That is a totally non-intuitive answer, but well thought-out and well reasoned. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm understanding is that internal adversaries are necessary and that stable societies are a dynamic equilibria over a long enough timeframe. The question then splits into the following:
What is the optimum amplitude of these cycles (ie: how extreme do they need to be) for society to be dynamically stable in the long-term? Many major societies that have totally failed have done so because they passed some upper threahold. You've argued successfully that too small an amplitude is also unstable. Somewhere in between is presumably what would be ideal.
Is society better with a high frequency (an underlying theory behind term limits and sunshine laws) or a low frequency (a key element of how the American and British civil service operate), or some blend (every nation has a different combination, but none seems to work terribly well)?
If you were to pick three nations that seem to be in a dynamic equilibrium that will work over very long timeframes, regardless of whether you happen to like them or not, what three would you pick?
As an aside, I've had some thoughts that came close to what you've described. On the basis that it is human to want to run the ragged edge of what the law allows, or cross the line a little ways, then it would make sense to have the law changed to match that behaviour. However lax you make the law, people will still do this, so have the law slightly more restrictive than necessary and ignore those who go marginally over.
So far, in modern society, it has been that the "adaptation" of secrecy/superiority gives an evolutionary advantage over those who share. To conclude from this that this must always be the case, or that humans are "naturally" like that, is as much a fallacy as to declare the opposite. The societies that have the most of the preferred adaptation will naturally do the best and there should be nothing surprising about it.
If you created an environment in which secrecy/superiority did NOT give an advantage, but sharing and collaborating did, then those would become the dominant traits and we would be sitting here discussing how these were the "natural" way to be. In societies dominated by "trial-by-combat" ideologies and might-makes-right, you see neither secrecy nor collaboration, but you do get a most diverse selection of warlords, strongmen and hangers-on.
There are societies on Earth where they haven't even invented numbers and have no concept of counting beyond none-few-lots. Nor are those societies easily capable of learning numbers. It is not merely that they have never come across them, the entire part of the brain dealing with logic has developed to process other information instead. Yes, the brain really is that flexible in the way it develops. Virtually nothing is hard-coded in at birth. How we are, what we do - these are all programmed in as you grow. Don't like the program? Then teach something different to the next generation. They're not confined to the limitations of those who lived before.
Ok, so it is clear from all of that that I believe that we could easily(!) mould society in whatever image we feel like. Ok, maybe not easily, but we could do it. It is possible. What is "human" is ultimately defined by us, we are not limited by that definition. The next question would then be "SHOULD we develop a society without selfishness, secrecy, one-upmanship, etc?"
This is not a trivial question. We have no evidence, on the level of entire modern societies, that this would be socially stable. It would be doable, but what happens next? Has society evolved the selfish traits because of the demands of growth, or are the selfish traits vestigial remnants of a long-decayed, long-surpassed requirement? Is copyright closer to the brain of society or its appendix? This is important - you wouldn't want to lobotomize humanity, but if overeager Intellectual Property has become a serious case of appendicitis, then to not remove it could be lethal.
I've worked for such people - including, apparently, some sort of wookie. They are not easy people to deal with, but there are plenty of studies which do show that these ARE typically very influential and powerful managers. I do not completely understand why, because it is destructive to the company. Invariably, companies that fail are the companies that pass the limits of such attitudes. You'd think that companies would be driven by success and profits, but research by psychologists shows otherwise.
Well, yes it has. Earliest I saw split-screen was on the BBC Micro, back in the mid 1980s. You could run the partitioned screen at different resolutions quite easily. The sideways ROMs allowed you to have multiple OS' running simultaneously. True, this was never turned into a fully-integrated solution, but all of the components existed and interoperated just fine. The only "invention" I'm seeing here is the commodity linking of these components. 22 years after those components had been established and developed. Someone in a hurry?
(Hell, even the IBM PC could support virtual OS' very early on. First I saw was 4DOS. It task-switched on a key combination between OS', but it was trivial to hook up a clock interrupt that would make the same call. Four simultaneous OS' on one PC. That was probably about 17 years ago. Again, this is not identical to the Microsoft offering, but for chrissakes, this is 17 YEARS later. I'd better be seeing something new in that amount of time. I'm just not convinced it is 17 years worth of tech R&D newer.)
Ok, ok! So Linux supports OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenEXR, JPEG-2000, Open Inventor, the Renderman scene language and shaders, DirectX under WINE, Constructive Solid Geometry, Sound Fonts, 5.1 audio, audio raytracing, speech synthesis, efficient use of multi-core CPUs, real-time process scheduling and asynchronous I/O, but... What have the Romans ever done for us?
Oh, certainly. 802.1x isn't perfect, by any means. The first rule of IT security, though, is to always be two steps ahead of those doing the compromising. One step means that you're secure when you install, but will have indefinite periods of uncertainty when you COULD be vulnerable. This is typically the way things are done, and it is stupid beyond belief.
