Sub designers, aircraft...cars...chairs...these guys/gals are supposed to have studied things like fish, birds, trees and insects for reasons why, and why not, long before they were hired to actually build things.
True, but it might be noted that we made very little progress in flying until some people gave up on trying to mimic birds, and tried other approaches. The first actual "flight" by humans was in the early 1800s, with hotter-than-air balloons. Then around 1900, a few experimenters started to get the hang of wings, and figured out that what worked was to separate the lift generation from the propulsion. Nature never came up with this scheme, but it's technically easier (if you know how to make a rotary motor or a jet engine) than nature's scheme of using wings for both functions.
Similarly, submarines look superficially like fish, but don't really work the same way. Fish use their fins for both steering and propulsion, while submarines use fins only for steering, with a propeller for propulsion. The similar shapes are only for streamlining, which does work the same for everything that needs it.
Usually, nature's solutions to problems are good models. But in cases like fish and birds, it has turned out to work better to give up on them and work from first principles. We're only now starting to produce machines that fly and swim like birds and fish, and they are little more than toys. Our non-natural solutions have turned out to work better for our purposes than what nature found.
We might also note that nature did discover a rotary motor, in the form of bacterial flagellae. We even have them in some of our cells. (Trivia question: Which cells are those?) But nature never figured out how to adapt them to larger, multi-cellular organisms. Maybe on some other planet, but not on this one. Nature also discovered jet propulsion, and uses it under water but not in the air. We know how to do both of these things on a larger scale, and we have used them to solve problems in ways that the evolutionary process hasn't found.
Again, no. The first flocks that set out at random either end up in the ocean, or find land. Those that find land will do this because they had enough food to do this. If each bird in the flock that found land had a random amount of fat, half of them would drop to the ocean, but half would arrive and breed. They would get kids that had genes that would make them eat a little bit more than the imaginary kids from the birds that died. Now repeat for millions of generations, and you'll end up with something quite optimized.
All very true, but you missed the fact that when they started out, Hawaii and Alaska were closer. Today's Hawaiian Islands are the end of a long chain of seamounts that stretch out nearly to the Aleutians, with the seamounts getting older as you go northwest. We don't know when those plovers started this migration, but it was some millions of years in the past, when the end of the Hawaiian chain was one of those older seamounts that was then an island. It could have even been back when the islands were barely offshore from the then supercontinent of Laurasia (though it should be mentioned that we don't know this).
So their ancestors that started this migration had an easier job of it. As the islands slowly drifted out to sea, each generation would be selected for the survivors that were able to make a slightly longer flight.
Environmental change, in this case the effect of a moving geological "hot spot", must be taken into account to fully explain a lot of evolutionary events. That's one way you can get results that seem impossible in today's world, especially things like the colonization of remote islands like Hawaii by species that can't cross the open ocean.
Let's face it, nobody has the slightest idea what Mohammed looked like, no more than anyone knows what Jesus looked like.
So pictures of Mohammed should be removed because they can't possibly be accurate. The only place where it might be appropriate to keep them would be in an article specifically about images of Mohammed.
Similarly for pictures of Jesus and other such ancient characters. Unless we actually have an image created during their lifetime, they have little value in anything claiming to be historically accurate.
OTOH, if it's a history of art, then I suppose anything goes. (Though recently we have had a few problems with museums showing "artistic" images of Jesus.;-)
External burner + XO laptop is cheaper than two other laptops, even if you have to replace the burner and XO two or three times on the trip.
So how do you go about replacing a stolen XO in the wilds of Tibet or Amsterdam or wherever? They're not exactly sitting there on the shelves of the neighborhood computer store.
Actually, I'm curious. My wife and I got a couple recently, and are going on a trip. We plan to take them along, though so far we haven't gotten very fluent in using them. I'm wondering if we could successfully use them to copy our pictures to a few SD cards. I don't seem to see the docs explaining how to do it...
I doubt it. If anything, we would want Iran to have 100% free and uncensored access for all citizens.
Impossible. That would enable them to share music and movies. Hollywood would go bankrupt.
