Everything - from the replication of databases or file storage to the distribution of high-end video - is delivered on a point-to-point basis. This simply does not scale. It is inefficient, it is expensive, it is wasteful, it is.... so mindbogglingly primitive. Point-to-point was great, when you had telephone switchboard operators. In the days of scalable reliable multicast (SRM) and anycast, when the Internet backbone runs multicast protocols natively (there has been no "mbone" per-se since 1996), it is so unnecessary.
Even if you limit yourself to replicating the distribution points with a protocol such as SRM or NORM (NACK-oriented Reliable Multicast), you eliminate huge chunks of totally unnecessary Internet traffic. However, there is no reason to limit yourself like that. The latency involved over long-distance Internet connections must exceed the interval time between requests for high-demand video content, so by simply waiting a little and collecting a batch of requests, you can transmit to the whole lot in a single go. No need for a PtP connection to each.
Then there is the fact that video is not the only information that eats bandwidth for breakfast. Static content - PDFs and other large documents - also devour any surplus capacity. So all an ISP needs to do is run a copy of Squid on each incoming line. How hard is that? It takes - what - all of 10 minutes to configure securely and fire up. You then forget about it.
There are people who would argue that it would impact banner ad revenue. Well, banner ad revenue is typically per-click, not per-view, so that is really a weak argument. Then there is the problem of copyright, as the cache is keeping a copy of text, images, etc. Well, so is your browser. Until a major website sues a Firefox user for copyright infringement for leaving their local cache enabled, it would seem that this is more paranoia than practical. As writers have noted for many centuries, we need fear nothing but fear itself. It is our fear of these solutions that are creating our existing problems. It seems the height of stupidity to create real problems for the sole purpose of avoiding problems that might be entirely fictional. "Better the devil you know" is a weak excuse when the devil you know is unacceptable.
OpenEXR is a nice piece of work and I believe it is supported on modern Linux desktops. (Now, if only there were cheap monitors and graphics cards that could support it to its full capacity.... What was that about Linux not supporting modern hardware? What about all the hardware that can't support modern Linux?!)
One of the benefits of OpenEXR over other very high dynamic range formats is that it doesn't seem to have the Intellectual Property burden. JPEG2000 doesn't look nearly as inviting and some of the other HDR formats are totally closed. One of the problems is that until it's being widely used on the web and other high-visibility places, it will be seen as an obscure format only of interest to movie studios.
There are a number of groupware packages for Linux, ranging from the trivial to the fairly comprehensive. True, none of them are "there", I don't know of any that are included on any mainstream distribution, and those that I've seen are trying to copy Exchange rather than go to first principles, identify what is actually needed, and then implement wrappers for compatibility. (You can't win a race by following in someone's footsteps. If they know where they're going, the best you can do is come second. If, as often happens in IT, they haven't a clue as to where to go, the more likely outcome is to get totally lost.)
I'd extend (1) a little - due to declining fish stocks, the squid are having to more thoroughly sieve the fishing nets to find anything worth eating. (3) is probably significant in places - the "dead zones" stretch far enough off coastlines to affect locations inhabited by giant and colossal squid.
Most such squid that have been found have been found very dead. This one was trying to get at food that had been caught, but appears to have been extremely dead by the time it was landed. I'll add a (1.5) of: fishermen are more willing to admit killing the damn things, rather than 'just finding them' somewhere.
As for (4), I think it's a joint venture between Cthulhu and John Wyndham's Kraken. Cthulhu normally only stalks Innsmouth and Hyperborea.
More computers have been destroyed by coffee spills than by crowbars. Particularly the kind of office coffee that contains chemicals usually used to dissolve gold or corrode neutron stars. (Note: Some early DEC machines were reportedly immune to such warfare and so included self-destruct opcodes to produce the same effect.)
Don't know if they still do, but in the 50's, the British used synchronized tapes with one-time pads. As best as I understand it, both sides of the link started their tapes at the same time and from the same offset (synchronized over secure phone) but had no control over when the machines at each end would actually sync up. (The exact sync mechanism is something I'm also a little unclear over - nothing from the tape was ever transmitted.) The practical upshot was that anyone who had a copy of the tape AND a copy of the transmission would still face a daunting computational challenge to break the encryption.
If you combine this with the split key concept, so that the difficulty of obtaining a full pad is considerably greater, and perhaps even run each fragment through a public key encryption algorithm to make getting that fragment a near-impossible task, you get damn close to the theoretical level of security offered by an OTP.
