It is very cool to see that this has been written up in Nature, however I'm a bit disparaged by the fact that the chat room that is mentioned here is not mentioned by name.
If you would like to meet some of the folks who do this sort of thing, you should stop by #space on irc.freenode.net. #space is an unofficial channel for discussion of space-related science, exploration, and events.
I've been around the channel since it split from #maestro, (a community of space enthusiasts who use the NASA Maestro program) and it is an exciting place to hang out during a space event.
I would also like to note that I presented the Huygens imagery last friday afternoon to 100+ community members at Cornell University. Despite the fact that Cornell has many scientists on the Cassini mission, the #space channel was by far the fastest way to get the newly released data. If it was out on the net to be found - someone in there would find it.
If you're interested in space it's a great place to go to answer questions or just to chat (flame wars about policy are kept in #space_politics:)). If you happen to drop by, I go by JPL-Justin in channel - say hello!
Has anyone considered the possibility that businesses going too far with laws like these might actually be a good thing? I mean, in the short run it will suck but perhaps the public will backlash against them and we will finally have a reasonable copyright/patent system.
I'm sure that if anyone who downloaded illegal music/games/porn/whatever on the internet got smacked with a $100 fine today, those laws would be fixed so fast you'd swear we had a functional government.
Right now the corporations are getting their way - but they are also quite greedy. Perhaps that is their weakness?
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be required to reveal the names of customers who may be distributing illegal wares on peer-to-peer networks.
There goes 'presumption of innocence.'
For hundreds of years our justice system has based its investigations on the concept of "probable cause." According to this well-written document, "probable cause" means either "more likely than not" or "substantial possibility". There are thousands of non-offending uses of P2P programs, many of which are beneficial - but lets face it, the vast majority of p2p use is illegal. If you're an ISP and you see someone using limewire to download 50 gigs of data - is it really likely that that person decided to download 75 linux ISOs? Probably not.
Do I like this law? Not really. But to say that it totally destroys "presumption of innocence" - when they take you to court, you're still presumed innocent until proven guilty, that has not changed.
Besides, if we lived in a land where people could only be searched if we were 100% sure they had broken the law, well, we wouldn't catch very many criminals that way.
The problem is that they want names of people that *MAY* be trading..
Presumed guilt.. That is a big problem.
What about propable cause?
Suspicous online behavior, extended transfers? There's plenty of perfectly legal uses of P2P, but lets face it - the vast majority of it isn't.
You don't have to know someone is guilty to check in on them, you just have to have a "good reason." This is how we catch many criminals (or in this case - civil offenders).
In order to run windows and OSX simulataneously, the CPU would have to be able to execute x86 instructions. PPC windows was no doubt mentioned to get another OS in the mix.
You forget about PPC version of NT which is being used in the next X-box (and has been around for about 10 years).
Of course the apps would have to be recompiled but... hey that's half the fun!
What about several layers of thin clear plastic that's tensioned?
You have each layer held down with tabs,and release them one by one as the cells accumulate dust. The released plastic curls up at one end of the cells when released.
I work for Steve Squyres (the Principle Investigator) and he said that they considered this option as well, and it was prone to failure.
Mistaking hacker for cracker is acceptable on the general media, where people aren't very aware of such subtleties. But on Slashdot?
I know this won't be very popular, but maybe it's time the "hacker" community accepted that like many other english words, it can mean multiple things. Geeze, already it can refer to someone who is bad at golf, or someone who enjoys chopping at wood, why not someone who "hacks" into computers?
Maybe i'm silly but I'd rather trust the Oxford English Dictionary on something than the consensus of slashdot. It's part of the english language now, and probably will be for the rest of our lives. Get used to it.
Government regulation is un-American and inefficient. Let the market decide. Those companies whose flights don't end in smoking craters will get more business.
Personally as a libertarian I don't think that people should be protected from their own stupidity/sense of adventure. However I don't want someone's idiotic spacecraft to fly into my house. I don't have problems with relatively unregulated spaceflight putting the passengers in danger, but I do not think that innocent bystanders should be in easily preventable danger. To me it's like drunk driving - I don't give a damn if some fool kills themself that way (that's the consequence of their own judgement), but the fact is drunk drivers kill plenty of innocent people - as the result of a completely preventable situation no less! Orbital spacecraft use energies that boggle the mind, and are dangerous if not properly contained.
Er, on a serious note, isn't pollution of space a fairly important issue as well? Left alone, companies will just dump their crap up there, and in 20 years time every launch will run the risk of being hit by orbiting junk
Well that has a pretty simple solution - earth orbit is a "public resource", like the EM spectrum, or natural parks. Companies should be forced to be liable for damages their junk causes, and the cost of tracking it. This is just like most other cases of pollution (but rather than smoke or something it's more like leaving land mines laying around, the energies involved are similar).
Or maybe people would be clueful enough to only support companies which didn't pollute space? Well we can wish:)
This spring my boss at the Jet Propulsion Lab invited J. Michael Straczynski out for a tour of the place... I was very lucky to spend an afternoon with him and his wife (shameless pic!). I somehow managed to stave off most of the B5 references that came to me as we were showing him around (but alas I still came off as the fanboy I am).
I asked him what he thought about the upcoming movie project, whether he thought it would be good or not. He replied, "It's going to be shit." After a moment I caught the sarcasm and I realized that he would not be doing this movie if he didn't have a great story to tell.
Judging from the stories he has already told, I think it's going to be well worth the wait.
This may not fully explain the results, but isn't one of the issues with this kind of test is that many countries do not have compulsatory education - the poor students get weeded out of the system, leaving only their best to be tested?
Seriously, our schools are certainly not great and yet there is still so much innovation in this country. I really have a hard time believing that that many other countries have solved the fundamental problems with public education, and that we are so far behind so many poorer countries. These tests certainly seem flawed.
Name an actual climatologist who seriously believes doing nothing at all is better than Kyoto.
I cannot name a climatologist, however, lets assume:
Humans are causing global warming,
If not stopped, it will cause massive problems for humans.
