ChromeOS encrypts all user data by default, automatically verifies the integrity of all software during startup, and reverts to a known-good version in the event any compromise is discovered. Boot verification is based on code and data stored in ROM, so subverting it requires modifying the hardware. Run-time compromise must be done by leveraging web-style attacks (cross-site scripting, etc.) and can normally only achieve what web-style attacks can achieve which is access to data from other sites, etc. In the event deeper compromise is achieved, it's lost as soon as the device is restarted, until the user visits the malicious web site again.
Use a Chromebook, connect only to trusted sites and only over SSL, and you become an extremely hard target for compromise. Little if any of your data is actually stored on the device, what is cached on it is encrypted. When you get home, reboot and you're very, very likely to have a trustworthy system again. Do a factory reset and it's guaranteed to be clean (barring hardware hacks), since all data will be gone, and any modified code will be detected by the verified boot process. And, as a last resort, you only paid $200 for the thing, so if you fear hardware hacks, just chuck it and buy a new one. It's unlikely to add more than about 5% to the cost of your trip.
Three points: One, since you have a husband I'm assuming you're a woman. Women are wired a little differently in this respect, I think. Not completely different, but substantially. Attribute it to what you will, men are by nature more tempted to philandering, so those of us who want to ensure it doesn't happen owe it to ourselves and our wives to take some precautions. I think women should also be careful, but it's less risky for them unless the marriage is pretty bad in many ways, in which case your position may have merit.
Second, I wasn't saying anything about the only thing keeping someone in the marriage being lack of opportunity. I have no lack of opportunity now. What I said is that it's wise to avoid closeness with a member of the opposite sex, to avoid building an emotion-laden relationship that could turn into romantic feelings. I know a number of women with whom I could have that kind of relationship, but I don't want to. At a purely hedonistic level, it would be fun, and I'm perfectly capable of developing a romantic relationship with another woman while still being in love with my wife. I also know that were I to do such a thing, it would feel more... intense... than what I share with my wife. Shallower, but more intense, because novelty is intense. I also have no doubt whatsoever that I would end up regretting the decision with all my heart, but that wouldn't come until later (which, BTW, appears to me to be yet another difference between men and women in this area; many (most?) women seem incapable of not considering the long-term impact of such relationship decisions, while many (most?) men find it hard to make themselves consider such things in the heat of the moment).
Third, you seem to place far too much emphasis on the role of sex in marriage -- or maybe you're just using it as a proxy for relationship health as a whole, which is a female thing to do (I think men see sex as a way to achieve emotional closeness, while women see sex as an expression of closeness already felt -- there's a very fundamental difference between those views). Sex is important, certainly, but if sex is the only thing making you wish you had someone other than your spouse then you'd be really foolish to act on that desire, because finding someone with whom you're deeply compatible is much harder than finding someone who is sexually desirable. If the sex in your marriage is lousy, you're much better of working on fixing that than on looking elsewhere. But I'll note again that for men, the sex can be great and they'll still be tempted. That doesn't make cheating okay -- not at all. But I think it's a different sort of issue for men.
Out of curiosity, how long have you been married? My 22nd anniversary is coming up.
Any serious exec is going to use a throw-away laptop for travelling to China. A $400 special will keep you online abroad, and then it can be destroyed as a business expense. Cheap insurance against hacking.
Nah. Take a $200 Chromebook. Factory reset it when you get back and you don't have to destroy it.
We saw this coming and bought 100% of our replacement servers and OSes and CALs and Exchange and Exchange CALs on Nov 30th. We're migrating from 4 older servers down to 2 so this just made up speed up and buy em at the last second instead of waiting 2 more weeks. Take that, Microsoft.
You just delayed the bite, you didn't avoid it.
However, if you work hard to find alternatives you may be able to switch before it catches up to you.
guess who's testing Libre Office Base with our Access databases this week.
Had that been true in the mid- to late 1700s, the United States would still be a set of British colonies. Within American political theory, at least, possession of arms by the common citizen is of critical importance to political freedom, since it provides the ultimate recourse should the political process be subverted so that it no longer recognizes the will of the people. This is the reason why the ability to manufacture arms at home is of value, because such self-manufactured arms cannot be regulated.
