>Maybe because the police force is for the most part reactive, not proactive?
So? What do you expect them to do? Walk two paces behind known villains till they do a crime?
>Think about it. It takes, on average, five to ten
>minutes for a police car to make it to a scene
>after a call comes in.
Cops have to be on the beat for 65 years (roughly) before coming across a crime in progress! In the modern world we have this technology called, wait for it, the MOTORCAR. You should try one sometime, they're much faster than walking. No, really, they're pretty good!
>Finally, a tale of two areas: crime went down in Texas after the concealed
>handgun permit went into effect. Crime in Australia skyrocketed after they started outlawing
>THEIR firearms.
Proves nothing. There were tax changes by the government both years. That may have triggered the crime spree! (Sure. Probably not... but nobody can prove that it didn't and it conceivably could have) Correlation only proves something if you do it enough times that the random variations cancel out. Twice is about 100x too few times to work something like this from that sort of data and its simply not provable if you have deliberately chosen the only examples that happen to 'prove' the point you were trying to prove and ignoring another huge set where your theory didn't work. Not that I'm accusing you of doing that but in 10 other cases in Outer Mongolia that was the case.
I feel blessed! A classic 'I don't care whether its illegal or not, it's right(!) darn it(!) to do X' statement. Haven't seen one of them in a few weeks now!
Atleast one court has already so decided it was illegal. Not MY logic I'm afraid. Perhaps the law is wrong. Still in a democracy we only really have the law; and as you demonstrate so well, ethics do vary.
It also hasn't shown particularly that they have a clue anywhere except a certain monopolistic operating system. Also a few closely associated applications where they illegally leveraged the operating system to gain market share e.g. wordprocessors (allegedly), web browsers (as found by a court)...
Nothing kills quicker than believing your own press.
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these babies ;-)
on
IBM Linux Watch v2.0
·
· Score: 2
Well, it would keep your arm warm, at the rate these watches drain their battery.
Wonder if they require an external fan?
On a slightly more useful note, if you connected up to IP (in the UK you can use GSM phones) you could have VOIP, Dick Tracy style. Then again you could just use the phone, but this is slashdot, news for Nerds, Dammit!
Emotions are just things that animals/humans have evolved to enhance survival of genes.
Jealousy? That's someone have sex with someone you want.
Anger? That's someone who has just taken your food.
Love? Someone you want to perpetuate your genes with.
The point is that AI can have just the same emotions and for the same reasons. The digital genes (and all genes are digital in fact) behave very much the same.
Re:Not: Re:why suprised? They HAVE TO RELEASE CODE
on
NSA Linux In Depth
·
· Score: 2
Not.
I'm saying that the new NSA code isn't GPLd.
I don't beleive that the NSA have decopyrighted Linux. (OTOH the GPL has never been tested in court so you never know.)
Re:Not: Re:why suprised? They HAVE TO RELEASE CODE
on
NSA Linux In Depth
·
· Score: 2
No. My theory is that works BY the government can't be legally copyrighted, and hence can't use the GPL as protection.
No they or anyone else CAN distribute it, but the government works aren't protected by copyright, and thus are unprotected by the GPL.
Anyone can rip them off, modify it further, and charge or not; binary only if they wish.
Of course if the government took a GPL'd program initially and changed it the software itself would still be copyright the author- the government can't steal copyright by mere modification or addition.
Not: Re:why suprised? They HAVE TO RELEASE CODE
on
NSA Linux In Depth
·
· Score: 1
If you check copyright law, government isn't bound by it. NSA is a government organisation.
GPL is based on copyright isn't it?
ergo: GPL doesn't apply to the government. They can do more or less whatever they want, even AFAIK legally charge for their changes and not release source.
"Normal" people think the same about this; where are the copy protected CD drives? Except in a few specialist areas, there aren't any. Same with videos, same with audio cassettes. It isn't because copy protected systems hard to make, it's because few people would buy one except where a monopoly exists that forces them to.
Still, even though the schemes aren't hard to make, ultimately they always fail. As soon as you have hardware designed to protect something placed in an environment where it can be taken apart by the owner, or the output recorded in some way, you soon have a non protected thing IMNHO.
Besides, don't underate the POWER OF SLASHDOT!
