It's more a testimony to how idiotic the "enforcement" side of school has become (6-year olds expelled for kissing, etc.).
Way back in about (*cough* *cough), my junior high had a PDP-11 (so I spit on the waffles of you NT youngsters). Was used for accounting, and admin. decided to teach a computer programming class...by the end of it half of us thirteen-year-olds knew more about the thing than anyone. Some of us were asked to help run it, some of us kept trying to crack it.
One of us punks starting collecting passwords with a login spoofer, etc, had a list of all accounting passwords, everything else really.
And when he was caught basically got a "don't do that again" lecture and was asked to show how he did it. Shades of Oliver Wendell Jones...
But of course, these days we have to start following the smart ones early...
...are some kludge pushed on us by the railroads as they spread across the world. To me, in today's world where "instant communications" makes timezones a major PITA, it seems like we should all function on a 24 hour clock, where it's 00:00 at the exact sime time, everywhere in the world.
Interesting that you should mention trains. When I took the trans-Siberian express some years ago (China-Moscow via Mongolia) the trains ran on Moscow time while crossing 8 timezones. So when we got on the train in the east, breakfast was served at 3pm, lunch at 8pm, dinner at 2am or so.
What we got over time as we went west was some of the worst continuing "jet" lag I've experienced. Not knowing when, how, if to be hungry...
We solved the problem by a simple discovery: Every hour is vodka hour.
I am in a field of science which relies heavily on historical data (specifically, atmospheric temperatures, NASA satellite imagry, etc.). This data has been collected on computers since the 1950s.
A great deal of the pre-analysis work I do (maybe 60-80% of the time of some projects) involves taking old data formats, and fragments of old code in Fortran, C, old Basic formats, etc, etc. and porting it to the latest thing. Many times, due to University purchases, this includes proprietary formats such as Visual Basic (sorry about that! Not my choice!).
Fortunately, Visual Basic source is still, at its heart, a set of text files. Now, let's say that it wasn't (no reason why it has to be!). Or even if it IS text...Let's say I write a set of algorithms for my work.
So, when the trends change, 10 years down the line, and Visual Basic joins the old language pile, and I join the old programmer pile and am no longer around... Can my successor, within the university/company that commissioned my work legally port my work without a Visual Basic license?
Or is reading old source and "decrypting" it into a new language illegal under the current law?
Word processing is the perfect example. The ability of many Office Suites to compete with the current dominant package (Microsoft Word) depends on their ability to at least import the text of Word documents (never mind proprietary fonts, etc.)
If it becomes illegal to open documents which I created without a specific license, all users will be forced onto a single format, effectively removing any and all competition.
A simple and effective analogy would be: if the company that patented the stapler also patented the staple remover, it would make it illegal to straighten the staple by hand! Clearly, this is a ridiculous abuse.
It can also mean accepting chaos as part of the cycle of life, but recognizing the need for order.
One of the tenents of Discordianism is that order and chaos should be balanced, but the current world errs on the side of order, so (to compensate) the practitioner should err on the side of chaos.
One of the tenants of Discordianism, on the other hand, is this guy Dave that we've been trying to evict from reality for a while. But just try to get a court order!
You can add four digits because the required "expiration date" becomes arbitrary, can't you? Puts it back up to 10^16, maybe that helps? It can also give a "series number" for recycling. Say, use expiration dates with years around 50 years in the future...
Does someone have a link to the zen video game that appeared here a while back... the one where two opponents faced each other hooked up to biofeedback, and the ball moved towards the one who was the "least relaxed."
That's the key, video games where you kill by relaxation...
Re:The sleestack come before us... Re:Great news
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
I have the coolest userid#.
Until you remember that 1+4 = 5 and -4+9 = 5 and 2+1+2 = 5...
The Law of Fives is never wrong.
Re:The sleestack come before us... Re:Great news
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
>>If you're a human and you hunt some game, you win, but if you kill just about everything, well...
>Then you had better be a good farmer.
I've always found it interesting that the U.S. definition of a national park is one with old-growth forest, while in England, a national park is most likely to be an old, farmed, hill covered with sheep...
