1. use DNA to determine whether supposed linguistic links between languages are causal or coincidental. the Ayrian hypothesis of those despicable Nazis arose because of philological similarities. Do DNA similarities also exist.
2. the bible has references in Genesis to people groups or tribes. can those groups be correlated with contemporary ethnic populations? such as was done with the black african jews that have the genetic marker associated with what the bible calls the Kohatites (sons of Aaron, or Levites).
3. are there similar genetic markers among other jews that could be traced back to other tribes, e.g. Judah. *Then* if the shroud stains are human blood, one could look for signs that it came from a descendent of Judah. If not, that would be strong evidence against the claims about the shroud of Turin.
4. using the fruit fly DNA, one could run simulations of micro-evolution and validate those simulations against all the experiments that have been done. Then, one could push the simulations forward to determine the mechanism for "punctuated equilibrium" that evolutionists claim to account for the gaps in the fossil record.
5. geneology records from the Mormon church & elsewhere could be checked for consistency with the genetics. unverified geneological hypotheses could be tested via DNA.
6. Determine the nationality of the "ice man" who came out of the alps. Also that of the caucasoid mummies found in central china.
7. Verification of Al Gore's claim that republicans have an extra chromosome.
"Nobody wants to look the artist in the eye and say, 'Giving your music away for free is going to make you lots of money' -- not while keeping a straight face, anyway," suggests solo artist, and founding member of the Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh.
I was reminded of a quote by Steve Ballmer or another MicorSerf who said that Open Source software doesn't/cannot exist because a programmer will not work for free.
And I am reminded by another quote by Erik Raymond that said that the truly great practitioners work for passion, not dollars.
(who works only for money up front? suits)
Can anyone look the principals at Red Hat, VA Linux, Slashdot/Andover, etc. in the eye and say "giving your software for free is going to bancrupt you?" -- not while keeping a straight face, anyway.
Back in the '70s gas shortage my pappy said, "You watch, when gas hits $1.00 a gallon, there'll be plenty of gasoline." So, last week I got a call from a headhunter. We got on famously and discussed a gig for which I was quite thoroughly qualified. After she looked at my resume she said the company was looking for someone with 2 years experience, not 20. And they were willing to pay about half what I'm making. I laughed and told her to instruct them to camp out on Calvin College's doorstep. Maybe they'll find an entry level kid who'll work for that. "Shortage" articles are written to make sure a ready supply of exploitable younger workers enter the profession. There will always be a "shortage" of any sort of people willing to work at below market rates.
I disagree with the premise that in the old old days the hunter went out when the gatherer stayed home with the kids. I'm of the opinion that until the Industrial Revolution both spouses stayed home and ran their household sort of like a sole proprietorship with the kids acting as unpaid staff working alongside Oog and Oogette.
In a telecommuting situation, both parents can be there for the kids. When I needed to concentrate, I stayed in the basement office and the kids knew to stay away. Just like in a work situation there are times when you're interruptable and others when you're not. You just have to have equivalent telltales that your coworkers or spouse can see and stay away (or interpret as a green light to shmooze).
Socially, I had some techie friends I'd pick up a phone and call from time to time when I was stuck on a problem. They were free to reciprocate.
The most significant aspect of telecommuting was the impact it had on my relationship with my wife. She's a stay-at-home mom and she was watching kids while I was hacking. I'd take coffee breaks at the kitchen table and hang out with my wife. It really had a positive effect on our relationship. Similarly, once the kids were at school we could take the phone off the hook at lunchtime...
Downside was that I'd be expected to do those "just five minute" errands around the house during work hours. And I had a tendency to work 24x7, or it felt that way. If I had a knotty problem I couldn't solve, I'd get up and shovel the sidewalk or something, or I'd get up in the middle of the night and code up a sudden inspiration.
Yesterday or the day before, I read bitter words to the effect that, "Fundamentalists can get anything on the ballot." Well, fundamentalists (of which I am one) got the internet filter on the ballot. and thankfully, the measure was defeated. (i oppose internet filters, too.) What the heck's wrong with getting divisive social issues put on the ballot? A worse problem is when unelected elites impose their morality upon others *without* the opportunity of putting the measure before the people for a vote. smiles and cheers, steve
One difference between the GWoC and I196 is that the Great Wall sticks up in the air. Thus, it can cast a shadow which will enhance its visiblity from space. Though the dimensions of interstate highways and the great wall are roughly equivalent, interstate highways do not cast shadows. It may be possible that the GWoC is visible in early morning or late evening local time as it casts a shadow that's much larger than itself. Another thing, Interstates are not generally built along ridges, and the Great Wall of China does follow ridges. To compare a highway nestled in a valley with a wall mounted on a ridge is probably not right. Note that I'm not claiming that the GWoC is naked-eye visible, but I do think that it can be much more visible than interstate highways are from space.
no, you don't get the walther PPK and the Aston Marton. In fact, you don't even get to order your martinis shaken, not stirred.