Kyoto does little or nothing to stop this
Kyoto costs a significant amount of money
Now, any one of those assumptions could in fact be wrong. However, if they are true, then I believe that many experts on environmental matters (including some professors I've had) would consider the Kyoto treaty damaging. The worst thing you can do about a problem is to pretend to be doing something about it - at great cost - so that the problem is "being worked on" and there is less pressure to solve it because we're "already doing something, isn't that enough?" when in fact it's not doing anything. But worse, it looks like our ability to fix the climate will be very much a function of our technology - the same thing that caused the problem in the first place. What we need right now is to develop new energy sources that do not release carbon and methane into the air, and new methods of food production that avoid the large herds of cows etc. All of this costs money for our economy to support, and so funnelling money into something like Kyoto may make it take significantly longer to make all of the breakthroughs required to get us out of the whole we may have dug ourselves.
Not to mention the fact that we have *NO IDEA* as of right now what happens when we start limiting our CO2 output - complex systems like the climate tend to be very sensitive to changes in variables and their derivatives. We need a solid predictive model if we're going to fight this thing - and by all means we should fight it if we can figure out how to.
Thinking BAD! Overgeneralizations and stereotypes GOOD!
Implying that the 51% or so who disagree with your political views are stupid sheep, well if that isn't elitist crap, I don't know what is. Isn't the left supposed to be all about tolerance anyways?
NASA has backed off of its Faster-Better-Cheaper which left faster and cheaper intact, while somewhat disregarding better, in favor of Faster-Better-Fund_Projects_Appropriatly...which seems certainly to have done the trick for such projects as the Mars Exploration Rovers, which (I would agrue appropriatly) cost hundreds of millions of dollars to properly build and test for the challenges they were being asked to face.
Actually MER really felt a lot of heat from budget cuts - it's amazing it's still working as well as it does. I used to write parts of the Ground Data System software, and I can tell you that many things on the ground came close to breaking during the mission as a result of underfunding. I would not agree that MER was funded appropriately.
I think we're still at "Faster-Better-Cheaper", just not publicized as such. Viking cost around 4 billion dollars, which is almost 10 times as much as a single MER costs. I'd say what we did was *definitely* cheaper.
It's unfortunate that the public isn't able to understand that we can make ten crappy space probes, three of which actually end up working, for the price of one uber-dependible probe. That's 3 times the science for the same money, but it's also 7 miserable failures to the public. I honestly wish NASA would get some balls again, but first the public would have to as well.
Just in time for Recount 2004: The 12 Days of Elections: (Sung to 12 days of christmas)
On # day of elections my voters gave to me:
A state where winning was key 2 hanging chads 3 third parties 4 challengers 5 votes that count 6 thousand lawyers 7 dead men voting 8 spinners spinning 9 judges judging 10 speakers speaking 11 folks still watching 12 founders weeping
Speaking as a lifelong Christian, I'd have to say things like this are fantastic. Why? Well, there's two kinds of things in the bible, things that are meant to be taken literally (plainly stated commands which are repeated as themes) and things which are to be taken figuratively (stories which contain valuable lessons for us). I think there is this false thinking in the church that evolution somehow destroys the "need" for God to exist, or changes the fact that humans are special and unique.
Honestly, the mechanics of the system are unimporant to religion - if God created the universe to be one where we'd develop, that's equivilent to creating us directly. It's kinda like creating a pile of logs and then lighting them on fire is basically equivilient to creating a pile of logs which are on fire. There's still things in this universe which are arbitrary and important for life (6 fundamental constants) which, unless we have some way of exploring outside of this universe, are likely going to always be a mystery. Maybe it was an accident (but that's require an infinite number of universes, which is hardly a simple answer) or maybe it was on purpose (which requires an infinite being of some sort outside our universe, also not simple).
I used to be a creationist, until I studied biology, evolution, and cosmology in detail. Then I realized that the arguments that had swayed me as a kid really didn't logically add up. I think that Creationism is dangerous in the sense that it widens the gap between Christianity and science/mainstream culture. This is bad because Christianity is about spreading a message of Love and Hope, and when scientists who spend their entire lives devoted to figuring out the secrets of life are alienated and ridiculed, it's hard for Christians to come off as anything but narrowminded fools. I know a lot of fundamentalist Christians (and in some ways I am fundamentalist, with a lower case f) and it's not narrowmindedness, it's the fact that science, especially evolution, has become so abstract, and so based on mathematical concepts you need a degree or two to understand, that the scientists might as well be saying random mumbo jumbo to these people. These people have no reason to trust the scientists (especially when these same scientists ridicule their faith, as many Humanists tend to do, especially on places such as slashdot) because they cannot understand them. And honestly, I'm just as wary of those who, for no particular reason, just seem to believe that Science will solve everything, and is the end all and be all of truth, as I am of those who have little faith in it. Science is just empiricism. It's a collection of ideas that happen to work, at least as far as we can test.
I for one like to think we're here for a reason. And I think that God gave us this universe full of beauty to explore and gave us the ability to try and understand it. And shouldn't we use that?
I know that Augmented Reality has many places where it can shine - on the battlefield, on the operating table, etc... but doesn't it seem like much of these functionalities simply distract from *REAL* reality? Does it say something about the attention span of this generation that we want to be bombarded with facts everywhere we go, like "Pop Up Video"?
I mean really, isn't the point of being outside to *GET AWAY* from computers and technology, and experience the real world? I mean, I love cyber space, and not that this isn't a cool technology, but really...
I believe that linux distributions like this that cater to older hardware encourage responsible environmental behavior among computer users. Honestly, for many purposes a 6 year old machine is just fine. I find it really convenient to have access to an always on, personally reconfigurable server that I can use for everything from a database to a small dynamic website. Most things that we do with computers nowadays don't really push our CPUs.
I also think it's fantastic that they are using new the new kernel - cutting edge software is a great way to reinvigorate older hardware. I really hope that this leads to more computer reuse by geeks and maybe eventually nongeeks.