There's no reason to call one less natural than the other, except for aesthetic reasons...
Mind you, aesthetically, I don't want to end up in a world of blue-green algae and yeast vats (aka Asimov's Caves of Steel or PKD's Do Androids D.O.E.S.). You know, that environmental degradation in "Androids" that didn't make it into Blade Runner (except for some nice visceral power-plant-images) -- the human desperate need for animal companionship...
It's interesting, the revulsion to the "almost human" thing... it's probably why I find some of the current computer-animated-human cartoons spookier than the more "cartoon like" ones...
Re:Fixing our Mistakes
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
That's not really that important... extinction has been going on for as long as death (read: as long as life). If you count all the bacteria that have gone extinct in the last 4 billion years, no problem reaching 99%. Here's one good perspective. Try searching "Extinction rate" on Google for more.
What matters is the difference in extinction rates. Are new species evolving faster than they are being driven extinct?
Of course, none of this really has a bearing on whether we should save endangered species or not. The best policy may be to nuke the world, increasing the extinction rate and the new mutation rate at the same time. Forget bringing back one extinct species...let's make a million new ones!
As others have said here, there's no natural reason to save species, clone, or not clone. The issue of saving species is one of self-preservation: we may need some of them one day. The issue of cloning is (to me) one of resources--are there better things to do with the laboratory space?
The sleestack come before us... Re:Great news
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, that's the really interesting thing about evolution, it's really a giant game of level-N mediocrity. And there's no way to know what the "right" level is to play on.
If you're an individual parasite or germ, you win by reproducing. But if you reproduce too much, you kill your host before your children can jump to a new one and... you lose. If you're an elephant and you eat some trees, you win, but if your herd eats all the trees before the drought... you lose. If you're a human and you hunt some game, you win, but if you kill just about everything, well...
These days, ecologists thinking beyond "charismatic megafauna" (like pandas and whales) haven't really agreed on how to prevent humans from losing, or even, what winning or losing entails.
As a stopgap, many people have come down on ecological diversity
with the general idea, if we don't know what we're going to need, let's keep as much as everything possible around.
Problem with cloning and sticking things in is: any time big changes happen (hurricanes, volcanoes, humans killing things, humans adding new species to an ecosystem) things tend to get simpler and less diverse for a while. If these happen regularly on a long term scale (like hurricanes) this lower diversity on one scale can lead to more diversity on a larger scale (there's that level-N thing again). But if not, things get more screwed.
So, the question is--- is the "natural Darwinistic act" of an intelligent species evolving and destroying things before going extinct something that happens every several millioin years? If so, no problem! First the sleestack, next us. I think the crows are next in line. They look like they're bored, overly smart, and waiting for something.
So the problem is the teachers, eh? That they tend to plunk kids down in front of useless "educational" software as a break from managing them?
So whose fault is that? Maybe the fault lies in the fact that anyone with the skill to teach computers prefers to make the $$$ in the world over giving anything back to teaching?
Back in the early 80s, my junior high school didn't have Apples or TRS-80s... a (very bright) bunch of administrators put out some money and bought a PDP-11/34 and a handful of terminals. We got a teacher who KNEW computers and for a few glorious years, programming was taught. And yes, 60-70% of the teaching time was spent AWAY from the computer, learning algorithms (well, mostly PRINT statements for the first year, but the thought was there). We learned. That is, until we discovered that account cracking was a good way to pick on our more muscular classmates;-)
Anyway, the program died by 1985, when:
1: The PDP-11 was replaced with Apples with "educational" software. 2: The computer teachers were hired by industry and the school couldn't pay anyone good (at computers) to replace them.
Two lessons here:
1: Is the purpose of computers to teach programming or to be used as a library tool? If the former, take away "educational" games and use text. If the latter, put them in the library.
2: If you want to complain about the quality of the teaching, ask: why aren't you doing it? If the answer is "because I make more money doing what I do" then the question is: which part of the system is broken?
This is a little off-topic, but it has to do with privacy and the recent DoS attacks.
