Bunch of different, theoretically compatible standards - international patent law called into play, with those Damned Communists trying to avoid paying their patent fees....
You know, if they keep this shit up, they might just distract the MPAA from the Internet long enough for me to finish building my archive:-)
Plus, he's bogged down in all of this political BS, trying to teach people a little american history and political theory (I'm sure he envisages small children asking "mommy, what's a republic?"), trying to live up to his earlier achievements, trying to say something of Significance.
And failing miserably in the process.
Spidey just has to be a good movie. With AOTC, Lucas had to live up to the legacy. And blew it.
It isn't: minidisc went through all this ten years ago, resulting in abominations like the "data / music firewall" (which is why you can't buy an MD drive for your computer, and why MD was never sold as a data storage format on a significant scale), why you can't copy your own music infinitely on Minidisc, and why hardware which unsets the copy protection bit is so hard to find.
The internet is just the next digital technology to come under the hammer.
You may laugh! Once you realize that this is really about an industry trying to get the same protection for it's warez that the government gives cash, the whole thing takes on an entirely different light, doesn't it?
To identify copyright violators online, and drag them to court, requires strong identity verification for transactions on the internet: you'll be accountable for everything you do on line, and surveilance will be mandatory to enforce copyright law: it's the equivalent of the russian system of watching every photocopier to make sure nobody is copying anti-Sovient propoganda.
* each copy of a given bill degrades it's value (dilution of currency by counterfieting)
* the owner of the bill (the Federal Government - well, probably the Federal Reserve actually) asks you not to copy it and takes technological measures to ensure that you do not.
The analogy is worth while if only because it highlights what I see as the real problem: you can't run a digital economy without property rights.
No, I'm not trolling, I'm dead serious: just because their solution is broken doesn't mean that there is no problem here: either bits have no value, or if they have value, that value has to either be:
1> given away
2> protected
Do you see any other options?
Stealing things is wrong: if Microsoft sold a product based on a modified Linux kernel, we'd scream blue murder and drag them into court.
But it's OK to download music?
We've got a double standard going on here: the GPL rests on copyright, but we don't want to enable big companies to implement technical measures to protect their copyrights....
If we don't take responsibility and solve this problem, it's going to get solved for us and we aren't going to like it one little bit.
If bits have inherant value, like cash (the Hollywood stance) then what Hollywood wants is bits which are as hard to copy as cash it, or preferrably harder.
We call it copying, they call it counterfeiting.
I can see their point: if I could walk up to any photocopier and digitally reproduce my twenty dollar bill, our economy really would be in trouble!
If it became impossible to protect cash from copying, all we'd have left is credit cards and other centralized systems for storing money: banks and the like, which prevent copying of money via tools like "accountancy".
I think, if we're serious about the so-called "digital economy", we better face this as a serious problem and propose a constructive solution, rather than running around like a bunch of children complaining because they can't photocopy twenties any more.
[ok, how much karma can I burn in a single post, huh?]
Although calling something free and charging five bucks for it is kinda scummy, at least these folks are punching a hole through the perception that there's something expensive about producing a CD.
although calling something free and charging five bucks for it is kinda scummy, at least these folks are punching a hole through the perception that there's something expensive about producing a CD.
15 bucks is NOT reasonable, and was the price point initially agreed upon to finance the cost to convert to the new format (i.e. from vinyl). CDs were supposed to cost about eight bucks in stores.
There is a chance, however, that this aesthetic has run it's course: that the notion of "science through simplicity (and logical depth!)" may be about to be augmented by a "new kind of science" - one which is much more about checking through those lists of a thousand cases, for example.
I'm not saying "this is so" - but it might be, and there's some evidence.
Well, equally it's not likely to be 1200 pages of "oh, by the way, complex systems exist" - though I do agree that most of what we're discussing here is stuff which was kinda-sorta controversial ten or fifteen years ago.
No. The universe can be described by calculus and difficult equations.
That's a philosophical rather than a practical distinction: we still don't know squat about why mathematics describes physics so well: it's an open question and may largely be about definitions.
Me: Phenomena like life, geology and the like are very badly behaved with respect to our standard mathematical tools and we all know this.
You: No they're not. It's just that in order to model biological phenomena very well, you have to do finite state analysis on a very fine scale
This is just re-creating the system "in silico" rather than "in vivo" - you have not gained understanding of the system by recreating it in another medium: there's no new law or discovery here, bar
1> what you learn by making the simulator work
2> what you learn from performing experiments on the simulator
It's likely to be productive, but it's not the same as discovering Newton's laws of motion or something.