Yeah; and I'd respond with "You're both right." It's probably true that we (i.e., the majority of/. participants) would want free and uncensored access for the Iranian population. But it's unlikely that many of the top people in the Bush Administration or Hollywood would agree with this, any more than the top people in the Iranian government would agree.
Much of the American computer geek population has a strong libertarian streak, which is hardly the social ideology of most of the top levels of the US government. In particular, computer geeks tend to strongly favor open communication, especially those of us whose livelihoods are based on it. But the Bush administration has a strong policy of imposing secrecy on nearly everything they do, and punishing "whistle blowers" who expose internal government activity to the public. And the big companies in the movie and recording industries have taken to prosecuting people who practice open communication.
They push a story out about Iran's Intenet being down, everyone who's interested in Iran pings their servers to death, HomeLand Security (TM) captures that information and monitors you for the rest of your life because after all, you must be a terrorist if you are pinging Iran:-)
Yeah, that occurred to me as I fired off the pings, traceroutes, and web connections to hosts in the.ir domain. But then I thought that their little lists now probably include 90% of the Silicon Valley population, at least 50% of Boston's Route 128 population, and a good part of the students at every university with an engineering school. In other words, their lists probably haven't grown much at all.;-)
Remember when it came out in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack that US government agencies had recordings of much of the phone traffic by the organizers of the attack. But they hadn't listened to them or translated them because they didn't have nearly enough people competent in Arabic. Similar things have happened at various times in the past, as the spy agencies collected so much data on their own population that they couldn't possibly dig much useful out of it in time to do anything meaningful. Most of the data on the public is only useful after the fact, if then.
If everybody is a suspect, then nobody is a suspect, really. And the US government has reached the point where pretty much the entire population is suspect. The TSA has made that clear. Those of us with any sense understand this, and go about our lives, only occasionally making it clear that we now have about as much respect for our own government as it has for us.
My favorite personal example was some years back, when I was hired for a job that involved working with various international networking standards bodies. One bit of absurdity was that everything we did was published openly, but we still had to get a "secret" clearance (the lowest level). During their interviews, I was pointedly asked if I'd ever belonged to any organization supported by a foreign government. With as straight a face as I could manage, I told them that I'd been a long-time member of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, with a subtle emphasis on that Royal. It was fun watching them try to hide their responses to this. And despite this membership, I did get the clearance. I didn't actually publish everything that I did, though; that would have bored the readers to death. But some of the code may still be floating around out there. And I was disappointed that they never asked me for any inside reports about the RSCDS. Boston is a real hotbed of Scottish Country Dance activity.
So, how many fscking cables do they have and can they please tell us exactly how many have to go down before I can't ping a single thing in Iran? I don't wanna go through this on the next 12 cables . ..
Y'know; it's really, really hard to cut the lines that go via satellites.
Of course, China did recently shoot up one of their own satellites, leaving zillions of pieces of shrapnel in orbit for at least the next several decades. Maybe we should add them to the list of suspects.
... Step 3: Have everyone ping Iranian servers to death to prove story wrong...
Heh. I read that while having a few traceroutes running in other windows, testing times to a few sites in Iran. All of them do pretty well from here (Boston) as far as the sites in New York, Amsterdam, and Turkey, with ping times mostly under 200 ms. Then the packets go to numbered machines without DNS addresses, and the ping times jump to over 500 ms. I'd thought that this was probably a sign of satellite hops, but now I wonder. Maybe it's just that we've slashdotted all the routers. Ya think?
The government site at www.iran.ir doesn't repond to pings, but it does respond on port 80 in the usual manner. It is sorta slow, but firefox doesn't time it out.
I don't read Farsi, so I can't tell much about what it says. There are some familiar faces at the upper left, though.;-)
My favorite part of the bill is the final line, which reads:
And be it remembered that these noted problems had been long since given up by scientific bodies as insolvable mysteries and above man's ability to comprehend.
