Several comments have said something to the effect of "it's not the Supremes, it is congress that is the problem".
As a Britain I get sick of being told by Americans that their system is so superior to ours because of the fabled "checks and balances" and all those "rights" the constitution reputidly give you.
Well from over here, the constitution doesn't seem to be working too well. Your rights are being eroded at a phenominal rate, and the checks and balances seem to have all but dissapeared.
The purpose of an indipendant judiciary, and specifically the Supremes, is to act as a check on the power of the other arms of government. In this context their job is to interpret the constitution; not just the letter, but the spirit. Here, they have failed in that duty. They have basically said that Congress can do what it likes.
Our system may not be perfect, but in some way this is a good thing. We know that there is no constitution to fall back on so we (well, the politically interested/active) tend to be more aware of what is going on. There has been a great deal of talk recently about the Houses of Parliament being more active in calling the executive to account, because it has been getting its own way too much recently. There have been developements to make scrutiny in the Commons and Lords stronger and more pro-active and indipendent. In fact, if we go to war on Iraq without a UN say-so, and the general will of the populace, expect the present ruling party to implode and take out Tony Blair in the process.
None of this stopped RIPA of course, but I am still hopefull that will be challenged eventually.
In some way, living with an imperfect system makes you more wary, rather than the false sense of security and superiority that a written constitution can give you. They are always open to interpretation, and can often be circumvented with ease.
Actually, what if there are a large number of different suppressed mutations in the population that all get released at the same time (because of the same environmental pressure).
Then you get a large number of different 'macro' mutations, some of which will be useless or crippling, but some of which could be beneficial. The ones that are good, survive.
That's the beuty of evolution, it is so simple. People think that it is complex, but the basic idea is as simple as you can get, just intterated over a large population and/or a long period of time.
Paul
Risk and Severity of a Hazard
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 2
If you ever get involved in safety or security assessment you will come across things called risk-severity matrixes, that can be used as either a quantitative (probabilities and cost/lost lives etc) or qualitative method of ranking potential hazards (improbable... highly likly, negligable... catastophic). This normally gives you a partally ordered list.
In this case the straight probability might be small, but the outcome is bloody big, so this would rank as fairly high as a hazard. On the other hand, the risk of small meteorites entering the atmosphere is high, but the outcome (severity) is tiny (I think there has only been a tiny handfull of cases of people being killed), so the hazard ranking would put this very low down on the list of things to worry about.
Unfortunatly, most people only look at the severity (people scared of flying, or traveling by train because of the nature of the accidents) without the risks (car travel, more likely to die, but only a couple die at any one time).
In this case the severity is so very high, and the risk not sufficiently low, that we really have to worry about it.
Why does the dot keep posting stories about obviously-misinterpreted science news while ignoring *serious* news like the cure for 1/3 of cancers in mice from a week ago?
Ok, I'm going to reply to myself in order to address one or two things that people have said.
a) I was replying to Taco's post. He expressed the view that he didn't want anyone being able to read his e-mail, no matter how good the system was. That was the angle I was working from.
b) I am against carnivor and similar systems as they stand. Someone made a comment that Carnivor sniffs everything at the moment. That is not a reason to be against sniffing of e-mail, it is a reason to abhore Carnivor and Echelon in their present state. It is also a reason to develope alternatives as this guy from Dartmouth has done.
c) I know that the USA PATRIOT act allows tapping without warrents, but this is not just confined to e-mails, it includes normal wire taps as well. This is not a reason to be against WARRENT RESTRICTED tapping, as I said several times in my post. It is however a reason to be against the USA PATRIOT act (and in the UK the R.I.P act (although that still requires warrents.
d) Abuse of evidence. Again I agree that there is a problem with abuse of evidence. Someone mentioned that when the FBI taps a phone they are restricted in what they can listen to. What stops them? Rules, and oversight. The same thing that will stop abuse of any power. Also I doubt that any conviction would stand purly on the basis of an e-mail, most convictions in this country that are based on a single piece of very limsy evidence generally get overturned pretty quick. Agian, systems like that being developed help in the oversight. Presumably there is a combination of technical systems, and human organisation that prevents the FBI from listening to the wrong thing on a wire tap, why can't the same be done for e-mail? Hmm?
All or most of this was in the original post, but then am I expecting too much of/.ers to read a post before they reply? Mabey I should just move permenantly to K5, people tend to read things more.
It's funny that/.ers tend to be the first to go "technology is not evil, people are!" when it is file-swapping etc, but when it is the feds then the tech itself becomes evil, not the rules and laws that are inacted by YOUR representatives, on YOUR behalf.
Why do people have so much of a problem with the authorities monitoring e-mail, yet don't get up in arms about straight phone tapping? The right of the police to tap your phone is no different from their right to search your home, search you or indeed put you in prison. The same goes for reading your e-mail.
Each of these powers is granted so that they can fight crime. I don't have a problem with the police having any of these powers, as long as they are restricted, i.e. you need a warrent to search someones house, or tap their phone, so you should need one to read their e-mail. I have a problem with echelon and 'fishing-trips', and the police abusing their power of search and arrest. But then thats why we have rules. Its up to us/our representatives/the judges to make sure that the police obay those rules. This is why so many cases get thrown out of court on 'technicalities', because someone broke the rules.
