I think the BOFH was their training manual. I can't say that the recent news that agents were arrested for facilitating drug smuggling in exchange for a cut of the profits did anything to improve my opinion. Stories from way back, for example one story on Slashdot where a former TSA agent claimed that their instructions were to allow guns through to avoid holding up the lines, also diminished what little regard I had for them. (The Slashdot claim mirrors claims by journalists at around the same time that around 30% of attempts to get a gun through screening succeeded, so I'm inclined to take the claim as more than just fluff.)
This is perhaps the first (and probably only) time I'm going to agree with R.P. on anything, he's normally 52 cards short of a full deck (all that's left are the jokers) but there really is no benefit in a security apparatus that offers no security but does offer a great deal of insecurity and hardship. The TSA has failed to demonstrate that it is competent or capable of dealing with any actual threat. Rather, it has an worryingly high failure rate and an even more worrying tendency to fix the wrong problem when something does go wrong - and usually badly.
There has been ONE attempt to put Semtex in a shoe, and the attempt could not have succeeded. It is extremely doubtful that passing the shoes through the scanner would have detected it. Compare that to the total number of hijacks that have succeeded due to firearms. Tell me, which of the attack vectors is a genuine threat more likely to pursue? The one that might work or the one that's stupid? So which does the TSA attempt to close? Yes, the one that's stupid. Yay. And "attempt" is about as far as it has probably got. I don't trust the TSA's competency at detecting Semtex, either in terms of finding a bomb detector that will spot it (it's notoriously difficult, which is why the IRA used it extensively) or in terms or recognizing that the detector has spotted anything at all.
No security is perfect, but if we're to believe (even a little bit) the Slashdot claim and the recent news stories, then it suggests that the TSA is not accidentally insecure but knowingly insecure. The people at the top probably didn't intend it to be that way, but the people at the top don't seem eager to fix the problems either. As such, it may not be their doing but it is their responsibility and they're failing.
Head injuries due to heading are the ones that have been studied, as shown by the links provided. They wouldn't have studied them if there was no concern by neurologists that it might be an issue.
Professional soccer doesn't have that many head-impacting-on-head collisions. At least, not the soccer matches I've seen - and I used to be addicted to Match of the Day. I've seen plenty of aggressive shoulder barges, mistimed sliding tackles, etc, but head collisions aren't something I've seen much of.
I'm willing to accept that it might have increased in frequency in recent years, but that would indicate a style problem and not a problem with the game. I'm also willing to bet that the number of head collisions is far lower than for American Football -- as noted above, there you have potentially 960-1280 concussions per player per year. Soccer is too ballet-like, too gymnastic, to permit that level of brain injury. If there's even a tenth of that number for a centre forward or a defender, I'd be surprised. (I'd also recommend replacing the coach.)
Agreed that there are problems everywhere (I'm firmly convinced that the Norse were onto something with their mythology of Loki - we see evidence of it in every government). Agreed that such regulations hurt everyone -- NASA's "Beowulf" software was classified as munitions for a while, as I'm sure older Slashdot readers will remember. It resulted in the software being smuggled into Canada and developed there.
I would want to ask the US Congress this - is the US truly made stronger, more capable and more competent by forcing the best minds to flee to other nations to continue their work?
A great example was PGPi, the European "International" version of PGP. If you took a copy of the software into the US, you weren't allowed to take it back out again.
The article has others, such as the guy who was banned from seeing the NASA commentary on code he'd written for them under contract because he wasn't cleared. (He can be given a contract, but be banned from completing it? Impressive.)
25 years or so ago, a UK government department was forbidden from selling a Cray supercomputer to, I think it was UCL (University College, London), by the American government because UCL had Russian students. There were rather unveiled threats made, as I recall, by the American government, which declared that all US semiconductors were US soil regardless of what country they were in.
I'm dual-national US/UK, and have run into similar problems myself when working on US government projects as my "official" nationality varied between individuals.
In short, ITAR and similar restrictions are routinely abused - and even when not abused are a severe constraint on US progress AND a crippling influence on relationships between the US and Tier 1 nations.
Hmmm. I believe you, but that smacks of a defect in digital cameras.
Remember, ADCs can operate at 24 bit resolutions, greater than the 16 bits per colour plane than is needed for most HDR images, and can operate at that resolution at speeds of hundreds of thousands of measurements per second. In principle, that means you can make far more accurate measurements of the voltage. Two pixels A and B measuring 1/250th of the difference at the higher speed than they would at the lower speed shouldn't (in principle) matter if you are capable of discerning differences 1/256th the size than you could with cameras designed specifically for the higher speed.
The sensitivity of the CCD itself obviously matters, since you can't measure a difference smaller than the smallest increment the CCD can measure before thermal and external noise mean you cannot distinguish what is a real increment and what is just noise. (This chart of various CCD types is useful, although I'm unsure how old it is and light-sensitive technologies improve all the time. http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/digitalimaging/images/ccdintro/ccdintrofigure10.jpg)
With modern systems, I see no obvious reason for a camera designed to work at 250 fps to need any more light than a camera designed to work at 24 fps, PROVIDED the necessary sensitivity is present AND noise is kept to a minimum AND the image is then contrast-stretched so that the much smaller increments as measured are mapped onto the corresponding large increments you would have had had more photons hit the sensor.
What you're saying is that basically no such camera exists - or, if it does, it's not in the hands of film-makers. I can see that high-speed cameras exist, that 3CCD cameras exist, and that the components needed to make a high-speed camera that creates HDR images that are perceptually the same as regular-speed cameras exist. Ergo, if no such camera has been built (at least at reasonable prices), then someone needs to build it. I do not believe for an instant that given the massive strides in photo-sensitive technology, ADC technology, etc, that this should be impossible at sensible prices.
I've thought about doing something like this, the problem is that although I can see no reason why a camera couldn't be built, it costs money (and lots of it) to found a startup and do the R&D to actually make such a product, so it has merely remained a thought. The well-publicized high-speed cameras also appeared to mean any such project would largely reinvent the wheel anyway. Why build from scratch, the hard way, what someone is already mass-producing?
Honestly, such a project would be outside of my skill set to complete, even though I can see how the overall design would have to work and some aspects would be relatively trivial for me. But you can't sell 1/10th of a camera. No use to anyone. (There's also a heap-load of other things like that, where I can see how to make things actually work -- I could even make Lightfleet's network design work -- and can certainly design small sections but cannot do the whole thing and cannot afford to put together the kind of startup that would be capable of doing the whole thing.)
These problems are technically solved - not by me, it's all lego blocks by that time, all I'm doing is putting the lego blocks together and carving maybe a couple of filler pieces here and there. Anyone can do that. Ok, if spotting that apples only fall downwards is a "hard" problem (that says a lot for average intelligence!) then maybe not everyone. Just most. There is no sane, rational or remotely intelligible reason why a properly-mapping high-speed camera should not be in the hands of every film-maker on the planet.