This, along with the rest of the math in the bill, makes it clear that the authors were the sort that only "believe" in rational numbers. Of course, by that time mathematicians already had a pretty good hold on the rest of the real numbers, and there wasn't any mystery at all about the existence of numbers that weren't the ration of two integers. The only real mystery here is why they preferred the approximation 3.2 rather than 3.1. Not that either is good enough for engineers, who routinely used 3 places as the minimal precision if you don't want to be laughed out of the room.
One of my favorite bits of mathematical humor is the many cases where they have taken criticisms and turned them into terminology. Thus, when it was realized that numbers like e and pi couldn't be written as ratios of integers, there were a lot of dummies who didn't accept this, and attacked the rationality of the people who did. The response of mathematicians was to say, in essence, "Hey, they call us irrational; that's a good word. Let's call the numbers that our critics believe in as 'rational', and the numbers that they don't believe in as 'irrational'. They'll be happy, and we'll have handy words for talking about these two kinds of numbers."
It happened again when people started talking about square roots of negative numbers (and engineers found practical uses for them in the real world). There were the usual criticisms, to the effect that negative numbers don't have square roots, and it's stupid to talk about things that don't exist. The natural (;-) reaction of the mathematicians was to first be bemused by the very idea that any kind of numbers have any sort of real existence. Then they adopted the critics' words as terminology, with 'real' numbers the sort that the critics accepted, and 'imaginary' numbers the kind that produced negative numbers when multiplied by themselves. That must have really played with the critics' minds. "Oh, you want to talk about real numbers; that's room 12A, just along the corridor. We're talking about imaginary numbers here. Stupid git."
Of course, there's the even more basic concept of 'natural' numbers, i.e., positive integers. It's clear from most most languages' words for numbers that most people historically have only dealt with this sort of number. Even today, many US high-school kids have a certain resistance to the idea that they have to learn about fractions, which strike them as 'unnatural' and pointless. So mathematicians adopted 'natural' as a subtle jab at the irrational attitude of the ignorant masses.
At least this bill's authors had enough understanding to accept rational numbers as real, though they classified irrational numbers like pi as "insolvable mysteries". It is sad (and funny) that as late as 1897 this sort of ignorance could actually make an appearance in a legislative body and apparently be taken as anything but a lame joke.
There have been other bills like this in the past, though as far as I've read, none of them has ever actually been passed, or even voted on. Anyone know of a case where one reached a vote?
It seems that once again, we have a case of a big company with control of a distribution channel and an effective monopoly in a lot of its market areas, who is claiming the lion's share of the sales price of a "work of art". In an earlier story today, we read about the RIAA's latest attempt to give artists even less of the sales price of a CD. The writer's strike comes from the fact that writers mostly get no money at all from even legal network downloads.
It's perhaps not so unusual that an ISP/cable company would see this as an opportunity. Why should they let those recording companies and movie studios get to claim all the profits without sharing them with the artists? An ISP also has a monopoly in most localities, so they should also be able claim monopoly rents from the studios, right?
I wonder if the folks involved in the Congressional "net neutrality" discussion are paying attention? Probably, because they'd see an opportunity for big personal profit ("campaign contributions") from the companies involved. To the detriment of both artists and audience, but they're just a bunch of, uh, customers, y'know.
I genuinely believe that geeky kids get more upset these days by having to pay for mp3s than they do if their president lies to them in order to start a war for his self interest. get some perspective.
Well, one perspective is that they differ only in the details. The most famous example of this perspective is Clausewitz's remark that war is just a continuation of diplomacy by other means. Others have observed that the same principle applies in business, where there are various persuasion tactics ranging from misleading advertising, "industry standard" contracts and legal threats to actions like mayhem and murder of competitors. Which are used are determined not by any morality or ethics, but by what the local government permits.
With both the Bush gang, and the RIAA, the motive behind their actions are essentially the same: power and profit. In both cases, they openly say that they consider themselves just businessmen, trying to maximize their profit. Bush, Cheney et al have done this by fomenting a war, as a way of channeling funding to their crowd's companies such as Haliburton. The RIAA uses shady legal tactics and bribery of politicians to control the distribution of funds away from artists and into their corporate coffers.
