I wonder what the chinese government would do if groups of individuals from around the world used techniques like this to DDoS the firewall. I highly doubt that they could get their population to accept them completely shutting off access to the outside world, and a stateful firewall would be considerably more expensive, assuming they wanted to keep their same (terrible) level of performance.
Thanks for the best slashdot comment I've seen all week. So many people forget that (while often misused) statistics can be used to determine things like this.
I worked as an intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and while I saw some... interesting things happening with software (don't ask), I also met and worked with individuals who did truly deserve the title of Software Engineer. A fault in their software could turn two $400 million rovers into paperweights - their methodology was appropriately conservative (unlike the ground software, but that is another story).
My own experience was that of working with Class A Mission Critical software, ran on the Ground Data System - classified as such because a failure on the ground could disrupt the tactical planning cycle (~4 hours to analyze data, figure out what to do, and sequence/transmit commands). These conditions were very strict and while liability was not financial, in an environment with such limited funding as NASA, the liability for failed software was essentially the discontinuation of the entire project.
I think we're already at a point where people can accept liability for software - it's the fact that customers demand specifications, feature sets, and timelines beyond the capabilities of current methodologies/personelle. In engineering, all is a cost/benefit/risk tradeoff - nothing is truly certain, and financial liability only serves to decrease the acceptable failure rate, not eliminate it. According to this economic tradeoff, the emergence of software engineers is merely defined as the point at which it is economically feasible to take such liability - not any true techincal accomplishment. Perhaps I am being too narrow in my definitions?
Maybe I am cynical, however, I cannot help but see such liability as anything other than a calculated finanical risk.
Out of curiousity, what term do you think should replace "Software Engineer." What a software engineer does is not that different from, say, an electrical engineer: analyze problems, design/implement solutions according to industry standard best practices, along with (sometimes) creative, custom solutions. The main difference is that the mathematics and practical experience of other engineering fields is so much more mature than in software that engineers can afford to accept liability for their actions. Also, unlike in the CS world, most engineers shy away from remotely approaching the performance limits of a technology (again, for liability reasons).
You'd probably get shot saying something like that at gunpoint, however if you had a sign below the counter explaining that "security footage is offsite" or something like that, they might believe you... and pick another target beforehand, perhaps.
I'm sure that any gravity waves it produce would be overwhelmed by the mechanical vibrations, intermitant air currents, and EMF noise it would make, short answer it must have been a joke.
I'm not so sure... all of that stuff dies out with at least inverse-distance-squared (faster for higher order moments) on its own, however EMF and mechanical vibrations are dampened considerably by ordinary matter, whereas gravity waves are affected much less... I would imagine that a device like this would be used several miles away from the array, at least, at which point nothing but the gravity waves would survive.
Also, note that there are methods that can pull out a constant signal at very, very low signal to noise ratios, given enough integration time. An astrophysicist I worked with at Cornell, the late Dr. Thomas Gold, once devised a method whereby he calculated that a pile driver, being operated constantly for about a week could be detected at the opposite side of the globe.
It's still possible it's a joke, of course, but it's not a slam-dunk by any means.
All physical objects are also "sound" generators, in the appropriate environment, but that does not mean that they are specifically designed to generate certain frequencies of sound, as real-life sound generators are... This device had a frequency control on it, etc.
Alright, I don't mean to troll/flame here - I absolutely love FOSS and use it every day at work and at home, but seriously, when are people going to stop using utterly ridiculous names for everything! It's difficult for people in a corporate context (or otherwise) to take a valid, FOSS project seriously when it is named in an absurd fashion - Wengophone (Wang-a-what?!), Ubuntu (WTF???), The GIMP (Gee, no bad associations there...)
I mean, obviously if you start a project, it's your right to name it whatever you want, and some people don't care about corporate acceptance, but anyone that wants to see FOSS software start edging out proprietary, restrictive garbage would be wise to get some marketing people involved, at least in the naming/branding department. Surprisingly, there are plenty of marketing people out there that *ARE* useful for something - this exact thing in fact.