A correctly-implemented OTP, in which the pad cannot be derived algorithmically from known quantities, where the pad is not cyclic, and where the pad is used exactly once, cannot be broken at all without physically obtaining the specific part of the pad that is actually used and some computationally-viable method of eliminating any excess. If the pad is rendered unreadable, or the specific information required to make the pad usable simply doesn't exist except at the moment of transmission and then only on the machines involved, then OTP is essentially unbreakable.
The premise of encryption is that nothing can ever be made 100% tamper-proof or uninterceptable, merely very tamper-resistant and very hard to intercept, and so you're far better off making what is obtained unusable. Having something that is supposedly not interceptable is so much snake oil. For a long time, nobody was sure you could undetectably tap optic fiber. What are the vulnerabilities of the endpoints? Is the connection between the "secure" endpoint and the computers at either end exploitable? Are any of the computers involved open to being monitored by TEMPEST or other remote techniques? If the machines are on partially or fully exposed networks, are the machines susceptible to having the transmission intercepted either prior to being secured or after being restored? (Partially exposed can include computers that share USB memory sticks or floppies with unsecure machines. All you need is a carrier for a virus.)
You do a wholly digital Tom Cruise for the acting (as this is something the computer will be better at), and use the real Tom Cruise as the voice. The credits then have Tom Cruise as the lead actor, the movie gets the brand value, the actor gets their money and glory, and the producer suffers less harassment and needs fewer, cheaper retakes. The movie industry is bound to get to the point where their simulations are capable of providing a body-double, and body-doubles don't replace who they are doubling for in the credits. When they're listed at all. Whether this contaminates the brand is another matter. When movie making is reduced to nothing more than producing a cartoon, what value does the actor actually have? If the original actor dies, simply find someone who sounds close enough. What is seen isn't going to change.
One of the other benefits of replacing actors completely, body-wise, is that action can be literally lethal in intensity. Ripping up a few CGI effects is perfectly safe and avoids having to hire stuntmen (who aren't cheap) or literal body-doubles (who are cheap, but aren't necessarily any good at acting).
Some day, it may be possible to use a 7-tesla or 9-tesla fMRI to record the neural activity of an actor and skip the body-suits completely. Just directly run the neural activity directly to the virtual system and vice versa. Then the actors become part of the CGI, not merely giving inputs to it. Of course, you'll get a new type of actor. One who has quite literally been pulverized, blown up, shot up, mutilated, drowned, incinerated and crushed, as far as their senses and memory are concerned. Scenes will become more realistic, as there is no physical risk to the actor, no matter how dangerous the scene. Sure, a few actors will likely suicide from the PTSD, but actors suicide for all kinds of reasons anyway, and Hollywood just uses it as an excuse to re-release their movies. Hollywood will like this a lot, as aging will be less of a problem. So long as the voice is still good, the physical ability of the actor becomes immaterial. A spinal injury, like that of Christopher Reed would have made no difference, as the brain doesn't need the spine in order to to produce the correct signals. You could have seen three or four more Superman movies with him as the star, and provided the graphics were good enough, it would have been impossible to tell the difference.
Is that possible? Sure. It just takes a LOT more computing power than is normally put into CGI. Pixar, et al, use simple shading techniques to produce the illusion of rendering. It's cheap, quick and produces perfectly adequate graphics for animations. For producing high-quality photorealistic CGI, you need a lot more power. You're looking at bell-distribution cone-tracing along with high-quality radiosity, and you need to treat the skin as a seven-layer non-uniform object. You also need to over-render, blur and shrink, in order to get rid of the inevitable artifacts produced by CGI.
Sound isn't much easier. You can't just record the voice and keep it like that. You have to wave-trace it through the scene file to get the acoustics right. Make it sound like the actor is really there, that this is a real live scene. Wave-tracing is computationally expensive stuff.
Computing-wise, all this is possible today. Elephants Dream was rendered on something like 240 G5 processors. I would imagine that a cluster of 72,000 G5 processors could render a feature-length movie with near-perfect photorealism and audiorealism. 1,152,000 if you want it rendered in real-time. AFAIK, there are no clusters today at a million-plus nodes, but that's because of expense, not technology. The technological capability to replace the physical bodies of actors exists today, but only a handful of the world's richest men even come close to being capable of afford such a system - and I seriously doubt any of them would be interested in doing so.
Having (a) been a bright kid, and (b) taught a series of classes on the scientific method to 11/12 yr-old exceptionally bright kids (think IQ greater than 140 - not average, minimum), I can say that traditional schooling is simply not appropriate. Arguably, it is the schools decision to make, in that the students do not own the school, however each bad decision by a school only affects the school's average grade at the end of the year. Each bad decision could permanently derail the future of any number of those kids and wreck their ability to recover. Schools cannot be held to account for that, at present. Until a better system is devised, bright kids should be encouraged to break the mould as much as they can. It is the only way they can develop as whole, sane, rational individuals, rather than intellectual or emotional cripples.