No, the logical method is to expect some component - any component - of the security to be compromised between now and the end of use. You then have a second, wholly independent, component which must simultaneously be compromised in order to be vulnerable. You upgrade when EITHER fails. It is then virtually certain that both have not failed, so everything remains intact, and you use that lead time to perform the upgrade.
You could regard this as a variant on the Byzantine General's Problem. There, some number of components are "traitors" (in this case, compromised), yet you have to make sure that the orders (data) received come from an authorized source alone. Other variants of this problem deal with making sure that that data does not fall into the wrong hands, such as using Byzantine key distribution.
Three algorithms, three block ciphers, three hashing functions. Any one of those gets broken, simply roll onto the next in the list. If you're sneaky enough, you have some mechanism for automatically switching combinations when the key is refreshed, making it much harder for an attacker to know which combination is actually being used at the time.
Security doesn't have to be perfect to be truly secure, it just has to be impassable in the time you detect an attacker bypassing one component and the time you can replace what has been broken. The defender in a real-time situation always has the advantage when it comes to what happens next. The attacker ONLY has the advantage when it comes to what has already happened. So long as there is no usable relationship, the attacker must always lose.
IPSec, SK/IP or even just an SSL tunnel should be used in any wireless environment in which you want meaningful security. SK/IP has better recovery, but isn't quite as tough.
WEP and WPA should - by now - be entirely replaced with 802.1x at the very least. Neither of those has any business being used on a modern wireless network. I can accept that not everyone can upgrade to firmware that supports adequate security, but that only excuses the users. The manufacturers have no such excuse, because they're the ones who write the software and strong wireless security has existed for many years now.
I don't see any problems with the basics. You'll want decent bandwidth, as all data storage is remote, but that's not so much an issue these days.
I don't see a pressing need to mandate Open Source software, per se, so long as all file I/O and all network I/O is restricted to truly open standards. Staff need to be able to read submitted work in the format intended, but don't need to care how that format was generated. For simplicity, I would suggest such a school only make an effort to validate against Open Source software (you can't validate against a million and one proprietary systems) and would expressly state that students who submit using proprietary software do so entirely at their own risk.
I wouldn't have the school "fix" anything. Students are there to learn - provide them with a special install/kickstart server system of some kind. If they mess the machine up, THEY have to burn their free time on fixing things. When the school does everything, the students are going to be less worried about keeping things intact. Obviously, if a student needs help (hardware faults, unusual situations, etc), the staff would HELP the student to get things going, but the student cannot learn how to recover by keeping the process hidden from them.
The ability to keep calm under stress, the ability to step through the unexpected problems to a solution, the confidence that comes from knowing that you are capable in fact and not just on paper - these are things that you are better learning in a safety-net environment like a school than when you are out in the Real World. Schools shouldn't ever abandon their students, but should push them to truly think, truly understand. I don't expect students to make their own ink, as they would have done in reneissance times, but maintaining the tools of their craft/trade has always been an important part in understanding the trade.
(Going back to Open Source for a second, that should be emphasised with the recommendation. The student cannot maintain a closed-source program at all. I don't expect an art student to fix Open Office, either, but I would expect them to be able to tweak some of the options and features to conform to scripting standards. If you can read and write English at all, you can do that much.)
There are mental illnesses of this kind. There was a very odd case in Victorian Britain of a politician confessing to the Prime Minister the murder of a colleague - who, incidentally, was alive and well in the room and right next to the confessor at the time. The Jon Bennet Ramsey confession was likely of the same sort, although as the guy was freed and not placed in a mental hospital, we will never know for sure.
There are also fear-induced forms of false confession, not coerced by the police. Unshielded witnesses in mafia trials in Italy have an... interesting propensity to go crazy, claim they're God, or whatever. Even in cases where no actual threat even existed, I'd be willing to bet that stress and anxiety created enough pressure to destroy the person's ability to think rationally.
At this point, I think the legal system needs to invest heavily in understanding the overlap between neurology and psychology, so that better testing is possible and the experts are less likely to merely repeat the views of whoever is paying them. It must be easier to identify the insane and easier to identify those who are a threat by being insane and those who are NOT because they're insane.
Easy. They have a confession, but probably no hard evidence that anyone is actually dead or even missing, or he would most definitely be in jail. They're probably hoping for him to say or do something that can stand up in court - an unsupported statement isn't much to go on. If he can help in determining Hans' guilt or innocence, then so much the better, and he's more likely to cooperate in that if he's not behind bars.
This isn't to say I agree with such tactics, but double jeopardy means that they have to get their cases right the first time. They can't produce a version 2. This is true of both Sturgeon and Reiser. The margin for error is zero, the risks are extreme. That limits the authorities to having to play it as cool as they can.
This all assumes they're smart, of course. They could just be be stupid, too. The easy way to find out is to see if Sturgeon is arrested a month or two after Reiser is convicted or freed, and/or if he is able to kill again. If the authorities are smart, Sturgeon will be under 24-hour watch by people in a position to prevent him killing someone. If Sturgeon succeeds, or even gets close to succeeding, then the authorities are out of their tiny little minds. Alternatively, if Sturgeon is really delusional, those same authorities should have him in a secure ward the first moment they have enough evidence to prove it.