True story: I was out at Caltech one summer, and was passing by the astronomy faculty lounge looking for a drink... I walked in and I noticed a curious contraption - it was rectangular, the size of a lunchbox (looked very much like a car battery charger, or power supply), but on the top it had a motor-driven bar with a metal sphere on each end. It was labeled "gravitational wave generator."
To this day, I'm not sure if it was a joke or a real device used for tuning LIGO... still a funny thing to find laying around:)
If we're talking abuse of science, I can't think of any better subject to discuss than the author of Andromeda Strain, Prey, and State of Fear... Michael Crichton doesn't know what he's talking about.
Here here to that! Micahel Crichton's works are disturbingly close to science, without actually being accurate (that is the danger - that they are confused with science by young/uneducated minds).
The essay you link is nothing but an attack on the argument by attacking the source of the argument as being from zealots. He accuses the environmental movement of being responsible for massive deaths.
Ad hominem attacks are highly effective. Why is this? Is it a quirk of human nature "I hate this guy so I don't listen to anything he says," or is it actually rational? Think about this for a moment:
If one takes a Bayesian view of probability (probability represents one's degree of belief in a proposition, not a frequency of occurrance), then if one is a rational Bayesian agent, one must incorporate all "relevant" information when ascertaining the belief of a hypothesis, through the chaining of probabilities. Starting with a prior on a statement (unfortunately what prior to choose is often unclear, and is perhaps even arbitrary), one modifies the belief by multiplying by conditional probabilities as gathered by evidence.
One can easily make the claim (the "proof" for this shall be left as an exercise to the reader) that given the sum of experiences one has collected over their lifetime, (direct experience or transitive experience through discussion, books, and other media) one can infer that there is indeed a conditional probability connecting the probability that entity A is a "zealot" and that information from entity A is incorrect.
Bayesian reasoning/inference differs significantly from "pure" boolean reasoning in that it captures this information in a way tha tis actually useful in real life. For instance, the statement "if someone is pointing a gun at you, they will kill you" is obviously false under boolean logic systems, however in real life it is prudent to infer that it is likely enough that htey will kill you that you should take it into account in your planning process. Similarly with the "ad hominem" attacks. The following statements are all valid in a Bayesian framework (when one takes into account the independence of these propositions from other information known about entity A):
Entity A is a zealot/crackpot, therefore assertion X is more likely to be incorrect.
Entity A is a well respected, unbiased source, therefore assertion X is likely to be correct.
Assertion X is known to conflict with deep laws of science/politics, or is a minority viewpoint which is considered to be "fringe thinking"/"crackpottery"/un-preferred worldview (i.e. over-unity devices, fascism, tinfoil-hat), therefore Entity A is likely to be an untrustworthy source
Assertion X, Y, Z, etc have proven to be correct and are in-line with generally accepted theory, therefore Entity A is more likely to be a trustworthy source.
All of these statements are fairly vague (I'm sure one can find a far more rigorous discussion of this somewhere online), however I trust you can see that independent of all other information on Entity A these statements are correct.
That leads me to conclude (in an albeit simplified fashion) that because information on a subject/individual/particular point is highly limited (indeed, with things like global warming, etc, even having a PhD in the field is only a reasonable start, not a comprehensive, authoritative educaiton), one must consider all information about an argument (and weight it according to statistical correlation) when one makes an inference (once again assuming one is a Bayesian, which is a strong assumption, but definitely closer to human reasoning under uncertainty than pure boolean logic, or
I've been working lately on a new moderation system for sites like this, based on collaborative filtering and (what I consider to be) a novel generative distribution which can be used with clustering to reduce the dimensionality of the problem significantly... I've been discussing this via email with Kevin Rose and it's my hope that something like this can be implemented there, as their discussion have even worse moderation than they are here.
The motto for my system - "The Mods Must Be Crazy." If you don't get the ref, check here.
