Much of the story unfolds within the tension of "what happened to everyone"? The answer is revealed at the end of the book, though those events predate the rest of the story. "There's a Ringworld" is revealed not onyl early in the story, but in the title and (usually) the cover illustration.
What if I told everyone currently reading the book that the Ringworld turns out to have been produced by Protectors, whose larval forms are mere humans? Even more ancient history, but still spoils some of the suspense. Someone other than the author telling the "big picture" story takes the fun out of reading it yourself.
Yes, Anonymous Puppeteer Coward, _Ringworld_ is science fiction. That's one of the most popular ways we imagine the consequences of scientific and engineering innovations, before it's too late to do something to protect ourselves. It's not a bible that must come true - just a detailed projection of consequences that we can judge for ourself, from the real world at hand. After all, your post is just an anonymous message on Slashdot, but it's worth dismissing on its own merits, not just because of its humble origin.
The origin of the Ringworld bacteria is immaterial, applying your own argument (a). You can't use an "argument from analogy" complaint, no matter how specious against my point, then base your own argument on the part of the analogy most specious, and least consequential.
Besides, I'm not talking about bacteria mutating. I'm talking about the designed bacteria escaping, like any industrial pollution. Which is exactly what happens today, with much less at stake, regardless of the _Ringworld_ novel I used to remind many Slashdot readers they've heard this before. There ain't no "environmental chamber" containing the infestation at your local steam plant they're infesting, and spraying gasoline around isn't a practical approach to a widespread outbreak.
You should leave the science and engineering alone, and stick to the fiction. It's less rigorous.
The several simple points I posted are not repeated anywhere in the thread. Except perhaps implicity in my original comment, which implication was not inferred by the poster to whom I responded.
What happens when these bacteria inevitably escape into the "wild"? Powerplants and conduits, whose designers never anticipated that hot styrofoam would rot within a few weeks, could suddenly fail, causing disasters worldwide. Nuclear plants, including nuclear submaries and aircraft carriers, could literally explode once their insulation (both heat and electric charge) disappears. Less sensational, but probably more destructive overall, bacterial infestations of general consumer products would destroy vast amounts of property with styrofoam components. Much of it critical, some of it valuable, but all of it gone, likely in large quantities.
The bacteria engineers would be much more responsible to include a critical factor required by the bacteria for digesting styrofoam, other than just heat. Like a cheap, biodegradable, nontoxic fluid "tagged" with a specific set of functional groups. That "synthetic enzyme" would allow the bacteria to eat the styrofoam when applied. When not applied, the bacteria couldn't eat, couldn't reproduce. We could control the amount of styrofoam consumed by controlling the cheap enzyme, mixing it into landfills and water purification.
He's a high-end IT consultant in NYC, his usual career for 15 years. Married, apparently wiser.
He had approached me and my company to do for NetBSD what Red Hat did for Linux, though the Linux model at the time was Slackware. My own partner, though no lawyer, refused, blew the opportunity for everyone. I wish we had done it, and I'm no lawyer, either.
Linux systems like Debian and Ubuntu use APT (A Package Tool) for automated install/update of dependent pacakges. APT keeps track of required versions, so upgrading any one part forces upgrades of all those depended upon. All automatic, across the Internet. Frequent security patches are easy. A client GUI notifies the admin that a new version is available, whenever (eg) a security patch is published. Clicking shows the details, including the changes in the new version and other packages that will get upgraded (but weren't warning because they weren't more urgent security upgrades). Clicking again performs the upgrades. There are many clients for the standard system, some of which completely automate everything, just emailing the admin when autoupdates were performed.
It's the main (daily) reason I use Linux, and certainly the main reason I prefer Debian-based distros. It's like Windows Update, but it works better, and it's open to anyone, without marketing considerations weighting its operational decisions.
I knew the founders of Wasabi Systems, here in NYC. The original "brains" behind the startup, which planned a "Red Hat for NetBSD", got screwed by his lawyer partner in the late 1990s, and left. No surprise to hear their business model is lying about GPL (Linux) in press releases.
