protest. She was scared - her father picked her up and brought her home.
I was all ready to make some post about NAMBLA being a right-wing boogieman. But first I decided to check Snopes and Wikipedia. Sometimes I guess truth really is stranger than fiction - including conspiracy theories.
It wasn't about the ships getting overtaken, boarded, etc. In Clarke's book I had thought it was about a later, faster ship colonizing a planet, and then an earlier ship visiting that same planet on its way past. Apparently slightly defective memory.
In the Hitchhiker's and Gentle Voices cases, the whole purpose was to get rid of your "surplus popluation", perhaps a little less cynically than in "The Marching Morons."
For the most part, the German scientists were stonewalling their own government, taking their own sweet time developing the superweapon - fast enough to avoid some sort of purge, but as slow as they could manage. Nor was heavy water a particularly good direction. From what I've heard, the Germans also had an intercontinentaly nuclear bomber under development, except it was designed around a bomb 10 times the weight of ours.
After V.E. day the Brits had the German scientists on ice, and kept them under observation as they let them see the Hiroshima/Nagasaki coverage. It only took a few hours for them to figure out the critical bits from "general coverage." They were sandbagging in Germany.
It's been a few decades - I read it when it first came out, so I can go with your version. I'll have to check if I still have the book.
The one time Clarke had any sort of FTL was in 2001: ASO, and he repudiated that (to bad effect, IMHO) in 3001: TFO.
Re:More details needed in story summary
on
Stuxnet Worms On
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· Score: 1
Somehow this reminds me of grey-goo or tailored virus attacks out of science fiction - and just as well targeted. After all, the "story" happens once things go awry, not while they're working as expected.
Assuming we can achieve a working Turing image, I kind of wonder how much time will be spent in virtual worlds and how much time will be spent in the real world, and for the latter how much human-mimic and how much some other sensory experience.
Your scenario is described in "Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C Clarke. In that book, the root of the solar neutrino problem was that the Sun was burning out. Light from the core takes 1000 years to get to the surface, but neutrinos get out practically immediately. The information that the hydrogen-burning life of the Sun was over hadn't made it to the surface yet. So we figured it out, and realized that we had some 900 years (Evidently the solar neutrino problem had barely started when we discovered it.) to find a new home. Interstellar travel became a top priority very quickly. First ships were slower, later ships were faster. The story takes place when an earlier ship stops over at a planet which had already been colonized by a later ship.
Or take "Hitchhiker's Guide" by Douglas Adams or "Those Gentle Voices" by George Alec Effinger. Put all of your non-productive people on the first slow ships. Then those that are left can work faster/better on newer, faster ships. In a twist, safe flight for the first slow ships is optional, as are intentional crashes.
Well before we have a fraction of the technology necessary to ship our "ugly bags of mostly water" to another star, we'll likely have hit Kurzweil's Singularity, and most notably the ability to extract and run a Turing image. Even if the computer necessary to run that Turing image is the size of a human body, its "life support" will be electricity and temperature control, the hardware can be slowed down during the boring parts of the journey, it can likely stand higher accelerations than bio-bodies, etc, etc, etc. All told, interstellar exploration by Turing images may well be far more likely than bio-bodies. It wouldn't surprise me that not long after we succeed at extracting and running a Turing image, we'll have interstellar capability for those images, even though we'll be a long way from doing so for bio-bodies.
Of course whether we first do that or render Earth unfit for advanced civilization is anyone's guess. (Environmental collapse rendering the planet nearly uninhabitable for millennia is not uncommon in geological time. The Earth has always recovered - in a few thousand to a few million years.)
While conservatives may dislike "Net Neutrality" for the reasons you state, I believe they have another reason - an undying faith in "the free market and the ability of players in the free market to come to an optimal solution for all." In other words, "Free market players need to have the maximum flexibility to arrive at market solutions which both maximize profits and deliver optimal solutions." Note that I keep using quotation marks in the prior sentence, and in this case it's not a misuse of "quotation marks," rather it's expressing a position that sounds really neat, but doesn't work that well in practice.
First off, the "free market" really isn't so free, it's loaded with large players. There have been studies indicating that when 4 or 5 major players have captured something like 80% of the market, it no longer acts like a "free market." According to those studies, even without overt collusion, a market dominated by a few large players starts to act as if there is price-fixing and market restriction happing, just by normal corporate behavior.