In a mass extinction, such as the Great Extinction, you lose CO2 sinks and CO2 sources at comparable levels. That's balance. You lose predators and prey. That's balance. Indeed, after both that and the Triassic-Jurassic Extinction Event, you see a massive explosion in genetic diversity -- quite impossible, if you do not have balance.
Several of these mass extinctions are now known to have taken thousands of years - hardly instantaneous - through better measurements via microfossil records and better analysis of regular fossils. We also have better tools for measuring the dates directly rather than by association.
My comment was modded to 5 interesting, not 5 PhD Thesis, nor 5 PLoS One. If people found it interesting, then it was interesting. Interesting can mean the readers disagreed with my post but STILL found it interesting. ALL it means is that it was interesting. Misleading information? Far less than your "rebuttal"! And anyone who depends on a Slashdot post without critical analysis of their own is an idiot. The Slashdot readers who tend to actually read my posts are not idiots. (My posts are long and I write in a far more formal, older-style of British English. No matter what their opinions of me or my posts, anyone who can handle that is almost by definition well above average.) Since they're smart, they WILL read the peer-reviewed literature (Wikipedia is useful for trivia only). They WILL form their own opinions and their own conclusions.
In short, whilst I aim for higher precision than most posters, whether I am right or wrong on specific details isn't what matters (although I'm very often right - and on a few occasions, more so than the experts at the time). What matters is that those who are curious are encouraged to think deeper, look things up, ask quality questions and do not fall into the trap of fixating on one detail so much that other, perhaps more important ones, are ignored. I believe that I'm successful in this. Perhaps there are others who are more so, but that's ok, this isn't an ego thing. I'd love it if, of the tens of thousands of Slashdot readers out there, the majority wrote something that excited the mind.
So what if my posts sometimes have the "scientific journalism" feel? Greg Perelman wrote a brilliant, absolutely correct paper but I'm absolutely certain that the book "The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe", written on the discovery, actually inspired more people to look at geometry as something fun, interesting and exciting than the paper did. If I wanted to write a paper for PLoS One, I would have done. I wrote a post for Slashdot.
The brain damage is obvious (well, at least to anyone who thinks about it - I honestly doubt the majority of American Football fans do).
What has been in dispute is whether the adoption of safety measures (helmets, padding, etc) has helped or hurt. The tide of medical opinion seems to be that it has hurt, that all the gear gives an illusion of safety that doesn't really exist, leading to more frequent, high momentum impacts. What has also been in dispute is whether players have been placed in excessive danger due to the machismo involved - that concussions have been treated as no big deal, resulting in players with potentially serious head injuries being ordered back onto the field, and that the desire to win at all costs by managers, sponsors and players has resulted in a level of injury and death that simply wouldn't exist if the players were more concerned with playing well than with the scoreline.
Certainly, you don't see reports of multiple suicides by New Zealand All Black Rugby players (although Rugby is arguably a more vicious game). Soccer players have reported deafness as a result of head injuries, but you don't see the massive incidents of domestic violence. That's usually left to the fans. (Ooops, did I say that?) Formula 1 drivers suffer incredible head trauma, but injuries of that kind are treated with extreme caution (neurologists are included amongst the circuit medics and brain scans after an accident are standard).
I'm not saying any of these sports are "safe" - soccer has worked on making the ball lighter to reduce head trauma, which is good, but all of these involve participants suffering brain injuries from time to time. What I am saying is that American Football appears to have both a higher incidence of brain injury AND a greater severity of brain injury when incidents occur than any of the other sports I listed. Which is impressive, when you think about it, given that F1 cars can slam into a barrier at 170 mph.
Of course, the big difference is that most F1 drivers have a major shunt perhaps two or three times a year, but American Football players can suffer head trauma every play and there will typically be between 60-80 of those per game (http://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/plays-per-game) over 16 games per season (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_regular_season), which gives you between 960-1280 potential head injuries per year.
Repetitive, untreated head trauma is going to be worse than a very few, treated head injuries even if the latter are more severe in a given incident.
Ok, what about soccer? It has plenty of head impacts. Well, according to studies, players head the ball 6-12 times in a game. (http://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Fulltext/2012/01000/Heading_in_Soccer___Dangerous_Play_.1.aspx) That's a tenth the number of head impacts of American Football. The mass of a soccer ball is 1 lb, but the mass of an American Football player can be 290 lbs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Castillo_%28American_football%29) If the impacts were at the same speed, you've vastly more momentum per collision in American Football -plus- vastly more collisions.
There's plenty of evidence that some brain injuries occur in soccer, though it's not easy to see how this can be reduced much further given that we've gone from pig-skin leather soccer balls to ultra-light plastic. (http://www.oysan.org/Assets/oysa_assets/doc/coachingarticles/ConcussionFindings.pdf and http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(03)00579-9/fulltext) This needs to be publicly recognized. It is NOT a risk-free sport and brain trauma IS inevitable.
Rugby is perhaps a more difficult sport to explain. Head crunches aren't uncommon (although leg tackles are the standard), all manner of injuries are very common, and the forces are absolutely incredible. (A rugby scrum can put 20 tonnes of force down your spine.) True, the All Black's Haka (htt
The net cost of zero CO2 emissions would be minimal. Yes, replacing coal with fission and (eventually) fusion would have an up-front cost, but fission has a much lower cost per watt than coal AND doesn't have a negative impact on other industries, so in net you'd actually save money. Further, having people lose skills through lack of work is expensive and it is MUCH more expensive to lose skills in the nuclear industries than in the coal industries. Building the reactors will require a great deal of labour, but we HAVE a great deal of unused labour at the moment, losing their construction skills developed during the last decade.
Ergo, the net cost there would be extremely small, you might even end up making a profit on the switch.
Cars? Well, mass transit is much more efficient than private transport, and trains have had regenerative brakes for 15+ years in Europe. You'd want better distribution centres, so that the net time to go from A to B is less than with private transport, but network theory today is vastly superior to how it was in the 1800s when mass transit first came into play.
It won't eliminate cars, but you could easily achieve 20% of current CO2 production without breaking into a sweat. And you would again have very little cost and might even make a profit.
Aviation is another easy one. Private planes are often unnecessary and are merely luxury toys. NASA designed a BWB airliner capable of twice the current capacity of even the largest super-jumbo, so finish designing and building it. You could slash the number of planes needed dramatically, thus reducing emissions. Things that aren't time-sensitive can be moved by ground at lower emission cost. Better warehousing and better planning would avoid many of the problems that currently make this difficult.