On the whole this is pretty well inforced in britain, for example ALL interviews with the police, MUST be taped, and there has to be a witness, (unlike in the US where recording is only reccommended. That said we do have the rather dubious RIP bill but that still requires a warrent.
So basically, if you are against (restricted, needs a warrent etc) tapping of your e-mails, you should be against the (warrented) search of properties and the (warrrented) tapping of phones.
The internet is no different from any other communications medium. If you really think that it is, or has ever been some utopian paradise of free speech somehow seperate from the real world and real world laws, where anything is allowed, then you need to get out and about a bit more.
The Internet is just another communications network, no different from any other. It is not special, just more advanced. Using the internet is no different from using a phone, or fax. You are not special, it is not special. Grow up and stop seeing the world from such a narrow viewpoint (I can't beleive I just said that on/.)
Paul
Most A.I. isn't really about intelligence.
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
An interesting thing to note about many of the things that are described as A.I. especially in the popular press, vision, walking, playing chess; none of them require intelligence as I think of it.
Much of the work done into mimicing vision has created systems with capabilities that in humans are achieved by hard wired parts of the brain. Movement, shape and even facial recognition are not really intelligence.
I think of intelligence as teh abiliy to reason about problems, not simply to solve them. Many of the supposed A.I. systems are just brute force search systems.
Deep blue is like any other chess system, just bigger and faster. Many problem solving systems are simply fast (normaly optomised for the problem) constraint solvers. Neural nets are simply an arbitrary system that is capable of partitioning a solution space in a non-linear fashion and the training algorithm is a search for the network values that partition the test data best. if you think that NNs are anything like real brain cells find biology student who has done some neuro-physiology and you will find there is alot more to them than just a sigmoid function and some weightings.
In fact the neural network training algorithm bears more than a parsing resemblance to simulated anealing (sp?) in its approach.
If you want to learn about machine learning algorithms check out Machine Learning by Thomas Mitchell. Small but well formed.
A quick statistic. The average grandmaster thinks something like 7 moves ahead. Deep blue plots about 15 moves ahead. I may have the numbers wrong but the ratio is about right. However it still only just beat Kasparov. That says something about the way that the human brain thinks about complex problems. This is why A.I. researchers have started to turn away from chess as a problem and towards Go. The branching factor in Go is some much larger than chess that even the best systems can be beaten by a one or two year player. Playing Go will require something more than just brute force.
Most so called A.I. is just a case of doing things quickley. As the PHBs (would probably) say, think smarter not faster. The brain is good at what it does, not just because it is massively complex and parralel, but also because of the way it simplifies many problems using clever tricks to reduce the workload.
I just think we have alot further to go than many researcher and reporters would like to think. Most of what we see these days if just 'clever' or 'smart' (like a spelling/grammer checker), not intelligent like someone designing a car engine using entiry novel techniques (not just optomising or using predefined parts).
Having said that there is some research that shows promise, such as some of the work going on at MIT with COG and co. Now that looks interesting. They arn't trying to make them smart/do clever tricks/play chess etc, but make them intelligent in the more human sense.
"We've gone back to basics with the educational. We've avoided multimedia for now. It's a strange sort of thing... people talk about interactive learning, but it's actually very passive," says Kendle.
I like this man already. There has always been so much hype about using computer based multimedia in education and museums, and most of it is rubbish. People just stand there looking at computer screens.
Yes, you might be able to get lots of information but it gets pretty boring very quickly. There is nothing like the hands on displays at places like the science museum in london. Even just moving between displays is more interesting than staring at yet another screen.
Another good example of an educational museum is the Norskbremusset (Norwegen Glacier Museum) at Fjaerland Norway. Lots of hands on stuff. If you ever go to that part of Norway it is worth a look.
The idea is that some form of lander will land on Europa. Then either it, or a smaller probe carried by it will burrow down throught the ice and into the ocean below.
One approach to this may be for a bullet shaped probe to melt the ice. In the process of heating the ice the surface of the probe would be heated so high as to sterilise it. The melt water would then freeze behind the probe, sealing the surface again. The probe could then just burrow back up when it has finished.
I beleive that there is a group who plan to use the same idea to get a probe into a lake in the arctic/antarctic (can't remember which) which has ben sealed by ice for thousands of years to see what kind of life is down there.
This is only one possibility, and any mission is probably a long time in the future so who knows what we might be able to do.
However it is done, they will have to find some way of making sure that the probe is absolutly sterile.
Totally agree. I just didn't word that bit quite right.
What I meant was that you at red hat are not critically dependent on JUST the software developement, there are other things that you add, support, manuals (when did you last see a MS product with a paper manual?). Sistina are critically dependent on their own technology, made even harder in that they are now competing against there own product. Also you are building on something that is already there and adding value, in a similar way with IBM websphere (which I think uses apache, it was a year ago I last worked there but I think that's right). They buid on apache and give patches and help to the community to improve it.
Also, most (all?) of what you create goes back to the community. I think that that model is the one that will ultimatly win out, which is good for you (and your bank manager).
Paul
The vast majority of open source software available has been produced by individuals or not for profit groups. Look at most of the major projects, the Linux Kernel, GNOME, KDE etc. These are not funded by companies, and if all of the companies trying to make money off of open source were to disapear tommorow, they would carry on.
Sites like ZDNet are fundamentally biased towards thinking about the world in terms of companies and their success. This is how they have always worked and why they don't understand the os world.
