The 21st century version: Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to automation.
It would be extremely tempting to attribute stupidity and incompetence on Microsoft's part. Stupider than that however is not knowing up to what point you should trust a system. Example: GPS. If your GPS shows there's supposed to be a bridge in front of you, but all you see is a ditch, do you drive on, confident that the GPS is never wrong, or do you trust the evidence of your eyes?
Well, it does have a tech angle, how to start a fire using your firearm. Many Slashdotters will probably find this too low-tech to be worthy of front page, although it beats using the old rub-the-stick routine when you've forgotten your match but not your trusty revolver.
Okay we know that Google, Facebook and other companies have a tracking system in place. But who's really watching? Is it possible that Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg is reading this post right now and will click his iAmWatchingU app to find out who typed these words? Or is some other sentient entity looking over me like the deity of some theistic religion.
Maybe the greater danger isn't that we are being watched, but that algorithms are now in control of our lives, processing, analyzing, bankrupting us in a way where sometimes the only human intervention is someone clicking OK.
"[T]he lack of well-established online voting systems is a real threat to democratic nations of the Western world," Kaspersky said in a recent interview with the BBC. He stated that the generational divide between ever-more-digitized youth and their parents will increase to the point where "the whole democratic system could collapse" because "if there's no online voting system, these kids won't physically go anywhere to vote, they just won't, they'll refuse."
Forget about democracy, the biggest threat to civilization is people refusing to go out of their basements to do a simple thing like voting. If the relatively safe act of voting is too inconvenient, then what more a protest action against the powers-that-be. Democracy will turn out to be a three-, four- or five-year ritual.
However...
I'm cautiously in favor of an online voting system that for the most part gets rid of representative democracy. Something like an American Idol sort of democracy where the citizens vote not for the cutest stars but on proposals. Want nuclear power? Yes or No? Want to nuke Country X? Yes or No? Want to send humans to Mars? Yes or no.
Some cooling off mechanism can be provided, of course. Or we might have the equivalent of the Supreme Court, consisting of thousands of legal experts similarly voting online to rule on the constitutionality of a proposal. Similarly military and economic experts could vote on the feasibility or readiness of the nation to go to war and veto it.
Alternatively, such system of direct democracy could be used only for veto purposes, negatively to overturn an unpopular law.
Implemented for a small set of critical system packages, an offline[*] update makes sense. By "critical system packages", I exclude user applications like Firefox. At worst (or at best) the policy should be limited to kernel upgrades, the way it's been done in a typical Unix or Unix-like system.
Which strictly isn't necessary. For example, I've already "updated" my running kernel since two weeks ago, while my system continues to run under the old kernel. I know this has security issues, but I'm not a server, so I'm waiting for the next power failure to reboot and for new kernel to actually be used.
*I'm perhaps not the only one confused by the use of "offline" in the title and TFA. In a different sense, Debian and friends can already do an "offline" update. There's a "--download-only" option in apt-get and an equivalent option in GUI package managers like synaptic. A more accurate but less sexy title would probably be "Reboot now needed to complete Fedora system updates" (if that's what it really is).
The sixth closest asteroid encounter on record, the May 29 near-miss by the object catalogued as "2012 KT42", was tracked by the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii as it whizzed inside the orbital distance of Earth geosynchronous satellites (6.6 Earth radii or an altitude of 22,000 miles).
Cheap as in dirt-cheap isn't the way to go when you have space tourists willing to blow a normal person's annual salary on a joyride. It would be better to design as suit that looks good, while functioning well. I'm think along the lines of Dava Newman's prototype Bio-Suit, a sleek looking design that doesn't make the presumably fit space traveller looking like the Teletubbies or the Pillsbury Dough boy.
The Bio-Suit is sleek because it is supposed to work on "mechanical counter-pressure" rather than through simple air pressure. That's the theory anyway. Here's hoping she and her team work out the kinks.
My thoughts exactly. If your girlfriend can't stand Star Trek, and you're a costume-wearing Trekkie, then you're in for a world of grief. She doesn't have to be Uhura, but she should like the franchise enough to watch the series without looking like she wants to be doing something else without you. If you're not really a Star Trek fan, forget it. Watch Twilight or Lincoln Vampire Hunter with her.