I realize many people have such deep faith in the inevitability of democratic processes that this seems silly. Personally, I hope they're right, because armed rebellions are very messy, nasty affairs, and there's no guarantee that what comes out the other end will be an improvement. But I see great value in preserving the option.
(To head off a common objection: Yes, 50 million people armed with rifles can successfully defeat a few hundred thousand armed with tanks and military aircraft. The first step is to use the rifles to acquire tanks and military aircraft. Even a few thousand people armed with rifles and improvised explosives can pose a serious challenge to a much larger modern military force, though not defeat it. In practice, merely having sufficient arms to force an open conflict would probably be enough to get a large portion of the military to refuse to fire on their fellow citizens, if not outright join them.)
Of course, we should be talking about the cost of an education. College tuition is seriously overpriced but instead everyone harps on student loans. And the government backing those loans simply adds fuel to the fire, creating a massive bubble.
Student loan debt problems are just evidence that fiscal irresponsibility starts young in this country. I'm not sure who we should blame for that, it doesn't seem right to blame the kids... kids are supposed to be stupid. But whatever the reason is for this widespread foolishness, it's foolishness. Just because someone will loan you far more money than you can pay back doesn't mean you should borrow it. Government backing of student loans is clearly a piece of the problem; lenders would be far more cautious in the amounts they loan without that assurance.
None of this has anything to do with the "cost of education", however. High tuitions are the result of the foolishness, not the cause. If students (or their parents, or advisors, or lenders, or...) weren't being stupid, they'd look at the high tuitions of the big schools and realize that's a bad idea. They'd go to smaller state colleges, or even to community colleges and then transfer. They'd work summer jobs, and part-time during school to help pay for it. The result would be downward pressure on tuitions where there currently is none. Big, expensive schools would see declining enrollment rates and have to reduce prices, which would require them to economize and become more efficient.
As long as students are willing to pay whatever the schools ask, and as long as there are government backed avenues to rack up whatever levels of debt are required to cover those bills, it'll just keep getting worse.
(My own experience: I went to a small four-year state university near my home so I could live with my parents, worked a part-time job -- writing code -- kept my grades very high so I could compete for academic tuition waivers and joined the Air Force Reserve to get GI Bill money. The GI Bill + tuition waivers more than covered the cost of school, and the part-time job made my car payments, bought gas, etc. I graduated with two BS degrees, some good work experience and not only no debt, but some money in the bank. It's really not that hard to get an education without a pile of debt, it just requires some hard work and some compromises.)
I don't see why you disparage option a). It's clearly the best of them, because b) has all of the problems of a) plus its own problems Why? Because in b), the federal government has to come up with the tax revenue to fund the bond redemptions, and tax revenue comes from private sector companies, some directly, mostly from their employees. So when massive inflation crushes many of the revenue-generating companies, and unemployment skyrockets, the tax base gets smashed flat, meaning even more inflation is required to fund the bond redemption.
But even more important, had the money been invested in private markets, which is to say, had the money been invested, period, rather than simply being spent, massive inflation would have been less necessary. Option b) is a big part of the problem whose solution your'e trying to say is less painful under option b).
Firstly, the actual maze produced isn't random but is a visualisation of the pseudo-random algorithm used in C64 basic. Who's to say that this doesn't contain structure just as complex as that of the mandelbrot set?
Doesn't matter. Try it with a different PRNG, or a TRNG, and you'll get the same maze-like effect, because the effect comes from the pattern-matching ability of the human mind, not from any real patterns in the slashes.
Secondly, the mandelbrot set may not really contain the structures that we see at all. All those lovely spirals and so-on might just be floating-point artifacts. No-one knows for sure.
Not true. The colors are representations of how many iterations it takes for the point to escape the unit circle (which shows that its absolute value will increase without bound). In portions of the edges of the set (the set itself is the points which remain bounded -- those are indeed hard to be certain of) the number of iterations is small, and it's easy to prove that the limits of the floating point representation are not being tested. Once you get "deeper", of course, floating point error becomes more significant. But the patterns don't change, which is itself interesting.
What you say is true, but in practice it's a distinction without a difference.
When a government can't pay its debts, it has two basic options: default or devalue.
