You can probably have as many outgoing gates as you want. If you dial a planet, you only get one "primary" gate though. The DHD can mark a gate as "primary", though it is likely that the SGC could eventually figure out what the DHD does to make a gate "primary" and override a DHD elsewhere on the planet, if they tried.
Just realized: In the episode 2010, we see a Stargate on Earth, in a possible future, in a "starport" in DC. They really should have had two, one dedicated to incoming and one dedicated to outgoing, to maximize throughput, as I would not be surprised that the incoming gate would not interfere with an outgoing gate. (Physically, there's no reason to assume either way, so it would probably be one of those properties that would be determined by the first plot that needed one of them... for instance, the episode where SG-1 ruins a sun and turns the film^W sun all red, it is suddenly revealed that a terminated wormhole dumps the matter out in the real universe. This was news, and IMHO doesn't make sense.)
Actually, I disagree, bearing in mind that you absolutely must lower your standards for a television show to some degree; you have all day to pick out plot holes but they are on a tight, tight schedule. You need to look at not just what they screw up, but what they get right.
Star Trek, for instance, has devolved to the point where even on the show's own terms they get almost nothing whatsoever right. The "sci fi" serves solely as dues ex machina and as a result the only episodes I find even remotely interesting anymore are the psychological episodes... which I can only remember one of in Voyager (where the captain encounters the embodiment of "fear" in suspended animation tubes) and I've stopped watching Enterprise but don't remember any episode in the first two seasons I'd call "psycological".
Stargate largely shoots pretty well; I have heard a few groaners and Carter is getting a little too Star Trek-y for my tastes but they manage to get a lot right. In the Watergate episode, Carter and Counselor Troi (heh heh) correctly notice that pressure should not be increasing without a corresponding increase in depth. This sounds like a little thing but it involves an elementary knowlege of high-school physics that seems beyond most sci-fi shows. In the black hole time-dilation episode, Carter correctly notes that the time dilation effect has been decoupled from the gravitational effect, which according to relativity is impossible (i.e., in relativity the two are equivalent anyhow if my understanding is correct so it's literally not a meaningful idea in modern relativity).
Certainly there are groaners (some of which came from the movie which I am not willing to blame them for, such as the way that despite not having a clue what the Stargate is until Daniel Jackson turns it on (and despite not trying the six symbols and all 39 possible seventh symbols...) they still have computers that know that the gate is "dematerializing" things, and have a tracker that tracks the progress of the object... one can sort of rationalize this by saying they've analysed the protocol the gate communicates in but it is virtually inconceivable that they'd know that much about it the first time they turn it on!), but they get a lot of stuff really right, too.
(My favorite thing they get right is military doctrine; our heros are horribly outnumbered and out-tech'ed, but our military significantly outperforms the Jaffa because of our massively superior doctrines, because we don't mind arming our armies with everything we've got, whereas the Gua'uld deliberately hobble the Jaffa with shitty weaponry so they can not successfully rebel. Or the eventual deployment of aerial surveillance, which took time to R&D. I especially enjoyed the episode where they used the aerial probe to paint two targets and then shot surface-to-surface missles through the gate to take out two anti-personnel emplacements without risking a man; now that is a quality understanding of military doctrine and appropriate use of purely-human technology we either have, or could perfectly plausibly have, today! With this simple human, not scientific, correctness that almost no other show I can name either sci-fi or otherwise gets right, I am will to spot them a lot of other stuff.)
If you only see faults in things, and I say this in a neutral fashion as it is a legitimate personality trait and is just something you need to know about yourself, then give up on sci-fi movies and television now. I've learned to be more lenient with movies or television then I am with books, and a large part of my acceptance was what I learned about the timescales these things are produced on. They are just such different beasts then books from a single author that I can not honestly treat them the same. I am still very hard on my books, but they also have an easier time, since there are no visual effects to pick apart (and visual effects inevitably contain much more information then the original description did, just as a 'for-instance'). SG-1, along with getting some stuff wrong, gets a lot of stuff right and is as good as you can hope for, at least the first four or five seasons of it.
On the surface they look like the ultimate hippies and are all about peaceful solutions at all costs, which just isn't a realistic solution for humans.
Then it turns out that they are just uber-powerful, and can frankly (and I mean this next word literally) afford such attitudes.
I'm still unsure whether the authors intended a pacifistic message and aren't clear on how pacifists never survive long enough to get that powerful, or whether they intended a sly comment on how you can only be pacifistic if you have the capability to defend yourself and the current Nox (like many modern humans) have forgotten that second part. In fact this is a running theme in Stargate: The more advanced the race, the more pacifistic and Bhuddist they get, until you get up to the Ascended who are nearly God-like but refuse to do anything whatsoever to the universe (IIRC, every single Ascended being we ever see up close is either evicted from the "main society" of the Ascended, whatever that is, or shortly will be evicted (Daniel during his "dead" season)), but is this supposed to be cause or effect? It's never really clear.
One of the things I've wondered, and I continue to wonder, is how long they can "keep the secret". Sooner or later, the public will know.
What do they do with the series then? It compromises the "vision" of the series beyond any redemption once the general public knows. One of the most enjoyable aspects is how it is set in today, but a "today" where the public knows aliens exist is no longer "today". While it is not completely impossible they'd manage to maintain the quality, I am concerned that they would rapidly become Just Another Sci-Fi show.
(Comments from the peanut gallery that they already are may be directed to/dev/null; this message isn't written for you.)
