And the problem is that this is a matter of how you read it; a lawyer could certainly go for my interpretation, and that's all that would matter to you for the duration of the trial...
I mostly agree with your more sober analysis and this isn't all bad, except for one clause:
A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following:
I think the debate was soured in advance by mentioning VPN. It's not VPN being attacked, at least not directly, since in a VPN situation you're not trying to hide the source of the communication or the other bad things. That's just another use of the internet. There is some legitimate reason to be concerned that an overly aggresive lawyer might make a case out of it, but frankly, that's always a concern.
What's really being banned here is wireless. Right now, because of the known weakness of the security provisions of current wireless technologies, unless someone's fixed them and I haven't heard about it, you can't put up a wireless node without expecting someone to crack into it no matter how hard you secure it, at which point someone is capable of all the things the law is banning. If you know that wireless is insecure and you put up a node anyhow, you are in violation of this law. On the other hand, if you didn't know it, you aren't.
NAT isn't really being banned unless you're NAT'ing a whole lot of computers. I have three computers behind my NAT firewall, but as far as the law is concerned, my ISP is perfectly capable of telling which packets came from me, even if they couldn't pinpoint the computer. That's all the law (should) really care about. If you had a lot of computers, like NAT'ing a whole university lab or an entire relatively large institution, you might make a case that the person of origin is obscured, but generally you shouldn't be NAT'ing things that large anyhow.
Similarly for VPN... you have packets coming from your current computer and packets from your VPN'ed computer, but both are clearly identified so at least in VPN's most common use case there's no obscuring of location going on. On the other hand, if you're aware that your VPN software has insecurities, you're in violation of this law. If you install PCAnywhere in the old default of "no password", you're up for 4 years and $2,000.
I'm very tempted to forward this information to the Comp. Sci. Chairman at MSU where I'm a grad student, since they run wireless nodes, both on the theory that they have lawyers that might be able to sort this out, and the theory that the local legislature is more likely to listen to them then me directly if they have to go there.
No. There is no contradiction between "Current XML parsing solutions suck for programmers." to "XML is a good thing overall." It's not a 360 [sic], because those are two seperate dimensions entirely.
RTFAs.
(One could argue that no good parsing solution is itself a weakness of XML, but IMHO the problem is that we got stuck going down the wrong road(s) for parsing, with SAX and DOM, both of which look good on paper but lack a certain practicality. If in five years there's still no good solution then maybe it is XML's fault.)
50 lrnef gb tb sbe n jbexvat dhnaghz pbzchgre frrzf n ovg ybat gb zr.
a.k.a
50 years to go for a working quantum computer seems a bit long to me.
Not if they're completely impossible. Personally, I think they are; to get a real quantum computer working requires near complete isolation of the computer from the rest of the universe on a quantum mechanical level, and you need to be able to switch that isolation on and off like a switch (set up the problem, isolate the system to compute, unisolate to get the answer). Error correction can alleviate that requirement a little, but only a little. As the problems get harder (i.e., go from "toy" to even slightly useful), the errors stack up exponentially but the error correction doesn't scale anywhere near that well, and I see no reason to think it ever will.
Obviously I can't say this is totally true. But if I had to lay money, this is where I'd put it. And I'm generally an technology optimist; quantum computing is different in that it requires fairly specific science advances in isolating system that strike me as being quite likely impossible. This is very different from techs like "speech recognition" that "merely" require much better processers and algorithms. (I'd bet on Strong AI before I'd bet on quantum computing.) As I like to say, it will take Nobel Prize-winning physics to make this work, and it's not good to depend on that. (Even warp drives seem more realistic to me, for what it's worth.)
Also, this goes for "strong" quantum computing, where some significant calculation is done entirely in a quantum machine. This has nothing to do with merely harnessing quantum mechanical effects on otherwise conventional chips, the somewhat misnamed "quantum encryption" (really should be called "quantum intrusion detection"), or other weaker uses of QM that may be useful.
The article simply says: do not encode "known" constants (such as tax levels, etc.) into the code, but put it in an external XML database.
No, that's not what it says. It says do not encode known behavior into the code, but put it in some more easily changed external data source. Also, it might be XML but it can also be in the code, just code structured more like data then code. (I often write code-data like that, writing default keymaps in the language itself, for instance. It's easier then writing a custom parser if you just use the language itself...)
Sales tax is used as an example for the interview, but it goes deeper then that. The other example is much more instructive, with the display of financial numbers. Few programmers instinctively write a "displayMonetaryAmount" function that allows them to make one edit to suddenly display negatives in red; it's much more common to always directly dump the value. "displayMonetaryAmount" is likely to be very simple, almost data-like, and easy to change, rather then changing the code everywhere that displays money, which is virtually impossible to correct.
There's a lot of value in that approach that is missed out on by a lot of programmers.
Do you honestly think people are going to see the label and say, "Oh wow! I had no idea!"
Yes, I do. Do you think everyone reads Slashdot?
Also, for better or for worse the entire technology sector has somehow managed to convince people that when something goes mysteriously wrong, it's their fault. If a normal person rips their CD collection, then buys the copy-protected CD and tries to rip that, when it doesn't work they normally blame themselves or their equipment, not the CD. However, if the CD is labelled (and I hope on the label itself, not a sticker on the outside wrapper plastic), they are vastly more likely to make the connection, and learn to avoid such things in the future... if they care.