A lesson people seem to have forgotten since the great depression survivors have moved on is "waste not want not". I for one think this world would be a better place with a little more of that attitude.
Besides, it's fun to think that our "favorite" OS could be helping keep the world a safe, clean place for our children.
I have a general question for the/.ers out there: do you feel that this kind of technology will tend to bring people together more, or apart?
I mean, when you can be 100 cool places at the flip of a button, why settle for wherever you are right now? Same with social stuff - why "put up with" the boring people next door instead of flipping on the immersive internet and talking to others who share your interests?
This is happenning already. Most of my communication with friends is IM, email, or cell phone. The amount of face-to-face talking, in real life, is astoundingly low. Is this a good thing? I mean, I can keep tabs with people around the country - and around the world. But it's not the same.
I can see a lot of legitimate business uses for this technology, and who wouldn't want to be able to attend famous lecturer's sessions without the need to travel (or fear of being caught sleeping)? I'm just worried that it will become an even stronger isolating force in our society.
Also, will telepresense bring about more outsourcing - why pay for a secretary who's right there, when for 1/10th the price you can have one from India, by telepresence, for the 90% or whatever things that need done that don't require actual presense.
Labeling something "beta" almost indefinitely should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card. It seems to me that once a product is in fairly widespread use -- once a product has a marketing plan behind it -- saying "no fair, it's a beta!" is a little disingenuous.
I highly disagree. When I use a product which is in "Beta" I do not expect it to meet the same level of stability/security etc. To do so is rediculous - anyone who develops software should understand why products of this kind require an extended beta period. It's definitely the best time to make last minute changes, adjustments, and to find problems like this. Finding these problems is the whole point of it being Beta in the first place. Anyone who's using this service for anything important, and then complaining about problems they have (other than as normal beta feedback) is being unreasonable!
you understand and agree that the Service is provided on an AS IS and AS AVAILABLE basis.
Their terms of service are very short, and easy to understand (not like most software agreements) and use of gmail is not only FREE, but it's entirely optional. No one's making you use it. People should not have the same level of expectation for this new service as they do of the original search engine, and if they, that's their own ignorance.
I also highly doubt that this beta period will last that much longer. GMail is becoming popular enough that the bugs and changes should be done soon.
Cheers,
Justin
Re:Doppler shifting radio waves?
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Saving Huygens
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· Score: 1
The general equation is:
fdoppler = (frest * velocity )/ c
Not to be pedantic, but I think it should be mentioned that this is a first order approximation to the relativistic doppler shift as seen (here):
fdoppler = frest * Sqrt(1-beta^2)/(1-beta)
where beta = velocity / c
Not terribly important here, but definitely so in other astronomical fields.
This is enough difference to allow police speed radar traps to work, and for researchers to measure the wind speeds inside tornado's.
Not only that, but I've personally measured changes in velocity of an object on the order of 10s of microns per second using gamma radiation doppler shift (using the Mossbauer Effect). It's really quite incredible - a simple and fun experiment to try if you can.
There wasn't wireless coverage in the dorm where we were housed. Worse, to get on the wireless network seemed to require some windows-only tool (according to the confrence organizers), so I was SOL with a linux laptop.
I believe it's simply VPN, which they rightly use to make their wireless networks secure (WEP just ain't enough). I believe that VPN clients for linux have been readily available, but I can't say it's easy to set up in this case. The organizers were probably not familiar with the intricacies of these involved.
The residential network worked just fine for me - though you did have to register your MAC address. You could bring your own wireless (if you use MAC spoofing) so if it's that big of a deal to have wireless in your dorm (something a lot of schools do not have) it's not hard. Besides, the dorms are so small, even a roll up ethernet cable works just fine:)
What I would like to see is some security comparison of Microsoft software and FOSS, corrected for target size.
FOSS advocates often whine about MS insecurity, whereas MS advocates often claim MS only gets more break-ins because it's used more
Well the problem with this is that I do not think that even if this is mostly a problem of market share, that the correlation need be anything remotely like linear (in fact closer to polynomial of a decent degree, or perhaps exponential). The reason for this that there is not only the target size (how easy it is to find a target for an attack) but also how easy it is to obtain a test system of that platform to test on (many script kiddies may not have the technical skill to set up a complex linux server system). Not only that, but the fact that a lot of worms spread not merely because there are more vulnerabilities in something like IIS, but the fact that they are used by individuals who tend not to customize their setups (leading to a homogeneous environment) and the fact that there are less minor versions (how many different versions of apache are there out there running?) Also add to that the fact that the speed of propagation of those worms is exponential in the "density" of infectable servvers on the network, and it's pretty clear that the relationship here is so nonlinear that it may be extremely difficult to "filter out."
Personally I think that there's two ways to go on this issue:
A discussion of the theoretical level of security by each based on their design - potential for break ins. This is a "pure" measurement of the "merit" of a particular piece of software.
A discussion of the likelihood that a given server would be broken into depending on what OS/Server Software it's running. This is much much more practical, but includes many factors that have little to do with the actual program design.
In fact, I see this dichotomy as being one of the main causes of misunderstandings and illogical discussion during flamewars. One can either discuss the theoretical merits of a piece of software - "Mac OS X has high reliability and a stable microkernel architecture, along with unparalleled interface design" - or the practical upshot of the usage of that software - "MS Windows has the largest userbase, and tens of thousands of specialized applications that run on that platform, including the latest games." It really just depends on what's important to you.
While I find the theoretical merits of different software approaches to be fascinating, what really matters at the end of the day is the reality of the situation. Personally I think if FOSS gives you the best result, you should use it. If MS does the trick, use that instead. It's like the tired old analogy of VHS vs BetaMax... you get the picture.
RPI's not a huge surprise? I expected MIT at number one... not below the top 25. Same for many others. WTF?
Well, unlike MIT, RPI is much much more interested in technology and applied science than pure science - it is an "engineer factory" so to speak. Not only that, but their campus is tiny. A few wireless access points is all it takes to cover the entire place, unlike my school (Cornell University).
When I was there last, it was hard to find a place without wireless or ethernet available. Very cool. Good job RPI!