C'mon, at least give me a DIFFICULT problem to solve. The ones you're offering are child's play and you should have been able to figure out the answers yourself.
(Net costs matter more than immediate costs because governments can borrow trillions and pay back over decades. That's normal. If you can do that, cover the interest AND make a profit at the end, you're insane not to borrow.)
Columbus didn't miscalculate the circumference, he simply used the largest number that the Spanish monarchy would be willing to pay to traverse. He knew the number was half what scientists had declared, but relied heavily on Norse and Irish accounts of land at approximately the distance he quoted to rationalize that the scientists must be wrong. (The Greeks had also proposed a second continent being where the Americas were, which turned out to be the correct answer, but Columbus wasn't going to get funds for discovering new continents so he came up with the politically-useful answer of saying that there wasn't such a landmass, that the world was much smaller.)
True, but it took millions of years to reach that point and millions more to change to a more hospitable environment. This time, it has taken around a century to do what would normally have taken hundreds of millennia to achieve. That's a huge difference. Atmospheric oxygen was also much, much higher during periods like the Cretaceous (the figures I've seen have been in the vicinity of 35%) but no such rise has occurred here. It is this rise in oxygen that allowed for massive insects.
The current imbalanced rise in CO2 is much more troubling because studies show that plants do NOT like massive levels of CO2 unless they come combined with massive levels of O2. CO2 rises alone, without any other alteration to the environment, will cause plant growth to decline and is eventually toxic. As such, it is very unlike the majority of historic events, which have tended to be balanced in some way. (PETM, for example, is linked to a massive increase in vulcanism. Volcanic ash contains superb nutrients for plants and algae, which meant that once the volcanoes stopped, things were ideally positioned for the CO2 released to be locked away on a much shorter order than it would have otherwise taken.)
This means that the potential exists for the end result to be far worse than for PETM. There's no introduction of a compensating variable, so even if industry stopped tomorrow, you would NOT see a rapid recovery as happened with PETM. Instead, things would worsen for a long time and - since chaotic systems leap from one orbit to another in dramatic and unpredictable shifts - a catastrophic switch could still occur at any time. The reason we've not seen the originally predicted shifts is that climate ISN'T linear, it's chaotic and Strange Attractors act in a manner analogous to quantum states -- systems don't change much until they leap from one state to another (the "quantum leap").
Natural climate shifts have built-in mechanisms that prevent quantum leaps, but this shift does not. If we want such mechanisms, we'll have to add them via geo-engineering of some kind.
Every other historic building in the US has either been demolished or is under threat of it. Including the Poe Museum. This allows Americans to complain they don't have any history (despite America being occupied by someone since 14K BC, had a European presence since the 7th C AD and actual European occupation since the 14th C AD). Clearly the RIAA wants to ensure a more consistent approach.
None. Digital cameras can detect stray cosmic rays passing through the shutter (which is why really good cameras take two images - one with the shutter closed, the next with it open, so that they can subtract background). 1000 FPS is becoming common on high-end digital cameras, 3CCD equipment would let you use the whole of that but using a 240 FPS system the camera has over four times the exposure time needed to get a professional-quality image.
Focal length is also less of an issue, now we're moving away from film. So long as you have the data, you can "focus" them in post-processing. That's how fixed-lens digital cameras operate. However, 3CCD devices get 3 times the data (because you've 3 CCD sensors rather than one of the same number of pixels where the pixels respond to specific light frequencies). That gives you more flexibility on what sort of data processing you can do. You can afford to lose a little resolution before it'll impact anything.
I'd argue the debacle of Vista also offered an opportunity - those users who were abandoning Vista were going to have to install another OS and learn a different UI, it was merely a question of whether they were going to go with a "downgrade" to XP (and risk losing technical support - Microsoft were threatening to discontinue updates for it at the time) or switch to Linux. Or scrap their PC and buy an Apple. Most opted for XP or Apple - illogical, but there ya go.
As did the OLPC, since the original system ran a variant of Linux. It would make sense for smaller schools to exploit the educational software for the OLPC by installing Linux plus Sugar, where other desktops were also available. Lower grades could then use the OLPC software, higher grades could use the office products and software engineering students could use the fairly comprehensive development tools. No push for it, never happened.
Part of the problem is extreme cynicism. Very few Linux developers believe a desktop Linux could exist, which is a big reason why it doesn't. The sad, pathetic fate of Berlin (an alternative to X), the fade-to-black on KGI and GGI, the total lack of any comparable modern effort -- these aren't caused by Microsoft or Apple aficionados, these are caused by disgraceful politics within our own communities. Sure, Berlin had problems. But (a) it was open source, and (b) it showed you could write other engines. So, no, those problems are not an excuse.
I've heard people mentioning games and business products. We -USED- to have this thing called IBCS, a module based on the Intel binary compatibility standard that would ANY binary for ANY Intel-based Unix to run on Linux. NOT through emulation, but via a transliteration between the calls on other Unix' to Linux. It was the creation of this patch that forced Oracle and other major vendors to port their database to Linux in the first place. It CREATED the Linux business market. It was abandoned as "unnecessary", but the posts on this discussion show that business software for Linux since has lost steam and lost capabilities Yet if anyone else here remembers the patch, my guess is that they'd still call it "unnecessary", all evidence in front of them notwithstanding.
How does this relate to games? Well, OS/X is implemented as an Intel-based Unix. Ergo, with the correct shim added to the module, all OS/X games would run natively under Linux.
Ok, IBCS wasn't the fastest code on Earth, but it's always possible to improve the performance of open source software. That the complainers were too busy complaining to patch just goes back to the whole thing about politics usurping the community.
POLITICS IS TEH PLEH! DO NOT WANT!
Desktop Linux will have one final chance - Windows 8 is unpopular in its current state of development, earning many negative reviews. If Linux can capture the imagination, it can leverage the increasing distaste for Microsoft's ideas of "new and improved" and be the heir apparent.
But if it is to do so, it MUST renounce the politics, the bickering, the antagonism towards constructive efforts. In open source, things will naturally survive if they are good and naturally die if they are not. Adding politics merely kills that which is good and perpetuates that which is bad. Politics is why we had the Open Office debacle rather than an office product that wiped the floor with everything else. Politics is why Ubuntu users feel like they're stuck with Unity when there are over 20 window managers out there. Politics is why speech recognition/synthesis on Linux is so primitive compared to Windows despite the fact that almost all the research in the field is on Unix-like OS' and has been for longer than Windows has existed.