It didn't work for cigarettes
Inapplicable comparision. Cigarettes are highly addictive both physically and psychologically, and damn near everybody who is now smoking is smoking despite the knowlege that it is incredibly bad for them. Many of them rationalize the issue away, or build a defense through denial, but on one level or another they are aware of this, and the addiction overpowers that knowlege.
Music is different in both senses: It is not significantly addictive (perhaps a very small psychological addiction but it's not even comparable to a substance addiction), and people are largely not aware of the copy protection measures being put on CDs. There are no similarities between music and cigarettes that make it useful to draw a comparision between the two.
Is it a trap? It may be the case that this won't get us everything we want, which is a restriction-free world. It may also be the case that if we don't grab this while we can we may get nothing. It is also likely that by raising public awareness of the problem we are that much more likely to get what we really want. It could be a trap, but it could also be the stepping stone we need. I say support it.
Few people seem to realize it, but if you have a computer that seems cursed, suspect the power supply.
My (now) wife's computer was toasting everything over a period of years. It didn't stop until I replaced the case, and thus the power supply in passing.
Nobody ever seems to suspect the power supply if the computer is running, but I suspect that ill-formed power can toast modern electronics.
To understand and enjoy the (original) miniseries, it is vital to understand one critical point.
It's not a movie. It's a filmed theature production with a few special effects.
Without that, you're doomed.
The performance of the Baron Harkonnen is most telling and what first twigged me to this; after the big space scene with the House Atreides moving off Caladan it looked like a movie, but as the planet Dune fades into the Baron's face, who is quite obviously delivering a soliloquy, I understood.
After that, the soundstages, the extreme lighting, a lot of other little things, it will all make sense. I also think that given the obvious budget constraints the hybridized approach allowed a superior product to be produced, vs. the cost of doing the whole thing as a movie. The cost of filming "on location" would have been truly prohibitive, and the project would simply never have been at all. Considering the IMHO fine quality of the final product, I think it's worthwhile.
I didn't find the acting flat, I found it appropriate for that environment.
I suspect the same will be true of the sequel, though as I can't get the Sci-Fi channel (sob!!!) I won't know. So watch it as a recorded theatrical production, not as a movie, and I think you'll see what I mean and enjoy it more.
The only thing that I really feel was sacrificed and I wish they had tried a bit harder ($$$) was they lost the feeling of being out on the Dunes. Even just one shot on location with a nice sweep away (my choice would have been as Paul and Jessica emerged from the ornithopter just prior to finding the Fremen) would have added a lot and I would have forgiven them the rest of the soundstage stuff. (Remember in Star Trek VI the huge pull-away done on location in Alaska? Effective, even though all the scenes on each side of that were soundstage.)
The fans don't have to necessarily fund a full season. It would require more writing but it's likely the cliffhangers could be resolved more quickly then was planned, perhaps in three or four episodes made with extreme attention to cost-savings. This might be an attainable goal, esp. if all the fans go out and buy three or four copies of the DVD releases; it might look profitable to make a final DVD or two just for that.;-)
I would never expect them to fund a full season but they might be able to get enough. It might seem a bit hurried to the fans but surely they'd understand. I don't watch Farscape so I don't know, but if the cliffhanger was intense enough, the speedy pace might even fit into the story.
Perhaps the story mentioned this. I don't know, because I can't view Salon stories. I can't see the ad I'm supposed to watch to get the day pass, nor do I really care, so please no RTFA comments; I would if I could.
You make the mistake of thinking that I consider Google sacred. The caching aspect of it probably was illegal, until the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. It is quite clearly recognized in the law as an exception for the purposes of caching. I've heard rumblings about people suing Google for the automatic indexing.
You can rationalize it by noticing that "robots.txt" can constitute acceptance, but it really is tenuous because "no robots.txt" constitutes acceptance, which is rather odd. In a fully rational legal system, it should probably be required to explicitly post a robots.txt that allows searching. If you think about it, this should make sense. Web search indexing may be a benefit to you, but it should be up to you to decide it's a benefit, not for the search engines, and not for the search engines to decide you didn't opt out.
And the reason I "bailed out" is I'm still writing the complete argument; it's up to 100 pages and counting. Can't post that to slashdot.
No, it is the same. The airline companies can't do business with you without showing their prices, anymore then you can do business without given them your address. The fact they appear to be "broadcasting" is an artefact of the fact that they want to do business with everybody. There's nothing special about being a corporation; you are free to start a business and if you do, you might also have to broadcast your address.
There is no real asymmetry between businesses and people in this case; either there information once aquired can be shared with anybody, or there is grounds to limit it, perhaps only to potential customers, as both in the Amazon case (with your address) or in this case, to the potential customers of the airline, which Farechase is not.
Also, quantity counts. Your billboard metaphor is entirely pointless on two grounds: One, it does not have enough information to be applicable to this discussion, and two, putting something on a billboard does not release the content into the public domain! It is still copyrighted and trademarked.
There isn't a difference that matters. If any sort of protection can exist, then the airline can claim it and prevent Farechase from scraping. If no sort of protection of data can exist, then there's no such thing as privacy. "Putting it out to the public" is not a meaningful way of looking at it; almost nobody truly puts out data to the public, rather they put it out to potential customers.
There is a connection between screen scraping and privacy arguments.
Many here are posting "What's wrong with screen scraping? The information is there, I can get it, what's the problem?"
By the same token, many decry things like Amazon.com selling their address just because "they have it".
Information is information. If you have the "right" to scrape whatever you want and distribute it however you want, then companies have the right to distribute your personal information to whomever they want, under whatever circumstances they want.