The number of times I have seen a story in slashdot and then later seen the same story somewhere else- I think some journalists read slashdot. It's only sensible.
Journalists do have significant power over the thoughts of population. Slashdot is all powerfull.;-)
If your work is owned by the DOD as they claim, then it probably counts as government work.
Check out:
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html
it seems to imply that you may not be able to apply copyright in this case, and if so, then the GPL probably doesn't apply anyway because it's based on a license to waive copyright in certain cases.
All looks very complex. It depends on who owns the software.
>you still have the same volume of stuff to get into orbit
Not true:
a) you're higher up (this is hardly any help- 93% of attaining orbit involves going sidewise very fast, the other 7% is going up 70 km or so.)
b) the atmosphere is thinner so there are less aerodynamic losses
c) rocket nozzles generally like less backpressure which you get at higher altitude
Other points:
1) energy budget is irrelevant for rockets- rockets don't conserve energy in the sense that most of the energy ends up in the exhaust.
2) takeoff weight is crucial for the aircraft part- once in the air the weight of fuel is often supported by aerodynamics, on the ground it has to be supported by metal that you have to carry with you later
3) range control is going to be a lot easier, the rocketry can happen over ocean and it won't land on someones head
4) this proposal is fully reusable, normally rockets are not very reusable
Scramjets? That's where unobtainium comes in doesn't it?
Economies of scale nearly always reduce cost; there's no known reason why that won't extend to space also.
The question is, is there anything about this idea that can reduce the standing army normally needed with rocketry? Clearly there is because this technology seems fully reusable, unlike the space shuttle; secondly this launch platform may well be further away from the bleeding edge of performance because it has two liquid fueled engines. That will help to keep costs down.
Incidentally, energy isn't the problem in rocketry; the real question here is takeoff mass- is it reduced or increased with all this mucking about? I expect that that's really what the study will be looking.
>A self-healing material sounds marvellous, but the fact is, as in real life, things need to
>break, as part of the natural cycle - if not, there is a potentially greater risk to us.
You're assuming that the material will wear out more slowly. In some cases that may happen, but in many cases it won't- a lot of wearing out is caused by surface effects, and the glue won't help there much.
This technology mainly reduces the chance that the part will catastophically fail- it will not usually increase the life; but it may increase the production yield, which tends to cut product costs without materially affecting manpower levels.
Yes, or you make the fabber assemble the parts when it is done. Or it is self assembling in some simple way.
Although the geometrically smaller fabber is useful until scaling laws start to bite; but the biggest problem is simply that it can only deal with a linear amount of energy and material, whereas Von Neumann machines can handle an infinite amount of both.
No, I'm saying that even wise/smart people make dumb predictions about impossibility/timelines. EVEN the smart ones.
As to the idea that this technology is lame, I kind of buy that right now. Still, all it takes is one killer app and... phooomb. Something comparable to what the web did to the internet may well happen here.
Also there's a lot of materials out there; you can bet that some combination of these materials are cost effective/useful.
"I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would
not fly for fifty years...Ever since, I have distrusted myself and
avoided all predictions."
Think about it, if you can put the recipe to build a fabber into a fabber...
This means that to start with you have 1 fabber. Then 2. Then 4, then 8 then...
This capability would be useful in some situations, particularly if you are in space and next to an asteroid you wish to mine. Run the fabbers for 16-30 generations and then switch to making mining equipment.
In space when you are next to an asteroid you have a) fairly unlimited materials and b) unlimited power (solar 1.6kw/m^2).
That combination is very useful.
Re:I expect it will make no difference at all.
on
Quake on IPv6
·
· Score: 2
Lag is caused by three things:
a) Einstein (well actually maxwell's laws) i.e. speed of light delay. But this is usually quite small e.g. UK to East Coast US is about 3000km i.e. maybe 30 milliseconds delay allowing for the refractive index of fiber
b) Hops (each machine adds a certain minimum delay, depending on the hardware/software on that host)
c) heavy traffic (when there are lots of packets, the lengths of queues increase, and introduce delays)
Anyway the point is that you can't do anything about a), [short of digging a straight line between the two sites(!), or moving yourselves closer together], b) you might change with extreme difficulty if at all.