And the longer they keep this massive secret, the more unbelievable it gets, too; for you fans, think about it. There are any number of episodes that would have given the secret away in the real world. In particular, the black hole episode would have been a dead giveaway (the atomic clocks we have today would be sensitive enough to notice some seriously wierd shit went down, and some civilian scientists should have rapidly been able to pinpoint Colorado, possibly even Colorado Springs as the source), and eventually the episode where the same day repeats for months would be a dead giveaway when the light sphere from the edge of the disturbance reaches Earth, and suddenly the entire Universe seems to jump forward six months, which astronomers would notice. And again, they'd have enough info to pinpoint the source planet, which wasn't Earth but would still prove alien intelligence. That was what, three years ago and we were on the edge of the disturbance, it's quite likely that we'd have seen that effect by now.
As much as I love SG-1, and I will give Atlantis its fair chance, I am seriously concerned that at least from my (freely admitted selfish) perspective, the best thing they could do would be to bring the series to some sort of closure and cut it off, why they are still ahead. Basically, the story just becomes too damn big. Star Trek worked best when it was "The Adventures of the Enterprise"; the more it became "The Adventures of the Federation and the Politics of the Alpha Quadrant", the suckier it got. (It suffered from other problems too and it's anyone's guess which are the most fundamental.) To date, SG-1 has largely been "The Adventures of SG-1" and to a lesser extent, "The Adventures of Stargate Command". As more and more of the world "knows" the truth about the universe (the Russians, more countries, more people, more chunks of the American government), the story just gets too big to keep track of in any reasonable sense.
(It is my considered opinion that an excellent team of writers could pull a Star Wars on the story and deliberately write just a slice of the story. As much as I disliked Star Wars I, I really felt that it managed to hint at the size of the Star Wars galaxy in a way that no other Star Wars did, with the shots of Coruscant, the Senate, and a few other quick little strokes that were largely missing (IMHO) from the other movies. Stargate might be able to survive this. Basically, this would go from telling "the whole story" to something more like what you'd expect from a documentary of, say, SG-11; just a slice of the action, because in a universe as big as ours that's all we need, we have no hope of processing the whole story. But to get there from here would take some very, very careful and considered writing. Considering the obvious fact that the Stargate staff is deliberately avoiding many of the more hackneyed Stargate cliches, there is much more hope that the Stargate franchise, if they hold on to their writers, will be more likely to pull this off then the Star Trek franchise could dream of (barring a complete personnel change). But I still consider it slim odds; it's a hell of a transition.)
do you honestly believe your any different than a terrorist?
No.
Therefore, I need to defend myself, because I recognize in myself and those around me that there are people who couldn't care less about me, and will kill me for many things, ranging from the sheer joy of killing, to jealously plain and simple, to desire for what I have. I have things. That is enough reason to kill me. If you think otherwise, you are sadly ignorant of basically all history... which is a rather common trait among people espousing your point of view.
Only the anomalous and regrettably isolated set of certain circumstances (I wish more people lived in better situations, but they don't) in the world allow you to forget that, and it is ironic that you accuse me of being brainwashed. I don't think anything has changed in the past several thousand years.
Note how smoothly you transition into an anti-American tirade that is quite frankly, off-topic for your post. Notice that despite talking about how everything is "shades of grey", your post is firmly in "black and white" land. (OK, to be fair, I'm extroplating a wee bit because your writing borders on the incomprehensibly vague.)
Like I said, you're free to live in your fun-happy land where if we all just tried really hard, we'd all get along. In the meantime, most of us in the real world know that's not how it works, and again, I'm very glad that the military protecting me has not fallen prey to the "if everybody just put their weapons down, peace would reign on Earth" fallacy... in flat contradiction of every known fact of human nature.
Yeah, it's an American post. We've been living in the real world for a long time now, because unlike certain other "Enlightened" part of the world, people have been gunning for us, with varying degrees of literalness, pretty much non-stop since at least WWII. In other words, the nature of living life since the first predator evolved. It is your world view that is strangely anomalous, ill-adapted, and prone to get your civilization killed sooner or later. It's a hard world. Sucks, but that's the way it is, and if we're going to have an opportunity to make a difference, and I believe we have been a largely positive influence on the world (again, go read your history books and try to do an honest comparision to what, say, Ceasar Augustus would have done with our power... not that I'm optimistic you can do that, but give it a whirl, why don't you? First, explain Germany and Japan and the rather odd indepedence they enjoy from us, then try to move on to more complicate subjects from there.), we first need to survive.
Uh-uh, no dancing on me. I was clearly criticizing your last phrase, which I quote: All it does it remove the mask of civility and democracy from what is ***IMHO*** an increasingly tyrannical power.
Except, apparently, how to handle Iraq after it is conquered.
We had plans for Iraq, post-conquest. They didn't work, so we tossed them out and came up with different ones, which sometimes worked really well and sometimes didn't, but pretty much uniformly worked better then the original ones.
The studied inability of people to understand that this is a good thing boggles my engineering mind. Apparently we were supposed to stick with a bad plan? Form over substance, indeed.
The basic problem with your view is that there is no alternative.
Are Americans supposed to get back in touch with their hippy selves and spread peace and love all over the world, until someone finally scrapes together the means and the intent to nuke us wholesale? Because it takes complete and willful ignorance of human nature to not realize that we have no choice but to arm ourselves and defend ourselves, or die, both collectively and individually.
