The world's requirements are going to grow exponentially. Technology won't solve that problem, simply because for the bulk of history only a very few nations have had technology of any real sophistication and they haven't been a significant percent of the world's population. The modern world isn't like that. We're in a stage where the population is growing exponentially globally AND populations that have not had access to advanced (resource-hungry) technology now have.
This picture is slightly complicated by the fact that technology has been getting more efficient over time. However, many efficient technologies are locked behind Intellectual Property laws and/or major price barriers and/or political considerations. Oil needs conserving, right? So it would be logical to eliminate wasteful technologies ASAP and replace them with efficient ones, right? You seriously imagine any Government anywhere offering to exchange wasteful 10 gallon-to-the-mile wrecks on wheels for nice, new shiny hybrids? Particularly in the US, where most hybrids are imports?
Nor can I see the President phoning up Castro and offering to replace Cuban power stations with a light water reactor, and to upgrade their grid to be more efficient and reliable. Yeah. That's just not going to happen. It wouldn't happen if Cuba had the last barrel of oil on Earth and it was the only way the US could save the world.
There's also the problem of resource decay. Radioactive materials decay over time. They don't exist forever. Even though they last a very long time (overall), the older they are, the more effort you'll need to put in to extract the usable uranium from the surrounding material and decay products, and the less there will be when you do. It won't wait forever.
The next one's not decay, but it's a limiting factor. Oil and coal are "stable", but you need a certain concentration before it's useful to you. A thousand mile coal seam one millimeter thick has a lot of coal, but it's useless to you. It's also got to be in a usable form - oil shales are bad enough on the surface, but they would pose a far more serious challenge a few miles underground.
The end result is that you effectively deplete resources FASTER than you can extract them. In the case of uranium, through decay. In the case of oil and coal, through wastage and inaccessibility.
The problem is not unsolvable, but the initial outlay would necessarily be very large. To do it right, you'd have to do it all. Every scrap of infrastructure on the planet overhauled to the highest existing standard, with alternative energy infrastructure (direct solar water heating is a good start - if it can work in the middle of Wales, it'll work anywhere!) wherever there would be a net saving of resources to do so. It would also mean abolishing all protectionism and all Intellectual Property concerning efficient technologies.
Sure, fuel may well totally run out in 2020 if we don't do this. I suspect most voters and most tax-payers would RATHER fuel ran out in 14 years time than pay for the overhaul needed today. Today is a lot closer and for many, money means far more than having a future.
Sometimes from those who control them, sometimes from their clients, sometimes from the authorities (cops who are bribed by pimps to beat up and return women who escape from slave operations, for example) and sometimes they themselves are the abusers and exploiters. (It's rarer, though it's not unknown. It's also much less discussed.)
Society is one very ugly mess. GTA probably doesn't help, but all things considered, I can't see how - even if it did "encourage" vile behavior - the impact could be remotely significant.
The same applies to murder. It's just usually* called "justifiable homicide" or "capital punishment". ("Reasonable force" is one thing, but Virginia permits shooting someone in the back if they once posed a threat in the past and I think Texas now allows you to kill someone if there's any chance they could pose a threat in the future.)
*This depends on the country and the context. Somalia has no Government to speak of and therefore nobody to define such terms. With assassination considered a legitimate tool in the war on terror, the boundaries are getting fuzzy even when stable political systems exist.
Yes, this is relevant, as we are looking here at whether something is considered by a given country to be a serious crime or even a crime at all. If there are countries where prostitution is a serious crime and murder is acceptable, then do you look at their standards for so judging, or go by your own?
I'm not condoning or condemning anything here, I'm merely pointing out that it's never been clear-cut. What is "serious" is simply too subjective and varies far too much between individuals, never mind countries.
As far as sex workers are concerned, my only personal opinion is that there exists no way of identifying and assisting abuse victims who drift into the trade, those abused within it, modern slaves, anyone acting under duress for any other reason, etc. Nor is any serious effort made to deal with those involved in abuse, slavery, etc.
Changing laws that are highly emotionally charged is difficult and likely to be infrequent. So it is vitally important that if/when they are changed, they are changed in a way that provides the greatest benefit for the longest time. I am not convinced that lobbyists are the best ones to explain benefits and I'm not convinced that anyone else has identified the risks - present or future.
