You get it right on the money in the sixth sense thing. Take, e.g., Wegener and plate tectonics. He was right on the large scheme but absolutely wrong in details which is why his work was ridiculed by his contemporaries. Only later the evidence started to crop up and the proper mechanism was discovered.
It is not a sin to come up with seemingly crackpot theories. In fact that's almost synonymous with ingenuity. What is a horrible, unforgivable crime is to tamper with data to fit it to model and not vice versa. To a scientist, real data is (or should be) holy and must be treated with due reverence.
The more science gets commercialized the more there will be people who are willing to "stretch" their imagination just a bit to get that fame and fortune, and the less there is public sharing of scientific findings in the name of intellectual property, the harder it will be to weed out these liberal interpretations of the scientific method. I am a scientist for the love of knowledge, my computer is analysing real data at the very moment and it is cool to be the first person in the world to see something come out of that. To be paid for the work is just an added bonus. The open/proprietary debate has been going on in the scientific community far longer than there have been modern IT.
My words exactly! Somebody might be led to believe that the '89 Amiga 3000 sitting on my side table is somewhere way beyond obsolete but that's not true. All the programs run as well as they did, what, 13 years ago. If I need quick and dirty subtitles on a video or just fancy a quick game of pinball, everything is running 15 seconds from power-up. And my kids seem to prefer those classic games as well:-)
I was under the impression that right and wrong were mutually exclusive. If it's not right then it has to be wrong.
One man's right is another's wrong. Why else would we vote on things? I find it funny that some people seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that most things are much more complicated than the black-and-white ethics of (cheap) children's cartoons.
I am a happy owner of both Mononoke Hime and Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi DVD:s (probably like every Miyazaki fan I ordered my copy of StCnKK directly from Japan the day it came out) as well as most other studio Ghibli products, and all I can tell is that if Mononoke was a very good, even great movie, then Sen to Chihiro is an unbelievably fantastic movie. Every time I watch the movie I am full of awe and disbelief for how somebody can make a movie this good. I even enjoy the Leica reel on the extras DVD! And please, don't call Miyazaki movies "anime" nor Miyazaki himself "the Disney of Japan". Both comparisons insult the author and his work. Studio Ghibli works are just great animated movies, and StCnKK is just a great movie, animated or not.
Go see this movie! Buy the DVD! Live happily ever after! (Disclaimer: the Japanese DVD:s available online from, e.g., CDJapan, are Region 2 DVD:s. That doesn't, of course, bother us decadent Europeans (I think that the evil conglomerates made in their US-centricity a blooper with this one but I am not going to complain). But everybody has bought a region-free DVD player anyway, right? Right?)
While I agree that DRM may be a terrible tool in wrong hands, I cannot see a scenario where it (or related legislature) kills free, unrestricted, multipurpose platforms. I am a scientist and like many other scientists that I know I write my own programs because that is the only way I can do the things that my research efforts require. A DRM platform won't let one run unlicensed programs. Most researchers work in non-commercial institutions which cannot afford the licensing cost. I can also imagine that most commercial entities would be extremely reluctant to release their specific code for the scrutiny from the fear of business secrets leaking out. So, it may happen that Joe Sixpack gets through his own ignorance thrown into a small DRM hell but I dare to say that it is extremely unlikely that any country is willing to pull nearly all of its scientific research down the drain just so that people could legally listen to Metallica on their shiny new DRMWindows box. Oh, and if the DRM is intentionally weakened to allow exceptions for scientists and the like, then the platform will instantly become hackable by anyone and the only ones who are screwed are the ignorant people. I could almost say that they get what they deserve.
Comic-not
Re:explanation? Impossible !!!
on
Draw!
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, 13**64 or 1e71. My mind was wandering. Anyway, the insight that Godel gave was exactly that although "King at E3, all other in their initial positions" is "illegal" since it cannot be reached by valid moves, it is still a "statement" of chess and as such an unprovable one.
Re:explanation? Impossible !!!
on
Draw!
·
· Score: 1
Interesting, but makes me think. Let's redefine the meaning of TRUE for a chess game to equal any state that does not per se contradict the rules, and FALSE to equal all other states. False states include, e.g., kings next to each other or all states containing any other number than exactly one king of each color on the board (I am considering chess to be a machine where each of the 64 variables can hold any single value for the group Empty, and pawn, horse, bishop, castle, queen, king of either color (there are thus 17**64 or the order of 1e78 states altogether). Furthermore, let's call the starting position of a chess play an axiom (it's the only one in this case). Now we can construct, starting from this axiom, other true statements (quite a large number of them, actually). However, there is also a large number of both true and false statements which cannot be reached from the axiom by applying the rules of chess. Let's consider some examples.
