It would need to be by consent of all, made by all and interpreted by all. Otherwise it's just the opinion piece of some ruling elite, which neither I nor - from the sounds of it - you would approve of. Such systems are not able to work for long, but open groups and national referenda can be coaxed into working.
Socrates, Plato and the other early philosophers argued this one to death - sometimes quite literally. Democracy is only workable if people are not sheep but are mature, educated and thinking individuals. It will degenerate into tyranny under any and every circumstance in which those conditions cannot be met.
Plato argued that such education is impossible - that people want to be dumb, basically - and argued the case for something more akin to a government in which only bureaucracies exist. What you're good at, you do. What you're not good at, you're told. That includes the leaders, who he argued should be good at governing but who should leave the thinking to others.
I don't agree with that line at all, I believe that education can (and should) push people to a sufficient level of intellectual and emotional maturity where democracy ("demos" crudely meaning the masses) can function correctly without such stuff. However, I am also a pragmatist - we're not going to be able to raise Europe to that standard overnight, and America is in far worse shape when it comes to sheephood. Tyranny is totally unacceptable. Plato's concern that skilled manipulators with sharp PR can seize control is a major problem in virtually every country that even has elections. So what's left?
The only solution I can think of that's left is to devolve some level of power out from all sections of society (the legislators, the executive, the judges, and yes the people as well) and codify it in a law that applies to all, equally, honoring no privilege or immunity, that prevents the extreme degenerate cases that happen in society and also prevents any change to that codification. And that's it. Absolutely nothing else.
That's the critical bit. It must be nothing else, or it itself will by tyranny, and that defeats the whole point.
Again, I entirely agree that it doesn't make me the moral arbiter, or any other individual. The important word there, however, is "individual". Common law protections, provided they have power and bite, should be entirely sufficient to prevent any individual from turning reasonable restraint into unreasonable constraint.
I also agree that Europe was destroyed by morons and thugs. There is not one village ANYWHERE in Europe that does not have a memorial to the fallen in World War I every bit as extensive as the memorials in US cities for their fallen in Vietnam. I advise those unfamiliar with the Great War to observe the difference in scale. My family was fortunate - they only suffered a 2/3rds loss of the males of that generation.
My concern is that the support for the Iraq war and other disastrous mis-adventures mirrors Plato's complaints about democracy in his book The Republic. Democracy is, in my opinion, the superior political system, but we're repeating 2,000+ year old mistakes. (Plato's home city repeatedly waged popularist pro-active "defensive" wars, utterly obliterating their economy and devastating society, not to mention creating dangerous enemies that never existed before.) How the hell can anyone claim that there is a single "mature" Western civilization if said civilization has demonstrated equal ignorance, folly and sociopathic tendencies as our ancient ancestral warrior societies? Maturity comes not from age or experience but from what you do with both. Clearly, actions reveal western industrial nations have chosen a path of not doing anything with either.
(This isn't to say anyone else is any better. Japan is busy re-writing textbooks to show the history of Okinawa never happened and have already done so on a bunch of other crimes against humanity. Most of the middle east has yet to comprehend the idea of humanity, despite inventing the word to describe all humans as a unified whole. Russia seems to think the James Bond movies are a training manual. Mind you, in Britain, Yes Prime Minister IS a training manual for the civil service.)
On the basis that all existent civilizations are currently demonstrably immature and beneath contempt, it would seem vital to ensure that all powers - including the freedoms of individuals, but also including any limits on those same freedoms - be bound at the outer limits until such time that something that can actually pass for maturity sinks through the brains of people.
Once we do indeed have some maturity as a people, fine. We can get rid of constraints that - in a mature society - are indeed more harmful than helpful. I've no problem with that. And, yes, I do believe humanity will eventually get to something that resembles a utopian society for all peoples of all cultures. It'll just take a lot longer if we pretend that what we have is any better than the frankly moronic societies that existed at the dawn of human civilization. At least they had the excuse of ignorance.
Well, it's much harder to find LISP processors these days - early LISP implementations were hardware and the better historic designs would likely still be favourable against modern software versions. Having said that, LISP is an amazing language and is probably the closest to an exception to that rule that you are likely to encounter.
This is what happens when laws blame those who are innocent and hold guiltless the guilty. Now, I have no objection to the prosecuting of conservatives, and think law enforcement agencies should be encouraged in the practice.... when the person is actually guilty of something more than not happening to be a god.
Censorship, hate-crime laws and speech restriction laws can be entirely valid, fair and appropriate. When they are, they should exist - no matter who doesn't like it. But when they exist, they should be balanced with common law principles of reasonableness and fairness. The sole purpose of such principles is to prevent useful laws from being abused, which is wont to happen when unreasonable and abusive use of the law is tolerated.
True free speech is actually much rarer in countries that tolerate the abuse of laws, because you can usually be prosecuted for something. Litigation-happy cultures do exist, sad to say, and they suffer horribly for it. America may nominally require freedom of speech, under the first amendment, but what's the reality? One potential case in Sweeden that may never go anywhere versus how many actual convictions for "unlawful" speech in the US this year?
Before we slam Sweden too much for one minor incident and call it "thoughtcrime", I'd point out that it's hard to compare this with, just for example, the crimes the CIA are now admitting to carrying out on those who thought wrong. I'd also point out that the Scandanavian countries - for all their laws on speech - are most unlikely to carry out such abuses. Freedom of speech is entirely right and proper, but it seems very clear that protecting freedom of speech is more complicated than simply saying that it's a nice idea.
I cannot recommend a good place for your lecturers and professors to undergo brain transplants. First off, any lecturer that recommends a specific language is violating the first rule of computing - EVERYTHING is transitory, nothing lasts forever. Their lecturers probably swore by Cobol or PL/I. Only a total idiot tells students that they should adhere to a solution rather than a methodology. Solutions come and go, but the same methodology will apply to them all and make learning the specifics a piece of cake.