Apps should be able to search not only a local component DB (not just Windows, but any OS), but Internet databases and repositories for compatible components. The extra necessary ingredient is crypto-secure signatures, so the identity of the component and its version can be trusted. Also required is some authority for comparing new signatures against, either centrally authorative or in a "web of trust".
That entire app architecture is much more efficient than today's haphazard interop scene. And would benefit from a sound, clear, consistent foundation of accurately and precisely numbering versions for compatibility determination.
A big problem with software versions is compatibility with other software. These days, most software has to interoperate with other software, whether operating systems, libraries, or other applications in a "toolchain" or "suite". But it's hard to know whether a program compatible with other software will remain compatible when any of the programs change version.
A big help lies in "object oriented" practices. Which boils down to "I don't care about how it works privately inside, as long as I can rely on what it tells me publicly". There are only a few public points of in/compatibility: UI, API and data format. Each of those interfaces should have a version number, in addition to the "function" version number.
We can learn (as usual) from hardware engineering, where there are already "model numbers" and "part numbers" for revised equipment. The model number need only be unique, and is used only to distinguish among different products appearing at the same time. Marketers and consumers like to use model numbers to express related products with similar model numbers, and better products with higher numbers. "Dot versions" have long been abused by marketers to signal small changes, even when those might break compatibility and cause big problems. While most vendors manipulate "major version" numbers to indicate progress even when there is no difference, or hide bait & switch tactics with incremented model numbers between unrelated versions.
Engineers use a part number. For software, the part number would best include UI/API/data versions. Each version number would be composed of a major number, incremented when incompatible with previous versions, a minor number, to reflect compatible releases, and an optional patch number, indicating compatible upgrades between releases. So a part# version would look like "U3.4.15/A6.4.0/D2.3.5". Parts with the same data version can exchange data interchangeably. Parts with the same API version can be called by each others method signatures interchangeably. And parts with the same UI version look the same to a user. That UI version will help consumers the most, because they don't have to learn anything new to use the new part version. Even different minor and patch numbers mean the parts are still compatible, at least in that layer.
Such version numbering helps identify what changed, now that we've learned that some changes matter to some people more than (to) others. With such precise numbering, we can much more easily upgrade, test, and roll back. Do I smell an RFC?
I'm not a Democrat either. But the people who run the site and post the stories, not just the comments, proudly claim to be Democrats. Like most Democrat sites, they allow anyone in the public to post, regardless of political affiliation.
I didn't say Kos was anything but where I read about this story. The "verifiable" claim, and the irony you crave, are in your mind. Along with your rationalization for promoting your fascist website, and your fixation on my underwear.
I'm not really bothered by it, but you are a weirdo.
This story is most significant as Washington DC decides whether to protect the free speech of bloggers, as the First Amendment requires, as completely as it protects the rights of mass media, like cable TV news. The mass media lobbies DC with scare stories about corporations paying bloggers to publish pure PR, as opposed to the "responsible, independent, researched journalism" from the mass media that the law currently protects. The idea is to protect a privileged class of journalists, the corporate mass media, but not the unprivileged interactive media, like bloggers.
Of course, the corporate media's entire business model is taking corporate money and publishing their PR, even if carefully cooked to provide harmless (or occasionally stress-releasing) corporate PR.
"Defective" means they don't do what the designer expected. In the context of proper science, there is no "designer", or the "designer" is nature, which does not "expect" anything. Or there is an "intelligent designer", for which there is, as yet, no real evidence.
Self-replicating RNA, not just any nucleotides, constituting just one of the many possible products of random chemical process "mutations", might have taken a much longer time to occur often enough to become established as a permanent presence in the organic soup. Simpler self-replicating proteins might have occurred earlier and in great enough numbers to become established, despite the other processes feeding off them and breaking them down. Where does your oversimplified analysis account for that?