Politics is part of why I gave up on the FOLK project. Not only were there too many projects, with too many incompatible mods, but too many developers were openly hostile to any increase in awareness of anything. I've met similar hostility with the projects I track on Freshmeat nee Freecode - a
Every component in the system introduces the possibility of error, agreed. People can detect and correct certain classes of error better than machines, but machines can detect and correct certain classes of error better than people. People can self-repair, to an extent. Blake's 7 Liberator-style auto-repair is still sci-fi. Sadly. Well-trained humans can identify errors in their training but can also forget the training that is correct. Computers cannot (yet) do either.
Yeah, I get the joke, so don't bother with whooshing.
The thing that always amuses (yet frustrates) me is that the Luddites weren't against technology, they were against workers being replaced by machines. If the mills had kept the same workforce but doubled production, diversified, or whatever, they wouldn't have complained.
A true Luddite would not complain about fly-by-wire as it's not replacing anyone. They'd applaud it because it was enhancing the skills of the people who were there.
It would not eliminate accidental corruption, but attacks would be out of the question.
That deals with your comments about erroneous advertisements. If you don't read my posts, don't expect me to bother with more of a reply than what I've already said.
router-level IP mobility (the routers automatically redirected packets if you moved between networks)
That deals with your comments about multi-home. Transient IP addressing assumed everyone could be multi-homed. Again, it really helps if you read what you're replying to. As I've noted before, I was one of the first IPv6 adopters, I know about the early concepts because I was there.
It depends on the conversion system. The cheaper ones just speed everything up. The more complex ones create whole new frames through linear interpolation (in-betweening), but neither add any new information, you are correct.
This is why, back when HDTV was first mooted, I was suggesting that they use the lowest resolution and framerate for which the existing standards were factors. It would mean that existing sets would be able to display actual pixels in actual frames, whether they were NTSC or PAL, resulting in cleaner images and cleaner sound. It would also have simplified manufacture (since switching between HDTV, PAL and NTSC would have been purely a matter of altering integer step sizes for horizontal, vertical and framerate, which is trivial compared to the algorithms multi-standard televisions are forced to use in practice).
48 FPS for a movie should not have caused any problems - since the complaints have to do with contrast, the cameras used may have had dynamic range issues when the higher frame rate was selected. Lowering the speed won't help if that is true. It might just have been viewers with a preference for a crappy product, though - it's not like Slashdot is unaware of such folk, we bitch about them often enough.
I wouldn't have used 48 for filming, though. Digital storage on the movie-making side is cheap. 48 for the theatres is fine, but it makes it hard to convert to TV. A frame rate of 240 for filming can be converted to conventional film, 48 frame film, 30 frame NTSC and 60 frame HDTV without any interpolation or time compression/stretching. HDR on high-speed digital cameras is usually done either using four colour filters or via 3CCD. In the first case, you can do up to 333 fps, which is above what I'm saying would be required to make a "play unmodified anywhere" movie.
Harsh lighting is another complaint about the movie - easily fixed. Astronomical photos, in particular, have all kinds of non-linear contrast stretching applied to make the image easy to see. The algorithms are readily-available and widely-used.
After that, people should stop whining about movies being actually better. You'd think they were expecting entertainment or something.
Probably the most useful genetic modification that could be done to humans is to add a background system check that runs during sleep to detect errors and automatically fix those that can be fixed. It's quite possible sleep is already designed to do just that (it seems to be some sort of processing and scanning mode) but the algorithms used are obviously flaky and should be upgraded as soon as we know where they are, how they work, and how to write a better one.
That might be a really good use for a hardwired backing-store for the brain, too. We already have Semantic Web reasoners that can do consistency checks over any number of hops with complex data. They're useless for web data, on the whole, but they might actually be useful if you could run them over a brain dump.
Poisoned router tables will indeed "infect" other routers, radiating out until the correct route has a preferred weighting to the toxic route.
A wonderful example of this occurred in 1995 in England, when Manchester University's computer centre decided that it WAS America. (Now, I know they tend to have an ego problem there, but this was impressive.) Because redirecting traffic to Manchester required fewer hops and utilized greater bandwidth to any other route to America, you can guess what happened next. It took quite some time for the engineers to clean up the mess, because the newly discovered Northwest Corridor^wWormhole had been discovered by so many routers and the information was being gossiped around. Just as with humans, once gossip starts it is very hard to stop - even when the source admits it was false.
There's not a lot you can do in a case like that. Once an authenticated router starts having delusions due to buggy software/hardware, there's not much any other router can do to determine that it truly is a delusion. Multipath helps (if you support dividing traffic between multiple routes, according to viability, you'll only lose a percentage of traffic, not all of it) but you'd need active path monitoring to go any further. Which would reduce bandwidth (which is already excessively limited) and increase complexity (the primary cause of hallucinating hardware).
BGP for IPv6 is essentially the same as BGP for IPv4, so if the protocol has a security hole then it will appear on both. However, because IPv6 is designed from the outset to be a hierarchical addressing scheme, address tables should end up being much smaller (even though each entry is longer) which in turn means that accidents should be less common. If it's easier to see the consequences of your actions, you (in theory) should be less likely to make mistakes.
Back in the days when IPv6 mandated IPSec, the problem of malicious router table poisoning simply wouldn't have existed -- all router protocol traffic would be encrypted and every link would be encrypted distinctly, where the keys used for encryption are securely exchanged in an encrypted form via IKE or IKE2 and where the key exchange encryption key is either a shared secret or a public/private key pair. It would not eliminate accidental corruption, but attacks would be out of the question.
Also back then, automatic address assignment, router and service discovery (via anycasting) and router-level IP mobility (the routers automatically redirected packets if you moved between networks) meant that manual router configuration was almost unnecessary. Virtually everything could be discovered - including MTU - and so nothing really needed to be configured. This would have eliminated manual errors. In fact, that was the whole point of all these automated mechanisms. There would be no manual entry and therefore there would be no manual errors.
Telebit added a nice touch, creating a routing protocol that permitted segments of the network to be transparent (essentially the same as NAT, only far more fine-grained and flexible), although it seems they made the grievous error of not making their protocol public. Certainly I've seen nobody attempt to use it and there has been no reference to it since Telebit went under. Further, the lack of NAT is something that has held back IPv6. Given that Telebit had a working NAT equivalent in 1996, this is incredibly annoying. (Apologies if they did make it public, but it is still true that it's not used and that complaints about a lack of NAT have been a serious issue - made all the more serious precisely because the problem was solved and the solution deployed very very early on.)
So the answer is "if IPv6 is deployed as close to originally intended as possible, the problem simply doesn't exist - in any form; but that if IPv6 is deployed as it is currently used, the hole will hang around although it will be a little smaller".