Military science is like any other science. Sticking your head in the ground as a society merely guarentees that somebody will beat you to it; it does little to nothing to prevent the science from being done and subsequently implemented by engineers. You're free to keep thinking that life would just be hunky dory if that big nasty USA would just take a collective hit from the Bong of International Willful Ignorance of Human Nature, but I don't think we're about to do that no matter how much you whine... thank goodness.
You might be somewhat happier to think of it as a shot across the bow; continued price fixing probably would result in massive fines.
On the other hand, you might be less happy thinking of it as a shot across the bow, since you might think they should be actually punished, not warned. Your call, I guess.;-)
Opportunity costs too high
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The opportunity costs are too high for this to be feasible. If we're throwing 500 pounds of anything at Mars, it's going to be a little more sophisticated then a hunk of inert metal.
This would be a feasible experiment if slinging 500 pounds of material around the Solar System were something we could do causually, so it's not like it's a bad idea, but at our present stage of development, we'd want that 500 pounds to be probes and satellites and sensors and such that are more useful for making things other then holes.
the spammers will use other people's computers to send email, resulting in other people being charged for the privilege!
Yes, but this is not a steady-state result; do you really think the recipients of the spam bills are just going to smile and pay them forever? Or do you think they will do what they need to do to prevent them from continuing to come in?
Not to mention once spam crosses the line into out-and-out theft like that the law will become more interested (and not have First Amendment or free speech issues to deal with).
This story is part of a larger pattern, where law enforcement thinks it can farm its job out to machines. DRM is another instance of the exact same bad idea.
But machines enforce a machine version of the law. We are human. We need fuzziness, and we need the expense of prosecution, as well. (See my linked essay for a justification of that second clause.) This is a feature of the law, not a bug!
What do you do when the machine gets a false positive? Or your life depending on going somewhere right now? Is the state going to take responsibility for the extra 30 it took to get someone to the hospital while they are having a heart attack, or on the verge of a potentially life-threatening birth??
And it is worth pointing out that while it is certainly abused, it is an absolute necessity to society as we know it. It's easy for some high school schmoe who has nothing better to do then post to Slashdot to complain about how corporations seem to be immune to things, but flip it around: If you are able to be held personally responsible for anything and everything that goes wrong at work, the only rational response is to give up and try to find some job, somewhere that doesn't incur some horrid liability, and despite racking my brains for such a thing several times in the past, I've never really managed to come up with a "safe" job. (Besides, the pay would be nothing since every rational person would want that job.)
Without that protection, there would be no entrepeneurs, and thus no corporations or even cooperation at all.
Nifty, but this is about three chapters too premature to be posting it on Slashdot.
Seriously, the author is biting a LOT off and while one chapter is a good start, it remains to be seen whether the author is biting off more then they can chew.
Truthfully, many programming languages are easy but even in this introduction there are signs that this isn't going to go down as well as the author would like, like the "symbols" discussion which I understood perfectly but is likely to make, say, my zoology-trained wife go "huh? so what are they good for? why not just use strings?"
You can also over-simplify Perl or Python this way too but when you start discussing @ISA or __metaclass__es, you're in trouble, and there is often just no way around those things, esp. if you're trying to read the code of others.
I am hopeful this will turn out well; it looks like a lot of fun and is full-unto-overflowing with personality, which can certainly reach out to a new audience. But it is also extremely ambitious and will be time consuming, so I must confess to a little bit of pessimism that that quality of output can be sustained all the way to the end of the book.
Oh, and entirely seperately, comparing a single chapter of an otherwise-unfinished book to the SICP disrespects the SICP. You do neither work a favor by comparing the two.
This is like claiming that the reason we should save the environment or the rain forest is that we might find a medicine in them. That's such a silly reason that it's almost a bad idea to bring it up in a debate; using a trivial reason can actually make your case look weaker, even if logically speaking it does technically make it stronger.
If that's the only reason you have to be worried about languages dying... then you have nothing to worry about.
Call me politically incorrect, but what do we really lose when we lose an obscure language? First, languages aren't like living creatures; if they evolve, they are Lamackian in their evolution and Lamarkian evolution don't really have gene pool diversity issues that Darwinian evolution has taught us about. Interesting or valuable ideas can be imported into other languages at any time, so the diversity arguments IMHO don't really play out.
Secondly, if we are really concerned about the idea or the viewpoints it represents, those truly reside in the human users, not the language. As the humans migrate, they will bring their ideas and viewpoints into their new languages; again, because languages are not static like an organism's genetic code is. If the ideas or viewpoints don't survive the migration, there's probably a good reason for it. (Again, it may be Lamarkian, but it is still evolution; useless things eventually come out of the pool.)
Consider this a contrary viewpoint; I don't necessarily think language death is a completely good thing, but instincts honed by environmentalism and Darwinian evolution do not serve you well when thinking about languages, which are neither environmental (in the Gaia sense) nor Darwinian. You need a better reason for thinking language death is bad then "It's bad, m'kay?" One may very well exist, but I can't think of it.
If they're as crappy as the others, I'm totally uninterested.
An emulator lives and dies, at least as far as I am concerned, by its accuracy with regard to three things: Video, audio, and emulation speed. While my experience with the Atari and Intellivision consoles was admittedly brief, I can verify that both of them completely fail the audio and speed criteria. The Intellivision was way too fast, and the Atari sound emulation about made me cry, and neither of them did well in the other department.
(I don't recall any video glitches but I couldn't bear to play long enough, nor do I perfectly recall the graphics originally.)