(Hell, anyone who lived through the.com fiasco saw what happened to Java programmers immediately before and immediately after. Java's a good solution to a number of problems, but the market became glutted when the bubble burst, making it a totally unmarketable language in the immediate aftermath.)
People have noted Sourceforge, and that is definitely a good place to go. If you're only "allowed" to add a few lines, then I'd also recommend investigating Unmaintained Free Software for projects that probably need relatively little work but which aren't receiving any attention at all. One of the benefits of going for an orphaned project is that you have much more freedom on where to take things. You are also, by definition, not subject to jargon on chat groups or mailing lists as there aren't any. It also gives you a chance to test the full range of computer science skills - analyzing, designing, implementing and testing - in a way a current project generally doesn't allow for. You'd be exercising one whole revolution of the software lifecycle.
The benefits of an existing project cannot be overstated, though. If there are existing coders, there are more pairs of eyes looking at what you're doing. There are people to ask for help/advice. You're less likely to be overwhelmed. There's also a touch more "street credibility" attached to being associated with a project that's better known, which won't hurt your employment prospects in the least.
If this is a final-year project, they'd better damn well want something non-trivial or I will most certainly have stern words with them. Not that my words are worth anything, I just write a lot of them. A half-way point between the full lifecycle (which makes for a wonderful final-year project report, which is ultimately all that matters) and working on an existing project is to pick something that accepts plug-ins or modules of some kind. There may be abandoned projects of that kind you can borrow from, but it's also stuff that's just simple enough that writing from scratch isn't going to kill you.
I fully agree with all those who have questioned the validity of the survey. However, that is not technically the question asked in the summary, so I will try to answer that part as well. There is no such thing as "too much technology", but there is such a thing as inappropriate attachment to a specific technology.
For most people, this is relatively mild - by overusing one and only one solution, a person can lose touch with the reality that other solutions exist. This creates a psychologically-maintained monopoly which is not subject to market forces or anything else. A certain Redmond-based corporation is often connected with this issue, but it's really only one of many companies that have an unhealthy mindshare, and any company that makes use of advertising is - in some way - exploiting this particular human sickness.
Note, however, that the problem is one of psychology and NOT one of technology. The technology merely happens to be the instrument used in some cases. It gets more press because tech companies are rather more prominent than breakfast cereal manufacturers, but the problem is universal. Kellogs didn't change their marketing strategy out of kindness, and the UK egg board didn't pull plans to reuse 1950s adverts for reasons of cost. Tech is easy to blame, but in this type of case it is not the subject that is the issue at all.
In a few, very few, cases there is a much more serious problem. These people have an actual biochemical or neurological disorder that creates disproportionate and dysfunctional cravings. As before, these attach to something external for a whole host of reasons, but what they attach to is generally unimportant. If something is addictive, it worsens that disorder, but it is still the disorder that is the issue and not the subject. Tech is not addictive, so although it can be the target of such cravings, it is merely the innocent victim. If it wasn't tech, it would be something else. Those with such disorders are guaranteed to latch onto something.
So, am I saying that tech isn't a problem? Yes and no. It is NOT a problem in the way that is talked about in the article or the summary. It is a problem in that there is so little innovation and true invention that we get into solution monocultures. This is a danger, if something goes wrong (see: Day of the Triffids for details, or indeed any of the mass power or phone blackouts that have occurred over the years). I would much prefer people to be aware of multiple ways to get the same result, because that is far more resilient to the inevitable problems in life. It is also a problem in the special case where the throw-away mentality produces steadily inferior products (see: Hitchhiker's Guide, shoe event horizon).
In neither of these cases, though, is tech the real culprit. It merely enables society to make very bad decisions, but ultimately society itself is at fault for making the decisions, the tech didn't force them to do so.
It's ok, it's only the press release that's JPLed. Has anyone submitted a record to Freshmeat yet? If it's taken the higher-ups this long to discover Open Source, despite their own engineers having developed a good percentage of it, I'm not sure I'd trust them to track it as well.
They are probably building a waverider that uses a ramjet (4,000 MPH is way way too slow for a scramjet) with some sort of launchassist mechanism - there are several they can choose. Though they could also use a turbine-assisted ramjet or variant. Again, there are several.
Does it matter? Well, the first to build a working waverider aircraft was a Scottish amateur rocketry group. Story has it that when NASA and Boeing engineers saw footage of the vehicle flying, they were staring at the screen in sheer envy. They'd got no further than theory. We also all know the story of the New Zealander who has jet-propelled go-karts and his own low-cost cruise missile. And the Gauss Rifle linked to above didn't look too complex, either.
Although amateurs are very unlikely to be building supersonic or hypersonic spy planes in the near future, none of this looks so complex that it could not be done by other nations in comparable time. Don't think it won't happen - too many potential benefits. Variants will also inevitably be adopted by commercial space planes, as it's so much cheaper than using vanilla rocketry and should be much more reliable.
To me, the only question I think worth asking at this point is who will be there first? Lockheed-Martin, China or Rutan? (And after Lockheed's disastrous hovering shuttle replacement in the late 1990s, it's not wise to just assume they'll automatically win such a race.)
If the WereMaggie and Thorn-in-my-foot EMI had bothered with such subsidies, Wales would be the home of one of the greatest chip companies outside of Silicon Valley (Inmos). Manchester England - the birthplace of the stored-program digital computer - used to have quite a number of manufacturers. You can still see the signs on some of the buildings they once owned. Once upon a forgotten era, Acorn used to be a major international vendor.