Slashdot Mirror
I think the BOFH was their training manual. I can't say that the recent news that agents were arrested for facilitating drug smuggling in exchange for a cut of the profits did anything to improve my opinion. Stories from way back, for example one story on Slashdot where a former TSA agent claimed that their instructions were to allow guns through to avoid holding up the lines, also diminished what little regard I had for them. (The Slashdot claim mirrors claims by journalists at around the same time that around 30% of attempts to get a gun through screening succeeded, so I'm inclined to take the claim as more than just fluff.)
This is perhaps the first (and probably only) time I'm going to agree with R.P. on anything, he's normally 52 cards short of a full deck (all that's left are the jokers) but there really is no benefit in a security apparatus that offers no security but does offer a great deal of insecurity and hardship. The TSA has failed to demonstrate that it is competent or capable of dealing with any actual threat. Rather, it has an worryingly high failure rate and an even more worrying tendency to fix the wrong problem when something does go wrong - and usually badly.
There has been ONE attempt to put Semtex in a shoe, and the attempt could not have succeeded. It is extremely doubtful that passing the shoes through the scanner would have detected it. Compare that to the total number of hijacks that have succeeded due to firearms. Tell me, which of the attack vectors is a genuine threat more likely to pursue? The one that might work or the one that's stupid? So which does the TSA attempt to close? Yes, the one that's stupid. Yay. And "attempt" is about as far as it has probably got. I don't trust the TSA's competency at detecting Semtex, either in terms of finding a bomb detector that will spot it (it's notoriously difficult, which is why the IRA used it extensively) or in terms or recognizing that the detector has spotted anything at all.
No security is perfect, but if we're to believe (even a little bit) the Slashdot claim and the recent news stories, then it suggests that the TSA is not accidentally insecure but knowingly insecure. The people at the top probably didn't intend it to be that way, but the people at the top don't seem eager to fix the problems either. As such, it may not be their doing but it is their responsibility and they're failing.
Head injuries due to heading are the ones that have been studied, as shown by the links provided. They wouldn't have studied them if there was no concern by neurologists that it might be an issue.
Professional soccer doesn't have that many head-impacting-on-head collisions. At least, not the soccer matches I've seen - and I used to be addicted to Match of the Day. I've seen plenty of aggressive shoulder barges, mistimed sliding tackles, etc, but head collisions aren't something I've seen much of.
I'm willing to accept that it might have increased in frequency in recent years, but that would indicate a style problem and not a problem with the game. I'm also willing to bet that the number of head collisions is far lower than for American Football -- as noted above, there you have potentially 960-1280 concussions per player per year. Soccer is too ballet-like, too gymnastic, to permit that level of brain injury. If there's even a tenth of that number for a centre forward or a defender, I'd be surprised. (I'd also recommend replacing the coach.)
Agreed that there are problems everywhere (I'm firmly convinced that the Norse were onto something with their mythology of Loki - we see evidence of it in every government). Agreed that such regulations hurt everyone -- NASA's "Beowulf" software was classified as munitions for a while, as I'm sure older Slashdot readers will remember. It resulted in the software being smuggled into Canada and developed there.
I would want to ask the US Congress this - is the US truly made stronger, more capable and more competent by forcing the best minds to flee to other nations to continue their work?
A great example was PGPi, the European "International" version of PGP. If you took a copy of the software into the US, you weren't allowed to take it back out again.
The article has others, such as the guy who was banned from seeing the NASA commentary on code he'd written for them under contract because he wasn't cleared. (He can be given a contract, but be banned from completing it? Impressive.)
25 years or so ago, a UK government department was forbidden from selling a Cray supercomputer to, I think it was UCL (University College, London), by the American government because UCL had Russian students. There were rather unveiled threats made, as I recall, by the American government, which declared that all US semiconductors were US soil regardless of what country they were in.
I'm dual-national US/UK, and have run into similar problems myself when working on US government projects as my "official" nationality varied between individuals.
In short, ITAR and similar restrictions are routinely abused - and even when not abused are a severe constraint on US progress AND a crippling influence on relationships between the US and Tier 1 nations.
Same here. But I'm still curious if NASA would get more funds if they went that route.
Hmmm. I believe you, but that smacks of a defect in digital cameras.
Remember, ADCs can operate at 24 bit resolutions, greater than the 16 bits per colour plane than is needed for most HDR images, and can operate at that resolution at speeds of hundreds of thousands of measurements per second. In principle, that means you can make far more accurate measurements of the voltage. Two pixels A and B measuring 1/250th of the difference at the higher speed than they would at the lower speed shouldn't (in principle) matter if you are capable of discerning differences 1/256th the size than you could with cameras designed specifically for the higher speed.
The sensitivity of the CCD itself obviously matters, since you can't measure a difference smaller than the smallest increment the CCD can measure before thermal and external noise mean you cannot distinguish what is a real increment and what is just noise. (This chart of various CCD types is useful, although I'm unsure how old it is and light-sensitive technologies improve all the time. http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/digitalimaging/images/ccdintro/ccdintrofigure10.jpg)
With modern systems, I see no obvious reason for a camera designed to work at 250 fps to need any more light than a camera designed to work at 24 fps, PROVIDED the necessary sensitivity is present AND noise is kept to a minimum AND the image is then contrast-stretched so that the much smaller increments as measured are mapped onto the corresponding large increments you would have had had more photons hit the sensor.
What you're saying is that basically no such camera exists - or, if it does, it's not in the hands of film-makers. I can see that high-speed cameras exist, that 3CCD cameras exist, and that the components needed to make a high-speed camera that creates HDR images that are perceptually the same as regular-speed cameras exist. Ergo, if no such camera has been built (at least at reasonable prices), then someone needs to build it. I do not believe for an instant that given the massive strides in photo-sensitive technology, ADC technology, etc, that this should be impossible at sensible prices.
I've thought about doing something like this, the problem is that although I can see no reason why a camera couldn't be built, it costs money (and lots of it) to found a startup and do the R&D to actually make such a product, so it has merely remained a thought. The well-publicized high-speed cameras also appeared to mean any such project would largely reinvent the wheel anyway. Why build from scratch, the hard way, what someone is already mass-producing?
Honestly, such a project would be outside of my skill set to complete, even though I can see how the overall design would have to work and some aspects would be relatively trivial for me. But you can't sell 1/10th of a camera. No use to anyone. (There's also a heap-load of other things like that, where I can see how to make things actually work -- I could even make Lightfleet's network design work -- and can certainly design small sections but cannot do the whole thing and cannot afford to put together the kind of startup that would be capable of doing the whole thing.)
These problems are technically solved - not by me, it's all lego blocks by that time, all I'm doing is putting the lego blocks together and carving maybe a couple of filler pieces here and there. Anyone can do that. Ok, if spotting that apples only fall downwards is a "hard" problem (that says a lot for average intelligence!) then maybe not everyone. Just most. There is no sane, rational or remotely intelligible reason why a properly-mapping high-speed camera should not be in the hands of every film-maker on the planet.
