IIUC, many of the TOR routers are operated by the US government, and the system is not inherently secure against changes of code in the machines that are running it. Why does this surprise you?
No, they are echoes of the ideas on which the nation was based. For a closer take of those ideas read the Declaration of Independence...which also has no legal force.
OTOH, it's worthwhile remembering that at the time the country was being set up, only about 1/3 of the population adhered to those ideals even to the extent of saying they agreed. In many areas the Tories were an absolute majority. And afterwards... Thomas Paine died in a French Jail and President Jefferson declined to write a letter asking for his pardon.
History isn't as simple as they make it sound in school books. And current events aren't as simple as they make them sound in newspapers.
All that said, the US president today has more effective control over the US citizenry than the British king did over British citizens in the 1700's. His legal control is less, but his effective control is greater. And even the "liberal" politicians are continually trying to increase it.
While it is in principle orthogonal, it's not in practice. In practice all GMO products are patented. I'm not really opposed to, e.g., golden rice because of the patent license terms. But it *is* patented, and the patent terms are subject to being changed, so I'm still opposed to it...just not very. From a cost/benefit perspective golden rice is a big plus, but not enough for me to say the principle is wrong.
With non-genetically modified plants there are almost always reasonable replacements. The patents only cover a small portion, and I'm not *much* more opposed to them than I am to hybrids (which I also don't like).
Patents, however, allow legal monopoly control, and that's very dangerous to allow over something essential, like the food supply. And since all GMO plants are patented, that means I'm opposed to all GMO plants even without looking further into whether there are other reasons to oppose them.
Now if you were to assert that it is not intrinsic that GMO plants be patented, I would agree. But the agreement is over a vacuous case. Given the legal system that we have, it is practically guaranteed that any GMO plant will be patented.
In a way it's sort of like what Disney did to fairy tales. The original Sleeping Beauty essentially cannot be discussed anymore because if you mention Sleeping Beauty everyone will come up with mental images that are copyrighted. A Sleeping Beauty with black hair would receive essentially universal rejection from the target audience (young children).
So they've determined that selling GMO plants doesn't lead to increased monopoly control over the food supply?
That's my primary objection. I'm hard to convince on the other points, but I know myself well enough to realize that this is mainly because nothing has altered my main grounds for opposition: monopoly control over the food supply. I could be convinced that chemical pesticides are safe...it would take better evidence than I've seen, but it could be done. However this wouldn't change my opposition to GMO foods unless it could be shown that they didn't lead to increased monopoly control.
To be fair, the system they were revolting against was as bad as Russia under the czars.
This overstates the point, I think. Russia had no burgeoning middle class, throwing new-found political clout around. There was nothing approaching the salons and political involvement of the common man. The system was still feudal, but gradual evolution in Western Europe had pulled far away from the sort of primitive serfdom that would continue to dominate Russia until the Bolshevik revolution.
Yeah, I did overstate my point a bit. But not all that much. The middle class was rising, but its rights weren't all that secure.
Similarly, if the French Revolution had not succeeded, then Napoleon would not have arisen, and would not have swept Europe with his armies, and would not have invaded Russia, so Russia might have remained in slumber, or at least been much less paranoid about invasion from the west.
There were continuing animosities with Sweden regarding the disposition of Poland and Lithuania, as well as tensions with the Ottoman Turks, that held Russia's interest in Europe. Combined with Tsar Alexander's interventionist stance, Russia's continuing involvement in Europe could not have been avoided. Indeed, he was committed to ending the French experiment a decade before a disappointed Napoleon finally arrived on his charred doorstep. Now, to be sure, the Napoleonic Wars granted Russia a level of prestige among continental powers it had theretofore not enjoyed, but I think even this was simply a matter of time and recognition.
Likewise I was being a bit optimistic about "what might have happened but didn't". Writing an alternate history is a big project, and I was just laying out some possibilities. Things could also have ended up much worse than they did.
So... Are you asserting that Nadella didn't want these developments?
And Nadella also has higher management, the BOD. I'll grant that oversight tends to get a bit diffuse, but the changes in MSWindows 10 have receives loud and numerous quite public complaints. If either Nadella or the Board of Directors had disagreed with the policies, changes would have happened. This hasn't been anything quiet or secretive.