BTW, if you wonder what they do there, I was talking to Freeman Dyson the other day and he seemed to be very excited about their lightcraft - UFO looking space ships powered by earth-mounted laser generators. He seems to think they are much more likely to work than space elevators.
Cheers,
Justin
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
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Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Reading your post, what sprung to my mind is the quote 'they who know history are doomed to see it repeated'.
Just because something bad has happened before is no reason to sit idly by as a different form of the same happens again. The whole point of civilisation is to/not/ repeat past mistakes.
Wow, I'd hate to see how bad our score is then, considering that that seems to be about all we're capable of (repeating the mistakes of yesterday, but with new spiffy technology to amplify it)
Quick example: real hackers (or anyone who bothered to do some (just a tiny amount) research) knew y2k was not something which would bring disaster, only mild discomfort if not dealt with.
That drives me nuts when people say that. The amazing amount of effort that was put into fixing the Y2K problem was not imaginary! There was a very real problem, and while yes some did blow it wildly out of proportion, if no one had fixed it, there would have been a *LOT* of bad things happenning. And the problem is that in a complex system like our society, there's serious issues with cascade failures (with interdependent subsystems, all it takes is one important thing like power or phone to fail, and a ton of other things fail as well, and those dependent on them, etc). When there's a large blackout, it causes a lot of problems, even if it's just for a day. I took a tour of a local power station just before Y2K and saw all of their auditing - there is a lot of equipment, some of which was actually affected by the bug. If that hadn't been fixed, bad things would have happenned. Y2K was blown out of proportion but just like any problem, let go too long, and it could have had a real nasty impact.
And anyone with a knowledge of history would have compared this to any other 'the world is going to end' craze of the past millenia (and there have been a few) and pretty much known that y2k wouldn't be as bad as it was made out to be. And hackers who know history? They'd have known/that/ the craze would happen and have some insight as to why.
Are you kidding? The fact that the world hasn't ended yet is no proof that it won't end - that doesn't even make sense! Lets say you drive a car 100 times on really icy roads and don't have an accident, that does not in any way prove that the 101st time, or 102nd time you won't have one. All it takes is for the world to end once. And unlike 1000 years ago, we have this nice little devices that can destroy EVERYTHING ON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET. Sounds pretty final to me.
And then there is stuff like the greenhouse effect, which is not in the above catagory for two reasons: nothing like it has happened before (ice-ages and the like don't count/compare with all the stuff humanity is putting up there) and it is scientific fact (just ask any scientist), against which we don't have any prevention/circumvention tools.
Oh geez... of course the greenhouse effect is a scientific fact... it was here long before man. Its effects, however, cannot currently be accurately modelled due the high nonlinearity of the system. It's possible we've already done a ton of damage, it's possible that we have little to do with global warming (a lot has to do with ocean currents and solar radiation flux, thigns that we don't really control). Hell we can't even come up with a model that can accurately predict past climates based on first principles and the same data we have today!
But I do agree that we shouldn't sit idly by... it's just that I think tinfoil hats and spreading FUD about the future just because the government does some things we don't agree with is the answer. Voting is a great way to start... after that, the sky's the limit! Maybe we need a hacker running for office? Well I guess Badnarik is the closest we'll get, since he was a software engineer.
Cheers,
Justin
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
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Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One of the things that make good hackers better at spotting trends is that they rely on evidence rather than suspicion and speculation. One of my good friends used to LART people constantly in meetings with 'Don't speculate - profile!'
The problem with this is that many hackers, while quite well versed in topics related to computers etc, have most likely not done any form of sociolical or economic field research. There is a lot that goes into analysis of trends and statistical information, as well as specific individual experiences etc. Combine that with a lack of law, economics, or politics education, and honestly I don't understand how it's anything but speculation. I mean, that's not to say that an intelligent person can't pick up a few things about those subjects without a formal education, however one really needs to have actual scientific research background to fully appreciate the difficulties associated with culling meaningful patterns out of the rediculously huge amount of events going on out there. Many of the supposed "warning signs" that we hear about are statistical anomolies, or things that are naturally corrected by the checks iand balances in our various political, social, and economic systems.
And now onto the grammar trolling (or related) part of your post. Yes, I'm that bored tonight. Enjoy a free english lesson.
I'm not saying that there isn't trouble brewing or that hackers aren't necessarily better at seeing this than others, its just like all the hackers that predicted the death of the internet for the last few decades...
1) 'All the hackers' is a hopelessly ambiguous modifier. Do you mean 'the majority'? I don't think so, based on context. Do you really mean 'many'? If so, how many? Who?
"that predicted... " is known as a restrictive clause. It reduces the set of possible meanings of the subject "All the hackers" from the set of all hackers, to the set of all hackers that predicted the death of the internet. It does not imply that these two sets are the same, nor is it ambiguous. I was referring to a subset of all hackers. As for how many of them, well, that's part of the problem here: given a simple question "how many hackers predicted the death of the internet, which did not occur" it is very difficult to quantify this without extensive research. Given that this is difficult, imagine how hard it would be for a hacker type person to form an accurate prediction about the socioeconomic/political future of the world, or even teh united states, over any long term, using only what they hear on the news or on places like slashdot (or maybe read in books). Without extensive research, the hard numbers just aren't there. And this "gut feeling" nonsense is exactly that - nonsense. It's utterly unscientific and until someone can prove this effect, or even create a decent hypothesis, I'm not going to believe it to be any more than wishful thinking on their part.
2) 'Predicted the death of the Internet' is another useless phrase. I can predict the death of the Internet with certainty. Watch: Some time before the heat death of the Universe, what we now know as the Internet will cease to exist. See? That was easy. 8^)
I'm nearly finished with my degree in physics, and the first thing you learn in physics is that theories change. The heat death of the universe is certain in theory but these very theories have massive holes in them. We really don't know how far things will expand etc. If the universe remains for an infinite amount of time, and eventually stops expanding, then the universe can (and will) spontaneously reorganize to lower entropy states - like resetting the clock. And if it collapses to a point and big-bangs again, it's possible that information could survive this (maybe by jumping ahead in time, or a wormhole through another universe or some other such theoretical nonsense involving string theory that we can't currently test). The heat death of
Slashdot Mirror
It is very cool to see that this has been written up in Nature, however I'm a bit disparaged by the fact that the chat room that is mentioned here is not mentioned by name.
