Fair comment. I think I'm just getting frustrated with one group of researchers after another announcing evidence of life on Mars, with each claim falling through (or at best significantly weakening) on closer inspection. As another thread on this story points out, we're edging into "boy who cried wolf" territory.
"We cannot find anything else to explain it," said evolutionary biologist Tibor Ganti, a member of the three-man Hungarian team that believes it has discovered life on the red planet.
"I mean, yes, we considered deposition and stripping of lighter-colored dust in a seasonal cycle related to wind patterns, which is a common phenomenon on Mars. And of course we pondered simple soil darkening due to partial ice melting; I mean, that's obvious, right? And we'd have been silly not to consider UV-catalyzed changes in soil chemistry which would occur in the spring as the UV-opaque ice layer thins or disappears.
"But," he continued, "Who's going to give us research funding for any of those? Life is our only ticket aboard the ESA 2003 mission. So, in funding terms, we literally couldn't think of anything else."
Years ago, I believe in Analog magazine, a story was published positing a future in which increasingly invasive government-mandated security measures were being forced into home computers. This was published some time in the mid-80s if memory serves, so it was remarkably prescient.
The most intriguing part is that the hero of the story was a lawyer who successfully got the security laws overturned in the Supreme Court based on the Third Amendment to the US Constitution. Not nearly as well known as some of the others, the Third Amendment reads as follows:
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
The lawyer argued that, since the mandated security software was operating to enforce the will of the government and protect its sovereignty, it constituted a "soldier" by any reasonable definition of the term, and thus could not be quartered in private homes (including inside the computers being used there) in peacetime.
Kind of makes you think, doesn't it? Is this just weird enough to work, perhaps?
If they have the rights to broadcast the songs, they should be able to do it on whatever media.
Actually, partitioning of various delivery mode rights goes way back and is essential to media business. Consider that otherwise, a theater owner who legitimately obtains a current movie could turn around and broadcast it over cable...after all, they're both just streaming delivery of the movie, right?
So the issue is delivery rights and who is owed money for what types of use, and not fear of piracy.
By the way, I think 'Ludacris' would make a great open-source project name.:)
We'd like to know how you feel about an electronic standard for weight.
That's odd, I don't understand how this question relates to an article about an electronic standard for mass. And before you flame me for nitpicking, let me remind you that Mars has some very expensive upper-atmospheric dust right now thanks to imprecise communication about units of force. Ordinary people can blithely confuse mass and weight without causing problems. Engineers can't, and this article appears in an engineering publication. When are we going to learn to be more precise about this sort of thing?
Yet another "the commoners have bad taste" rant. If 80% of Americans want to limit their browsing to MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, more power to them. If they don't want to, so be it. If they don't want to educate themselves enough to even know they have a choice, well, seems like an odd decision to me, but last I heard they hadn't asked for my advice.
As long as corporate control of large chunks of the net doesn't impact my own ability to both share and obtain unpopular information, I don't especially care about it. I'm far more worried about (e.g.) the potential for single-chokepoint content controls when there are only a half-dozen giant ISPs left.
If you want to enter Tolkien's world, the best way is to read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the The Silmarillion
Just on the off-chance someone is actually using this to plan out their reading list, it should be noted that The Hobbit precedes The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the story arc, and should probably therefore be read first. Note that it was written as a children's book (unlike the others), and thus has a slightly twee style that some may find a bit off-putting.
The Silmarillion is a compendium of material concerning events far earlier in Middle Earth's history, but should be read after LotR simply because it's denser, less accessible, and relies heavily on a good understanding of Middle Earth as a prerequisite.
"The economy" is the subject matter of economics. The article used the term in a sense limited to monetary valuations and capitalist exchange models, which is not the full extent of the economy, properly understood. I stand by my comments.
The only OS projects that stand a chance are open source, because they don't play by the rules of the economy.
This is akin to saying "The only things that get off the ground are airplanes, because they don't play by the rules of gravity". Every human activity obeys the rules of economics; at its core, economics is the study of how human labor and available resources are allocated. If some people allocate their labor to produce 'free' (insert your favorite sense of that term here) software, that is an economic activity just like any other.