(railing against mods on slashdot seems to get one modded up - my theory on this is that there are multiple different "factions" of mods, and each thinks the others are crazy - my system would isolate these so that people got moderation they agreed with)
For the record, I think science reporting is perhaps the worst kind of reporting in terms of quality - you have a bunch of people who may be fantastic writers, but often know *nothing* about Science, either as a collection of facts and principles, or even as an abstract process!
However I think that you and I disagree on what CN's comment meant. I read it to mean that further experiments may (somehow) disprove Einstein - this, while unlikely, is very reasonable considering that we are dealing with an area of the theory that has not been thoroughly tested (unlike most normal conditions). We're in somewhat uncharted (if not entirely uncertain) territory. I suppose you could read CN's comment to mean "if this experimentation turns out to be true, it may disprove Einstein" - which is different than what I read. Not being CowboyNeal, I can't tell what he meant, and not being a psychologist, I cannot tell what the most probable interpretation of CN's statement is according to the underlying distribution of readers.
I have reasonable faculty for determining alternate interpretations of statements, however I have found in my experience that my own interpretation often deviates significantly from the norm, probably because I assume literality unless there is a reason (use of idioms, exaggeration, or contextual clues). I do not, however, think there is a clear case for CowboyNeal not reading the article, considering that he said is entirely consistant with the content of the article, and that, unlike me (and perhaps you as well) he does not have a degree in physics.
That being said, the editors of slashdot do appear to do astoundingly little! That's gotta be a hella cool job.
I've seen all that (my undergraduate degree is in Physics), however the value he chose was still completely incorrect and in no way supported by evidence - he should have left it as an unknown value that would have to be empirically determined!
Alright this is a stupid argument but really, what in this statement:
While there's not much use to come of it yet, it will be interesting if Einstein himself is proved wrong.
suggests in any way that Einstein was wrong? The entire point of the experiment is that we DO NOT KNOW FOR CERTAIN that Einstein's theories will hold in this unusual regime - you cannot "put something to the test" unless your setup allows for that something's failure.
Now, I highly doubt we will ever see evidence of causal information traveling faster than the speed of light, at least in our lifetimes, but if we do it would not be the first time Einstein was completely and utterly wrong about something, check out the EPR paradox. And, of course, the cosmological constant nonsense. (by nonsense I mean arbitrarily making up a number to keep the universe static, despite no evidence for doing so)
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the researcher himself seems to think that even though light is currently following predictions under these circumstances, it might be useful to test the theory under even more unusual cases.
I for one agree with him - I suspect rather heavily (I'd bet at odds well over 100 to 1) that we will not see significant deviation from theory, but we don't know for certain unless we try.
The article was (as all of these ridiculous "faster than light" articles are) absolutely oversensational, but there is some real valid experimental physics going on. I don't even know how to begin to quantify the number of discoveries in Physics that occurred because people did experiments that turned out to have results that were different than expected. If nothing else, perhaps this stuff helps pique the public's interest.
"Boyd is already working on ways to see what will happen if he can design a pulse without a leading edge. Einstein says the entire faster-than-light and reverse-light phenomena will disappear. Boyd is eager to put Einstein to the test."
No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free.
and it's corollary:
It is impossible to completely test a sufficiently complex system in every possible way to be certain that it's bug-free.
This is why we have automated reasoning systems, theorom provers, etc. They allow us to reduce the set of all possible states down to a set of orthogonal equivilence classes, only one example from which need to actually be tested.
Now, of course, at some point non-ideal physical characteristics can interfere with this, along with incomplete knowledge from noisy measuring devices. Of course one could also say that "No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free." is not true, rather that "No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free with high probability," or that "No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free and also known to be bug free with 100% certainty."
Ahh, the hair splitting that is possible with such nebulous concepts as "complexity."
There's actually some unfortunate side effects of adults enjoying video games more than kids.
I was over at my uncle's house and my 12-year-old cousin was playing on his father's Everquest account. I then heard the following (rather ironic, IMHO) exchange:
COUSIN: "Dad, can I go outside and play?" UNCLE: "Not until you've leveled my character."