Kids don't need technology, they need an education
The two aren't necessarily contradictory, but I absolutely agree that the education must come first. Schools must provide the knowledge and understanding required to move forward. This includes research and study skills, the basics in as many subjects as practical, enough transferable skills to not limit future growth, the understanding of how to reason and deduce effectively, and the specialist skills required to progress effectively in the chosen career path.
Sure that's a lot. Schools also have from when the kid is about 3 or 5 (depending on the quality of "preschooling") up through to when the kid is 18. (Education only until the age of 16 should be scrapped. There aren't any trades or occupations that can get away with that any more. You might need vocational schooling or a trade school, but you WILL need schooling past 16. Many jobs need training beyond that - London cabbies are the best in the world, not because they're smarter but because the standards of training are higher. Don't even begin to tell me other vocational trades couldn't benefit from squeezing every last drop of blood - err, ability out of people.)
Where computers can assist in education, they should be used in education. Where they do not, they shouldn't be within a thousand feet of a single student. Where student-usable laptops are available, they should be securely configured to do the work intended and nothing more. If that means burning the OS and config files into an eprom, then burn the bloody OS and config files into an eprom. You can use LinuxBIOS as a starting point to do exactly that, if you like. That's what it's there for.
Of course, many schools are lazy and unwilling to put effort into teaching, training or educating, let alone designing the tools necessary for the job. Many others simply don't have the time or the money, even though they have all the enthusiasm and understanding in the world. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. Yet others are filled with people who entirely satisfy the criteria of "those who can't, teach".
In order for education to work, it must be ripped up, with the unable and the unwilling taken out of the picture, and the rest provided with absolutely anything and everything they need to do their jobs well. The important part of that is "well". Consultants and computer "experts" who recommend inappropriate solutions should be stripped of all certifications, degrees and acolades, before having their toenails painted pink and chased through redneck country. Appropriate is tough, sure. It means doing REAL analysis of requirements (ie: finding out what is needed, whether or not it is wanted), REAL problem specification and REAL supervised and monitored integration with the schools. Monitored? Yes. You need to compare what is expected with what happens, and modify the analysis and specification accordingly. That is why software has a life CYCLE. You take the output and use it as input for the next iteration.
It seems very clear that none of this has not happened. No real analysis, no reverse-engineering of expertise, no real specification of the problem to hand, and certainly no monitoring and assessing of impact until the point of total collapse was reached.
This is not nearly good enough. I would perhaps expect such poor performance if tenth-graders were running the education department and the schools. Oh. Maybe they are...
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· Score: 2, Interesting
modern "western" medicine is something called evidence based medicine.
That is perfectly true, in theory. In practice, Britain's medical system certainly performs a lot of experimental medicine - usually "unofficially" (patient consents, but there's no paperwork), most frequently for conditions deemed highly life-threatening or otherwise terminal, but sometimes for less-serious but "untreatable" conditions. These are usually not "controlled" experiments, participation is usually large and pre-existing evidence is usually marginal.
(And, yes, quite a bit of this is first-hand knowledge, the rest is from direct interviews with those carrying out the medical experiments.)
Indeed, a recent BBC report suggested that as much as 75% of treatments recommended by GPs in Britain had no scientific basis whatsoever. Obviously, I can't verify that one, but it agrees with my own experience well.
I don't know as much about the American health system, but there are documented reports of doctors injecting foetal cells into alzheimer patient brains (ten-to-fifteen years ago), or experimenting with non-FDA-approved medicines (not always with consent), which makes me think it's not just that side of the Atlantic.
However, these therapies almost always have something in common - they'd be damn-near impossible to sue over, for a whole range of reasons - the main one being that it's easy to be discrete with them. Slow-revival techniques would involve a lot more people, probably including friends/relatives. Dodgy pills are much easier to keep under the radar.
I'm not saying this is right - it's often highly unethical - and yes, evidential methods are definitely the way medicine should be practised. The evidence would seem to suggest, however, that it's only practised when the doctor is as much at risk as the patient.
Re:I'm continually amazed at
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Treating the Dead
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· Score: 2, Insightful
From the sounds of other posters, this is 20+ year old knowledge and I'm guessing the theory is much further along. I'd also guess that the ultraconservative medical practices out there are reluctant to use this knowledge. Well, can you blame them if they are? If they did something different from tradition and it failed, they're in for a lawsuit from hell. Even if it succeeded, but wasn't perfect, you can bet people would sue them to hell and back for malpractice. And if it was perfect, they end up with having to treat more patients in hospitals that are already overloaded and understaffed. They can't win for losing.
However, yes, this would likely be useful in cryogenics. If it takes an hour for a cell to start to die, then you can afford to be much more gentle on tissue when thawing it, and therefore should be able to develop methods that are much less damaging. It should also increase the number of transplantable organs, as there'd be a far larger window of opportunity.
