After reading the FAQ, I was very impressed. I have always been one of those using the term "Linux" (because it is the conventional term) along with a 10 minute explanation of its GNU history.
However, they make a very good case that such explanations do not stick. In fact, I can usually see the subjects eyes glazing over as I speak. The simple strategy of changing the name will be much more effective. When someone asks, "Why do you say 'Gnu/Linux' when everyone else says just 'Linux'?", the 10 minute explanation will be much better recieved.
One thing I'm curious about. There are very frequent mentions of choosing actions because they are "right". Is Richard Stallman still an atheist? Is there some stuff on the web about his personal religious views? (Preferrably by Stallman himself.)
The problem is that maturity varies greatly with the individual child. While Government minimum standards can be helpful, ultimately, a good parent has to tailor each childs education. It is crucial to be aware of the existence of seamy side streets, but important not to be aware of them at an age where they might be explored out of innocent curiosity (and the child exploited).
The Original Poster did not state his case very clearly, but he did mention things starting out with tremendous order. He was not claiming that local entropy can't decrease, but only that the universe as a whole had to start out with a fantastically low entropy for local entropy to be be able to decrease.
How low was the initial entropy? In The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose makes a back of the envelope calculation, and comes up with 1/2^10^80. Now one explanation of where this highly selected early universe came from is that "it just happened". Another explanation is that "God did it". Both views have about equal explanatory power from a scientific viewpoint. Roger Penrose's comment was, "Even God couldn't be that precise!"
This reminds me a period in the Roman Empire when citizenship could be bought:
Paul of Tarsus has just made a very Politically Incorrect speech to some Jewish Rabbis in Jerusalem, (Paul is himself Jewish), and his listeners become enraged:
Acts 22:22
And they gave him audience unto this word, and then lifted up their voices, and said, "Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live." And as they cried out, and cast off their clothes, and threw dust into the air, the chief captain commanded him to be brought into the castle, and bade that he should be examined by scourging; that he might know wherefore they cried so against him.
And as they bound him with thongs, Paul said unto the centurion that stood by, "Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?"
When the centurion heard that , he went and told the chief captain, saying, "Take heed what thou doest: for this man is a Roman." Then the chief captain came, and said unto him, "Tell me, art thou a Roman?" He said, "Yea." And the chief captain answered, "With a great sum obtained I this freedom." And Paul said, "But I was free born."
Then straightway they departed from him which should have examined him: and the chief captain also was afraid, after he knew that he was a Roman, and because he had bound him.
This is a trend that really needs encouragement. So, despite the fact that I can't stand modern rock, I went to their web site for some 30 second samples to see if I could bring myself to buy a CD as a vote of confidence.
With the first sample, I had to cover my ears, and now I've got my David Bellugi early rennaisance CD on to clear out my eardrums. I'm truly sorry, but someone that actually likes this stuff will have to take up the slack.
I am not that interested in blazing speed. What I want from a system is:
Reliability (ECC mem, parity on cache, internal thermal limits)
Low noise. My dream system has no fan, but I can't afford water cooled and speed does matter enough that Pentium 200 doesn't cut it.
Low power.
Low cost.
A transmeta motherboard with ECC would probably be up my alley, but don't tell me where I could have bought one, because I just sprung for a Dell SC500 - noisy fan, not exactly low power, but low cost ($400 w/ rebate) and reliable.
I am a Cox Highspeed Internet customer. They hooked me with $40/mo, but jacked it back up to $50/mo once I was on board. However, since they are down an average of 3 days every month, and I religiously log the downtime (and Cox is good about giving credit for downtime), I'm not paying much more than $40/mo.
I wouldn't mind paying $50/mo if it was as reliable as the phone, and I could ditch phone service for VOIP. You can buy a neat POTS adapter and a service to provide a telephone number for VOIP. The total cost would be less than two ordinary phone lines plus dialup internet.
I am on Cox Cable Internet - a US provider. They have no restrictions on running servers - other than the dynamic IP and bandwidth cap, of course. You can pay extra to get fixed IP and raise the cap.
I am aware of DSL ISPs that block outgoing port 25 except to their mail gateway, in an effort to control SPAM. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
So who are the big US cable modem providers that have such stupid policies? My internet connection would be worthless and I would drop the ISP in a heartbeat if I couldn't connect to my home machine via HTTP and SSH from anywhere. I don't keep any publically advertized web pages at home because I don't want the world tying up my 500K upstream cap, but if I wanted to run a small server with dynamic DNS, why should the ISP care?
