"For those who don't know about the Halting Problem or Busy Beaver Problem then you should really know about what computers can or cannot do."
I'm not sure what the relevance is here though. They are claiming that they can find security problems, not that they can guarentee to find all security problems.
The halting problem does not mean that you can not write a program to identify other programs that will not halt. It just says you can not always do this.
"now that many conferences and universities have wireless access, some people discuss lectures via instant message or weblog as they happen."
"And that's a good thing? Don't students have a hard enough time paying attention to lectures? I was a student once; I know!"
I've certainly known it happen at many conferences. People will often look up the website of the speaker, try out their tools, look up their papers while they are speaking. A very good thing.
Of course others do spend lots of time checking their email, or doing other work. But this is the nature of the beast. At many conferences most delegates are not interested in all the talks, but you often do not know whether you are or not, till a couple of minutes in. So now the choice is between listening to something you are not interested in, or email. A improvement from when you could listen, or fall asleep....
"When it comes to government expenditure, I really don't want a "free market""
Well I wouldn't disagree with this, although I am not particularly a fan of all this free market stuff anyway. I just find it interesting how the argument seems to be given both ways from some people. "The free market is a great thing, except when it isn't". We here all sorts of nonsense coming out of the free marketters about health services, and such like. I can't see why the same logic does not apply to the armed forces.
"You missed the point. The US does not lack that expertise internally (I think I can safely say Linus and the guys behind Red Hat Linux and SELinux are both capable of writing an OS, securely)"
As I said, I have no idea whether the US has the talent or not. Maybe the redhat guys could do it. There again maybe they already have a job, and didn't this grant. Its not an uncommon situation in research.
"Get some researchers in the US! Either train people already here, or attract people with those skills to immigrate."
Where will you train them? You need the people who have the knowledge to do the work. If they are not in the US, and do not wish to be in the US, then you have to live with the situation.
"It is an American funding body. "
So it is to fund American research, rather than research that American needs. This is fair enough, if that is the case.
"Like other defense procurement - and indeed almost all other government expenditure - it must come from the US wherever possible; "
All hail the free market.
"can you really claim the US lacks security researchers capable of working on a secure OS"
No idea. Security is not my thing. I'm talking from the experience of my own research area.
"True. Most rules of this sort can't be rigidly enforced, or things collapse. Spending some grant money overseas is one thing, though, making a "sub-grant" to an entire foreign project is another!"
Why? This sort of thing happens all the time. The money goes through a US institution but the research is done outside of the US.
Research is a small community of specialists. For a given research project there are probably only a few people in the world who have the ability and expertise to fulfil the research. And if these are abroad, what can you do about it?
Of course, its not surprising if there is some control over where it is spent, and through who. But there again I thought that DARPA's remit was to get the research done, rather than get it done somewhere specifically. Do they want to fund American research, or fund research for the American state. I guess largely the latter.
I certainly know several people who are funded indirectly through DARPA who do not work in the US. And likewise, I know many people on EU grants who work in the US.
I guess that most researchers just take the pragmatic view of things. Its hard enough getting people to do the research in the first place. Letting something like geography get in the way makes no sense, especially in fields (like computer science, of which DARPA funds a lot) which have no necessary geographical constraints.
"UPenn's redirection certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of these rules: the funding is supposed to fund work within the US."
Large parts of DARPA's research programme would collapse if they actually did things this way. There are too many researchers who do not live in the US, who they rely on.
"DARPA money cannot directly fund work outside the US so this method was being used."
Believe me, I know.
I'm not sure that its relevant though. This is an accounting fiction. If DARPA are removing grants based on political views, even if this is being done remotely its a problem. For that matter if U Penn, are doing then same, its a problem.
Now, of course, this is different from saying that its unexpected, or unusual. But its still a problem.
"Maybe I'm just not up to date on the Bill of Rights, but I don't see anything that says the government is requied to foot the bill for all research projects."
Redirecting money for research projects based on the political views of those carrying them out, though, is a different kettle of fish.
"Their are in the bill of rights to allow the citizens that right to over turn an oppressive government."
And at the time, this actually made some sense. The government had no standing army, relying instead on a citizen militia in times of war.
Nowadays the US has the largest army in the world, with all the high tech stuff that we keep on hearing about in the news. The idea that a few citizens, with some side arms and shot guns are going to over throw a tyrannical government is absurd.