Default is decidedly unlikely in the case of the United States. Unless we decide to actually pay down the debt, devaluation is what we'll do... and the president doesn't have to do anything bizarre like declaring some disk as being worth some huge amount. It's much simpler than that. The fed will simply keep set the prime lending rate to zero and keep it there, which will have the effect of creating all of the money anyone wants to borrow, which will create heavy inflation, reducing the real value of the debt until it gets to a level where it can be paid.
I'd think some really interesting things could be done with machine learning. A truly optimal elevator control system would be one that adapts itself over time.
Sheer body mass probably also plays a non-trivial role. Six-foot, 250+-pound white guys are pretty common. Asians of similar mass certainly exist (and bigger!) but they're pretty rare. Assuming it's not all fat, a 250-pound person has a big advantage over a 125-pound person when it comes to tolerating alcohol.
Really? Have you seen what sometimes gets called art? For that matter, it's possible to call anything art -- doesn't mean it has any value.
Yes really. Value? Who the fuck are you to judge? I'll tell you this, the French government does fund it's artists properly, and without judgement, and it's a better country for it.
Who are you to judge? I'm an artist (photographer), and I'd love it if I got government funding so I could do more. Why shouldn't I?
Why do you need to be persuaded here and not with respect to science or art? What is the difference?
Because I've already been persuaded by scientists and artists being government funded. But I haven't been yet persuaded by the concept of the government funding coders. In fact yours is the first suggestion I've come across of such a thing.
That's a non-answer. And you obviously haven't been paying attention if you haven't seen suggestions that governments should fund Free Software development.
Again, what is the difference? And your original statement is the very definition of a blank check. You didn't put any constraints or limitations on it whatsoever.
There's a difference between funding without judgement of results and a blank check. A blank cheque means the recipient decides how much money they are going to get. No one is suggesting that.
So who does decide the funding amount? And on what basis do they decide?
It sort of reminds me of similar little tricks used to generate landscapes and other such things... mandelbrot comes to mind.
Except that the Mandelbrot set, for example, really is much, much more interesting. It actually has a great deal of sophisticated structure, that's highly chaotic (in both typical and mathematical senses of the word) but not random at all. Not at all comparable to this example, whose output has no real structure at all, but just exploits the tendency of the human brain to find patterns whether or not they exist.
Public money spent on having artists do art is money well spent.
I couldn't agree more.
Really? Have you seen what sometimes gets called art? For that matter, it's possible to call anything art -- doesn't mean it has any value.
Public money spent on having coders write code is money well spent.
There I need to be persuaded. I need to know what long term good they will likely produce that the commercial software industry will not. I'm not saying no, I just want to know what the benefits are in the same way as I know the benefits of scientists and artists being publicly funded.
Why do you need to be persuaded here and not with respect to science or art? What is the difference?
The fact is that whether or not it's well spent depends on what kind of work is done, how the work is done, and what the results are.
Of course there are no blank cheques. It's not about pre-judging the results. Because often the results cannot be predicted before the work is done. Both in science and the arts. Not so sure about coding though.
Again, what is the difference? And your original statement is the very definition of a blank check. You didn't put any constraints or limitations on it whatsoever.
The paper presentation at CCS 2002 was pretty good. I was one of the about 60 people in the room and 5 minutes in I had the feeling of witnessing history in the making.
I suppose that feeling could have arisen from shock that people from a major corporation were being allowed to say it out loud. The basic point is fundamentally obvious to anyone who's taken an information theory course (or thought hard about it for a while). DRM, when implemented on a general-purpose computer wholly under the control of its owner, is an exercise in trying to give someone a piece of information and then take it back. It's impossible, period.
This plan, as laid out, smells like "Workfare for Scientists".
Public money spent on having scientists do science is money well spent.
Public money spent on having artists do art is money well spent.
Public money spent on having coders write code is money well spent.
Those are just as valid as your claim. The fact is that whether or not it's well spent depends on what kind of work is done, how the work is done, and what the results are. It's perfectly possible to have a lot of scientists exploring obscure and relatively useless areas of knowledge, to no net benefit. It's also perfectly possible to have scientists exploring potentially very useful areas of knowledge but doing it ineffectively and wastefully.