The status quo sucks (bad choice of words for this topic, but who cares?) but every alternative I've ever heard seems infinitely worse and far more prone to bring about the very problems that are supposed to be being cured, especially as the real problems seem to be largely being ignored.
Deal with the serious stuff first and then worry about the details. Otherwise it is just vote-trawling and people-pleasing.
I would argue that it is reasonable to use force in the defence of oneself or someone who cannot take defensive action, within the constraint that the force is reasonable to the circumstance and where (regardless of how) the level of force that can be considered reasonable is reduced over time as far as is practical to achieve, but no further. I would also add the extension that what is "reasonable force" should take into account passive defences and other methods of preventing the attacker from inflicting harm, and that such prevention should always be preferred over inflicting harm.
"Preferred" does not mean "stand back and get beaten up", it means what it says. If there is an option by which nobody gets hurt, that should be considered (not "required", considered) first.
"Well, yes," you might say, "so if we all drive around in armoured, bullet-proof cars, wore chainmail armour and had a forcefield generator in a pocket, we'd be a lot safer. And how likely is that?"
With the exception of the forcefield, I don't see anything there that is so totally impossible that it simply cannot be done. You wouldn't use medieval chainmail, but you don't need medieval materials or design requirements, there not being many people with broadswords and maces walking around, and material science is a damn sight more advanced today. I'm also talking about a direction, not a specific point in time. If it's not viable today, then do your best today and see what you can do in ten years time, or a hundred years time. The idea that offence is the ONLY defence is not going to be valid for all time and may not be valid in many situations today.
I see no reason why society persists in limiting itself to 12th century methods, using 16th century tools, of handling 21st century threats which are likely as bad as they are due to 1st century attitudes. There almost has to be better methods of dealing with things, regardless of whether those methods are known today.
It depends too much on context to be easily categorized. I would argue that people drawing up specifications and designs should not be concerned at all with new technologies, because specifications should be implementation-independent. I would argue that QA people should certainly use proven methods, as they have to be certain WHERE problems are introduced, and that requires limiting the number of variables. Again, with maintenance Software Engineers, mix-n-match of new ideas with old designs is often not a good idea unless it significantly simplifies things.
For original authors, however, the ONLY consideration beyond implementing ALL of the requirements in full, should be to keep the software as simple. Anything - anything at all - that complicates the implementation unnecessarily should be banned. (Necessary complications would include maintenance considerations, probable future extensions, etc.)
If, for any reason, you find that the best way to get from specification to the simplest, most elegant final product is to write in C, you would write in C. If, when applying the same test, you find the optimal solution is to write in PHP, write in PHP. If Occam would prove to be perfect, use Occam. Hammers are great for nails, you DON'T use them to cut wood, no matter how much experience you have with hammers. The right tool for the right job, first, last and ALWAYS. No exceptions.
I'm a student of linguistic anthropology, in case you were wondering where I'm getting this crap.
Your comments are probably right. You'd need to do a snapshot of a reasonable subset, then.
A linguistic anthropologist. There are only three possibilities here - you've either gone insane from the stress (which explains why you'd be on Slashdot), or you're unimaginably intelligent (which would also expain why you're on Slashdot), or both.
There's a theory that the spacing in Beowulf is itself structured and contains some of the language. If that is correct, it may not even be possible to determine all of the degrees of freedom, as there may be too many that we don't see or recognize.
Do you know anyone who specializes in rare or extinct languages? It occurs to me that adding proper support for such languages to the translations of applications and GUIs could be extremely interesting.
He never said it wasn't about the money. He only said that money wasn't enough. Money will buy almost everything, so by implication those can't be enough either. It follows that he wants everything money won't buy, as well, not instead of. That, to me, is scary.
It's that money isn't enough. He wants the rest of the Universe as well. However, I would like to offer my services in any experiment to prove whether money really is enough.
The signature is only as good as the checks placed on the certificate being signed, the checks on the entity being who they say they are, the security on the private key of the signer and the strength of the key and hashing function used. Any of those points can become weakspots if a single signature on a certificate is used.
(If someone is using a weak algorithm and a weak key, especially if the key is not random but based on knowable information, then it may be possible for someone with sufficient computing power to calculate a key that is functionally identical to the original.)