However c) is a variable delay and relates to the lack of quality of service guarantees by the network. The kicker here is that the IP6 has protocols that can give guarantees (excepting network failures once the connection is set up).
c) is probably dominant or important in quite a lot of situations, and yes, IP6 does or atleast can help.
Also, in a Quake scenario, any reduction in variation translates into a big help. Variable delays can make it very difficult to play. Playing Quake with what amounts to a higher priority link compared to web page downloads or ftp sessions is a godsend - it isn't as if Quake uses much bandwidth, but it is very timing sensitive.
Um, actually... they're not COMPLETELY independent.
The earth rotates on its axis every 23 hours 56 minutes, rather than 24. You can check this by using the stars.
The 24 hour bit is caused by the fact that the earth is in orbit around the sun causing the sun to illuminate the earth from different angles at different times of year.
Basically the earths orbit ends up subtracting off a day from the year. Kinda like the same way that they lost a day if you've ever read "Around the world in 80 days." - the sun is moving east all th e time in the sky.
Therefore if the year's length changes the length of the day would change too, probably shorter by a minute or two.
IMO He's VERY confused because he associates the operating system/device drivers with the behaviour of the UI. The two are so completely at a different level that it makes my nose bleed just thinking about it. Still there is a connection there, and he has a point, but I'll see if I can clarify it.
The point is that of configuration control over an operating system and installed applications- i.e. interdependency checking both between applications, but also between applications and device drivers and applications and devices and drivers, even between kernels and applications.
e.g. I would like to install say, a wordprocessor. Let's say that the wordprocessor is only supported on 2.4.2 kernel with a particular 3D accelerator device driver. In principle I should just be able to go to it, and click on an web page and it should download and run it without ANY further intervention. However if this would introduce an incompatibility between ANOTHER app and the kernel or some device driver, my system should tell me and let me decide whether I really want to do this.
Another example how dependency checking can be made better: suppose I am running, say, bind, and it turns out that bind has a security issue. The security issue may not be publicised, but a new patched copy is available- the system should automatically find it and ask if I wish to install it. (Yes, I know that Microsoft already does that kind of thing, Linux needs it too! Only we'll do it better;-)
Slashdot Mirror
>Maybe because the police force is for the most part reactive, not proactive?
So? What do you expect them to do? Walk two paces behind known villains till they do a crime?
>Think about it. It takes, on average, five to ten
>minutes for a police car to make it to a scene
>after a call comes in.
Cops have to be on the beat for 65 years (roughly) before coming across a crime in progress! In the modern world we have this technology called, wait for it, the MOTORCAR. You should try one sometime, they're much faster than walking. No, really, they're pretty good!
>Finally, a tale of two areas: crime went down in Texas after the concealed
>handgun permit went into effect. Crime in Australia skyrocketed after they started outlawing
>THEIR firearms.
Proves nothing. There were tax changes by the government both years. That may have triggered the crime spree! (Sure. Probably not... but nobody can prove that it didn't and it conceivably could have) Correlation only proves something if you do it enough times that the random variations cancel out. Twice is about 100x too few times to work something like this from that sort of data and its simply not provable if you have deliberately chosen the only examples that happen to 'prove' the point you were trying to prove and ignoring another huge set where your theory didn't work. Not that I'm accusing you of doing that but in 10 other cases in Outer Mongolia that was the case.
I feel blessed! A classic 'I don't care whether its illegal or not, it's right(!) darn it(!) to do X' statement. Haven't seen one of them in a few weeks now!
Atleast one court has already so decided it was illegal. Not MY logic I'm afraid. Perhaps the law is wrong. Still in a democracy we only really have the law; and as you demonstrate so well, ethics do vary.
It also hasn't shown particularly that they have a clue anywhere except a certain monopolistic operating system. Also a few closely associated applications where they illegally leveraged the operating system to gain market share e.g. wordprocessors (allegedly), web browsers (as found by a court)...
Nothing kills quicker than believing your own press.
Well, it would keep your arm warm, at the rate these watches drain their battery.
;-)
Wonder if they require an external fan?
On a slightly more useful note, if you connected up to IP (in the UK you can use GSM phones) you could have VOIP, Dick Tracy style. Then again you could just use the phone, but this is slashdot, news for Nerds, Dammit!
Where DO you plug the sound card in anyway?
AI creatures don't climb artificial mountains.
Of course not;
Because it isn't there.