White king at A1 and black king at A3 is a provably true statement.
White king at A1 and black king at A2 is a provably false statement.
White king at A1, no other pieces on the board is a false but unprovable statement (there is no move for removing a king from the board, so this is a metamathematical result).
White king at E3, all other pieces as in the initial position is a true but unprovable statement.
In any case, I do not think that one needs to take such a vehemently personal take on the topic. This is an interesting issue that I would like to discuss in a civilized manner (as people who have both played their share of chess and read enough Godel (and other mathematics as well)).
I'm a workaholic on withdrawal - and working hard not to relapse - comic-not
At least the one I bought for the kids had Macrovision enabled. Well, I pressed the magic buttons to conjure Macrovision away and copied the movie on VHS. Mind you, that was completely legal, since the video was for personal use (kids went to see their DVD-less grandparents for a couple of weeks and the only way to prevent the kids from driving poor gramps and granny nuts was to supplement them with the movie). Anyway, I find the whole Macrovision scheme laughable and completely disingenious, other than from the point of Macrovision the Co. who has successfully sold hi-tech snake oil for some time now.
Once again, IANAL, but at this stage we should rather discuss how things ought to be than how they currently are according to the law. When talking about security, a good analogy would be the doors (including locks, steel grilles, alarm switches etc.) of your house. Any door can be compromized but the used method makes all the difference when it comes to liability. If the least intrusive way to compromize your door is to push it in with a wrecking ball, bulldozer or 5 sticks of dynamite, I would assume that the door works as intended and in the case of a security breach the manufacturer should not be held liable for the damage, direct or indirect. If, however, all the doors manufactured by a vendor can be opened without a trace simply by inserting a stick in the keyhole and yanking the door handle three times in quick succession, the product is clearly defective. The question thus is, which level of security one should reasonably expect to obtain through the use of a security product X. IMHO the current line of MS products does not meet this criterion.
Anyway, there won't be true online security without a radical paradigm change in OS design. I would tend to go for VM instancing and genetic antibodies similar to biological immune systems.
Made me wonder, has anyone yet patented slood? (for those who don't recognize a Discworld reference, Terry Pratchett described slood to be much easier to discover than fire, and only slightly harder to discover than water, and the earthlings were probably the only beings in the multiverse stupid enough to discover fire but not slood).
But they would never have to go as far as to the court (BTW, I've never understood the American court frenzy either). Let's say that company Foo.com submits a patent application for no-click shopping. Upon submission, the PTO verifies that the claim is potentially patentable (i.e., it's a formally valid and sensible claim). The application is acknowledged and made public. Then another company Bar.com sees the application and submits proof that no-click shopping has been used well before Foo.com. The PTO (not the court) verifies the claim and invalidates the patent.
The PTO would not have to find prior art itself if it could tap the resources of the community for that, otherwise it would make decisions on the same grounds as today. Also, considering the extended processing times of recent patents, especially IT patents are either obsolete or then overtly general in scope once they come out of the mill (independently of whether software should be patentable at all). The kind of shortcut I was suggesting would cut the processing time to minimum, if the patent could be immediately exercised until contested.
Ok, I'm a scientist, and on that field the process has proved to be very effective. Someone claims something, and then everybody is free to try to prove otherwise. Every hypothesis is held potentially true until falsified, but nothing is ever proved true, only the most plausible/widely accepted theory.
I may not have stated the idea clearly enough. If patent applications were public and disputable from the day they were sent to the patent office, then anybody could submit instances of prior art, which would invalidate the patent claim once verified. This way, effectively, the community as whole would review the patent applications, and the actual work of the patent office would change from searching (not too adeptly) cases of prior art to verifying claims of prior art. I am starting to see an analogy to open/closed source software development here, which must mean that I have read too much/. lately.
...so that all patent applications would be automatically acknowledged, and then the dubious ones could be challenged by any interested party? The patent office would not have to employ enough specialists to sort out the validity of every silly application, they would only have to have enough knowledge to be able to verify the claims of people who dispute the alleged patent.