You don't suppose that a few tax pounds might have made it quite unnecessary for the EU to even need cheap chips or systems from the US? Hell, why isn't the UK a major exporter of information technology? The University of Manchester developed a series of asynchronous CPUs (AMULET) that used a derivative of the SPARC instruction set. They were designed for mobile phones. Let me know when you find a phone in Britain that uses a British-designed, British-made CPU. With the collapse of Rover, there aren't even any British cars left, though that had been largely true in Britain for over 15 years anyway. Strange, for a country that produces virtually all Formula One and Indycar vehicles to the most incredible specifications known to man.
(As might be gathered, I have a serious grudge when it comes to neglect of industries.)
Arguably, you are correct - parallelism will scale according to Ahmdal's Law, which means it is not only worse than linear initially, it will eventually become negative.
Now, I certainly believe in having a parallel architecture. You do not play four games at once, but you DO run one application, one GUI and one OS at the same time, at least. If you're running over X, then make that one X client and one X server for the GUI. If these were farmed off onto parallel components, you would obviously get some improvement on performance.
I disagree with the existing multi-core, multi-threaded designs, however. Parallelizing over a heterogeneous set of specialized cores that are optimized for their specialty will almost invariably be superior to parallelizing over a totally homogeneous stack of cores, in real-world situations. That's why enormous sums of money went into very complex systems in the early days of supercomputing. Such designs fell out of favor, because pile-of-pc supercomputers are simpler to build and much cheaper if there's no commodity MPP market.
These days, however, that's no longer the case. Check how many threads are running on your machine right now. It'll be a lot. But they won't be a single task and it would be a waste of power and silicon to run each one on a universal core. Worse, because the core won't be optimized for any of the tasks, it'll to ALL of them badly.
This doesn't matter too much in the supercomputer world. When you get to a few thousand nodes, the communications inefficiency is so great that CPU inefficiencies are barely going to register. A cluster with far more CPUs that are suboptimal is generally preferable to having a handful of CPUs that are actually doing a decent job. I don't know of any existent networking technology that will fix that. On a home PC, however, you're stuck with a few cores and the less efficient they are, the more obvious that inefficiency will be.
One CPU manufacturer, one GPU manufacturer... This is in no way a good thing. With ATI being bought out, the market has lost TWO major vendors, not one. Worse, Intel has dumped their network processor, Transmeta is dead, Freescale is practically dead, rival chips are dead or dying, Intel is reducing their diversity, are losing their knowledge-base and only change when competitors get close.
We need more competition, not less. If there was ever a time when subsidies were a good idea, this would be it.
I've heard from various sources that some of the internals are iffy, which is a damn shame. Although I believe it is now Open Source, it doesn't seem to have anything like the developer base it deserves and it has a release cycle that is so slow that it needs WD40 to prevent it rusting up.
Having said that, you are absolutely right. Plan 9 is radical, it is highly distributed and in many ways it is decades ahead of where rival operating systems are today. It needs work, but so do all Operating Systems. That's just a matter of degree and the number of eyes available.
I would love to see more effort by the Plan 9 maintainers to offer challenges, improve awareness and improve communication. I would love to see software developers take the time to compile their pet project on Plan 9 - not necessarily to provide support, but even just saying it can be done would be a major improvement on the current state of affairs. And it would be awesome if we had more distros based around Plan 9.
Just as good (IMHO) would be to work more at what Plan 9 ideas can be merged into Linux. So what if that would involve breaking the internal API? The internal API breaks all the time. The only constraint would be that existing external APIs would need to work. If there were a whole bunch of new external APIs, what difference does it make? Linux needs better built-in support for clustering - there are way too many "solutions" which partially re-invent the wheel. If we want whole wheels, the kernel needs to provide more suitable components.
(Why is a merge good? Because diffusing development too far isn't helping Plan 9 at all, and may be harming other systems, but it would be a disaster if the masses of good work in Plan 9 got lost simply for that reason.)
Depending on the number of markers on a person's DNA test, this will range from the fairly useless to the totally useless. These things can't even be used for paternity tests. Let's say someone has 37 Y-chromosome markers tested - a fairly common thing to do. You will match if you have a last common ancestor in the last 6 generations. Very useful for genealogy, but bugger all use for criminology, unless they want to press charges against your great great grandfather.
The most extreme test available (67 Y-chromosome markers + deep subclade + Kittler DYS385, 25 autosomnal DNA markers, 16 X-chromosome markers and complete mapping of the mitochondrial DNA + identification of sub-sub-branch), assuming the DNA was from a male, would be good enough to identify a person and all their male siblings. It's no better than that. And, frankly, these tests aren't cheap and unless you were adopted from a fairly high-tech country, no sane person would ever get this level of testing. They'd have the family tree back some number of generations and would not bother testing more accurately than needed to examine the next few generations out.
The other thing to consider is that these are not supervised tests. Anyone can send in DNA from anyone else under any name at all, and the lab would have no way of knowing. It makes no difference to the person getting the test done, because all lookups from there-on-out are all done by reference number or by the name of the most ancient ancestor known, not by the living person's name.
From a law-enforcement perspective, it might eliminate some possibilities, but I can't see it being useful in positive identification.
Now, there IS one area of concern for me. Some DNA labs do retain additional DNA samples for retesting or upgrades from previous tests. This is raw DNA material and could potentially be accessed by the wrong person. Usually, there is some protection (the vials are only marked with a serial number, not a name), but law enforcement could potentially gain access to the database that links name to number. That could be a problem.
Beyond that, though, this really does only have use for genealogists, historians and anthropologists. The data is just too vague for anyone else.
There have been dozens (at least, and excluding dupes) of stories covering systems that can lift the last ten layers of disk content off a drive. Unless these guys have done a secure wipe with specially-designed patterns to eliminate residual information, why the hell isn't anyone paying one of the labs capable of such content lifting to read these drives?