You are absolutely right. My lab would have both ends of the wormhole present at any point in time - each stablized in a colorful box the size of a sportster modem. One end is connected to 1 year in the future, and the other end connected to 1 year in the past.
This immediately points out a restriction. I can't recycle IP addresses for the WLAN - otherwise there will be interference. Even if I use IPV6 for the IP level, there is a limited number of years before the WLAN hardware addresses conflict. With a large number of WLANs connected together (each 1 year apart in time), how well would the WLAN function?
It seems that reading the result of future computation through the wormhole is not as simple as it seemed at first glance. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just difficult enough to prevent paradox
I suspect that there would also be a large attractive force between the wormhole ends - so they are probably both housed in a single colorful box with appropriate devices to prevent their mutual annihilation. Or perhaps there is a repulsive force proportional to the distance in time. In either case, it may be pysically impossible to maintain two wormhole ends separated by 1 year of time at a distance any closer than 1 light year . . .
Once a worm hole is created, the two ends are in continuous communication. All events that transpire involving either wormhole end will already take into account nearby events at both ends. Does this prevent paradoxes?
Here is a thought experiment. Suppose I have such a worm home set up in my computer lab, one end a year in the future. It is a microscopic one, cause I am a computer guy with no use for planet sized machines. I want stuff that is small and uses minimal power. So my wormhole is just big enough for me to connect to the wireless LAN in my lab 1 year in the future. I change the IP address of my WLAN every 6 months so that there is no conflict.
Now, I start a prime number factorization on my beowulf cluster that will take a year to crack an RSA key. I start the computation, and ssh through the microscopic wormhole to see the result immediately. Cool!
Ok, now I want to crack another key, and I don't want to wait a year, so I interrupt the program. I've already copied the result of the previous computation, and verified that it is correct, so I don't need to actually finish it. Now I can crack another key! In fact, this 1 year microscopic wormhole makes a great way to accelerate any long running computation - provided your computer can stay up for at least a year. (So it won't work for Windows.) Think of being able to render computer animated movies in fantastic detail in seconds!
This smells of a paradox to me, unless I'm missing something.
Exactly. My post was a dig against open source IMAP servers as well as MS active document bloat. MS Exchange really does do this part right. Of course, don't expect to recover anything if their proprietary object mail database gets corrupted.
Hmmmmm. There might be a solution to those 500MB mailboxes that never get looked at. "Your mailbox has been corrupted. Only the last years worth of mail has been recovered." If they put up with losing it all with Microsoft, they ought to be real happy to have saved the last years worth!
And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.
Plus, they will keep all the resulting multi-megabyte virus carrying executable 1 page memos they have ever received from anyone in or outside the company for the last 5 years in their inbox on the Linux IMAP server. The IMAP server will take forever with wicked diskloads to parse their 500MB inbox in/var/spool/mail whenever they check their mail. Attempts to show them how to move mail to other folders are met with a glazed look.
Then, a Microsoft salesman will show up explaining how this problem is easily solved by installing an MS Exchange server.
The July 2002 Dr. Dobbs Journal has a provable prime algorithm. The article did not do a complexity analysis, but it requires work equivalent to two passes of Miller-Rabin. The algorithm is called CUL and does two Lucas function tests. However, the proof doesn't deal with whether composites are provable - so perhaps it is what you are looking for. The proof for probable primes was reasonably simple.
We recycled our TV 12 years ago. The conventional wisdom is to just "use the on/off switch" and control the TV. The reality is that trying to control something as addictive as TV is extremely stressful. Getting rid of the dang thing was a huge load off of our backs and simplified life tremendously.
Now, let's see, how do I add Slashdot to the banned list for my Squid web filter . . .
Maybe this is a revival of Christian tradition. You'll never find a "deep reference" in the Bible. Only "as the Scripture saith" - and it is up to the reader to find the reference.
Of course, this policy makes more sense when the material referenced stays the same for thousands of years - as opposed to changing every day.
What IBM has up their sleeve
on
IBM Spins Down
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· Score: 1
My personal theory is that their holographic drives are getting closer to production. The interesting thing about the holo drives is that the sector size is around 64K. The seek time is near zero, but you have to finish reading the entire 64K sector before you can use any of it, and sectors must be written as a unit also. This should make for some interesting file system design changes.