I'll concede the Intellivision was never going to match the original experience with a new controller; for this my thumbs are grateful; you think Nintendo thumb is bad, try Intellivision-disc-thumb! But the degree to which the emulation is too fast is truly amazing; they didn't even try.
Do not hold your breath for this release; they do not respect these games at all.
Anonymous coward says: How many of those operating systems use Apache? On how many of them does the base source packages compile and run?
This was what I was getting at when I said I've run several exploits against my machine and none of them did what they were supposed to do. Yes, two or three of them were Apache but while they worked on the stock RedHat box I tried it on, my Gentoo box summarily terminated the Apache process. Bad, yes, but nowhere near as bad as a full-scale intrusion.
Even if "Linux" dominates, you've still got "Red Hat", "Debian", "SuSE", a handful of others that can be called popular, a lot that can't be, and the meta-distros like Gentoo where each install is its own distro. To answer one of the other anonymous cowards who replied, yes, Joe Six-pack may get a relatively-popular Easy-Windows-Like-Linux install that is like every other Easy-Windows-Like-Linux, but that exact distro won't ever be 90% of the market.
(Also, a lot of getting Linux onto such a system will help the *BSDs and other UNIX-like OS's, since it's mostly desktop and infrastructure work, so I'd expect if Linux-on-the-Joe-Sixpack-Desktop takes off, BSD won't be far behind. Once Linux opens the doors, there's going to be a lot of people trying to get through it.)
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS X, varients of Linux so dissimilar they are just barely the same operating system, revived BeOS, the HURD, and the continuing divergence of existing operating systems and potential availability of new ones (Plan 9 may have largely failed but where it failed others can succeed (hint: driver support)) is an odd definition of "new monoculture".
(Heck, every Linux install has the potential to be a potentially new OS; my kernel is most likely the only kernel exactly like it in the world, as as I use gentoo, even a lot of the support programs are customized and potentially unique. I've tried five or six binary vulnerabilities that Linux programs are vulnerable to, and while several managed to crash my computer, not a single one of them has resulted in privilege escalation or anything meaningful, because my system is so different at the binary level from anybody else's. Even to the extent that Linux is a monoculture I've not suffered the price of living in a monoculture.)
The end of the economy would not come if gold was suddenly worthless. We'd just have to fully shift off of the gold standard, which is probably inevitable.
If nanotechnology succeeds (and I'm talking weak nanotechnology, not even self-replication, so this seems pretty likely) a lot of materials are likely to become worth less. Sooner or later, the world economy is going to become stabalized around energy, which there is a finite amount available at any time. It's a little less stable but will remain a limiting factor for the forseeable future.
Note this has been explored already in some sci-fi; for instance, the Science Fiction game Alpha Centuari expressed money in terms of "energy credits". (Yes, it's a game, but it is also a legitimate work of Science Fiction, and I mean that in the highest sense as a hard-core sci-fi fan.) One could probably argue that to some extent it's already happened.
(One could also imagine stabalizing on information, but that's a little too fungible to provide a foundation, and energy is, in the final analysis, more fundamental; information is really organized energy and matter. In fact, matter is nothing more then organized energy and it is plausible that someday we will realize that literally in an economic sense, although direct matter-to-energy conversion seems unlikely. (Not quite as unlikely as FTL but still seemingly increasingly unlikely.))
Have we ever compressed any matter on earth at all to a density of 1 million grams per cc?
Probably. When a supercolliders collide two gold nuclei, the density gets pretty damned high, but unfortunately I can't seem to Google any solid numbers up. I'd strongly suspect that the density gets into that range.
Of course your point stands, in that we have never taken macroscopic quantities of matter up to that density, and what matter we have taken to that density doesn't stay there long at all.
Just an informational posting; I agree with the parent in general.
(Another interesting note; dividing the volume by mass gives average density. The density will be much less at the surface and much greater in the middle (IIRC it's typically an exponential curve). So the maximum density is even greater then the BOTE calculation would indicate.)
IIRC correctly, the bitmap format is already upside down. (i.e., the first image byte is on the last row of the image) So turning the world upside down would just put it upright again.
And you think the entire community, including IBM and other companies that have bet the farm or at least huge sums of money on OSS are just going to roll over and take it?
If the lawsuits get too frivolous, not even Microsoft will be immune to countersuits, plus such massive lawsuits aren't going to be "free" in reputation terms, either. ("Gee, if all Microsoft can produce is lawsuits, maybe they aren't such a leading company after all?")
Besides, so they prove some small chunk of code is encumbered. (It is virtually inconceivable that huge chunks of code will make it in.) So we rip it out and keep going. Killing any given iteration of Apache may be possible, but taking down the entire thing legally is going to be quite a feat! (And remember that unlike SCO, Microsoft is limited by the fact that they are still selling software; they can't for instance go after the GPL in a really serious way because they'd likely end up invalidating their own licenses; "Unenforcable GPL" is good FUD but would be an atrocious court strategy for them!)
It's not hopeless, not by a long shot. I won't say they couldn't make a real annoyance of themselves and I won't say Total Open Source victory is some sort of inevitability, but it's not hopeless.
Slashdot Mirror
You can probably have as many outgoing gates as you want. If you dial a planet, you only get one "primary" gate though. The DHD can mark a gate as "primary", though it is likely that the SGC could eventually figure out what the DHD does to make a gate "primary" and override a DHD elsewhere on the planet, if they tried.