I think he's assuming decent management. The assertion is not without plausibility. The reason that MeeGo never amounted to anything was clearly managerial. Whether it would ever have been good enough to challenge Android is not clear. (And remember, it would only need to be challenging the first version of Android.)
To be fair, the system they were revolting against was as bad as Russia under the czars. The common people had essentially no rights. Even the nobles were endangered. The king of France looked the matter over and decided against even trying to make things better. We don't really know why he just shrugged his shoulders and said "After me the deluge.", but perhaps he saw no acceptable (to him) way to resolve the situation. Or perhaps he was saying "I've got mine Jack,...".
With that government and that situation, there may not have been a moderate solution. The Russians tried to go from an autarchy to a democracy with the Duma, and couldn't hold out against a different group of autarchs. So the French choice may not even have been wrong...as viewed from the current time through our eyes. (I'm using the term autarchy because I want to include both monarchs and dictators.)
But my original point was that we still don't know what the long term effects will be. That will take a few centuries. We now pretty much know what the long term effects of the Roman Empire conquering Egypt were...though even there the echoes have died down completely. And since we will never know what the alternatives would have lead to, any evaluation has to be speculative. E.g., would an independent Egypt have prevented the spread of the Muslim religion when the Mongols sacked the Caliphate? A divine king ruling in Egypt might well have decided to not permit the Muslims to become powerful...but it would have weakened Rome and possibly strengthened Byzantium to the point where Rome would not have conquered it. And that would have drastically re-shaped history.
Similarly, if the French Revolution had not succeeded, then Napoleon would not have arisen, and would not have swept Europe with his armies, and would not have invaded Russia, so Russia might have remained in slumber, or at least been much less paranoid about invasion from the west. It would mean that Germany would not have been re-cast into the modern form, but might well have been a bunch of small independent states. Poland might have been relatively powerful. Etc.
So while we can see good and bad things that came from a historic event, we can't really judge whether the event was good or bad, because we don't know the alternatives. That would require a predictive model of human societies, and Hari Seldon hasn't yet appeared.
While it's true that I do not understand everything in detail, the purpose of the reboot shutdown was to switch between systems installed on different partitions. Do you know of a better way to do this?
Well, you don't get much more peaceful than a graveyard. But point me at a religion that doesn't sanction killing unbelievers. Buddhism fails because it's not a religion, and I'm not considering small sects, like the Quakers.
It's true that the Muslim religion *has* a more violent holy book than most others, because the founder was almost compelled to become a warlord, but it wasn't a Muslim who said "Kill them all, God will know his own."
What's special about (some) rich people is the same thing that's special about movie stars. Lots of people look at their picture and say "Gee, I wish I was him!", so they feel injured when their idol is injured.
Actually I think you're doing a very clumsy job of "mind-reading" by projecting what could get you into that kind of situation onto them.
This is occasionally useful, but it works a lot better if you know the situation and the people you're projecting onto. And even then you need to use large error-bars.
Is he really being philanthropic now? The last time I checked the Gates Foundation was acting as a non-profit MSWindows marketing organization. Admittedly that was over a decade ago.
How long a run? It was a bad thing during the lifetimes of almost everyone around at the time, and we don't know the really long term effect yet. Currently it seems like it was a good thing, but the future is hard to predict.
However, do remember, it was a bad thing during the lifetimes of almost everyone around at the time.
There are a lot of unpleasant interactions between, I think, wine and 64-bit linux. To be honest, I'm not certain the interactions aren't with systemD, but now whenever I try to restart the system that has wine installed, it nearly hangs on a process that didn't shut down, and I end up needing to do a shutdown reboot.
I haven't traced these problems in detail, but they started when I installed wine. However, it's also true that I hadn't restarted for a long while prior to that, so the problem could be with something else, with systemd being my "most likely candidate".
Unless you're talking about thought processes, then when they don't have mechanical aids, mathematicians work by hand. And the predominate aid is the computer. Slide rules helped engineers a lot, but didn't do that much for mathematicians.