Then you do not comprehend balance.
In a mass extinction, such as the Great Extinction, you lose CO2 sinks and CO2 sources at comparable levels. That's balance. You lose predators and prey. That's balance. Indeed, after both that and the Triassic-Jurassic Extinction Event, you see a massive explosion in genetic diversity -- quite impossible, if you do not have balance.
Several of these mass extinctions are now known to have taken thousands of years - hardly instantaneous - through better measurements via microfossil records and better analysis of regular fossils. We also have better tools for measuring the dates directly rather than by association.
My comment was modded to 5 interesting, not 5 PhD Thesis, nor 5 PLoS One. If people found it interesting, then it was interesting. Interesting can mean the readers disagreed with my post but STILL found it interesting. ALL it means is that it was interesting. Misleading information? Far less than your "rebuttal"! And anyone who depends on a Slashdot post without critical analysis of their own is an idiot. The Slashdot readers who tend to actually read my posts are not idiots. (My posts are long and I write in a far more formal, older-style of British English. No matter what their opinions of me or my posts, anyone who can handle that is almost by definition well above average.) Since they're smart, they WILL read the peer-reviewed literature (Wikipedia is useful for trivia only). They WILL form their own opinions and their own conclusions.
In short, whilst I aim for higher precision than most posters, whether I am right or wrong on specific details isn't what matters (although I'm very often right - and on a few occasions, more so than the experts at the time). What matters is that those who are curious are encouraged to think deeper, look things up, ask quality questions and do not fall into the trap of fixating on one detail so much that other, perhaps more important ones, are ignored. I believe that I'm successful in this. Perhaps there are others who are more so, but that's ok, this isn't an ego thing. I'd love it if, of the tens of thousands of Slashdot readers out there, the majority wrote something that excited the mind.
So what if my posts sometimes have the "scientific journalism" feel? Greg Perelman wrote a brilliant, absolutely correct paper but I'm absolutely certain that the book "The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe", written on the discovery, actually inspired more people to look at geometry as something fun, interesting and exciting than the paper did. If I wanted to write a paper for PLoS One, I would have done. I wrote a post for Slashdot.
The brain damage is obvious (well, at least to anyone who thinks about it - I honestly doubt the majority of American Football fans do).
What has been in dispute is whether the adoption of safety measures (helmets, padding, etc) has helped or hurt. The tide of medical opinion seems to be that it has hurt, that all the gear gives an illusion of safety that doesn't really exist, leading to more frequent, high momentum impacts. What has also been in dispute is whether players have been placed in excessive danger due to the machismo involved - that concussions have been treated as no big deal, resulting in players with potentially serious head injuries being ordered back onto the field, and that the desire to win at all costs by managers, sponsors and players has resulted in a level of injury and death that simply wouldn't exist if the players were more concerned with playing well than with the scoreline.
Certainly, you don't see reports of multiple suicides by New Zealand All Black Rugby players (although Rugby is arguably a more vicious game). Soccer players have reported deafness as a result of head injuries, but you don't see the massive incidents of domestic violence. That's usually left to the fans. (Ooops, did I say that?) Formula 1 drivers suffer incredible head trauma, but injuries of that kind are treated with extreme caution (neurologists are included amongst the circuit medics and brain scans after an accident are standard).
I'm not saying any of these sports are "safe" - soccer has worked on making the ball lighter to reduce head trauma, which is good, but all of these involve participants suffering brain injuries from time to time. What I am saying is that American Football appears to have both a higher incidence of brain injury AND a greater severity of brain injury when incidents occur than any of the other sports I listed. Which is impressive, when you think about it, given that F1 cars can slam into a barrier at 170 mph.
Of course, the big difference is that most F1 drivers have a major shunt perhaps two or three times a year, but American Football players can suffer head trauma every play and there will typically be between 60-80 of those per game (http://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/plays-per-game) over 16 games per season (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_regular_season), which gives you between 960-1280 potential head injuries per year.
Repetitive, untreated head trauma is going to be worse than a very few, treated head injuries even if the latter are more severe in a given incident.
Ok, what about soccer? It has plenty of head impacts. Well, according to studies, players head the ball 6-12 times in a game. (http://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Fulltext/2012/01000/Heading_in_Soccer___Dangerous_Play_.1.aspx) That's a tenth the number of head impacts of American Football. The mass of a soccer ball is 1 lb, but the mass of an American Football player can be 290 lbs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Castillo_%28American_football%29) If the impacts were at the same speed, you've vastly more momentum per collision in American Football -plus- vastly more collisions.
There's plenty of evidence that some brain injuries occur in soccer, though it's not easy to see how this can be reduced much further given that we've gone from pig-skin leather soccer balls to ultra-light plastic. (http://www.oysan.org/Assets/oysa_assets/doc/coachingarticles/ConcussionFindings.pdf and http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(03)00579-9/fulltext) This needs to be publicly recognized. It is NOT a risk-free sport and brain trauma IS inevitable.
Rugby is perhaps a more difficult sport to explain. Head crunches aren't uncommon (although leg tackles are the standard), all manner of injuries are very common, and the forces are absolutely incredible. (A rugby scrum can put 20 tonnes of force down your spine.) True, the All Black's Haka (htt
Astrix the Gaul is an absolute must!
The net cost of zero CO2 emissions would be minimal. Yes, replacing coal with fission and (eventually) fusion would have an up-front cost, but fission has a much lower cost per watt than coal AND doesn't have a negative impact on other industries, so in net you'd actually save money. Further, having people lose skills through lack of work is expensive and it is MUCH more expensive to lose skills in the nuclear industries than in the coal industries. Building the reactors will require a great deal of labour, but we HAVE a great deal of unused labour at the moment, losing their construction skills developed during the last decade.
Ergo, the net cost there would be extremely small, you might even end up making a profit on the switch.
Cars? Well, mass transit is much more efficient than private transport, and trains have had regenerative brakes for 15+ years in Europe. You'd want better distribution centres, so that the net time to go from A to B is less than with private transport, but network theory today is vastly superior to how it was in the 1800s when mass transit first came into play.
It won't eliminate cars, but you could easily achieve 20% of current CO2 production without breaking into a sweat. And you would again have very little cost and might even make a profit.
Aviation is another easy one. Private planes are often unnecessary and are merely luxury toys. NASA designed a BWB airliner capable of twice the current capacity of even the largest super-jumbo, so finish designing and building it. You could slash the number of planes needed dramatically, thus reducing emissions. Things that aren't time-sensitive can be moved by ground at lower emission cost. Better warehousing and better planning would avoid many of the problems that currently make this difficult.
C'mon, at least give me a DIFFICULT problem to solve. The ones you're offering are child's play and you should have been able to figure out the answers yourself.