The ideal, in my opinion, would be to stream schools by both individual ability and by group ability, where individuals work well together. This would need to be fine-grained, say at the level of a series of classes, to be effective. Being good at one thing doesn't make you good at everything, and vice versa. This is going to result in multiple people having to teach the same class, but that's good. We've all encountered situations where a teacher was superb at explaining to some people but not others. This gives you the chance to simply schedule round that and ensure kids get teachers they learn best from. Encouraging the brighter kids to write up how-to guides would help solidify what they learned and provide potentially useful teaching material. Oh, and I'd limit a class to no fewer than 1 member of staff per 7-10 students at age 10, increasing as the ages go down.
As for out-of-class stuff, which was the point of the original article, the more research they do, the better. Let the kids accelerate their own learning. There's a lot of good stuff on the Internet. True, there's a lot of crap there, too, but kids need to learn how to filter the noise from the signals and so long as the kids feel comfortable around the staff, the Internet is probably one of the safest places to learn how to filter. Yes, there are dangers, but that's why it is vital to create an atmosphere in which kids and staff coexist rather than fight it out. Sure, this isn't a perfect remedy, and even if it were, no school would ever dream of adopting such revolutionary ideas, but it's an option nonetheless. A lack of use doesn't equate to a lack of existence.
To answer the original question: Depends on the school. If the school is dictatorial, then a way for the kids to act out safely is extremely ethical, although not necessarily lawful. If the school is moderate but the computer department is a little strange, then I'd say it's both ethical and lawful. In all other cases, it's an almost impossible question to answer. Too many variables, too many unknowns.
Very likely, the autistic spectrum is the final common pathway of two (or more) independent neurological failures. MRI scans show two distinct regions of the brain to be commonly impacted with "lower-functioning" and "higher-functioning" autism, of which one is shared with Asperger's Syndrome (I think those are the mirror cells) and the other, towards the middle of the brain, is shared with schizo-effective disorders. Only the latter would appear to have even the remotest chance of being linked to inflamation, which means that you might - just might - be able to push people around on the autistic spectrum, but this would not be a cure. Also note that there is a world of difference between "commonly" and "always". There are very likely many conditions mis-classified as autistic spectrum, and there are also very likely more than just the three subclasses of actual autism.
(Although Aspergers differs mechanistically from the other types of autism, by my understanding of the fMRI studies on the subject, it is entirely possible that "classic autism" is simply Asperger's with any other disorder that disrupts the brain's ability to filter and process data correctly. Asperger's might also be the point of intersection of autism and an as-yet unidentified condition. Or one of any number of billion other possibilities.)
I agree that there are probably no "cures" for autism, as there is still so much uncertainty as to what it is we mean by autism and what it is we mean by "cure" in this context. And even if these were known, it would seem unlikely that the means to implement such a cure exist. How do you go about fixing a mirror cell? Certainly not by any kind of classical medicine. Are there methods of limiting its impact? Possibly. An interesting book, "Somebody, Somewhere", documents an interesting theory - that some forms of autism limit the ability to cope with the flood of information from a "noisy" world and that people with this form of autism may be coping with this by setting up mental blocks to avoid being totally overwhelmed. If this sounds reasonable, then it would seem to me that replacing coping mechanisms that don't work well for an individual with ones that might work better could help a lot.
(I have Asperger's and actually don't want a total cure. It is actually a big help in the IT profession. However, I could do without some of the more debilitating aspects, if it's possible to benefit from the positives whilst limiting the negatives.)
...that it took fourty years from Macmillan's "Winds Of Change" speech for events to actually transpire as he had predicted. (Whilst I am not a fan of many of the older politicos, I was actually very impressed by that speech when the BBC make it available via UnrealAudio. Personally, I think it's one of the very few speeches that would deserve to be more widely known.)
If a person lives on a street being used as a "rat run" (ie: a minor road that is capable of handling faster cars than a major road), the normal practice is to install what the British would call "sleeping policemen" - speed bumps to Americans. That usually only requires the local housing association to approve it - local authorities will usually go along with such a plan as it's cheap and they can brag about their traffic management strategies to the local press.
Another method that is popular is to make all junctions staggered by just enough to make straight-line acceleration a pain. Or you could dispose of open junctions altogether and use roundabouts. Much better for normal driving than a two-way or four-way stop, and much less likely to be ignored, owing to the crash barrier in the middle of the road.
If offenses are genuinely as common as is being made out by the original couple, then have the local TV station do a human-interest story on it. It's doubtful these two have much community standing, and harassing those they "catch" is likely to help nobody in their area, but a TV crew recording fairly demonstrable, repeated dangerous driving would likely have generated a stir.
