Remind me to shred the next mailing from my library asking for money. Same goes for when the gubmint has to choose whether to give money to welfare mothers or libraries. (Or let me keep the money to give it to the deserving poor myself. Nah, that'll never happen.)
Why do libraries need to provide computers? Anybody who's read Cliff Stoll knows that libraries with manual card catalogs can work better than the computerized versions. In short, the addition of technology does not contribute to the Library's mission, spends money and only creates problems when homeless pervs surf porn and moralists whine about it and other moralists whine about censoring it.
If I need something library-related that's online I google it from home. When I'm at the library, I'm only interested in whatever's on the premises. It might be smart to let libraries setup interlibrary loan orders from home.
Fermi's paradox wonders why there's no obvious sign of intelligent life in the galaxy. One possible explanation is that intelligent life is inherently suicidal. Instead of Vernor Vinge's Singularity, we may stand at the cusp of Something Bad where Columbine Crazies have access to world destroying gimracks.
First, only the largest nation states held the power to kill us all. Before the Columbine Boys get this power, there's a time where Religious Fanatics With Billions can do so.
Personally, I see the asymmetrical conflict between the US and various Islamist (not Islamic) organizations and individuals through the lens of my own affliction with Cancer. The docs cut me open and removed the tumor, but not before it had metastasized to other parts of my body. I think the unpleasantness in Afghanistan and Iraq are the equivalent of tumor removal.
Loss of personal liberties makes me nauseous. Just like the chemotherapy I'm now enduring makes me nauseous. Chemotherapy is an ugly business of hunting down and killing rogue cancer cells. In so doing, you puke, have diarrhea, and your hair falls out. Collateral damage sucks, but it beats the alternative.
Now, some bright day, the docs will say the Cancer is gone and I'll discontinue chemotherapy and I'll feel great again. In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, after that cup of wrath was finished, habeas corpus was restored. It wasn't restored automatically, that work should be done when the terrorism threat is no longer credible.
The Soviets proved that the Rights of Man are not the property of the State. The government that denies those rights undermines itself. I'm not talking about bogus rights invented by legislation or litigation to distract us, but those rights which were endowed by our creator.
Craig Livingstone got a severe whining at for providing the White House with hundreds of FBI reports--plenty of blackmail material which proved quite useful during the Clinton impeachment vote in congress. Just ask Larry Flynt.
Conversely, Chuck Colson went to Federal Prison for disclosing one FBI report, providing the Watergate with a convenient conviction.
Who cares what's in the FBI files since they'll only be used for political purposes by moral relativists.
I don't understand why failing to sign the Kyoto Protocols causes the sun to shine hotter? Is it because the Solarians refuse to reduce their greenhouse gasses?
Or is it because we've outlawed Freon, that the Solarians can't run air conditioners?
Yeah, but did P&G know about the select-play-select-3-0-select hack?
(dunno what that means? google "tivo 30 second skip hack")
I didn't like fast forwarding thru commercials because I had to pay too much attention. But now I just hit that little time-warp button 8 times and walla, i'm back to watching the show.
Only time I watch commercials is when I recognize one I like and then instant-replay jump back to its start.
will Titan be classified as a planet?
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 1
If we use a pure size-based measure of whether a lump of matter is a planet, then will the moon Titan be reclassified as a planet?
Maybe we need to define a planet as something relatively big, not orbiting something bigger than itself, and almost alone. e.g. Pluto is a planet because it's pretty much by itself and bigger than anything around it. Ceres is not a planet because it's got a lot of other stuff around it.
Even this exception would need an exception to handle things like Earth's moon and Pluto's moon.
Oh what a tangled web we weave...
Is Science Fiction healthy?
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Lots of folks love SF: Today there's a cable network and a nauseating volume of Star Trek reruns. Computer graphics makes it feasible to put a movie into any imaginable setting. Technology is being deployed so quickly that Vernor Vinge's singularity comes to mind. Technological progress is moving so fast it is hard to anticipate it.