If a group of folks decided to boycott a company, and got a handful of computers with high bandwidth on which they had legitimate accounts and permission from the owners and launched DoS attacks, could this be seen as valid protest?
In the sense that such an attack damages the company by blocking business (and doesn't cause any other, direct damage), it seems that this would be as resonable a form of protest as marching on public streets surrounding the buildings, blocking access, etc... the cyber equivalent of the recent WTO protests.
If such an event took place, what laws would be broken? Is it ethical? And should the individual blockaders be able to remain anoymous (assuming that the group as a whole identifies its aims).
Like hands in a sour glass, so are the lays of our dives.
You know, I've got a good friend who works as a developer on Word at MS, and has done since Word 6.0. (He's not the one who made the paperclip). He tells me that the mass of features isn't his fault. I believe him. I've been with him at (non-Microsoft) parties. When some random schmo finally worms out of him what is job is, the response is always "Wow, it would be cool if Word could do this!!
It's kind of like being a doctor at a party and having to listen to symptoms. Of course, the definition of this changes with each and every damn user. Everyone wants to use their software differently. Fine, what we REALLY need is a system that can be:
(1)customized by individuals or small groups, I mean REALLY customized, so one group can use a math module, one a magazine-module, etc. So I get a VERY stripped down basic module, and choose my add-ons. Sounds like emacs, TeX, right? But then there's
(2)the subsets must be COMPATIBLE with each other. That's the problem. Not MS, but that all of us subgroups have to be compatible with whatever the LORGs decide to use. Which really focuses on the lowest common denomimator. That's the creeping evil of the LORGLUDs ("Large Organization's Lowest User Denominator";-) )
So how do we get a system that does both? I think that serious thoughts should be given to current Office emulators: don't try to emulate Word, just be able to read Word files in the most stripped down way possible. Then, let each use DECIDE which functions are useful. EASILY.
Re:World Championship Play by Play
on
Brainball!
·
· Score: 1
"I am the serenest!" Bikram shouted to the estimated crowd of 20,000 yoga fans, vigorously pumping his fists. "No one is serener than Sri Dhananjai Bikram--I am the greatest monk of all time!"
Well, I do some pretty heavy-duty "scientific" processing and mathematical manipulation of huge data sets, and I use a combination of Perl and shell scrips on Linux (as a first filter), and Excel with VB (to do the much of the analysis). So if you accept that as a qualification, I have a comment. I wonder how many folks who quote the power of Unix have gotten into Excel? It is damn powerful, and damn fast (intuitive at getting results). I've tried the various (underpowered) Linux Office spreadsheets and they don't come close. I agree, Linux is VERY powerful. If I have a large batch job with many calculations, I'll write a Perl routine. But the ease of the Excel Pivot Table, compared to using the "power" and needing to write a search routine to summarize? No comparison. My ideal environment at the moment is a Windows box on my desk, and a Linux box in the corner. I have a couple term emulators (vi or emacs) to write my perl scripts, generate my data, then (here's the rub) bring it over and look at the data in Excel. It works wonderfully for me (at the price of two machines). Before I did this work, I used Linux quite a bit, so I am very familiar with the tools. But, even KNOWING all the ins and outs, and not particularly WANTING to learn anything outside of Linux, Excel coming along really changed the way I worked. To me, MS as a WHOLE isn't evil, but windows is. This battle should be on making Linux such a pervasive environment that MS CAN'T AFFORD NOT TO release an Office for Linux. Do you think that's better than digging for non-working solutions in the name of OS purity? I'm pleased to hear that others have had my experiences with Excel...and let me reiterate...I haven't found a good Linux tool that matches, even with a lot of work on Perl and other things.
Re:My Battle with Infinite Information
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 1
There's a second point here. Information is not a single species, it is an entire ecology of species.
We, as regulons (discarding information as mentioned above) are the limited habitat in an environment. But we aren't acting alone, without feedback.
As the ideas compete, expect to see whole schools of thought, mutually dependent, come together. Expect these schools of thought to be self-regulating: If you trust CNN, you take on its news (and not the news of others). But this trust is built out of the information itself.