Yes, corperate help can speed up developement of a system but it isn't critical.
The way I see it, there are three business models that can, and have worked, and two that won't.
The Red Hat way - Selling totally open systems with support and (shock!) manuals etc. Adding something to a fundamentally free product.
The IBM way - use free software as a base for your proprietory products. Why make your own UNIX when there is a free one. Mabey give developement back to the community.
The QT way - Create a product that people have to pay for if they make money out of it, but is free if they don't
The VALinux way - This is just another dot com and isn't really about open source, they just work off the open source community. The sourceforge model is broken in the same way as...
The sistina way - Provide a product that is both open and closed source. This will fork. Unless the closed version is a long way ahead of the open version people will not pay serious money for it. GFS is not protected by the GPL in the same way as QT. I could package GFS (gpl version) with a closed source product and sell it, I can't use QT in closed source without paying.
Of these, only the first three will work. Red Hat does not depend on a massive in house development effort to produce its product (unlike sistena). IBM and QT are both profitable companies. IBM is using Linux and Apache to reduce costs, and gives a little back in return, especially where specialist development is needed, but again it does not involve a major (relative) developement effort. Trolltech makes money, but gives its product away to people who do not make any money out of it, thus increasing its visibility. I hadn't heard of QT before KDE came about.
VA Linux is just a web publisher like any other. Sistina is fighting a loosing battle against its own technology. Once something is GPL'd you can't unGPL it.
Whatever ZDNet says. Open Source will continue for the same reasons that it got started in the first place, because people enjoy writing software and creating and sharing something, and mabey for the kudos. These are the same reasons that I want to start my own project (a developent env for Prolog), not for the money, but because I enjoy it, and it would be an interesting challange. OS has never been about the money. If it had been, GNU would not exist, nor Linux, nor any of the other major components of the OS panthion (*BSD etc).
End sermon
Re:Brits and failure to invest...
on
The Difference Engine
·
· Score: 3, Informative
On the whole I think you are right but some of your details are a bit off.
On Babbage:
He was a polymath. He had fingers in half a dozen differnent pies. Like many true geniuses from history he was interested in many things and that meant that he had a tendancy to stop projects and go and work on whatever new thing he was interested in. That said, what he was proposing, while it may sound obvious to us, was pretty radical (and very costly) in his day. It's a bit like fusion research today, expensive, and hard to get right.
Collosus:
The guy you are thinking of is called Tommy Flowers. He originally worked for the post office (which in those days ran the phone system). He was the brains behind Collosus. The reason he had to keep quite was the same reason that everyone who worked at station X had to. What they worked on was top secret. This had nothing to do with lack of funding. Much of the developement of the modern computer was done in British universities (especially Manchester).
Transputer:
Inmos was a private company. It's failure had little to do with the govenment. It was taken over by another company who insisted that it use a standardised design tool. it wasn't until late in the developemnet phase that a fault in the tool (something to do with timing calculations) came to light. This set back the developement by many month (if not years) and killed the company. This is what is happening in Transmeta, great, innovative tech, let down by the company that created it.
It the sad fact that many revolutionary indeviduals (i.e. those who were different, shock horror) have been persecuted or died penniless. Turing was a particularly sad case, considering what he did for the war effort, same goes for other homosexuals from history, Oscar Wilde being the prime example. The world hasn't changed that much though, people who are *different* are still persecuted, it just tends to be less obvious.
P.s.
Collosus has actually been rebuilt, see here. Sadly Tommy Flowers died soon after it was built (at the age of 92 I think).
The inmos thing might be a bit off but that is the main gist of what happened. of course if anyone who worked at inmos around that time could correct me that would be good...
You will also find that the russians now use those pens.
You can't use pencils in space for a prolonged period of time because of the graphite powder that is given off while writing. This is not a problem on earth because gravity gets it out of the way, but in space it lingers in the air and gets in the lungs, very bad for you.
The main worry people seem to have here is that while these powers may be necessary in the present circumstance, they may never be removed.
In the uk we have the Prevention of Terrorism Act. There are two points to note about this act...
The act does provide specific extra powers to the security services/police, but they are all wrapped up together, not distributed among a miriad of regulations, recommendations, and guidlines. This makes the powers more visible. it also emphasises that these powers are to be used specifically against terrorism and are not general powers.
The act must be passed yearly, in the same way as the budget must be passed every year in order to allow the collection of income tax (which is effectively a temporary tax for one year). This means that it is debated on a regular basis, and scrutinised to ensure that the powers it provides are still reasonable in the light of the present circumstances.
This may be just the kind of mechanism that is needed here.
What disturbes me here is the definition of "questionable content".
I can entirely understand the removal of songs that were distastful, much in the same way games and film companies are removing references to, or images of the twin towers. That is simply a matter of taste. But banning anti-war or pro-peace songs is far more worrying. It's saying that "The US is going to war, and if you disagree then you are wrong".
The McCarthy witchhunts were ostensibly (sic) about protecting the US from the Communist Threat. The irony was that in doing so, they sacrificed the very thing they claimed to be protecting, namely freedom; to think and say what you want, and not be persecuted for it.
During the Vietnam war, people who disagreed with the policy were regarded as anti-american. The whole point of democracy is that everyones opinion, no matter how vial it may seem to others, is equally valid.
I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
We are seeing the whole Nam/McCarthy thing happening again. With the stated aim of protecting freedom, we are having it systematically removed.