Signed certificates are fine, but they have to be done right, where "right" is in such a way that both the certifier and the certified can 100% guarantee that the certificate is utterly, unconditionally, totally proof against any viable attack. (I'll define "viable" as anything on-par with a full-scale quantum computer, or launching a full-scale military assault on the certificate holder and the signer(s).)
In my books, this would really require a web of trust, extremely tough security on all computers holding ANY data that could be used to derive part of the key used for signing OR be used to re-generate that key, plus a high level of validation at all points in the sequence. A "web of trust" is only valid if 66% + 1 of all members are absolutely on the level, as proven by the Byzantine General's Problem. Tough security would ideally mean that commercially sensitive data of that kind could not be accessed remotely at all and could neither be read nor written to directly by any user. The user doesn't need direct access to anything, they only need to call processes that can generate signatures and sign things. The actual data should be completely invisible to them. Further, the information used to generate keys should be purely random, no pseudorandom bullshit, and should not be retained. Further, the signee's Internet-connected machine should have mandatory access controls such that the certificate cannot be accessed by anything - anything at all - other than the code that is used to establish and maintain the secure connection.
In practice, checks are all but non-existant. I believe one phisher was able to get hold of Microsoft's signing keys from Verisign at one point. To do so would require a total absence of security at so many levels. (Why on earth would you want 'cp' to have permission to read a key file, for a start?) Since that time, so many more signers have materialized, and it is doubtful in the extreme that even a fraction of those have any meaningful security policy at all.
Oh, and to top it all off, signature schemes are a one-way relationship. There is currently no way of taking a certificate that has the correct information in it, and signed by a valid signer, to determine if the correct signer has signed the certificate. The web of trust needs bi-directional links, to prove the complete relationship. I do not believe that there is any trivial way to do this with existing protocols and I'm 99% certain none of the certificate authorities provide a validation mechanism by which you could perform the check, even if you could implement one.
I'd have said Blair would have qualified, along with Thatcher. John Major would have escaped such a fate by getting on his soap box and boring the army to death. Actually, you mentioning the summoning of an MP has given me an idea. If enough people in enough constituancies go down and demand to see their MP at the same time, it could seriously clog up the House of Commons. It could be very effective as a means of public protest - at least, until the rules are changed. Far more than by-elections have been.
The Government has been itching to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with elected (read: identical) officials. The last thing we need is for the one last group of semi-independent observers to be kicked out in favour or a bunch of clones and sheep.
(The HoL isn't perfect, but the theory of having wholly independent mechanisms in the checks and balances seems to be sounder than having the US system where money can buy you everything.)
The Queen could refuse to sign, but the Government wants to replace her, too. Besides, as nobody sees the Queen sign anything, who's to say that the PM doesn't have a rubber stamp with her signature etched on it? It's not as if she is in a position to complain!
(I like democracy, but I utterly reject the notion that you can have truly independent segments of Government with true separation of powers when those segments exist in a wholly co-dependent, master-slave relationship.)
If you include usable archaic words (words that people in England would recognize, even if they wouldn't actually use them in general conversation) and regional words that are sufficiently limited that they wouldn't make it into the OED, my guess is you could probably double the number of words estimated in the English language. If you include American English and International English, it would likely be closer to triple.
I've long held the belief that the total complexity of language (which would be a measure of the complexity of the characters, the complexity of the grammar, and the total number of words) would necessarily be comparable for all languages. You've still got to express about the same number of things, all you're doing is shifting where the work is done.
However, this does not appear to apply very well to English. True, it doesn't have a neuter gender and the structure of a sentance is notoriously flexible, but it does have a vast number of rules and special cases. Over time, I've also encountered many cases where a concept in one language simply doesn't have anything comparable in English. This suggests that overall complexity is not as simple as I'd assumed, although I strongly suspect I'm not too far wide of the mark.
(I would love it if someone who specializes in language could draw up a map, showing the various degrees of freedom within a language, and how different languages compare both within any given degree of freedom and overall.)
Studies are usually designed to prove a point rather than to objectively study a difference. Even when this is not the intent, study designers are likely to subconciously inject their own biases. Only a truly representitive sample, compared totally objectively, can really be considered neutral - and you're simply not going to get that in any study conducted by people. There is also the problem that TCO is not a fixed number. You're looking at a fairly complex function that varies wildly according to a large number of parameters. however, any such plot of TCO would be completely meaningless to any corporate manager.