Dissmissive? Not in my mind. The people who set up the process that I implemented not only designed the process, they did a significant study to acquire the relevant correlation factors. This, itself, was a multi-year project, and involved getting a random selection of people to answer a lot of questions about how they made their journey to work, and what factors impinged on it. E.g., in figuring bridge penalties, how significant was a toll? But that was all done before I started my part of the work. Another mathematician constructed a detailed model of how the factors should be applied, but that also had to be complete before I could start on my work. (And I'm oversimplifying here, because he was also involved in adjusting the model when the results didn't seem reasonable.)
But KdV and BBM are not things that could be usefully worked out without computers to assist. Without computers they wouldn't even be useful.
When I first started computer time cost $400/second (well, it was on a large computer). At that cost, the problems you can address need to be fairly simple. As computer costs decreased increasingly complex problems started being addressed, and in large part it's BECAUSE computer costs decreased. IIUC we're just now getting to the point where simulations are good enough to replace most wind-tunnel tests...and that's because it would have been too expensive to run the equations at the required level of detail with previous computers. Yes, there have been some theoretical developments that handle the fine details, but those would have been essentially worthless if the computer time hadn't gotten cheap enough to make the calculations worth doing.
Mathematics is important, but it's never sufficient. And engineers ARE mathematicians. Applied mathematicians, it's true, but still mathematicians. So are programmers. So are architects. Etc.
Back when I was studying math heavily I started believing that numbers had more reality than anything else. One of my friends still believes that, but it's not true. Mathematics is a language for talking about the physical world, and it's quite powerful, but it's not sufficient for anything in and of itself. Mathematicians who don't realize this are like grammarians who thing that only the grammar of what is said is important, and ignore the meaning. I'm not denying that grammar is important, but it's not sufficient.
Don't think of it as tutoring, think of it as a very small class. For most purposes tutoring is not the optimal approach....and what I'm talking about optimizing is quality of learning.
Your reference compared tutoring against a class size of 30, which is far above the optimum for most circumstances. But 1:1 is below the optimum. A study reported by the California Association of Teachers said that for high school students there was a strong fall off of quality when the class size exceeded... I think it was 18 students. They weren't looking for an optimum, but for an argument to limit the legal class size. The actual optimum depends on the subject matter, but it is rarely as low as 1:1. The most common reason for 1:1 being superior is if the student is quite different in ability from others who would potentially be in the same class. And even then it's not always optimum.
While true, the cost of having a mathematician set up the process and evaluate the output is trivial compared to the cost of having someone work through those equations by hand, and someone else error check everything, and then redo the calculations several times because of trivial errors.
So computers are (currently) limited in how much they can reduce costs, but they have cut the cost of most mathematical procedures immensely, and speeded up getting results event more.
I used to do traffic modeling projections, and that would just not be doable at all without computers. By the time you had gotten the answer, the traffic would already have grown and population relocated, so you couldn't build highways before the population was in place...which would greatly increase the costs of building the highways, not to mention immensely frustrating commuters. So instead of building highways to minimize average journey-to-work times they'd be built on purely political grounds. (I'm not saying that that isn't still an important component.)
FWIW, we didn't always get the projection correct. But we did a lot better than pure politics. (Actually, most of the time we projected alternatives, and tried to shape things so that the best alternative was built. But predicting where or if someone is going to put in a new sports stadium, e.g., just isn't doable. And while you can notice where zoning is in place, you can't say that a factory will actually be built, or precisely how many workers will come from where. So you make your best guess. And that's highly mathematical involving both factor analysis and regression. And then you need to actually use those results. I was involved in using the results rather than the original analysis, but I knew the people who did it.)
That's only one possibility. Another is that there were different small groups setting things up, and they weren't communicating very well. So when everyone got together a lot of things got changed.
OTOH, they did leave the name starting with HG... (They should have changed it to be "Huge Genome..." if they wanted to keep the initials.
IIRC, the Instrumentality didn't begin with the creation of the under-people, though I'm not sure. Wasn't the Instrumentality a part of "The Game of Rat and Dragon" or "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul"? (Admittedly they both have sort of proto-underpeople.) Or possibly "Mark Elf", though they could have existed without being visible in that one, and it's really out of the straight line history, as normal humans had nearly disappeared.
Umnh...they're just talking about building DNA strands here.
If they tried to do that this decade they'd just end up with a mess. And mitochondria should be easier to synthesize than a complete genome. (Admittedly, even that's beyond current state of the art.)