Americans are now only allowed to think what they are told to think by their government and the media (which generally goes along the same lines).
In trying to destroy this evil, you are becomming what you despise.
The terrorists have done far more damage than I think they could have hoped for, and I do not think America will realise this until it is too late.
There was a documentary (I think it was called Undeer the Veil) shown on british telly recently made by the reporter Siras Shar (Not sure about the spelling). Her parents come from Afghanistan and she sneeked into the country with the help of an underground movement. The footage that was shown was very sobering, some of it showed a football stadium (ironically built by the international community to help return normality to the country) being used for very brutal executions, hangings, stonings, shooting etc.
The people in Af are under the complete control of the Taliban. They are ruled with the proverbial rod of iron (which is normally used to beat to death 13 year old girls for daring to read a book). Their interpretation of Islamic law is so extreme that most other Muslims, even the most 'orthodox'(*) ones consider it over the top.
It is seeing what can happen in a country like this that puts life in the west into perspective. We may whine about companies protecting IP, or governments introducing face recognising CCTV, but thats nothing compared to what these people are living through.
If it ever shown where you live, try and watch it. It certainly made me realise just how lucky I am. At least I have the freedom to live a normal life, go to school (although I have just finished Uni but you know what I mean), walk down the street, without risking beating, or death. And I have some say, no matter how small, in the way my country is run, I have a voice. People in Afganistan have no voice, not even a small one, especially not women, who are basically non-people.
(*) I don't like the word extremist, it smacks of American cliches about Muslims, most of whome are peaceful, honest, friendly, well educated and moral. The combative tendancy in the area is like that in europe up to about 50 years ago (ignoring the balkans), not a product of religion, just of the situation, religion just tends to fan the flames (the religious wars of europe, papal intervention in politics, the holy roman empire etc)
This argument could be taken even further. What if I produce a program using GPL code, and GPL it. This then exposes a CORBA interface which other programs can call. Are the IDLs deemed to be GPLed?
Also what if I take a library, wrap it up in a program (GPL it) and use IPC of some form to make the calls to the functionality in the GPLed library. If you created a library that was responsible for sending the calls down the pipes/sockects/queues etc but which appeared as a series of function calls to the user program, should that library be GPLed, it uses no GPL code, merly the protocol used by the GPLed server component (and what if the protocol was licensed before the software was written using a none GPL license and therefore was not a derrived work).
Basically we will see this becomming more and more of a problem as software is increasingly being built out of distributed runtime components (and there is nothing to say you can't use CORBA on a single machine). What is to stop me wrapping libraries in runtime object (programs, activex components, Java RMI objects etc) and then using IPC to access their functionality (distributed or otherwise). If you define the interface/protocol (CORBA IDL, XML DTD) prior to developing the system and release it under no license, and then develope the system around this interface then it can't be derived work.
I'm not saying that this isn't against the GPL, but things start to get pretty messy at this stage.
Something that is missing from the images is a scale. This can be extremely important in interpreting images. A good example where scale can be miss-used was one of Graham Hancock's (wrote Chariot of the Gods and other twaddle) claims about a plateau in south america (I forget what it is called). Basically this plateau is very high, very large and very flat. it is also very dry. It is covered in marking, some of which Hancock interpreted as alien run-ways, and indeed from the photos they did look remarkably plausable.
The problem though was that the structures were only a few feet wide, he had neglected to put a scale on the images.
Basically, many features look like something they are not, when viewed in the wrong scale. Also these images have no context, ideally there should be a pair of images, the fine resolution ones, together with a larger scale one showing the context. Ask any archiologist and they will tell you, any object is next to useless out of context.
Before I start taking any of these sorts of things seriously, I want scales and context.
Structure to rest on 3,000ft wide concrete base with lake to absorb earthquake shockwaves
Now, if my maths is right then the area that would have to be set aside for this thing is
(1500^2)*pi = approx 700000 sqr ft
This is assuming that not much else could really be built on this area.
That is 70 sqr ft per person.
Now, would you really get more people in that area by building a great big building, or by having 700000 sqr ft of mid rise (3-4 floor) housing, and which would be cheaper? Anyone know how much floor space there would be per person in this tower (there are no dimensions except the height on the times article)?
This is a serious question and not flamebait.
I just can't figure out what AmigaOS adds to a system. It runs on most OSs, which will provide process, thread and other system functionality. The Java VM provides the cross plateform capabilities. So just what does the AmigaOS provide for a program compiled to java that you don't get with just a good Java VM.
The problem with these is that they still have to emit light. There are two problems with this. The first is that they use power (not much, but some). Second (if my memory of my User Interface Design course serves me right) the eye is not designed to focus on emmitted light, it prefers reflected. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it is why it is nicer to read a book, than a computer screen (if you ignore the refresh problem). LCDs, while being able to work on reflected light, just loos too much of the light they reflect, too many layers or something (have to ask my sister, Phd in LCD physics).
The ideal display would be one where you could have a surface that had good reflective properties and could be dynamically changed. I know that MIT are working on a n ink system that you can effectively turn on and off by running it through a kind of laser printer, allowing you to repeatedly re-print onto a piece of paper (I think they managed to reprint hundreds of thousands of times without degredation). If you could do that quickly without the extra machinery then you would have the perfect display, god knows how you would get colour though. mabey some kind of electrically sensetive pigment. Obviously you would have to light it, but only as much as a paper book.