When Apple came out with one phone which did everything for everybody, suddenly you could just add a rubber cover and use your business phone (which needed a calendar) for sport (where you need non-scratch glass).
Tell that to the Blackberry crowd. iDevices are notorious for not even attempting to cater to every user case scenario (single-button mouse, no keyboard, hard to disassemble, etc). Apple as a fashion item is comparable to high heels and sports cars. They're not for everybody. (I know, it's possible to extend iDevices to cater to the Blackberry crowd, but that's a whole different banana.)
Google appear to understand it a little better than Big Media, which target the downloaders. Google here appears to be targetting the equivalent of the tracker used by individual torrent users. I'd say Google has become clearly evil when they start taking part in FBI raids to shut down and seize the assets of allegedly infringing sites.
An Android phone that you don't want to root? There must be something wrong there. Seriously, I'm green with envy. Just one question. How's the face "lock" feature?
Wernher von Braun, designer of the Saturn V, also wanted to go to Mars and had even written a fairly detailed book on how to do so. But von Braun knew that to get there, he had to take small steps and not a single giant leap toward the Red Planet. Maybe this is what Musk and von Braun have in common (beside both being naturalized Americans), their willingness to go after intermediate goals (the Moon or LEO) while keeping their ultimate goal (Mars and beyond) still within sight.
I agree, if you broaden the definition of ROI to include the non-financial benefits of having a space program. For one thing, it's likely to be good propaganda in the future if the Party can brag to its citizens that they are in space, while the other guys aren't. It's also a great way to stress test military-grade hardware without the other countries raising a hoot. People would think differently of Iran and North Korean if these two supposed wannabees already have a space station in orbit or in the Moon.
I'd take the news report with a grain of salt. But if it's anywhere near half true, this has me wondering why MS is at all pushing, even if they've backtracked a bit, for some sort of boot lockdown. Why not just let the OEMs do the hell what they want and concentrate on their own hardware offerings? That way they can point to a faulty Win8 install and say, hey, that's not our hardware, if you want the full Win8 XPerience buy our Surface branded tabputer. The OEMs will be the advertising for the MS hardware in a far more profitable way than some unlicensed whitebox install.
I say it depends on what those libraries, etc., are. I mean, what if we think of the prefab parts as analogous to the software that an open-source developer builds upon? Do we then say that the shiny new program took not just one Summer of Code but three decades starting from the day RMS established the Free Software Foundation?
BTW the collateral damage from a collapse is likely to be less than 838 m. Since the design is presumably modular rather than monolithic, shouldn't it fall more like childrens' blocks than like a wine bottle?
Maybe their attempts at building a rocket-powered human canonball are part of the trend toward the democratization of technology, just as the printing press and later the Web enabled even "commoners" to publish.
I think the total size of the economy is more important in attempting to measure a country's ability to maintain a national space program. Otherwise some small but rich European or oil-producing country would have also launched humans into space a long time ago. The Soviet Union was clearly poorer than the US in per capita terms, but managed to beat the US to several early space milestones.
A cyber strike-back policy can turn out to be the more malevolent version of the attempt by some media monopolists to track and threaten alleged copyright infringers by IP address. But where the track-and-sue approach pays lip service to the law, this one's attempting the online equivalent of vigilante justice. It would be interesting what methods these "security" companies will resort to.
I like how the article quite randomly mentions that Jobs used to do LSD, for no apparent reason:
Quite suggestive that Page and Brin are into something, too;). However, it could also be an in-joke about enlightenment. After all, in the sixties, LSD was the shorter path to achieving oneness with the universe (the long way was to go on a pilgrimage to India). Now iimagine Jobs advising his young apprentices (disciples?) to unite their different services into the One web portal.
Mr Jing, 46, is making his second spaceflight after participating in the Shenzhou-7 outing in 2008 - the mission that included China's first spacewalk.
His flight engineers are both first-timers, however.