And where does your obnoxious retorts, including stabs at "Darwinists", fit into the proper context of science? It really sounds to me like you've got your own version of "science", which you're latching onto and running with. Which makes sense, but not in the context of proper science.
Griffin used to help run the Star Wars "missile defense" boondoggle. That was a program outlawed by Congress in the 1980s, but whose administrators still found $BILLIONS each year to keep going. A program producing little useful science, and no useful defense products. It's only value was pumping corporate welfare into defense contractors and "trickle down" bribes into the politicians who love them.
But when running NASA, even Griffin can't find money to keep America's most beloved, productive, and strategic science agency alive.
Meanwhile, Bush's support for proliferating nuclear weapons to all the hot wars in Asia is great marketing for the useless Star Wars "missile defense shield".
There are several class action lawsuits pending against PayPal for exactly that abuse. There's no doubt they know the public doesn't like it. They apparently don't care. And why should they? They're an unregulated global Internet banking monopoly.
That was exactly the bullshit scam that PayPal pulled on me to "freeze" my account, thousands of dollars, for over a year. I'm sure banks got the Feds to write those rules to cover their new "obligations" to hold onto billions in "questionable", interest-bearing transactions. Which they invest while they hold it.
There should be a penalty for wrongfully intercepting those transactions. A just world would hold the banks, and those parties who make these bad models they apply unilaterally, liable for the losses and damage - if only inconvenience.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd asked, I'd have told you to quit at the title - my copy got thrown through an open window.
Also, FYI, Larry Niven is an obnoxious jerk. Who hasn't written anything good on his own in almost 30 years.
But "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" is a classic.
Much of the story unfolds within the tension of "what happened to everyone"? The answer is revealed at the end of the book, though those events predate the rest of the story. "There's a Ringworld" is revealed not onyl early in the story, but in the title and (usually) the cover illustration.
What if I told everyone currently reading the book that the Ringworld turns out to have been produced by Protectors, whose larval forms are mere humans? Even more ancient history, but still spoils some of the suspense. Someone other than the author telling the "big picture" story takes the fun out of reading it yourself.
Yes, Anonymous Puppeteer Coward, _Ringworld_ is science fiction. That's one of the most popular ways we imagine the consequences of scientific and engineering innovations, before it's too late to do something to protect ourselves. It's not a bible that must come true - just a detailed projection of consequences that we can judge for ourself, from the real world at hand. After all, your post is just an anonymous message on Slashdot, but it's worth dismissing on its own merits, not just because of its humble origin.
The origin of the Ringworld bacteria is immaterial, applying your own argument (a). You can't use an "argument from analogy" complaint, no matter how specious against my point, then base your own argument on the part of the analogy most specious, and least consequential.
Besides, I'm not talking about bacteria mutating. I'm talking about the designed bacteria escaping, like any industrial pollution. Which is exactly what happens today, with much less at stake, regardless of the _Ringworld_ novel I used to remind many Slashdot readers they've heard this before. There ain't no "environmental chamber" containing the infestation at your local steam plant they're infesting, and spraying gasoline around isn't a practical approach to a widespread outbreak.
You should leave the science and engineering alone, and stick to the fiction. It's less rigorous.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
I give an alternate citation for the story, and that's a "Troll"?
Pentagon TrollMods just hate the Daily Kos.
Moderation -1
100% Redundant
The several simple points I posted are not repeated anywhere in the thread. Except perhaps implicity in my original comment, which implication was not inferred by the poster to whom I responded.
TrollMods just hate interactive democracy.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
That's not a "Troll", that's "Flamebait" - to a loser taking their marbles and going home.
Larry Niven's famous Ringworld civilization (SPOILER ALERT) collapsed when they became infested with rampant superconductor-eating bacteria.