Second, the "free market" never developed anything like the internet, and they had over a decade of failure at it. CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, The Source, etc are all ashes of the market failure. The only reason AOL has anything like survived is because of the proprietary players it best embraced the internet. The normal corporate behavior these days is to "own the pie" rather than work with others to create a much bigger pie. Oddly enough, they continue to do that even when the cooperative pie is so much bigger that their share is bigger than their full ownership of a private pie.
Finally, I don't think conservatives understand that sometimes we do better if our actions are limited. They have complete distrust of the limiting agency - ie, the government, and do understand that sometimes their own decisions can be bad, but fail to see that sometimes, the "free market" will fail to correct them, and they fail to appreciate the damage done, while waiting for the marketplace to correct things.
I remember hearing about some of the problems with this, and another. A turbine also happens to be wonderful gyroscope, so Chrysler's Turbine Car (I remember seeing the TV commercials as a kid.) had an embedded gyroscope which interfered somewhat with steering. Obviously arranging the axis of the turbine correctly can take care of this, but might make it more difficult to extract power from the engine. When I heard that this new car had 2 turbines, especially after reading about the difficulty of scaling turbines downward, I thought "counter-rotating" to mitigate the gyroscopic effects.
I also have an old high-school friend that has the gearbox problem. He travels to tractor-pull competitions with his jet-powered tractor. Last I talked to him, his #1 maintenance item was the gearbox. No matter what you did, high power plus high RPMs just makes for a tough problem. I also saw the engine room of the battleship Massachusetts at Fall River, Ma. It was steam turbine powered, and the gearbox was several times the size of the turbine.
Using the turbine to drive a generator instead of trying to directly extract mechanical power out of it solves a lot of problems. But from some other reading, I get the impression that they still gear the turbines down, preferring to generate electricity at about 1800 rpm instead of the direct 30-40 krpm. Makes me wonder about the difficulties of high-rpm electrical generation, and how tough that would be to solve.
How appropriate, because this code is BSD licensed. Netcraft-dead encryption code on a Netcraft-dead platform - kind of like the advertising blurb of the Betamax HD-DVD converter I've got clipped to my door.
Slashdot Mirror
Since there's an island of relative sanity here, here I'll respond. As you have implied and others have stated, the surveillance would be kept funded in preference to many other things we may consider more valuable. But there's another thing...
Imagine the aftermath of the next successful terrorist event. The first question to be asked will be, "Why didn't the government stop this?" The answer will carry the next question (demand), "Because we didn't have enough law enforcement capabilities, give us more!" What's missing is reason. I can grant that some level of surveillance, wiretaps, etc is necessary in order to mitigate security threats, but I believe that wholesale surveillance is ineffective in addition to being just plain wrong. Unfortunately we only appear to hear from 2 camps, the Omnipresent Camp (see and hear everything) and the No Surveillance Camp. No (audible) public voices are trying to chart the course to find effective security, acceptable risk, and preserving our privacy and freedom. It's a really delicate balancing act, but in the public forum I don't even think we're trying to find a sweet spot.
But that was really my point. If the goal is to create wealth, anything that "disrupts" the flow of money between the wealth creators and the investors is counter-productive. Any "inefficiency" in that flow impairs the creation of wealth.
How about this as a backup...
Investment doesn't, in and of itself, create wealth. Investment is putting money in the hands of people who CAN create wealth, but don't have enough money to do so on their own. The idea is that the investers should be rewarded for taking the financial gamble, and the people they invested in should be rewarded for having created something valuable.
High Frequency Trading screws them both.
High Frequency Trading is anathema to the very concept of investment - and the stock market.
We'd all be better off if the HFT people simply went to the races, instead.
You must have a pretty bad connection. My remote X sessions on my LAN are just fine, especially for simple non-graphically-intensive stuff like clicking "File". At work I routinely run Cadence over a network connection, without problems or noticable lags. Even through the VPN over the WAN it's a bit sluggish, but usable. You must have a problem somewhere.
I know who it's intended for, and I agree. I'm more worried about the unintended consequences - like crowding out some of the things that are great about traditional X - like network transparency.
That's a nifty description - transparency. VNC can let you do the work, but it just isn't transparent, at all.
I understand that Wayland is necessarily local, but I strongly suspect that if you were willing to give up performance - and drop back to something more like X - it could do remote, as well. The big thing is the unified access. I know you don't want to run a first-person shooter over the network. Heck, I don't even want to run VLSI CAD tools over the network - but sometimes I have to, and when you need it, you need it.
If the most popular distribution goes local-only, I fear the coming round of popular never-transparent applications running on it. People talk about "too many distributions", which is mostly a red herring, because there is so much in common. But two non-interoperable display technologies is true balkanization - a truly dangerous split.