A narrow view of economics which ignores volunteer labor, bartering of labor and resources, and value measures other than money will steadily diverge from the real world as this new century progresses. The net has finally allowed us to approximate the world of "perfect information" which allows the economy -- in all its many forms -- to operate at peak efficiency. To think that it will continue to do so within current market models is to profoundly miss the point.
who would read a story about a man who created a "monster" that was happy, friendly, and harmless, or a computer that worked perfectly and caused no trouble?
Actually, the scariest and likeliest tale about the future of AI, Jack Willamson's The Humanoids, fits your description exactly. The artificially intelligent robots in this novel are so helpful, so solicitous, and so efficient that they quickly reduce humanity to a state of enforced safe docility. This novel gives me chills just because it gets more plausible every day.
Circular orbits are less common than highly
elliptical orbits, and are more promising.
Actually, in the planets detected thus far, ciruclar orbits extremely close to the star and highly elliptical orbits are about equally common, with big circular orbits indeed being much rarer.
However, it should be noted that the stellar-wobbling method of planet detection is highly biased toward detecting large (Jupiter sized or larger) planets in close orbits. We can't even detect Earth-sized planets, or a Saturn-sized planet at Saturn's distance from its star. So we are getting a very distorted picture of what constitutes a "common" type of planet. It may be that Earth-sized planets in wide circular orbits are the norm, but we won't ever see them with the tools currently available.
...which conveniently explains the prominence of "666" in the Christian account of how the world ends. Give us write access to c and we'll accidentally set it to zero or something in no time flat. Well, actually the amount of time depends on what we set c to...and how far away the keyboard is...now my head hurts.
My question is, why were these guys always in the city hanging out? Did they ever get any filming done? I'm kind of saying this tongue in cheek, but it's a valid question. I had always heard the Hollywood myth: actors work such long days, filming is hard work, blah blah. Lawrence didn't look very stressed; chilling out with his ever present sunglasses and a frosty beer...
A film actor's life is much like that of a Navy crewman during wartime -- months of boredom, punctuated by hours of panic. A movie shoot is like any other complex jury-rigged system; it takes a while to set up and get running, and is prone to unexpected failures and delays. During such times, low-ranking actors hang around the set drinking beer; high-ranking actors drive somewhere nice to drink beer, but leave their cell phone ringers on.
And yes, once filming actually gets under way, it can be exhausting and very demanding work. I'm not sure it's worth $10 million a film, but it's not a cake walk, either.
In other words, if counterviruses and antiworms became commonplace, it would turn the internet into one big war zone for autonomous code. And I can't even imagine what might result if an arms race broke out in that contest, though I expect some of its fruits would be quite frightening. I've already drawn the analogy to Core War in a previous thread.
...A war which would have no direct effect on those practicing safe computing, and which would encourage everyone to join that group as quickly as possible. In a network of properly secured machines, both 'good' and 'bad' agents would starve.
If you're going to call it a virus, think of the influenza virus. A medicine is widely available on the market. It is up to the infected party to take the medicine, and it would be unethical to sieze the unwitting victim and force the medicine into their bodies.
Ah, but we (as a society) do legally require people to get vaccinated, because doing so benefits society as a whole sufficiently to justify the slight loss of personal freedom. Most people consider compulsory vaccination to be quite ethical. How does this differ from compulsory computer security measures?
Just combine this new toy with the recent X10 wireless minicamera ad blitz...the likely exit path for the swallowable camera gives a whole new sense to the term "popunder".
On my first paying software job, a summer intern position between freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked for a startup building process-control equipment for -- get this -- industrial butter churns. (This has been my working example of the phrase "niche market" ever since.)
I was building system diagnostic tools, working on a full system mockup. One of the system health indicators at my disposal was a set of 16 LEDs which indicated whether 'on' signals were being sent from each switch controller. One of my tools would just strobe these 16 in the best Star Trek rolling-marquee-lights fashion, and ask the user if all 16 were lighting up, and doing so in the right order.