A nifty possibility is that the crystal could be removeable. Storing gigabytes on a sugar cube sized crystal with no moving parts reminds me of the Anne McCaffrey novel PartnerShip, which also features a villain who runs a galactic monopoly with a remarkable resemblance to Microsoft.
I thought that competition was good? If you want a nice simple market with only one vender, and no struggles between a dozen competitors vying to set standards, you might try Microsoft.
We use RedHat for our business clients because it works out of the box and looks dignified and business like. For our non-technical clients - this is *very* important. I don't mean that in a snide way - it shows that the overall focus of RedHat is business, as opposed to games or kernel hacking.
Games and kernel hacking are important too. That is why in the Linux world we have choice - and why the Microsoft world is bad, even if it does provide regimented order that puts Storm Troopers to shame.
Christians and Jews believe in only one self-existent God. However, there are many created gods - both good and evil.
Evil gods include creations of human imagination (idols) - or creations of God who have rebelled (Satan "the god of this world", demons).
Good gods are subordinate to God. They include morally good creations of human imagination, Angels, and even Human Beings ("Ye are gods"). The difference with respect to New Age, is that New Age denies the existence of one Sovereign self-existent God.
As gods made in the image of God, Human beings have the power to create - Tolkein's world, computer simulated worlds. Our creations are not on the same level as the created universe we live in, but they inherit the moral qualities of their creators - for good or evil.
As has been pointed out ad nauseum already, most pirates wouldn't have bought the program anyway. It seems that any proprietary product would be best served with the "Non-commercial use only" type license - where copies are free (as in free beer) for individuals and non profit-making activities within a corporation (such as evaluation).
This allows all the benefits of piracy - lots of people who wouldn't or couldn't otherwise buy the software get familiar with it, and you can still send the BSA out to raid corporations that use it to run their sales force without paying. It has the further benefit of not promoting the moral decay that comes with deliberately disrespecting the legal rights of copyright holders.
No real lenses or mirrors are required for coherent monochromatic light. It suffices to use a hologram of the lens/mirror assembly. The hologram has exactly the same effect on the laser as real optics.
It gets better. There need not be any real optics to take a holgram of. The hologram can be computer generated, and can act like optics that would be impossible to construct physically (for example, lenses and mirrors suspended in space with no support).
In Science News, sometime in the last year, there was an article on work that accurately modeled bumblebee flight for the first time. The researchers even built a mechanical bumble bee which has been proposed as a military drone vehicle. It can hover with far less fuel than a helicopter, and uses a simple vibrator rather than an engine.
The scientific dogma when the Wright brothers made their historic flight was that heavier than air flight is impossible. The news of their success was "exposed" as a fraud by some scientists for some time afterward.
Until very recently, bumblebees were unable to fly according to our best models of aerodynamics.
I knew a "crank" inventor with real reproducible results. He called his invention the "Zero Bandwidth Transmitter" - a contradiction in terms by standard definitions. However, his invention was based on a DSP and the prototype units could transmit a high quality voice signal for many miles while producing zero interference as measured by official FCC compliance monitoring equipment. In other words, he had really invented a "Spread Spectrum Transmitter". Unfortunately, his work was repeatedly thrown out of the patent office because of his insistance on using his own idiosyncratic vocabulary to describe the invention. (And yet silly patents abound.) He eventually ran out of money, leaving him bitter and disillusioned.
Mr. Curie died in a horse cart accident. Mrs. Curie lived to a ripe old age - no radiation poisoning or cancer. In fact, for many years radium was used for its health benefits - many cancer victims recovered with its use. It was only later that we discovered that radiation carried its own statistically applied dangers.
Radiation therapy is rather like kicking a machine that has stopped working. The jolt often causes it to start operating again. On the other hand, repeatedly kicking a machine is likely to break it.
Slashdot Mirror
However, they make a very good case that such explanations do not stick. In fact, I can usually see the subjects eyes glazing over as I speak. The simple strategy of changing the name will be much more effective. When someone asks, "Why do you say 'Gnu/Linux' when everyone else says just 'Linux'?", the 10 minute explanation will be much better recieved.
One thing I'm curious about. There are very frequent mentions of choosing actions because they are "right". Is Richard Stallman still an atheist? Is there some stuff on the web about his personal religious views? (Preferrably by Stallman himself.)