In a day and age when Big Brother is all but day-to-day reality, the government is prohibited from censoring but corporations are actively encouraged. Corporate censorship is probably worse than Government censorship, in that corporations produce things - and sometimes those things have turned out to be harmful in some way, or sometimes quite lethal to the user. Said Vioxx. Other times, there have been very very narrow escapes - aspartamine was never clinically tested and this information was actively suppressed for some time. Turns out it does impair brain functioning, mildly. Sony did everything in its power to limit knowledge of the rootkit it released and the potential damage it could cause, on a less hazardous - but potentially expensive - note.
Yet as the grandparent post shows, there are those determined to believe only governments can censor, and there have been many cases where people have attempted to sue companies over first amendment rights. Censorship can happen between any two or more individuals, and you ONLY have rights when it comes to the Government.
This is also the phenomena associated with tape recordings of ghosts (where people want to hear a voice), premonitions, etc. The human brain is geared specifically to spot patterns. It's probably an evolutionary survival trait - patterns are easier and quicker to spot than predators and other threats, so seeing patterns and forming associations may have kept early humans alive. It's also likely a factor in religion and magical beliefs.
VTK is amazing and can be used in conjunction with other toolkits, such as ITK, to produce visualization for specific purposes. (ITK was designed for medical work, for example.) Other great visualization tolkits are OpenDX, GGobi, Ballview, ChomboVis and Fityk. This is something that is badly needed, if the number of toolkits is anything to go by. 3D FFTs are often closely associated with scientific visualization, but I've only found one package (P3DFFT) that supports it.
I have to say that the physical carvings did not match with the patterns being shown nearly so well as I'd expect if they were a genuine encoding. The stave thing is interesting (there's an apparent representation of a figure indicating a chord, which seems to be the same as the sound indicated by the cube above it). However, the human brain is excellent at only seeing patterns that match up with preconceived notions. Are there contra-indicators that were ignored? If you apply the same logic to patterns known not to be musical (such as geological formations), would you get an equally playable, convincing result? Until there is an effort to falsify the theory (not slam it, falsify it - there's a difference) then it is merely speculation, albeit very interesting speculation. And even if it were falsified, say by geological formations, it's always an opportunity to start a whole new form of, uhhh... rock music.
Purely for the information of anyone who cares, a great uncle of mine was captured by the Germans at Dunkirk. No, he wasn't one of those running - he was one of those ordered to hold off the whole friggin' German army whilst the rest fled. Later on, after escaping from a POW camp, he was aided by one of the French underground movements dedicated to helping escapees reach Gibraltar and Britain. Amazingly, I talked at some length with a member of the group involved in my great uncle's escape - amazingly because few enough survived the war (there were several members who were paid Gestapo informers) and of those far fewer survive into the present day, but also amazingly because just a week or so before my great uncle reached the French border, much of the line had been shut down and many members killed or arrested. That the remainder were stubborn enough to help when under such extreme danger and stress - that shows the meaning of not giving up.
So for those French on Slashdot, I certainly salute your stubbornness and determination.
Very few OO languages come remotely close to taking advantage of the fact that OO is inherently highly parallelizable. An instance of an object is, to all practical intents and purposes, a thread. Method invocation is method invocation, whether you are looking at Java, CORBA, or MPI. Yet most languages treat OO as though it were simply a very fancily-encapsulated sequential program. This is important - it's easy to serialize a parallel approach, it's bloody hard to parallelize a serial approach. (Why do you think there are so few decent parallel programmers - to the point Intel has to beg people to write parallel code?)
Also, very few OO languages are consistent. Advanced IDE and RAD packages are needed, together with books that aren't just dead tree matter but look about the size of said dead tree, because the interfaces are illogical, and what is mathematically pure and correct is often not directly implementable at all.
OO could be better. OO should be better.
Others have picked up on the failures of existing implementations, though for different reasons. D is infinitely better than C#, C++ or Java, for example. If you want a good, solid, cross-platform framework, then writing it for D would make more sense than writing it for C#. And although.Net is ok, it's not what I'd call good. Use ACE+TAU+CIAO for a while. Real-Time CORBA 3 isn't lightning-fast, but I'd use it over.Net any day.
Nonono. You're missing the point. The people who can break DRM are the ones who have the movies. The movies are mind-wrenchingly bad and will cause your brain to explode. The upshot is that only the brains of pirates will be destroyed. Don't you see? This is the most cunning plan Baldrick has come up with yet!
Yeah, the system needs tweaking. I was thinking of one patch set, which may cover multiple patch releases but where the subsequent updates aren't really "new work", involve "new discoveries" or add anything that wasn't intended by the first patchset. So, ten patches to the same bug - split by files or by time - would be only one patch by my system, unless something radical was discovered in the process. Ten patches to ten different, unrelated, bugs would be considered ten patches.
In part, I was thinking of cases where a company might add support for a device that is an upgrade from something already supported by supplying a patch to an existing driver. I was also thinking of small fixes for significant issues. I seem to remember reports of a security hole in the Mozilla codebase that had pre-existed the Open-sourcing of Netscape. The patch ended up being a handful of lines, but that was a critical fix.