:)). If you happen to drop by, I go by JPL-Justin in channel - say hello!
If you would like to meet some of the folks who do this sort of thing, you should stop by #space on irc.freenode.net. #space is an unofficial channel for discussion of space-related science, exploration, and events.
I've been around the channel since it split from #maestro, (a community of space enthusiasts who use the NASA Maestro program) and it is an exciting place to hang out during a space event.
I would also like to note that I presented the Huygens imagery last friday afternoon to 100+ community members at Cornell University. Despite the fact that Cornell has many scientists on the Cassini mission, the #space channel was by far the fastest way to get the newly released data. If it was out on the net to be found - someone in there would find it.
If you're interested in space it's a great place to go to answer questions or just to chat (flame wars about policy are kept in #space_politics
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Has anyone considered the possibility that businesses going too far with laws like these might actually be a good thing? I mean, in the short run it will suck but perhaps the public will backlash against them and we will finally have a reasonable copyright/patent system.
I'm sure that if anyone who downloaded illegal music/games/porn/whatever on the internet got smacked with a $100 fine today, those laws would be fixed so fast you'd swear we had a functional government.
Right now the corporations are getting their way - but they are also quite greedy. Perhaps that is their weakness?
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be required to reveal the names of customers who may be distributing illegal wares on peer-to-peer networks.
There goes 'presumption of innocence.'
For hundreds of years our justice system has based its investigations on the concept of "probable cause." According to this well-written document, "probable cause" means either "more likely than not" or "substantial possibility". There are thousands of non-offending uses of P2P programs, many of which are beneficial - but lets face it, the vast majority of p2p use is illegal. If you're an ISP and you see someone using limewire to download 50 gigs of data - is it really likely that that person decided to download 75 linux ISOs? Probably not.
Do I like this law? Not really. But to say that it totally destroys "presumption of innocence" - when they take you to court, you're still presumed innocent until proven guilty, that has not changed.
Besides, if we lived in a land where people could only be searched if we were 100% sure they had broken the law, well, we wouldn't catch very many criminals that way.
The problem is that they want names of people that *MAY* be trading..
Presumed guilt.. That is a big problem.
What about propable cause?
Suspicous online behavior, extended transfers? There's plenty of perfectly legal uses of P2P, but lets face it - the vast majority of it isn't.
You don't have to know someone is guilty to check in on them, you just have to have a "good reason." This is how we catch many criminals (or in this case - civil offenders).
In order to run windows and OSX simulataneously, the CPU would have to be able to execute x86 instructions. PPC windows was no doubt mentioned to get another OS in the mix.
You forget about PPC version of NT which is being used in the next X-box (and has been around for about 10 years).
Of course the apps would have to be recompiled but... hey that's half the fun!
What about several layers of thin clear plastic that's tensioned? You have each layer held down with tabs,and release them one by one as the cells accumulate dust. The released plastic curls up at one end of the cells when released.
I work for Steve Squyres (the Principle Investigator) and he said that they considered this option as well, and it was prone to failure.
Looks like they made the right call after all!
Cheers,
Justin
Mistaking hacker for cracker is acceptable on the general media, where people aren't very aware of such subtleties. But on Slashdot?
I know this won't be very popular, but maybe it's time the "hacker" community accepted that like many other english words, it can mean multiple things. Geeze, already it can refer to someone who is bad at golf, or someone who enjoys chopping at wood, why not someone who "hacks" into computers?
Maybe i'm silly but I'd rather trust the Oxford English Dictionary on something than the consensus of slashdot. It's part of the english language now, and probably will be for the rest of our lives. Get used to it.
Government regulation is un-American and inefficient. Let the market decide. Those companies whose flights don't end in smoking craters will get more business.
Personally as a libertarian I don't think that people should be protected from their own stupidity/sense of adventure. However I don't want someone's idiotic spacecraft to fly into my house. I don't have problems with relatively unregulated spaceflight putting the passengers in danger, but I do not think that innocent bystanders should be in easily preventable danger. To me it's like drunk driving - I don't give a damn if some fool kills themself that way (that's the consequence of their own judgement), but the fact is drunk drivers kill plenty of innocent people - as the result of a completely preventable situation no less! Orbital spacecraft use energies that boggle the mind, and are dangerous if not properly contained.
Er, on a serious note, isn't pollution of space a fairly important issue as well? Left alone, companies will just dump their crap up there, and in 20 years time every launch will run the risk of being hit by orbiting junk
Well that has a pretty simple solution - earth orbit is a "public resource", like the EM spectrum, or natural parks. Companies should be forced to be liable for damages their junk causes, and the cost of tracking it. This is just like most other cases of pollution (but rather than smoke or something it's more like leaving land mines laying around, the energies involved are similar).
Or maybe people would be clueful enough to only support companies which didn't pollute space? Well we can wish :)
Cheers,Justin
This spring my boss at the Jet Propulsion Lab invited J. Michael Straczynski out for a tour of the place... I was very lucky to spend an afternoon with him and his wife (shameless pic!). I somehow managed to stave off most of the B5 references that came to me as we were showing him around (but alas I still came off as the fanboy I am).
I asked him what he thought about the upcoming movie project, whether he thought it would be good or not. He replied, "It's going to be shit." After a moment I caught the sarcasm and I realized that he would not be doing this movie if he didn't have a great story to tell.
Judging from the stories he has already told, I think it's going to be well worth the wait.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
This may not fully explain the results, but isn't one of the issues with this kind of test is that many countries do not have compulsatory education - the poor students get weeded out of the system, leaving only their best to be tested?
Seriously, our schools are certainly not great and yet there is still so much innovation in this country. I really have a hard time believing that that many other countries have solved the fundamental problems with public education, and that we are so far behind so many poorer countries. These tests certainly seem flawed.