The problem is that maturity varies greatly with the individual child. While Government minimum standards can be helpful, ultimately, a good parent has to tailor each childs education. It is crucial to be aware of the existence of seamy side streets, but important not to be aware of them at an age where they might be explored out of innocent curiosity (and the child exploited).
How low was the initial entropy? In The Emperor's New Mind , Roger Penrose makes a back of the envelope calculation, and comes up with 1/2^10^80. Now one explanation of where this highly selected early universe came from is that "it just happened". Another explanation is that "God did it". Both views have about equal explanatory power from a scientific viewpoint. Roger Penrose's comment was, "Even God couldn't be that precise!"
Paul of Tarsus has just made a very Politically Incorrect speech to some Jewish Rabbis in Jerusalem, (Paul is himself Jewish), and his listeners become enraged:
Acts 22:22
And they gave him audience unto this word, and then lifted up their voices, and said, "Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live." And as they cried out, and cast off their clothes, and threw dust into the air, the chief captain commanded him to be brought into the castle, and bade that he should be examined by scourging; that he might know wherefore they cried so against him.
And as they bound him with thongs, Paul said unto the centurion that stood by, "Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?"
When the centurion heard that , he went and told the chief captain, saying, "Take heed what thou doest: for this man is a Roman." Then the chief captain came, and said unto him, "Tell me, art thou a Roman?" He said, "Yea." And the chief captain answered, "With a great sum obtained I this freedom." And Paul said, "But I was free born."
Then straightway they departed from him which should have examined him: and the chief captain also was afraid, after he knew that he was a Roman, and because he had bound him.
With the first sample, I had to cover my ears, and now I've got my David Bellugi early rennaisance CD on to clear out my eardrums. I'm truly sorry, but someone that actually likes this stuff will have to take up the slack.
- Reliability (ECC mem, parity on cache, internal thermal limits)
- Low noise. My dream system has no fan, but I can't afford water cooled and speed does matter enough that Pentium 200 doesn't cut it.
- Low power.
- Low cost.
A transmeta motherboard with ECC would probably be up my alley, but don't tell me where I could have bought one, because I just sprung for a Dell SC500 - noisy fan, not exactly low power, but low cost ($400 w/ rebate) and reliable.I wouldn't mind paying $50/mo if it was as reliable as the phone, and I could ditch phone service for VOIP. You can buy a neat POTS adapter and a service to provide a telephone number for VOIP. The total cost would be less than two ordinary phone lines plus dialup internet.
If the ISO standard for MP3 was published in 1988, shouldn't the patent be expired by now? How long do german patents last?
I am aware of DSL ISPs that block outgoing port 25 except to their mail gateway, in an effort to control SPAM. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
So who are the big US cable modem providers that have such stupid policies? My internet connection would be worthless and I would drop the ISP in a heartbeat if I couldn't connect to my home machine via HTTP and SSH from anywhere. I don't keep any publically advertized web pages at home because I don't want the world tying up my 500K upstream cap, but if I wanted to run a small server with dynamic DNS, why should the ISP care?
This immediately points out a restriction. I can't recycle IP addresses for the WLAN - otherwise there will be interference. Even if I use IPV6 for the IP level, there is a limited number of years before the WLAN hardware addresses conflict. With a large number of WLANs connected together (each 1 year apart in time), how well would the WLAN function?
It seems that reading the result of future computation through the wormhole is not as simple as it seemed at first glance. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just difficult enough to prevent paradox
I suspect that there would also be a large attractive force between the wormhole ends - so they are probably both housed in a single colorful box with appropriate devices to prevent their mutual annihilation. Or perhaps there is a repulsive force proportional to the distance in time. In either case, it may be pysically impossible to maintain two wormhole ends separated by 1 year of time at a distance any closer than 1 light year . . .
Here is a thought experiment. Suppose I have such a worm home set up in my computer lab, one end a year in the future. It is a microscopic one, cause I am a computer guy with no use for planet sized machines. I want stuff that is small and uses minimal power. So my wormhole is just big enough for me to connect to the wireless LAN in my lab 1 year in the future. I change the IP address of my WLAN every 6 months so that there is no conflict.
Now, I start a prime number factorization on my beowulf cluster that will take a year to crack an RSA key. I start the computation, and ssh through the microscopic wormhole to see the result immediately. Cool!