NASA is dinking around in LEO: Boldly going where John Glenn has gone four decades before. I don't know who said it: The future just ain't what it used to be.
The Sputnik generation is graying: When I was a lad, I watched moon shots. It captured my imagination. I read any book that had a rocket on its cover. I'm late forties and will be dead of cancer soon.
Writers are moving out of SF: William Gibson's latest novel has high geek content, but none of the science isn't already deployed. Same for Neal Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_: good story with high geek content, but nothing beyond the current state of the art. And I've seen guys who once wrote Hard Science Fiction branching out to Fantasy.
Publishing is corporatized: The huge bookstores I haunt have SF sections that are overcrowded with Fantasy and StarTrek, StarWars, Babylon5 & <insert corporate franchise here> serials.
It looks to me as if Science Fiction is in trouble, or it may be sick, or it may be dead and doesn't know it yet.
What is your assessment of SF's health and which of these considerations do you think most significant?
how long would it take for every server with any kinda taxable activity to relocate to Nevada? or Vanatu? You can bet that after any government starts taxing something, it'll never be free again. The power to tax is the power to destroy. This is an opening move in the destruction of high tech in California.
My dad worried about out-sourcing union jobs to Mexico. I worry about out-sourcing programming jobs to India. What's to stop the out-sourcing of all the other high-paying professions to low-tax areas?
if you do not passionately believe programming is the coolest thing you could possibly do, change something as fast as possible.
excellence is its own reward. i'm a puritan, my purpose in life is to glorify God. God is not glorified by my performing duties in a desultory fashion.
When i have felt no joy in programming, i worked for a company whose name started with "Rapist." At that time I considered a career change. Happily, I got an employer upgrade and the joy returned.
Years back (the '80s) the US took an F-16 and outfitted a rocket to it. The F-16 flew straight up and at the peak of its trajectory, it launched the rocket which went straight up about 30 more miles then exploded in a cloud of shrapnel.
Moments later, a satellite ploughed through the debris field that was in the process of falling back to earth. If your target is going 17,000 miles per hour, you can kill it with a stationary bullet. (Remember this next time you see a James Bond villain shoot down anti-satellite missiles.)
The moral of the story is that you don't need all that much delta-vee to kill something in low earth orbit. This is a Bad Thing. Is such a capability within the grasp of the kind of folks who fly airplanes into buildings? I hope not.
Couple decades back, I left my job as a cryptanalyst and became a software engineer here in the midwest. After a few months I bought the house I was living in, a four-plex, and became a landlord. First thing I did was to rekey all the locks. While I was filing away at little bits of metal, I realized just how similar this business of keying locks was to crypto.
The locks I was rekeying were all simple, so I didn't bother to think about cryptographic attacks on master-keys.
In the crypto world, there's a word for "master keys," they're called "trap doors."
1st year: obsessed and built the slowest car out there. 2nd year: grumbled, but kids insisted on building cars. I helped at the last minute: hollowed out undersides, polished wheels and axles, installed max weight. Took home 3 first place trophies. 3rd year: became more involved. built three cars, took home 1st & 3rd and 1st place trophies. daughter and i were in same category and double elimination unfairly hurt her. subsequent years were more fair since we used times instead. 4th year: got serious. took home 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 1st place trophies. 5th year: everyone was out to get me. took home three 1st place trophies. One car won for design instead of speed. it was too tall to test and was slow.
Lessons learned: wheels and axles are most important. Polish with fanaticism. avoid grit, dust, sawdust contamination. Keep cars in zip-lock bags. If your kids want to play with the cars, build a second car for them to screw up but not race.
Testing is important. cars must run straight (use a pingpong table's stripe). Make a test track from a pair of rain gutters pop-riveted together. use an opto sensor for timing. the 2nd lane was a waste, use a single lane and an opto sensor timer.