Well, one day, a delegation from the Danish Dairy Council (I kid you not) was coming through on short notice, and wanted to see some demos. Needless to say, we didn't have a 12-ton industrial churn in-house, so a real demo couldn't be managed. My boss ran out, breathless, and asked if I could cook something visual in 15 minutes. "How about this?" I asked, running the LED sweeper app.
He nodded, started to walk away, and then asked, "Can you make them blink out of sequence?" I did, with five minutes to spare. The Danes were suitably impressed.
This was ten years before "Airplane II" came out. I nearly fainted when Shatner delivered nearly the same line to a Moonbase technician.:-)
Having read this summary and both Apocalypses, and as a long-time and ardent Perl user, I must say I'm profoundly uneasy about where Larry is taking Perl 6. Many, many of the proposed changes (for example, the -> ~ . operator modifications mentioned in the article) will both break virtually all existing Perl code, and require fairly fundamental relearning by Perl coders. And yes, I know there's a planned kludge to use syntax to grandfather in P5 modules, but it's ugly and doesn't cover main programs).
My question is, why? Why mess with so much of Perl? Why break backwards-compatibility across the board? If Larry wants to create a new language, he should go for it, and I'd probably be eager to try it out. But with Perl 6, he seems to be creating a new language and calling it Perl, which strikes me as the worst possible path.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair comment. I think I'm just getting frustrated with one group of researchers after another announcing evidence of life on Mars, with each claim falling through (or at best significantly weakening) on closer inspection. As another thread on this story points out, we're edging into "boy who cried wolf" territory.
"I mean, yes, we considered deposition and stripping of lighter-colored dust in a seasonal cycle related to wind patterns, which is a common phenomenon on Mars. And of course we pondered simple soil darkening due to partial ice melting; I mean, that's obvious, right? And we'd have been silly not to consider UV-catalyzed changes in soil chemistry which would occur in the spring as the UV-opaque ice layer thins or disappears.
"But," he continued, "Who's going to give us research funding for any of those? Life is our only ticket aboard the ESA 2003 mission. So, in funding terms, we literally couldn't think of anything else."
The most intriguing part is that the hero of the story was a lawyer who successfully got the security laws overturned in the Supreme Court based on the Third Amendment to the US Constitution. Not nearly as well known as some of the others, the Third Amendment reads as follows:
The lawyer argued that, since the mandated security software was operating to enforce the will of the government and protect its sovereignty, it constituted a "soldier" by any reasonable definition of the term, and thus could not be quartered in private homes (including inside the computers being used there) in peacetime.
Kind of makes you think, doesn't it? Is this just weird enough to work, perhaps?
Well, yes; clearly at least 21 years after. :)
Actually, partitioning of various delivery mode rights goes way back and is essential to media business. Consider that otherwise, a theater owner who legitimately obtains a current movie could turn around and broadcast it over cable...after all, they're both just streaming delivery of the movie, right?
So the issue is delivery rights and who is owed money for what types of use, and not fear of piracy.
By the way, I think 'Ludacris' would make a great open-source project name.
We've known for some time that Palm and Handspring operated on razor-thin profit margarines.
Hang on, isn't this how Planet of the Mice starts?
That's odd, I don't understand how this question relates to an article about an electronic standard for mass. And before you flame me for nitpicking, let me remind you that Mars has some very expensive upper-atmospheric dust right now thanks to imprecise communication about units of force. Ordinary people can blithely confuse mass and weight without causing problems. Engineers can't, and this article appears in an engineering publication. When are we going to learn to be more precise about this sort of thing?
As long as corporate control of large chunks of the net doesn't impact my own ability to both share and obtain unpopular information, I don't especially care about it. I'm far more worried about (e.g.) the potential for single-chokepoint content controls when there are only a half-dozen giant ISPs left.
Just on the off-chance someone is actually using this to plan out their reading list, it should be noted that The Hobbit precedes The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the story arc, and should probably therefore be read first. Note that it was written as a children's book (unlike the others), and thus has a slightly twee style that some may find a bit off-putting.
The Silmarillion is a compendium of material concerning events far earlier in Middle Earth's history, but should be read after LotR simply because it's denser, less accessible, and relies heavily on a good understanding of Middle Earth as a prerequisite.