Just realized: In the episode 2010, we see a Stargate on Earth, in a possible future, in a "starport" in DC. They really should have had two, one dedicated to incoming and one dedicated to outgoing, to maximize throughput, as I would not be surprised that the incoming gate would not interfere with an outgoing gate. (Physically, there's no reason to assume either way, so it would probably be one of those properties that would be determined by the first plot that needed one of them... for instance, the episode where SG-1 ruins a sun and turns the film^W sun all red, it is suddenly revealed that a terminated wormhole dumps the matter out in the real universe. This was news, and IMHO doesn't make sense.)
Actually, I disagree, bearing in mind that you absolutely must lower your standards for a television show to some degree; you have all day to pick out plot holes but they are on a tight, tight schedule. You need to look at not just what they screw up, but what they get right.
Star Trek, for instance, has devolved to the point where even on the show's own terms they get almost nothing whatsoever right. The "sci fi" serves solely as dues ex machina and as a result the only episodes I find even remotely interesting anymore are the psychological episodes... which I can only remember one of in Voyager (where the captain encounters the embodiment of "fear" in suspended animation tubes) and I've stopped watching Enterprise but don't remember any episode in the first two seasons I'd call "psycological".
Stargate largely shoots pretty well; I have heard a few groaners and Carter is getting a little too Star Trek-y for my tastes but they manage to get a lot right. In the Watergate episode, Carter and Counselor Troi (heh heh) correctly notice that pressure should not be increasing without a corresponding increase in depth. This sounds like a little thing but it involves an elementary knowlege of high-school physics that seems beyond most sci-fi shows. In the black hole time-dilation episode, Carter correctly notes that the time dilation effect has been decoupled from the gravitational effect, which according to relativity is impossible (i.e., in relativity the two are equivalent anyhow if my understanding is correct so it's literally not a meaningful idea in modern relativity).
Certainly there are groaners (some of which came from the movie which I am not willing to blame them for, such as the way that despite not having a clue what the Stargate is until Daniel Jackson turns it on (and despite not trying the six symbols and all 39 possible seventh symbols...) they still have computers that know that the gate is "dematerializing" things, and have a tracker that tracks the progress of the object... one can sort of rationalize this by saying they've analysed the protocol the gate communicates in but it is virtually inconceivable that they'd know that much about it the first time they turn it on!), but they get a lot of stuff really right, too.
(My favorite thing they get right is military doctrine; our heros are horribly outnumbered and out-tech'ed, but our military significantly outperforms the Jaffa because of our massively superior doctrines, because we don't mind arming our armies with everything we've got, whereas the Gua'uld deliberately hobble the Jaffa with shitty weaponry so they can not successfully rebel. Or the eventual deployment of aerial surveillance, which took time to R&D. I especially enjoyed the episode where they used the aerial probe to paint two targets and then shot surface-to-surface missles through the gate to take out two anti-personnel emplacements without risking a man; now that is a quality understanding of military doctrine and appropriate use of purely-human technology we either have, or could perfectly plausibly have, today! With this simple human, not scientific, correctness that almost no other show I can name either sci-fi or otherwise gets right, I am will to spot them a lot of other stuff.)
If you only see faults in things, and I say this in a neutral fashion as it is a legitimate personality trait and is just something you need to know about yourself, then give up on sci-fi movies and television now. I've learned to be more lenient with movies or television then I am with books, and a large part of my acceptance was what I learned about the timescales these things are produced on. They are just such different beasts then books from a single author that I can not honestly treat them the same. I am still very hard on my books, but they also have an easier time, since there are no visual effects to pick apart (and visual effects inevitably contain much more information then the original description did, just as a 'for-instance'). SG-1, along with getting some stuff wrong, gets a lot of stuff right and is as good as you can hope for, at least the first four or five seasons of it.
Oh yeah, the Nox, I love those guys.
On the surface they look like the ultimate hippies and are all about peaceful solutions at all costs, which just isn't a realistic solution for humans.
Then it turns out that they are just uber-powerful, and can frankly (and I mean this next word literally) afford such attitudes.
I'm still unsure whether the authors intended a pacifistic message and aren't clear on how pacifists never survive long enough to get that powerful, or whether they intended a sly comment on how you can only be pacifistic if you have the capability to defend yourself and the current Nox (like many modern humans) have forgotten that second part. In fact this is a running theme in Stargate: The more advanced the race, the more pacifistic and Bhuddist they get, until you get up to the Ascended who are nearly God-like but refuse to do anything whatsoever to the universe (IIRC, every single Ascended being we ever see up close is either evicted from the "main society" of the Ascended, whatever that is, or shortly will be evicted (Daniel during his "dead" season)), but is this supposed to be cause or effect? It's never really clear.
I agree with most of that.
/dev/null; this message isn't written for you.)
One of the things I've wondered, and I continue to wonder, is how long they can "keep the secret". Sooner or later, the public will know.
What do they do with the series then? It compromises the "vision" of the series beyond any redemption once the general public knows. One of the most enjoyable aspects is how it is set in today, but a "today" where the public knows aliens exist is no longer "today". While it is not completely impossible they'd manage to maintain the quality, I am concerned that they would rapidly become Just Another Sci-Fi show.