Right now, we're still in the "rapid growth" phase of this particular ecosystem (r-selected phase). Look at any good textbook on ecological succession, and you'll see what to expect... slow growth, sudden decay/destruction, and rapid growth again.
Very much like our recent stock market lessons...just because growth is exponential for a few years, don't expect it to go on forever without reaching some kind of carrying capacity. Just because you've only seen one part of the cycle, don't think that the cycle doesn't exist (See S.J. Gould's Time's Arrow/Time's Cycle, for example).
That being said, remember that (if we see our heads and eyes as habitat), this habitat, the human population, is still growing exponentially after thousands of years. That's the real trend to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more a testimony to how idiotic the "enforcement" side of school has become (6-year olds expelled for kissing, etc.).
Way back in about (*cough* *cough), my junior high had a PDP-11 (so I spit on the waffles of you NT youngsters). Was used for accounting, and admin. decided to teach a computer programming class...by the end of it half of us thirteen-year-olds knew more about the thing than anyone. Some of us were asked to help run it, some of us kept trying to crack it.
One of us punks starting collecting passwords with a login spoofer, etc, had a list of all accounting passwords, everything else really.
And when he was caught basically got a "don't do that again" lecture and was asked to show how he did it. Shades of Oliver Wendell Jones...
But of course, these days we have to start following the smart ones early...
Interesting that you should mention trains. When I took the trans-Siberian express some years ago (China-Moscow via Mongolia) the trains ran on Moscow time while crossing 8 timezones. So when we got on the train in the east, breakfast was served at 3pm, lunch at 8pm, dinner at 2am or so.
What we got over time as we went west was some of the worst continuing "jet" lag I've experienced. Not knowing when, how, if to be hungry...
We solved the problem by a simple discovery: Every hour is vodka hour.
I am in a field of science which relies heavily on historical data (specifically, atmospheric temperatures, NASA satellite imagry, etc.). This data has been collected on computers since the 1950s.
A great deal of the pre-analysis work I do (maybe 60-80% of the time of some projects) involves taking old data formats, and fragments of old code in Fortran, C, old Basic formats, etc, etc. and porting it to the latest thing. Many times, due to University purchases, this includes proprietary formats such as Visual Basic (sorry about that! Not my choice!).
Fortunately, Visual Basic source is still, at its heart, a set of text files. Now, let's say that it wasn't (no reason why it has to be!). Or even if it IS text...Let's say I write a set of algorithms for my work.
So, when the trends change, 10 years down the line, and Visual Basic joins the old language pile, and I join the old programmer pile and am no longer around... Can my successor, within the university/company that commissioned my work legally port my work without a Visual Basic license?
Or is reading old source and "decrypting" it into a new language illegal under the current law?
Word processing is the perfect example. The ability of many Office Suites to compete with the current dominant package (Microsoft Word) depends on their ability to at least import the text of Word documents (never mind proprietary fonts, etc.)
If it becomes illegal to open documents which I created without a specific license, all users will be forced onto a single format, effectively removing any and all competition.
A simple and effective analogy would be: if the company that patented the stapler also patented the staple remover, it would make it illegal to straighten the staple by hand! Clearly, this is a ridiculous abuse.
One of the tenents of Discordianism is that order and chaos should be balanced, but the current world errs on the side of order, so (to compensate) the practitioner should err on the side of chaos.
One of the tenants of Discordianism, on the other hand, is this guy Dave that we've been trying to evict from reality for a while. But just try to get a court order!
You can add four digits because the required "expiration date" becomes arbitrary, can't you? Puts it back up to 10^16, maybe that helps? It can also give a "series number" for recycling. Say, use expiration dates with years around 50 years in the future...
Does someone have a link to the zen video game that appeared here a while back... the one where two opponents faced each other hooked up to biofeedback, and the ball moved towards the one who was the "least relaxed." That's the key, video games where you kill by relaxation...
I have the coolest userid#.