The only thing that will be stirred in this case is porridge.
...although Kermit might qualify. However, if they find a Transylvanian vampire duck with a penchant for carrot-juice preserved in amber, they'd damn well better get the DNA, whatever the owner says.
On 7, when using multiple repositories, the packages should state the assumptions made at time of packaging. You should be able to reject a package on assumptions that are not valid for your system -or- your way of doing things. So that this actually works, you'd need a standard, common list of assumptions that could be tested against.
For 8, There should be the ability to respond to optional software dependencies, as well as hardware dependencies. This should either be automagic or (at the user's discretion) from a picklist that the package manager can plug into the package's configuration mechanism.
I'd also include four more:
#9. It must be possible to dump and reload the database using a single command for each operation. Reloads should optimize seek times for frequently-accessed records.
#10. There must be a way to validate the database's integrity and eliminate phantom and corrupt entries.
#11. Some idiot package managers put the same file into multiple packages, making it impossible to install cleanly. When a file is already installed and the SHA1/MD5 checksums confirm the packaged file is identical, the database should simply increase the count on that file and not install it, rater than error out - unless the user flags that the package manager should do so.
#12. Name clashes are beginning to get out of hand and not all major programs out there conform to LSB anyway. There should be two options - one to install software in a more robust way (for those installing many packages) and one to massage non-LSB software to conform to existing standards when this is the preferred option.
Since all existing package managers can perform at least a subset of all of these, it should be possible to provide the necessary extra tools to provide them all. The "standard" package manager then becomes a wrapper over whatever actual package manager is installed. Eventually, if the wrapper is any good, people will migrate code to the wrapper and package managers as they exist today will be assimilated into the Borg Collective. If the wrapper is crap, then at least all package management systems will have some measure of interoperability and the stress over which to use will go down.
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 1
That barely registers on the list of very likely disasters on an ark-like project. Can you imagine what 700 years of sustained high-energy ionizing radiation is going to do to ANY living matter? Outside the heliopause, radiation levels will be, well, astronomical. The only way to counter this is to add more shielding. The more shielding you add, the slower you'll have to travel in order to carry sufficient fuel to stop. Worse, manoevering round exoplanets will be highly entertaining, as your momentum will be simply too great for any kind of rapid turns.
The crew size will also need to be significant. You need at least 100 people who are of sufficient genetic distance to avoid problems, for a multi-generational vehicle. Ideally, you'd allow for the inevitable and make that 200. Biosphere II was roughly a third the size needed to sustain about a fourtieth of that. So, your habitable area (ie: excluding all radiation shielding, other superstructure, fuel, air-scrubbing facilities in case of disaster, computer systems, educational facilities, etc) need to be 1,200 times the size of Biosphere II. However, it doesn't end there. Humans don't do well for sustained periods of time in zero gravity. To add artificial gravity, you need TWO of these biospheres on opposite ends of some sort of pylon that is at least three-quarters of a mile long. (It needs to be that long for the spin to cause negligible problems for humans and plants.)
This is somehow more achievable than the Star Trek warp drive? Material science is fairly advanced, but not THAT advanced. NASA has had problems with tethers a few tens of feet, yet can somehow manage to tether two ruddy great biospheres at.75 of a mile? Biosphere II also relied heavily on natural sunlight, which this little ark won't have - do you know how many grow-lamps it would take to provide adequate natural sunlight for something on this scale for seven centuries? Or how much electricity it would take?
This is not to say it is impossible - I've not figured through all of the constraints so don't know if it is - but I can say that existing technology is nowhere near close.
(Impossible? Constraints? Yes. The more advanced the technology, the easier it will get to solve some problems. This will follow an S-curve. Initially, the improvements will be small. Eventually, you'll hit the maximum on the curve, and after that there will be diminishing returns that will tend towards some upper limit which it cannot pass. If the technology required exceeds that upper limit, then the technology required cannot be achieved. To determine if some specific approach to a problem can lead to an actual solution, figure out what the constraints are on the system and then figure out if the constraints have non-zero solutions by the time you reach the upper limit. If the answer is no, then no technology - however advanced - can master that approach. It doesn't matter what new will be known a hundred or a thousand years from now, that method won't work. Other methods might, but that one would be truly impossible.)
But this study has been roundly condemned as not following any of the accepted practices or standards for scientific experiments, so we can't assume they would have used standard lab rats. (Besides, The Brain had other plans...) For all we know, they bought them on eBay or sent some students down the sewer tunnels with nets.