What happens when these bacteria inevitably escape into the "wild"? Powerplants and conduits, whose designers never anticipated that hot styrofoam would rot within a few weeks, could suddenly fail, causing disasters worldwide. Nuclear plants, including nuclear submaries and aircraft carriers, could literally explode once their insulation (both heat and electric charge) disappears. Less sensational, but probably more destructive overall, bacterial infestations of general consumer products would destroy vast amounts of property with styrofoam components. Much of it critical, some of it valuable, but all of it gone, likely in large quantities.
The bacteria engineers would be much more responsible to include a critical factor required by the bacteria for digesting styrofoam, other than just heat. Like a cheap, biodegradable, nontoxic fluid "tagged" with a specific set of functional groups. That "synthetic enzyme" would allow the bacteria to eat the styrofoam when applied. When not applied, the bacteria couldn't eat, couldn't reproduce. We could control the amount of styrofoam consumed by controlling the cheap enzyme, mixing it into landfills and water purification.
He's a high-end IT consultant in NYC, his usual career for 15 years. Married, apparently wiser.
He had approached me and my company to do for NetBSD what Red Hat did for Linux, though the Linux model at the time was Slackware. My own partner, though no lawyer, refused, blew the opportunity for everyone. I wish we had done it, and I'm no lawyer, either.
Linux systems like Debian and Ubuntu use APT (A Package Tool) for automated install/update of dependent pacakges. APT keeps track of required versions, so upgrading any one part forces upgrades of all those depended upon. All automatic, across the Internet. Frequent security patches are easy. A client GUI notifies the admin that a new version is available, whenever (eg) a security patch is published. Clicking shows the details, including the changes in the new version and other packages that will get upgraded (but weren't warning because they weren't more urgent security upgrades). Clicking again performs the upgrades. There are many clients for the standard system, some of which completely automate everything, just emailing the admin when autoupdates were performed.
It's the main (daily) reason I use Linux, and certainly the main reason I prefer Debian-based distros. It's like Windows Update, but it works better, and it's open to anyone, without marketing considerations weighting its operational decisions.
I knew the founders of Wasabi Systems, here in NYC. The original "brains" behind the startup, which planned a "Red Hat for NetBSD", got screwed by his lawyer partner in the late 1990s, and left. No surprise to hear their business model is lying about GPL (Linux) in press releases.
Apps should be able to search not only a local component DB (not just Windows, but any OS), but Internet databases and repositories for compatible components. The extra necessary ingredient is crypto-secure signatures, so the identity of the component and its version can be trusted. Also required is some authority for comparing new signatures against, either centrally authorative or in a "web of trust".
That entire app architecture is much more efficient than today's haphazard interop scene. And would benefit from a sound, clear, consistent foundation of accurately and precisely numbering versions for compatibility determination.
A big problem with software versions is compatibility with other software. These days, most software has to interoperate with other software, whether operating systems, libraries, or other applications in a "toolchain" or "suite". But it's hard to know whether a program compatible with other software will remain compatible when any of the programs change version.
A big help lies in "object oriented" practices. Which boils down to "I don't care about how it works privately inside, as long as I can rely on what it tells me publicly". There are only a few public points of in/compatibility: UI, API and data format. Each of those interfaces should have a version number, in addition to the "function" version number.
We can learn (as usual) from hardware engineering, where there are already "model numbers" and "part numbers" for revised equipment. The model number need only be unique, and is used only to distinguish among different products appearing at the same time. Marketers and consumers like to use model numbers to express related products with similar model numbers, and better products with higher numbers. "Dot versions" have long been abused by marketers to signal small changes, even when those might break compatibility and cause big problems. While most vendors manipulate "major version" numbers to indicate progress even when there is no difference, or hide bait & switch tactics with incremented model numbers between unrelated versions.
Engineers use a part number. For software, the part number would best include UI/API/data versions. Each version number would be composed of a major number, incremented when incompatible with previous versions, a minor number, to reflect compatible releases, and an optional patch number, indicating compatible upgrades between releases. So a part# version would look like "U3.4.15/A6.4.0/D2.3.5". Parts with the same data version can exchange data interchangeably. Parts with the same API version can be called by each others method signatures interchangeably. And parts with the same UI version look the same to a user. That UI version will help consumers the most, because they don't have to learn anything new to use the new part version. Even different minor and patch numbers mean the parts are still compatible, at least in that layer.