(Comments from the peanut gallery that they already are may be directed to
And the longer they keep this massive secret, the more unbelievable it gets, too; for you fans, think about it. There are any number of episodes that would have given the secret away in the real world. In particular, the black hole episode would have been a dead giveaway (the atomic clocks we have today would be sensitive enough to notice some seriously wierd shit went down, and some civilian scientists should have rapidly been able to pinpoint Colorado, possibly even Colorado Springs as the source), and eventually the episode where the same day repeats for months would be a dead giveaway when the light sphere from the edge of the disturbance reaches Earth, and suddenly the entire Universe seems to jump forward six months, which astronomers would notice. And again, they'd have enough info to pinpoint the source planet, which wasn't Earth but would still prove alien intelligence. That was what, three years ago and we were on the edge of the disturbance, it's quite likely that we'd have seen that effect by now.
As much as I love SG-1, and I will give Atlantis its fair chance, I am seriously concerned that at least from my (freely admitted selfish) perspective, the best thing they could do would be to bring the series to some sort of closure and cut it off, why they are still ahead. Basically, the story just becomes too damn big. Star Trek worked best when it was "The Adventures of the Enterprise"; the more it became "The Adventures of the Federation and the Politics of the Alpha Quadrant", the suckier it got. (It suffered from other problems too and it's anyone's guess which are the most fundamental.) To date, SG-1 has largely been "The Adventures of SG-1" and to a lesser extent, "The Adventures of Stargate Command". As more and more of the world "knows" the truth about the universe (the Russians, more countries, more people, more chunks of the American government), the story just gets too big to keep track of in any reasonable sense.
(It is my considered opinion that an excellent team of writers could pull a Star Wars on the story and deliberately write just a slice of the story. As much as I disliked Star Wars I, I really felt that it managed to hint at the size of the Star Wars galaxy in a way that no other Star Wars did, with the shots of Coruscant, the Senate, and a few other quick little strokes that were largely missing (IMHO) from the other movies. Stargate might be able to survive this. Basically, this would go from telling "the whole story" to something more like what you'd expect from a documentary of, say, SG-11; just a slice of the action, because in a universe as big as ours that's all we need, we have no hope of processing the whole story. But to get there from here would take some very, very careful and considered writing. Considering the obvious fact that the Stargate staff is deliberately avoiding many of the more hackneyed Stargate cliches, there is much more hope that the Stargate franchise, if they hold on to their writers, will be more likely to pull this off then the Star Trek franchise could dream of (barring a complete personnel change). But I still consider it slim odds; it's a hell of a transition.)
do you honestly believe your any different than a terrorist?
No.
Therefore, I need to defend myself, because I recognize in myself and those around me that there are people who couldn't care less about me, and will kill me for many things, ranging from the sheer joy of killing, to jealously plain and simple, to desire for what I have. I have things. That is enough reason to kill me. If you think otherwise, you are sadly ignorant of basically all history... which is a rather common trait among people espousing your point of view.
Only the anomalous and regrettably isolated set of certain circumstances (I wish more people lived in better situations, but they don't) in the world allow you to forget that, and it is ironic that you accuse me of being brainwashed. I don't think anything has changed in the past several thousand years.
Note how smoothly you transition into an anti-American tirade that is quite frankly, off-topic for your post. Notice that despite talking about how everything is "shades of grey", your post is firmly in "black and white" land. (OK, to be fair, I'm extroplating a wee bit because your writing borders on the incomprehensibly vague.)
Like I said, you're free to live in your fun-happy land where if we all just tried really hard, we'd all get along. In the meantime, most of us in the real world know that's not how it works, and again, I'm very glad that the military protecting me has not fallen prey to the "if everybody just put their weapons down, peace would reign on Earth" fallacy... in flat contradiction of every known fact of human nature.
Yeah, it's an American post. We've been living in the real world for a long time now, because unlike certain other "Enlightened" part of the world, people have been gunning for us, with varying degrees of literalness, pretty much non-stop since at least WWII. In other words, the nature of living life since the first predator evolved. It is your world view that is strangely anomalous, ill-adapted, and prone to get your civilization killed sooner or later. It's a hard world. Sucks, but that's the way it is, and if we're going to have an opportunity to make a difference, and I believe we have been a largely positive influence on the world (again, go read your history books and try to do an honest comparision to what, say, Ceasar Augustus would have done with our power... not that I'm optimistic you can do that, but give it a whirl, why don't you? First, explain Germany and Japan and the rather odd indepedence they enjoy from us, then try to move on to more complicate subjects from there.), we first need to survive.
Uh-uh, no dancing on me. I was clearly criticizing your last phrase, which I quote: All it does it remove the mask of civility and democracy from what is ***IMHO*** an increasingly tyrannical power.
Survival isn't tyranny.
Except, apparently, how to handle Iraq after it is conquered.
We had plans for Iraq, post-conquest. They didn't work, so we tossed them out and came up with different ones, which sometimes worked really well and sometimes didn't, but pretty much uniformly worked better then the original ones.
The studied inability of people to understand that this is a good thing boggles my engineering mind. Apparently we were supposed to stick with a bad plan? Form over substance, indeed.
The basic problem with your view is that there is no alternative.
Are Americans supposed to get back in touch with their hippy selves and spread peace and love all over the world, until someone finally scrapes together the means and the intent to nuke us wholesale? Because it takes complete and willful ignorance of human nature to not realize that we have no choice but to arm ourselves and defend ourselves, or die, both collectively and individually.
Military science is like any other science. Sticking your head in the ground as a society merely guarentees that somebody will beat you to it; it does little to nothing to prevent the science from being done and subsequently implemented by engineers. You're free to keep thinking that life would just be hunky dory if that big nasty USA would just take a collective hit from the Bong of International Willful Ignorance of Human Nature, but I don't think we're about to do that no matter how much you whine... thank goodness.