(Net costs matter more than immediate costs because governments can borrow trillions and pay back over decades. That's normal. If you can do that, cover the interest AND make a profit at the end, you're insane not to borrow.)
Columbus didn't miscalculate the circumference, he simply used the largest number that the Spanish monarchy would be willing to pay to traverse. He knew the number was half what scientists had declared, but relied heavily on Norse and Irish accounts of land at approximately the distance he quoted to rationalize that the scientists must be wrong. (The Greeks had also proposed a second continent being where the Americas were, which turned out to be the correct answer, but Columbus wasn't going to get funds for discovering new continents so he came up with the politically-useful answer of saying that there wasn't such a landmass, that the world was much smaller.)
True, but it took millions of years to reach that point and millions more to change to a more hospitable environment. This time, it has taken around a century to do what would normally have taken hundreds of millennia to achieve. That's a huge difference. Atmospheric oxygen was also much, much higher during periods like the Cretaceous (the figures I've seen have been in the vicinity of 35%) but no such rise has occurred here. It is this rise in oxygen that allowed for massive insects.
The current imbalanced rise in CO2 is much more troubling because studies show that plants do NOT like massive levels of CO2 unless they come combined with massive levels of O2. CO2 rises alone, without any other alteration to the environment, will cause plant growth to decline and is eventually toxic. As such, it is very unlike the majority of historic events, which have tended to be balanced in some way. (PETM, for example, is linked to a massive increase in vulcanism. Volcanic ash contains superb nutrients for plants and algae, which meant that once the volcanoes stopped, things were ideally positioned for the CO2 released to be locked away on a much shorter order than it would have otherwise taken.)
This means that the potential exists for the end result to be far worse than for PETM. There's no introduction of a compensating variable, so even if industry stopped tomorrow, you would NOT see a rapid recovery as happened with PETM. Instead, things would worsen for a long time and - since chaotic systems leap from one orbit to another in dramatic and unpredictable shifts - a catastrophic switch could still occur at any time. The reason we've not seen the originally predicted shifts is that climate ISN'T linear, it's chaotic and Strange Attractors act in a manner analogous to quantum states -- systems don't change much until they leap from one state to another (the "quantum leap").
Natural climate shifts have built-in mechanisms that prevent quantum leaps, but this shift does not. If we want such mechanisms, we'll have to add them via geo-engineering of some kind.
Uhhhhhh....... riiiiiiiight. Keep taking the pills and if you could just hand over anything sharp.... ....slowly.....
Every other historic building in the US has either been demolished or is under threat of it. Including the Poe Museum. This allows Americans to complain they don't have any history (despite America being occupied by someone since 14K BC, had a European presence since the 7th C AD and actual European occupation since the 14th C AD). Clearly the RIAA wants to ensure a more consistent approach.
None. Digital cameras can detect stray cosmic rays passing through the shutter (which is why really good cameras take two images - one with the shutter closed, the next with it open, so that they can subtract background). 1000 FPS is becoming common on high-end digital cameras, 3CCD equipment would let you use the whole of that but using a 240 FPS system the camera has over four times the exposure time needed to get a professional-quality image.
Focal length is also less of an issue, now we're moving away from film. So long as you have the data, you can "focus" them in post-processing. That's how fixed-lens digital cameras operate. However, 3CCD devices get 3 times the data (because you've 3 CCD sensors rather than one of the same number of pixels where the pixels respond to specific light frequencies). That gives you more flexibility on what sort of data processing you can do. You can afford to lose a little resolution before it'll impact anything.
I'd argue the debacle of Vista also offered an opportunity - those users who were abandoning Vista were going to have to install another OS and learn a different UI, it was merely a question of whether they were going to go with a "downgrade" to XP (and risk losing technical support - Microsoft were threatening to discontinue updates for it at the time) or switch to Linux. Or scrap their PC and buy an Apple. Most opted for XP or Apple - illogical, but there ya go.
As did the OLPC, since the original system ran a variant of Linux. It would make sense for smaller schools to exploit the educational software for the OLPC by installing Linux plus Sugar, where other desktops were also available. Lower grades could then use the OLPC software, higher grades could use the office products and software engineering students could use the fairly comprehensive development tools. No push for it, never happened.
Part of the problem is extreme cynicism. Very few Linux developers believe a desktop Linux could exist, which is a big reason why it doesn't. The sad, pathetic fate of Berlin (an alternative to X), the fade-to-black on KGI and GGI, the total lack of any comparable modern effort -- these aren't caused by Microsoft or Apple aficionados, these are caused by disgraceful politics within our own communities. Sure, Berlin had problems. But (a) it was open source, and (b) it showed you could write other engines. So, no, those problems are not an excuse.
I've heard people mentioning games and business products. We -USED- to have this thing called IBCS, a module based on the Intel binary compatibility standard that would ANY binary for ANY Intel-based Unix to run on Linux. NOT through emulation, but via a transliteration between the calls on other Unix' to Linux. It was the creation of this patch that forced Oracle and other major vendors to port their database to Linux in the first place. It CREATED the Linux business market. It was abandoned as "unnecessary", but the posts on this discussion show that business software for Linux since has lost steam and lost capabilities Yet if anyone else here remembers the patch, my guess is that they'd still call it "unnecessary", all evidence in front of them notwithstanding.
How does this relate to games? Well, OS/X is implemented as an Intel-based Unix. Ergo, with the correct shim added to the module, all OS/X games would run natively under Linux.
Ok, IBCS wasn't the fastest code on Earth, but it's always possible to improve the performance of open source software. That the complainers were too busy complaining to patch just goes back to the whole thing about politics usurping the community.
POLITICS IS TEH PLEH! DO NOT WANT!
Desktop Linux will have one final chance - Windows 8 is unpopular in its current state of development, earning many negative reviews. If Linux can capture the imagination, it can leverage the increasing distaste for Microsoft's ideas of "new and improved" and be the heir apparent.
But if it is to do so, it MUST renounce the politics, the bickering, the antagonism towards constructive efforts. In open source, things will naturally survive if they are good and naturally die if they are not. Adding politics merely kills that which is good and perpetuates that which is bad. Politics is why we had the Open Office debacle rather than an office product that wiped the floor with everything else. Politics is why Ubuntu users feel like they're stuck with Unity when there are over 20 window managers out there. Politics is why speech recognition/synthesis on Linux is so primitive compared to Windows despite the fact that almost all the research in the field is on Unix-like OS' and has been for longer than Windows has existed.
Politics is part of why I gave up on the FOLK project. Not only were there too many projects, with too many incompatible mods, but too many developers were openly hostile to any increase in awareness of anything. I've met similar hostility with the projects I track on Freshmeat nee Freecode - a
Every component in the system introduces the possibility of error, agreed.