What you do get if you land a job with GCHQ is a lot more restrictions on your freedoms than if you took the equivalent gig at NSA. The Brits have the "official secrets act" which sorta sucks. Of course, the Brits don't have a 2nd amendment, either.
My (20 years ago) experience with the GCHQ guys were that they were all incredibly bright Oxbridge types. Back then, the tech opportunities in the States were much brighter than in England, so if you were the brightest kid at Harvard, you moved to Scottsdale, Arizona and started a software company whereas an equivalent brightest kid at Oxford or Cambridge took a job at GCHQ. Now, if you start a company in Arizona, you can do fun things like move it to Redmond, Washington, but if you take a gig at GCHQ, you're pretty much stuck in Cheltanham, UK.
Me, I preferred the sunny climes of western michigan, land of Lake Effect.
I'm a bible-believing baptist deacon and sunday school teacher (not bragging, merely establishing my credentials).
I say go for it!
When in college, hypsters reflected upon the state of the art in genetic engineering and said that "scientists had created life in a test tube." My fave response was to point out that it was equivalent to jacking up a car, replacing its tires and then saying you'd created an automobile.
The proposed experiment sounds analogous to trying to pull the engine, or changing out the carb. That's the kind of stuff one must do if one's to understand what's going on.
I think experiments like this one is exactly what is needed to get creationists like me and evolutionists to quit shouting propaganda at each other and get on with the task of learning the underlying mechanisms at work in reality.
I recall reading a program listing in "Creative Computing" magazine that when poked in and run would cause the computer (mebbe a TRS80 or Apple II or earlier) to emit EMI signals that could be detected on an AM radio placed atop the computer. (At that time, my Rockwell and many of my friends' TI calculators could be heard on the AM band when you told them to calculate large factorials.) The article said that this program would play the Minute Waltz on your AM Radio.
I just need to find an attic wherein is stored a stack of '78 vintage computer magazines.
in the article, the example is given of a hypothetical Linux fork called "fooware os" and the additional hypothetical that the perpetrator of fooware is a crack ninja programmer with an army of software ninjas straight out of a bruce lee film.
one alternative not explored was suppose the fooware ninjas come up with a cool thing and Linus says, "no way, that's not going into the kernel." in this case, the coolness of the cool thing increases pressure on the system to either accept the patches into Linux, or switchover form Linux to Fooware.
what's lovely is how OpenSource routes around intransigence. we're all human, nobody's perfect, and the character traits that make us great software developers also cause us to get in our own way. when that happens, the fooware os fork becomes a Good Thing.
Also, hidden in the fork between gnu/emacs and xemacs was the different programming styles. the procedural versus oo indicates that team based projects will probably stick with OO or easily modularized projects, and gnarlie "keep it all inside one head" projects will be one-great-man projects. the risk of the gnarlies is the death or disinterest of the one-great-man. note how OO and componentized strategies favor open source teaming.
1. find out exactly who those lawyers represent in "the film industry" and then boycott and badmouth the companies in the most creative ways possible. How many times have you seen a Hollywood movie where the villains are evil corporate types? My isn't that a meme to surf upon. Can you imagine the parody websites?
2. find out exactly which countries are free of copyright laws such as these. move public reverse engineering there. everyone else in the gulag must circulate source samizdat.
3. send money to someone, say ESR or RMS (i don't care) to start a legal defense fund, and recruit right-thinking lawyers who value freedom and progress to work pro bono defending Derek et al.
4. this would be tricky: Try an "Atlas Shrugged" play where all open source software would just quit working on a chosen protest day. 1/1/00?
Think of it as cosmic justice. I remember when Toshiba sold the Russians the machine tools they needed to make their nuclear submarines' propellers a zillion times quieter.
This is also a cautionary tale for cryptologists that every cryptanalyst knows by heart.
Cryptologists will often be deluded into thinking their systems are far more secure than they really are. Cryptanalysts stay in business because of this.
so, i was going to buy a book from Amazon a couple weeks back. then i read on slashdot that Amazon had acquired a patent on one-click. so, when i went to the online bookstore to effect my purchase my fingers typed www.fatbrain.com/
i suppose that if every slashdotter who was annoyed at the Amazon patent strategy did the same, Amazon might be less inclined assert the patent.
no, i don't own stock or work for or have a brother in law at fatbrain or barnes & noble or anything. i'm just negatively inclined toward amazon right now.
if i have to really think thru something difficult, you can count on either total silence or something baroque: Bach, Vivaldi, Bach, Pacobel, and Bach. Oh, did I mention Bach? But that's more algorithm design and not nuts and bolts hacking.
Now, let's suppose its 3:30pm friday and i'm about to go home. "Stranglehold" by Nugent, or "Mars" by Holst. Van Hagar or Def Lepperd also helps to raise the spirits during those last hours at work.