I just received a big, glossy leaflet from the beast, titled "Microsoft's IT security guide" (approximate translation to English), full of the usual apologetics. It provided solid fun and chuckles for a while, as undoubtedly would any book entitled "Virgins' best sex techniques", should anybody be sufficiently detached from the reality to write one. Well, apparently, somebody is.
The energy needed to create the electricity sufficient enough to accomplice this feat would be the equivalent of sending it up via hydro/carbons or any other volatile gas
Not so. The fuel/energy demand for a given delta-V scales exponentially for a conventional rocket, since it must accelerate both the rocket and itself. The energy consumption of a mass drive, however, only scales (approximately) linearly which is a really huge difference.
... this would only be feasible on planetary bodies lacking a substantial atmosphere, e.g., the Moon, where a mass drive would be the most effective way to transfer mined materials to an L point. I cannot think of a scenario where they'd launch anything from the surface of the Earth with any kind of mass drive. Space elevator, perhaps, mass drive, hell, no.
Your comic looks magnificent! It's very beautiful.
Thanks! Another odd thing is that some illiterate moron modified my original, substantiated criticism as 0, Troll. Thus, I'll risk losing what little karma I've got left to once more mention my quite unique and totally non-commercial online graphic novel which IMNSHO mediates true hacker spirit much better than badly drawn bad jokes.
Why do people publish comics that are so badly drawn that it defies description? Ok, Dilbert is not a hallmark of technical proficiency either but at least it obeys the K.I.S.S. principle, and it works. People that can draw comics as good as the one above come thirteen in a dozen - heck, even my 8 years old daughter draws comics that are of higher quality. To make the point that I'm not just another badmouthing neophyte, I'd like to shamelessly recommend my own online comic, The Sixth Seal. It is a good example of a comic drawn by a visually oriented hacker who puts in as much effort as some of his peers put in software development, with the same ultimatum that only quality matters.
One billion mosquitoes stalking in the jungle. One gets swatted. Now there are one billion and fifty mosquitoes stalking in the jungle.
Quite frankly, this is an exercise in futility as long as the basic machinery which keeps on rubber stamping genuine idiocies does not get reformed one way or another.
Well, making a parable, at least where I live all car users must pay a yearly traffic insurance that is used to cover the damages people cause by reckless driving. So, I'm paying for other people's crimes and it still doesn't give me the right to play real life carmageddon. Kind of sucks but it's still understandable.
Slashdot Mirror
You get it right on the money in the sixth sense thing. Take, e.g., Wegener and plate tectonics. He was right on the large scheme but absolutely wrong in details which is why his work was ridiculed by his contemporaries. Only later the evidence started to crop up and the proper mechanism was discovered.
It is not a sin to come up with seemingly crackpot theories. In fact that's almost synonymous with ingenuity. What is a horrible, unforgivable crime is to tamper with data to fit it to model and not vice versa. To a scientist, real data is (or should be) holy and must be treated with due reverence.
The more science gets commercialized the more there will be people who are willing to "stretch" their imagination just a bit to get that fame and fortune, and the less there is public sharing of scientific findings in the name of intellectual property, the harder it will be to weed out these liberal interpretations of the scientific method. I am a scientist for the love of knowledge, my computer is analysing real data at the very moment and it is cool to be the first person in the world to see something come out of that. To be paid for the work is just an added bonus. The open/proprietary debate has been going on in the scientific community far longer than there have been modern IT.
My words exactly! Somebody might be led to believe that the '89 Amiga 3000 sitting on my side table is somewhere way beyond obsolete but that's not true. All the programs run as well as they did, what, 13 years ago. If I need quick and dirty subtitles on a video or just fancy a quick game of pinball, everything is running 15 seconds from power-up. And my kids seem to prefer those classic games as well :-)
Comic-not
One man's right is another's wrong. Why else would we vote on things? I find it funny that some people seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that most things are much more complicated than the black-and-white ethics of (cheap) children's cartoons.
Comic-not
I am a happy owner of both Mononoke Hime and Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi DVD:s (probably like every Miyazaki fan I ordered my copy of StCnKK directly from Japan the day it came out) as well as most other studio Ghibli products, and all I can tell is that if Mononoke was a very good, even great movie, then Sen to Chihiro is an unbelievably fantastic movie. Every time I watch the movie I am full of awe and disbelief for how somebody can make a movie this good. I even enjoy the Leica reel on the extras DVD! And please, don't call Miyazaki movies "anime" nor Miyazaki himself "the Disney of Japan". Both comparisons insult the author and his work. Studio Ghibli works are just great animated movies, and StCnKK is just a great movie, animated or not.
