While neural networks and the like might be robust to noise, they have the problem of doing the job imperfectly.
Do you want your data almost sorted or sorted perfectly?
Do you want your satellite to make the right calculations to orbit and point its attenna, or is it ok to be 1% off?
I'm also sure the bank won't mind if its accounting software is off by 1% or so. The IRS won't mind either.
Unfortunately, there are too many operations that we want to be exact. Even very small floating point errors can cause problems, so numerical algorithms have to written with this issue in mind.
There is one point left out by the article, and one other point which is plain wrong.
If corporations want to increase the viability of open source, one very important action they can do (and have been doing to some extent) is to hire open source programmers. That way the features they want will be more likely to get included, and the bugs they discover are more likely to be fixed. One difficulty is to ensure that any of their proprietary software does not "infected" with any GPLed software.
One point where the article is plain wrong is where it says OS software will be the best because the users will program the features they want. Sorry, but l^Husers can't program. But users can get the features they want by paying OS programmers, e.g., by buying (favorite brandname) Linux or *BSD and/or service agreements.
And maybe one more point. The nicest thing about the open monopoly is that everyone can join.
I'm not sure how Unix permissions can qualify as circumvention of any device. Which device or software? Maybe copyrighted material could be (badly) protected by
chmod 600 metallica.mp3
chown riaa metallica.mp3
Then only programs with suid riaa could access metallica.mp3. Of course, that wouldn't do much good when you know the root password. I assume that what's going on isn't so simpleminded.
You complain that "Information wants to be free." is anthropomorphic, and then you assert "Knowledge is power." without any embarrassment.
From where I grew up, this is referred to as "the pot calling the kettle black". Or maybe another moral might be more appropriate: "Physician, heal thyself."
Reacting to Complexity We Didn't Need
on
Autonomic Computing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think a lot of the complexity we have is superfluous. Do we really need 1 GB of MS Super-Duper-Word to write a few lines of text? We bring too much complexity upon ourselves by our demand for more features and prettier interfaces.
Anyway, the idea of Autonomic Computing is hardly new (consider plug-and-play and autoinstallers). The really, really hard part of it is to impose autonomic computing on a system that was not designed for it. It is very difficult to make a complex system "simple" without redesigning the complex system.
For a variety of reasons, Lisp and Scheme remain, in my opinion, marginal languages for computer programming. If you had the chance to redesign Lisp and/or Scheme, what would you change so that they would have become as popular as say C/C++/Java?
Also, anyone who sends unencrypted data over the internet should be assuming that crackers (or the government) can read what you're sending. If you don't want anyone to read it, then you should encrypt it. If you don't encrypt it, then quit your whining.
The trend is toward freely available (or nearly free) scientific publications, and I see very little that is going to stop it. Peer review and long-term availability are issues that are easily resolved.
In large part, the publishers have brought this upon themselves by charging skyrocketing rates for subscriptions, especially to libraries. For quite a few years now, the vast majority of Computer Science papers have been available online, apparently in disregard of any publishers' terms. There is even a web site, the NEC ResearchIndex, that has a fairly large collection of Computer Science papers.
A major feature of scientific research has usually been the openness of scientific results; any result has generally been freely open to improvement (the DMCA has created some controversial exceptions). Now the results will become freely available to obtain as well.
I would guess your method won't work because the least significant bit of each pixel value isn't really random, i.e., in "normal" pictures, this bit has a certain kind of distribution and your method would detectably change it.
A better method would be to scan the original image and find those pixels where the value of the least significant bit is 50/50. These would be the bits that you could encode. Of course, this is only as good as your model of the least significant bit.
You are probably right, Greyfox, except maybe for calling it "progress". All this "progress" is going to need a lot more prevention, which means a lot more surveillance and lot less privacy.
Some human inventions involve power (HBombs) or mechanisms (designer viruses) that can have catastrophic consequences. One evil act (or unthinking act or unknowing act) and you have the end of the world as we know it (or too close to it for comfort, e.g., Cuban missle crisis).
At the moment, we have been able to prevent such acts (e.g., bin Laden getting 100 H-Bombs), but prevention is much harder than post mortem.
No, I don't think evil people using encryption is a world-ending catastrophe. Anyone who thinks is just plain silly. Using encryption by itself doesn't harm anybody. Other technologies are different, though.
I agree to "stop whining" if the additional wiretapping powers given to FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. are limited to preventing terrorist attacks and make it illegal to leak or distribute the information gathered for any other reason.