The freedom of information act, and free speech, is far more important than the right to bear arms. If the US government wanted to enforce a tyranny, you would not stop its military with your arms. You would stop it by convincing the soldiers not to attack you. This is a much more powerful weapon than a shotgun, and has the advantage that its much harder to shoot people by accident.
The best sections of the BBC (read Radio 4) are good not because they are unbiased, but because they wear their bias on their sleeves.
Its pointless trying to get unbiased reporting. Everyone has a opinion, a point of view. Even if everything that is said is true, there is still the issue of what is not said. You can not cover everything.
News is at it's best where alternative view points are presented, discussed and argued out. The BBC does quite a lot of this, and it's for this that I like to listen to it.
It strikes me that as the threshold is approached a company will have less and less incentive to offer support on their product, because after all they will not be able to get direct revenue from the sale for much longer. Likewise development. Why release new versions? At the same time, there will be no open source version, so no one else will be able to fix it.
I think the they key problem here is the assumption that a piece of software is created, and released at one point in time, when this is clearly not the case. Is the Emacs that I use daily 2 months old since that was when it was released. Or is 20 years old because some of the code dates back that far?
Software does not exist at a point in in time, but is a continually developing thing. This is why many companies are moving toward a leasing model, and this is also one of the main advantages of free software...you can track the development as and when you choose, not as the company chooses to release a new version.
"The Second Amendment was put in place by our founding fathers to ensure that the People will always have the means to defend their Freedoms against would-be tyrants."
The founding fathers existed at a time when the notion of a standing army was an anathema to them. Anyone who supports the right to bear arms, to prevent tyranny, should also argue, it seems to me, for the abolition of the US army (and other military force).
It all strikes me as a bit ludicrous. The idea that a population with a few hand guns are going to prevent a tyranny from forming when the army has tanks, helicopters, and heavy bombers is little short of absurd.
Accountability, division of power, freedom of speech, are much more important. The pen is, indeed, mightier than the sword.
"Most European countries have their own version on the MPAA rating scheme."
Which relates to films which are purchased in these countries, or displayed in a public forum. This clearly does not cover those films bought, for instance, in the US, then imported back to the UK.
The only reason that DVD's have region encoding, is that the companies wanted to ensure that the inflated costs of media in europe stayed the same. Many people already buy CD's abroad and import them back, which costs them CD companies a lot of cash. They do not do so with videos because the different TV standards prevent it. With DVD's they wented to arbitrarily enforce this situation.
The free market is fine when it makes people big business rich. When it does not, clearly, they want to stop it.
"The completed human sequence was available from a company called Celera"
And was based on the publically available version.
"the quality (and therefore usability) of the public version is still below that of the private version."
Ditto.
"Without the private version to stress the academic guys, "
This is the "academics can never do anything" argument, and its a fallacy. The public effort has still produced more sequence than the private.
"All I'm saying is that sometimes some good old competition, can help to accomplish research goals."
Celera did force the pace and this was no bad thing. But competition is not unique to the private sector, its present in academia as well.
"The company in this case, should get the credit they deserve for the innovative methods"
Indeed. Celera's main innovation was their generation of the best techniques for contig assembly, and their techniques still outstrip those publically available. Of course most of the work for this was done in the public sector, so the public/private argument is somewhat fallacious. But producing data which is not freely accessible is of limited value. Nature is complex enough without adding lawyers into the mix.
I wonder why the last post get moderated down to -1, given that it's a perfectly reasonable and sensible post. I wonder if it was because it was a little rude about scientologists.
"Note that "freedom of expression" != "freedom of slandering" !!!"
Unfortunately according to law Jesus and the Virgin Mary are both dead, and therefore can not actually be slandered.
The other point is that freedom of religion does not also cover freedom of lack of religion. Atheism is not classified as a religion, and is not protected under the human rights convention in the same way that a religion is. Odd but true.
I would imagine the rise of high speed transportation made it much easier for the blind. In the same way that the rise of digital media has made it easier. Once information is digital its much easier to present it in audible or touch format.
I think that the whole argument is backwards to be honest.
"Almost all the Dr. Who villians are greedy capitalists."
"huh?"
"the master - just plain evil, wouldn't mind being rich, but only because he wants power"
So a capitalist then.
"the daleks - do whatever they please, not interested in money at all, basically stupid war mongers"
War is always good for business.