Slashdot Mirror
Several comments have said something to the effect of "it's not the Supremes, it is congress that is the problem".
As a Britain I get sick of being told by Americans that their system is so superior to ours because of the fabled "checks and balances" and all those "rights" the constitution reputidly give you.
Well from over here, the constitution doesn't seem to be working too well. Your rights are being eroded at a phenominal rate, and the checks and balances seem to have all but dissapeared.
The purpose of an indipendant judiciary, and specifically the Supremes, is to act as a check on the power of the other arms of government. In this context their job is to interpret the constitution; not just the letter, but the spirit. Here, they have failed in that duty. They have basically said that Congress can do what it likes.
Our system may not be perfect, but in some way this is a good thing. We know that there is no constitution to fall back on so we (well, the politically interested/active) tend to be more aware of what is going on. There has been a great deal of talk recently about the Houses of Parliament being more active in calling the executive to account, because it has been getting its own way too much recently. There have been developements to make scrutiny in the Commons and Lords stronger and more pro-active and indipendent. In fact, if we go to war on Iraq without a UN say-so, and the general will of the populace, expect the present ruling party to implode and take out Tony Blair in the process.
None of this stopped RIPA of course, but I am still hopefull that will be challenged eventually.
In some way, living with an imperfect system makes you more wary, rather than the false sense of security and superiority that a written constitution can give you. They are always open to interpretation, and can often be circumvented with ease.
Commence flame.
Paul
SPARK Ada this would never have happend.
Go static analysis!
Actually, what if there are a large number of different suppressed mutations in the population that all get released at the same time (because of the same environmental pressure).
Then you get a large number of different 'macro' mutations, some of which will be useless or crippling, but some of which could be beneficial. The ones that are good, survive.
That's the beuty of evolution, it is so simple. People think that it is complex, but the basic idea is as simple as you can get, just intterated over a large population and/or a long period of time. Paul
If you ever get involved in safety or security assessment you will come across things called risk-severity matrixes, that can be used as either a quantitative (probabilities and cost/lost lives etc) or qualitative method of ranking potential hazards (improbable... highly likly, negligable... catastophic). This normally gives you a partally ordered list.
In this case the straight probability might be small, but the outcome is bloody big, so this would rank as fairly high as a hazard. On the other hand, the risk of small meteorites entering the atmosphere is high, but the outcome (severity) is tiny (I think there has only been a tiny handfull of cases of people being killed), so the hazard ranking would put this very low down on the list of things to worry about.
Unfortunatly, most people only look at the severity (people scared of flying, or traveling by train because of the nature of the accidents) without the risks (car travel, more likely to die, but only a couple die at any one time).
In this case the severity is so very high, and the risk not sufficiently low, that we really have to worry about it.
Paul
Why does the dot keep posting stories about obviously-misinterpreted science news while ignoring *serious* news like the cure for 1/3 of cancers in mice from a week ago?
Because not many mice read slashdot?
Ok, I'm going to reply to myself in order to address one or two things that people have said.
/.ers to read a post before they reply? Mabey I should just move permenantly to K5, people tend to read things more.
/.ers tend to be the first to go "technology is not evil, people are!" when it is file-swapping etc, but when it is the feds then the tech itself becomes evil, not the rules and laws that are inacted by YOUR representatives, on YOUR behalf.
a) I was replying to Taco's post. He expressed the view that he didn't want anyone being able to read his e-mail, no matter how good the system was. That was the angle I was working from.
b) I am against carnivor and similar systems as they stand. Someone made a comment that Carnivor sniffs everything at the moment. That is not a reason to be against sniffing of e-mail, it is a reason to abhore Carnivor and Echelon in their present state. It is also a reason to develope alternatives as this guy from Dartmouth has done.
c) I know that the USA PATRIOT act allows tapping without warrents, but this is not just confined to e-mails, it includes normal wire taps as well. This is not a reason to be against WARRENT RESTRICTED tapping, as I said several times in my post. It is however a reason to be against the USA PATRIOT act (and in the UK the R.I.P act (although that still requires warrents.
d) Abuse of evidence. Again I agree that there is a problem with abuse of evidence. Someone mentioned that when the FBI taps a phone they are restricted in what they can listen to. What stops them? Rules, and oversight. The same thing that will stop abuse of any power. Also I doubt that any conviction would stand purly on the basis of an e-mail, most convictions in this country that are based on a single piece of very limsy evidence generally get overturned pretty quick. Agian, systems like that being developed help in the oversight. Presumably there is a combination of technical systems, and human organisation that prevents the FBI from listening to the wrong thing on a wire tap, why can't the same be done for e-mail? Hmm?
All or most of this was in the original post, but then am I expecting too much of
It's funny that
Paul
Why do people have so much of a problem with the authorities monitoring e-mail, yet don't get up in arms about straight phone tapping? The right of the police to tap your phone is no different from their right to search your home, search you or indeed put you in prison. The same goes for reading your e-mail.
/.)
Each of these powers is granted so that they can fight crime. I don't have a problem with the police having any of these powers, as long as they are restricted, i.e. you need a warrent to search someones house, or tap their phone, so you should need one to read their e-mail. I have a problem with echelon and 'fishing-trips', and the police abusing their power of search and arrest. But then thats why we have rules. Its up to us/our representatives/the judges to make sure that the police obay those rules. This is why so many cases get thrown out of court on 'technicalities', because someone broke the rules.