Satriani's "Surfing with the Alien" is regarded by some to be the ultimate programming CD. I'm inclined to agree. I keep Satriani's stuff going a lot while hacking. That's what's wonderful about MP3s, you can put in a day's worth of programming music on a CD-ROM and never have to cycle CDs.
i found many of the insights of the article on point. methinks there may have been an agenda behind it. but i'd worry if i hadn't noticed an agenda. i tremble to speculate that it was high-class fud: some of the info was unattributed accusations of Linux being unstable and buggy and no different than IBM's mainframe strategy. sounded exactly like a M$ fudpiece i read last summer.
one pertinent observation needs to be made. the author said that democrasy is the first thing that gets sacrificed for speed. then he made the claim that Linux needs speed to compete with Microsoft. I think that is not true in the least.
If Microsoft was continually putting new technology and innovation into things like Office, and Windows, that might be true. But what have we seen Microsoft do lately? The changes of Office97 over Office95 and maybe (we'll see) Office2k are not essential to the functionality of word processing, spreadsheets and databases. Instead, they're the 90s equivalent of sheet-metal and tail fins: The planned obsolescence of the 50s Detroit/General Motors reborn in the 90s in Redmond, WA.
Open source efforts do not need to track sheet-metal changes and anti-competitive incompatibility versions. Open Source projects need only develop the best possible editor, compiler, etc. and improve upon it incrementally.
the QNX demo floppy has been around for at least a year, maybe two. i work with QNX and i'm not particularly impressed. if i were an OS expert, i'd talk about monolithic kernels and probably have some opinion about its "inherent superiority," but i don't, so i just marvel at how crufty it all is.
i was a fresh graduate with a masters' from MSU in applied mathematics. Jimmy Carter was president when i interviewed and they had a hiring freeze on. Except for mathematicians. i got the job as a CryptoMathematician. Mathematicians ruled the roost. Never been any place like that before or since.
it was like living inside a Clancy novel. lots of toys. lots of secret stuff. and a lot of self-importance you don't notice until you're away for a while: the really secret stuff that i did had already been written up in Jack Anderson's column.
you'll never get into an office with more stimulating and smart people than NSA. most of the guys there were flaming liberals, which was surprising, but it makes sense, since government workers tend to lean democrat, not republican. i was a civilian, the military guys were fun.
the process of getting in was a little demeaning, but i didn't notice in my youthful idealism. they basically give you all these psychological tests to discover (1) are you a genius? and (2) are you in any way untrustworthy? then there's polygraph tests to make sure that question #2 is correctly answered. lot of lifestyle questions had to get answered right. (i'm straight as an arrow sexually, never done drugs and in '80 that was important.) they didn't want to hire people who were "blackmailable." Thus at the time gays were discriminated against. That's probably no longer true, because if one is in the closet, there's don't ask/don't tell, and if one's out of the closet, there's no basis for blackmail.
btw, Alan Turing committed suicide because he was gay, worked at GCHQ (the British NSA), the Ruskies found out and tried to blackmail him.
What kinds of secret stuff goes on there? imagine the best science you can find on the best university. now apply that to figuring out what the bad guys are doing. meanwhile, have the brightest boys play with the biggest toys to push the state of the art in mathematics and computer science.
sorta sad though. i went to the National Cryptologic Museum last summer and saw that one of the computers i worked on was no longer state-of-the-art, but was now literally, a museum piece. sigh. i'm getting old. it's probably all changed in the last 20 years.
anyway, it was a good first gig out of grad school and if you can get in, you'll have fun.
The most famous of which is the Venona traffic in which case Russian spy traffic was encrypted using a one time pad. *But* the Ruskies lost part of a copy of that pad in Finland and the Finns gave us a copy. God bless the Finns. That OTP key was used to decrypt Rusky spook traffic here.
After the Russians opened their archives, scholars started reading Venona traffic from *that* end and someone got around to asking, "Why does NSA still have all this stuff classified?" So the Venona decrypts were released. It turns out that the Rosenbergs weren't exactly the innocent victims of red-baiting that the Lefty press claimed for decades.
ww2 sigint was categorized under at least two codewords: magic and ultra.
if you read _Cryptonomicon_ there's a character who'd had a nervous breakdown in a bathrobe. in reality, this character was none other than William Friedman who broke the Papanese purple machine. he did this by studying ciphertext alone. this was Magic.
Conversely, workmen smuggled parts of enigma machines out of german factories to Poland, where Polish cryptanalists devised the crypto attack. enough parts were smuggled out for the Poles to build a complete enigma machine. the Brits received all this intel after Poland fell. the Brits were effective in automating the Poles' crypto attack. this was Ultra.