I guess my question could be phrased as: "how do you maximize the usefulness to the audience while minimizing the sacrifices to accuracy? And how much of a compromise can you really afford to make before the study actually degrades understanding?"
The word "game" is (ab)used to mean childish things alone by Joe and Jane Public. That, however, is the fate of many words and unless somebody is proposing a Word Police*, I don't see that changing any time soon. If you were to approach a mathematician who specializes in Game Theory, don't expect them to merely be very good at Ludo or Snap.
I think it safe to say that "game" is a very old word, which means it has probably had many meanings over time. I fully expect that trend to continue. Those things we call "games" today will acquire a new label and the word "game" will move on.
*The French, in an effort to keep their language pure, do have an official council to ensure that imported words are minimized and new words are of genuine French derivation. If I recall from French studies correctly, there are even legal restrictions on what name a person can be given.
Accepted, though POSIX is getting archaic these days. Non-volatile RAM would seem to address the issue of lost data, though. Well, thinking about it further, you'd also need battery backup on the CPU and a sleep mode for it, or you'd lose the state of the CPU registers and any data in cache that had not (yet) been copied into RAM.
The rats investigated showed a lack of fear, if not an attraction towards potentially lethal scenarios. This is not that uncommon in humans and I'd certainly count some politicians amongst the ranks of Homo Lemmingus. From what I understand of other posts, that specific link hasn't been evident, but of course that would somewhat depend on whether anyone has looked for it.
("Mental retardation" has been linked, and there's little doubt that you'll find more people with mental problems in dangerous professions than chance alone would suggest. However, that could also be because nobody else wants those kinds of jobs, and the safer jobs tend to also have very high entry requirements. Having said that, though, statistics can't tell you what is cause and what is effect in such cases. Both predate all written language.)
I know that's the case for metadata journalling, but if you use full data journalling, I would have thought you'd be fine.
Actually, I wouldn't use ANY filesystem for this sort of work. The files won't change in size and I doubt they'll be deleted. It would seem more sensible to battery-back the RAM on the computer and the hard drive, use a raw partition for the data and a "sequential index" database to figure out where the data starts and how long it is. Batteries guarantee that the state of the computer will never be lost (as the RAM is now non-volatile), so you won't need journalling, and if you can guarantee the data will never fragment, you don't need the overhead of a filesystem.
It would be better if you could find some way of using core memory, rather than magnetic disks or optical media. Magnetic disks have a lifespan of a decade or less, optical media won't even last that. Core memory, on the other hand, requires a refresh rate of about once a century and is unlikely to have significant errors within the remaining lifetime of western civilization. There are only two drawbacks. It's sloooow (anyone with a Commodore 64 disk drive? anyone care to imagine something that's about a hundred times slower?) and it's bulky (you could probably replace your CD collection - but you'd need to put the people on Rhode Island somewhere else first).
Actually, it describes an idea that's been around since at least the late 70s, which is why I'm surprised that the reaction has been so negative to my post. (It wouldn't be so bad, if they'd pointed to an example as to WHY this wouldn't work.) My only dispute with these existing approaches is that either the technology didn't exist at the time (the late 70s was a trifle early in the parallel era to do a good design, and they couldn't have created a CPU with enough transistors to do the job right, even if they had such a design) or they are not taking enough advantage of everything they could do, presumably because it's fashionable to do as much as possible in software.
What I'm looking for is a way to take the trends being followed to see where you would logically end up if chip designers keep following them. My guesses are probably way off what the "end result" would be, but do seem to be in the general direction of where people are going, so would seem a good starting point for speculation.
At least, compared to a good, high-speed processor. However, some of the ideas from FPGAs, multi-path hardware, "fat trees" and packet switching are perfectly usable within a CPU to redirect internal operations and to provide common resources. It is not a crime to re-use ideas. (Ok, SCO thinks is, but I'm ignoring them for now.) As for the idea of having unequal division of labour, that's a big part of IBM's "cell" technology but is really as old as "intelligent" peripherals and the use of dedicated processors. All I'm doing is taking existing methods and looking at what mixes make for the best gumbo.