It's a problem of HYPE - and there's HYPE written all over this book.
Hype is a standard part of science, particularly old science: the shenanigans around the emergence of the calculus, for example, were nothing short of theatrical.
You can't discount the work just because Wolfram has some style:-):-):-):-):-)
As a way of framing this more generally, let's suppose that a test of valid scientific models of reality is quantatative predictions - you can use your model to predict, numerically, the behavior or range of behaviors of a given physical system.
One possible outcome of all this is that there will turn out to be a "paring" of Wolfram's toy systems and real world phenomena like weather or fluid dynamics or crowd behaviors or stock markets: you can populate a cellular automata with data from the real world, run it a few million times, and come out with predictions about the likely behavior of the system you were looking at.
You may not know why the systems are coupled, but they seem to be.
At this point, if we ever reach it, I would say that Wolfram's work would now have significance in the same ball park as any other discovery of systems which are coupled to the real world: Calculus, for example, or any of the major physical laws.
Just because the coupled system is not normal mathematics doesn't mean it isn't science.
Now, I'm not sure we're going to see this kind of predictive modeling from Wolfram's work, but it's the acid test, isn't it?
is that the observable universe is defined by calculus and differential equations in very small areas: planetery motion, for example, or atomic physics.
Phenomena like life, geology and the like are very badly behaved with respect to our standard mathematical tools and we all know this.
Wolfram is suggesting that cellular automata provide a simple framework for examining the phenomena outside of the "magic circle" of the calculus: i.e. most of life and the universe.
Of course, for a long time we've confused hard science with the application of calculus, which has effected what we consider "science" to be: if it is not an equation, we don't think it's scientific.
Well,
1> go talk to some biologists
2> get used to it: equations got us this far, but after this it may be increasingly about computation.
Consider, for example, the Four Color Theorem - the only existing proof of which requires a lot of computer power to grind through cases. Is it a valid proof? Probably - but not to the standards of mathematicians who grew up in the pre-computer age, to whom an exhaustively checked list of cases does not look like mathematics at all.
We'll see how Wolfram's work fares over time, but my bet is that it will fare Quite Well.
but compared to gigabit ethernet, it's really not all that fast, particularly when you start splitting it over an office or some such.
Well, I read it, and I can't see any patterns...
on
Ten Technology Disasters
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously: ten catastrophic goofs, but I don't see anything which really ties them together!
Am I missing something?
Yeah, sure "Don't cut corners" and "Don't trust management who would like to cut corners", but that's pretty obvious and we all still do it, right?
There's also some stuff like "Watch when retrofitting parts of an old system with new technology" and "pay attention to boundry conditions", but really I think this is just a laundry list.
So does anybody know of a good reference work out there which actually has some worthwhile analysis on stuff like this? Didn't Feynmann write something up after Challenger?
A lot of problems in third world development and disaster relief are not cash-limited, they're brain limited: we really do not know the best ways of treating epidemics in places without any decent high tech infrastructure, for example. Innovative ideas and approaches help: I've seen structures at Burning Man which were a lot better for their purpose than yer average disaster relief tent.
I think opening the design process up to the widest possible collaboration and really encouraging people to follow through could make a difference: kinda like the Simputer project may: a diversity of minds, of approaches, may be the best way to help the poor and the starving.
We can't wait for government to feed the people, you know? Too big, too slow. It's up to us. And it always has been - this is just one more way to help.
Gerald Bull who shot to fame as the inventor of the Iraqi Super Gun did a lot of work on constant pressure launch systems - enormous cannons with explosives positioned along the barrel to keep the pressure behind the projectile constant for the full launch length.
Estimated cost to LEO? $1 per pound.
Because the shock was distributed along the acceleration, maximum G force on the load was 40G: fine for food and fuel and most construction supplies.
Slashdot Mirror
Bunch of different, theoretically compatible standards - international patent law called into play, with those Damned Communists trying to avoid paying their patent fees....
:-)
You know, if they keep this shit up, they might just distract the MPAA from the Internet long enough for me to finish building my archive
Lucas has lost his touch!
Plus, he's bogged down in all of this political BS, trying to teach people a little american history and political theory (I'm sure he envisages small children asking "mommy, what's a republic?"), trying to live up to his earlier achievements, trying to say something of Significance.
And failing miserably in the process.
Spidey just has to be a good movie. With AOTC, Lucas had to live up to the legacy. And blew it.