All the Magic intel came from cryptanalysis based solely upon studying ciphertext, whereas the ultra intel came from studying an intact enigma machine. (when steckered enigma came out, it took the allies *months* to figure out the variation in the rotor motion. this almost cost us the battle of the atlantic.) the cryptanalytic achievement of William Friedman, Lambros Dimitrious and the organization that became the NSA was far more significant than the cryptanalytical achievement of the Brits' GCHQ.
btw, _Cryptonomicon_ is a veiled reference to the _MilCrypt_ volumes, some of which I believe you can buy from Agean Park Press.
incidentally, i'd like to ask Neal Stephenson if i ever meet him, "Was Randy's grandfather patterened after Lambros Dimitrious?"
i think this is all written up in _the codebreakers_ by David Kahn. there are also some very good books now available about "Venona" that describe what the Russians were doing. if ever between Washington DC and Baltimore on the BW Parkway, stop in at the National Cryptologic Museum at the NSA exit.
in the novel _1984_, the government redefined words to mean exactly what they wanted them to mean. this was called newspeak.
since 1973, privacy has meant that the government may not protect the life of a fetus, skirting the issue of just what sort of non-person a fetus is.
soon, privacy shall mean that the government can snoop into one's records or communications whenever it wants.
a government that can redefine words' meaning to give to one group can later redefine words' meaning to take from others. (please don't take this as an anti-abortion polemic as much as an observation of the downside of legal positivism.)
Frank Borman the astronaut tells an unhappy tale of one time he was invited by Sagan to some seminar or another and he ended up getting called a baby killer militarist by a bunch of snotty faced commie sympathizers. Sagan just watched benignly.
Later, Sagan was instrumental in propagating the nuclear winter hoax. After all the headlines on nuclear winter died down, other atmosphere modeling guys studied the TTOPS report and found it simplistic and wired to result in a doomsday scenario.
frankly, i'm less concerned about the muddy-thinking inducing vices of Dr. Sagan than i am of the muddy-thinking inducing propaganda he inflicted upon society.
Now, let's suppose you've got a world-class IQ and you're into computers. Ok, that makes you a typical slashdotter. What else? it means you went to college/university. Now, the American educational establishment has certain stereotypical attitudes:
1. There are no absolutes, absolutely!
2. We will under no circumstances, ever, tolerate intolerance.
3. All persons are to be treated equally, unless that person is a member of a politically powerful group with a history of being oppressed, in which case they get preferential treatment.
4. Hate speech is universally condemned, unless the speaker is humiliating a Christian or Republican, or member of any other group outside the "intellectual" left.
5. Free inquiry and skepticism are universally Good Things until someone questions the welfare state, gun control, or the theory of evolution.
get the picture?
Now, let's suppose you have attitudes similar to those of Neal Stephenson's protagonist Randy in _Cryptonomicon_. He's a geek and he sees the emporer has no clothes. He keeps quiet to avoid a quarrel with his post-rational shackup. Keep the lid on things and he gets some, open his mouth and he hears a muddled melange of whining and sleeps on the couch. Geeks understand the pleasure/pain principle and keep quiet.
Geeks live in tension. Geeks often find themselves in the company of post-rational induhviduals. Geeks in order to *survive* have to be rigorously rational or their programs won't run. Geeks work on computers, not societies.
Fixing the idiocy enumerated above JUST ISN'T OUR JOB.
Maybe after the last cool hack has been debugged, the geeks will inherit the earth sweeping away the post-rational induhviduals like a bunch of pansy 3rd world bohemian have-nots.
In the meantime, Republican, Christian, heterosexual, gun loving and/or conservative Geeks keep a low profile, say aloud what they hear on NPR and stay in the closet.
If i recall my philosophy of science and scientific method, science is based upon conclusions drawn from repeatable experiment within a conceptual framework to the end of disproving erroneous hypotheses.
Note the distinction between the words "law" and "theory": When i say "Newton's law of gravity" it means that i have repeatable experiment that proves "Newton's theory of gravity." Science never goes beyond "Darwin's theory of evolution" because no repeatable experiment can prove that things happened as Darwin theorized. I'm not talking religion, i'm talking scientific method.
Evolution is a well supported theoretical framework. Like any theoretical framework, it must overcome the reasonable (and non-obstreporous) objections of skeptics. A good example of that is _Darwin's Black Box_ by Michael Behe, which does *not* assert blind adherence to the 1st chapters of Genesis but nevertheless points out reasonable challenges that the theory of evolution must overcome.
Anyone who thinks the theory of evolution cannot be questioned by skeptics must realize his dogmatism is substantially equivalent to that of the most closed-minded Fundamentalist.
Dogmatism, be it creationist or evolutionist does not advance science. If the state of Kansas has passed this law to create an enlightened spirit of inquiry about origins, that's a Good Thing. If Kansas has done so to dogmatically assert a creationist credo, this Christian says that's a Bad Thing.
(this is similar to The Mad Hawk's posting with a similar title.) However, instead of focusing upon the evolutionary pressure exerted upon the employer at the end of the HR pipeline, I'd like to focus upon the recruiters. In the original article, the headhunter was obviously a moron. given a choice between two headhunters, one competent and the other incompetent, who is the applicant and the employer going to go with?
If it turns out that moronic headhunters who can't effectively sort out buzzwords (e.g. JDBC) predominate, a niche in the hiring ecosystem will form for headhunters who are NOT moronic. non-moronic headhunters will place better fitting candidates and thus get more business. as quick as you can say Darwin Award, the moronic ones will either grow a brain or start selling Amway
frankly, the best gigs i've gotten have come word-of-mouth. that's the real motivation for a programmer to work on open source projects. with a good reputation, a lot of the channel noise from headhunters gets bypassed.