There is absolutely bugger all point in eliminating time delays from a lack of resources if you end up adding even greater delays by soft-coding everything into an FPGA. What's wanted is to hard-code everything that is concrete (so you run at maximum speed) but soft-code everything that's already abstract (so you don't introduce delays through implementation that were never a part of the design).
This would do away with all task switching and time slicing (up to the limit of the virtual cores). This would be executing instructions in a true parallel fashion, not by rotating between them, but it would (a) shift the CPU resource allocation from the OS to the CPU, and (b) eliminate all context switching. Instead of tightly binding resources to a given CPU and loosely coupling the context with the code, you'd loosely couple the resources to the CPU and tightly bind the context to a given block of code.
As context switching and time slicing are huge contributors to latency and cycle overhead, eliminating those should produce smoother, faster code. They are also heavily re-used bits of code, which means eliminating them should be kinder to the stack and to the kernel threading mechanism.
In any optimization, you always want to go for the biggest contributor that you can change significantly. These are probably the most frequently used parts of the kernel and this would not just simplify them but would eliminate them entirely.
(If you take this to the extreme, you'd start with a nano-kernel - so you've only the really essential stuff that absolutely can't be in userspace in kernel space - and push as much of that into hardware as you can. You can't push everything - yet - but the less you have in pure software, the less switching you need and the faster it'll run.
Because you'd be fetching from N instruction queues in parallel, you'd be capable of running N times as many instructions at the same time. (You've only got one bus to memory, so your "fetch" doesn't change, no matter how many cores or physical CPUs you have. Indeed, half the problem with SMP is precisely that - you can't have multiple CPUs fetch simultaneously.)
Just to make this clear, I am not talking about one physical CPU core with multiple registers it cycles between. That would be ghastly slow. I'm talking about the ability to fetch and execute multiple instructions purely in parallel, no cycling, but where you are not left with idle resources in any CPU core when another CPU core could really benefit from them.
(This does mean "tagging" all internal operations with which core they go with, so that results go to the right place. That's a slight complication. You don't need that when you've tight coupling, because there's only one place the results CAN go to.)
The idea is that, behind the user-programmable part, you've pools of compute elements that are kept physically isolated in a "pure" multi-core CPU. This is wasteful, if one of those CPUs needs compute elements that another CPU is leaving untouched. When doing SIMD, it's ok. "Single instruction, multi data" implies you'll be using the same compute elements on all CPUs anyway, so there's no benefit to having common pools. However, that leaves out all multi-tasking and all MIMD code. With those, the odds are very high that different tasks will have very different CPU requirements, so soft-coding what elements go with what core would be highly beneficial.
...that you were thinking. There are many different places you can parallelize, in a CPU, and many different forms of parallelization. It would not be that there was "more" parallelization (overall), merely that you were diverting resources so that you have more hardware where you need it, and less where you don't. The sum total would remain the same.
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This picture is slightly complicated by the fact that technology has been getting more efficient over time. However, many efficient technologies are locked behind Intellectual Property laws and/or major price barriers and/or political considerations. Oil needs conserving, right? So it would be logical to eliminate wasteful technologies ASAP and replace them with efficient ones, right? You seriously imagine any Government anywhere offering to exchange wasteful 10 gallon-to-the-mile wrecks on wheels for nice, new shiny hybrids? Particularly in the US, where most hybrids are imports?
Nor can I see the President phoning up Castro and offering to replace Cuban power stations with a light water reactor, and to upgrade their grid to be more efficient and reliable. Yeah. That's just not going to happen. It wouldn't happen if Cuba had the last barrel of oil on Earth and it was the only way the US could save the world.
There's also the problem of resource decay. Radioactive materials decay over time. They don't exist forever. Even though they last a very long time (overall), the older they are, the more effort you'll need to put in to extract the usable uranium from the surrounding material and decay products, and the less there will be when you do. It won't wait forever.
The next one's not decay, but it's a limiting factor. Oil and coal are "stable", but you need a certain concentration before it's useful to you. A thousand mile coal seam one millimeter thick has a lot of coal, but it's useless to you. It's also got to be in a usable form - oil shales are bad enough on the surface, but they would pose a far more serious challenge a few miles underground.