America is probably not a good example to use. Estimates of autism have shot up in recent years, it is now classed as the second-worst contry in the Western world for children, education standards have fallen, creationists have become a major political force, obesity is sky-high and rising, something caused Britney Spears' hair to fall out, and 90% of all recent US news stories on legal and/or political issues can be best explained by some form of brain damage.
There are something like 1,500 identified types of potato, any of which can contain higher-than-normal levels of chlorophyll. This gives us 3,000 permutations. Of the possible genetic modifications, I'd say there are likely to be dozens by now, if not hundreds. Then, there are probably many hundreds of members of the rodent family that can be classed as rats. At this point, the number of possible permutations of rat and potato are so astronomically high that nothing much can be concluded.
(eg: Let's say that the rats were fed a GMed potato that had been GMed to be toxic to rodents. This proves what?)
Whether this is a problem of the research itself or merely the extremely bad reporting of it is hard to say. Personally, I am not keen on GM as it currently exists - we're barely at the point of understanding the functioning of genes, the interaction between genes and "junk DNA", and the interaction between different genes. We're also not very skilled at gene splicing - genetic therapies are rarely used due to their high risk and lack of proven benefit. This is not to say GM is bad, only that I have serious doubts that biotech companies are nearly as knowledgeable as they claim to be. This is one area that BSODs are definitely unwelcome and where we have the luxury to spend a little time on making sure that the bugs are ironed out.
You take the Google paper and the twenty others on disk failure, take the third page of each, sort them by their papers' Google rankings and take the middle letter of every 42nd word, whilst standing in the middle of a pentagram under the second full moon of the month.
"We don't want to be sued to within an inch of our lives by certain very wealthy brands, due to US law allowing manufacturers to prohibit unfavourable reviews."
Ideally, they would have formatted the text to spell out the names of the brands if you take the first letter of every Nth word, or some specific column of text. (Or maybe they have...)
He preaches the same rhetoric to everyone, equally, without bias or prejudice. I find it deliciously refreshing to find that a person who claims to believe in freedom and distribution is willing to advocate it to all peoples, rather than restricting the distribution of that freedom. To not have gone would have violated every ethical principle laid out in the GPL. THAT would have been ironic. Merely honoring his own beliefs, regardless of his opinion of the audience, is IMHO an extremely noble thing and deserves respect.
(This is not to say he dislines - or likes - communism, capitalism or any other ism. My point is that it doesn't matter. What matters is whether he honors the very standards he sets, and this shows that he does so. What's wrong with that?)
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you limit yourself to replicating the distribution points with a protocol such as SRM or NORM (NACK-oriented Reliable Multicast), you eliminate huge chunks of totally unnecessary Internet traffic. However, there is no reason to limit yourself like that. The latency involved over long-distance Internet connections must exceed the interval time between requests for high-demand video content, so by simply waiting a little and collecting a batch of requests, you can transmit to the whole lot in a single go. No need for a PtP connection to each.
Then there is the fact that video is not the only information that eats bandwidth for breakfast. Static content - PDFs and other large documents - also devour any surplus capacity. So all an ISP needs to do is run a copy of Squid on each incoming line. How hard is that? It takes - what - all of 10 minutes to configure securely and fire up. You then forget about it.
There are people who would argue that it would impact banner ad revenue. Well, banner ad revenue is typically per-click, not per-view, so that is really a weak argument. Then there is the problem of copyright, as the cache is keeping a copy of text, images, etc. Well, so is your browser. Until a major website sues a Firefox user for copyright infringement for leaving their local cache enabled, it would seem that this is more paranoia than practical. As writers have noted for many centuries, we need fear nothing but fear itself. It is our fear of these solutions that are creating our existing problems. It seems the height of stupidity to create real problems for the sole purpose of avoiding problems that might be entirely fictional. "Better the devil you know" is a weak excuse when the devil you know is unacceptable.
One of the benefits of OpenEXR over other very high dynamic range formats is that it doesn't seem to have the Intellectual Property burden. JPEG2000 doesn't look nearly as inviting and some of the other HDR formats are totally closed. One of the problems is that until it's being widely used on the web and other high-visibility places, it will be seen as an obscure format only of interest to movie studios.
Being better isn't good enough, these days.
There are a number of groupware packages for Linux, ranging from the trivial to the fairly comprehensive. True, none of them are "there", I don't know of any that are included on any mainstream distribution, and those that I've seen are trying to copy Exchange rather than go to first principles, identify what is actually needed, and then implement wrappers for compatibility. (You can't win a race by following in someone's footsteps. If they know where they're going, the best you can do is come second. If, as often happens in IT, they haven't a clue as to where to go, the more likely outcome is to get totally lost.)