Slashdot Mirror
2. the bible has references in Genesis to people groups or tribes. can those groups be correlated with contemporary ethnic populations? such as was done with the black african jews that have the genetic marker associated with what the bible calls the Kohatites (sons of Aaron, or Levites).
3. are there similar genetic markers among other jews that could be traced back to other tribes, e.g. Judah. *Then* if the shroud stains are human blood, one could look for signs that it came from a descendent of Judah. If not, that would be strong evidence against the claims about the shroud of Turin.
4. using the fruit fly DNA, one could run simulations of micro-evolution and validate those simulations against all the experiments that have been done. Then, one could push the simulations forward to determine the mechanism for "punctuated equilibrium" that evolutionists claim to account for the gaps in the fossil record.
5. geneology records from the Mormon church & elsewhere could be checked for consistency with the genetics. unverified geneological hypotheses could be tested via DNA.
6. Determine the nationality of the "ice man" who came out of the alps. Also that of the caucasoid mummies found in central china.
7. Verification of Al Gore's claim that republicans have an extra chromosome.
"Nobody wants to look the artist in the eye and say, 'Giving your music away for free is going to make you lots of money' -- not while keeping a straight face, anyway," suggests solo artist, and founding member of the Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh.
I was reminded of a quote by Steve Ballmer or another MicorSerf who said that Open Source software doesn't/cannot exist because a programmer will not work for free.
And I am reminded by another quote by Erik Raymond that said that the truly great practitioners work for passion, not dollars.
(who works only for money up front? suits)
Can anyone look the principals at Red Hat, VA Linux, Slashdot/Andover, etc. in the eye and say "giving your software for free is going to bancrupt you?" -- not while keeping a straight face, anyway.
Back in the '70s gas shortage my pappy said, "You watch, when gas hits $1.00 a gallon, there'll be plenty of gasoline." So, last week I got a call from a headhunter. We got on famously and discussed a gig for which I was quite thoroughly qualified. After she looked at my resume she said the company was looking for someone with 2 years experience, not 20. And they were willing to pay about half what I'm making. I laughed and told her to instruct them to camp out on Calvin College's doorstep. Maybe they'll find an entry level kid who'll work for that. "Shortage" articles are written to make sure a ready supply of exploitable younger workers enter the profession. There will always be a "shortage" of any sort of people willing to work at below market rates.
In a telecommuting situation, both parents can be there for the kids. When I needed to concentrate, I stayed in the basement office and the kids knew to stay away. Just like in a work situation there are times when you're interruptable and others when you're not. You just have to have equivalent telltales that your coworkers or spouse can see and stay away (or interpret as a green light to shmooze).
Socially, I had some techie friends I'd pick up a phone and call from time to time when I was stuck on a problem. They were free to reciprocate.
The most significant aspect of telecommuting was the impact it had on my relationship with my wife. She's a stay-at-home mom and she was watching kids while I was hacking. I'd take coffee breaks at the kitchen table and hang out with my wife. It really had a positive effect on our relationship. Similarly, once the kids were at school we could take the phone off the hook at lunchtime...
Downside was that I'd be expected to do those "just five minute" errands around the house during work hours. And I had a tendency to work 24x7, or it felt that way. If I had a knotty problem I couldn't solve, I'd get up and shovel the sidewalk or something, or I'd get up in the middle of the night and code up a sudden inspiration.
Yesterday or the day before, I read bitter words to the effect that, "Fundamentalists can get anything on the ballot."
Well, fundamentalists (of which I am one) got the internet filter on the ballot. and thankfully, the measure was defeated. (i oppose internet filters, too.)
What the heck's wrong with getting divisive social issues put on the ballot? A worse problem is when unelected elites impose their morality upon others *without* the opportunity of putting the measure before the people for a vote.
smiles and cheers,
steve
One difference between the GWoC and I196 is that the Great Wall sticks up in the air. Thus, it can cast a shadow which will enhance its visiblity from space. Though the dimensions of interstate highways and the great wall are roughly equivalent, interstate highways do not cast shadows. It may be possible that the GWoC is visible in early morning or late evening local time as it casts a shadow that's much larger than itself. Another thing, Interstates are not generally built along ridges, and the Great Wall of China does follow ridges. To compare a highway nestled in a valley with a wall mounted on a ridge is probably not right. Note that I'm not claiming that the GWoC is naked-eye visible, but I do think that it can be much more visible than interstate highways are from space.
no, you don't get the walther PPK and the Aston Marton. In fact, you don't even get to order your martinis shaken, not stirred.
What you do get if you land a job with GCHQ is a lot more restrictions on your freedoms than if you took the equivalent gig at NSA. The Brits have the "official secrets act" which sorta sucks. Of course, the Brits don't have a 2nd amendment, either.