Go see this movie! Buy the DVD! Live happily ever after! (Disclaimer: the Japanese DVD:s available online from, e.g., CDJapan, are Region 2 DVD:s. That doesn't, of course, bother us decadent Europeans (I think that the evil conglomerates made in their US-centricity a blooper with this one but I am not going to complain). But everybody has bought a region-free DVD player anyway, right? Right?)
Comic-not
This is trivial: at last Bill will be able to fullfill his dream of earning $.01 each time you push the enter button.
Comic-not
While I agree that DRM may be a terrible tool in wrong hands, I cannot see a scenario where it (or related legislature) kills free, unrestricted, multipurpose platforms. I am a scientist and like many other scientists that I know I write my own programs because that is the only way I can do the things that my research efforts require. A DRM platform won't let one run unlicensed programs. Most researchers work in non-commercial institutions which cannot afford the licensing cost. I can also imagine that most commercial entities would be extremely reluctant to release their specific code for the scrutiny from the fear of business secrets leaking out. So, it may happen that Joe Sixpack gets through his own ignorance thrown into a small DRM hell but I dare to say that it is extremely unlikely that any country is willing to pull nearly all of its scientific research down the drain just so that people could legally listen to Metallica on their shiny new DRMWindows box. Oh, and if the DRM is intentionally weakened to allow exceptions for scientists and the like, then the platform will instantly become hackable by anyone and the only ones who are screwed are the ignorant people. I could almost say that they get what they deserve.
Comic-not
Sorry, 13**64 or 1e71. My mind was wandering. Anyway, the insight that Godel gave was exactly that although "King at E3, all other in their initial positions" is "illegal" since it cannot be reached by valid moves, it is still a "statement" of chess and as such an unprovable one.
Interesting, but makes me think. Let's redefine the meaning of TRUE for a chess game to equal any state that does not per se contradict the rules, and FALSE to equal all other states. False states include, e.g., kings next to each other or all states containing any other number than exactly one king of each color on the board (I am considering chess to be a machine where each of the 64 variables can hold any single value for the group Empty, and pawn, horse, bishop, castle, queen, king of either color (there are thus 17**64 or the order of 1e78 states altogether). Furthermore, let's call the starting position of a chess play an axiom (it's the only one in this case). Now we can construct, starting from this axiom, other true statements (quite a large number of them, actually). However, there is also a large number of both true and false statements which cannot be reached from the axiom by applying the rules of chess. Let's consider some examples.
In any case, I do not think that one needs to take such a vehemently personal take on the topic. This is an interesting issue that I would like to discuss in a civilized manner (as people who have both played their share of chess and read enough Godel (and other mathematics as well)).
I'm a workaholic on withdrawal - and working hard not to relapse - comic-not
At least the one I bought for the kids had Macrovision enabled. Well, I pressed the magic buttons to conjure Macrovision away and copied the movie on VHS. Mind you, that was completely legal, since the video was for personal use (kids went to see their DVD-less grandparents for a couple of weeks and the only way to prevent the kids from driving poor gramps and granny nuts was to supplement them with the movie). Anyway, I find the whole Macrovision scheme laughable and completely disingenious, other than from the point of Macrovision the Co. who has successfully sold hi-tech snake oil for some time now.
Once again, IANAL, but at this stage we should rather discuss how things ought to be than how they currently are according to the law. When talking about security, a good analogy would be the doors (including locks, steel grilles, alarm switches etc.) of your house. Any door can be compromized but the used method makes all the difference when it comes to liability. If the least intrusive way to compromize your door is to push it in with a wrecking ball, bulldozer or 5 sticks of dynamite, I would assume that the door works as intended and in the case of a security breach the manufacturer should not be held liable for the damage, direct or indirect. If, however, all the doors manufactured by a vendor can be opened without a trace simply by inserting a stick in the keyhole and yanking the door handle three times in quick succession, the product is clearly defective. The question thus is, which level of security one should reasonably expect to obtain through the use of a security product X. IMHO the current line of MS products does not meet this criterion.
Anyway, there won't be true online security without a radical paradigm change in OS design. I would tend to go for VM instancing and genetic antibodies similar to biological immune systems.
Comic-not
Made me wonder, has anyone yet patented slood? (for those who don't recognize a Discworld reference, Terry Pratchett described slood to be much easier to discover than fire, and only slightly harder to discover than water, and the earthlings were probably the only beings in the multiverse stupid enough to discover fire but not slood).