I prefer to live in the world where control over information on the societal level is still allowed; no concept of privacy can exist without it. Not letting people screen scrape isn't even something I'd consider a "price".
To be a bit more theoretical, there is value in information transfer.
This is a summary of a much longer and more complete argument, but it should get a lot of the point across. I won't be defending this on a point-by-point basis in replies as a result.
I think you've misinterpreted that ruling. Collections of fact can be copyrighted if it passes a creativity criterion. To my knowlege, the phone book is the only thing to fail that criterion to date. That's the really key thing to take away from the case... the creativity criterion is low, low, low. Airline fares require considerably more creativity then setting phone numbers. I'd expect the collection to be copyrightable, especially in the current environment, where I'd bet even the phone book decision could be overturned.
Perhaps that's her rationalization and/or what she tells you because, deep down, she might feel like a "burden" to unappreciative and impatient grandchildren.
You know, your points are good enough to stand in a debate without constantly personally attacking the other guy. Stop exaggerating the other guy's point and reading into what he's saying, and start reading what's actually there; no more, no less. You're coming off like a jackass.
Who knows what changes in thought patterns might occur with completely fresh neurons in a brain?
No need to wonder; look at how "fresh neurons" behave in real life. In other words, look at newborn babies. The answer is "not much".
Neural weights only really have meaning in highly specific contexts. Even if you could "copy & paste" neurons in your brain, the new location would render the neurons effectively noise, having no coherent effect, and thus having effectively no effect at all.
Again, you can partially see this in the real world. We've watch people's brains adapt to losing vision and going to sound for their primary input, converting vision brain area to sound brain area in the process. It's not magical; the old vision stuff is effectively useless and completely re-purposed. Cognitive-level concepts are far, far, far higher then neural weights. So the old neurons are effectively full of garbage.
That's the reason this is so impressive to me. We've more-or-less decoded how the ear transmits sound to the brain, and have devices that can do this now, albiet not quite as well as real ears yet. We've started with ocular implants, though I don't know if that uses direct ocular nerve stimulation. This is because there are reasonably rational patterns that the sense data is transmitted in.
But once you're inside the brain, the nerve impulses have no objective meaning. "Thought transmission", if it is ever acheived by technology, won't be as simple as replaying neural impulses from one brain into another; there's no one-to-one correspondence between neurons, and certainly no corresponence to neural weights. (Odds are, we'd have to learn to use it, and it would 'just another' line of communication, not 'mind reading' as it was portrayed in past literature. Of course, if too much information is transmitted skilled "telepaths" might still get more information then the sender intended, just as reading body language can tell you more then the speaker intended.)
To acheive any success with an internal brain structure, understood or otherwise, is (IMHO, this is subjective of course) orders of magnitude more interesting then the ocular implants, which were pretty impressive themselves.
Again, I emphasize: This isn't magic. This is droll reality. Out of context, a neuron is nearly useless.
"Son, it's time we had that special man-to-man talk about where babies come from. See, your mom and I tried to, uhhh, 'swap location', and everybody knows that to swap two variables, you need a temporary variable*. Well, you're that temporary variable. You just better hope you don't go out of scope soon..."
(*: True in the general case, since the XOR trick only works in certain circumstances.)
Actually, my experience is quite the opposite. Python is much more flexible then Perl. I keep trying to do things in Perl that are easy in Python, and they are either difficult, impossible, or too dangerous due to other side effects. One biggie I wanted recently was to wrap a method in an object with something else. In Python like this:
o = SomeObject() # with method "method", let's say def method_wrapper(self, *args, **kwds):
print "I'm a wrapper!"
self.method_orig(*args, **kwds) o.method_wrapper = o.method o.method = method_wrapper
Perl wouldn't let me do that. So I went a different route with anonymous subs and it's fine, but this is just an example of a general principle, which is that in the (useful!) tricks department, I'm usually stuck in Perl when in Python it'd be easier. (Metaclasses, anyone? I'm not even certain it could be done correctly in Perl.)
Now, that shouldn't be a shock. There is a price to pay for Perl's flexibility, as well as gains. There is a price to pay for Python's "tighter" syntax, but gains as well. (Python is also much easier to mentally model, for what it's worth; I feel I could re-implement Python in a reasonable amount of time, I don't feel like I could ever quite match Perl's quirks.) Both languages have their place.
All else being equal, science will consider the simpler explanation more likely to be true. Both of the italicized phrases are very importent.
The simplest possible theory of everything is simply "God wills it thus." You invoke one entity, and don't muck around with gravity, electomagnetism, etc. You even get some predictive power: "God wills that apples fall, so when I drop this apple, it will fall."
The reason that science discounts this theory is not that it has a simpler one. Quite the contrary; just try to learn quantum mechanics in anything less then five or ten years. What it has is a theory that predicts things much better. "God wills it" doesn't work well as the only theory of the universe, because it's a disguised form of appeal to experience, and there are a lot of edge cases, such as the famous gold foil experiment that gave strong evidence for the existance of atoms, where your experience isn't sufficient.
First, the point is that given two theories that make the same prediction, science prefers the simpler one. Second, the point is that that means nothing about the truth of such theories; the more complicated one may still be correct.
Thus, if there is a God who did indeed create the universe, then there is one, regardless of how the additional apparent complication may offend your sensibilities. Thus, Occam's Razor is only a rule of thumb useful for proceeding with scientific discovery; it is not a fundamental truth of the universe and has no power.