My (20 years ago) experience with the GCHQ guys were that they were all incredibly bright Oxbridge types. Back then, the tech opportunities in the States were much brighter than in England, so if you were the brightest kid at Harvard, you moved to Scottsdale, Arizona and started a software company whereas an equivalent brightest kid at Oxford or Cambridge took a job at GCHQ. Now, if you start a company in Arizona, you can do fun things like move it to Redmond, Washington, but if you take a gig at GCHQ, you're pretty much stuck in Cheltanham, UK.
Me, I preferred the sunny climes of western michigan, land of Lake Effect.
I'm a bible-believing baptist deacon and sunday school teacher (not bragging, merely establishing my credentials).
I say go for it!
When in college, hypsters reflected upon the state of the art in genetic engineering and said that "scientists had created life in a test tube." My fave response was to point out that it was equivalent to jacking up a car, replacing its tires and then saying you'd created an automobile.
The proposed experiment sounds analogous to trying to pull the engine, or changing out the carb. That's the kind of stuff one must do if one's to understand what's going on.
I think experiments like this one is exactly what is needed to get creationists like me and evolutionists to quit shouting propaganda at each other and get on with the task of learning the underlying mechanisms at work in reality.
I recall reading a program listing in "Creative Computing" magazine that when poked in and run would cause the computer (mebbe a TRS80 or Apple II or earlier) to emit EMI signals that could be detected on an AM radio placed atop the computer. (At that time, my Rockwell and many of my friends' TI calculators could be heard on the AM band when you told them to calculate large factorials.) The article said that this program would play the Minute Waltz on your AM Radio.
I just need to find an attic wherein is stored a stack of '78 vintage computer magazines.
in the article, the example is given of a hypothetical Linux fork called "fooware os" and the additional hypothetical that the perpetrator of fooware is a crack ninja programmer with an army of software ninjas straight out of a bruce lee film.
one alternative not explored was suppose the fooware ninjas come up with a cool thing and Linus says, "no way, that's not going into the kernel." in this case, the coolness of the cool thing increases pressure on the system to either accept the patches into Linux, or switchover form Linux to Fooware.
what's lovely is how OpenSource routes around intransigence. we're all human, nobody's perfect, and the character traits that make us great software developers also cause us to get in our own way. when that happens, the fooware os fork becomes a Good Thing.
Also, hidden in the fork between gnu/emacs and xemacs was the different programming styles. the procedural versus oo indicates that team based projects will probably stick with OO or easily modularized projects, and gnarlie "keep it all inside one head" projects will be one-great-man projects. the risk of the gnarlies is the death or disinterest of the one-great-man. note how OO and componentized strategies favor open source teaming.
sorry, i'm stating the obvious.
1. find out exactly who those lawyers represent in "the film industry" and then boycott and badmouth the companies in the most creative ways possible. How many times have you seen a Hollywood movie where the villains are evil corporate types? My isn't that a meme to surf upon. Can you imagine the parody websites?
2. find out exactly which countries are free of copyright laws such as these. move public reverse engineering there. everyone else in the gulag must circulate source samizdat.
3. send money to someone, say ESR or RMS (i don't care) to start a legal defense fund, and recruit right-thinking lawyers who value freedom and progress to work pro bono defending Derek et al.
4. this would be tricky: Try an "Atlas Shrugged" play where all open source software would just quit working on a chosen protest day. 1/1/00?
Think of it as cosmic justice. I remember when Toshiba sold the Russians the machine tools they needed to make their nuclear submarines' propellers a zillion times quieter.
This is also a cautionary tale for cryptologists that every cryptanalyst knows by heart.
Cryptologists will often be deluded into thinking their systems are far more secure than they really are. Cryptanalysts stay in business because of this.
so, i was going to buy a book from Amazon a couple weeks back. then i read on slashdot that Amazon had acquired a patent on one-click. so, when i went to the online bookstore to effect my purchase my fingers typed www.fatbrain.com/
i suppose that if every slashdotter who was annoyed at the Amazon patent strategy did the same, Amazon might be less inclined assert the patent.
no, i don't own stock or work for or have a brother in law at fatbrain or barnes & noble or anything. i'm just negatively inclined toward amazon right now.
if i have to really think thru something difficult, you can count on either total silence or something baroque: Bach, Vivaldi, Bach, Pacobel, and Bach. Oh, did I mention Bach? But that's more algorithm design and not nuts and bolts hacking.
Now, let's suppose its 3:30pm friday and i'm about to go home. "Stranglehold" by Nugent, or "Mars" by Holst. Van Hagar or Def Lepperd also helps to raise the spirits during those last hours at work.
Satriani's "Surfing with the Alien" is regarded by some to be the ultimate programming CD. I'm inclined to agree. I keep Satriani's stuff going a lot while hacking. That's what's wonderful about MP3s, you can put in a day's worth of programming music on a CD-ROM and never have to cycle CDs.
i found many of the insights of the article on point. methinks there may have been an agenda behind it. but i'd worry if i hadn't noticed an agenda. i tremble to speculate that it was high-class fud: some of the info was unattributed accusations of Linux being unstable and buggy and no different than IBM's mainframe strategy. sounded exactly like a M$ fudpiece i read last summer.
one pertinent observation needs to be made. the author said that democrasy is the first thing that gets sacrificed for speed. then he made the claim that Linux needs speed to compete with Microsoft. I think that is not true in the least.