Until you remember that 1+4 = 5 and -4+9 = 5 and 2+1+2 = 5...
The Law of Fives is never wrong.
>Then you had better be a good farmer.
I've always found it interesting that the U.S. definition of a national park is one with old-growth forest, while in England, a national park is most likely to be an old, farmed, hill covered with sheep...
There's no reason to call one less natural than the other, except for aesthetic reasons...
Mind you, aesthetically, I don't want to end up in a world of blue-green algae and yeast vats (aka Asimov's Caves of Steel or PKD's Do Androids D.O.E.S.). You know, that environmental degradation in "Androids" that didn't make it into Blade Runner (except for some nice visceral power-plant-images) -- the human desperate need for animal companionship...
It's interesting, the revulsion to the "almost human" thing... it's probably why I find some of the current computer-animated-human cartoons spookier than the more "cartoon like" ones...
What matters is the difference in extinction rates. Are new species evolving faster than they are being driven extinct?
Of course, none of this really has a bearing on whether we should save endangered species or not. The best policy may be to nuke the world, increasing the extinction rate and the new mutation rate at the same time. Forget bringing back one extinct species...let's make a million new ones!
As others have said here, there's no natural reason to save species, clone, or not clone. The issue of saving species is one of self-preservation: we may need some of them one day. The issue of cloning is (to me) one of resources--are there better things to do with the laboratory space?
Yeah, that's the really interesting thing about evolution, it's really a giant game of level-N mediocrity. And there's no way to know what the "right" level is to play on.
If you're an individual parasite or germ, you win by reproducing. But if you reproduce too much, you kill your host before your children can jump to a new one and... you lose. If you're an elephant and you eat some trees, you win, but if your herd eats all the trees before the drought... you lose. If you're a human and you hunt some game, you win, but if you kill just about everything, well...
These days, ecologists thinking beyond "charismatic megafauna" (like pandas and whales) haven't really agreed on how to prevent humans from losing, or even, what winning or losing entails.
As a stopgap, many people have come down on ecological diversity with the general idea, if we don't know what we're going to need, let's keep as much as everything possible around.
Problem with cloning and sticking things in is: any time big changes happen (hurricanes, volcanoes, humans killing things, humans adding new species to an ecosystem) things tend to get simpler and less diverse for a while. If these happen regularly on a long term scale (like hurricanes) this lower diversity on one scale can lead to more diversity on a larger scale (there's that level-N thing again). But if not, things get more screwed.
So, the question is--- is the "natural Darwinistic act" of an intelligent species evolving and destroying things before going extinct something that happens every several millioin years? If so, no problem! First the sleestack, next us. I think the crows are next in line. They look like they're bored, overly smart, and waiting for something.
So the problem is the teachers, eh? That they tend to plunk kids down in front of useless "educational" software as a break from managing them?
;-)
So whose fault is that? Maybe the fault lies in the fact that anyone with the skill to teach computers prefers to make the $$$ in the world over giving anything back to teaching?
Back in the early 80s, my junior high school didn't have Apples or TRS-80s... a (very bright) bunch of administrators put out some money and bought a PDP-11/34 and a handful of terminals. We got a teacher who KNEW computers and for a few glorious years, programming was taught. And yes, 60-70% of the teaching time was spent AWAY from the computer, learning algorithms (well, mostly PRINT statements for the first year, but the thought was there). We learned. That is, until we discovered that account cracking was a good way to pick on our more muscular classmates
Anyway, the program died by 1985, when:
1: The PDP-11 was replaced with Apples with "educational" software.
2: The computer teachers were hired by industry and the school couldn't pay anyone good (at computers) to replace them.
Two lessons here:
1: Is the purpose of computers to teach programming or to be used as a library tool? If the former, take away "educational" games and use text. If the latter, put them in the library.
2: If you want to complain about the quality of the teaching, ask: why aren't you doing it? If the answer is "because I make more money doing what I do" then the question is: which part of the system is broken?
This is a little off-topic, but it has to do with privacy and the recent DoS attacks.