The owners of the system claim deleted files can't be recovered. Well, like I said, unless it's a secure wipe, that's patently bogus, even if the original tracks have now been filled with other data. Up to nine times over, if you're lucky. I'm not sure I would trust a technologically-ignorant group to run a critical service.
The Democrats, on the other hand, no matter how justified their cause, are either unwilling to get competent technical advice or are unwilling to take the gamble of being wrong if they have that advice or knowledge. This may well be rocket science, but it still doesn't take a rocket scientist to do a search on Google to find out what can be done and who can do it.
In short, for me this has ceased to be a matter of rights and wrongs, of whether the law was broken, or of whether civil servants lost their jobs due to degenerate politics. Nobody will ever know the full facts of the matter, because those who could perfectly well obtain them have - for their own reasons - declined to do so. I trust the Democrats on many issues, but after this, I cannot trust them on the issue of cleaning up politics. How can I? Either they want to but can't, or they don't and won't. What does it matter which it is?
I'd also LOVE to know where all the technologists are, who are fully aware of these sorts of capabilities. Why the silence? It's not a conspiracy, that's obvious enough, so why is nobody asking questions? Why are the Republicans not asking why the Democrats aren't making the effort? Why are the blogs not discussing the effects of layering text over text on the magnetic fields? Even if the reliability of the technique is too poor, someone could at least have asked and gotten that reply.
That is not entirely true. EAL5 is within reach of commodity Operating Systems and, indeed, two hold such status. EAL6 is pushing it, but I can see nothing that would technically be impossible. EAL7 is the only one I can see that is definitely beyond commodity OS level.
Certainly, after the disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade (in which the survivors rightly deserved commendation, but should also have been placed in padded rooms for their own safety), the idea of people paying for their rank was massively condemned. Certainly, people can enter Sandhurst and become a low-ranking officer without having been an infantryman, but Sandhurst is no playground by all accounts and you can't walk out a Brigadier or Field Marshall, no matter how rich you are.
Virtually all of Western civilization - including the Greek and Roman forms - ultimately derive from the Sumerian civilization about which knowledge is fragmentary and translations of texts are of dubious reliability. Only the wealthy could afford to place their children in schools, but conditions were brutal and neither graduation nor survival were guaranteed for any student, no matter how wealthy. Wealth opened doors, as in modern American society, but you still had to step through and that was not a safe or easy proposition. Buying rank in the military appears to have been rare to non-existent. Buying power and influence seems to have been limited to bribing the church, but their separation between church and state was rather better than that in America and it had no more influence than bribing a Hollywood director to get in a movie.
That covers truly ancient times. How about medieval Europe? Medieval Europe practiced (for the most part) feudalism and fiefdoms. I would have to agree that a lot of people bought their positions of power and status. Not entirely, though. There were a few medieval orders (the Order of the Garter, for example) that had very strict entry requirements and were of strictly limited size. The Order of Merit awarded to Tim Berners-Lee is another of this type - only 24 living people may hold the award and it is given only to the most exceptional of intellectuals and artists. The abuse of these high Orders is virtually non-existent. If I remember history correctly, abuse is outed about once a century.
The "regular" titles and ranks have been abused much more often, in medieval times especially. People bought knighthoods, earldoms and baronies on a regular basis. True, they did in Margret Thatcher's time, and Tony Blair has been investigated for it as well, but modern abuses have been relatively rare. I think they could be reduced further if members of the British government could be sentenced by British courts to being tarred and feathered in true historic fashion. A little jail time and a small fine, and only for the bit players, is clearly not much of a deterrent. Hell, if Pamela Bordes and the other assorted mistresses/sex providers of British politicians are being paid to whip and beat the living daylights out of HMG, it's entirely possible that they might enjoy just about any medieval punishment that could be inflicted.
(That leaves one option left. It's terrible, it's evil, it's sadistic beyond all belief, but it might just work. Celebrity Big Brother...)
Look. Gold has a value determined by mass, not by quantity. This particle is five times more massive than the particle it would replace. Sure, it'll be short-lived and will have weird electrical properties (as it would need positrons to orbit a nucleus built from Cascade B to get it to a neutral charge), but so long as they've handed you the money, why should you care if it spontaneously decomposes into its component quarks? I can't think of a better way to hide the evidence.
It's very obvious. One or two scientists made the particle but the chief physicist dropped it on the floor shortly afterwards. You know how messy labs get - there was no way they could find it on their own.
Model: Idealistic, simplified representation of something that exists. Usually static and non-functional, hence the phrase "working model" to denote a model that works. As applied to people, usually refers to individuals who are unhealthy/near-death and plasticized for the purpose of persuading the extremely rich to buy something other than what is shown.
I think the word apples extremely well to this piece of legislative insanity. Hell, virtually every civilization that has ever existed has rapidly discovered that freedom of movement by others (especially traders) is paramount for survival, with many passing laws prohibiting their governments from ever impeding such travel. It's good to know that the Department of Homeland Security is merely 5,000 years behind the times. It gives us a means of estimating when they will become civilized themselves.
First, since anyone can become a respected scientist - you just need to study, publish verifiable results, and show that you are honest - then those who choose NOT to be a scientist are no different from those who choose NOT to vote. So long as you authorize people to vote or not vote by free choice and still call the system "democracy", there is no distinction between the freedoms within a democracy or a scientific community.
Now, what is meant by science, anyway? Science is about deriving a consensual reality by means of observation. Consensus is achieved by means of Athenian democratic techniques - that is to say, all have a voice and a vote in what the consensus is. It is not representational, nor is it senatorial. It is democracy in its purest, most ancient form.