Emotions are just things that animals/humans have evolved to enhance survival of genes.
Jealousy? That's someone have sex with someone you want.
Anger? That's someone who has just taken your food.
Love? Someone you want to perpetuate your genes with.
The point is that AI can have just the same emotions and for the same reasons. The digital genes (and all genes are digital in fact) behave very much the same.
Not.
I'm saying that the new NSA code isn't GPLd.
I don't beleive that the NSA have decopyrighted Linux. (OTOH the GPL has never been tested in court so you never know.)
No. My theory is that works BY the government can't be legally copyrighted, and hence can't use the GPL as protection.
No they or anyone else CAN distribute it, but the government works aren't protected by copyright, and thus are unprotected by the GPL.
Anyone can rip them off, modify it further, and charge or not; binary only if they wish.
Of course if the government took a GPL'd program initially and changed it the software itself would still be copyright the author- the government can't steal copyright by mere modification or addition.
GPL is based on copyright isn't it?
ergo: GPL doesn't apply to the government. They can do more or less whatever they want, even AFAIK legally charge for their changes and not release source.
"Normal" people think the same about this; where are the copy protected CD drives? Except in a few specialist areas, there aren't any. Same with videos, same with audio cassettes. It isn't because copy protected systems hard to make, it's because few people would buy one except where a monopoly exists that forces them to.
;-)
Still, even though the schemes aren't hard to make, ultimately they always fail. As soon as you have hardware designed to protect something placed in an environment where it can be taken apart by the owner, or the output recorded in some way, you soon have a non protected thing IMNHO.
Besides, don't underate the POWER OF SLASHDOT!
The number of times I have seen a story in slashdot and then later seen the same story somewhere else- I think some journalists read slashdot. It's only sensible.
Journalists do have significant power over the thoughts of population. Slashdot is all powerfull.
Instead there is a device called a Josephson Junction that can switch at terahertz frequencies.
Check out the Scientific American article.
IMO Josephson Junctions would make for a great CPU!
If your work is owned by the DOD as they claim, then it probably counts as government work.
Check out:
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html
it seems to imply that you may not be able to apply copyright in this case, and if so, then the GPL probably doesn't apply anyway because it's based on a license to waive copyright in certain cases.
All looks very complex. It depends on who owns the software.
>you still have the same volume of stuff to get into orbit
Not true:
a) you're higher up (this is hardly any help- 93% of attaining orbit involves going sidewise very fast, the other 7% is going up 70 km or so.)
b) the atmosphere is thinner so there are less aerodynamic losses
c) rocket nozzles generally like less backpressure which you get at higher altitude
Other points:
1) energy budget is irrelevant for rockets- rockets don't conserve energy in the sense that most of the energy ends up in the exhaust.
2) takeoff weight is crucial for the aircraft part- once in the air the weight of fuel is often supported by aerodynamics, on the ground it has to be supported by metal that you have to carry with you later
3) range control is going to be a lot easier, the rocketry can happen over ocean and it won't land on someones head
4) this proposal is fully reusable, normally rockets are not very reusable
Scramjets? That's where unobtainium comes in doesn't it?
I would add a third thing more critical thing:
3) launch often
Economies of scale nearly always reduce cost; there's no known reason why that won't extend to space also.
The question is, is there anything about this idea that can reduce the standing army normally needed with rocketry? Clearly there is because this technology seems fully reusable, unlike the space shuttle; secondly this launch platform may well be further away from the bleeding edge of performance because it has two liquid fueled engines. That will help to keep costs down.
Incidentally, energy isn't the problem in rocketry; the real question here is takeoff mass- is it reduced or increased with all this mucking about? I expect that that's really what the study will be looking.
Cool jacket!
Where could I buy such a jacket?
Maybe 'Deal with it' could be on the back.
;-)
>A self-healing material sounds marvellous, but the fact is, as in real life, things need to
>break, as part of the natural cycle - if not, there is a potentially greater risk to us.
You're assuming that the material will wear out more slowly. In some cases that may happen, but in many cases it won't- a lot of wearing out is caused by surface effects, and the glue won't help there much.
This technology mainly reduces the chance that the part will catastophically fail- it will not usually increase the life; but it may increase the production yield, which tends to cut product costs without materially affecting manpower levels.