Slashdot Mirror
All I have to say is that the Greg Stillsons of the world better watch out!
I wonder what the chinese government would do if groups of individuals from around the world used techniques like this to DDoS the firewall. I highly doubt that they could get their population to accept them completely shutting off access to the outside world, and a stateful firewall would be considerably more expensive, assuming they wanted to keep their same (terrible) level of performance.
What does slashdot think about this?
Thanks for the best slashdot comment I've seen all week. So many people forget that (while often misused) statistics can be used to determine things like this.
I worked as an intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and while I saw some... interesting things happening with software (don't ask), I also met and worked with individuals who did truly deserve the title of Software Engineer. A fault in their software could turn two $400 million rovers into paperweights - their methodology was appropriately conservative (unlike the ground software, but that is another story).
My own experience was that of working with Class A Mission Critical software, ran on the Ground Data System - classified as such because a failure on the ground could disrupt the tactical planning cycle (~4 hours to analyze data, figure out what to do, and sequence/transmit commands). These conditions were very strict and while liability was not financial, in an environment with such limited funding as NASA, the liability for failed software was essentially the discontinuation of the entire project.
I think we're already at a point where people can accept liability for software - it's the fact that customers demand specifications, feature sets, and timelines beyond the capabilities of current methodologies/personelle. In engineering, all is a cost/benefit/risk tradeoff - nothing is truly certain, and financial liability only serves to decrease the acceptable failure rate, not eliminate it. According to this economic tradeoff, the emergence of software engineers is merely defined as the point at which it is economically feasible to take such liability - not any true techincal accomplishment. Perhaps I am being too narrow in my definitions?
Maybe I am cynical, however, I cannot help but see such liability as anything other than a calculated finanical risk.
Out of curiousity, what term do you think should replace "Software Engineer." What a software engineer does is not that different from, say, an electrical engineer: analyze problems, design/implement solutions according to industry standard best practices, along with (sometimes) creative, custom solutions. The main difference is that the mathematics and practical experience of other engineering fields is so much more mature than in software that engineers can afford to accept liability for their actions. Also, unlike in the CS world, most engineers shy away from remotely approaching the performance limits of a technology (again, for liability reasons).
Of course, this assumes your watchdog OS doesn't have vulnerabilities...
Of course not nearly as fun as having half naked chicks in awe of your massive girth from above, as they appear to have in austrailia.
You'd probably get shot saying something like that at gunpoint, however if you had a sign below the counter explaining that "security footage is offsite" or something like that, they might believe you... and pick another target beforehand, perhaps.
I'm sure that any gravity waves it produce would be overwhelmed by the mechanical vibrations, intermitant air currents, and EMF noise it would make, short answer it must have been a joke.
I'm not so sure... all of that stuff dies out with at least inverse-distance-squared (faster for higher order moments) on its own, however EMF and mechanical vibrations are dampened considerably by ordinary matter, whereas gravity waves are affected much less... I would imagine that a device like this would be used several miles away from the array, at least, at which point nothing but the gravity waves would survive.
Also, note that there are methods that can pull out a constant signal at very, very low signal to noise ratios, given enough integration time. An astrophysicist I worked with at Cornell, the late Dr. Thomas Gold, once devised a method whereby he calculated that a pile driver, being operated constantly for about a week could be detected at the opposite side of the globe.
It's still possible it's a joke, of course, but it's not a slam-dunk by any means.
All physical objects are also "sound" generators, in the appropriate environment, but that does not mean that they are specifically designed to generate certain frequencies of sound, as real-life sound generators are... This device had a frequency control on it, etc.
Alright, I don't mean to troll/flame here - I absolutely love FOSS and use it every day at work and at home, but seriously, when are people going to stop using utterly ridiculous names for everything! It's difficult for people in a corporate context (or otherwise) to take a valid, FOSS project seriously when it is named in an absurd fashion - Wengophone (Wang-a-what?!), Ubuntu (WTF???), The GIMP (Gee, no bad associations there...)