Huh? Isn't science about absolutes? No, science has been beating up - errr, replacing antiquated, pre-science notions of absolutism over the millennia. Any theory is only good for the range of conditions for which it is defined, and even then is subject to being replaced without notice the moment an exception is discovered or a simpler proposal is advanced. Science is assumed to be repeatable from a near-identical perspective under near-identical conditions nearly anywhere, but you have to be wary about those "near" elements. When systems are sensitive to initial conditions (and a great many are), how near-identical must the conditions be? And what is "repeatable", in a chaotic system, anyway?
How can perspective or location affect things? Well, you need to reduce the system to two groups of entities - known quantities, and the parameters you wish to observe - but you can't always do this. It depends on how complete an understanding you have. A trivial example would be that ultra-precise measurements of space and time are going to be influenced by fluctuations in gravitational field and frame-dragging (ie: locational issues), how you model space and time (quantized or continuous, subject to quantum foam, etc) and whether your calculations are based on particles or waves.
Nonetheless, through a process of debate within conferences and the scientific press, and "voting" through the peer-review and citation mechanisms, a consensus is generally established as to how to view some aspect of the universe and the bounds in which that view shall be regarded as valid. This view may be wildly wrong - that has happened - and that is the consequence of rule by the demos (loosely translated as the governed or the majority) that is the heart and soul of democracy.
Were science an ogliarchy (rule by the rich and powerful), then science would be dictated by a few powerful organizations or governments. Independent research, experimental science and independent observations would be impossible. This is obviously not the case, so clearly this is not the system by which science is governed.
Ah, but aren't there certain Governments and politicians who WANT that level of control? Sure. THEY are the ogliarchies, the tyrannizers and the dictators. They have no interest in rule by consensus, because consensus says that those Governments are full of bovine scatological constructs. They accuse science of dictating what is, when in truth it is the politicians who are trying to demand the authority to say what is, without review, without critique and without consequence.
Sadly, there are enough people who do not understand science and definitely do not want anyone else to either, that such people will get listened to. It is to these politicians and their supporters that the phrase "the fox in charge of the hen-house" should be applied.
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It would need to be by consent of all, made by all and interpreted by all. Otherwise it's just the opinion piece of some ruling elite, which neither I nor - from the sounds of it - you would approve of. Such systems are not able to work for long, but open groups and national referenda can be coaxed into working.
Plato argued that such education is impossible - that people want to be dumb, basically - and argued the case for something more akin to a government in which only bureaucracies exist. What you're good at, you do. What you're not good at, you're told. That includes the leaders, who he argued should be good at governing but who should leave the thinking to others.
I don't agree with that line at all, I believe that education can (and should) push people to a sufficient level of intellectual and emotional maturity where democracy ("demos" crudely meaning the masses) can function correctly without such stuff. However, I am also a pragmatist - we're not going to be able to raise Europe to that standard overnight, and America is in far worse shape when it comes to sheephood. Tyranny is totally unacceptable. Plato's concern that skilled manipulators with sharp PR can seize control is a major problem in virtually every country that even has elections. So what's left?
The only solution I can think of that's left is to devolve some level of power out from all sections of society (the legislators, the executive, the judges, and yes the people as well) and codify it in a law that applies to all, equally, honoring no privilege or immunity, that prevents the extreme degenerate cases that happen in society and also prevents any change to that codification. And that's it. Absolutely nothing else.
That's the critical bit. It must be nothing else, or it itself will by tyranny, and that defeats the whole point.
I also agree that Europe was destroyed by morons and thugs. There is not one village ANYWHERE in Europe that does not have a memorial to the fallen in World War I every bit as extensive as the memorials in US cities for their fallen in Vietnam. I advise those unfamiliar with the Great War to observe the difference in scale. My family was fortunate - they only suffered a 2/3rds loss of the males of that generation.
My concern is that the support for the Iraq war and other disastrous mis-adventures mirrors Plato's complaints about democracy in his book The Republic. Democracy is, in my opinion, the superior political system, but we're repeating 2,000+ year old mistakes. (Plato's home city repeatedly waged popularist pro-active "defensive" wars, utterly obliterating their economy and devastating society, not to mention creating dangerous enemies that never existed before.) How the hell can anyone claim that there is a single "mature" Western civilization if said civilization has demonstrated equal ignorance, folly and sociopathic tendencies as our ancient ancestral warrior societies? Maturity comes not from age or experience but from what you do with both. Clearly, actions reveal western industrial nations have chosen a path of not doing anything with either.
(This isn't to say anyone else is any better. Japan is busy re-writing textbooks to show the history of Okinawa never happened and have already done so on a bunch of other crimes against humanity. Most of the middle east has yet to comprehend the idea of humanity, despite inventing the word to describe all humans as a unified whole. Russia seems to think the James Bond movies are a training manual. Mind you, in Britain, Yes Prime Minister IS a training manual for the civil service.)
On the basis that all existent civilizations are currently demonstrably immature and beneath contempt, it would seem vital to ensure that all powers - including the freedoms of individuals, but also including any limits on those same freedoms - be bound at the outer limits until such time that something that can actually pass for maturity sinks through the brains of people.
Once we do indeed have some maturity as a people, fine. We can get rid of constraints that - in a mature society - are indeed more harmful than helpful. I've no problem with that. And, yes, I do believe humanity will eventually get to something that resembles a utopian society for all peoples of all cultures. It'll just take a lot longer if we pretend that what we have is any better than the frankly moronic societies that existed at the dawn of human civilization. At least they had the excuse of ignorance.
Well, it's much harder to find LISP processors these days - early LISP implementations were hardware and the better historic designs would likely still be favourable against modern software versions. Having said that, LISP is an amazing language and is probably the closest to an exception to that rule that you are likely to encounter.