Such version numbering helps identify what changed, now that we've learned that some changes matter to some people more than (to) others. With such precise numbering, we can much more easily upgrade, test, and roll back. Do I smell an RFC?
You keep making up gibberish to hear yourself talk. You didn't even notice me in your own noise anyway. Good riddance.
I'm not a Democrat either. But the people who run the site and post the stories, not just the comments, proudly claim to be Democrats. Like most Democrat sites, they allow anyone in the public to post, regardless of political affiliation.
I didn't say Kos was anything but where I read about this story. The "verifiable" claim, and the irony you crave, are in your mind. Along with your rationalization for promoting your fascist website, and your fixation on my underwear.
I'm not really bothered by it, but you are a weirdo.
Who says it's unbiased? I never did, and they proudly claim they're Democrats. As for their reliability, they cite and source every story.
Who can vouch for your reliability and bias?
Moderation -1
100% Troll
I love facts and relevance. TrollMods love corporate welfare and hate NASA.
I read about the Pentagon blacklisting non-warmonger websites, but favoring the warmongers, at Daily Kos.
This story is most significant as Washington DC decides whether to protect the free speech of bloggers, as the First Amendment requires, as completely as it protects the rights of mass media, like cable TV news. The mass media lobbies DC with scare stories about corporations paying bloggers to publish pure PR, as opposed to the "responsible, independent, researched journalism" from the mass media that the law currently protects. The idea is to protect a privileged class of journalists, the corporate mass media, but not the unprivileged interactive media, like bloggers.
Of course, the corporate media's entire business model is taking corporate money and publishing their PR, even if carefully cooked to provide harmless (or occasionally stress-releasing) corporate PR.
Bloggers update faster than newspapers and TV news that received Wal*Mart email and began to simply copy the PR text.
"Prions are defective proteins."
"Defective" means they don't do what the designer expected. In the context of proper science, there is no "designer", or the "designer" is nature, which does not "expect" anything. Or there is an "intelligent designer", for which there is, as yet, no real evidence.
Self-replicating RNA, not just any nucleotides, constituting just one of the many possible products of random chemical process "mutations", might have taken a much longer time to occur often enough to become established as a permanent presence in the organic soup. Simpler self-replicating proteins might have occurred earlier and in great enough numbers to become established, despite the other processes feeding off them and breaking them down. Where does your oversimplified analysis account for that?
And where does your obnoxious retorts, including stabs at "Darwinists", fit into the proper context of science? It really sounds to me like you've got your own version of "science", which you're latching onto and running with. Which makes sense, but not in the context of proper science.
Griffin used to help run the Star Wars "missile defense" boondoggle. That was a program outlawed by Congress in the 1980s, but whose administrators still found $BILLIONS each year to keep going. A program producing little useful science, and no useful defense products. It's only value was pumping corporate welfare into defense contractors and "trickle down" bribes into the politicians who love them.
But when running NASA, even Griffin can't find money to keep America's most beloved, productive, and strategic science agency alive.
Meanwhile, Bush's support for proliferating nuclear weapons to all the hot wars in Asia is great marketing for the useless Star Wars "missile defense shield".
There are several class action lawsuits pending against PayPal for exactly that abuse. There's no doubt they know the public doesn't like it. They apparently don't care. And why should they? They're an unregulated global Internet banking monopoly.
Party of big government.
That was exactly the bullshit scam that PayPal pulled on me to "freeze" my account, thousands of dollars, for over a year. I'm sure banks got the Feds to write those rules to cover their new "obligations" to hold onto billions in "questionable", interest-bearing transactions. Which they invest while they hold it.
There should be a penalty for wrongfully intercepting those transactions. A just world would hold the banks, and those parties who make these bad models they apply unilaterally, liable for the losses and damage - if only inconvenience.