I don't know if this plan is a good idea or not... it could be. There's no doubt that achieving the 5-5-5 goal would have enormous beneficial impact. Whether or not this plan will achieve it, or anything of substance is harder to say -- it will depend on how the money is spent. I think the odds of success would be higher with an X Prize approach: Offer a $120M prize to anyone who succeeds at creating a practical* battery technology with 5X the energy density for 1/5th the cost by 2018 and it'll probably spark even more research -- and if it fails to achieve the goals we'll probably still have achieved significant progress but without spending a dime of public money. If it does achieve the goals, well, it was a bargain.
* "Practical" would need to be defined. It would obviously need to include some requirements around the environmental impact of production/disposal, useful battery lifetime and charging rates.
Then you are very odd. And I disagree with your conclusion, but then, I got married with the expectation that it is forever, and so I work to keep my marriage strong and avoid doing anything that risks weakening it.
I suppose "One's" never stopped to consider that maybe those Americans who make fiscal security a priority over popping out offspring do so for the benefit of said potential offspring.
When those older people grew up "popping out offspring" was the route to fiscal security. Maybe they didn't think of it that way, exactly, but it was. Lots of hands to help work the farm, and lots of kids to help support the parents when the parents got old. A larger family was a wealthier family.
And, interestingly, when you have a national Ponzi scheme like Social Security running... more kids is also the path to fiscal security for people in their old age, except on a collective rather than individual family basis. For individual families the economic realities are different now, and it's smarter to keep your family smaller, but as those parents age and start living on social security they'll end up wishing their generation had popped out a lot more offspring. Again, they probably won't think about it that way, but that's the reality.
Stop your whining. It was your generation in power that decided that starting multiple wars, deregulating the financial system, and then cutting taxes at the same time was a good idea. Your generation doesn't deserve shit for retirement compared to how your generation looted and pillaged the country thinking that your kids would clean it up.
Except that it wasn't the OP's generation that did all of that, at least not alone. It was all of the voting generations. Oh, and you forgot to include massively expanding entitlements (particularly Medicare) and bailing out the banks in your list of fiscal irresponsibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
ChromeOS encrypts all user data by default, automatically verifies the integrity of all software during startup, and reverts to a known-good version in the event any compromise is discovered. Boot verification is based on code and data stored in ROM, so subverting it requires modifying the hardware. Run-time compromise must be done by leveraging web-style attacks (cross-site scripting, etc.) and can normally only achieve what web-style attacks can achieve which is access to data from other sites, etc. In the event deeper compromise is achieved, it's lost as soon as the device is restarted, until the user visits the malicious web site again.
Use a Chromebook, connect only to trusted sites and only over SSL, and you become an extremely hard target for compromise. Little if any of your data is actually stored on the device, what is cached on it is encrypted. When you get home, reboot and you're very, very likely to have a trustworthy system again. Do a factory reset and it's guaranteed to be clean (barring hardware hacks), since all data will be gone, and any modified code will be detected by the verified boot process. And, as a last resort, you only paid $200 for the thing, so if you fear hardware hacks, just chuck it and buy a new one. It's unlikely to add more than about 5% to the cost of your trip.
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview
Three points: One, since you have a husband I'm assuming you're a woman. Women are wired a little differently in this respect, I think. Not completely different, but substantially. Attribute it to what you will, men are by nature more tempted to philandering, so those of us who want to ensure it doesn't happen owe it to ourselves and our wives to take some precautions. I think women should also be careful, but it's less risky for them unless the marriage is pretty bad in many ways, in which case your position may have merit.
Second, I wasn't saying anything about the only thing keeping someone in the marriage being lack of opportunity. I have no lack of opportunity now. What I said is that it's wise to avoid closeness with a member of the opposite sex, to avoid building an emotion-laden relationship that could turn into romantic feelings. I know a number of women with whom I could have that kind of relationship, but I don't want to. At a purely hedonistic level, it would be fun, and I'm perfectly capable of developing a romantic relationship with another woman while still being in love with my wife. I also know that were I to do such a thing, it would feel more... intense... than what I share with my wife. Shallower, but more intense, because novelty is intense. I also have no doubt whatsoever that I would end up regretting the decision with all my heart, but that wouldn't come until later (which, BTW, appears to me to be yet another difference between men and women in this area; many (most?) women seem incapable of not considering the long-term impact of such relationship decisions, while many (most?) men find it hard to make themselves consider such things in the heat of the moment).