Censorship, hate-crime laws and speech restriction laws can be entirely valid, fair and appropriate. When they are, they should exist - no matter who doesn't like it. But when they exist, they should be balanced with common law principles of reasonableness and fairness. The sole purpose of such principles is to prevent useful laws from being abused, which is wont to happen when unreasonable and abusive use of the law is tolerated.
True free speech is actually much rarer in countries that tolerate the abuse of laws, because you can usually be prosecuted for something. Litigation-happy cultures do exist, sad to say, and they suffer horribly for it. America may nominally require freedom of speech, under the first amendment, but what's the reality? One potential case in Sweeden that may never go anywhere versus how many actual convictions for "unlawful" speech in the US this year?
Before we slam Sweden too much for one minor incident and call it "thoughtcrime", I'd point out that it's hard to compare this with, just for example, the crimes the CIA are now admitting to carrying out on those who thought wrong. I'd also point out that the Scandanavian countries - for all their laws on speech - are most unlikely to carry out such abuses. Freedom of speech is entirely right and proper, but it seems very clear that protecting freedom of speech is more complicated than simply saying that it's a nice idea.
(Hell, anyone who lived through the .com fiasco saw what happened to Java programmers immediately before and immediately after. Java's a good solution to a number of problems, but the market became glutted when the bubble burst, making it a totally unmarketable language in the immediate aftermath.)
People have noted Sourceforge, and that is definitely a good place to go. If you're only "allowed" to add a few lines, then I'd also recommend investigating Unmaintained Free Software for projects that probably need relatively little work but which aren't receiving any attention at all. One of the benefits of going for an orphaned project is that you have much more freedom on where to take things. You are also, by definition, not subject to jargon on chat groups or mailing lists as there aren't any. It also gives you a chance to test the full range of computer science skills - analyzing, designing, implementing and testing - in a way a current project generally doesn't allow for. You'd be exercising one whole revolution of the software lifecycle.
The benefits of an existing project cannot be overstated, though. If there are existing coders, there are more pairs of eyes looking at what you're doing. There are people to ask for help/advice. You're less likely to be overwhelmed. There's also a touch more "street credibility" attached to being associated with a project that's better known, which won't hurt your employment prospects in the least.
If this is a final-year project, they'd better damn well want something non-trivial or I will most certainly have stern words with them. Not that my words are worth anything, I just write a lot of them. A half-way point between the full lifecycle (which makes for a wonderful final-year project report, which is ultimately all that matters) and working on an existing project is to pick something that accepts plug-ins or modules of some kind. There may be abandoned projects of that kind you can borrow from, but it's also stuff that's just simple enough that writing from scratch isn't going to kill you.
Hope that gives you some ideas.
For most people, this is relatively mild - by overusing one and only one solution, a person can lose touch with the reality that other solutions exist. This creates a psychologically-maintained monopoly which is not subject to market forces or anything else. A certain Redmond-based corporation is often connected with this issue, but it's really only one of many companies that have an unhealthy mindshare, and any company that makes use of advertising is - in some way - exploiting this particular human sickness.
Note, however, that the problem is one of psychology and NOT one of technology. The technology merely happens to be the instrument used in some cases. It gets more press because tech companies are rather more prominent than breakfast cereal manufacturers, but the problem is universal. Kellogs didn't change their marketing strategy out of kindness, and the UK egg board didn't pull plans to reuse 1950s adverts for reasons of cost. Tech is easy to blame, but in this type of case it is not the subject that is the issue at all.
In a few, very few, cases there is a much more serious problem. These people have an actual biochemical or neurological disorder that creates disproportionate and dysfunctional cravings. As before, these attach to something external for a whole host of reasons, but what they attach to is generally unimportant. If something is addictive, it worsens that disorder, but it is still the disorder that is the issue and not the subject. Tech is not addictive, so although it can be the target of such cravings, it is merely the innocent victim. If it wasn't tech, it would be something else. Those with such disorders are guaranteed to latch onto something.
So, am I saying that tech isn't a problem? Yes and no. It is NOT a problem in the way that is talked about in the article or the summary. It is a problem in that there is so little innovation and true invention that we get into solution monocultures. This is a danger, if something goes wrong (see: Day of the Triffids for details, or indeed any of the mass power or phone blackouts that have occurred over the years). I would much prefer people to be aware of multiple ways to get the same result, because that is far more resilient to the inevitable problems in life. It is also a problem in the special case where the throw-away mentality produces steadily inferior products (see: Hitchhiker's Guide, shoe event horizon).
In neither of these cases, though, is tech the real culprit. It merely enables society to make very bad decisions, but ultimately society itself is at fault for making the decisions, the tech didn't force them to do so.
It's ok, it's only the press release that's JPLed. Has anyone submitted a record to Freshmeat yet? If it's taken the higher-ups this long to discover Open Source, despite their own engineers having developed a good percentage of it, I'm not sure I'd trust them to track it as well.
I have heard NASA wants to free space.
A posting that talks about unbelievable length -and- sex and completely fails to include a single double entendre... I can't believe you didn't do it.
Does it matter? Well, the first to build a working waverider aircraft was a Scottish amateur rocketry group. Story has it that when NASA and Boeing engineers saw footage of the vehicle flying, they were staring at the screen in sheer envy. They'd got no further than theory. We also all know the story of the New Zealander who has jet-propelled go-karts and his own low-cost cruise missile. And the Gauss Rifle linked to above didn't look too complex, either.
Although amateurs are very unlikely to be building supersonic or hypersonic spy planes in the near future, none of this looks so complex that it could not be done by other nations in comparable time. Don't think it won't happen - too many potential benefits. Variants will also inevitably be adopted by commercial space planes, as it's so much cheaper than using vanilla rocketry and should be much more reliable.
To me, the only question I think worth asking at this point is who will be there first? Lockheed-Martin, China or Rutan? (And after Lockheed's disastrous hovering shuttle replacement in the late 1990s, it's not wise to just assume they'll automatically win such a race.)