On the whole this is pretty well inforced in britain, for example ALL interviews with the police, MUST be taped, and there has to be a witness, (unlike in the US where recording is only reccommended. That said we do have the rather dubious RIP bill but that still requires a warrent.
So basically, if you are against (restricted, needs a warrent etc) tapping of your e-mails, you should be against the (warrented) search of properties and the (warrrented) tapping of phones.
The internet is no different from any other communications medium. If you really think that it is, or has ever been some utopian paradise of free speech somehow seperate from the real world and real world laws, where anything is allowed, then you need to get out and about a bit more.
The Internet is just another communications network, no different from any other. It is not special, just more advanced. Using the internet is no different from using a phone, or fax. You are not special, it is not special. Grow up and stop seeing the world from such a narrow viewpoint (I can't beleive I just said that on
Paul
An interesting thing to note about many of the things that are described as A.I. especially in the popular press, vision, walking, playing chess; none of them require intelligence as I think of it.
Much of the work done into mimicing vision has created systems with capabilities that in humans are achieved by hard wired parts of the brain. Movement, shape and even facial recognition are not really intelligence.
I think of intelligence as teh abiliy to reason about problems, not simply to solve them. Many of the supposed A.I. systems are just brute force search systems.
Deep blue is like any other chess system, just bigger and faster. Many problem solving systems are simply fast (normaly optomised for the problem) constraint solvers. Neural nets are simply an arbitrary system that is capable of partitioning a solution space in a non-linear fashion and the training algorithm is a search for the network values that partition the test data best. if you think that NNs are anything like real brain cells find biology student who has done some neuro-physiology and you will find there is alot more to them than just a sigmoid function and some weightings.
In fact the neural network training algorithm bears more than a parsing resemblance to simulated anealing (sp?) in its approach.
If you want to learn about machine learning algorithms check out Machine Learning by Thomas Mitchell. Small but well formed.
A quick statistic. The average grandmaster thinks something like 7 moves ahead. Deep blue plots about 15 moves ahead. I may have the numbers wrong but the ratio is about right. However it still only just beat Kasparov. That says something about the way that the human brain thinks about complex problems. This is why A.I. researchers have started to turn away from chess as a problem and towards Go. The branching factor in Go is some much larger than chess that even the best systems can be beaten by a one or two year player. Playing Go will require something more than just brute force.
Most so called A.I. is just a case of doing things quickley. As the PHBs (would probably) say, think smarter not faster. The brain is good at what it does, not just because it is massively complex and parralel, but also because of the way it simplifies many problems using clever tricks to reduce the workload.
I just think we have alot further to go than many researcher and reporters would like to think. Most of what we see these days if just 'clever' or 'smart' (like a spelling/grammer checker), not intelligent like someone designing a car engine using entiry novel techniques (not just optomising or using predefined parts).
Having said that there is some research that shows promise, such as some of the work going on at MIT with COG and co. Now that looks interesting. They arn't trying to make them smart/do clever tricks/play chess etc, but make them intelligent in the more human sense.
Anyway, I'll stop my ramblings now.
Paul
"We've gone back to basics with the educational. We've avoided multimedia for now. It's a strange sort of thing ... people talk about interactive learning, but it's actually very passive," says Kendle.
I like this man already. There has always been so much hype about using computer based multimedia in education and museums, and most of it is rubbish. People just stand there looking at computer screens.
Yes, you might be able to get lots of information but it gets pretty boring very quickly. There is nothing like the hands on displays at places like the science museum in london. Even just moving between displays is more interesting than staring at yet another screen.
Another good example of an educational museum is the Norskbremusset (Norwegen Glacier Museum) at Fjaerland Norway. Lots of hands on stuff. If you ever go to that part of Norway it is worth a look.
Paul
Basically, yes.
The idea is that some form of lander will land on Europa. Then either it, or a smaller probe carried by it will burrow down throught the ice and into the ocean below.
One approach to this may be for a bullet shaped probe to melt the ice. In the process of heating the ice the surface of the probe would be heated so high as to sterilise it. The melt water would then freeze behind the probe, sealing the surface again. The probe could then just burrow back up when it has finished.
I beleive that there is a group who plan to use the same idea to get a probe into a lake in the arctic/antarctic (can't remember which) which has ben sealed by ice for thousands of years to see what kind of life is down there.
This is only one possibility, and any mission is probably a long time in the future so who knows what we might be able to do.
However it is done, they will have to find some way of making sure that the probe is absolutly sterile.
Paul
Totally agree. I just didn't word that bit quite right.
What I meant was that you at red hat are not critically dependent on JUST the software developement, there are other things that you add, support, manuals (when did you last see a MS product with a paper manual?). Sistina are critically dependent on their own technology, made even harder in that they are now competing against there own product. Also you are building on something that is already there and adding value, in a similar way with IBM websphere (which I think uses apache, it was a year ago I last worked there but I think that's right). They buid on apache and give patches and help to the community to improve it.
Also, most (all?) of what you create goes back to the community. I think that that model is the one that will ultimatly win out, which is good for you (and your bank manager). Paul
Well put, and rather more succinct than my original posting. :->
The vast majority of open source software available has been produced by individuals or not for profit groups. Look at most of the major projects, the Linux Kernel, GNOME, KDE etc. These are not funded by companies, and if all of the companies trying to make money off of open source were to disapear tommorow, they would carry on.