Liu Wang, 42, a People's Liberation Army fighter pilot, has got his chance after spending 14 years in the China National Space Administration's astronaut corps.
Thirty-three-year-old Liu Yang, also a fighter pilot, has on the other hand emerged as China's first woman astronaut after just two years of training.
The implication is that Yang is there because of some sort of affirmative action. Astronauts from the astronaut pool are likely to be similarly qualified. After all, if one of them gets sick, another is going in his or her stead.
Slashdot Mirror
The 21st century version: Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to automation.
It would be extremely tempting to attribute stupidity and incompetence on Microsoft's part. Stupider than that however is not knowing up to what point you should trust a system. Example: GPS. If your GPS shows there's supposed to be a bridge in front of you, but all you see is a ditch, do you drive on, confident that the GPS is never wrong, or do you trust the evidence of your eyes?
Well, it does have a tech angle, how to start a fire using your firearm. Many Slashdotters will probably find this too low-tech to be worthy of front page, although it beats using the old rub-the-stick routine when you've forgotten your match but not your trusty revolver.
When unsure, ask. What we don't is an AI that shoots first.
Okay we know that Google, Facebook and other companies have a tracking system in place. But who's really watching? Is it possible that Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg is reading this post right now and will click his iAmWatchingU app to find out who typed these words? Or is some other sentient entity looking over me like the deity of some theistic religion.
Maybe the greater danger isn't that we are being watched, but that algorithms are now in control of our lives, processing, analyzing, bankrupting us in a way where sometimes the only human intervention is someone clicking OK.
I was under the impression that Tor nodes are more permanent affairs. That's why Wikipedia can ban them for repeated vandalism.
Forget about democracy, the biggest threat to civilization is people refusing to go out of their basements to do a simple thing like voting. If the relatively safe act of voting is too inconvenient, then what more a protest action against the powers-that-be. Democracy will turn out to be a three-, four- or five-year ritual.
However...
I'm cautiously in favor of an online voting system that for the most part gets rid of representative democracy. Something like an American Idol sort of democracy where the citizens vote not for the cutest stars but on proposals. Want nuclear power? Yes or No? Want to nuke Country X? Yes or No? Want to send humans to Mars? Yes or no.
Some cooling off mechanism can be provided, of course. Or we might have the equivalent of the Supreme Court, consisting of thousands of legal experts similarly voting online to rule on the constitutionality of a proposal. Similarly military and economic experts could vote on the feasibility or readiness of the nation to go to war and veto it.
Alternatively, such system of direct democracy could be used only for veto purposes, negatively to overturn an unpopular law.
Implemented for a small set of critical system packages, an offline[*] update makes sense. By "critical system packages", I exclude user applications like Firefox. At worst (or at best) the policy should be limited to kernel upgrades, the way it's been done in a typical Unix or Unix-like system.
Which strictly isn't necessary. For example, I've already "updated" my running kernel since two weeks ago, while my system continues to run under the old kernel. I know this has security issues, but I'm not a server, so I'm waiting for the next power failure to reboot and for new kernel to actually be used.
*I'm perhaps not the only one confused by the use of "offline" in the title and TFA. In a different sense, Debian and friends can already do an "offline" update. There's a "--download-only" option in apt-get and an equivalent option in GUI package managers like synaptic. A more accurate but less sexy title would probably be "Reboot now needed to complete Fedora system updates" (if that's what it really is).
So Skynet can have free speech, but not Andrew or Hal?
Cheap as in dirt-cheap isn't the way to go when you have space tourists willing to blow a normal person's annual salary on a joyride. It would be better to design as suit that looks good, while functioning well. I'm think along the lines of Dava Newman's prototype Bio-Suit, a sleek looking design that doesn't make the presumably fit space traveller looking like the Teletubbies or the Pillsbury Dough boy.
The Bio-Suit is sleek because it is supposed to work on "mechanical counter-pressure" rather than through simple air pressure. That's the theory anyway. Here's hoping she and her team work out the kinks.