You can obviously argue that wholesale killing of innocent bystanders is something different from suing grannies. But to the top managers of these enterprises, this isn't really their concern. Businessmen have often used tactics like extortion, torture and killing when the legal system permits it. Bush's people are allowed to kill to get their way, so they do that. The RIAA is constrained by government regulation (criminal law) from doing this, but they are allowed to use the legal system as they have been doing, so they do. In each case, they're merely using the most extreme persuasion techniques that the legal system permits them to use. If the RIAA knew they could torture or kill people with impunity, that's what they would be doing.
See Russia for a nice example of how this works. Russia has been a "free and unregulated market" for over a decade now. It's open knowledge that extortion, torture and murder are now standard business practice in Russia, and the reason is simple: The government has stopped regulating such actions when done by businesses. At the other extreme, business in much of Europe is now suffering from the fact that some of them have actually been prosecuted for bribing politicians. In the US, political bribes are called "campaign contributions", and they're legal. So corporations like the RIAA might not be able to send in thugs to rough up "pirates", but at least they can pay money to politicians to get the laws changed so that more money gets channeled away from the artists and into the corporate coffers. And so far, they haven't been punished for scatter-shot lawsuits, so they use that tactic.
Actually, of course, there are a lot of politicians and businessmen with functional morals and/or ethics. But we're not talking about that kind of people here; we're talking about big, successful trade organizations and big, successful governments. These are usually not constrained by anything except the punishments they might receive for their actions. And that's really the only thing that explains differences in their tactics.
Open Source is *not* about innovation, it's about building solid products. In general, the only thing truly innovative about Open Source software is the Open Source model itself.
Well, the first may be true, but the vaunted "Open Source Model" is actually not the least bit innovative. It's just the centuries-old model of scientific advance via open publication. Software people pretend that they invented something new, but all they really did was "innovate" new terminology for the process that has made modern science such a force for improvement. And that process goes back centuries.
An informative approach here is to distinguish the common use of "innovation" from "invention". When someone actually creates something that's conceptually new, that's usually called "invention". If you look closely at how "innovation" is used, it's mostly a marketing term meaning "making small, cosmetic changes to something that already exists".
And in this sense, the Open Source crowd has been tremendously "innovative". This is an ongoing complaint from their critics, though it's usually expressed as "Open Source gives me too many choices and I don't want to waste my time doing all that configuring and twiddling options". We've heard that criticism here on/., right?;-)
Something I've gotten involved in a few times is the basic time-and-motion studies of computer GUIs. Invariably, the "open" packages, mostly based on X-Windows, win these tests hands down. It usually takes a bit of configuring and learning how to use things, but when you do, the open-source tools are almost always faster to use.
Some of the examples are downright silly. Thus, on the vaunted Mac GUI (which I'm using to type this;-), you can only resize a window with the lower right corner. So if you want to enlarge a window on the top or left, you must first move the pointer to the title bar and move the window's upper left corner, then move the pointer to the lower right and move it to where it was before. This is twice as much hand motion as on any other system. In this case, MS Windows is usually a lot faster, but experienced unix/linux users have usually discovered how to do the job with even less hand motion that either of the "market leaders".
Examples like this abound. And the reason is that the X-Windows package actively encourages experimenting with different window managers. I've long since lost track of how many such window managers exist, and most of them have several different schemes that a user can configure for doing common actions. In the X-Windows arena, there are a lot of people who will happily bend your ear for hours on the relative merits of the zillions of ways of doing almost anything on a computer screen.
In the MS and Apple worlds, very little of this "innovation" has happened, because the companies keep tight control of their platforms. This means that innovation is only permitted from within the company. Customers who have ideas (good or bad) about the design have very little effect, because they are rarely heard by the people who are allowed to experiment.
Not that this has much effect on "the Market", of course, since that's mostly determined by who has the highest marketing budget. So most computer "innovation", even though it's done out of sight by people working on "open" systems, doesn't much see the light of day until one or the other of the two big software companies notices and copies the innovations. This often takes years after the initial invention, because managers at Microsoft and Apple don't pay much attention to experiments within the Open Source community.