Poverty is one problem, but pouring money into these countries will do little good unless you also change their tyrannical governments and their stifling religious life. The Marshall Plan after WW II was a great success because Western Europe was democratic and upheld basic human rights, including religious freedom. Certainly, much more money has been poured into Africa with very little success.
We (the US and it allies) cannot solve terrorism by pouring money into these countries. Look at all the relief that has been poured into Africa and how desperate much of Africa remains.
I'm not against aid to these countries, but the other factors are the brutal governments and stifling religious life over most of the Middle East. The US has not helped much in countries that it supports (e.g., Saudi Arabia), but countries outside US support (e.g., Syria) aren't exactly wonderful, either.
They need aid and reform. Aid without reform will help them a little, but they won't really improve unless there is reform in their system.
I agree this is a good site. I ended up getting an SMC Barricade, which has worked pretty well. The only thing that has been flaky is NNTP VPN, but most of the problems with that has been with flaky software and proper configuration rather than the Barricade.
One reason Lisp has fallen because the Lisp community could not resist the temptation of feature creep. Common Lisp is a huge language with all sorts of cruft and a difficult to understand packaging system. Java, on the other hand, is a much smaller language, but with a huge API. It is much easier to learn Java and then to pick and choose what parts of the API you need to know. Lisp should have standardized and modularized the API rather than bloating the language.
Copying is a fundamental operation of computers. Most of what a computer does is to make a copy from one place and move it to another place (e.g., between floppies, disks, tapes, memory, cache, registers, CD, and so on). How the hell are you going to enforce a copy control scheme on every piece of hardware and software (down to every instruction)?
if one is required
by law to use Free software, doesn't that represent a loss of freedom? Isn't freedom of choice important as well?
I agree. Sort of. In an ideal world, I would prefer laws that would require that spending money on software be justified over free alternatives, not that it be banned (if there are free alternatives). In reality, I like seeing Microsoft getting poked in the nose.
I don't think it will be quite the scale as the Drug War, but this is not a bad analogy. Foreign nations with less draconian laws/enforcement will be used to traffic "illegal information". Illegal information networks will form to avoid the law (e.g., Gnutella, Freenet). The US will pressure other nations to get in line.
I look forward to taking the plunge into Java. I'll skip C++.
I can agree with that. I have been hoping for some time that I wouldn't have to learn C++ very deeply.
Both C and Java are nice languages because they are small and are appropriate for particular tasks, roughly "low-level" and "high-level" applications. As a language, it seems that there is too much in C++ to be able to learn it well, and C++ tries to have it both ways. Garbage collection in particular is very nice to have for "high-level" programming because it removes one large set of "low-level" details to worry about (or at least, worry a lot less about it). Two more messy low-level details missing from Java are include files and make files. I think we can live without them for many programming tasks.
The reason we see US courts so sympathetic to anonymous speech is because of the Federalist Papers which written in the late 1780s (or so) to create support for adopting the US Constitution. It turned out the anonymous authors were Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.
Slashdot Mirror
Ghost images?
Do you want your data almost sorted or sorted perfectly?
Do you want your satellite to make the right calculations to orbit and point its attenna, or is it ok to be 1% off?
I'm also sure the bank won't mind if its accounting software is off by 1% or so. The IRS won't mind either.
Unfortunately, there are too many operations that we want to be exact. Even very small floating point errors can cause problems, so numerical algorithms have to written with this issue in mind.
eXPose your personal data to Microsoft.
eXPress outrage at anything Microsoft.
If corporations want to increase the viability of open source, one very important action they can do (and have been doing to some extent) is to hire open source programmers. That way the features they want will be more likely to get included, and the bugs they discover are more likely to be fixed. One difficulty is to ensure that any of their proprietary software does not "infected" with any GPLed software.
One point where the article is plain wrong is where it says OS software will be the best because the users will program the features they want. Sorry, but l^Husers can't program. But users can get the features they want by paying OS programmers, e.g., by buying (favorite brandname) Linux or *BSD and/or service agreements.
And maybe one more point. The nicest thing about the open monopoly is that everyone can join.
chmod 600 metallica.mp3
chown riaa metallica.mp3
Then only programs with suid riaa could access metallica.mp3. Of course, that wouldn't do much good when you know the root password. I assume that what's going on isn't so simpleminded.