Ok, I guess the criticality of the patch could be used to modify the score. My system only looked at the size of the patch. If we added a whole set of multipliers, we can distinguish both the size of the patch and its impact:
x2 for mission-critical updates/fixes (mission critical would be something likely to cause tens of millions of dollars of damage or put lives at risk if it fails), x1 for a functionally significant patch (ie: it's not going to kill anyone, but you won't be able to do what you want the way you want, either), x0.5 for a functionally moderate patch (everyone'll notice the difference, but only a third to two-thirds will give a damn), 0.25 for a functionally trivial patch (it's good that it's there, but that's about it), 0.1 for a prettification patch (nothing useful is added, but it should help later developers write something that is).
There will be other problems with this whole scheme, but this patch should fix the overvaluing of a patch without undervaluing genuinely critical show-stoppers.
Because Open Source isn't insular. It exists in a macrocosm, a space filled with a myriad perspectives, beliefs and philosophies, some of which are not Open Source (gasp!) but none-the-less are nurturing and supportive. IBM's DB/2 and Oracle's database are hardly Open Source, yet their credibility has enhanced Linux' credibility. IBM's management and installation tools for Apache were also not Open Source, but it would not surprise me if such tools had played a measurable part in Apache's success story.
Should we deny these programs any credit, merely because they do not entirely agree with our perspective? That would seem to be not only stupid but suicidal - Linux has respect not because of its philosophy but because you can do things. That is the currency that ISPs, businesses and academics understand. Freedom is nice, but Plan 9 is free these days. So is Exokern. So is Eros - one hell of a secure OS, by all accounts. Do these have a reputation? Has anyone even heard of them?
Obviously the answer is "no" amongst the people with any kind of money, but the odds are that the answer is "no" even amongst a majority of Open Source enthusiasts and ubergeeks. Those of you who have never heard of these OS' have probably not heard of them PRECISELY BECAUSE there is no commercial software for them. Would you have heard of Linux, had it not been for such software?
If you joined the Linux in-crowd at any time after about 1994, commercial closed-source software was plentiful and it would be hard to convince anyone that such software had not played some role in your awareness -- doubly so if you are still unaware of major Open Source projects for which no such software has ever existed.
I don't pretend to like closed-source solutions, I regard them as a perfect breeding-ground for bugs and rot. However, I would be thrice-foolish to deny that they have transformed the Linux landscape in the 13 years such software has been around, forcing the pace of development of things Linux users today take for granted. Opened source, such as XFS and JFS have been major benefits, but do you seriously imagine those would have happened if the commercial space hadn't ever existed at all?
And what of all the Open Source projects that corporations released and were then abandoned? SGI's OB1. IBM's DAISY. Hewlett-Packard's Scheduler Plugin system. Admit it - more people buy Oracle for Linux on a daily basis than ever used any of these programs for their entire project lifetime. So which has a bigger impact on Linux development - the stuff we use, or the stuff we don't?
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside, I've had some thoughts that came close to what you've described. On the basis that it is human to want to run the ragged edge of what the law allows, or cross the line a little ways, then it would make sense to have the law changed to match that behaviour. However lax you make the law, people will still do this, so have the law slightly more restrictive than necessary and ignore those who go marginally over.
If you created an environment in which secrecy/superiority did NOT give an advantage, but sharing and collaborating did, then those would become the dominant traits and we would be sitting here discussing how these were the "natural" way to be. In societies dominated by "trial-by-combat" ideologies and might-makes-right, you see neither secrecy nor collaboration, but you do get a most diverse selection of warlords, strongmen and hangers-on.
There are societies on Earth where they haven't even invented numbers and have no concept of counting beyond none-few-lots. Nor are those societies easily capable of learning numbers. It is not merely that they have never come across them, the entire part of the brain dealing with logic has developed to process other information instead. Yes, the brain really is that flexible in the way it develops. Virtually nothing is hard-coded in at birth. How we are, what we do - these are all programmed in as you grow. Don't like the program? Then teach something different to the next generation. They're not confined to the limitations of those who lived before.
Ok, so it is clear from all of that that I believe that we could easily(!) mould society in whatever image we feel like. Ok, maybe not easily, but we could do it. It is possible. What is "human" is ultimately defined by us, we are not limited by that definition. The next question would then be "SHOULD we develop a society without selfishness, secrecy, one-upmanship, etc?"
This is not a trivial question. We have no evidence, on the level of entire modern societies, that this would be socially stable. It would be doable, but what happens next? Has society evolved the selfish traits because of the demands of growth, or are the selfish traits vestigial remnants of a long-decayed, long-surpassed requirement? Is copyright closer to the brain of society or its appendix? This is important - you wouldn't want to lobotomize humanity, but if overeager Intellectual Property has become a serious case of appendicitis, then to not remove it could be lethal.
I've worked for such people - including, apparently, some sort of wookie. They are not easy people to deal with, but there are plenty of studies which do show that these ARE typically very influential and powerful managers. I do not completely understand why, because it is destructive to the company. Invariably, companies that fail are the companies that pass the limits of such attitudes. You'd think that companies would be driven by success and profits, but research by psychologists shows otherwise.