Finally, in this particular case the true paradox is "Something, instead of nothing, exists." "God exists and created a universe" and "A universe exists" are really on the same level of complexity; both simply assert something exists. From our point of view it may seem simpler to simply assume the existance of a universe, but again, that has no power over what is true. A pet bird that never leaves a house may find it easier to simply assume the existance of a house, but that doesn't mean that the house was not created by humans and lots of raw materials that weren't a house to start with, even if it never sees the humans of the house do anything remotely resembling construction.
Do you know what it takes to avoid burning up in reentry?
It takes an ablative shield (since you're only using it once), a big parachute, and a capsule to hold the people. The problem has been solved for nearly twice as long as I've been alive. Frankly, it's not that hard, they didn't even have computers to speak of then for modeling things.
No, I couldn't build any of those things personally, except maybe the parachute, but then, I couldn't personally build the computer I'm posting this with either, as I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy. The great thing about communication is that we get to use other people's knowlege, too.
Re:Another good reason to reach for this
on
The Space Elevator
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· Score: 1
Not to rain on your parade, but unless there is a clearly identifiable return, merely throwing a bucket of money at a public works project is not the most efficient way to jump start the economy.
The economic gain is the good coming down, the goods coming up, and the research gains that translate into value elsewhere, as all space research does. All those mining proposals and other dreams we've given up on become possible again, and that's where the economic value would come from. This is all after the elevator is built, so by "research" I mean the real research we do after we can get to orbit for a reasonable price, not the half-assed research we do now in space, or the research to build it in the first place (though there is some benefit in the material science, it's not much and it'll probably happen with or without an elevator project). I'm not factoring any supposed benefits of building the elevator; I'm not a PhD in economics but I have heard of the broken window fallacy which is enough to scare me off from trying to estimate the benefits of the project itself.
However, alternatives should involve a considered cost / benefit analysis, incorporating and quantifying risk where possible. I would posit that domestic economic stimulus would be much lower risk and have a much more clearly defined benefit than a space elevator.
Well, at 6 billion, even if that's off by a factor of 100 which it may be (although I'd guess that as long as you don't try to force the building of one before the nanotube technology is complete, it would only be off by the more typical 5-10 that such estimates typically are), it's not like the space elevator must pre-empt other, more reasonable and more short-term stimulus. I would want to see it in addition to more rational policies, not in lieu of.
Nobody talked about building it right away, only "ASAP". In that regard it's perfectly feasible.
Re:NASA *is* funding this already
on
The Space Elevator
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Because it's NOT feasible right now, for only $6 billion or any amount.
Because . . . ?
I must confess that intuitively,
Oh. Your intuition. I guess we should give up on this right now.
Can you just imagine the harmonics on this thing when the jetstream plucks it (or whatever).
I don't have to imagine. I have computers. I can model the questions. Obviously, I personally haven't, but the people writing this book have. While I have not read this exact book, the atmospheric effects have not been neglected in the other treatments I have read have not, and they aren't much of a problem.
They are certainly more intelligent then your analysis. Talking about harmonics in this situation is a crock of shit. The exact "resonance frequency" depends on the tension, but over tens of thousands of kilometers you're talking something that is a vanishing fraction of a Hz! At that point "resonant frequency" is meaningless, you're just talking about tension propogating.
Given the failure of human intuition to handle large numbers, which you see routinely on Slashdot, I gotta say I'm much more inclined to believe a well-researched book then your intuition, or mine either for that matter.
Re:Weight of the elevator?
on
The Space Elevator
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· Score: 2, Informative
The space elevator satellite also extends a cable outwards, which balances the gravity experienced by the bottom part with the centrifugal psuedo-force on the top part.
This is also why a break on the planetside isn't the disaster most people think it would be; the part below the break falls to the earth, probably at not too great a speed, and the part above the break floats out into space.
A break above the satellite is worse, but there are ways of helping that too. One interesting, albiet possibly controversial idea, and bear in mind I'm just thinking of this right now, is to deliberately set up explosives/chemicals to cut the elevator at certain intervals, so if a break does occur, you cut an equivalent amount of the cable off the other end so the body of the cable and the satellite are still salvagable.
Also, since you can lift so much, any manned vehicle can be made safe as long as the explosion doesn't occur onboard (obviously); there's enough weight available to make a vehicle that can land safely on the Earth. (Look at the pods for the Apollo missions; it doesn't take too much to splash-down safely, compared to what it takes to get that high in the first place.)
Another good reason to reach for this
on
The Space Elevator
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The good reason to reach for this which can't be emphasized enough in the current environment is that for a relatively modest investment, the impact on the economy would be enormous (and good). Compared to other proposals to jumpstart the economy, this one has incredible bang for the buck.
Obviously this isn't a short-term, instantaneous fix, but this is exactly the sort of project that something like the United States should undertake to help maintain its lead in the economy, if it is interested in maintaining it. The economic advantage of having the only working space elevator (even if it was only until we could build another for someone else, assuming optimistically we wouldn't build ourselves a few backups first) in the world would be absolutely incredible.
Considering the price, it's complete foolishness not to pursue this, even if common sense says the opposite. And the best news of all is that carbon nanotube research is interesting enough on other, more commonly-sensible grounds, that it's going to continue anyhow.
Another thing that should be emphasized is "Suppose China gets there first." Personally, I'd love to see a space race over this issue. It would be one hell of a lot more productive over the long term then the moon race was!