From where I grew up, this is referred to as "the pot calling the kettle black". Or maybe another moral might be more appropriate: "Physician, heal thyself."
Copyright protection is security.
Microsoft is not a monopoly.
Anyway, the idea of Autonomic Computing is hardly new (consider plug-and-play and autoinstallers). The really, really hard part of it is to impose autonomic computing on a system that was not designed for it. It is very difficult to make a complex system "simple" without redesigning the complex system.
For a variety of reasons, Lisp and Scheme remain, in my opinion, marginal languages for computer programming. If you had the chance to redesign Lisp and/or Scheme, what would you change so that they would have become as popular as say C/C++/Java?
Also, anyone who sends unencrypted data over the internet should be assuming that crackers (or the government) can read what you're sending. If you don't want anyone to read it, then you should encrypt it. If you don't encrypt it, then quit your whining.
In large part, the publishers have brought this upon themselves by charging skyrocketing rates for subscriptions, especially to libraries. For quite a few years now, the vast majority of Computer Science papers have been available online, apparently in disregard of any publishers' terms. There is even a web site, the NEC ResearchIndex, that has a fairly large collection of Computer Science papers.
A major feature of scientific research has usually been the openness of scientific results; any result has generally been freely open to improvement (the DMCA has created some controversial exceptions). Now the results will become freely available to obtain as well.
I would guess your method won't work because the least significant bit of each pixel value isn't really random, i.e., in "normal" pictures, this bit has a certain kind of distribution and your method would detectably change it. A better method would be to scan the original image and find those pixels where the value of the least significant bit is 50/50. These would be the bits that you could encode. Of course, this is only as good as your model of the least significant bit.
You are probably right, Greyfox, except maybe for calling it "progress". All this "progress" is going to need a lot more prevention, which means a lot more surveillance and lot less privacy.
At the moment, we have been able to prevent such acts (e.g., bin Laden getting 100 H-Bombs), but prevention is much harder than post mortem.
No, I don't think evil people using encryption is a world-ending catastrophe. Anyone who thinks is just plain silly. Using encryption by itself doesn't harm anybody. Other technologies are different, though.
I agree to "stop whining" if the additional wiretapping powers given to FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. are limited to preventing terrorist attacks and make it illegal to leak or distribute the information gathered for any other reason.
It's Senator Hollings, not Representative Hollings.
Poverty is one problem, but pouring money into these countries will do little good unless you also change their tyrannical governments and their stifling religious life. The Marshall Plan after WW II was a great success because Western Europe was democratic and upheld basic human rights, including religious freedom. Certainly, much more money has been poured into Africa with very little success.
I'm not against aid to these countries, but the other factors are the brutal governments and stifling religious life over most of the Middle East. The US has not helped much in countries that it supports (e.g., Saudi Arabia), but countries outside US support (e.g., Syria) aren't exactly wonderful, either.
They need aid and reform. Aid without reform will help them a little, but they won't really improve unless there is reform in their system.
I agree this is a good site. I ended up getting an SMC Barricade, which has worked pretty well. The only thing that has been flaky is NNTP VPN, but most of the problems with that has been with flaky software and proper configuration rather than the Barricade.
One reason Lisp has fallen because the Lisp community could not resist the temptation of feature creep. Common Lisp is a huge language with all sorts of cruft and a difficult to understand packaging system. Java, on the other hand, is a much smaller language, but with a huge API. It is much easier to learn Java and then to pick and choose what parts of the API you need to know. Lisp should have standardized and modularized the API rather than bloating the language.
Copying is a fundamental operation of computers. Most of what a computer does is to make a copy from one place and move it to another place (e.g., between floppies, disks, tapes, memory, cache, registers, CD, and so on). How the hell are you going to enforce a copy control scheme on every piece of hardware and software (down to every instruction)?
Not a bad analogy at all.
Both C and Java are nice languages because they are small and are appropriate for particular tasks, roughly "low-level" and "high-level" applications. As a language, it seems that there is too much in C++ to be able to learn it well, and C++ tries to have it both ways. Garbage collection in particular is very nice to have for "high-level" programming because it removes one large set of "low-level" details to worry about (or at least, worry a lot less about it). Two more messy low-level details missing from Java are include files and make files. I think we can live without them for many programming tasks.
The reason we see US courts so sympathetic to anonymous speech is because of the Federalist Papers which written in the late 1780s (or so) to create support for adopting the US Constitution. It turned out the anonymous authors were Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.