...lawyers?
(Hell, even the IBM PC could support virtual OS' very early on. First I saw was 4DOS. It task-switched on a key combination between OS', but it was trivial to hook up a clock interrupt that would make the same call. Four simultaneous OS' on one PC. That was probably about 17 years ago. Again, this is not identical to the Microsoft offering, but for chrissakes, this is 17 YEARS later. I'd better be seeing something new in that amount of time. I'm just not convinced it is 17 years worth of tech R&D newer.)
Ok, ok! So Linux supports OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenEXR, JPEG-2000, Open Inventor, the Renderman scene language and shaders, DirectX under WINE, Constructive Solid Geometry, Sound Fonts, 5.1 audio, audio raytracing, speech synthesis, efficient use of multi-core CPUs, real-time process scheduling and asynchronous I/O, but... What have the Romans ever done for us?
No, the logical method is to expect some component - any component - of the security to be compromised between now and the end of use. You then have a second, wholly independent, component which must simultaneously be compromised in order to be vulnerable. You upgrade when EITHER fails. It is then virtually certain that both have not failed, so everything remains intact, and you use that lead time to perform the upgrade.
You could regard this as a variant on the Byzantine General's Problem. There, some number of components are "traitors" (in this case, compromised), yet you have to make sure that the orders (data) received come from an authorized source alone. Other variants of this problem deal with making sure that that data does not fall into the wrong hands, such as using Byzantine key distribution.
Three algorithms, three block ciphers, three hashing functions. Any one of those gets broken, simply roll onto the next in the list. If you're sneaky enough, you have some mechanism for automatically switching combinations when the key is refreshed, making it much harder for an attacker to know which combination is actually being used at the time.
Security doesn't have to be perfect to be truly secure, it just has to be impassable in the time you detect an attacker bypassing one component and the time you can replace what has been broken. The defender in a real-time situation always has the advantage when it comes to what happens next. The attacker ONLY has the advantage when it comes to what has already happened. So long as there is no usable relationship, the attacker must always lose.
WEP and WPA should - by now - be entirely replaced with 802.1x at the very least. Neither of those has any business being used on a modern wireless network. I can accept that not everyone can upgrade to firmware that supports adequate security, but that only excuses the users. The manufacturers have no such excuse, because they're the ones who write the software and strong wireless security has existed for many years now.
I don't see a pressing need to mandate Open Source software, per se, so long as all file I/O and all network I/O is restricted to truly open standards. Staff need to be able to read submitted work in the format intended, but don't need to care how that format was generated. For simplicity, I would suggest such a school only make an effort to validate against Open Source software (you can't validate against a million and one proprietary systems) and would expressly state that students who submit using proprietary software do so entirely at their own risk.
I wouldn't have the school "fix" anything. Students are there to learn - provide them with a special install/kickstart server system of some kind. If they mess the machine up, THEY have to burn their free time on fixing things. When the school does everything, the students are going to be less worried about keeping things intact. Obviously, if a student needs help (hardware faults, unusual situations, etc), the staff would HELP the student to get things going, but the student cannot learn how to recover by keeping the process hidden from them.
The ability to keep calm under stress, the ability to step through the unexpected problems to a solution, the confidence that comes from knowing that you are capable in fact and not just on paper - these are things that you are better learning in a safety-net environment like a school than when you are out in the Real World. Schools shouldn't ever abandon their students, but should push them to truly think, truly understand. I don't expect students to make their own ink, as they would have done in reneissance times, but maintaining the tools of their craft/trade has always been an important part in understanding the trade.
(Going back to Open Source for a second, that should be emphasised with the recommendation. The student cannot maintain a closed-source program at all. I don't expect an art student to fix Open Office, either, but I would expect them to be able to tweak some of the options and features to conform to scripting standards. If you can read and write English at all, you can do that much.)
There are also fear-induced forms of false confession, not coerced by the police. Unshielded witnesses in mafia trials in Italy have an... interesting propensity to go crazy, claim they're God, or whatever. Even in cases where no actual threat even existed, I'd be willing to bet that stress and anxiety created enough pressure to destroy the person's ability to think rationally.
At this point, I think the legal system needs to invest heavily in understanding the overlap between neurology and psychology, so that better testing is possible and the experts are less likely to merely repeat the views of whoever is paying them. It must be easier to identify the insane and easier to identify those who are a threat by being insane and those who are NOT because they're insane.
This isn't to say I agree with such tactics, but double jeopardy means that they have to get their cases right the first time. They can't produce a version 2. This is true of both Sturgeon and Reiser. The margin for error is zero, the risks are extreme. That limits the authorities to having to play it as cool as they can.