Slashdot Mirror
Objects don't have intents.
And the problem is that this is a matter of how you read it; a lawyer could certainly go for my interpretation, and that's all that would matter to you for the duration of the trial...
To put it another way,
Please don't. Wireless nodes aren't locks, and hackers aren't using lockpicks.
I mostly agree with your more sober analysis and this isn't all bad, except for one clause:
A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following:
I think the debate was soured in advance by mentioning VPN. It's not VPN being attacked, at least not directly, since in a VPN situation you're not trying to hide the source of the communication or the other bad things. That's just another use of the internet. There is some legitimate reason to be concerned that an overly aggresive lawyer might make a case out of it, but frankly, that's always a concern.
What's really being banned here is wireless. Right now, because of the known weakness of the security provisions of current wireless technologies, unless someone's fixed them and I haven't heard about it, you can't put up a wireless node without expecting someone to crack into it no matter how hard you secure it, at which point someone is capable of all the things the law is banning. If you know that wireless is insecure and you put up a node anyhow, you are in violation of this law. On the other hand, if you didn't know it, you aren't.
NAT isn't really being banned unless you're NAT'ing a whole lot of computers. I have three computers behind my NAT firewall, but as far as the law is concerned, my ISP is perfectly capable of telling which packets came from me, even if they couldn't pinpoint the computer. That's all the law (should) really care about. If you had a lot of computers, like NAT'ing a whole university lab or an entire relatively large institution, you might make a case that the person of origin is obscured, but generally you shouldn't be NAT'ing things that large anyhow.
Similarly for VPN... you have packets coming from your current computer and packets from your VPN'ed computer, but both are clearly identified so at least in VPN's most common use case there's no obscuring of location going on. On the other hand, if you're aware that your VPN software has insecurities, you're in violation of this law. If you install PCAnywhere in the old default of "no password", you're up for 4 years and $2,000.
I'm very tempted to forward this information to the Comp. Sci. Chairman at MSU where I'm a grad student, since they run wireless nodes, both on the theory that they have lawyers that might be able to sort this out, and the theory that the local legislature is more likely to listen to them then me directly if they have to go there.
No. There is no contradiction between "Current XML parsing solutions suck for programmers." to "XML is a good thing overall." It's not a 360 [sic], because those are two seperate dimensions entirely.
RTFAs.
(One could argue that no good parsing solution is itself a weakness of XML, but IMHO the problem is that we got stuck going down the wrong road(s) for parsing, with SAX and DOM, both of which look good on paper but lack a certain practicality. If in five years there's still no good solution then maybe it is XML's fault.)
50 lrnef gb tb sbe n jbexvat dhnaghz pbzchgre frrzf n ovg ybat gb zr.
a.k.a
50 years to go for a working quantum computer seems a bit long to me.
Not if they're completely impossible. Personally, I think they are; to get a real quantum computer working requires near complete isolation of the computer from the rest of the universe on a quantum mechanical level, and you need to be able to switch that isolation on and off like a switch (set up the problem, isolate the system to compute, unisolate to get the answer). Error correction can alleviate that requirement a little, but only a little. As the problems get harder (i.e., go from "toy" to even slightly useful), the errors stack up exponentially but the error correction doesn't scale anywhere near that well, and I see no reason to think it ever will.
Obviously I can't say this is totally true. But if I had to lay money, this is where I'd put it. And I'm generally an technology optimist; quantum computing is different in that it requires fairly specific science advances in isolating system that strike me as being quite likely impossible. This is very different from techs like "speech recognition" that "merely" require much better processers and algorithms. (I'd bet on Strong AI before I'd bet on quantum computing.) As I like to say, it will take Nobel Prize-winning physics to make this work, and it's not good to depend on that. (Even warp drives seem more realistic to me, for what it's worth.)
Also, this goes for "strong" quantum computing, where some significant calculation is done entirely in a quantum machine. This has nothing to do with merely harnessing quantum mechanical effects on otherwise conventional chips, the somewhat misnamed "quantum encryption" (really should be called "quantum intrusion detection"), or other weaker uses of QM that may be useful.
The article simply says: do not encode "known" constants (such as tax levels, etc.) into the code, but put it in an external XML database.
No, that's not what it says. It says do not encode known behavior into the code, but put it in some more easily changed external data source. Also, it might be XML but it can also be in the code, just code structured more like data then code. (I often write code-data like that, writing default keymaps in the language itself, for instance. It's easier then writing a custom parser if you just use the language itself...)
Sales tax is used as an example for the interview, but it goes deeper then that. The other example is much more instructive, with the display of financial numbers. Few programmers instinctively write a "displayMonetaryAmount" function that allows them to make one edit to suddenly display negatives in red; it's much more common to always directly dump the value. "displayMonetaryAmount" is likely to be very simple, almost data-like, and easy to change, rather then changing the code everywhere that displays money, which is virtually impossible to correct.
There's a lot of value in that approach that is missed out on by a lot of programmers.
Do you honestly think people are going to see the label and say, "Oh wow! I had no idea!"
Yes, I do. Do you think everyone reads Slashdot?
Also, for better or for worse the entire technology sector has somehow managed to convince people that when something goes mysteriously wrong, it's their fault. If a normal person rips their CD collection, then buys the copy-protected CD and tries to rip that, when it doesn't work they normally blame themselves or their equipment, not the CD. However, if the CD is labelled (and I hope on the label itself, not a sticker on the outside wrapper plastic), they are vastly more likely to make the connection, and learn to avoid such things in the future... if they care.