The end result is that you effectively deplete resources FASTER than you can extract them. In the case of uranium, through decay. In the case of oil and coal, through wastage and inaccessibility.
The problem is not unsolvable, but the initial outlay would necessarily be very large. To do it right, you'd have to do it all. Every scrap of infrastructure on the planet overhauled to the highest existing standard, with alternative energy infrastructure (direct solar water heating is a good start - if it can work in the middle of Wales, it'll work anywhere!) wherever there would be a net saving of resources to do so. It would also mean abolishing all protectionism and all Intellectual Property concerning efficient technologies.
Sure, fuel may well totally run out in 2020 if we don't do this. I suspect most voters and most tax-payers would RATHER fuel ran out in 14 years time than pay for the overhaul needed today. Today is a lot closer and for many, money means far more than having a future.
Society is one very ugly mess. GTA probably doesn't help, but all things considered, I can't see how - even if it did "encourage" vile behavior - the impact could be remotely significant.
Sounds a perfectly arm-less proposal to me, but is it leg-itimate?
*This depends on the country and the context. Somalia has no Government to speak of and therefore nobody to define such terms. With assassination considered a legitimate tool in the war on terror, the boundaries are getting fuzzy even when stable political systems exist.
Yes, this is relevant, as we are looking here at whether something is considered by a given country to be a serious crime or even a crime at all. If there are countries where prostitution is a serious crime and murder is acceptable, then do you look at their standards for so judging, or go by your own?
I'm not condoning or condemning anything here, I'm merely pointing out that it's never been clear-cut. What is "serious" is simply too subjective and varies far too much between individuals, never mind countries.
As far as sex workers are concerned, my only personal opinion is that there exists no way of identifying and assisting abuse victims who drift into the trade, those abused within it, modern slaves, anyone acting under duress for any other reason, etc. Nor is any serious effort made to deal with those involved in abuse, slavery, etc.
Changing laws that are highly emotionally charged is difficult and likely to be infrequent. So it is vitally important that if/when they are changed, they are changed in a way that provides the greatest benefit for the longest time. I am not convinced that lobbyists are the best ones to explain benefits and I'm not convinced that anyone else has identified the risks - present or future.
The status quo sucks (bad choice of words for this topic, but who cares?) but every alternative I've ever heard seems infinitely worse and far more prone to bring about the very problems that are supposed to be being cured, especially as the real problems seem to be largely being ignored.
Deal with the serious stuff first and then worry about the details. Otherwise it is just vote-trawling and people-pleasing.
"Preferred" does not mean "stand back and get beaten up", it means what it says. If there is an option by which nobody gets hurt, that should be considered (not "required", considered) first.
"Well, yes," you might say, "so if we all drive around in armoured, bullet-proof cars, wore chainmail armour and had a forcefield generator in a pocket, we'd be a lot safer. And how likely is that?"
With the exception of the forcefield, I don't see anything there that is so totally impossible that it simply cannot be done. You wouldn't use medieval chainmail, but you don't need medieval materials or design requirements, there not being many people with broadswords and maces walking around, and material science is a damn sight more advanced today. I'm also talking about a direction, not a specific point in time. If it's not viable today, then do your best today and see what you can do in ten years time, or a hundred years time. The idea that offence is the ONLY defence is not going to be valid for all time and may not be valid in many situations today.
I see no reason why society persists in limiting itself to 12th century methods, using 16th century tools, of handling 21st century threats which are likely as bad as they are due to 1st century attitudes. There almost has to be better methods of dealing with things, regardless of whether those methods are known today.
For original authors, however, the ONLY consideration beyond implementing ALL of the requirements in full, should be to keep the software as simple. Anything - anything at all - that complicates the implementation unnecessarily should be banned. (Necessary complications would include maintenance considerations, probable future extensions, etc.)
If, for any reason, you find that the best way to get from specification to the simplest, most elegant final product is to write in C, you would write in C. If, when applying the same test, you find the optimal solution is to write in PHP, write in PHP. If Occam would prove to be perfect, use Occam. Hammers are great for nails, you DON'T use them to cut wood, no matter how much experience you have with hammers. The right tool for the right job, first, last and ALWAYS. No exceptions.
He never said it wasn't about the money. He only said that money wasn't enough. Money will buy almost everything, so by implication those can't be enough either. It follows that he wants everything money won't buy, as well, not instead of. That, to me, is scary.