I cannot name a climatologist, however, lets assume:
Now, any one of those assumptions could in fact be wrong. However, if they are true, then I believe that many experts on environmental matters (including some professors I've had) would consider the Kyoto treaty damaging. The worst thing you can do about a problem is to pretend to be doing something about it - at great cost - so that the problem is "being worked on" and there is less pressure to solve it because we're "already doing something, isn't that enough?" when in fact it's not doing anything. But worse, it looks like our ability to fix the climate will be very much a function of our technology - the same thing that caused the problem in the first place. What we need right now is to develop new energy sources that do not release carbon and methane into the air, and new methods of food production that avoid the large herds of cows etc. All of this costs money for our economy to support, and so funnelling money into something like Kyoto may make it take significantly longer to make all of the breakthroughs required to get us out of the whole we may have dug ourselves.
Not to mention the fact that we have *NO IDEA* as of right now what happens when we start limiting our CO2 output - complex systems like the climate tend to be very sensitive to changes in variables and their derivatives. We need a solid predictive model if we're going to fight this thing - and by all means we should fight it if we can figure out how to.
Cheers,
Justin
Thinking BAD! Overgeneralizations and stereotypes GOOD!
Implying that the 51% or so who disagree with your political views are stupid sheep, well if that isn't elitist crap, I don't know what is. Isn't the left supposed to be all about tolerance anyways?
NASA has backed off of its Faster-Better-Cheaper which left faster and cheaper intact, while somewhat disregarding better, in favor of Faster-Better-Fund_Projects_Appropriatly...which seems certainly to have done the trick for such projects as the Mars Exploration Rovers, which (I would agrue appropriatly) cost hundreds of millions of dollars to properly build and test for the challenges they were being asked to face.
Actually MER really felt a lot of heat from budget cuts - it's amazing it's still working as well as it does. I used to write parts of the Ground Data System software, and I can tell you that many things on the ground came close to breaking during the mission as a result of underfunding. I would not agree that MER was funded appropriately.
I think we're still at "Faster-Better-Cheaper", just not publicized as such. Viking cost around 4 billion dollars, which is almost 10 times as much as a single MER costs. I'd say what we did was *definitely* cheaper.
It's unfortunate that the public isn't able to understand that we can make ten crappy space probes, three of which actually end up working, for the price of one uber-dependible probe. That's 3 times the science for the same money, but it's also 7 miserable failures to the public. I honestly wish NASA would get some balls again, but first the public would have to as well.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Just in time for Recount 2004: The 12 Days of Elections: (Sung to 12 days of christmas)
On # day of elections my voters gave to me:
A state where winning was key
2 hanging chads
3 third parties
4 challengers
5 votes that count
6 thousand lawyers
7 dead men voting
8 spinners spinning
9 judges judging
10 speakers speaking
11 folks still watching
12 founders weeping
Copyright 2004 Justin Wick and Thomas Womack
Enjoy!*
*NOTE: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SING AS A ROUND
Speaking as a lifelong Christian, I'd have to say things like this are fantastic. Why? Well, there's two kinds of things in the bible, things that are meant to be taken literally (plainly stated commands which are repeated as themes) and things which are to be taken figuratively (stories which contain valuable lessons for us). I think there is this false thinking in the church that evolution somehow destroys the "need" for God to exist, or changes the fact that humans are special and unique.
Honestly, the mechanics of the system are unimporant to religion - if God created the universe to be one where we'd develop, that's equivilent to creating us directly. It's kinda like creating a pile of logs and then lighting them on fire is basically equivilient to creating a pile of logs which are on fire. There's still things in this universe which are arbitrary and important for life (6 fundamental constants) which, unless we have some way of exploring outside of this universe, are likely going to always be a mystery. Maybe it was an accident (but that's require an infinite number of universes, which is hardly a simple answer) or maybe it was on purpose (which requires an infinite being of some sort outside our universe, also not simple).
I used to be a creationist, until I studied biology, evolution, and cosmology in detail. Then I realized that the arguments that had swayed me as a kid really didn't logically add up. I think that Creationism is dangerous in the sense that it widens the gap between Christianity and science/mainstream culture. This is bad because Christianity is about spreading a message of Love and Hope, and when scientists who spend their entire lives devoted to figuring out the secrets of life are alienated and ridiculed, it's hard for Christians to come off as anything but narrowminded fools. I know a lot of fundamentalist Christians (and in some ways I am fundamentalist, with a lower case f) and it's not narrowmindedness, it's the fact that science, especially evolution, has become so abstract, and so based on mathematical concepts you need a degree or two to understand, that the scientists might as well be saying random mumbo jumbo to these people. These people have no reason to trust the scientists (especially when these same scientists ridicule their faith, as many Humanists tend to do, especially on places such as slashdot) because they cannot understand them. And honestly, I'm just as wary of those who, for no particular reason, just seem to believe that Science will solve everything, and is the end all and be all of truth, as I am of those who have little faith in it. Science is just empiricism. It's a collection of ideas that happen to work, at least as far as we can test.
I for one like to think we're here for a reason. And I think that God gave us this universe full of beauty to explore and gave us the ability to try and understand it. And shouldn't we use that?
Cheers,
Justin
I know that Augmented Reality has many places where it can shine - on the battlefield, on the operating table, etc... but doesn't it seem like much of these functionalities simply distract from *REAL* reality? Does it say something about the attention span of this generation that we want to be bombarded with facts everywhere we go, like "Pop Up Video"?
I mean really, isn't the point of being outside to *GET AWAY* from computers and technology, and experience the real world? I mean, I love cyber space, and not that this isn't a cool technology, but really...
I believe that linux distributions like this that cater to older hardware encourage responsible environmental behavior among computer users. Honestly, for many purposes a 6 year old machine is just fine. I find it really convenient to have access to an always on, personally reconfigurable server that I can use for everything from a database to a small dynamic website. Most things that we do with computers nowadays don't really push our CPUs.