Third, you seem to place far too much emphasis on the role of sex in marriage -- or maybe you're just using it as a proxy for relationship health as a whole, which is a female thing to do (I think men see sex as a way to achieve emotional closeness, while women see sex as an expression of closeness already felt -- there's a very fundamental difference between those views). Sex is important, certainly, but if sex is the only thing making you wish you had someone other than your spouse then you'd be really foolish to act on that desire, because finding someone with whom you're deeply compatible is much harder than finding someone who is sexually desirable. If the sex in your marriage is lousy, you're much better of working on fixing that than on looking elsewhere. But I'll note again that for men, the sex can be great and they'll still be tempted. That doesn't make cheating okay -- not at all. But I think it's a different sort of issue for men.
Out of curiosity, how long have you been married? My 22nd anniversary is coming up.
Any serious exec is going to use a throw-away laptop for travelling to China. A $400 special will keep you online abroad, and then it can be destroyed as a business expense. Cheap insurance against hacking.
Nah. Take a $200 Chromebook. Factory reset it when you get back and you don't have to destroy it.
We saw this coming and bought 100% of our replacement servers and OSes and CALs and Exchange and Exchange CALs on Nov 30th. We're migrating from 4 older servers down to 2 so this just made up speed up and buy em at the last second instead of waiting 2 more weeks. Take that, Microsoft.
You just delayed the bite, you didn't avoid it.
However, if you work hard to find alternatives you may be able to switch before it catches up to you.
guess who's testing Libre Office Base with our Access databases this week.
That's a good place to start.
The government should have a monopoly on violence
Had that been true in the mid- to late 1700s, the United States would still be a set of British colonies. Within American political theory, at least, possession of arms by the common citizen is of critical importance to political freedom, since it provides the ultimate recourse should the political process be subverted so that it no longer recognizes the will of the people. This is the reason why the ability to manufacture arms at home is of value, because such self-manufactured arms cannot be regulated.
I realize many people have such deep faith in the inevitability of democratic processes that this seems silly. Personally, I hope they're right, because armed rebellions are very messy, nasty affairs, and there's no guarantee that what comes out the other end will be an improvement. But I see great value in preserving the option.
(To head off a common objection: Yes, 50 million people armed with rifles can successfully defeat a few hundred thousand armed with tanks and military aircraft. The first step is to use the rifles to acquire tanks and military aircraft. Even a few thousand people armed with rifles and improvised explosives can pose a serious challenge to a much larger modern military force, though not defeat it. In practice, merely having sufficient arms to force an open conflict would probably be enough to get a large portion of the military to refuse to fire on their fellow citizens, if not outright join them.)
Of course, we should be talking about the cost of an education. College tuition is seriously overpriced but instead everyone harps on student loans. And the government backing those loans simply adds fuel to the fire, creating a massive bubble.
Student loan debt problems are just evidence that fiscal irresponsibility starts young in this country. I'm not sure who we should blame for that, it doesn't seem right to blame the kids... kids are supposed to be stupid. But whatever the reason is for this widespread foolishness, it's foolishness. Just because someone will loan you far more money than you can pay back doesn't mean you should borrow it. Government backing of student loans is clearly a piece of the problem; lenders would be far more cautious in the amounts they loan without that assurance.
None of this has anything to do with the "cost of education", however. High tuitions are the result of the foolishness, not the cause. If students (or their parents, or advisors, or lenders, or...) weren't being stupid, they'd look at the high tuitions of the big schools and realize that's a bad idea. They'd go to smaller state colleges, or even to community colleges and then transfer. They'd work summer jobs, and part-time during school to help pay for it. The result would be downward pressure on tuitions where there currently is none. Big, expensive schools would see declining enrollment rates and have to reduce prices, which would require them to economize and become more efficient.
As long as students are willing to pay whatever the schools ask, and as long as there are government backed avenues to rack up whatever levels of debt are required to cover those bills, it'll just keep getting worse.
(My own experience: I went to a small four-year state university near my home so I could live with my parents, worked a part-time job -- writing code -- kept my grades very high so I could compete for academic tuition waivers and joined the Air Force Reserve to get GI Bill money. The GI Bill + tuition waivers more than covered the cost of school, and the part-time job made my car payments, bought gas, etc. I graduated with two BS degrees, some good work experience and not only no debt, but some money in the bank. It's really not that hard to get an education without a pile of debt, it just requires some hard work and some compromises.)