It's that money isn't enough. He wants the rest of the Universe as well. However, I would like to offer my services in any experiment to prove whether money really is enough.
...that would be the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.
(If someone is using a weak algorithm and a weak key, especially if the key is not random but based on knowable information, then it may be possible for someone with sufficient computing power to calculate a key that is functionally identical to the original.)
Signed certificates are fine, but they have to be done right, where "right" is in such a way that both the certifier and the certified can 100% guarantee that the certificate is utterly, unconditionally, totally proof against any viable attack. (I'll define "viable" as anything on-par with a full-scale quantum computer, or launching a full-scale military assault on the certificate holder and the signer(s).)
In my books, this would really require a web of trust, extremely tough security on all computers holding ANY data that could be used to derive part of the key used for signing OR be used to re-generate that key, plus a high level of validation at all points in the sequence. A "web of trust" is only valid if 66% + 1 of all members are absolutely on the level, as proven by the Byzantine General's Problem. Tough security would ideally mean that commercially sensitive data of that kind could not be accessed remotely at all and could neither be read nor written to directly by any user. The user doesn't need direct access to anything, they only need to call processes that can generate signatures and sign things. The actual data should be completely invisible to them. Further, the information used to generate keys should be purely random, no pseudorandom bullshit, and should not be retained. Further, the signee's Internet-connected machine should have mandatory access controls such that the certificate cannot be accessed by anything - anything at all - other than the code that is used to establish and maintain the secure connection.
In practice, checks are all but non-existant. I believe one phisher was able to get hold of Microsoft's signing keys from Verisign at one point. To do so would require a total absence of security at so many levels. (Why on earth would you want 'cp' to have permission to read a key file, for a start?) Since that time, so many more signers have materialized, and it is doubtful in the extreme that even a fraction of those have any meaningful security policy at all.
Oh, and to top it all off, signature schemes are a one-way relationship. There is currently no way of taking a certificate that has the correct information in it, and signed by a valid signer, to determine if the correct signer has signed the certificate. The web of trust needs bi-directional links, to prove the complete relationship. I do not believe that there is any trivial way to do this with existing protocols and I'm 99% certain none of the certificate authorities provide a validation mechanism by which you could perform the check, even if you could implement one.
I'd have said Blair would have qualified, along with Thatcher. John Major would have escaped such a fate by getting on his soap box and boring the army to death. Actually, you mentioning the summoning of an MP has given me an idea. If enough people in enough constituancies go down and demand to see their MP at the same time, it could seriously clog up the House of Commons. It could be very effective as a means of public protest - at least, until the rules are changed. Far more than by-elections have been.
(The HoL isn't perfect, but the theory of having wholly independent mechanisms in the checks and balances seems to be sounder than having the US system where money can buy you everything.)
The Queen could refuse to sign, but the Government wants to replace her, too. Besides, as nobody sees the Queen sign anything, who's to say that the PM doesn't have a rubber stamp with her signature etched on it? It's not as if she is in a position to complain!
(I like democracy, but I utterly reject the notion that you can have truly independent segments of Government with true separation of powers when those segments exist in a wholly co-dependent, master-slave relationship.)
I've long held the belief that the total complexity of language (which would be a measure of the complexity of the characters, the complexity of the grammar, and the total number of words) would necessarily be comparable for all languages. You've still got to express about the same number of things, all you're doing is shifting where the work is done.
However, this does not appear to apply very well to English. True, it doesn't have a neuter gender and the structure of a sentance is notoriously flexible, but it does have a vast number of rules and special cases. Over time, I've also encountered many cases where a concept in one language simply doesn't have anything comparable in English. This suggests that overall complexity is not as simple as I'd assumed, although I strongly suspect I'm not too far wide of the mark.
(I would love it if someone who specializes in language could draw up a map, showing the various degrees of freedom within a language, and how different languages compare both within any given degree of freedom and overall.)
I guess my question could be phrased as: "how do you maximize the usefulness to the audience while minimizing the sacrifices to accuracy? And how much of a compromise can you really afford to make before the study actually degrades understanding?"
I think it safe to say that "game" is a very old word, which means it has probably had many meanings over time. I fully expect that trend to continue. Those things we call "games" today will acquire a new label and the word "game" will move on.