Most such squid that have been found have been found very dead. This one was trying to get at food that had been caught, but appears to have been extremely dead by the time it was landed. I'll add a (1.5) of: fishermen are more willing to admit killing the damn things, rather than 'just finding them' somewhere.
As for (4), I think it's a joint venture between Cthulhu and John Wyndham's Kraken. Cthulhu normally only stalks Innsmouth and Hyperborea.
More computers have been destroyed by coffee spills than by crowbars. Particularly the kind of office coffee that contains chemicals usually used to dissolve gold or corrode neutron stars. (Note: Some early DEC machines were reportedly immune to such warfare and so included self-destruct opcodes to produce the same effect.)
If you combine this with the split key concept, so that the difficulty of obtaining a full pad is considerably greater, and perhaps even run each fragment through a public key encryption algorithm to make getting that fragment a near-impossible task, you get damn close to the theoretical level of security offered by an OTP.
A correctly-implemented OTP, in which the pad cannot be derived algorithmically from known quantities, where the pad is not cyclic, and where the pad is used exactly once, cannot be broken at all without physically obtaining the specific part of the pad that is actually used and some computationally-viable method of eliminating any excess. If the pad is rendered unreadable, or the specific information required to make the pad usable simply doesn't exist except at the moment of transmission and then only on the machines involved, then OTP is essentially unbreakable.
The premise of encryption is that nothing can ever be made 100% tamper-proof or uninterceptable, merely very tamper-resistant and very hard to intercept, and so you're far better off making what is obtained unusable. Having something that is supposedly not interceptable is so much snake oil. For a long time, nobody was sure you could undetectably tap optic fiber. What are the vulnerabilities of the endpoints? Is the connection between the "secure" endpoint and the computers at either end exploitable? Are any of the computers involved open to being monitored by TEMPEST or other remote techniques? If the machines are on partially or fully exposed networks, are the machines susceptible to having the transmission intercepted either prior to being secured or after being restored? (Partially exposed can include computers that share USB memory sticks or floppies with unsecure machines. All you need is a carrier for a virus.)
But, if you want to confuse them, use:
value = ((12 >> value) & 3)
as this gives you greycodes.
Although he Mozart, he isn't Elgar to to really explore the possibilities. Besides, he prefers to Bethoven down the pub.
One of the other benefits of replacing actors completely, body-wise, is that action can be literally lethal in intensity. Ripping up a few CGI effects is perfectly safe and avoids having to hire stuntmen (who aren't cheap) or literal body-doubles (who are cheap, but aren't necessarily any good at acting).
Some day, it may be possible to use a 7-tesla or 9-tesla fMRI to record the neural activity of an actor and skip the body-suits completely. Just directly run the neural activity directly to the virtual system and vice versa. Then the actors become part of the CGI, not merely giving inputs to it. Of course, you'll get a new type of actor. One who has quite literally been pulverized, blown up, shot up, mutilated, drowned, incinerated and crushed, as far as their senses and memory are concerned. Scenes will become more realistic, as there is no physical risk to the actor, no matter how dangerous the scene. Sure, a few actors will likely suicide from the PTSD, but actors suicide for all kinds of reasons anyway, and Hollywood just uses it as an excuse to re-release their movies. Hollywood will like this a lot, as aging will be less of a problem. So long as the voice is still good, the physical ability of the actor becomes immaterial. A spinal injury, like that of Christopher Reed would have made no difference, as the brain doesn't need the spine in order to to produce the correct signals. You could have seen three or four more Superman movies with him as the star, and provided the graphics were good enough, it would have been impossible to tell the difference.
Is that possible? Sure. It just takes a LOT more computing power than is normally put into CGI. Pixar, et al, use simple shading techniques to produce the illusion of rendering. It's cheap, quick and produces perfectly adequate graphics for animations. For producing high-quality photorealistic CGI, you need a lot more power. You're looking at bell-distribution cone-tracing along with high-quality radiosity, and you need to treat the skin as a seven-layer non-uniform object. You also need to over-render, blur and shrink, in order to get rid of the inevitable artifacts produced by CGI.
Sound isn't much easier. You can't just record the voice and keep it like that. You have to wave-trace it through the scene file to get the acoustics right. Make it sound like the actor is really there, that this is a real live scene. Wave-tracing is computationally expensive stuff.
Computing-wise, all this is possible today. Elephants Dream was rendered on something like 240 G5 processors. I would imagine that a cluster of 72,000 G5 processors could render a feature-length movie with near-perfect photorealism and audiorealism. 1,152,000 if you want it rendered in real-time. AFAIK, there are no clusters today at a million-plus nodes, but that's because of expense, not technology. The technological capability to replace the physical bodies of actors exists today, but only a handful of the world's richest men even come close to being capable of afford such a system - and I seriously doubt any of them would be interested in doing so.