When they first do this it will be for something economically important. Cows, sheep, chickens, fish, soybeans, something. Plants are a bit tricky, but they tolerate small changes well. And they're easy to clone. People are tricky...in fact primates are tricky as a whole, but if you botch creating a person you've got potential legal troubles.
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IIUC, many of the TOR routers are operated by the US government, and the system is not inherently secure against changes of code in the machines that are running it. Why does this surprise you?
No, they are echoes of the ideas on which the nation was based. For a closer take of those ideas read the Declaration of Independence...which also has no legal force.
OTOH, it's worthwhile remembering that at the time the country was being set up, only about 1/3 of the population adhered to those ideals even to the extent of saying they agreed. In many areas the Tories were an absolute majority. And afterwards... Thomas Paine died in a French Jail and President Jefferson declined to write a letter asking for his pardon.
History isn't as simple as they make it sound in school books. And current events aren't as simple as they make them sound in newspapers.
All that said, the US president today has more effective control over the US citizenry than the British king did over British citizens in the 1700's. His legal control is less, but his effective control is greater. And even the "liberal" politicians are continually trying to increase it.
While it is in principle orthogonal, it's not in practice. In practice all GMO products are patented. I'm not really opposed to, e.g., golden rice because of the patent license terms. But it *is* patented, and the patent terms are subject to being changed, so I'm still opposed to it...just not very. From a cost/benefit perspective golden rice is a big plus, but not enough for me to say the principle is wrong.
With non-genetically modified plants there are almost always reasonable replacements. The patents only cover a small portion, and I'm not *much* more opposed to them than I am to hybrids (which I also don't like).
Patents, however, allow legal monopoly control, and that's very dangerous to allow over something essential, like the food supply. And since all GMO plants are patented, that means I'm opposed to all GMO plants even without looking further into whether there are other reasons to oppose them.
Now if you were to assert that it is not intrinsic that GMO plants be patented, I would agree. But the agreement is over a vacuous case. Given the legal system that we have, it is practically guaranteed that any GMO plant will be patented.
In a way it's sort of like what Disney did to fairy tales. The original Sleeping Beauty essentially cannot be discussed anymore because if you mention Sleeping Beauty everyone will come up with mental images that are copyrighted. A Sleeping Beauty with black hair would receive essentially universal rejection from the target audience (young children).
So they've determined that selling GMO plants doesn't lead to increased monopoly control over the food supply?
That's my primary objection. I'm hard to convince on the other points, but I know myself well enough to realize that this is mainly because nothing has altered my main grounds for opposition: monopoly control over the food supply. I could be convinced that chemical pesticides are safe...it would take better evidence than I've seen, but it could be done. However this wouldn't change my opposition to GMO foods unless it could be shown that they didn't lead to increased monopoly control.
Yeah, I did overstate my point a bit. But not all that much. The middle class was rising, but its rights weren't all that secure.
Likewise I was being a bit optimistic about "what might have happened but didn't". Writing an alternate history is a big project, and I was just laying out some possibilities. Things could also have ended up much worse than they did.
So...
Are you asserting that Nadella didn't want these developments?
And Nadella also has higher management, the BOD. I'll grant that oversight tends to get a bit diffuse, but the changes in MSWindows 10 have receives loud and numerous quite public complaints. If either Nadella or the Board of Directors had disagreed with the policies, changes would have happened. This hasn't been anything quiet or secretive.
Nope. Those things are so blatant that if he was in charge of implementing them, he must have been doing what higher management wanted.
He's merely an accomplice before the fact.
That's something "Get Smart" missed.
I think he's assuming decent management. The assertion is not without plausibility. The reason that MeeGo never amounted to anything was clearly managerial. Whether it would ever have been good enough to challenge Android is not clear. (And remember, it would only need to be challenging the first version of Android.)
Being plausible doesn't make it true, of course.
To be fair, the system they were revolting against was as bad as Russia under the czars. The common people had essentially no rights. Even the nobles were endangered. The king of France looked the matter over and decided against even trying to make things better. We don't really know why he just shrugged his shoulders and said "After me the deluge.", but perhaps he saw no acceptable (to him) way to resolve the situation. Or perhaps he was saying "I've got mine Jack, ...".