"The economy" is the subject matter of economics. The article used the term in a sense limited to monetary valuations and capitalist exchange models, which is not the full extent of the economy, properly understood. I stand by my comments.
This is akin to saying "The only things that get off the ground are airplanes, because they don't play by the rules of gravity". Every human activity obeys the rules of economics; at its core, economics is the study of how human labor and available resources are allocated. If some people allocate their labor to produce 'free' (insert your favorite sense of that term here) software, that is an economic activity just like any other.
A narrow view of economics which ignores volunteer labor, bartering of labor and resources, and value measures other than money will steadily diverge from the real world as this new century progresses. The net has finally allowed us to approximate the world of "perfect information" which allows the economy -- in all its many forms -- to operate at peak efficiency. To think that it will continue to do so within current market models is to profoundly miss the point.
Actually, that's the first amendment. The second amendment is the one that discourages Congress or the states from messing with the first one .
Of course, we won't know if the project worked or not until someone looks inside the lab in 2005.
Actually, the scariest and likeliest tale about the future of AI, Jack Willamson's The Humanoids, fits your description exactly. The artificially intelligent robots in this novel are so helpful, so solicitous, and so efficient that they quickly reduce humanity to a state of enforced safe docility. This novel gives me chills just because it gets more plausible every day.
Actually, in the planets detected thus far, ciruclar orbits extremely close to the star and highly elliptical orbits are about equally common, with big circular orbits indeed being much rarer.
However, it should be noted that the stellar-wobbling method of planet detection is highly biased toward detecting large (Jupiter sized or larger) planets in close orbits. We can't even detect Earth-sized planets, or a Saturn-sized planet at Saturn's distance from its star. So we are getting a very distorted picture of what constitutes a "common" type of planet. It may be that Earth-sized planets in wide circular orbits are the norm, but we won't ever see them with the tools currently available.
A film actor's life is much like that of a Navy crewman during wartime -- months of boredom, punctuated by hours of panic. A movie shoot is like any other complex jury-rigged system; it takes a while to set up and get running, and is prone to unexpected failures and delays. During such times, low-ranking actors hang around the set drinking beer; high-ranking actors drive somewhere nice to drink beer, but leave their cell phone ringers on.
And yes, once filming actually gets under way, it can be exhausting and very demanding work. I'm not sure it's worth $10 million a film, but it's not a cake walk, either.
They did. Problem was, thos "other business models" prominently included giving away free services.
Ah, but we (as a society) do legally require people to get vaccinated, because doing so benefits society as a whole sufficiently to justify the slight loss of personal freedom. Most people consider compulsory vaccination to be quite ethical. How does this differ from compulsory computer security measures?
Certain sections of it were. Others remain in force.
--
--
On my first paying software job, a summer intern position between freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked for a startup building process-control equipment for -- get this -- industrial butter churns. (This has been my working example of the phrase "niche market" ever since.)
I was building system diagnostic tools, working on a full system mockup. One of the system health indicators at my disposal was a set of 16 LEDs which indicated whether 'on' signals were being sent from each switch controller. One of my tools would just strobe these 16 in the best Star Trek rolling-marquee-lights fashion, and ask the user if all 16 were lighting up, and doing so in the right order.
Well, one day, a delegation from the Danish Dairy Council (I kid you not) was coming through on short notice, and wanted to see some demos. Needless to say, we didn't have a 12-ton industrial churn in-house, so a real demo couldn't be managed. My boss ran out, breathless, and asked if I could cook something visual in 15 minutes. "How about this?" I asked, running the LED sweeper app.
He nodded, started to walk away, and then asked, "Can you make them blink out of sequence?" I did, with five minutes to spare. The Danes were suitably impressed.
This was ten years before "Airplane II" came out. I nearly fainted when Shatner delivered nearly the same line to a Moonbase technician. :-)
My question is, why? Why mess with so much of Perl? Why break backwards-compatibility across the board? If Larry wants to create a new language, he should go for it, and I'd probably be eager to try it out. But with Perl 6, he seems to be creating a new language and calling it Perl, which strikes me as the worst possible path.
Am I alone in feeling this way?
--