You might be somewhat happier to think of it as a shot across the bow; continued price fixing probably would result in massive fines.
;-)
On the other hand, you might be less happy thinking of it as a shot across the bow, since you might think they should be actually punished, not warned. Your call, I guess.
The opportunity costs are too high for this to be feasible. If we're throwing 500 pounds of anything at Mars, it's going to be a little more sophisticated then a hunk of inert metal.
This would be a feasible experiment if slinging 500 pounds of material around the Solar System were something we could do causually, so it's not like it's a bad idea, but at our present stage of development, we'd want that 500 pounds to be probes and satellites and sensors and such that are more useful for making things other then holes.
the spammers will use other people's computers to send email, resulting in other people being charged for the privilege!
Yes, but this is not a steady-state result; do you really think the recipients of the spam bills are just going to smile and pay them forever? Or do you think they will do what they need to do to prevent them from continuing to come in?
Not to mention once spam crosses the line into out-and-out theft like that the law will become more interested (and not have First Amendment or free speech issues to deal with).
Read more carefully, stop assuming and exaggerating other people's points.
Support Human Justice for Human Beings.
This story is part of a larger pattern, where law enforcement thinks it can farm its job out to machines. DRM is another instance of the exact same bad idea.
But machines enforce a machine version of the law. We are human. We need fuzziness, and we need the expense of prosecution, as well. (See my linked essay for a justification of that second clause.) This is a feature of the law, not a bug!
What do you do when the machine gets a false positive? Or your life depending on going somewhere right now? Is the state going to take responsibility for the extra 30 it took to get someone to the hospital while they are having a heart attack, or on the verge of a potentially life-threatening birth??
Machines and law enforcement do not go together!
And it is worth pointing out that while it is certainly abused, it is an absolute necessity to society as we know it. It's easy for some high school schmoe who has nothing better to do then post to Slashdot to complain about how corporations seem to be immune to things, but flip it around: If you are able to be held personally responsible for anything and everything that goes wrong at work, the only rational response is to give up and try to find some job, somewhere that doesn't incur some horrid liability, and despite racking my brains for such a thing several times in the past, I've never really managed to come up with a "safe" job. (Besides, the pay would be nothing since every rational person would want that job.)
Without that protection, there would be no entrepeneurs, and thus no corporations or even cooperation at all.
Anything can give them grounds to fire you at a later date.
In fact, in most places, they don't even need "grounds" to fire you.
I'm all in favor of ethics, but in this case, there's no point in pretending that you're going to be rewarded for them, at least not directly.
If you're going to write all in one paragraph, at least have the courtesy to leave the default proportional font alone!
<tt> is for code, not a way of life!
Nifty, but this is about three chapters too premature to be posting it on Slashdot.
Seriously, the author is biting a LOT off and while one chapter is a good start, it remains to be seen whether the author is biting off more then they can chew.
Truthfully, many programming languages are easy but even in this introduction there are signs that this isn't going to go down as well as the author would like, like the "symbols" discussion which I understood perfectly but is likely to make, say, my zoology-trained wife go "huh? so what are they good for? why not just use strings?"
You can also over-simplify Perl or Python this way too but when you start discussing @ISA or __metaclass__es, you're in trouble, and there is often just no way around those things, esp. if you're trying to read the code of others.
I am hopeful this will turn out well; it looks like a lot of fun and is full-unto-overflowing with personality, which can certainly reach out to a new audience. But it is also extremely ambitious and will be time consuming, so I must confess to a little bit of pessimism that that quality of output can be sustained all the way to the end of the book.
Oh, and entirely seperately, comparing a single chapter of an otherwise-unfinished book to the SICP disrespects the SICP. You do neither work a favor by comparing the two.
This is like claiming that the reason we should save the environment or the rain forest is that we might find a medicine in them. That's such a silly reason that it's almost a bad idea to bring it up in a debate; using a trivial reason can actually make your case look weaker, even if logically speaking it does technically make it stronger.
If that's the only reason you have to be worried about languages dying... then you have nothing to worry about.
Call me politically incorrect, but what do we really lose when we lose an obscure language? First, languages aren't like living creatures; if they evolve, they are Lamackian in their evolution and Lamarkian evolution don't really have gene pool diversity issues that Darwinian evolution has taught us about. Interesting or valuable ideas can be imported into other languages at any time, so the diversity arguments IMHO don't really play out.
Secondly, if we are really concerned about the idea or the viewpoints it represents, those truly reside in the human users, not the language. As the humans migrate, they will bring their ideas and viewpoints into their new languages; again, because languages are not static like an organism's genetic code is. If the ideas or viewpoints don't survive the migration, there's probably a good reason for it. (Again, it may be Lamarkian, but it is still evolution; useless things eventually come out of the pool.)
Consider this a contrary viewpoint; I don't necessarily think language death is a completely good thing, but instincts honed by environmentalism and Darwinian evolution do not serve you well when thinking about languages, which are neither environmental (in the Gaia sense) nor Darwinian. You need a better reason for thinking language death is bad then "It's bad, m'kay?" One may very well exist, but I can't think of it.
If they're as crappy as the others, I'm totally uninterested.
.