Right. A set of commercial agreements which completely stifled fair use of the technology. Does this sound familiar to you?
The BPDG is the same routine, all over again, but with more government backing.
Minidisc never got to the legislative stage because Sony cut a deal with the music companies.
If we don't provide an alternative, then eventually one of these completely brain damaged pieces of legislation will pass, and then where will we be?
It isn't: minidisc went through all this ten years ago, resulting in abominations like the "data / music firewall" (which is why you can't buy an MD drive for your computer, and why MD was never sold as a data storage format on a significant scale), why you can't copy your own music infinitely on Minidisc, and why hardware which unsets the copy protection bit is so hard to find.
The internet is just the next digital technology to come under the hammer.
You may laugh! Once you realize that this is really about an industry trying to get the same protection for it's warez that the government gives cash, the whole thing takes on an entirely different light, doesn't it?
To identify copyright violators online, and drag them to court, requires strong identity verification for transactions on the internet: you'll be accountable for everything you do on line, and surveilance will be mandatory to enforce copyright law: it's the equivalent of the russian system of watching every photocopier to make sure nobody is copying anti-Sovient propoganda.
Is that what you want?
I didn't think so. Next solution?
But there are also significant similarities:
* each copy of a given bill degrades it's value (dilution of currency by counterfieting)
* the owner of the bill (the Federal Government - well, probably the Federal Reserve actually) asks you not to copy it and takes technological measures to ensure that you do not.
The analogy is worth while if only because it highlights what I see as the real problem: you can't run a digital economy without property rights.
No, I'm not trolling, I'm dead serious: just because their solution is broken doesn't mean that there is no problem here: either bits have no value, or if they have value, that value has to either be:
1> given away
2> protected
Do you see any other options?
Stealing things is wrong: if Microsoft sold a product based on a modified Linux kernel, we'd scream blue murder and drag them into court.
But it's OK to download music?
We've got a double standard going on here: the GPL rests on copyright, but we don't want to enable big companies to implement technical measures to protect their copyrights....
If we don't take responsibility and solve this problem, it's going to get solved for us and we aren't going to like it one little bit.
If bits have inherant value, like cash (the Hollywood stance) then what Hollywood wants is bits which are as hard to copy as cash it, or preferrably harder.
We call it copying, they call it counterfeiting.
I can see their point: if I could walk up to any photocopier and digitally reproduce my twenty dollar bill, our economy really would be in trouble!
If it became impossible to protect cash from copying, all we'd have left is credit cards and other centralized systems for storing money: banks and the like, which prevent copying of money via tools like "accountancy".
I think, if we're serious about the so-called "digital economy", we better face this as a serious problem and propose a constructive solution, rather than running around like a bunch of children complaining because they can't photocopy twenties any more.
[ok, how much karma can I burn in a single post, huh?]
Really, at the end of the day, nobody gives a shit what OS the POS is running: as long as it's doing it's job, who cares?
Very much like the server market - as long as it works, nobody gives a damn what OS is running.
I'd say this is an ideal niche, and there's no reason to use anything *else* on a POS, is there?
Although calling something free and charging five bucks for it is kinda scummy, at least these folks are punching a hole through the perception that there's something expensive about producing a CD.
although calling something free and charging five bucks for it is kinda scummy, at least these folks are punching a hole through the perception that there's something expensive about producing a CD.
15 bucks is NOT reasonable, and was the price point initially agreed upon to finance the cost to convert to the new format (i.e. from vinyl). CDs were supposed to cost about eight bucks in stores.
Well said! I wish you'd chipped in more earlier!
There is a chance, however, that this aesthetic has run it's course: that the notion of "science through simplicity (and logical depth!)" may be about to be augmented by a "new kind of science" - one which is much more about checking through those lists of a thousand cases, for example.
I'm not saying "this is so" - but it might be, and there's some evidence.
Is this Wolfram's point? I'd say so!
Well, equally it's not likely to be 1200 pages of "oh, by the way, complex systems exist" - though I do agree that most of what we're discussing here is stuff which was kinda-sorta controversial ten or fifteen years ago.
Ha!!! Postgres is TOO SLOW to compute my AWESOME WEALTH!
Python? The CONSTANT INSERTION OF "L" BEHIND MY DOLLARS OFFENDS!
Fie!
I recon you can't beat MySQL and Perl for all of your financial needs :-)
No. The universe can be described by calculus and difficult equations.
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
That's a philosophical rather than a practical distinction: we still don't know squat about why mathematics describes physics so well: it's an open question and may largely be about definitions.