Sites like ZDNet are fundamentally biased towards thinking about the world in terms of companies and their success. This is how they have always worked and why they don't understand the os world.
Yes, corperate help can speed up developement of a system but it isn't critical.
The way I see it, there are three business models that can, and have worked, and two that won't.
The Red Hat way - Selling totally open systems with support and (shock!) manuals etc. Adding something to a fundamentally free product.
The IBM way - use free software as a base for your proprietory products. Why make your own UNIX when there is a free one. Mabey give developement back to the community.
The QT way - Create a product that people have to pay for if they make money out of it, but is free if they don't
The VALinux way - This is just another dot com and isn't really about open source, they just work off the open source community. The sourceforge model is broken in the same way as...
The sistina way - Provide a product that is both open and closed source. This will fork. Unless the closed version is a long way ahead of the open version people will not pay serious money for it. GFS is not protected by the GPL in the same way as QT. I could package GFS (gpl version) with a closed source product and sell it, I can't use QT in closed source without paying.
Of these, only the first three will work. Red Hat does not depend on a massive in house development effort to produce its product (unlike sistena). IBM and QT are both profitable companies. IBM is using Linux and Apache to reduce costs, and gives a little back in return, especially where specialist development is needed, but again it does not involve a major (relative) developement effort. Trolltech makes money, but gives its product away to people who do not make any money out of it, thus increasing its visibility. I hadn't heard of QT before KDE came about.
VA Linux is just a web publisher like any other. Sistina is fighting a loosing battle against its own technology. Once something is GPL'd you can't unGPL it.
Whatever ZDNet says. Open Source will continue for the same reasons that it got started in the first place, because people enjoy writing software and creating and sharing something, and mabey for the kudos. These are the same reasons that I want to start my own project (a developent env for Prolog), not for the money, but because I enjoy it, and it would be an interesting challange. OS has never been about the money. If it had been, GNU would not exist, nor Linux, nor any of the other major components of the OS panthion (*BSD etc).
End sermon
On the whole I think you are right but some of your details are a bit off.
On Babbage:
He was a polymath. He had fingers in half a dozen differnent pies. Like many true geniuses from history he was interested in many things and that meant that he had a tendancy to stop projects and go and work on whatever new thing he was interested in. That said, what he was proposing, while it may sound obvious to us, was pretty radical (and very costly) in his day. It's a bit like fusion research today, expensive, and hard to get right.
Collosus:
The guy you are thinking of is called Tommy Flowers. He originally worked for the post office (which in those days ran the phone system). He was the brains behind Collosus. The reason he had to keep quite was the same reason that everyone who worked at station X had to. What they worked on was top secret. This had nothing to do with lack of funding. Much of the developement of the modern computer was done in British universities (especially Manchester).
Transputer:
Inmos was a private company. It's failure had little to do with the govenment. It was taken over by another company who insisted that it use a standardised design tool. it wasn't until late in the developemnet phase that a fault in the tool (something to do with timing calculations) came to light. This set back the developement by many month (if not years) and killed the company. This is what is happening in Transmeta, great, innovative tech, let down by the company that created it.
It the sad fact that many revolutionary indeviduals (i.e. those who were different, shock horror) have been persecuted or died penniless. Turing was a particularly sad case, considering what he did for the war effort, same goes for other homosexuals from history, Oscar Wilde being the prime example. The world hasn't changed that much though, people who are *different* are still persecuted, it just tends to be less obvious.
P.s.
Collosus has actually been rebuilt, see here. Sadly Tommy Flowers died soon after it was built (at the age of 92 I think).
The inmos thing might be a bit off but that is the main gist of what happened. of course if anyone who worked at inmos around that time could correct me that would be good...
You will also find that the russians now use those pens.
You can't use pencils in space for a prolonged period of time because of the graphite powder that is given off while writing. This is not a problem on earth because gravity gets it out of the way, but in space it lingers in the air and gets in the lungs, very bad for you.
This may be just the kind of mechanism that is needed here.
Have a look at freenet. I think this might be what you are looking for.
What disturbes me here is the definition of "questionable content".
I can entirely understand the removal of songs that were distastful, much in the same way games and film companies are removing references to, or images of the twin towers. That is simply a matter of taste. But banning anti-war or pro-peace songs is far more worrying. It's saying that "The US is going to war, and if you disagree then you are wrong".
The McCarthy witchhunts were ostensibly (sic) about protecting the US from the Communist Threat. The irony was that in doing so, they sacrificed the very thing they claimed to be protecting, namely freedom; to think and say what you want, and not be persecuted for it.
During the Vietnam war, people who disagreed with the policy were regarded as anti-american. The whole point of democracy is that everyones opinion, no matter how vial it may seem to others, is equally valid.
I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
We are seeing the whole Nam/McCarthy thing happening again. With the stated aim of protecting freedom, we are having it systematically removed.
Americans are now only allowed to think what they are told to think by their government and the media (which generally goes along the same lines).
In trying to destroy this evil, you are becomming what you despise.
The terrorists have done far more damage than I think they could have hoped for, and I do not think America will realise this until it is too late.
A sympathetic, and very concerned Brit.