An emulator lives and dies, at least as far as I am concerned, by its accuracy with regard to three things: Video, audio, and emulation speed. While my experience with the Atari and Intellivision consoles was admittedly brief, I can verify that both of them completely fail the audio and speed criteria. The Intellivision was way too fast, and the Atari sound emulation about made me cry, and neither of them did well in the other department.
(I don't recall any video glitches but I couldn't bear to play long enough, nor do I perfectly recall the graphics originally.)
I'll concede the Intellivision was never going to match the original experience with a new controller; for this my thumbs are grateful; you think Nintendo thumb is bad, try Intellivision-disc-thumb! But the degree to which the emulation is too fast is truly amazing; they didn't even try
Do not hold your breath for this release; they do not respect these games at all.
Anonymous coward says: How many of those operating systems use Apache? On how many of them does the base source packages compile and run?
This was what I was getting at when I said I've run several exploits against my machine and none of them did what they were supposed to do. Yes, two or three of them were Apache but while they worked on the stock RedHat box I tried it on, my Gentoo box summarily terminated the Apache process. Bad, yes, but nowhere near as bad as a full-scale intrusion.
Even if "Linux" dominates, you've still got "Red Hat", "Debian", "SuSE", a handful of others that can be called popular, a lot that can't be, and the meta-distros like Gentoo where each install is its own distro. To answer one of the other anonymous cowards who replied, yes, Joe Six-pack may get a relatively-popular Easy-Windows-Like-Linux install that is like every other Easy-Windows-Like-Linux, but that exact distro won't ever be 90% of the market.
(Also, a lot of getting Linux onto such a system will help the *BSDs and other UNIX-like OS's, since it's mostly desktop and infrastructure work, so I'd expect if Linux-on-the-Joe-Sixpack-Desktop takes off, BSD won't be far behind. Once Linux opens the doors, there's going to be a lot of people trying to get through it.)
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS X, varients of Linux so dissimilar they are just barely the same operating system, revived BeOS, the HURD, and the continuing divergence of existing operating systems and potential availability of new ones (Plan 9 may have largely failed but where it failed others can succeed (hint: driver support)) is an odd definition of "new monoculture".
(Heck, every Linux install has the potential to be a potentially new OS; my kernel is most likely the only kernel exactly like it in the world, as as I use gentoo, even a lot of the support programs are customized and potentially unique. I've tried five or six binary vulnerabilities that Linux programs are vulnerable to, and while several managed to crash my computer, not a single one of them has resulted in privilege escalation or anything meaningful, because my system is so different at the binary level from anybody else's. Even to the extent that Linux is a monoculture I've not suffered the price of living in a monoculture.)
The end of the economy would not come if gold was suddenly worthless. We'd just have to fully shift off of the gold standard, which is probably inevitable.
If nanotechnology succeeds (and I'm talking weak nanotechnology, not even self-replication, so this seems pretty likely) a lot of materials are likely to become worth less. Sooner or later, the world economy is going to become stabalized around energy, which there is a finite amount available at any time. It's a little less stable but will remain a limiting factor for the forseeable future.
Note this has been explored already in some sci-fi; for instance, the Science Fiction game Alpha Centuari expressed money in terms of "energy credits". (Yes, it's a game, but it is also a legitimate work of Science Fiction, and I mean that in the highest sense as a hard-core sci-fi fan.) One could probably argue that to some extent it's already happened.
(One could also imagine stabalizing on information, but that's a little too fungible to provide a foundation, and energy is, in the final analysis, more fundamental; information is really organized energy and matter. In fact, matter is nothing more then organized energy and it is plausible that someday we will realize that literally in an economic sense, although direct matter-to-energy conversion seems unlikely. (Not quite as unlikely as FTL but still seemingly increasingly unlikely.))
Have we ever compressed any matter on earth at all to a density of 1 million grams per cc?
Probably. When a supercolliders collide two gold nuclei, the density gets pretty damned high, but unfortunately I can't seem to Google any solid numbers up. I'd strongly suspect that the density gets into that range.
Of course your point stands, in that we have never taken macroscopic quantities of matter up to that density, and what matter we have taken to that density doesn't stay there long at all.
Just an informational posting; I agree with the parent in general.
(Another interesting note; dividing the volume by mass gives average density. The density will be much less at the surface and much greater in the middle (IIRC it's typically an exponential curve). So the maximum density is even greater then the BOTE calculation would indicate.)
The world will be turned upside down!
IIRC correctly, the bitmap format is already upside down. (i.e., the first image byte is on the last row of the image) So turning the world upside down would just put it upright again.
And you think the entire community, including IBM and other companies that have bet the farm or at least huge sums of money on OSS are just going to roll over and take it?
If the lawsuits get too frivolous, not even Microsoft will be immune to countersuits, plus such massive lawsuits aren't going to be "free" in reputation terms, either. ("Gee, if all Microsoft can produce is lawsuits, maybe they aren't such a leading company after all?")
Besides, so they prove some small chunk of code is encumbered. (It is virtually inconceivable that huge chunks of code will make it in.) So we rip it out and keep going. Killing any given iteration of Apache may be possible, but taking down the entire thing legally is going to be quite a feat! (And remember that unlike SCO, Microsoft is limited by the fact that they are still selling software; they can't for instance go after the GPL in a really serious way because they'd likely end up invalidating their own licenses; "Unenforcable GPL" is good FUD but would be an atrocious court strategy for them!)
It's not hopeless, not by a long shot. I won't say they couldn't make a real annoyance of themselves and I won't say Total Open Source victory is some sort of inevitability, but it's not hopeless.