This all assumes they're smart, of course. They could just be be stupid, too. The easy way to find out is to see if Sturgeon is arrested a month or two after Reiser is convicted or freed, and/or if he is able to kill again. If the authorities are smart, Sturgeon will be under 24-hour watch by people in a position to prevent him killing someone. If Sturgeon succeeds, or even gets close to succeeding, then the authorities are out of their tiny little minds. Alternatively, if Sturgeon is really delusional, those same authorities should have him in a secure ward the first moment they have enough evidence to prove it.
Might be. The Stranger hasn't appeared in any Bill Baggs Videos for a while.
The two aren't necessarily contradictory, but I absolutely agree that the education must come first. Schools must provide the knowledge and understanding required to move forward. This includes research and study skills, the basics in as many subjects as practical, enough transferable skills to not limit future growth, the understanding of how to reason and deduce effectively, and the specialist skills required to progress effectively in the chosen career path.
Sure that's a lot. Schools also have from when the kid is about 3 or 5 (depending on the quality of "preschooling") up through to when the kid is 18. (Education only until the age of 16 should be scrapped. There aren't any trades or occupations that can get away with that any more. You might need vocational schooling or a trade school, but you WILL need schooling past 16. Many jobs need training beyond that - London cabbies are the best in the world, not because they're smarter but because the standards of training are higher. Don't even begin to tell me other vocational trades couldn't benefit from squeezing every last drop of blood - err, ability out of people.)
Where computers can assist in education, they should be used in education. Where they do not, they shouldn't be within a thousand feet of a single student. Where student-usable laptops are available, they should be securely configured to do the work intended and nothing more. If that means burning the OS and config files into an eprom, then burn the bloody OS and config files into an eprom. You can use LinuxBIOS as a starting point to do exactly that, if you like. That's what it's there for.
Of course, many schools are lazy and unwilling to put effort into teaching, training or educating, let alone designing the tools necessary for the job. Many others simply don't have the time or the money, even though they have all the enthusiasm and understanding in the world. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. Yet others are filled with people who entirely satisfy the criteria of "those who can't, teach".
In order for education to work, it must be ripped up, with the unable and the unwilling taken out of the picture, and the rest provided with absolutely anything and everything they need to do their jobs well. The important part of that is "well". Consultants and computer "experts" who recommend inappropriate solutions should be stripped of all certifications, degrees and acolades, before having their toenails painted pink and chased through redneck country. Appropriate is tough, sure. It means doing REAL analysis of requirements (ie: finding out what is needed, whether or not it is wanted), REAL problem specification and REAL supervised and monitored integration with the schools. Monitored? Yes. You need to compare what is expected with what happens, and modify the analysis and specification accordingly. That is why software has a life CYCLE. You take the output and use it as input for the next iteration.
It seems very clear that none of this has not happened. No real analysis, no reverse-engineering of expertise, no real specification of the problem to hand, and certainly no monitoring and assessing of impact until the point of total collapse was reached.
This is not nearly good enough. I would perhaps expect such poor performance if tenth-graders were running the education department and the schools. Oh. Maybe they are...
That is perfectly true, in theory. In practice, Britain's medical system certainly performs a lot of experimental medicine - usually "unofficially" (patient consents, but there's no paperwork), most frequently for conditions deemed highly life-threatening or otherwise terminal, but sometimes for less-serious but "untreatable" conditions. These are usually not "controlled" experiments, participation is usually large and pre-existing evidence is usually marginal.
(And, yes, quite a bit of this is first-hand knowledge, the rest is from direct interviews with those carrying out the medical experiments.)
Indeed, a recent BBC report suggested that as much as 75% of treatments recommended by GPs in Britain had no scientific basis whatsoever. Obviously, I can't verify that one, but it agrees with my own experience well.
I don't know as much about the American health system, but there are documented reports of doctors injecting foetal cells into alzheimer patient brains (ten-to-fifteen years ago), or experimenting with non-FDA-approved medicines (not always with consent), which makes me think it's not just that side of the Atlantic.
However, these therapies almost always have something in common - they'd be damn-near impossible to sue over, for a whole range of reasons - the main one being that it's easy to be discrete with them. Slow-revival techniques would involve a lot more people, probably including friends/relatives. Dodgy pills are much easier to keep under the radar.
I'm not saying this is right - it's often highly unethical - and yes, evidential methods are definitely the way medicine should be practised. The evidence would seem to suggest, however, that it's only practised when the doctor is as much at risk as the patient.
However, yes, this would likely be useful in cryogenics. If it takes an hour for a cell to start to die, then you can afford to be much more gentle on tissue when thawing it, and therefore should be able to develop methods that are much less damaging. It should also increase the number of transplantable organs, as there'd be a far larger window of opportunity.
Yet as the grandparent post shows, there are those determined to believe only governments can censor, and there have been many cases where people have attempted to sue companies over first amendment rights. Censorship can happen between any two or more individuals, and you ONLY have rights when it comes to the Government.
This is also the phenomena associated with tape recordings of ghosts (where people want to hear a voice), premonitions, etc. The human brain is geared specifically to spot patterns. It's probably an evolutionary survival trait - patterns are easier and quicker to spot than predators and other threats, so seeing patterns and forming associations may have kept early humans alive. It's also likely a factor in religion and magical beliefs.