I don't see why you disparage option a). It's clearly the best of them, because b) has all of the problems of a) plus its own problems Why? Because in b), the federal government has to come up with the tax revenue to fund the bond redemptions, and tax revenue comes from private sector companies, some directly, mostly from their employees. So when massive inflation crushes many of the revenue-generating companies, and unemployment skyrockets, the tax base gets smashed flat, meaning even more inflation is required to fund the bond redemption.
But even more important, had the money been invested in private markets, which is to say, had the money been invested, period, rather than simply being spent, massive inflation would have been less necessary. Option b) is a big part of the problem whose solution your'e trying to say is less painful under option b).
Someone is going to HAVE to lose out, to not get all of what they promised. The coming fight is who is going to be left holding the bag.
Which is how Ponzi schemes always end. But you knew that.
Firstly, the actual maze produced isn't random but is a visualisation of the pseudo-random algorithm used in C64 basic. Who's to say that this doesn't contain structure just as complex as that of the mandelbrot set?
Doesn't matter. Try it with a different PRNG, or a TRNG, and you'll get the same maze-like effect, because the effect comes from the pattern-matching ability of the human mind, not from any real patterns in the slashes.
Secondly, the mandelbrot set may not really contain the structures that we see at all. All those lovely spirals and so-on might just be floating-point artifacts. No-one knows for sure.
Not true. The colors are representations of how many iterations it takes for the point to escape the unit circle (which shows that its absolute value will increase without bound). In portions of the edges of the set (the set itself is the points which remain bounded -- those are indeed hard to be certain of) the number of iterations is small, and it's easy to prove that the limits of the floating point representation are not being tested. Once you get "deeper", of course, floating point error becomes more significant. But the patterns don't change, which is itself interesting.
You use many words to say basically nothing. Feel free to reply; I'll let you have the last word.
What you say is true, but in practice it's a distinction without a difference.
When a government can't pay its debts, it has two basic options: default or devalue.
Default is decidedly unlikely in the case of the United States. Unless we decide to actually pay down the debt, devaluation is what we'll do... and the president doesn't have to do anything bizarre like declaring some disk as being worth some huge amount. It's much simpler than that. The fed will simply keep set the prime lending rate to zero and keep it there, which will have the effect of creating all of the money anyone wants to borrow, which will create heavy inflation, reducing the real value of the debt until it gets to a level where it can be paid.
This is not, however, an outcome to be desired.
I'd think some really interesting things could be done with machine learning. A truly optimal elevator control system would be one that adapts itself over time.
Sheer body mass probably also plays a non-trivial role. Six-foot, 250+-pound white guys are pretty common. Asians of similar mass certainly exist (and bigger!) but they're pretty rare. Assuming it's not all fat, a 250-pound person has a big advantage over a 125-pound person when it comes to tolerating alcohol.
Really? Have you seen what sometimes gets called art? For that matter, it's possible to call anything art -- doesn't mean it has any value.
Yes really. Value? Who the fuck are you to judge? I'll tell you this, the French government does fund it's artists properly, and without judgement, and it's a better country for it.
Who are you to judge? I'm an artist (photographer), and I'd love it if I got government funding so I could do more. Why shouldn't I?
Why do you need to be persuaded here and not with respect to science or art? What is the difference?
Because I've already been persuaded by scientists and artists being government funded. But I haven't been yet persuaded by the concept of the government funding coders. In fact yours is the first suggestion I've come across of such a thing.
That's a non-answer. And you obviously haven't been paying attention if you haven't seen suggestions that governments should fund Free Software development.
Again, what is the difference? And your original statement is the very definition of a blank check. You didn't put any constraints or limitations on it whatsoever.
There's a difference between funding without judgement of results and a blank check. A blank cheque means the recipient decides how much money they are going to get. No one is suggesting that.
So who does decide the funding amount? And on what basis do they decide?
I know this will shock many slashdot users... but people do use the web for things other than porn (and slashdot).
It sort of reminds me of similar little tricks used to generate landscapes and other such things... mandelbrot comes to mind.
Except that the Mandelbrot set, for example, really is much, much more interesting. It actually has a great deal of sophisticated structure, that's highly chaotic (in both typical and mathematical senses of the word) but not random at all. Not at all comparable to this example, whose output has no real structure at all, but just exploits the tendency of the human brain to find patterns whether or not they exist.