I mean, obviously if you start a project, it's your right to name it whatever you want, and some people don't care about corporate acceptance, but anyone that wants to see FOSS software start edging out proprietary, restrictive garbage would be wise to get some marketing people involved, at least in the naming/branding department. Surprisingly, there are plenty of marketing people out there that *ARE* useful for something - this exact thing in fact.
True story: I was out at Caltech one summer, and was passing by the astronomy faculty lounge looking for a drink... I walked in and I noticed a curious contraption - it was rectangular, the size of a lunchbox (looked very much like a car battery charger, or power supply), but on the top it had a motor-driven bar with a metal sphere on each end. It was labeled "gravitational wave generator."
:)
To this day, I'm not sure if it was a joke or a real device used for tuning LIGO... still a funny thing to find laying around
Here here to that! Micahel Crichton's works are disturbingly close to science, without actually being accurate (that is the danger - that they are confused with science by young/uneducated minds).
The essay you link is nothing but an attack on the argument by attacking the source of the argument as being from zealots. He accuses the environmental movement of being responsible for massive deaths.
Ad hominem attacks are highly effective. Why is this? Is it a quirk of human nature "I hate this guy so I don't listen to anything he says," or is it actually rational? Think about this for a moment:
If one takes a Bayesian view of probability (probability represents one's degree of belief in a proposition, not a frequency of occurrance), then if one is a rational Bayesian agent, one must incorporate all "relevant" information when ascertaining the belief of a hypothesis, through the chaining of probabilities. Starting with a prior on a statement (unfortunately what prior to choose is often unclear, and is perhaps even arbitrary), one modifies the belief by multiplying by conditional probabilities as gathered by evidence.
One can easily make the claim (the "proof" for this shall be left as an exercise to the reader) that given the sum of experiences one has collected over their lifetime, (direct experience or transitive experience through discussion, books, and other media) one can infer that there is indeed a conditional probability connecting the probability that entity A is a "zealot" and that information from entity A is incorrect.
Bayesian reasoning/inference differs significantly from "pure" boolean reasoning in that it captures this information in a way tha tis actually useful in real life. For instance, the statement "if someone is pointing a gun at you, they will kill you" is obviously false under boolean logic systems, however in real life it is prudent to infer that it is likely enough that htey will kill you that you should take it into account in your planning process. Similarly with the "ad hominem" attacks. The following statements are all valid in a Bayesian framework (when one takes into account the independence of these propositions from other information known about entity A):
All of these statements are fairly vague (I'm sure one can find a far more rigorous discussion of this somewhere online), however I trust you can see that independent of all other information on Entity A these statements are correct.
That leads me to conclude (in an albeit simplified fashion) that because information on a subject/individual/particular point is highly limited (indeed, with things like global warming, etc, even having a PhD in the field is only a reasonable start, not a comprehensive, authoritative educaiton), one must consider all information about an argument (and weight it according to statistical correlation) when one makes an inference (once again assuming one is a Bayesian, which is a strong assumption, but definitely closer to human reasoning under uncertainty than pure boolean logic, or
I've been working lately on a new moderation system for sites like this, based on collaborative filtering and (what I consider to be) a novel generative distribution which can be used with clustering to reduce the dimensionality of the problem significantly... I've been discussing this via email with Kevin Rose and it's my hope that something like this can be implemented there, as their discussion have even worse moderation than they are here.
The motto for my system - "The Mods Must Be Crazy." If you don't get the ref, check here.
(railing against mods on slashdot seems to get one modded up - my theory on this is that there are multiple different "factions" of mods, and each thinks the others are crazy - my system would isolate these so that people got moderation they agreed with)
For the record, I think science reporting is perhaps the worst kind of reporting in terms of quality - you have a bunch of people who may be fantastic writers, but often know *nothing* about Science, either as a collection of facts and principles, or even as an abstract process!