"the cybermen - definitely not interested in gold;-) as once humans, they simply do whatever they feel is necessary to reproduce, and consider themselves the most evolved life in the universe."
Authoritarian, evil, the most powerful should rule. In otherwords capitalists.
Take Dr Who and the Sunmakers. Trotsky in space. Yeah go Doctor.
And the fact that the greedy capitalist was actually a small green alien is really just a detail.
Well to be honest the last attempt to do this was, well, totally crap. Paul McGann tried his hardest, but the script was weak, and setting it in the US gratuitous. And as for the car chase. Dearie, dearie me...
"Here in the UK we pay a shade over 100 pounds ($150) a year to have a couple of advert free TV channels and a number of advert free radio stations."
Which is great for those of us who only have a radio, and don't have to pay anything at all.
It is, of course, worth mentioning that most of the TV channels in the UK do not in fact get government money. They actually have to compete against the BBC which gets publically funded, and raise their revenue with advertising. Which they do. And they also do with far far less advertising than in the US.
When ever we go over to the US we are always amazed by how much advertising you have on. Its continual. I think that the US consumer ought to be asking for a better deal than its getting.
"NO, he did NOT in fact the soviets simply ruined russian economy"
Stalin closed down all the Soviets, or removed all of their power.
Do you have any evidence for this statement. When the Russian revolution happened, the Tsar had just managed to get millions killed in a war, millions more were starving to death. Russia had no industrial power, and was in fact an agrarian economy.
There is almost no country which has turned into an major industrial economy as quickly. What evidence do you have that the economy would "have gone faster without them"?
I'm no fan of what Stalin did, but to pretend that he did nothing at all is revisionism of the worst
sort.
Sadly whisky production on Islay involves digging up large quantities of peat, and burning that to produce heat. Which is pretty much as environmentally unfriendly as you can get. Although obviously it makes the whisky taste great.
Slashdot Mirror
"For those who don't know about the Halting Problem or Busy Beaver Problem then you should really know about what computers can or cannot do."
I'm not sure what the relevance is here though. They are claiming that they can find security problems, not that they can guarentee to find all security problems.
The halting problem does not mean that you can not write a program to identify other programs that will not halt. It just says you can not always do this.
Phil
"now that many conferences and universities have wireless access, some people discuss lectures via instant message or weblog as they happen."
"And that's a good thing? Don't students have a hard enough time paying attention to lectures? I was a student once; I know!"
I've certainly known it happen at many conferences. People will often look up the website of the speaker, try out their tools, look up their papers while they are speaking. A very good thing.
Of course others do spend lots of time checking their email, or doing other work. But this is the nature of the beast. At many conferences most delegates are not interested in all the talks, but you often do not know whether you are or not, till a couple of minutes in. So now the choice is between listening to something you are not interested in, or email. A improvement from when you could listen, or fall asleep....
Phil
The River Severn is the longest river in the UK.
It could be named after this.
Phil
"When it comes to government expenditure, I really don't want a "free market""
Well I wouldn't disagree with this, although I am not particularly a fan of all this free market stuff anyway. I just find it interesting how the argument seems to be given both ways from some people. "The free market is a great thing, except when it isn't". We here all sorts of nonsense coming out of the free marketters about health services, and such like. I can't see why the same logic does not apply to the armed forces.
"You missed the point. The US does not lack that expertise internally (I think I can safely say Linus and the guys behind Red Hat Linux and SELinux are both capable of writing an OS, securely)"
As I said, I have no idea whether the US has the talent or not. Maybe the redhat guys could do it. There again maybe they already have a job, and didn't this grant. Its not an uncommon situation in research.
Phil
"Research is a small community of specialists. "
"Get some researchers in the US! Either train people already here, or attract people with those skills to immigrate."
Where will you train them? You need the people who
have the knowledge to do the work. If they are not in the US, and do not wish to be in the US, then you have to live with the situation.
"It is an American funding body. "
So it is to fund American research, rather than research that American needs. This is fair enough, if that is the case.
"Like other defense procurement - and indeed almost all other government expenditure - it must come from the US wherever possible; "
All hail the free market.
"can you really claim the US lacks security researchers capable of working on a secure OS"
No idea. Security is not my thing. I'm talking from the experience of my own research area.
Phil
"True. Most rules of this sort can't be rigidly enforced, or things collapse. Spending some grant money overseas is one thing, though, making a "sub-grant" to an entire foreign project is another!"