You mean like the fact that I need to use the same Cadence you're talking about as part of my day job, as well as a whole host of other X-based VLSI CAD applications. Every now and then I need to work from home, and X lets me do that. To be sure, sometimes I use VNC, but sometimes I run the X tools native on my home system, too. Different tasks call for different approaches.
Leaving work out of it, sometimes I just like to run some GUI tools on my server, with the display exported back to my desktop. My server doesn't even have an X server installed.
I strongly suspect that the people who pooh-pooh the networking capabilities of X never got used to using them.
It's easier to wax moralistic about cannabis and gays.
Plus people are already making money on those things that are harmful and already legal.
So this may be the biggest reason to root for Kurzweil and his Singularity.
The only reason we can imagine the technology required for "bodily" interstellar travel is because of our fiction. Faced with the real task of doing it, we don't even know where to start with current or near-in technology. The only real start we could make is - start developing more technology with more realistic near-in goals.
Post-Singularity the whole issue is much different. Pack a few Personalities (to keep each other company at the destination) into our shiny new post-Singularity computing system, slow or completely queisce the whole thing so they don't go batty during the trip, and shoot! We've had the necessary technology for THIS kind of interstellar travel since Voyager or maybe even earlier, and we could do much, much better today.
Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here.
There's a surplus of workers out there. Simply make handling information overload another qualification for the job. People who can otherwise do excellent work, but can't handle a deluge of irrelevant facts can just find a job picking apples at $15/barrel.
I write that with tongue-in-cheek, some sarcasm, and some irony, but unfortunately it may well be THE solution for some employers. Aside from the waste of good workers, part of management's responsibility is setting up a productive working environment. With this solution they may well be casting off workers better able to handle the job desired in favor of workers better able to wade an ocean of irrelevant distractions. The proper working environment would help shield workers from those distractions, allowing better work to be done.
I think I've seen this kind of thing before... squares and octagons instead of circles and elipses. That's right, it was in Superman comics I read as a kid. We live in the Bizarro Galaxy.
Grew up in the area, had friends that (later) went to KSU, was pre-HS at the time.
My father had a friend at work who had a daughter going to KSU. A few days before this got so bad, she called her dad, telling about what she heard from the apartment above. (thin walls, thin floors, cheap college rental) She heard the students there calling all over the US, lining up people to bring in to help with the protest. She was scared - her father picked her up and brought her home.
I was all ready to make some post about NAMBLA being a right-wing boogieman. But first I decided to check Snopes and Wikipedia. Sometimes I guess truth really is stranger than fiction - including conspiracy theories.
It wasn't about the ships getting overtaken, boarded, etc. In Clarke's book I had thought it was about a later, faster ship colonizing a planet, and then an earlier ship visiting that same planet on its way past. Apparently slightly defective memory.
In the Hitchhiker's and Gentle Voices cases, the whole purpose was to get rid of your "surplus popluation", perhaps a little less cynically than in "The Marching Morons."
That was my point.
For the most part, the German scientists were stonewalling their own government, taking their own sweet time developing the superweapon - fast enough to avoid some sort of purge, but as slow as they could manage. Nor was heavy water a particularly good direction. From what I've heard, the Germans also had an intercontinentaly nuclear bomber under development, except it was designed around a bomb 10 times the weight of ours.
After V.E. day the Brits had the German scientists on ice, and kept them under observation as they let them see the Hiroshima/Nagasaki coverage. It only took a few hours for them to figure out the critical bits from "general coverage." They were sandbagging in Germany.
It's been a few decades - I read it when it first came out, so I can go with your version. I'll have to check if I still have the book.
The one time Clarke had any sort of FTL was in 2001: ASO, and he repudiated that (to bad effect, IMHO) in 3001: TFO.
Somehow this reminds me of grey-goo or tailored virus attacks out of science fiction - and just as well targeted. After all, the "story" happens once things go awry, not while they're working as expected.
Assuming we can achieve a working Turing image, I kind of wonder how much time will be spent in virtual worlds and how much time will be spent in the real world, and for the latter how much human-mimic and how much some other sensory experience.
As long as you're into science fiction...
Your scenario is described in "Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C Clarke. In that book, the root of the solar neutrino problem was that the Sun was burning out. Light from the core takes 1000 years to get to the surface, but neutrinos get out practically immediately. The information that the hydrogen-burning life of the Sun was over hadn't made it to the surface yet. So we figured it out, and realized that we had some 900 years (Evidently the solar neutrino problem had barely started when we discovered it.) to find a new home. Interstellar travel became a top priority very quickly. First ships were slower, later ships were faster. The story takes place when an earlier ship stops over at a planet which had already been colonized by a later ship.