It didn't work for cigarettes
Inapplicable comparision. Cigarettes are highly addictive both physically and psychologically, and damn near everybody who is now smoking is smoking despite the knowlege that it is incredibly bad for them. Many of them rationalize the issue away, or build a defense through denial, but on one level or another they are aware of this, and the addiction overpowers that knowlege.
Music is different in both senses: It is not significantly addictive (perhaps a very small psychological addiction but it's not even comparable to a substance addiction), and people are largely not aware of the copy protection measures being put on CDs. There are no similarities between music and cigarettes that make it useful to draw a comparision between the two.
Is it a trap? It may be the case that this won't get us everything we want, which is a restriction-free world. It may also be the case that if we don't grab this while we can we may get nothing. It is also likely that by raising public awareness of the problem we are that much more likely to get what we really want. It could be a trap, but it could also be the stepping stone we need. I say support it.
Few people seem to realize it, but if you have a computer that seems cursed, suspect the power supply.
My (now) wife's computer was toasting everything over a period of years. It didn't stop until I replaced the case, and thus the power supply in passing.
Nobody ever seems to suspect the power supply if the computer is running, but I suspect that ill-formed power can toast modern electronics.
To understand and enjoy the (original) miniseries, it is vital to understand one critical point.
It's not a movie. It's a filmed theature production with a few special effects.
Without that, you're doomed.
The performance of the Baron Harkonnen is most telling and what first twigged me to this; after the big space scene with the House Atreides moving off Caladan it looked like a movie, but as the planet Dune fades into the Baron's face, who is quite obviously delivering a soliloquy, I understood.
After that, the soundstages, the extreme lighting, a lot of other little things, it will all make sense. I also think that given the obvious budget constraints the hybridized approach allowed a superior product to be produced, vs. the cost of doing the whole thing as a movie. The cost of filming "on location" would have been truly prohibitive, and the project would simply never have been at all. Considering the IMHO fine quality of the final product, I think it's worthwhile.
I didn't find the acting flat, I found it appropriate for that environment.
I suspect the same will be true of the sequel, though as I can't get the Sci-Fi channel (sob!!!) I won't know. So watch it as a recorded theatrical production, not as a movie, and I think you'll see what I mean and enjoy it more.
The only thing that I really feel was sacrificed and I wish they had tried a bit harder ($$$) was they lost the feeling of being out on the Dunes. Even just one shot on location with a nice sweep away (my choice would have been as Paul and Jessica emerged from the ornithopter just prior to finding the Fremen) would have added a lot and I would have forgiven them the rest of the soundstage stuff. (Remember in Star Trek VI the huge pull-away done on location in Alaska? Effective, even though all the scenes on each side of that were soundstage.)
The fans don't have to necessarily fund a full season. It would require more writing but it's likely the cliffhangers could be resolved more quickly then was planned, perhaps in three or four episodes made with extreme attention to cost-savings. This might be an attainable goal, esp. if all the fans go out and buy three or four copies of the DVD releases; it might look profitable to make a final DVD or two just for that. ;-)
I would never expect them to fund a full season but they might be able to get enough. It might seem a bit hurried to the fans but surely they'd understand. I don't watch Farscape so I don't know, but if the cliffhanger was intense enough, the speedy pace might even fit into the story.
Perhaps the story mentioned this. I don't know, because I can't view Salon stories. I can't see the ad I'm supposed to watch to get the day pass, nor do I really care, so please no RTFA comments; I would if I could.
Using your logic google should be illegal.
You make the mistake of thinking that I consider Google sacred. The caching aspect of it probably was illegal, until the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. It is quite clearly recognized in the law as an exception for the purposes of caching. I've heard rumblings about people suing Google for the automatic indexing.
You can rationalize it by noticing that "robots.txt" can constitute acceptance, but it really is tenuous because "no robots.txt" constitutes acceptance, which is rather odd. In a fully rational legal system, it should probably be required to explicitly post a robots.txt that allows searching. If you think about it, this should make sense. Web search indexing may be a benefit to you, but it should be up to you to decide it's a benefit, not for the search engines, and not for the search engines to decide you didn't opt out.
And the reason I "bailed out" is I'm still writing the complete argument; it's up to 100 pages and counting. Can't post that to slashdot.
See cousin post for other points.
No, it is the same. The airline companies can't do business with you without showing their prices, anymore then you can do business without given them your address. The fact they appear to be "broadcasting" is an artefact of the fact that they want to do business with everybody. There's nothing special about being a corporation; you are free to start a business and if you do, you might also have to broadcast your address.
There is no real asymmetry between businesses and people in this case; either there information once aquired can be shared with anybody, or there is grounds to limit it, perhaps only to potential customers, as both in the Amazon case (with your address) or in this case, to the potential customers of the airline, which Farechase is not.
Also, quantity counts. Your billboard metaphor is entirely pointless on two grounds: One, it does not have enough information to be applicable to this discussion, and two, putting something on a billboard does not release the content into the public domain! It is still copyrighted and trademarked.
There isn't a difference that matters. If any sort of protection can exist, then the airline can claim it and prevent Farechase from scraping. If no sort of protection of data can exist, then there's no such thing as privacy. "Putting it out to the public" is not a meaningful way of looking at it; almost nobody truly puts out data to the public, rather they put it out to potential customers.
There is a connection between screen scraping and privacy arguments.
Many here are posting "What's wrong with screen scraping? The information is there, I can get it, what's the problem?"