Ok, now I want to crack another key, and I don't want to wait a year, so I interrupt the program. I've already copied the result of the previous computation, and verified that it is correct, so I don't need to actually finish it. Now I can crack another key! In fact, this 1 year microscopic wormhole makes a great way to accelerate any long running computation - provided your computer can stay up for at least a year. (So it won't work for Windows.) Think of being able to render computer animated movies in fantastic detail in seconds!
This smells of a paradox to me, unless I'm missing something.
Hmmmmm. There might be a solution to those 500MB mailboxes that never get looked at. "Your mailbox has been corrupted. Only the last years worth of mail has been recovered." If they put up with losing it all with Microsoft, they ought to be real happy to have saved the last years worth!
Plus, they will keep all the resulting multi-megabyte virus carrying executable 1 page memos they have ever received from anyone in or outside the company for the last 5 years in their inbox on the Linux IMAP server. The IMAP server will take forever with wicked diskloads to parse their 500MB inbox in /var/spool/mail whenever they check their mail. Attempts to show them how to move mail to other folders are met with a glazed look.
Then, a Microsoft salesman will show up explaining how this problem is easily solved by installing an MS Exchange server.
The July 2002 Dr. Dobbs Journal has a provable prime algorithm. The article did not do a complexity analysis, but it requires work equivalent to two passes of Miller-Rabin. The algorithm is called CUL and does two Lucas function tests. However, the proof doesn't deal with whether composites are provable - so perhaps it is what you are looking for. The proof for probable primes was reasonably simple.
Now, let's see, how do I add Slashdot to the banned list for my Squid web filter . . .
Of course, this policy makes more sense when the material referenced stays the same for thousands of years - as opposed to changing every day.
A nifty possibility is that the crystal could be removeable. Storing gigabytes on a sugar cube sized crystal with no moving parts reminds me of the Anne McCaffrey novel PartnerShip, which also features a villain who runs a galactic monopoly with a remarkable resemblance to Microsoft.
We use RedHat for our business clients because it works out of the box and looks dignified and business like. For our non-technical clients - this is *very* important. I don't mean that in a snide way - it shows that the overall focus of RedHat is business, as opposed to games or kernel hacking.
Games and kernel hacking are important too. That is why in the Linux world we have choice - and why the Microsoft world is bad, even if it does provide regimented order that puts Storm Troopers to shame.
Evil gods include creations of human imagination (idols) - or creations of God who have rebelled (Satan "the god of this world", demons).
Good gods are subordinate to God. They include morally good creations of human imagination, Angels, and even Human Beings ("Ye are gods"). The difference with respect to New Age, is that New Age denies the existence of one Sovereign self-existent God.
As gods made in the image of God, Human beings have the power to create - Tolkein's world, computer simulated worlds. Our creations are not on the same level as the created universe we live in, but they inherit the moral qualities of their creators - for good or evil.
This allows all the benefits of piracy - lots of people who wouldn't or couldn't otherwise buy the software get familiar with it, and you can still send the BSA out to raid corporations that use it to run their sales force without paying. It has the further benefit of not promoting the moral decay that comes with deliberately disrespecting the legal rights of copyright holders.
It gets better. There need not be any real optics to take a holgram of. The hologram can be computer generated, and can act like optics that would be impossible to construct physically (for example, lenses and mirrors suspended in space with no support).
In Science News, sometime in the last year, there was an article on work that accurately modeled bumblebee flight for the first time. The researchers even built a mechanical bumble bee which has been proposed as a military drone vehicle. It can hover with far less fuel than a helicopter, and uses a simple vibrator rather than an engine.
Until very recently, bumblebees were unable to fly according to our best models of aerodynamics.
I knew a "crank" inventor with real reproducible results. He called his invention the "Zero Bandwidth Transmitter" - a contradiction in terms by standard definitions. However, his invention was based on a DSP and the prototype units could transmit a high quality voice signal for many miles while producing zero interference as measured by official FCC compliance monitoring equipment. In other words, he had really invented a "Spread Spectrum Transmitter". Unfortunately, his work was repeatedly thrown out of the patent office because of his insistance on using his own idiosyncratic vocabulary to describe the invention. (And yet silly patents abound.) He eventually ran out of money, leaving him bitter and disillusioned.
Radiation therapy is rather like kicking a machine that has stopped working. The jolt often causes it to start operating again. On the other hand, repeatedly kicking a machine is likely to break it.