Me:
Phenomena like life, geology and the like are very badly behaved with respect to our standard mathematical tools and we all know this.
You:
No they're not. It's just that in order to model biological phenomena very well, you have to do finite state analysis on a very fine scale
This is just re-creating the system "in silico" rather than "in vivo" - you have not gained understanding of the system by recreating it in another medium: there's no new law or discovery here, bar
1> what you learn by making the simulator work
2> what you learn from performing experiments on the simulator
It's likely to be productive, but it's not the same as discovering Newton's laws of motion or something.
It's a problem of HYPE - and there's HYPE written all over this book.
Hype is a standard part of science, particularly old science: the shenanigans around the emergence of the calculus, for example, were nothing short of theatrical.
You can't discount the work just because Wolfram has some style
As a way of framing this more generally, let's suppose that a test of valid scientific models of reality is quantatative predictions - you can use your model to predict, numerically, the behavior or range of behaviors of a given physical system.
One possible outcome of all this is that there will turn out to be a "paring" of Wolfram's toy systems and real world phenomena like weather or fluid dynamics or crowd behaviors or stock markets: you can populate a cellular automata with data from the real world, run it a few million times, and come out with predictions about the likely behavior of the system you were looking at.
You may not know why the systems are coupled, but they seem to be.
At this point, if we ever reach it, I would say that Wolfram's work would now have significance in the same ball park as any other discovery of systems which are coupled to the real world: Calculus, for example, or any of the major physical laws.
Just because the coupled system is not normal mathematics doesn't mean it isn't science.
Now, I'm not sure we're going to see this kind of predictive modeling from Wolfram's work, but it's the acid test, isn't it?
is that the observable universe is defined by calculus and differential equations in very small areas: planetery motion, for example, or atomic physics.
Phenomena like life, geology and the like are very badly behaved with respect to our standard mathematical tools and we all know this.
Wolfram is suggesting that cellular automata provide a simple framework for examining the phenomena outside of the "magic circle" of the calculus: i.e. most of life and the universe.
Of course, for a long time we've confused hard science with the application of calculus, which has effected what we consider "science" to be: if it is not an equation, we don't think it's scientific.
Well,
1> go talk to some biologists
2> get used to it: equations got us this far, but after this it may be increasingly about computation.
Consider, for example, the Four Color Theorem - the only existing proof of which requires a lot of computer power to grind through cases. Is it a valid proof? Probably - but not to the standards of mathematicians who grew up in the pre-computer age, to whom an exhaustively checked list of cases does not look like mathematics at all.
We'll see how Wolfram's work fares over time, but my bet is that it will fare Quite Well.
but compared to gigabit ethernet, it's really not all that fast, particularly when you start splitting it over an office or some such.
Seriously: ten catastrophic goofs, but I don't see anything which really ties them together!
Am I missing something?
Yeah, sure "Don't cut corners" and "Don't trust management who would like to cut corners", but that's pretty obvious and we all still do it, right?
There's also some stuff like "Watch when retrofitting parts of an old system with new technology" and "pay attention to boundry conditions", but really I think this is just a laundry list.
So does anybody know of a good reference work out there which actually has some worthwhile analysis on stuff like this? Didn't Feynmann write something up after Challenger?
for the air traffic control system for the airport you're about to land at.... and you notice a bug.... or a long jump... :-)
Perhaps there are some things it's better not to know!
A lot of problems in third world development and disaster relief are not cash-limited, they're brain limited: we really do not know the best ways of treating epidemics in places without any decent high tech infrastructure, for example. Innovative ideas and approaches help: I've seen structures at Burning Man which were a lot better for their purpose than yer average disaster relief tent.
I think opening the design process up to the widest possible collaboration and really encouraging people to follow through could make a difference: kinda like the Simputer project may: a diversity of minds, of approaches, may be the best way to help the poor and the starving.
We can't wait for government to feed the people, you know? Too big, too slow. It's up to us. And it always has been - this is just one more way to help.
Gerald Bull who shot to fame as the inventor of the Iraqi Super Gun did a lot of work on constant pressure launch systems - enormous cannons with explosives positioned along the barrel to keep the pressure behind the projectile constant for the full launch length.
Estimated cost to LEO? $1 per pound.
Because the shock was distributed along the acceleration, maximum G force on the load was 40G: fine for food and fuel and most construction supplies.
You can read more about his work at Federation of American Scientists Supergun pages, [2], and at NASA.
There really is more than one way to do it.