Yes, or you make the fabber assemble the parts when it is done. Or it is self assembling in some simple way.
Although the geometrically smaller fabber is useful until scaling laws start to bite; but the biggest problem is simply that it can only deal with a linear amount of energy and material, whereas Von Neumann machines can handle an infinite amount of both.
No, I'm saying that even wise/smart people make dumb predictions about impossibility/timelines. EVEN the smart ones.
As to the idea that this technology is lame, I kind of buy that right now. Still, all it takes is one killer app and... phooomb. Something comparable to what the web did to the internet may well happen here.
Also there's a lot of materials out there; you can bet that some combination of these materials are cost effective/useful.
The technology seems pregnant to me.
"I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would
not fly for fifty years...Ever since, I have distrusted myself and
avoided all predictions."
Wilbur Wright, U.S. aviation pioneer, 1908.
Think about it, if you can put the recipe to build a fabber into a fabber...
This means that to start with you have 1 fabber. Then 2. Then 4, then 8 then...
This capability would be useful in some situations, particularly if you are in space and next to an asteroid you wish to mine. Run the fabbers for 16-30 generations and then switch to making mining equipment.
In space when you are next to an asteroid you have a) fairly unlimited materials and b) unlimited power (solar 1.6kw/m^2).
That combination is very useful.
Lag is caused by three things:
a) Einstein (well actually maxwell's laws) i.e. speed of light delay. But this is usually quite small e.g. UK to East Coast US is about 3000km i.e. maybe 30 milliseconds delay allowing for the refractive index of fiber
b) Hops (each machine adds a certain minimum delay, depending on the hardware/software on that host)
c) heavy traffic (when there are lots of packets, the lengths of queues increase, and introduce delays)
Anyway the point is that you can't do anything about a), [short of digging a straight line between the two sites(!), or moving yourselves closer together], b) you might change with extreme difficulty if at all.
However c) is a variable delay and relates to the lack of quality of service guarantees by the network. The kicker here is that the IP6 has protocols that can give guarantees (excepting network failures once the connection is set up).
c) is probably dominant or important in quite a lot of situations, and yes, IP6 does or atleast can help.
Also, in a Quake scenario, any reduction in variation translates into a big help. Variable delays can make it very difficult to play. Playing Quake with what amounts to a higher priority link compared to web page downloads or ftp sessions is a godsend - it isn't as if Quake uses much bandwidth, but it is very timing sensitive.
Um, actually... they're not COMPLETELY independent.
The earth rotates on its axis every 23 hours 56 minutes, rather than 24. You can check this by using the stars.
The 24 hour bit is caused by the fact that the earth is in orbit around the sun causing the sun to illuminate the earth from different angles at different times of year.
Basically the earths orbit ends up subtracting off a day from the year. Kinda like the same way that they lost a day if you've ever read "Around the world in 80 days." - the sun is moving east all th e time in the sky.
Therefore if the year's length changes the length of the day would change too, probably shorter by a minute or two.
IMO He's VERY confused because he associates the operating system/device drivers with the behaviour of the UI. The two are so completely at a different level that it makes my nose bleed just thinking about it. Still there is a connection there, and he has a point, but I'll see if I can clarify it.
;-)
The point is that of configuration control over an operating system and installed applications- i.e. interdependency checking both between applications, but also between applications and device drivers and applications and devices and drivers, even between kernels and applications.
e.g. I would like to install say, a wordprocessor. Let's say that the wordprocessor is only supported on 2.4.2 kernel with a particular 3D accelerator device driver. In principle I should just be able to go to it, and click on an web page and it should download and run it without ANY further intervention. However if this would introduce an incompatibility between ANOTHER app and the kernel or some device driver, my system should tell me and let me decide whether I really want to do this.
Another example how dependency checking can be made better: suppose I am running, say, bind, and it turns out that bind has a security issue. The security issue may not be publicised, but a new patched copy is available- the system should automatically find it and ask if I wish to install it. (Yes, I know that Microsoft already does that kind of thing, Linux needs it too! Only we'll do it better
"a static growth rate"
I actually laughed at that one. Not a flat market share. A static *growth* rate.
e.g. Linux is growing at 5% a year; i.e. exponential growth
That's a sure sign of impending doom if ever I saw one. (NOT!)