Weight placement is a religious argument. You want your car to run stable down track. I minimize angular moment in hopes that rattles down the track will be easily corrected. Ideally, I want a 5oz point mass payload centered in a zero-mass car. others maximize angular moment to prevent rattling. that means a dumbbell mass distribution. Check it out for yourself. I place weight just in front of and above rear axle. I remove all material possible from everything else in the car. Since car sits on a slope, rearward weight is located higher on the track. This gives you epsilon more potential energy. Probably not significant. I think locating weight on & just before the rear axle makes the car more stable.
Everybody you talk to has his pet ideas. Nod, smile and wait to see if their cars go faster.
People with the fastest cars do the least talking.
What Lindows should have done is hire a hit man/career criminal to break into Microsoft or a 3rd party who has the key and steal it. Or optionally pay off an Xbox developer or employee who has similar access. Either way, it would be both cheaper and actually give the real key, unlike all of this nonsense
I'm wearing my novelist hat: Let's suppose he's already done this. If he just releases the number, it'll be suppressed as stolen goods.
Suppose instead that he instigates a hopeless distributed cryptographic attack that just happens to get remarkably lucky.
he maintains plausible deniability.
if he spoofs J Random User's client connection, he's got an unwitting cutout
in JRH.
In fact, a cunning villain will choose the teenage son of someone with sizeable political moxie to defend the lad.
I love to read and I love to soak in the hot tub. This is a wonderful thing. You can't really relax with a good book when you're afraid that too much relaxation will result in a dunked, icky book.
I can't wait to get all my fave penny-dreadfuls in this format.
Yes: I see the developers have a right to restrict access to the docs. This is a rather clever notion consistent with RMS' claim that programmers can turn a buck selling expertise.
AND No: I think that creating a phony scarcity economy based upon witheld information as a Bad Thing I'd expect RMS to denounce.
IMHO, this is probably going to hurt the project. Languishing in obscurity is probably the greatest risk facing a project like this. If potential customers are cheesed off, they can direct their talent to another project.
If you still lose sleep about the closed docs, fork the docs. You've got the sources, that should be enough. Heck, fork the discussion forum. (I want to add "and the horse they rode in on," but it's probably inappropriate.)
So, the cops are busting down your door. You warm up the EMP gizmo that Neal Stephenson described in Cryptonomicon, and aim it at their guns. Inspector Friendly won't be hurt, but all the electronics inside the his gun will be reduced to smoking silicon.
Zimmerman sounds reasonable, but I'd dearly love to hear what RMS has to say about this.
I think that both Zimmerman and Stallman are Good Guys.
There's daylight between Zimmerman's source release and the GPL. I think Zimmerman's license intends to accomplish something different than the GPL. "There's no NSA backdoors in here." is different than "Here's the source, send back any improvements you find."
I think the GPL is more realistic in that it acknowledges that (healthy) software is not static. The proof of this conjecture will come when PGP and GPG have been out there for a few years and we see which one has more useful features and fewer bugs.
Favorites are a matter of personal taste. I find that personal tastes change with time. When I was a lad, I loved some stuff I like now, and I hated some stuff I really like now.
I really liked A.E. van Vogt. I really liked Doc Smith and the lensmen series. Heck, I really liked the Perry Rhodan series. Was it great literature? Nope.
I really like Neal Stephenson's stuff. Literature-wise, his stuff is a lot better. And it looks like he's outgrowing SF. Cryptonomicon was a tech-heavy mainstream novel.
Nowadays, I'm thinking that SF is in trouble. The rate of technological change makes it hard to anticipate the future. Vinge throws his hands up and talks about the singularity.
A lot of SF authors are moving over to Fantasy. I think that Hard SF is to hard for lit majors, and the days of a technical expert writing something that can escape the slushpile are long past.
Slashdot Mirror
Remind me to shred the next mailing from my library asking for money. Same goes for when the gubmint has to choose whether to give money to welfare mothers or libraries. (Or let me keep the money to give it to the deserving poor myself. Nah, that'll never happen.)