The ideal, in my opinion, would be to stream schools by both individual ability and by group ability, where individuals work well together. This would need to be fine-grained, say at the level of a series of classes, to be effective. Being good at one thing doesn't make you good at everything, and vice versa. This is going to result in multiple people having to teach the same class, but that's good. We've all encountered situations where a teacher was superb at explaining to some people but not others. This gives you the chance to simply schedule round that and ensure kids get teachers they learn best from. Encouraging the brighter kids to write up how-to guides would help solidify what they learned and provide potentially useful teaching material. Oh, and I'd limit a class to no fewer than 1 member of staff per 7-10 students at age 10, increasing as the ages go down.
As for out-of-class stuff, which was the point of the original article, the more research they do, the better. Let the kids accelerate their own learning. There's a lot of good stuff on the Internet. True, there's a lot of crap there, too, but kids need to learn how to filter the noise from the signals and so long as the kids feel comfortable around the staff, the Internet is probably one of the safest places to learn how to filter. Yes, there are dangers, but that's why it is vital to create an atmosphere in which kids and staff coexist rather than fight it out. Sure, this isn't a perfect remedy, and even if it were, no school would ever dream of adopting such revolutionary ideas, but it's an option nonetheless. A lack of use doesn't equate to a lack of existence.
To answer the original question: Depends on the school. If the school is dictatorial, then a way for the kids to act out safely is extremely ethical, although not necessarily lawful. If the school is moderate but the computer department is a little strange, then I'd say it's both ethical and lawful. In all other cases, it's an almost impossible question to answer. Too many variables, too many unknowns.
(Although Aspergers differs mechanistically from the other types of autism, by my understanding of the fMRI studies on the subject, it is entirely possible that "classic autism" is simply Asperger's with any other disorder that disrupts the brain's ability to filter and process data correctly. Asperger's might also be the point of intersection of autism and an as-yet unidentified condition. Or one of any number of billion other possibilities.)
I agree that there are probably no "cures" for autism, as there is still so much uncertainty as to what it is we mean by autism and what it is we mean by "cure" in this context. And even if these were known, it would seem unlikely that the means to implement such a cure exist. How do you go about fixing a mirror cell? Certainly not by any kind of classical medicine. Are there methods of limiting its impact? Possibly. An interesting book, "Somebody, Somewhere", documents an interesting theory - that some forms of autism limit the ability to cope with the flood of information from a "noisy" world and that people with this form of autism may be coping with this by setting up mental blocks to avoid being totally overwhelmed. If this sounds reasonable, then it would seem to me that replacing coping mechanisms that don't work well for an individual with ones that might work better could help a lot.
(I have Asperger's and actually don't want a total cure. It is actually a big help in the IT profession. However, I could do without some of the more debilitating aspects, if it's possible to benefit from the positives whilst limiting the negatives.)
...that it took fourty years from Macmillan's "Winds Of Change" speech for events to actually transpire as he had predicted. (Whilst I am not a fan of many of the older politicos, I was actually very impressed by that speech when the BBC make it available via UnrealAudio. Personally, I think it's one of the very few speeches that would deserve to be more widely known.)
Another method that is popular is to make all junctions staggered by just enough to make straight-line acceleration a pain. Or you could dispose of open junctions altogether and use roundabouts. Much better for normal driving than a two-way or four-way stop, and much less likely to be ignored, owing to the crash barrier in the middle of the road.
If offenses are genuinely as common as is being made out by the original couple, then have the local TV station do a human-interest story on it. It's doubtful these two have much community standing, and harassing those they "catch" is likely to help nobody in their area, but a TV crew recording fairly demonstrable, repeated dangerous driving would likely have generated a stir.
The only thing that will be stirred in this case is porridge.
...although Kermit might qualify. However, if they find a Transylvanian vampire duck with a penchant for carrot-juice preserved in amber, they'd damn well better get the DNA, whatever the owner says.
They'll just wait until he croaks.
For 8, There should be the ability to respond to optional software dependencies, as well as hardware dependencies. This should either be automagic or (at the user's discretion) from a picklist that the package manager can plug into the package's configuration mechanism.
I'd also include four more:
#9. It must be possible to dump and reload the database using a single command for each operation. Reloads should optimize seek times for frequently-accessed records.
#10. There must be a way to validate the database's integrity and eliminate phantom and corrupt entries.
#11. Some idiot package managers put the same file into multiple packages, making it impossible to install cleanly. When a file is already installed and the SHA1/MD5 checksums confirm the packaged file is identical, the database should simply increase the count on that file and not install it, rater than error out - unless the user flags that the package manager should do so.