By the same token, many decry things like Amazon.com selling their address just because "they have it".
Information is information. If you have the "right" to scrape whatever you want and distribute it however you want, then companies have the right to distribute your personal information to whomever they want, under whatever circumstances they want.
I prefer to live in the world where control over information on the societal level is still allowed; no concept of privacy can exist without it. Not letting people screen scrape isn't even something I'd consider a "price".
To be a bit more theoretical, there is value in information transfer.
This is a summary of a much longer and more complete argument, but it should get a lot of the point across. I won't be defending this on a point-by-point basis in replies as a result.
I think you've misinterpreted that ruling. Collections of fact can be copyrighted if it passes a creativity criterion. To my knowlege, the phone book is the only thing to fail that criterion to date. That's the really key thing to take away from the case... the creativity criterion is low, low, low. Airline fares require considerably more creativity then setting phone numbers. I'd expect the collection to be copyrightable, especially in the current environment, where I'd bet even the phone book decision could be overturned.
Perhaps that's her rationalization and/or what she tells you because, deep down, she might feel like a "burden" to unappreciative and impatient grandchildren.
You know, your points are good enough to stand in a debate without constantly personally attacking the other guy. Stop exaggerating the other guy's point and reading into what he's saying, and start reading what's actually there; no more, no less. You're coming off like a jackass.
Who knows what changes in thought patterns might occur with completely fresh neurons in a brain?
No need to wonder; look at how "fresh neurons" behave in real life. In other words, look at newborn babies. The answer is "not much".
Neural weights only really have meaning in highly specific contexts. Even if you could "copy & paste" neurons in your brain, the new location would render the neurons effectively noise, having no coherent effect, and thus having effectively no effect at all.
Again, you can partially see this in the real world. We've watch people's brains adapt to losing vision and going to sound for their primary input, converting vision brain area to sound brain area in the process. It's not magical; the old vision stuff is effectively useless and completely re-purposed. Cognitive-level concepts are far, far, far higher then neural weights. So the old neurons are effectively full of garbage.
That's the reason this is so impressive to me. We've more-or-less decoded how the ear transmits sound to the brain, and have devices that can do this now, albiet not quite as well as real ears yet. We've started with ocular implants, though I don't know if that uses direct ocular nerve stimulation. This is because there are reasonably rational patterns that the sense data is transmitted in.
But once you're inside the brain, the nerve impulses have no objective meaning. "Thought transmission", if it is ever acheived by technology, won't be as simple as replaying neural impulses from one brain into another; there's no one-to-one correspondence between neurons, and certainly no corresponence to neural weights. (Odds are, we'd have to learn to use it, and it would 'just another' line of communication, not 'mind reading' as it was portrayed in past literature. Of course, if too much information is transmitted skilled "telepaths" might still get more information then the sender intended, just as reading body language can tell you more then the speaker intended.)
To acheive any success with an internal brain structure, understood or otherwise, is (IMHO, this is subjective of course) orders of magnitude more interesting then the ocular implants, which were pretty impressive themselves.
Again, I emphasize: This isn't magic. This is droll reality. Out of context, a neuron is nearly useless.
"Son, it's time we had that special man-to-man talk about where babies come from. See, your mom and I tried to, uhhh, 'swap location', and everybody knows that to swap two variables, you need a temporary variable*. Well, you're that temporary variable. You just better hope you don't go out of scope soon..."
(*: True in the general case, since the XOR trick only works in certain circumstances.)
Actually, my experience is quite the opposite. Python is much more flexible then Perl. I keep trying to do things in Perl that are easy in Python, and they are either difficult, impossible, or too dangerous due to other side effects. One biggie I wanted recently was to wrap a method in an object with something else. In Python like this:
o = SomeObject() # with method "method", let's say
def method_wrapper(self, *args, **kwds):
print "I'm a wrapper!"
self.method_orig(*args, **kwds)
o.method_wrapper = o.method
o.method = method_wrapper
Perl wouldn't let me do that. So I went a different route with anonymous subs and it's fine, but this is just an example of a general principle, which is that in the (useful!) tricks department, I'm usually stuck in Perl when in Python it'd be easier. (Metaclasses, anyone? I'm not even certain it could be done correctly in Perl.)
Now, that shouldn't be a shock. There is a price to pay for Perl's flexibility, as well as gains. There is a price to pay for Python's "tighter" syntax, but gains as well. (Python is also much easier to mentally model, for what it's worth; I feel I could re-implement Python in a reasonable amount of time, I don't feel like I could ever quite match Perl's quirks.) Both languages have their place.
Close, but not quite.
All else being equal, science will consider the simpler explanation more likely to be true. Both of the italicized phrases are very importent.
The simplest possible theory of everything is simply "God wills it thus." You invoke one entity, and don't muck around with gravity, electomagnetism, etc. You even get some predictive power: "God wills that apples fall, so when I drop this apple, it will fall."
The reason that science discounts this theory is not that it has a simpler one. Quite the contrary; just try to learn quantum mechanics in anything less then five or ten years. What it has is a theory that predicts things much better. "God wills it" doesn't work well as the only theory of the universe, because it's a disguised form of appeal to experience, and there are a lot of edge cases, such as the famous gold foil experiment that gave strong evidence for the existance of atoms, where your experience isn't sufficient.
First, the point is that given two theories that make the same prediction, science prefers the simpler one. Second, the point is that that means nothing about the truth of such theories; the more complicated one may still be correct.