Or take "Hitchhiker's Guide" by Douglas Adams or "Those Gentle Voices" by George Alec Effinger. Put all of your non-productive people on the first slow ships. Then those that are left can work faster/better on newer, faster ships. In a twist, safe flight for the first slow ships is optional, as are intentional crashes.
Then there's the other way...
Well before we have a fraction of the technology necessary to ship our "ugly bags of mostly water" to another star, we'll likely have hit Kurzweil's Singularity, and most notably the ability to extract and run a Turing image. Even if the computer necessary to run that Turing image is the size of a human body, its "life support" will be electricity and temperature control, the hardware can be slowed down during the boring parts of the journey, it can likely stand higher accelerations than bio-bodies, etc, etc, etc. All told, interstellar exploration by Turing images may well be far more likely than bio-bodies. It wouldn't surprise me that not long after we succeed at extracting and running a Turing image, we'll have interstellar capability for those images, even though we'll be a long way from doing so for bio-bodies.
Of course whether we first do that or render Earth unfit for advanced civilization is anyone's guess. (Environmental collapse rendering the planet nearly uninhabitable for millennia is not uncommon in geological time. The Earth has always recovered - in a few thousand to a few million years.)
Build space stations and put them in "cycler orbits." (Was it Buzz Aldrin who coined the term "cycler orbit" or did he merely popularize id?)
While conservatives may dislike "Net Neutrality" for the reasons you state, I believe they have another reason - an undying faith in "the free market and the ability of players in the free market to come to an optimal solution for all." In other words, "Free market players need to have the maximum flexibility to arrive at market solutions which both maximize profits and deliver optimal solutions." Note that I keep using quotation marks in the prior sentence, and in this case it's not a misuse of "quotation marks," rather it's expressing a position that sounds really neat, but doesn't work that well in practice.
First off, the "free market" really isn't so free, it's loaded with large players. There have been studies indicating that when 4 or 5 major players have captured something like 80% of the market, it no longer acts like a "free market." According to those studies, even without overt collusion, a market dominated by a few large players starts to act as if there is price-fixing and market restriction happing, just by normal corporate behavior.
Second, the "free market" never developed anything like the internet, and they had over a decade of failure at it. CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, The Source, etc are all ashes of the market failure. The only reason AOL has anything like survived is because of the proprietary players it best embraced the internet. The normal corporate behavior these days is to "own the pie" rather than work with others to create a much bigger pie. Oddly enough, they continue to do that even when the cooperative pie is so much bigger that their share is bigger than their full ownership of a private pie.
Finally, I don't think conservatives understand that sometimes we do better if our actions are limited. They have complete distrust of the limiting agency - ie, the government, and do understand that sometimes their own decisions can be bad, but fail to see that sometimes, the "free market" will fail to correct them, and they fail to appreciate the damage done, while waiting for the marketplace to correct things.
I remember hearing about some of the problems with this, and another. A turbine also happens to be wonderful gyroscope, so Chrysler's Turbine Car (I remember seeing the TV commercials as a kid.) had an embedded gyroscope which interfered somewhat with steering. Obviously arranging the axis of the turbine correctly can take care of this, but might make it more difficult to extract power from the engine. When I heard that this new car had 2 turbines, especially after reading about the difficulty of scaling turbines downward, I thought "counter-rotating" to mitigate the gyroscopic effects.
I also have an old high-school friend that has the gearbox problem. He travels to tractor-pull competitions with his jet-powered tractor. Last I talked to him, his #1 maintenance item was the gearbox. No matter what you did, high power plus high RPMs just makes for a tough problem. I also saw the engine room of the battleship Massachusetts at Fall River, Ma. It was steam turbine powered, and the gearbox was several times the size of the turbine.
Using the turbine to drive a generator instead of trying to directly extract mechanical power out of it solves a lot of problems. But from some other reading, I get the impression that they still gear the turbines down, preferring to generate electricity at about 1800 rpm instead of the direct 30-40 krpm. Makes me wonder about the difficulties of high-rpm electrical generation, and how tough that would be to solve.
How appropriate, because this code is BSD licensed. Netcraft-dead encryption code on a Netcraft-dead platform - kind of like the advertising blurb of the Betamax HD-DVD converter I've got clipped to my door.