Why? This sort of thing happens all the time. The money goes through a US institution but the research is done outside of the US.
Research is a small community of specialists. For a given research project there are probably only a few people in the world who have the ability and expertise to fulfil the research. And if these are abroad, what can you do about it?
Of course, its not surprising if there is some control over where it is spent, and through who. But there again I thought that DARPA's remit was to get the research done, rather than get it done somewhere specifically. Do they want to fund American research, or fund research for the American state. I guess largely the latter.
I certainly know several people who are funded indirectly through DARPA who do not work in the US. And likewise, I know many people on EU grants who work in the US.
I guess that most researchers just take the pragmatic view of things. Its hard enough getting people to do the research in the first place. Letting something like geography get in the way makes no sense, especially in fields (like computer science, of which DARPA funds a lot) which have no necessary geographical constraints.
Phil
"UPenn's redirection certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of these rules: the funding is supposed to fund work within the US."
Large parts of DARPA's research programme would collapse if they actually did things this way. There are too many researchers who do not live in the US, who they rely on.
Phil
"DARPA money cannot directly fund work outside the US so this method was being used."
Believe me, I know.
I'm not sure that its relevant though. This is
an accounting fiction. If DARPA are removing
grants based on political views, even if this
is being done remotely its a problem. For that
matter if U Penn, are doing then same, its
a problem.
Now, of course, this is different from saying
that its unexpected, or unusual. But its
still a problem.
Phil
"Maybe I'm just not up to date on the Bill of Rights, but I don't see anything that says the government is requied to foot the bill for all research projects."
Redirecting money for research projects based on the political views of those carrying them out, though, is a different kettle of fish.
Phil
"Their are in the bill of rights to allow the citizens that right to over turn an oppressive government."
And at the time, this actually made some sense. The government had no standing army, relying instead on a citizen militia in times of war.
Nowadays the US has the largest army in the world, with all the high tech stuff that we keep on hearing about in the news. The idea that a few citizens, with some side arms and shot guns are going to over throw a tyrannical government is absurd.
The freedom of information act, and free speech, is far more important than the right to bear arms. If the US government wanted to enforce a tyranny, you would not stop its military with your arms. You would stop it by convincing the soldiers not to attack you. This is a much more powerful weapon than a shotgun, and has the advantage that its much harder to shoot people by accident.
Phil
The best sections of the BBC (read Radio 4) are good not because they are unbiased, but because they wear their bias on their sleeves.
Its pointless trying to get unbiased reporting. Everyone has a opinion, a point of view. Even if everything that is said is true, there is still the issue of what is not said. You can not cover everything.
News is at it's best where alternative view points are presented, discussed and argued out. The BBC does quite a lot of this, and it's for this that I like to listen to it.
Phil
It strikes me that as the threshold is approached a company will have less and less incentive to offer support on their product, because after all they will not be able to get direct revenue from the sale for much longer. Likewise development. Why release new versions? At the same time, there will be no open source version, so no one else will be able to fix it.
I think the they key problem here is the assumption that a piece of software is created, and released at one point in time, when this is clearly not the case. Is the Emacs that I use daily 2 months old since that was when it was released. Or is 20 years old because some of the code dates back that far?
Software does not exist at a point in in time, but is a continually developing thing. This is why many companies are moving toward a leasing model, and this is also one of the main advantages of free software...you can track the development as and when you choose, not as the company chooses to release a new version.
Phil
"The Second Amendment was put in place by our founding fathers to ensure that the People will always have the means to defend their Freedoms against would-be tyrants."
The founding fathers existed at a time when the notion of a standing army was an anathema to them. Anyone who supports the right to bear arms, to prevent tyranny, should also argue, it seems to me, for the abolition of the US army (and other military force).
It all strikes me as a bit ludicrous. The idea that a population with a few hand guns are going to prevent a tyranny from forming when the army has tanks, helicopters, and heavy bombers is little short of absurd.
Accountability, division of power, freedom of speech, are much more important. The pen is, indeed, mightier than the sword.
Phil
"Most European countries have their own version on the MPAA rating scheme."
Which relates to films which are purchased in these countries, or displayed in a public forum. This clearly does not cover those films bought, for instance, in the US, then imported back to the UK.