Why do libraries need to provide computers? Anybody who's read Cliff Stoll knows that libraries with manual card catalogs can work better than the computerized versions. In short, the addition of technology does not contribute to the Library's mission, spends money and only creates problems when homeless pervs surf porn and moralists whine about it and other moralists whine about censoring it.
If I need something library-related that's online I google it from home. When I'm at the library, I'm only interested in whatever's on the premises. It might be smart to let libraries setup interlibrary loan orders from home.
the slashdot summary of this case said this guy is being held in a federal lockup.
Heh. I thought when you are "disappeared" they don't know where you're being held or where you're buried.
Maybe I don't understand the term "disappeared," have they rendered him invisible?
Oh well, I'd better get back to work on my bioweapon (potato cannon) project.
Fermi's paradox wonders why there's no obvious sign of intelligent life in the galaxy. One possible explanation is that intelligent life is inherently suicidal. Instead of Vernor Vinge's Singularity, we may stand at the cusp of Something Bad where Columbine Crazies have access to world destroying gimracks.
First, only the largest nation states held the power to kill us all. Before the Columbine Boys get this power, there's a time where Religious Fanatics With Billions can do so.
Personally, I see the asymmetrical conflict between the US and various Islamist (not Islamic) organizations and individuals through the lens of my own affliction with Cancer. The docs cut me open and removed the tumor, but not before it had metastasized to other parts of my body. I think the unpleasantness in Afghanistan and Iraq are the equivalent of tumor removal.
Loss of personal liberties makes me nauseous. Just like the chemotherapy I'm now enduring makes me nauseous. Chemotherapy is an ugly business of hunting down and killing rogue cancer cells. In so doing, you puke, have diarrhea, and your hair falls out. Collateral damage sucks, but it beats the alternative.
Now, some bright day, the docs will say the Cancer is gone and I'll discontinue chemotherapy and I'll feel great again. In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, after that cup of wrath was finished, habeas corpus was restored. It wasn't restored automatically, that work should be done when the terrorism threat is no longer credible.
The Soviets proved that the Rights of Man are not the property of the State. The government that denies those rights undermines itself. I'm not talking about bogus rights invented by legislation or litigation to distract us, but those rights which were endowed by our creator.
Craig Livingstone got a severe whining at for providing the White House with hundreds of FBI reports--plenty of blackmail material which proved quite useful during the Clinton impeachment vote in congress. Just ask Larry Flynt.
Conversely, Chuck Colson went to Federal Prison for disclosing one FBI report, providing the Watergate with a convenient conviction.
Who cares what's in the FBI files since they'll only be used for political purposes by moral relativists.
I don't understand why failing to sign the Kyoto Protocols causes the sun to shine hotter? Is it because the Solarians refuse to reduce their greenhouse gasses?
Or is it because we've outlawed Freon, that the Solarians can't run air conditioners?
Yeah, but did P&G know about the select-play-select-3-0-select hack?
(dunno what that means? google "tivo 30 second skip hack")
I didn't like fast forwarding thru commercials because I had to pay too much attention. But now I just hit that little time-warp button 8 times and walla, i'm back to watching the show.
Only time I watch commercials is when I recognize one I like and then instant-replay jump back to its start.
If we use a pure size-based measure of whether a lump of matter is a planet, then will the moon Titan be reclassified as a planet?
Maybe we need to define a planet as something relatively big, not orbiting something bigger than itself, and almost alone. e.g. Pluto is a planet because it's pretty much by itself and bigger than anything around it. Ceres is not a planet because it's got a lot of other stuff around it.
Even this exception would need an exception to handle things like Earth's moon and Pluto's moon.
Oh what a tangled web we weave...
Lots of folks love SF: Today there's a cable network and a nauseating volume of Star Trek reruns. Computer graphics makes it feasible to put a movie into any imaginable setting. Technology is being deployed so quickly that Vernor Vinge's singularity comes to mind. Technological progress is moving so fast it is hard to anticipate it.