However I think that you and I disagree on what CN's comment meant. I read it to mean that further experiments may (somehow) disprove Einstein - this, while unlikely, is very reasonable considering that we are dealing with an area of the theory that has not been thoroughly tested (unlike most normal conditions). We're in somewhat uncharted (if not entirely uncertain) territory. I suppose you could read CN's comment to mean "if this experimentation turns out to be true, it may disprove Einstein" - which is different than what I read. Not being CowboyNeal, I can't tell what he meant, and not being a psychologist, I cannot tell what the most probable interpretation of CN's statement is according to the underlying distribution of readers.
I have reasonable faculty for determining alternate interpretations of statements, however I have found in my experience that my own interpretation often deviates significantly from the norm, probably because I assume literality unless there is a reason (use of idioms, exaggeration, or contextual clues). I do not, however, think there is a clear case for CowboyNeal not reading the article, considering that he said is entirely consistant with the content of the article, and that, unlike me (and perhaps you as well) he does not have a degree in physics.
That being said, the editors of slashdot do appear to do astoundingly little! That's gotta be a hella cool job.
I've seen all that (my undergraduate degree is in Physics), however the value he chose was still completely incorrect and in no way supported by evidence - he should have left it as an unknown value that would have to be empirically determined!
Alright this is a stupid argument but really, what in this statement:
While there's not much use to come of it yet, it will be interesting if Einstein himself is proved wrong.
suggests in any way that Einstein was wrong? The entire point of the experiment is that we DO NOT KNOW FOR CERTAIN that Einstein's theories will hold in this unusual regime - you cannot "put something to the test" unless your setup allows for that something's failure.
Now, I highly doubt we will ever see evidence of causal information traveling faster than the speed of light, at least in our lifetimes, but if we do it would not be the first time Einstein was completely and utterly wrong about something, check out the EPR paradox. And, of course, the cosmological constant nonsense. (by nonsense I mean arbitrarily making up a number to keep the universe static, despite no evidence for doing so)
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the researcher himself seems to think that even though light is currently following predictions under these circumstances, it might be useful to test the theory under even more unusual cases.
I for one agree with him - I suspect rather heavily (I'd bet at odds well over 100 to 1) that we will not see significant deviation from theory, but we don't know for certain unless we try.
The article was (as all of these ridiculous "faster than light" articles are) absolutely oversensational, but there is some real valid experimental physics going on. I don't even know how to begin to quantify the number of discoveries in Physics that occurred because people did experiments that turned out to have results that were different than expected. If nothing else, perhaps this stuff helps pique the public's interest.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Wiki
I'm pretty sure that's proof that anything that looks like a joke can get modded up, regardless of actual humor content.
(And yes, the original SNL skit was very funny)
"Boyd is already working on ways to see what will happen if he can design a pulse without a leading edge. Einstein says the entire faster-than-light and reverse-light phenomena will disappear. Boyd is eager to put Einstein to the test."
Way to read the article, Lord Ender
Now, of course, at some point non-ideal physical characteristics can interfere with this, along with incomplete knowledge from noisy measuring devices. Of course one could also say that "No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free." is not true, rather that "No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free with high probability," or that "No sufficiently complex system can ever be completely bug-free and also known to be bug free with 100% certainty."
Ahh, the hair splitting that is possible with such nebulous concepts as "complexity."
There's actually some unfortunate side effects of adults enjoying video games more than kids.
I was over at my uncle's house and my 12-year-old cousin was playing on his father's Everquest account. I then heard the following (rather ironic, IMHO) exchange:
COUSIN: "Dad, can I go outside and play?"
UNCLE: "Not until you've leveled my character."
Ahh... if only that had been my childhood...
Nothing is impossible with enough perl scripts!
Thank god I can sleep easy at night ;)
But doesn't increased availability of coffee make it harder to sleep?
I know the submission was astroturf, but I'm still interested to see what the heck this thing actually is.
Engadget is running an article with some possible information on the project. Looks somewhat interesting.