There was a documentary (I think it was called Undeer the Veil) shown on british telly recently made by the reporter Siras Shar (Not sure about the spelling). Her parents come from Afghanistan and she sneeked into the country with the help of an underground movement. The footage that was shown was very sobering, some of it showed a football stadium (ironically built by the international community to help return normality to the country) being used for very brutal executions, hangings, stonings, shooting etc.
:->
The people in Af are under the complete control of the Taliban. They are ruled with the proverbial rod of iron (which is normally used to beat to death 13 year old girls for daring to read a book). Their interpretation of Islamic law is so extreme that most other Muslims, even the most 'orthodox'(*) ones consider it over the top.
It is seeing what can happen in a country like this that puts life in the west into perspective. We may whine about companies protecting IP, or governments introducing face recognising CCTV, but thats nothing compared to what these people are living through.
If it ever shown where you live, try and watch it. It certainly made me realise just how lucky I am. At least I have the freedom to live a normal life, go to school (although I have just finished Uni but you know what I mean), walk down the street, without risking beating, or death. And I have some say, no matter how small, in the way my country is run, I have a voice. People in Afganistan have no voice, not even a small one, especially not women, who are basically non-people.
(*) I don't like the word extremist, it smacks of American cliches about Muslims, most of whome are peaceful, honest, friendly, well educated and moral. The combative tendancy in the area is like that in europe up to about 50 years ago (ignoring the balkans), not a product of religion, just of the situation, religion just tends to fan the flames (the religious wars of europe, papal intervention in politics, the holy roman empire etc)
Here endeth the lesson
This argument could be taken even further. What if I produce a program using GPL code, and GPL it. This then exposes a CORBA interface which other programs can call. Are the IDLs deemed to be GPLed?
Also what if I take a library, wrap it up in a program (GPL it) and use IPC of some form to make the calls to the functionality in the GPLed library. If you created a library that was responsible for sending the calls down the pipes/sockects/queues etc but which appeared as a series of function calls to the user program, should that library be GPLed, it uses no GPL code, merly the protocol used by the GPLed server component (and what if the protocol was licensed before the software was written using a none GPL license and therefore was not a derrived work).
Basically we will see this becomming more and more of a problem as software is increasingly being built out of distributed runtime components (and there is nothing to say you can't use CORBA on a single machine). What is to stop me wrapping libraries in runtime object (programs, activex components, Java RMI objects etc) and then using IPC to access their functionality (distributed or otherwise). If you define the interface/protocol (CORBA IDL, XML DTD) prior to developing the system and release it under no license, and then develope the system around this interface then it can't be derived work.
I'm not saying that this isn't against the GPL, but things start to get pretty messy at this stage.
Something that is missing from the images is a scale. This can be extremely important in interpreting images. A good example where scale can be miss-used was one of Graham Hancock's (wrote Chariot of the Gods and other twaddle) claims about a plateau in south america (I forget what it is called). Basically this plateau is very high, very large and very flat. it is also very dry. It is covered in marking, some of which Hancock interpreted as alien run-ways, and indeed from the photos they did look remarkably plausable.
The problem though was that the structures were only a few feet wide, he had neglected to put a scale on the images.
Basically, many features look like something they are not, when viewed in the wrong scale. Also these images have no context, ideally there should be a pair of images, the fine resolution ones, together with a larger scale one showing the context. Ask any archiologist and they will tell you, any object is next to useless out of context.
Before I start taking any of these sorts of things seriously, I want scales and context.
Structure to rest on 3,000ft wide concrete base with lake to absorb earthquake shockwaves
Now, if my maths is right then the area that would have to be set aside for this thing is
(1500^2)*pi = approx 700000 sqr ft
This is assuming that not much else could really be built on this area.
That is 70 sqr ft per person.
Now, would you really get more people in that area by building a great big building, or by having 700000 sqr ft of mid rise (3-4 floor) housing, and which would be cheaper? Anyone know how much floor space there would be per person in this tower (there are no dimensions except the height on the times article)?
This is a serious question and not flamebait.
I just can't figure out what AmigaOS adds to a system. It runs on most OSs, which will provide process, thread and other system functionality. The Java VM provides the cross plateform capabilities. So just what does the AmigaOS provide for a program compiled to java that you don't get with just a good Java VM.
Can anyone enlighten me?
The problem with these is that they still have to emit light. There are two problems with this. The first is that they use power (not much, but some). Second (if my memory of my User Interface Design course serves me right) the eye is not designed to focus on emmitted light, it prefers reflected. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it is why it is nicer to read a book, than a computer screen (if you ignore the refresh problem). LCDs, while being able to work on reflected light, just loos too much of the light they reflect, too many layers or something (have to ask my sister, Phd in LCD physics).
The ideal display would be one where you could have a surface that had good reflective properties and could be dynamically changed. I know that MIT are working on a n ink system that you can effectively turn on and off by running it through a kind of laser printer, allowing you to repeatedly re-print onto a piece of paper (I think they managed to reprint hundreds of thousands of times without degredation). If you could do that quickly without the extra machinery then you would have the perfect display, god knows how you would get colour though. mabey some kind of electrically sensetive pigment. Obviously you would have to light it, but only as much as a paper book.
Another one that might be useful : The Nothing that is, A Natural History of Zero, Robert Kaplan.
The flowery, overly verbose language can get a bit annoying at times, but it is a reasonably interesting read.