You don't suppose that a few tax pounds might have made it quite unnecessary for the EU to even need cheap chips or systems from the US? Hell, why isn't the UK a major exporter of information technology? The University of Manchester developed a series of asynchronous CPUs (AMULET) that used a derivative of the SPARC instruction set. They were designed for mobile phones. Let me know when you find a phone in Britain that uses a British-designed, British-made CPU. With the collapse of Rover, there aren't even any British cars left, though that had been largely true in Britain for over 15 years anyway. Strange, for a country that produces virtually all Formula One and Indycar vehicles to the most incredible specifications known to man.
(As might be gathered, I have a serious grudge when it comes to neglect of industries.)
Now, I certainly believe in having a parallel architecture. You do not play four games at once, but you DO run one application, one GUI and one OS at the same time, at least. If you're running over X, then make that one X client and one X server for the GUI. If these were farmed off onto parallel components, you would obviously get some improvement on performance.
I disagree with the existing multi-core, multi-threaded designs, however. Parallelizing over a heterogeneous set of specialized cores that are optimized for their specialty will almost invariably be superior to parallelizing over a totally homogeneous stack of cores, in real-world situations. That's why enormous sums of money went into very complex systems in the early days of supercomputing. Such designs fell out of favor, because pile-of-pc supercomputers are simpler to build and much cheaper if there's no commodity MPP market.
These days, however, that's no longer the case. Check how many threads are running on your machine right now. It'll be a lot. But they won't be a single task and it would be a waste of power and silicon to run each one on a universal core. Worse, because the core won't be optimized for any of the tasks, it'll to ALL of them badly.
This doesn't matter too much in the supercomputer world. When you get to a few thousand nodes, the communications inefficiency is so great that CPU inefficiencies are barely going to register. A cluster with far more CPUs that are suboptimal is generally preferable to having a handful of CPUs that are actually doing a decent job. I don't know of any existent networking technology that will fix that. On a home PC, however, you're stuck with a few cores and the less efficient they are, the more obvious that inefficiency will be.
Nono, it's ok, they weren't swearing or having sex at the time of the transmission.
We need more competition, not less. If there was ever a time when subsidies were a good idea, this would be it.
I thought it was Russian for "he who sneezes whilst smoking Cuban imports".
Having said that, you are absolutely right. Plan 9 is radical, it is highly distributed and in many ways it is decades ahead of where rival operating systems are today. It needs work, but so do all Operating Systems. That's just a matter of degree and the number of eyes available.
I would love to see more effort by the Plan 9 maintainers to offer challenges, improve awareness and improve communication. I would love to see software developers take the time to compile their pet project on Plan 9 - not necessarily to provide support, but even just saying it can be done would be a major improvement on the current state of affairs. And it would be awesome if we had more distros based around Plan 9.
Just as good (IMHO) would be to work more at what Plan 9 ideas can be merged into Linux. So what if that would involve breaking the internal API? The internal API breaks all the time. The only constraint would be that existing external APIs would need to work. If there were a whole bunch of new external APIs, what difference does it make? Linux needs better built-in support for clustering - there are way too many "solutions" which partially re-invent the wheel. If we want whole wheels, the kernel needs to provide more suitable components.
(Why is a merge good? Because diffusing development too far isn't helping Plan 9 at all, and may be harming other systems, but it would be a disaster if the masses of good work in Plan 9 got lost simply for that reason.)
The most extreme test available (67 Y-chromosome markers + deep subclade + Kittler DYS385, 25 autosomnal DNA markers, 16 X-chromosome markers and complete mapping of the mitochondrial DNA + identification of sub-sub-branch), assuming the DNA was from a male, would be good enough to identify a person and all their male siblings. It's no better than that. And, frankly, these tests aren't cheap and unless you were adopted from a fairly high-tech country, no sane person would ever get this level of testing. They'd have the family tree back some number of generations and would not bother testing more accurately than needed to examine the next few generations out.
The other thing to consider is that these are not supervised tests. Anyone can send in DNA from anyone else under any name at all, and the lab would have no way of knowing. It makes no difference to the person getting the test done, because all lookups from there-on-out are all done by reference number or by the name of the most ancient ancestor known, not by the living person's name.
From a law-enforcement perspective, it might eliminate some possibilities, but I can't see it being useful in positive identification.
Now, there IS one area of concern for me. Some DNA labs do retain additional DNA samples for retesting or upgrades from previous tests. This is raw DNA material and could potentially be accessed by the wrong person. Usually, there is some protection (the vials are only marked with a serial number, not a name), but law enforcement could potentially gain access to the database that links name to number. That could be a problem.
Beyond that, though, this really does only have use for genealogists, historians and anthropologists. The data is just too vague for anyone else.
The owners of the system claim deleted files can't be recovered. Well, like I said, unless it's a secure wipe, that's patently bogus, even if the original tracks have now been filled with other data. Up to nine times over, if you're lucky. I'm not sure I would trust a technologically-ignorant group to run a critical service.
The Democrats, on the other hand, no matter how justified their cause, are either unwilling to get competent technical advice or are unwilling to take the gamble of being wrong if they have that advice or knowledge. This may well be rocket science, but it still doesn't take a rocket scientist to do a search on Google to find out what can be done and who can do it.
In short, for me this has ceased to be a matter of rights and wrongs, of whether the law was broken, or of whether civil servants lost their jobs due to degenerate politics. Nobody will ever know the full facts of the matter, because those who could perfectly well obtain them have - for their own reasons - declined to do so. I trust the Democrats on many issues, but after this, I cannot trust them on the issue of cleaning up politics. How can I? Either they want to but can't, or they don't and won't. What does it matter which it is?