Public money spent on having artists do art is money well spent.
I couldn't agree more.
Really? Have you seen what sometimes gets called art? For that matter, it's possible to call anything art -- doesn't mean it has any value.
Public money spent on having coders write code is money well spent.
There I need to be persuaded. I need to know what long term good they will likely produce that the commercial software industry will not. I'm not saying no, I just want to know what the benefits are in the same way as I know the benefits of scientists and artists being publicly funded.
Why do you need to be persuaded here and not with respect to science or art? What is the difference?
The fact is that whether or not it's well spent depends on what kind of work is done, how the work is done, and what the results are.
Of course there are no blank cheques. It's not about pre-judging the results. Because often the results cannot be predicted before the work is done. Both in science and the arts. Not so sure about coding though.
Again, what is the difference? And your original statement is the very definition of a blank check. You didn't put any constraints or limitations on it whatsoever.
The paper presentation at CCS 2002 was pretty good. I was one of the about 60 people in the room and 5 minutes in I had the feeling of witnessing history in the making.
I suppose that feeling could have arisen from shock that people from a major corporation were being allowed to say it out loud. The basic point is fundamentally obvious to anyone who's taken an information theory course (or thought hard about it for a while). DRM, when implemented on a general-purpose computer wholly under the control of its owner, is an exercise in trying to give someone a piece of information and then take it back. It's impossible, period.
This plan, as laid out, smells like "Workfare for Scientists".
Public money spent on having scientists do science is money well spent.
Public money spent on having artists do art is money well spent.
Public money spent on having coders write code is money well spent.
Those are just as valid as your claim. The fact is that whether or not it's well spent depends on what kind of work is done, how the work is done, and what the results are. It's perfectly possible to have a lot of scientists exploring obscure and relatively useless areas of knowledge, to no net benefit. It's also perfectly possible to have scientists exploring potentially very useful areas of knowledge but doing it ineffectively and wastefully.
I don't know if this plan is a good idea or not... it could be. There's no doubt that achieving the 5-5-5 goal would have enormous beneficial impact. Whether or not this plan will achieve it, or anything of substance is harder to say -- it will depend on how the money is spent. I think the odds of success would be higher with an X Prize approach: Offer a $120M prize to anyone who succeeds at creating a practical* battery technology with 5X the energy density for 1/5th the cost by 2018 and it'll probably spark even more research -- and if it fails to achieve the goals we'll probably still have achieved significant progress but without spending a dime of public money. If it does achieve the goals, well, it was a bargain.
* "Practical" would need to be defined. It would obviously need to include some requirements around the environmental impact of production/disposal, useful battery lifetime and charging rates.
That's not what it used to be.
Social aspects, sexual selection etc. are probably getting more important, the more the physical aspects are getting lost.
Please elaborate. How are social aspects getting more important?
Then you are very odd. And I disagree with your conclusion, but then, I got married with the expectation that it is forever, and so I work to keep my marriage strong and avoid doing anything that risks weakening it.
Slashdot is not what it used to be :-(
I suppose "One's" never stopped to consider that maybe those Americans who make fiscal security a priority over popping out offspring do so for the benefit of said potential offspring.
When those older people grew up "popping out offspring" was the route to fiscal security. Maybe they didn't think of it that way, exactly, but it was. Lots of hands to help work the farm, and lots of kids to help support the parents when the parents got old. A larger family was a wealthier family.
And, interestingly, when you have a national Ponzi scheme like Social Security running... more kids is also the path to fiscal security for people in their old age, except on a collective rather than individual family basis. For individual families the economic realities are different now, and it's smarter to keep your family smaller, but as those parents age and start living on social security they'll end up wishing their generation had popped out a lot more offspring. Again, they probably won't think about it that way, but that's the reality.
Stop your whining. It was your generation in power that decided that starting multiple wars, deregulating the financial system, and then cutting taxes at the same time was a good idea. Your generation doesn't deserve shit for retirement compared to how your generation looted and pillaged the country thinking that your kids would clean it up.
Except that it wasn't the OP's generation that did all of that, at least not alone. It was all of the voting generations. Oh, and you forgot to include massively expanding entitlements (particularly Medicare) and bailing out the banks in your list of fiscal irresponsibilities.