I also think it's fantastic that they are using new the new kernel - cutting edge software is a great way to reinvigorate older hardware. I really hope that this leads to more computer reuse by geeks and maybe eventually nongeeks.
A lesson people seem to have forgotten since the great depression survivors have moved on is "waste not want not". I for one think this world would be a better place with a little more of that attitude.
Besides, it's fun to think that our "favorite" OS could be helping keep the world a safe, clean place for our children.
Cheers,
Justin
I have a general question for the /.ers out there: do you feel that this kind of technology will tend to bring people together more, or apart?
I mean, when you can be 100 cool places at the flip of a button, why settle for wherever you are right now? Same with social stuff - why "put up with" the boring people next door instead of flipping on the immersive internet and talking to others who share your interests?
This is happenning already. Most of my communication with friends is IM, email, or cell phone. The amount of face-to-face talking, in real life, is astoundingly low. Is this a good thing? I mean, I can keep tabs with people around the country - and around the world. But it's not the same.
I can see a lot of legitimate business uses for this technology, and who wouldn't want to be able to attend famous lecturer's sessions without the need to travel (or fear of being caught sleeping)? I'm just worried that it will become an even stronger isolating force in our society.
Also, will telepresense bring about more outsourcing - why pay for a secretary who's right there, when for 1/10th the price you can have one from India, by telepresence, for the 90% or whatever things that need done that don't require actual presense.
Just some questions to think about.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
I highly disagree. When I use a product which is in "Beta" I do not expect it to meet the same level of stability/security etc. To do so is rediculous - anyone who develops software should understand why products of this kind require an extended beta period. It's definitely the best time to make last minute changes, adjustments, and to find problems like this. Finding these problems is the whole point of it being Beta in the first place. Anyone who's using this service for anything important, and then complaining about problems they have (other than as normal beta feedback) is being unreasonable!
From their Terms of Use: Their terms of service are very short, and easy to understand (not like most software agreements) and use of gmail is not only FREE, but it's entirely optional. No one's making you use it. People should not have the same level of expectation for this new service as they do of the original search engine, and if they, that's their own ignorance.
I also highly doubt that this beta period will last that much longer. GMail is becoming popular enough that the bugs and changes should be done soon.
Cheers,
Justin
The general equation is:
fdoppler = (frest * velocity )/ c
Not to be pedantic, but I think it should be mentioned that this is a first order approximation to the relativistic doppler shift as seen (here):
fdoppler = frest * Sqrt(1-beta^2)/(1-beta)
where beta = velocity / c
Not terribly important here, but definitely so in other astronomical fields.
This is enough difference to allow police speed radar traps to work, and for researchers to measure the wind speeds inside tornado's.
Not only that, but I've personally measured changes in velocity of an object on the order of 10s of microns per second using gamma radiation doppler shift (using the Mossbauer Effect). It's really quite incredible - a simple and fun experiment to try if you can.
Cheers,
Justin
There wasn't wireless coverage in the dorm where we were housed. Worse, to get on the wireless network seemed to require some windows-only tool (according to the confrence organizers), so I was SOL with a linux laptop.
:)
I believe it's simply VPN, which they rightly use to make their wireless networks secure (WEP just ain't enough). I believe that VPN clients for linux have been readily available, but I can't say it's easy to set up in this case. The organizers were probably not familiar with the intricacies of these involved.
The residential network worked just fine for me - though you did have to register your MAC address. You could bring your own wireless (if you use MAC spoofing) so if it's that big of a deal to have wireless in your dorm (something a lot of schools do not have) it's not hard. Besides, the dorms are so small, even a roll up ethernet cable works just fine
Cheers,
Justin
Well the problem with this is that I do not think that even if this is mostly a problem of market share, that the correlation need be anything remotely like linear (in fact closer to polynomial of a decent degree, or perhaps exponential). The reason for this that there is not only the target size (how easy it is to find a target for an attack) but also how easy it is to obtain a test system of that platform to test on (many script kiddies may not have the technical skill to set up a complex linux server system). Not only that, but the fact that a lot of worms spread not merely because there are more vulnerabilities in something like IIS, but the fact that they are used by individuals who tend not to customize their setups (leading to a homogeneous environment) and the fact that there are less minor versions (how many different versions of apache are there out there running?) Also add to that the fact that the speed of propagation of those worms is exponential in the "density" of infectable servvers on the network, and it's pretty clear that the relationship here is so nonlinear that it may be extremely difficult to "filter out."
Personally I think that there's two ways to go on this issue:
- A discussion of the theoretical level of security by each based on their design - potential for break ins. This is a "pure" measurement of the "merit" of a particular piece of software.
- A discussion of the likelihood that a given server would be broken into depending on what OS/Server Software it's running. This is much much more practical, but includes many factors that have little to do with the actual program design.
In fact, I see this dichotomy as being one of the main causes of misunderstandings and illogical discussion during flamewars. One can either discuss the theoretical merits of a piece of software - "Mac OS X has high reliability and a stable microkernel architecture, along with unparalleled interface design" - or the practical upshot of the usage of that software - "MS Windows has the largest userbase, and tens of thousands of specialized applications that run on that platform, including the latest games." It really just depends on what's important to you.While I find the theoretical merits of different software approaches to be fascinating, what really matters at the end of the day is the reality of the situation. Personally I think if FOSS gives you the best result, you should use it. If MS does the trick, use that instead. It's like the tired old analogy of VHS vs BetaMax... you get the picture.
Cheers,
Justin
RPI's not a huge surprise? I expected MIT at number one... not below the top 25. Same for many others. WTF?
Well, unlike MIT, RPI is much much more interested in technology and applied science than pure science - it is an "engineer factory" so to speak. Not only that, but their campus is tiny. A few wireless access points is all it takes to cover the entire place, unlike my school (Cornell University).
When I was there last, it was hard to find a place without wireless or ethernet available. Very cool. Good job RPI!
BTW, if you wonder what they do there, I was talking to Freeman Dyson the other day and he seemed to be very excited about their lightcraft - UFO looking space ships powered by earth-mounted laser generators. He seems to think they are much more likely to work than space elevators.