With that government and that situation, there may not have been a moderate solution. The Russians tried to go from an autarchy to a democracy with the Duma, and couldn't hold out against a different group of autarchs. So the French choice may not even have been wrong...as viewed from the current time through our eyes.
(I'm using the term autarchy because I want to include both monarchs and dictators.)
But my original point was that we still don't know what the long term effects will be. That will take a few centuries. We now pretty much know what the long term effects of the Roman Empire conquering Egypt were...though even there the echoes have died down completely. And since we will never know what the alternatives would have lead to, any evaluation has to be speculative. E.g., would an independent Egypt have prevented the spread of the Muslim religion when the Mongols sacked the Caliphate? A divine king ruling in Egypt might well have decided to not permit the Muslims to become powerful...but it would have weakened Rome and possibly strengthened Byzantium to the point where Rome would not have conquered it. And that would have drastically re-shaped history.
Similarly, if the French Revolution had not succeeded, then Napoleon would not have arisen, and would not have swept Europe with his armies, and would not have invaded Russia, so Russia might have remained in slumber, or at least been much less paranoid about invasion from the west. It would mean that Germany would not have been re-cast into the modern form, but might well have been a bunch of small independent states. Poland might have been relatively powerful. Etc.
So while we can see good and bad things that came from a historic event, we can't really judge whether the event was good or bad, because we don't know the alternatives. That would require a predictive model of human societies, and Hari Seldon hasn't yet appeared.
While it's true that I do not understand everything in detail, the purpose of the reboot shutdown was to switch between systems installed on different partitions. Do you know of a better way to do this?
Well, you don't get much more peaceful than a graveyard. But point me at a religion that doesn't sanction killing unbelievers. Buddhism fails because it's not a religion, and I'm not considering small sects, like the Quakers.
It's true that the Muslim religion *has* a more violent holy book than most others, because the founder was almost compelled to become a warlord, but it wasn't a Muslim who said "Kill them all, God will know his own."
What's special about (some) rich people is the same thing that's special about movie stars. Lots of people look at their picture and say "Gee, I wish I was him!", so they feel injured when their idol is injured.
Actually I think you're doing a very clumsy job of "mind-reading" by projecting what could get you into that kind of situation onto them.
This is occasionally useful, but it works a lot better if you know the situation and the people you're projecting onto. And even then you need to use large error-bars.
Is he really being philanthropic now? The last time I checked the Gates Foundation was acting as a non-profit MSWindows marketing organization. Admittedly that was over a decade ago.
How long a run? It was a bad thing during the lifetimes of almost everyone around at the time, and we don't know the really long term effect yet. Currently it seems like it was a good thing, but the future is hard to predict.
However, do remember, it was a bad thing during the lifetimes of almost everyone around at the time.
There are a lot of unpleasant interactions between, I think, wine and 64-bit linux. To be honest, I'm not certain the interactions aren't with systemD, but now whenever I try to restart the system that has wine installed, it nearly hangs on a process that didn't shut down, and I end up needing to do a shutdown reboot.
I haven't traced these problems in detail, but they started when I installed wine. However, it's also true that I hadn't restarted for a long while prior to that, so the problem could be with something else, with systemd being my "most likely candidate".
Unless you're talking about thought processes, then when they don't have mechanical aids, mathematicians work by hand. And the predominate aid is the computer. Slide rules helped engineers a lot, but didn't do that much for mathematicians.
Dissmissive? Not in my mind. The people who set up the process that I implemented not only designed the process, they did a significant study to acquire the relevant correlation factors. This, itself, was a multi-year project, and involved getting a random selection of people to answer a lot of questions about how they made their journey to work, and what factors impinged on it. E.g., in figuring bridge penalties, how significant was a toll? But that was all done before I started my part of the work. Another mathematician constructed a detailed model of how the factors should be applied, but that also had to be complete before I could start on my work. (And I'm oversimplifying here, because he was also involved in adjusting the model when the results didn't seem reasonable.)
But KdV and BBM are not things that could be usefully worked out without computers to assist. Without computers they wouldn't even be useful.