I'd also LOVE to know where all the technologists are, who are fully aware of these sorts of capabilities. Why the silence? It's not a conspiracy, that's obvious enough, so why is nobody asking questions? Why are the Republicans not asking why the Democrats aren't making the effort? Why are the blogs not discussing the effects of layering text over text on the magnetic fields? Even if the reliability of the technique is too poor, someone could at least have asked and gotten that reply.
That is not entirely true. EAL5 is within reach of commodity Operating Systems and, indeed, two hold such status. EAL6 is pushing it, but I can see nothing that would technically be impossible. EAL7 is the only one I can see that is definitely beyond commodity OS level.
Virtually all of Western civilization - including the Greek and Roman forms - ultimately derive from the Sumerian civilization about which knowledge is fragmentary and translations of texts are of dubious reliability. Only the wealthy could afford to place their children in schools, but conditions were brutal and neither graduation nor survival were guaranteed for any student, no matter how wealthy. Wealth opened doors, as in modern American society, but you still had to step through and that was not a safe or easy proposition. Buying rank in the military appears to have been rare to non-existent. Buying power and influence seems to have been limited to bribing the church, but their separation between church and state was rather better than that in America and it had no more influence than bribing a Hollywood director to get in a movie.
That covers truly ancient times. How about medieval Europe? Medieval Europe practiced (for the most part) feudalism and fiefdoms. I would have to agree that a lot of people bought their positions of power and status. Not entirely, though. There were a few medieval orders (the Order of the Garter, for example) that had very strict entry requirements and were of strictly limited size. The Order of Merit awarded to Tim Berners-Lee is another of this type - only 24 living people may hold the award and it is given only to the most exceptional of intellectuals and artists. The abuse of these high Orders is virtually non-existent. If I remember history correctly, abuse is outed about once a century.
The "regular" titles and ranks have been abused much more often, in medieval times especially. People bought knighthoods, earldoms and baronies on a regular basis. True, they did in Margret Thatcher's time, and Tony Blair has been investigated for it as well, but modern abuses have been relatively rare. I think they could be reduced further if members of the British government could be sentenced by British courts to being tarred and feathered in true historic fashion. A little jail time and a small fine, and only for the bit players, is clearly not much of a deterrent. Hell, if Pamela Bordes and the other assorted mistresses/sex providers of British politicians are being paid to whip and beat the living daylights out of HMG, it's entirely possible that they might enjoy just about any medieval punishment that could be inflicted.
(That leaves one option left. It's terrible, it's evil, it's sadistic beyond all belief, but it might just work. Celebrity Big Brother...)
Look. Gold has a value determined by mass, not by quantity. This particle is five times more massive than the particle it would replace. Sure, it'll be short-lived and will have weird electrical properties (as it would need positrons to orbit a nucleus built from Cascade B to get it to a neutral charge), but so long as they've handed you the money, why should you care if it spontaneously decomposes into its component quarks? I can't think of a better way to hide the evidence.
It's very obvious. One or two scientists made the particle but the chief physicist dropped it on the floor shortly afterwards. You know how messy labs get - there was no way they could find it on their own.
I think the word apples extremely well to this piece of legislative insanity. Hell, virtually every civilization that has ever existed has rapidly discovered that freedom of movement by others (especially traders) is paramount for survival, with many passing laws prohibiting their governments from ever impeding such travel. It's good to know that the Department of Homeland Security is merely 5,000 years behind the times. It gives us a means of estimating when they will become civilized themselves.
Now, what is meant by science, anyway? Science is about deriving a consensual reality by means of observation. Consensus is achieved by means of Athenian democratic techniques - that is to say, all have a voice and a vote in what the consensus is. It is not representational, nor is it senatorial. It is democracy in its purest, most ancient form.
Huh? Isn't science about absolutes? No, science has been beating up - errr, replacing antiquated, pre-science notions of absolutism over the millennia. Any theory is only good for the range of conditions for which it is defined, and even then is subject to being replaced without notice the moment an exception is discovered or a simpler proposal is advanced. Science is assumed to be repeatable from a near-identical perspective under near-identical conditions nearly anywhere, but you have to be wary about those "near" elements. When systems are sensitive to initial conditions (and a great many are), how near-identical must the conditions be? And what is "repeatable", in a chaotic system, anyway?
How can perspective or location affect things? Well, you need to reduce the system to two groups of entities - known quantities, and the parameters you wish to observe - but you can't always do this. It depends on how complete an understanding you have. A trivial example would be that ultra-precise measurements of space and time are going to be influenced by fluctuations in gravitational field and frame-dragging (ie: locational issues), how you model space and time (quantized or continuous, subject to quantum foam, etc) and whether your calculations are based on particles or waves.
Nonetheless, through a process of debate within conferences and the scientific press, and "voting" through the peer-review and citation mechanisms, a consensus is generally established as to how to view some aspect of the universe and the bounds in which that view shall be regarded as valid. This view may be wildly wrong - that has happened - and that is the consequence of rule by the demos (loosely translated as the governed or the majority) that is the heart and soul of democracy.
Were science an ogliarchy (rule by the rich and powerful), then science would be dictated by a few powerful organizations or governments. Independent research, experimental science and independent observations would be impossible. This is obviously not the case, so clearly this is not the system by which science is governed.
Ah, but aren't there certain Governments and politicians who WANT that level of control? Sure. THEY are the ogliarchies, the tyrannizers and the dictators. They have no interest in rule by consensus, because consensus says that those Governments are full of bovine scatological constructs. They accuse science of dictating what is, when in truth it is the politicians who are trying to demand the authority to say what is, without review, without critique and without consequence.
Sadly, there are enough people who do not understand science and definitely do not want anyone else to either, that such people will get listened to. It is to these politicians and their supporters that the phrase "the fox in charge of the hen-house" should be applied.