My thoughts exactly. If your girlfriend can't stand Star Trek, and you're a costume-wearing Trekkie, then you're in for a world of grief. She doesn't have to be Uhura, but she should like the franchise enough to watch the series without looking like she wants to be doing something else without you. If you're not really a Star Trek fan, forget it. Watch Twilight or Lincoln Vampire Hunter with her.
Tell that to the Blackberry crowd. iDevices are notorious for not even attempting to cater to every user case scenario (single-button mouse, no keyboard, hard to disassemble, etc). Apple as a fashion item is comparable to high heels and sports cars. They're not for everybody. (I know, it's possible to extend iDevices to cater to the Blackberry crowd, but that's a whole different banana.)
Google appear to understand it a little better than Big Media, which target the downloaders. Google here appears to be targetting the equivalent of the tracker used by individual torrent users. I'd say Google has become clearly evil when they start taking part in FBI raids to shut down and seize the assets of allegedly infringing sites.
What's this, a web site owned by a British MP available only in the United States?
An Android phone that you don't want to root? There must be something wrong there. Seriously, I'm green with envy. Just one question. How's the face "lock" feature?
Wernher von Braun, designer of the Saturn V, also wanted to go to Mars and had even written a fairly detailed book on how to do so. But von Braun knew that to get there, he had to take small steps and not a single giant leap toward the Red Planet. Maybe this is what Musk and von Braun have in common (beside both being naturalized Americans), their willingness to go after intermediate goals (the Moon or LEO) while keeping their ultimate goal (Mars and beyond) still within sight.
I agree, if you broaden the definition of ROI to include the non-financial benefits of having a space program. For one thing, it's likely to be good propaganda in the future if the Party can brag to its citizens that they are in space, while the other guys aren't. It's also a great way to stress test military-grade hardware without the other countries raising a hoot. People would think differently of Iran and North Korean if these two supposed wannabees already have a space station in orbit or in the Moon.
I'd take the news report with a grain of salt. But if it's anywhere near half true, this has me wondering why MS is at all pushing, even if they've backtracked a bit, for some sort of boot lockdown. Why not just let the OEMs do the hell what they want and concentrate on their own hardware offerings? That way they can point to a faulty Win8 install and say, hey, that's not our hardware, if you want the full Win8 XPerience buy our Surface branded tabputer. The OEMs will be the advertising for the MS hardware in a far more profitable way than some unlicensed whitebox install.
I say it depends on what those libraries, etc., are. I mean, what if we think of the prefab parts as analogous to the software that an open-source developer builds upon? Do we then say that the shiny new program took not just one Summer of Code but three decades starting from the day RMS established the Free Software Foundation?
BTW the collateral damage from a collapse is likely to be less than 838 m. Since the design is presumably modular rather than monolithic, shouldn't it fall more like childrens' blocks than like a wine bottle?
Maybe their attempts at building a rocket-powered human canonball are part of the trend toward the democratization of technology, just as the printing press and later the Web enabled even "commoners" to publish.
I think the total size of the economy is more important in attempting to measure a country's ability to maintain a national space program. Otherwise some small but rich European or oil-producing country would have also launched humans into space a long time ago. The Soviet Union was clearly poorer than the US in per capita terms, but managed to beat the US to several early space milestones.
A cyber strike-back policy can turn out to be the more malevolent version of the attempt by some media monopolists to track and threaten alleged copyright infringers by IP address. But where the track-and-sue approach pays lip service to the law, this one's attempting the online equivalent of vigilante justice. It would be interesting what methods these "security" companies will resort to.
Righto. Facebook is a threat to Google only so far as it reduces Google's ad revenue. Facebook could well be a news or pr0n site.
Quite suggestive that Page and Brin are into something, too;). However, it could also be an in-joke about enlightenment. After all, in the sixties, LSD was the shorter path to achieving oneness with the universe (the long way was to go on a pilgrimage to India). Now iimagine Jobs advising his young apprentices (disciples?) to unite their different services into the One web portal.
The implication is that Yang is there because of some sort of affirmative action. Astronauts from the astronaut pool are likely to be similarly qualified. After all, if one of them gets sick, another is going in his or her stead.