Thus, if there is a God who did indeed create the universe, then there is one, regardless of how the additional apparent complication may offend your sensibilities. Thus, Occam's Razor is only a rule of thumb useful for proceeding with scientific discovery; it is not a fundamental truth of the universe and has no power.
Finally, in this particular case the true paradox is "Something, instead of nothing, exists." "God exists and created a universe" and "A universe exists" are really on the same level of complexity; both simply assert something exists. From our point of view it may seem simpler to simply assume the existance of a universe, but again, that has no power over what is true. A pet bird that never leaves a house may find it easier to simply assume the existance of a house, but that doesn't mean that the house was not created by humans and lots of raw materials that weren't a house to start with, even if it never sees the humans of the house do anything remotely resembling construction.
Do you know what it takes to avoid burning up in reentry?
It takes an ablative shield (since you're only using it once), a big parachute, and a capsule to hold the people. The problem has been solved for nearly twice as long as I've been alive. Frankly, it's not that hard, they didn't even have computers to speak of then for modeling things.
No, I couldn't build any of those things personally, except maybe the parachute, but then, I couldn't personally build the computer I'm posting this with either, as I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy. The great thing about communication is that we get to use other people's knowlege, too.
Not to rain on your parade, but unless there is a clearly identifiable return, merely throwing a bucket of money at a public works project is not the most efficient way to jump start the economy.
The economic gain is the good coming down, the goods coming up, and the research gains that translate into value elsewhere, as all space research does. All those mining proposals and other dreams we've given up on become possible again, and that's where the economic value would come from. This is all after the elevator is built, so by "research" I mean the real research we do after we can get to orbit for a reasonable price, not the half-assed research we do now in space, or the research to build it in the first place (though there is some benefit in the material science, it's not much and it'll probably happen with or without an elevator project). I'm not factoring any supposed benefits of building the elevator; I'm not a PhD in economics but I have heard of the broken window fallacy which is enough to scare me off from trying to estimate the benefits of the project itself.
However, alternatives should involve a considered cost / benefit analysis, incorporating and quantifying risk where possible. I would posit that domestic economic stimulus would be much lower risk and have a much more clearly defined benefit than a space elevator.
Well, at 6 billion, even if that's off by a factor of 100 which it may be (although I'd guess that as long as you don't try to force the building of one before the nanotube technology is complete, it would only be off by the more typical 5-10 that such estimates typically are), it's not like the space elevator must pre-empt other, more reasonable and more short-term stimulus. I would want to see it in addition to more rational policies, not in lieu of.
Nobody talked about building it right away, only "ASAP". In that regard it's perfectly feasible.
Because it's NOT feasible right now, for only $6 billion or any amount.
Because . . . ?
I must confess that intuitively,
Oh. Your intuition. I guess we should give up on this right now.
Can you just imagine the harmonics on this thing when the jetstream plucks it (or whatever).
I don't have to imagine. I have computers. I can model the questions. Obviously, I personally haven't, but the people writing this book have. While I have not read this exact book, the atmospheric effects have not been neglected in the other treatments I have read have not, and they aren't much of a problem.
They are certainly more intelligent then your analysis. Talking about harmonics in this situation is a crock of shit. The exact "resonance frequency" depends on the tension, but over tens of thousands of kilometers you're talking something that is a vanishing fraction of a Hz! At that point "resonant frequency" is meaningless, you're just talking about tension propogating.
Given the failure of human intuition to handle large numbers, which you see routinely on Slashdot, I gotta say I'm much more inclined to believe a well-researched book then your intuition, or mine either for that matter.
The space elevator satellite also extends a cable outwards, which balances the gravity experienced by the bottom part with the centrifugal psuedo-force on the top part.
This is also why a break on the planetside isn't the disaster most people think it would be; the part below the break falls to the earth, probably at not too great a speed, and the part above the break floats out into space.
A break above the satellite is worse, but there are ways of helping that too. One interesting, albiet possibly controversial idea, and bear in mind I'm just thinking of this right now, is to deliberately set up explosives/chemicals to cut the elevator at certain intervals, so if a break does occur, you cut an equivalent amount of the cable off the other end so the body of the cable and the satellite are still salvagable.
Also, since you can lift so much, any manned vehicle can be made safe as long as the explosion doesn't occur onboard (obviously); there's enough weight available to make a vehicle that can land safely on the Earth. (Look at the pods for the Apollo missions; it doesn't take too much to splash-down safely, compared to what it takes to get that high in the first place.)
The good reason to reach for this which can't be emphasized enough in the current environment is that for a relatively modest investment, the impact on the economy would be enormous (and good). Compared to other proposals to jumpstart the economy, this one has incredible bang for the buck.
Obviously this isn't a short-term, instantaneous fix, but this is exactly the sort of project that something like the United States should undertake to help maintain its lead in the economy, if it is interested in maintaining it. The economic advantage of having the only working space elevator (even if it was only until we could build another for someone else, assuming optimistically we wouldn't build ourselves a few backups first) in the world would be absolutely incredible.
Considering the price, it's complete foolishness not to pursue this, even if common sense says the opposite. And the best news of all is that carbon nanotube research is interesting enough on other, more commonly-sensible grounds, that it's going to continue anyhow.
Another thing that should be emphasized is "Suppose China gets there first." Personally, I'd love to see a space race over this issue. It would be one hell of a lot more productive over the long term then the moon race was!
No, you need to embed your commentary in the stream, not just have it on some random location on the disk.