If a group of folks decided to boycott a company, and got a handful of computers with high bandwidth on which they had legitimate accounts and permission from the owners and launched DoS attacks, could this be seen as valid protest?
In the sense that such an attack damages the company by blocking business (and doesn't cause any other, direct damage), it seems that this would be as resonable a form of protest as marching on public streets surrounding the buildings, blocking access, etc... the cyber equivalent of the recent WTO protests.
If such an event took place, what laws would be broken? Is it ethical? And should the individual blockaders be able to remain anoymous (assuming that the group as a whole identifies its aims).
Like hands in a sour glass, so are the lays of our dives.
You know, I've got a good friend who works as a developer on Word at MS, and has done since Word 6.0. (He's not the one who made the paperclip). He tells me that the mass of features isn't his fault. I believe him. I've been with him at (non-Microsoft) parties. When some random schmo finally worms out of him what is job is, the response is always "Wow, it would be cool if Word could do this!!
It's kind of like being a doctor at a party and having to listen to symptoms. Of course, the definition of this changes with each and every damn user. Everyone wants to use their software differently. Fine, what we REALLY need is a system that can be:
(1)customized by individuals or small groups, I mean REALLY customized, so one group can use a math module, one a magazine-module, etc. So I get a VERY stripped down basic module, and choose my add-ons. Sounds like emacs, TeX, right? But then there's
(2)the subsets must be COMPATIBLE with each other. That's the problem. Not MS, but that all of us subgroups have to be compatible with whatever the LORGs decide to use. Which really focuses on the lowest common denomimator. That's the creeping evil of the LORGLUDs ("Large Organization's Lowest User Denominator" ;-) )
So how do we get a system that does both? I think that serious thoughts should be given to current Office emulators: don't try to emulate Word, just be able to read Word files in the most stripped down way possible. Then, let each use DECIDE which functions are useful. EASILY.
The obvious followup is Monk Gloats Over Yoga Championship from The Onion Archives...
"I am the serenest!" Bikram shouted to the estimated crowd of 20,000 yoga fans, vigorously pumping his fists. "No one is serener than Sri Dhananjai Bikram--I am the greatest monk of all time!"
Well, I do some pretty heavy-duty "scientific" processing and mathematical manipulation of huge data sets, and I use a combination of Perl and shell scrips on Linux (as a first filter), and Excel with VB (to do the much of the analysis). So if you accept that as a qualification, I have a comment. I wonder how many folks who quote the power of Unix have gotten into Excel? It is damn powerful, and damn fast (intuitive at getting results). I've tried the various (underpowered) Linux Office spreadsheets and they don't come close. I agree, Linux is VERY powerful. If I have a large batch job with many calculations, I'll write a Perl routine. But the ease of the Excel Pivot Table, compared to using the "power" and needing to write a search routine to summarize? No comparison. My ideal environment at the moment is a Windows box on my desk, and a Linux box in the corner. I have a couple term emulators (vi or emacs) to write my perl scripts, generate my data, then (here's the rub) bring it over and look at the data in Excel. It works wonderfully for me (at the price of two machines). Before I did this work, I used Linux quite a bit, so I am very familiar with the tools. But, even KNOWING all the ins and outs, and not particularly WANTING to learn anything outside of Linux, Excel coming along really changed the way I worked. To me, MS as a WHOLE isn't evil, but windows is. This battle should be on making Linux such a pervasive environment that MS CAN'T AFFORD NOT TO release an Office for Linux. Do you think that's better than digging for non-working solutions in the name of OS purity? I'm pleased to hear that others have had my experiences with Excel...and let me reiterate...I haven't found a good Linux tool that matches, even with a lot of work on Perl and other things.
Very much like our recent stock market lessons...just because growth is exponential for a few years, don't expect it to go on forever without reaching some kind of carrying capacity. Just because you've only seen one part of the cycle, don't think that the cycle doesn't exist (See S.J. Gould's Time's Arrow/Time's Cycle, for example).
That being said, remember that (if we see our heads and eyes as habitat), this habitat, the human population, is still growing exponentially after thousands of years. That's the real trend to watch.