When I first started computer time cost $400/second (well, it was on a large computer). At that cost, the problems you can address need to be fairly simple. As computer costs decreased increasingly complex problems started being addressed, and in large part it's BECAUSE computer costs decreased. IIUC we're just now getting to the point where simulations are good enough to replace most wind-tunnel tests...and that's because it would have been too expensive to run the equations at the required level of detail with previous computers. Yes, there have been some theoretical developments that handle the fine details, but those would have been essentially worthless if the computer time hadn't gotten cheap enough to make the calculations worth doing.
Mathematics is important, but it's never sufficient. And engineers ARE mathematicians. Applied mathematicians, it's true, but still mathematicians. So are programmers. So are architects. Etc.
Back when I was studying math heavily I started believing that numbers had more reality than anything else. One of my friends still believes that, but it's not true. Mathematics is a language for talking about the physical world, and it's quite powerful, but it's not sufficient for anything in and of itself. Mathematicians who don't realize this are like grammarians who thing that only the grammar of what is said is important, and ignore the meaning. I'm not denying that grammar is important, but it's not sufficient.
Don't think of it as tutoring, think of it as a very small class. For most purposes tutoring is not the optimal approach....and what I'm talking about optimizing is quality of learning.
Your reference compared tutoring against a class size of 30, which is far above the optimum for most circumstances. But 1:1 is below the optimum. A study reported by the California Association of Teachers said that for high school students there was a strong fall off of quality when the class size exceeded ... I think it was 18 students. They weren't looking for an optimum, but for an argument to limit the legal class size. The actual optimum depends on the subject matter, but it is rarely as low as 1:1. The most common reason for 1:1 being superior is if the student is quite different in ability from others who would potentially be in the same class. And even then it's not always optimum.
While true, the cost of having a mathematician set up the process and evaluate the output is trivial compared to the cost of having someone work through those equations by hand, and someone else error check everything, and then redo the calculations several times because of trivial errors.
So computers are (currently) limited in how much they can reduce costs, but they have cut the cost of most mathematical procedures immensely, and speeded up getting results event more.
I used to do traffic modeling projections, and that would just not be doable at all without computers. By the time you had gotten the answer, the traffic would already have grown and population relocated, so you couldn't build highways before the population was in place...which would greatly increase the costs of building the highways, not to mention immensely frustrating commuters. So instead of building highways to minimize average journey-to-work times they'd be built on purely political grounds. (I'm not saying that that isn't still an important component.)
FWIW, we didn't always get the projection correct. But we did a lot better than pure politics. (Actually, most of the time we projected alternatives, and tried to shape things so that the best alternative was built. But predicting where or if someone is going to put in a new sports stadium, e.g., just isn't doable. And while you can notice where zoning is in place, you can't say that a factory will actually be built, or precisely how many workers will come from where. So you make your best guess. And that's highly mathematical involving both factor analysis and regression. And then you need to actually use those results. I was involved in using the results rather than the original analysis, but I knew the people who did it.)
If they really don't know, then they've got to be incompetent. It's not enough to say what they are incompetent at, but at least at quality control.
Of course, they could be lying about not knowing, or the spokesman could be kept intentionally ignorant.
That's only one possibility. Another is that there were different small groups setting things up, and they weren't communicating very well. So when everyone got together a lot of things got changed.
OTOH, they did leave the name starting with HG... (They should have changed it to be "Huge Genome..." if they wanted to keep the initials.
Ah, but which version? My favorite, I must admit, is C'Mell.
IIRC, the Instrumentality didn't begin with the creation of the under-people, though I'm not sure. Wasn't the Instrumentality a part of "The Game of Rat and Dragon" or "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul"? (Admittedly they both have sort of proto-underpeople.) Or possibly "Mark Elf", though they could have existed without being visible in that one, and it's really out of the straight line history, as normal humans had nearly disappeared.
Umnh...they're just talking about building DNA strands here.
If they tried to do that this decade they'd just end up with a mess. And mitochondria should be easier to synthesize than a complete genome. (Admittedly, even that's beyond current state of the art.)
When they first do this it will be for something economically important. Cows, sheep, chickens, fish, soybeans, something. Plants are a bit tricky, but they tolerate small changes well. And they're easy to clone. People are tricky...in fact primates are tricky as a whole, but if you botch creating a person you've got potential legal troubles.