NASA is dinking around in LEO: Boldly going where John Glenn has gone four decades before. I don't know who said it: The future just ain't what it used to be.
The Sputnik generation is graying: When I was a lad, I watched moon shots. It captured my imagination. I read any book that had a rocket on its cover. I'm late forties and will be dead of cancer soon.
Writers are moving out of SF: William Gibson's latest novel has high geek content, but none of the science isn't already deployed. Same for Neal Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_: good story with high geek content, but nothing beyond the current state of the art. And I've seen guys who once wrote Hard Science Fiction branching out to Fantasy.
Publishing is corporatized: The huge bookstores I haunt have SF sections that are overcrowded with Fantasy and StarTrek, StarWars, Babylon5 & <insert corporate franchise here> serials.
It looks to me as if Science Fiction is in trouble, or it may be sick, or it may be dead and doesn't know it yet.
What is your assessment of SF's health and which of these considerations do you think most significant?
how long would it take for every server with any kinda taxable activity to relocate to Nevada? or Vanatu? You can bet that after any government starts taxing something, it'll never be free again. The power to tax is the power to destroy. This is an opening move in the destruction of high tech in California.
My dad worried about out-sourcing union jobs to Mexico. I worry about out-sourcing programming jobs to India. What's to stop the out-sourcing of all the other high-paying professions to low-tax areas?
if you do not passionately believe programming is the coolest thing you could possibly do, change something as fast as possible.
excellence is its own reward. i'm a puritan, my purpose in life is to glorify God. God is not glorified by my performing duties in a desultory fashion.
When i have felt no joy in programming, i worked for a company whose name started with "Rapist." At that time I considered a career change. Happily, I got an employer upgrade and the joy returned.
Maybe he got caught porking Miss Kitty in the back room of the Long Branch Saloon,
(Uh, i hope someone here's old enough to remember Gunsmoke.)
Years back (the '80s) the US took an F-16 and outfitted a rocket to it. The F-16 flew straight up and at the peak of its trajectory, it launched the rocket which went straight up about 30 more miles then exploded in a cloud of shrapnel.
Moments later, a satellite ploughed through the debris field that was in the process of falling back to earth. If your target is going 17,000 miles per hour, you can kill it with a stationary bullet. (Remember this next time you see a James Bond villain shoot down anti-satellite missiles.)
The moral of the story is that you don't need all that much delta-vee to kill something in low earth orbit. This is a Bad Thing. Is such a capability within the grasp of the kind of folks who fly airplanes into buildings? I hope not.
Then Hollywood will sue all the networks for inserting commercials when they broadcast movies.
Right?
Couple decades back, I left my job as a cryptanalyst and became a software engineer here in the midwest. After a few months I bought the house I was living in, a four-plex, and became a landlord. First thing I did was to rekey all the locks. While I was filing away at little bits of metal, I realized just how similar this business of keying locks was to crypto.
The locks I was rekeying were all simple, so I didn't bother to think about cryptographic attacks on master-keys.
In the crypto world, there's a word for "master keys," they're called "trap doors."
i see dead files
1st year: obsessed and built the slowest car out there. 2nd year: grumbled, but kids insisted on building cars. I helped at the last minute: hollowed out undersides, polished wheels and axles, installed max weight. Took home 3 first place trophies. 3rd year: became more involved. built three cars, took home 1st & 3rd and 1st place trophies. daughter and i were in same category and double elimination unfairly hurt her. subsequent years were more fair since we used times instead. 4th year: got serious. took home 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 1st place trophies. 5th year: everyone was out to get me. took home three 1st place trophies. One car won for design instead of speed. it was too tall to test and was slow.
Lessons learned: wheels and axles are most important. Polish with fanaticism. avoid grit, dust, sawdust contamination. Keep cars in zip-lock bags. If your kids want to play with the cars, build a second car for them to screw up but not race.