If Microsoft was continually putting new technology and innovation into things like Office, and Windows, that might be true. But what have we seen Microsoft do lately? The changes of Office97 over Office95 and maybe (we'll see) Office2k are not essential to the functionality of word processing, spreadsheets and databases. Instead, they're the 90s equivalent of sheet-metal and tail fins: The planned obsolescence of the 50s Detroit/General Motors reborn in the 90s in Redmond, WA.
Open source efforts do not need to track sheet-metal changes and anti-competitive incompatibility versions. Open Source projects need only develop the best possible editor, compiler, etc. and improve upon it incrementally.
the QNX demo floppy has been around for at least a year, maybe two. i work with QNX and i'm not particularly impressed. if i were an OS expert, i'd talk about monolithic kernels and probably have some opinion about its "inherent superiority," but i don't, so i just marvel at how crufty it all is.
i was a fresh graduate with a masters' from MSU in applied mathematics. Jimmy Carter was president when i interviewed and they had a hiring freeze on. Except for mathematicians. i got the job as a CryptoMathematician. Mathematicians ruled the roost. Never been any place like that before or since.
it was like living inside a Clancy novel. lots of toys. lots of secret stuff. and a lot of self-importance you don't notice until you're away for a while: the really secret stuff that i did had already been written up in Jack Anderson's column.
you'll never get into an office with more stimulating and smart people than NSA. most of the guys there were flaming liberals, which was surprising, but it makes sense, since government workers tend to lean democrat, not republican. i was a civilian, the military guys were fun.
the process of getting in was a little demeaning, but i didn't notice in my youthful idealism. they basically give you all these psychological tests to discover (1) are you a genius? and (2) are you in any way untrustworthy? then there's polygraph tests to make sure that question #2 is correctly answered. lot of lifestyle questions had to get answered right. (i'm straight as an arrow sexually, never done drugs and in '80 that was important.) they didn't want to hire people who were "blackmailable." Thus at the time gays were discriminated against. That's probably no longer true, because if one is in the closet, there's don't ask/don't tell, and if one's out of the closet, there's no basis for blackmail.
btw, Alan Turing committed suicide because he was gay, worked at GCHQ (the British NSA), the Ruskies found out and tried to blackmail him.
What kinds of secret stuff goes on there? imagine the best science you can find on the best university. now apply that to figuring out what the bad guys are doing. meanwhile, have the brightest boys play with the biggest toys to push the state of the art in mathematics and computer science.
sorta sad though. i went to the National Cryptologic Museum last summer and saw that one of the computers i worked on was no longer state-of-the-art, but was now literally, a museum piece. sigh. i'm getting old. it's probably all changed in the last 20 years.
anyway, it was a good first gig out of grad school and if you can get in, you'll have fun.
The most famous of which is the Venona traffic in which case Russian spy traffic was encrypted using a one time pad. *But* the Ruskies lost part of a copy of that pad in Finland and the Finns gave us a copy. God bless the Finns. That OTP key was used to decrypt Rusky spook traffic here.
After the Russians opened their archives, scholars started reading Venona traffic from *that* end and someone got around to asking, "Why does NSA still have all this stuff classified?" So the Venona decrypts were released. It turns out that the Rosenbergs weren't exactly the innocent victims of red-baiting that the Lefty press claimed for decades.
ww2 sigint was categorized under at least two codewords: magic and ultra.
if you read _Cryptonomicon_ there's a character who'd had a nervous breakdown in a bathrobe. in reality, this character was none other than William Friedman who broke the Papanese purple machine. he did this by studying ciphertext alone. this was Magic.
Conversely, workmen smuggled parts of enigma machines out of german factories to Poland, where Polish cryptanalists devised the crypto attack. enough parts were smuggled out for the Poles to build a complete enigma machine. the Brits received all this intel after Poland fell. the Brits were effective in automating the Poles' crypto attack. this was Ultra.
All the Magic intel came from cryptanalysis based solely upon studying ciphertext, whereas the ultra intel came from studying an intact enigma machine. (when steckered enigma came out, it took the allies *months* to figure out the variation in the rotor motion. this almost cost us the battle of the atlantic.) the cryptanalytic achievement of William Friedman, Lambros Dimitrious and the organization that became the NSA was far more significant than the cryptanalytical achievement of the Brits' GCHQ.
btw, _Cryptonomicon_ is a veiled reference to the _MilCrypt_ volumes, some of which I believe you can buy from Agean Park Press.
incidentally, i'd like to ask Neal Stephenson if i ever meet him, "Was Randy's grandfather patterened after Lambros Dimitrious?"
i think this is all written up in _the codebreakers_ by David Kahn. there are also some very good books now available about "Venona" that describe what the Russians were doing. if ever between Washington DC and Baltimore on the BW Parkway, stop in at the National Cryptologic Museum at the NSA exit.
in the novel _1984_, the government redefined words to mean exactly what they wanted them to mean. this was called newspeak.
since 1973, privacy has meant that the government may not protect the life of a fetus, skirting the issue of just what sort of non-person a fetus is.
soon, privacy shall mean that the government can snoop into one's records or communications whenever it wants.
a government that can redefine words' meaning to give to one group can later redefine words' meaning to take from others. (please don't take this as an anti-abortion polemic as much as an observation of the downside of legal positivism.)