Comic-not
But they would never have to go as far as to the court (BTW, I've never understood the American court frenzy either). Let's say that company Foo.com submits a patent application for no-click shopping. Upon submission, the PTO verifies that the claim is potentially patentable (i.e., it's a formally valid and sensible claim). The application is acknowledged and made public. Then another company Bar.com sees the application and submits proof that no-click shopping has been used well before Foo.com. The PTO (not the court) verifies the claim and invalidates the patent.
The PTO would not have to find prior art itself if it could tap the resources of the community for that, otherwise it would make decisions on the same grounds as today. Also, considering the extended processing times of recent patents, especially IT patents are either obsolete or then overtly general in scope once they come out of the mill (independently of whether software should be patentable at all). The kind of shortcut I was suggesting would cut the processing time to minimum, if the patent could be immediately exercised until contested.
Ok, I'm a scientist, and on that field the process has proved to be very effective. Someone claims something, and then everybody is free to try to prove otherwise. Every hypothesis is held potentially true until falsified, but nothing is ever proved true, only the most plausible/widely accepted theory.
Comic-not
I may not have stated the idea clearly enough. If patent applications were public and disputable from the day they were sent to the patent office, then anybody could submit instances of prior art, which would invalidate the patent claim once verified. This way, effectively, the community as whole would review the patent applications, and the actual work of the patent office would change from searching (not too adeptly) cases of prior art to verifying claims of prior art. I am starting to see an analogy to open/closed source software development here, which must mean that I have read too much /. lately.
Comic-not
...so that all patent applications would be automatically acknowledged, and then the dubious ones could be challenged by any interested party? The patent office would not have to employ enough specialists to sort out the validity of every silly application, they would only have to have enough knowledge to be able to verify the claims of people who dispute the alleged patent.
Comic-not
I just received a big, glossy leaflet from the beast, titled "Microsoft's IT security guide" (approximate translation to English), full of the usual apologetics. It provided solid fun and chuckles for a while, as undoubtedly would any book entitled "Virgins' best sex techniques", should anybody be sufficiently detached from the reality to write one. Well, apparently, somebody is.
Comic - not!
The energy needed to create the electricity sufficient enough to accomplice this feat would be the equivalent of sending it up via hydro/carbons or any other volatile gas
Not so. The fuel/energy demand for a given delta-V scales exponentially for a conventional rocket, since it must accelerate both the rocket and itself. The energy consumption of a mass drive, however, only scales (approximately) linearly which is a really huge difference.
Comic - not!
... this would only be feasible on planetary bodies lacking a substantial atmosphere, e.g., the Moon, where a mass drive would be the most effective way to transfer mined materials to an L point. I cannot think of a scenario where they'd launch anything from the surface of the Earth with any kind of mass drive. Space elevator, perhaps, mass drive, hell, no.
Comic - not!
Your comic looks magnificent! It's very beautiful.
Thanks! Another odd thing is that some illiterate moron modified my original, substantiated criticism as 0, Troll. Thus, I'll risk losing what little karma I've got left to once more mention my quite unique and totally non-commercial online graphic novel which IMNSHO mediates true hacker spirit much better than badly drawn bad jokes.
- comic_not
Why do people publish comics that are so badly drawn that it defies description? Ok, Dilbert is not a hallmark of technical proficiency either but at least it obeys the K.I.S.S. principle, and it works. People that can draw comics as good as the one above come thirteen in a dozen - heck, even my 8 years old daughter draws comics that are of higher quality. To make the point that I'm not just another badmouthing neophyte, I'd like to shamelessly recommend my own online comic, The Sixth Seal. It is a good example of a comic drawn by a visually oriented hacker who puts in as much effort as some of his peers put in software development, with the same ultimatum that only quality matters.
Are you saying that it does not? Rats, gotta find that dictionary again...
One billion mosquitoes stalking in the jungle. One gets swatted. Now there are one billion and fifty mosquitoes stalking in the jungle.
Quite frankly, this is an exercise in futility as long as the basic machinery which keeps on rubber stamping genuine idiocies does not get reformed one way or another.
Well, making a parable, at least where I live all car users must pay a yearly traffic insurance that is used to cover the damages people cause by reckless driving. So, I'm paying for other people's crimes and it still doesn't give me the right to play real life carmageddon. Kind of sucks but it's still understandable.