VTK is amazing and can be used in conjunction with other toolkits, such as ITK, to produce visualization for specific purposes. (ITK was designed for medical work, for example.) Other great visualization tolkits are OpenDX, GGobi, Ballview, ChomboVis and Fityk. This is something that is badly needed, if the number of toolkits is anything to go by. 3D FFTs are often closely associated with scientific visualization, but I've only found one package (P3DFFT) that supports it.
I have to say that the physical carvings did not match with the patterns being shown nearly so well as I'd expect if they were a genuine encoding. The stave thing is interesting (there's an apparent representation of a figure indicating a chord, which seems to be the same as the sound indicated by the cube above it). However, the human brain is excellent at only seeing patterns that match up with preconceived notions. Are there contra-indicators that were ignored? If you apply the same logic to patterns known not to be musical (such as geological formations), would you get an equally playable, convincing result? Until there is an effort to falsify the theory (not slam it, falsify it - there's a difference) then it is merely speculation, albeit very interesting speculation. And even if it were falsified, say by geological formations, it's always an opportunity to start a whole new form of, uhhh... rock music.
If it keeps Ms. Hilton busy and out of the news, I can't see why it would be so bad.
So for those French on Slashdot, I certainly salute your stubbornness and determination.
Also, very few OO languages are consistent. Advanced IDE and RAD packages are needed, together with books that aren't just dead tree matter but look about the size of said dead tree, because the interfaces are illogical, and what is mathematically pure and correct is often not directly implementable at all.
OO could be better. OO should be better.
Others have picked up on the failures of existing implementations, though for different reasons. D is infinitely better than C#, C++ or Java, for example. If you want a good, solid, cross-platform framework, then writing it for D would make more sense than writing it for C#. And although .Net is ok, it's not what I'd call good. Use ACE+TAU+CIAO for a while. Real-Time CORBA 3 isn't lightning-fast, but I'd use it over .Net any day.
Nonono. You're missing the point. The people who can break DRM are the ones who have the movies. The movies are mind-wrenchingly bad and will cause your brain to explode. The upshot is that only the brains of pirates will be destroyed. Don't you see? This is the most cunning plan Baldrick has come up with yet!
In part, I was thinking of cases where a company might add support for a device that is an upgrade from something already supported by supplying a patch to an existing driver. I was also thinking of small fixes for significant issues. I seem to remember reports of a security hole in the Mozilla codebase that had pre-existed the Open-sourcing of Netscape. The patch ended up being a handful of lines, but that was a critical fix.
Ok, I guess the criticality of the patch could be used to modify the score. My system only looked at the size of the patch. If we added a whole set of multipliers, we can distinguish both the size of the patch and its impact:
x2 for mission-critical updates/fixes (mission critical would be something likely to cause tens of millions of dollars of damage or put lives at risk if it fails), x1 for a functionally significant patch (ie: it's not going to kill anyone, but you won't be able to do what you want the way you want, either), x0.5 for a functionally moderate patch (everyone'll notice the difference, but only a third to two-thirds will give a damn), 0.25 for a functionally trivial patch (it's good that it's there, but that's about it), 0.1 for a prettification patch (nothing useful is added, but it should help later developers write something that is).
There will be other problems with this whole scheme, but this patch should fix the overvaluing of a patch without undervaluing genuinely critical show-stoppers.
Should we deny these programs any credit, merely because they do not entirely agree with our perspective? That would seem to be not only stupid but suicidal - Linux has respect not because of its philosophy but because you can do things. That is the currency that ISPs, businesses and academics understand. Freedom is nice, but Plan 9 is free these days. So is Exokern. So is Eros - one hell of a secure OS, by all accounts. Do these have a reputation? Has anyone even heard of them?
Obviously the answer is "no" amongst the people with any kind of money, but the odds are that the answer is "no" even amongst a majority of Open Source enthusiasts and ubergeeks. Those of you who have never heard of these OS' have probably not heard of them PRECISELY BECAUSE there is no commercial software for them. Would you have heard of Linux, had it not been for such software?
If you joined the Linux in-crowd at any time after about 1994, commercial closed-source software was plentiful and it would be hard to convince anyone that such software had not played some role in your awareness -- doubly so if you are still unaware of major Open Source projects for which no such software has ever existed.
I don't pretend to like closed-source solutions, I regard them as a perfect breeding-ground for bugs and rot. However, I would be thrice-foolish to deny that they have transformed the Linux landscape in the 13 years such software has been around, forcing the pace of development of things Linux users today take for granted. Opened source, such as XFS and JFS have been major benefits, but do you seriously imagine those would have happened if the commercial space hadn't ever existed at all?
And what of all the Open Source projects that corporations released and were then abandoned? SGI's OB1. IBM's DAISY. Hewlett-Packard's Scheduler Plugin system. Admit it - more people buy Oracle for Linux on a daily basis than ever used any of these programs for their entire project lifetime. So which has a bigger impact on Linux development - the stuff we use, or the stuff we don't?