Testing is important. cars must run straight (use a pingpong table's stripe). Make a test track from a pair of rain gutters pop-riveted together. use an opto sensor for timing. the 2nd lane was a waste, use a single lane and an opto sensor timer.
Weight placement is a religious argument. You want your car to run stable down track. I minimize angular moment in hopes that rattles down the track will be easily corrected. Ideally, I want a 5oz point mass payload centered in a zero-mass car. others maximize angular moment to prevent rattling. that means a dumbbell mass distribution. Check it out for yourself. I place weight just in front of and above rear axle. I remove all material possible from everything else in the car. Since car sits on a slope, rearward weight is located higher on the track. This gives you epsilon more potential energy. Probably not significant. I think locating weight on & just before the rear axle makes the car more stable.
Everybody you talk to has his pet ideas. Nod, smile and wait to see if their cars go faster.
People with the fastest cars do the least talking.
Me? I'm not racing this year.
If J. Michael Straczynski wrote the Lord Of The Rings, it would have been called Babylon Five.
I'm wearing my novelist hat: Let's suppose he's already done this. If he just releases the number, it'll be suppressed as stolen goods.
Suppose instead that he instigates a hopeless distributed cryptographic attack that just happens to get remarkably lucky.
he maintains plausible deniability.
if he spoofs J Random User's client connection, he's got an unwitting cutout
in JRH.
In fact, a cunning villain will choose the teenage son of someone with sizeable political moxie to defend the lad.
I love to read and I love to soak in the hot tub. This is a wonderful thing. You can't really relax with a good book when you're afraid that too much relaxation will result in a dunked, icky book.
I can't wait to get all my fave penny-dreadfuls in this format.
I'm ambivalent.
Yes: I see the developers have a right to restrict access to the docs. This is a rather clever notion consistent with RMS' claim that programmers can turn a buck selling expertise.
AND No: I think that creating a phony scarcity economy based upon witheld information as a Bad Thing I'd expect RMS to denounce.
IMHO, this is probably going to hurt the project. Languishing in obscurity is probably the greatest risk facing a project like this. If potential customers are cheesed off, they can direct their talent to another project.
If you still lose sleep about the closed docs, fork the docs. You've got the sources, that should be enough. Heck, fork the discussion forum. (I want to add "and the horse they rode in on," but it's probably inappropriate.)
title sez it all
So, the cops are busting down your door. You warm up the EMP gizmo that Neal Stephenson described in Cryptonomicon, and aim it at their guns. Inspector Friendly won't be hurt, but all the electronics inside the his gun will be reduced to smoking silicon.
With the police disarmed, the rest is up to you.
the guy rocks, but he says he only uses Lynx. He's image deprived.
Zimmerman sounds reasonable, but I'd dearly love to hear what RMS has to say about this.
I think that both Zimmerman and Stallman are Good Guys.
There's daylight between Zimmerman's source release and the GPL. I think Zimmerman's license intends to accomplish something different than the GPL. "There's no NSA backdoors in here." is different than "Here's the source, send back any improvements you find."
I think the GPL is more realistic in that it acknowledges that (healthy) software is not static. The proof of this conjecture will come when PGP and GPG have been out there for a few years and we see which one has more useful features and fewer bugs.
We'll see.
Favorites are a matter of personal taste. I find that personal tastes change with time. When I was a lad, I loved some stuff I like now, and I hated some stuff I really like now.
I really liked A.E. van Vogt. I really liked Doc Smith and the lensmen series. Heck, I really liked the Perry Rhodan series. Was it great literature? Nope.
I really like Neal Stephenson's stuff. Literature-wise, his stuff is a lot better. And it looks like he's outgrowing SF. Cryptonomicon was a tech-heavy mainstream novel.
Nowadays, I'm thinking that SF is in trouble. The rate of technological change makes it hard to anticipate the future. Vinge throws his hands up and talks about the singularity.
A lot of SF authors are moving over to Fantasy. I think that Hard SF is to hard for lit majors, and the days of a technical expert writing something that can escape the slushpile are long past.