*The French, in an effort to keep their language pure, do have an official council to ensure that imported words are minimized and new words are of genuine French derivation. If I recall from French studies correctly, there are even legal restrictions on what name a person can be given.
Accepted, though POSIX is getting archaic these days. Non-volatile RAM would seem to address the issue of lost data, though. Well, thinking about it further, you'd also need battery backup on the CPU and a sleep mode for it, or you'd lose the state of the CPU registers and any data in cache that had not (yet) been copied into RAM.
("Mental retardation" has been linked, and there's little doubt that you'll find more people with mental problems in dangerous professions than chance alone would suggest. However, that could also be because nobody else wants those kinds of jobs, and the safer jobs tend to also have very high entry requirements. Having said that, though, statistics can't tell you what is cause and what is effect in such cases. Both predate all written language.)
Actually, I wouldn't use ANY filesystem for this sort of work. The files won't change in size and I doubt they'll be deleted. It would seem more sensible to battery-back the RAM on the computer and the hard drive, use a raw partition for the data and a "sequential index" database to figure out where the data starts and how long it is. Batteries guarantee that the state of the computer will never be lost (as the RAM is now non-volatile), so you won't need journalling, and if you can guarantee the data will never fragment, you don't need the overhead of a filesystem.
It would be better if you could find some way of using core memory, rather than magnetic disks or optical media. Magnetic disks have a lifespan of a decade or less, optical media won't even last that. Core memory, on the other hand, requires a refresh rate of about once a century and is unlikely to have significant errors within the remaining lifetime of western civilization. There are only two drawbacks. It's sloooow (anyone with a Commodore 64 disk drive? anyone care to imagine something that's about a hundred times slower?) and it's bulky (you could probably replace your CD collection - but you'd need to put the people on Rhode Island somewhere else first).
What about Excell?
What I'm looking for is a way to take the trends being followed to see where you would logically end up if chip designers keep following them. My guesses are probably way off what the "end result" would be, but do seem to be in the general direction of where people are going, so would seem a good starting point for speculation.
There is absolutely bugger all point in eliminating time delays from a lack of resources if you end up adding even greater delays by soft-coding everything into an FPGA. What's wanted is to hard-code everything that is concrete (so you run at maximum speed) but soft-code everything that's already abstract (so you don't introduce delays through implementation that were never a part of the design).
As context switching and time slicing are huge contributors to latency and cycle overhead, eliminating those should produce smoother, faster code. They are also heavily re-used bits of code, which means eliminating them should be kinder to the stack and to the kernel threading mechanism.
In any optimization, you always want to go for the biggest contributor that you can change significantly. These are probably the most frequently used parts of the kernel and this would not just simplify them but would eliminate them entirely.
(If you take this to the extreme, you'd start with a nano-kernel - so you've only the really essential stuff that absolutely can't be in userspace in kernel space - and push as much of that into hardware as you can. You can't push everything - yet - but the less you have in pure software, the less switching you need and the faster it'll run.
Just to make this clear, I am not talking about one physical CPU core with multiple registers it cycles between. That would be ghastly slow. I'm talking about the ability to fetch and execute multiple instructions purely in parallel, no cycling, but where you are not left with idle resources in any CPU core when another CPU core could really benefit from them.
(This does mean "tagging" all internal operations with which core they go with, so that results go to the right place. That's a slight complication. You don't need that when you've tight coupling, because there's only one place the results CAN go to.)
The idea is that, behind the user-programmable part, you've pools of compute elements that are kept physically isolated in a "pure" multi-core CPU. This is wasteful, if one of those CPUs needs compute elements that another CPU is leaving untouched. When doing SIMD, it's ok. "Single instruction, multi data" implies you'll be using the same compute elements on all CPUs anyway, so there's no benefit to having common pools. However, that leaves out all multi-tasking and all MIMD code. With those, the odds are very high that different tasks will have very different CPU requirements, so soft-coding what elements go with what core would be highly beneficial.
...that you were thinking. There are many different places you can parallelize, in a CPU, and many different forms of parallelization. It would not be that there was "more" parallelization (overall), merely that you were diverting resources so that you have more hardware where you need it, and less where you don't. The sum total would remain the same.