Cheers,
Justin
Reading your post, what sprung to my mind is the quote 'they who know history are doomed to see it repeated'. Just because something bad has happened before is no reason to sit idly by as a different form of the same happens again. The whole point of civilisation is to /not/ repeat past mistakes.
/that/ the craze would happen and have some insight as to why.
Wow, I'd hate to see how bad our score is then, considering that that seems to be about all we're capable of (repeating the mistakes of yesterday, but with new spiffy technology to amplify it)
Quick example: real hackers (or anyone who bothered to do some (just a tiny amount) research) knew y2k was not something which would bring disaster, only mild discomfort if not dealt with.
That drives me nuts when people say that. The amazing amount of effort that was put into fixing the Y2K problem was not imaginary! There was a very real problem, and while yes some did blow it wildly out of proportion, if no one had fixed it, there would have been a *LOT* of bad things happenning. And the problem is that in a complex system like our society, there's serious issues with cascade failures (with interdependent subsystems, all it takes is one important thing like power or phone to fail, and a ton of other things fail as well, and those dependent on them, etc). When there's a large blackout, it causes a lot of problems, even if it's just for a day. I took a tour of a local power station just before Y2K and saw all of their auditing - there is a lot of equipment, some of which was actually affected by the bug. If that hadn't been fixed, bad things would have happenned. Y2K was blown out of proportion but just like any problem, let go too long, and it could have had a real nasty impact.
And anyone with a knowledge of history would have compared this to any other 'the world is going to end' craze of the past millenia (and there have been a few) and pretty much known that y2k wouldn't be as bad as it was made out to be. And hackers who know history? They'd have known
Are you kidding? The fact that the world hasn't ended yet is no proof that it won't end - that doesn't even make sense! Lets say you drive a car 100 times on really icy roads and don't have an accident, that does not in any way prove that the 101st time, or 102nd time you won't have one. All it takes is for the world to end once. And unlike 1000 years ago, we have this nice little devices that can destroy EVERYTHING ON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET. Sounds pretty final to me.
And then there is stuff like the greenhouse effect, which is not in the above catagory for two reasons: nothing like it has happened before (ice-ages and the like don't count/compare with all the stuff humanity is putting up there) and it is scientific fact (just ask any scientist), against which we don't have any prevention/circumvention tools.
Oh geez... of course the greenhouse effect is a scientific fact... it was here long before man. Its effects, however, cannot currently be accurately modelled due the high nonlinearity of the system. It's possible we've already done a ton of damage, it's possible that we have little to do with global warming (a lot has to do with ocean currents and solar radiation flux, thigns that we don't really control). Hell we can't even come up with a model that can accurately predict past climates based on first principles and the same data we have today!
But I do agree that we shouldn't sit idly by... it's just that I think tinfoil hats and spreading FUD about the future just because the government does some things we don't agree with is the answer. Voting is a great way to start... after that, the sky's the limit! Maybe we need a hacker running for office? Well I guess Badnarik is the closest we'll get, since he was a software engineer.
Cheers,
Justin
One of the things that make good hackers better at spotting trends is that they rely on evidence rather than suspicion and speculation. One of my good friends used to LART people constantly in meetings with 'Don't speculate - profile!'
... " is known as a restrictive clause. It reduces the set of possible meanings of the subject "All the hackers" from the set of all hackers, to the set of all hackers that predicted the death of the internet. It does not imply that these two sets are the same, nor is it ambiguous. I was referring to a subset of all hackers. As for how many of them, well, that's part of the problem here: given a simple question "how many hackers predicted the death of the internet, which did not occur" it is very difficult to quantify this without extensive research. Given that this is difficult, imagine how hard it would be for a hacker type person to form an accurate prediction about the socioeconomic/political future of the world, or even teh united states, over any long term, using only what they hear on the news or on places like slashdot (or maybe read in books). Without extensive research, the hard numbers just aren't there. And this "gut feeling" nonsense is exactly that - nonsense. It's utterly unscientific and until someone can prove this effect, or even create a decent hypothesis, I'm not going to believe it to be any more than wishful thinking on their part.
The problem with this is that many hackers, while quite well versed in topics related to computers etc, have most likely not done any form of sociolical or economic field research. There is a lot that goes into analysis of trends and statistical information, as well as specific individual experiences etc. Combine that with a lack of law, economics, or politics education, and honestly I don't understand how it's anything but speculation. I mean, that's not to say that an intelligent person can't pick up a few things about those subjects without a formal education, however one really needs to have actual scientific research background to fully appreciate the difficulties associated with culling meaningful patterns out of the rediculously huge amount of events going on out there. Many of the supposed "warning signs" that we hear about are statistical anomolies, or things that are naturally corrected by the checks iand balances in our various political, social, and economic systems.
And now onto the grammar trolling (or related) part of your post. Yes, I'm that bored tonight. Enjoy a free english lesson.
I'm not saying that there isn't trouble brewing or that hackers aren't necessarily better at seeing this than others, its just like all the hackers that predicted the death of the internet for the last few decades...
1) 'All the hackers' is a hopelessly ambiguous modifier. Do you mean 'the majority'? I don't think so, based on context. Do you really mean 'many'? If so, how many? Who?
"that predicted
2) 'Predicted the death of the Internet' is another useless phrase. I can predict the death of the Internet with certainty. Watch: Some time before the heat death of the Universe, what we now know as the Internet will cease to exist. See? That was easy. 8^)
I'm nearly finished with my degree in physics, and the first thing you learn in physics is that theories change. The heat death of the universe is certain in theory but these very theories have massive holes in them. We really don't know how far things will expand etc. If the universe remains for an infinite amount of time, and eventually stops expanding, then the universe can (and will) spontaneously reorganize to lower entropy states - like resetting the clock. And if it collapses to a point and big-bangs again, it's possible that information could survive this (maybe by jumping ahead in time, or a wormhole through another universe or some other such theoretical nonsense involving string theory that we can't currently test). The heat death of