People can detect and correct certain classes of error better than machines, but machines can detect and correct certain classes of error better than people.
People can self-repair, to an extent. Blake's 7 Liberator-style auto-repair is still sci-fi. Sadly.
Well-trained humans can identify errors in their training but can also forget the training that is correct. Computers cannot (yet) do either.
A perfect balance is what we need.
Yeah, I get the joke, so don't bother with whooshing.
The thing that always amuses (yet frustrates) me is that the Luddites weren't against technology, they were against workers being replaced by machines. If the mills had kept the same workforce but doubled production, diversified, or whatever, they wouldn't have complained.
A true Luddite would not complain about fly-by-wire as it's not replacing anyone. They'd applaud it because it was enhancing the skills of the people who were there.
That deals with your comments about erroneous advertisements. If you don't read my posts, don't expect me to bother with more of a reply than what I've already said.
That deals with your comments about multi-home. Transient IP addressing assumed everyone could be multi-homed. Again, it really helps if you read what you're replying to. As I've noted before, I was one of the first IPv6 adopters, I know about the early concepts because I was there.
Oh, I will. (There are all kinds of ideas swimming in my mind.)
It depends on the conversion system. The cheaper ones just speed everything up. The more complex ones create whole new frames through linear interpolation (in-betweening), but neither add any new information, you are correct.
This is why, back when HDTV was first mooted, I was suggesting that they use the lowest resolution and framerate for which the existing standards were factors. It would mean that existing sets would be able to display actual pixels in actual frames, whether they were NTSC or PAL, resulting in cleaner images and cleaner sound. It would also have simplified manufacture (since switching between HDTV, PAL and NTSC would have been purely a matter of altering integer step sizes for horizontal, vertical and framerate, which is trivial compared to the algorithms multi-standard televisions are forced to use in practice).
48 FPS for a movie should not have caused any problems - since the complaints have to do with contrast, the cameras used may have had dynamic range issues when the higher frame rate was selected. Lowering the speed won't help if that is true. It might just have been viewers with a preference for a crappy product, though - it's not like Slashdot is unaware of such folk, we bitch about them often enough.
I wouldn't have used 48 for filming, though. Digital storage on the movie-making side is cheap. 48 for the theatres is fine, but it makes it hard to convert to TV. A frame rate of 240 for filming can be converted to conventional film, 48 frame film, 30 frame NTSC and 60 frame HDTV without any interpolation or time compression/stretching. HDR on high-speed digital cameras is usually done either using four colour filters or via 3CCD. In the first case, you can do up to 333 fps, which is above what I'm saying would be required to make a "play unmodified anywhere" movie.
Harsh lighting is another complaint about the movie - easily fixed. Astronomical photos, in particular, have all kinds of non-linear contrast stretching applied to make the image easy to see. The algorithms are readily-available and widely-used.
After that, people should stop whining about movies being actually better. You'd think they were expecting entertainment or something.
*SIGH*
*Beats ISPs over the head with a wet herring*
Ok, correction noted, though it's good to see that at least fewer prefixes are needed so I'm at least half-right.
*Beats IPSs over the head with a smoked herring, then lets the cats loose*
Probably the most useful genetic modification that could be done to humans is to add a background system check that runs during sleep to detect errors and automatically fix those that can be fixed. It's quite possible sleep is already designed to do just that (it seems to be some sort of processing and scanning mode) but the algorithms used are obviously flaky and should be upgraded as soon as we know where they are, how they work, and how to write a better one.
That might be a really good use for a hardwired backing-store for the brain, too. We already have Semantic Web reasoners that can do consistency checks over any number of hops with complex data. They're useless for web data, on the whole, but they might actually be useful if you could run them over a brain dump.
Poisoned router tables will indeed "infect" other routers, radiating out until the correct route has a preferred weighting to the toxic route.
A wonderful example of this occurred in 1995 in England, when Manchester University's computer centre decided that it WAS America. (Now, I know they tend to have an ego problem there, but this was impressive.) Because redirecting traffic to Manchester required fewer hops and utilized greater bandwidth to any other route to America, you can guess what happened next. It took quite some time for the engineers to clean up the mess, because the newly discovered Northwest Corridor^wWormhole had been discovered by so many routers and the information was being gossiped around. Just as with humans, once gossip starts it is very hard to stop - even when the source admits it was false.
There's not a lot you can do in a case like that. Once an authenticated router starts having delusions due to buggy software/hardware, there's not much any other router can do to determine that it truly is a delusion. Multipath helps (if you support dividing traffic between multiple routes, according to viability, you'll only lose a percentage of traffic, not all of it) but you'd need active path monitoring to go any further. Which would reduce bandwidth (which is already excessively limited) and increase complexity (the primary cause of hallucinating hardware).
BGP for IPv6 is essentially the same as BGP for IPv4, so if the protocol has a security hole then it will appear on both. However, because IPv6 is designed from the outset to be a hierarchical addressing scheme, address tables should end up being much smaller (even though each entry is longer) which in turn means that accidents should be less common. If it's easier to see the consequences of your actions, you (in theory) should be less likely to make mistakes.
Back in the days when IPv6 mandated IPSec, the problem of malicious router table poisoning simply wouldn't have existed -- all router protocol traffic would be encrypted and every link would be encrypted distinctly, where the keys used for encryption are securely exchanged in an encrypted form via IKE or IKE2 and where the key exchange encryption key is either a shared secret or a public/private key pair. It would not eliminate accidental corruption, but attacks would be out of the question.
Also back then, automatic address assignment, router and service discovery (via anycasting) and router-level IP mobility (the routers automatically redirected packets if you moved between networks) meant that manual router configuration was almost unnecessary. Virtually everything could be discovered - including MTU - and so nothing really needed to be configured. This would have eliminated manual errors. In fact, that was the whole point of all these automated mechanisms. There would be no manual entry and therefore there would be no manual errors.
Telebit added a nice touch, creating a routing protocol that permitted segments of the network to be transparent (essentially the same as NAT, only far more fine-grained and flexible), although it seems they made the grievous error of not making their protocol public. Certainly I've seen nobody attempt to use it and there has been no reference to it since Telebit went under. Further, the lack of NAT is something that has held back IPv6. Given that Telebit had a working NAT equivalent in 1996, this is incredibly annoying. (Apologies if they did make it public, but it is still true that it's not used and that complaints about a lack of NAT have been a serious issue - made all the more serious precisely because the problem was solved and the solution deployed very very early on.)
So the answer is "if IPv6 is deployed as close to originally intended as possible, the problem simply doesn't exist - in any form; but that if IPv6 is deployed as it is currently used, the hole will hang around although it will be a little smaller".