#12. Name clashes are beginning to get out of hand and not all major programs out there conform to LSB anyway. There should be two options - one to install software in a more robust way (for those installing many packages) and one to massage non-LSB software to conform to existing standards when this is the preferred option.
Since all existing package managers can perform at least a subset of all of these, it should be possible to provide the necessary extra tools to provide them all. The "standard" package manager then becomes a wrapper over whatever actual package manager is installed. Eventually, if the wrapper is any good, people will migrate code to the wrapper and package managers as they exist today will be assimilated into the Borg Collective. If the wrapper is crap, then at least all package management systems will have some measure of interoperability and the stress over which to use will go down.
The crew size will also need to be significant. You need at least 100 people who are of sufficient genetic distance to avoid problems, for a multi-generational vehicle. Ideally, you'd allow for the inevitable and make that 200. Biosphere II was roughly a third the size needed to sustain about a fourtieth of that. So, your habitable area (ie: excluding all radiation shielding, other superstructure, fuel, air-scrubbing facilities in case of disaster, computer systems, educational facilities, etc) need to be 1,200 times the size of Biosphere II. However, it doesn't end there. Humans don't do well for sustained periods of time in zero gravity. To add artificial gravity, you need TWO of these biospheres on opposite ends of some sort of pylon that is at least three-quarters of a mile long. (It needs to be that long for the spin to cause negligible problems for humans and plants.)
This is somehow more achievable than the Star Trek warp drive? Material science is fairly advanced, but not THAT advanced. NASA has had problems with tethers a few tens of feet, yet can somehow manage to tether two ruddy great biospheres at .75 of a mile? Biosphere II also relied heavily on natural sunlight, which this little ark won't have - do you know how many grow-lamps it would take to provide adequate natural sunlight for something on this scale for seven centuries? Or how much electricity it would take?
This is not to say it is impossible - I've not figured through all of the constraints so don't know if it is - but I can say that existing technology is nowhere near close.
(Impossible? Constraints? Yes. The more advanced the technology, the easier it will get to solve some problems. This will follow an S-curve. Initially, the improvements will be small. Eventually, you'll hit the maximum on the curve, and after that there will be diminishing returns that will tend towards some upper limit which it cannot pass. If the technology required exceeds that upper limit, then the technology required cannot be achieved. To determine if some specific approach to a problem can lead to an actual solution, figure out what the constraints are on the system and then figure out if the constraints have non-zero solutions by the time you reach the upper limit. If the answer is no, then no technology - however advanced - can master that approach. It doesn't matter what new will be known a hundred or a thousand years from now, that method won't work. Other methods might, but that one would be truly impossible.)
But this study has been roundly condemned as not following any of the accepted practices or standards for scientific experiments, so we can't assume they would have used standard lab rats. (Besides, The Brain had other plans...) For all we know, they bought them on eBay or sent some students down the sewer tunnels with nets.
Trust me, it can't be any worse than any of the other predictions in the IT industry.
America is probably not a good example to use. Estimates of autism have shot up in recent years, it is now classed as the second-worst contry in the Western world for children, education standards have fallen, creationists have become a major political force, obesity is sky-high and rising, something caused Britney Spears' hair to fall out, and 90% of all recent US news stories on legal and/or political issues can be best explained by some form of brain damage.
(eg: Let's say that the rats were fed a GMed potato that had been GMed to be toxic to rodents. This proves what?)
Whether this is a problem of the research itself or merely the extremely bad reporting of it is hard to say. Personally, I am not keen on GM as it currently exists - we're barely at the point of understanding the functioning of genes, the interaction between genes and "junk DNA", and the interaction between different genes. We're also not very skilled at gene splicing - genetic therapies are rarely used due to their high risk and lack of proven benefit. This is not to say GM is bad, only that I have serious doubts that biotech companies are nearly as knowledgeable as they claim to be. This is one area that BSODs are definitely unwelcome and where we have the luxury to spend a little time on making sure that the bugs are ironed out.
The coastline might make a break for it first. It might prove necessary to accelerate the asteroid to prevent this.
You take the Google paper and the twenty others on disk failure, take the third page of each, sort them by their papers' Google rankings and take the middle letter of every 42nd word, whilst standing in the middle of a pentagram under the second full moon of the month.
Ideally, they would have formatted the text to spell out the names of the brands if you take the first letter of every Nth word, or some specific column of text. (Or maybe they have...)
(This is not to say he dislines - or likes - communism, capitalism or any other ism. My point is that it doesn't matter. What matters is whether he honors the very standards he sets, and this shows that he does so. What's wrong with that?)