Frank Borman the astronaut tells an unhappy tale of one time he was invited by Sagan to some seminar or another and he ended up getting called a baby killer militarist by a bunch of snotty faced commie sympathizers. Sagan just watched benignly.
Later, Sagan was instrumental in propagating the nuclear winter hoax. After all the headlines on nuclear winter died down, other atmosphere modeling guys studied the TTOPS report and found it simplistic and wired to result in a doomsday scenario.
frankly, i'm less concerned about the muddy-thinking inducing vices of Dr. Sagan than i am of the muddy-thinking inducing propaganda he inflicted upon society.
...gets hammered down.
Now, let's suppose you've got a world-class IQ and you're into computers. Ok, that makes you a typical slashdotter. What else? it means you went to college/university. Now, the American educational establishment has certain stereotypical attitudes:
1. There are no absolutes, absolutely!
2. We will under no circumstances, ever, tolerate intolerance.
3. All persons are to be treated equally, unless that person is a member of a politically powerful group with a history of being oppressed, in which case they get preferential treatment.
4. Hate speech is universally condemned, unless the speaker is humiliating a Christian or Republican, or member of any other group outside the "intellectual" left.
5. Free inquiry and skepticism are universally Good Things until someone questions the welfare state, gun control, or the theory of evolution.
get the picture?
Now, let's suppose you have attitudes similar to those of Neal Stephenson's protagonist Randy in _Cryptonomicon_. He's a geek and he sees the emporer has no clothes. He keeps quiet to avoid a quarrel with his post-rational shackup. Keep the lid on things and he gets some, open his mouth and he hears a muddled melange of whining and sleeps on the couch. Geeks understand the pleasure/pain principle and keep quiet.
Geeks live in tension. Geeks often find themselves in the company of post-rational induhviduals. Geeks in order to *survive* have to be rigorously rational or their programs won't run. Geeks work on computers, not societies.
Fixing the idiocy enumerated above JUST ISN'T OUR JOB.
Maybe after the last cool hack has been debugged, the geeks will inherit the earth sweeping away the post-rational induhviduals like a bunch of pansy 3rd world bohemian have-nots.
In the meantime, Republican, Christian, heterosexual, gun loving and/or conservative Geeks keep a low profile, say aloud what they hear on NPR and stay in the closet.
smiles and cheers,
steve
If i recall my philosophy of science and scientific method, science is based upon conclusions drawn from repeatable experiment within a conceptual framework to the end of disproving erroneous hypotheses.
Note the distinction between the words "law" and "theory": When i say "Newton's law of gravity" it means that i have repeatable experiment that proves "Newton's theory of gravity." Science never goes beyond "Darwin's theory of evolution" because no repeatable experiment can prove that things happened as Darwin theorized. I'm not talking religion, i'm talking scientific method.
Evolution is a well supported theoretical framework. Like any theoretical framework, it must overcome the reasonable (and non-obstreporous) objections of skeptics. A good example of that is _Darwin's Black Box_ by Michael Behe, which does *not* assert blind adherence to the 1st chapters of Genesis but nevertheless points out reasonable challenges that the theory of evolution must overcome.
Anyone who thinks the theory of evolution cannot be questioned by skeptics must realize his dogmatism is substantially equivalent to that of the most closed-minded Fundamentalist.
Dogmatism, be it creationist or evolutionist does not advance science. If the state of Kansas has passed this law to create an enlightened spirit of inquiry about origins, that's a Good Thing. If Kansas has done so to dogmatically assert a creationist credo, this Christian says that's a Bad Thing.
(this is similar to The Mad Hawk's posting with a similar title.) However, instead of focusing upon the evolutionary pressure exerted upon the employer at the end of the HR pipeline, I'd like to focus upon the recruiters. In the original article, the headhunter was obviously a moron. given a choice between two headhunters, one competent and the other incompetent, who is the applicant and the employer going to go with?
If it turns out that moronic headhunters who can't effectively sort out buzzwords (e.g. JDBC) predominate, a niche in the hiring ecosystem will form for headhunters who are NOT moronic. non-moronic headhunters will place better fitting candidates and thus get more business. as quick as you can say Darwin Award, the moronic ones will either grow a brain or start selling Amway
frankly, the best gigs i've gotten have come word-of-mouth. that's the real motivation for a programmer to work on open source projects. with a good reputation, a lot of the channel noise from headhunters gets bypassed.
'nuff said