The only reason that DVD's have region encoding, is that the companies wanted to ensure that the inflated costs of media in europe stayed the same. Many people already buy CD's abroad and import them back, which costs them CD companies a lot of cash. They do not do so with videos because the different TV standards prevent it. With DVD's they wented to arbitrarily enforce this situation.
The free market is fine when it makes people big business rich. When it does not, clearly, they want to stop it.
Phil
"The completed human sequence was available from a company called Celera"
And was based on the publically available version.
"the quality (and therefore usability) of the public version is still below that of the private version."
Ditto.
"Without the private version to stress the academic guys, "
This is the "academics can never do anything" argument, and its a fallacy. The public effort has still produced more sequence than the private.
"All I'm saying is that sometimes some good old competition, can help to accomplish research goals."
Celera did force the pace and this was no bad thing. But competition is not unique to the private sector, its present in academia as well.
"The company in this case, should get the credit they deserve for the innovative methods"
Indeed. Celera's main innovation was their generation of the best techniques for contig assembly, and their techniques still outstrip those publically available. Of course most of the work for this was done in the public sector, so the public/private argument is somewhat fallacious. But producing data which is not freely accessible is of limited value. Nature is complex enough without adding lawyers into the mix.
Phil
I wonder why the last post get moderated down to -1, given that it's a perfectly reasonable and sensible post. I wonder if it was because it was a little rude about scientologists.
Phil
"Note that "freedom of expression" != "freedom of slandering" !!!"
Unfortunately according to law Jesus and the Virgin Mary are both dead, and therefore can not actually be slandered.
The other point is that freedom of religion does not also cover freedom of lack of religion. Atheism is not classified as a religion, and is not protected under the human rights convention in the same way that a religion is. Odd but true.
Phil
I would imagine the rise of high speed transportation made it much easier for the blind. In the same way that the rise of digital media has made it easier. Once information is digital its much easier to present it in audible or touch format.
I think that the whole argument is backwards to be honest.
Phil
"So you admit that capitalists are usually evil...?"
I don't only admit it, I positively assert it.
Phil
"Almost all the Dr. Who villians are greedy capitalists."
;-) as once humans, they simply do whatever they feel is necessary to reproduce, and consider themselves the most evolved life in the universe."
"huh?"
"the master - just plain evil, wouldn't mind being rich, but only because he wants power"
So a capitalist then.
"the daleks - do whatever they please, not interested in money at all, basically stupid war mongers"
War is always good for business.
"the cybermen - definitely not interested in gold
Authoritarian, evil, the most powerful should rule. In otherwords capitalists.
Take Dr Who and the Sunmakers. Trotsky in space. Yeah go Doctor.
And the fact that the greedy capitalist was actually a small green alien is really just a detail.
Phil
"Sadly, the Beeb deny this here [bbc.co.uk]."
Well to be honest the last attempt to do this was, well, totally crap. Paul McGann tried his hardest, but the script was weak, and setting it in the US gratuitous. And as for the car chase. Dearie, dearie me...
Phil
"Here in the UK we pay a shade over 100 pounds ($150) a year to have a couple of advert free TV channels and a number of advert free radio stations."
Which is great for those of us who only have a radio, and don't have to pay anything at all.
It is, of course, worth mentioning that most of the TV channels in the UK do not in fact get government money. They actually have to compete against the BBC which gets publically funded, and raise their revenue with advertising. Which they do. And they also do with far far less advertising than in the US.
When ever we go over to the US we are always amazed by how much advertising you have on. Its continual. I think that the US consumer ought to be asking for a better deal than its getting.
Phil
"NO, he did NOT in fact the soviets simply ruined russian economy"
Stalin closed down all the Soviets, or removed all of their power.
Do you have any evidence for this statement. When the Russian revolution happened, the Tsar had just managed to get millions killed in a war, millions more were starving to death. Russia had no industrial power, and was in fact an agrarian economy.
There is almost no country which has turned into an major industrial economy as quickly. What evidence do you have that the economy would "have gone faster without them"?
I'm no fan of what Stalin did, but to pretend that he did nothing at all is revisionism of the worst
sort.
Phil
I think you are getting confused.
Its "ahh Bisto".....
Phil
Sadly whisky production on Islay involves digging up large quantities of peat, and burning that to produce heat. Which is pretty much as environmentally unfriendly as you can get. Although obviously it makes the whisky taste great.
Phil