Thus, some day the good folks at Apple will suddenly realize the value of thin resize handles along the edges and at the corners of windows. They'll announce it with the usual fanfare, and they'll get credit for another "innovation" in their great GUI. The people who actually invented the idea 20 or 30 years ago will never be noticed.
I am posting on dialup. There is no competition in the local "broadband" market, so the one provider charges too much. And the phone company cannot be arsed to extend their DSL coverage the 2-3 blocks necessary to reach my house.
It's even weirder at our house. Verizon "owns" the phone line, and some years back, I checked with them about DSL. They said we're too far away for DSL. So I checked with speakeasy, and they said "Sure, we can do it". We've had speakeasy service now for a couple of years, and it works fine over Verizon's wires. They're even unix/linux-friendly, and have knowledgeable CS people, and don't block ports.
A month or so ago, just for yuks, I checked with Verizon again. They told me that we can't get DSL, because we're too far away. Speakeasy's DLS goes over a line leased from Verizon, of course, since Verizon is the local monopoly. Verizon can't (or more likely won't) supply DSL on their line, but at the moment they're required by law to lease it to other companies. It turns out that two of those companies (Covad and speakeasy) are collaborating to do with Verizon's line what Verizon can't be "arsed" to do.
OTOH, Verizon is actively pushing their FIOS in our neighborhood. One aspect to this is that they don't have to lease their fibre to other ISPs. Another aspect is that when they install FIOS, they routinely pull the copper, making service like what Covad and speakeasy provide no longer possible. So the apparent conclusion is that they are using FIOS to terminate the "obsolete" copper-based phone service, where they are no longer permitted a monopoly. Since they are permitted a monopoly over fibre, they are pushing to eliminate the medium in which there is competition, and replace it with fibre, where they can legally lock out competitors.
Funny how "the Market" works in telecommunications...
Not tinfoil hat time, either. Just the U.S. government doing what it does best - tapping into and monitoring our enemies'(and everyone else's) communications. Just one more reason to not use the Net for anything that requires secrecy.
Nah; you just have to accept the advice that the internet security folks have been saying again and again, at least from the early 1980s, and probably a lot earlier: The only way to have secrecy is end-to-end encryption. And you can't rely on any builtin encryption; you have to install it yourself. Preferably from the source code, because if you use any vendor's binaries, you have no idea what may be hidden inside them.
This is not some sort of clever or paranoid advice. It's the ongoing from all the security folks from the beginning.
(Well, OK; except for the ones who have something they want to sell you.;-)
Google doesn't say "Don't go here because this site looks spammy" they just say "Don't go here" by putting those results at the bottom of the page.
Actually, google does something very much like that. I've seen a number of search results that have one or more sites labeled with their "This site may harm your computer" warning. This means that their search code has detected malware on the site. It's interesting that this sometimes shows up in the first page of matches. So they're not actually using it as part of the page rank. They sort the results by their ranking scheme, give you a warning, and then let you decide whether to look at the page.
Hmmm... I just noticed that I once again have mod points. This has been happening 2 or 3 times a week for a while. But I've never, ever been invited into the Cabal. I wonder why this might be.
Make sure the two aren't going down into the same underground conduit.
The canonical example of this was the incident on the morning of 12 December 1986, when the Internet/ARPAnet had seven trunk lines connecting New England to the rest of the US. But all seven lines passed through a single conduit between Newark (NJ) and White Plains (NY). A worker cut the conduit and severed all the cables inside.
This is used as a textbook example of why the layered architecture of such systems shouldn't be absolute. Without software that is able to look at all the layers and compare them, you can't prevent people from making mistakes like this. You need a way for management software to peek into both the network level and the hardware level, and throw a warning if redundancy has been subverted in ways like this.
And a big part of the problem is that major infrastructure suppliers like the phone and cable companies consider this "Someone Else's Problem". They are strongly motivated to minimize their costs, which includes minimizing the hardware and eliminating redundancy. As long as there are profits at stake, such problems can't be solved without an outside actor that can enforce redundancy. Here in the US, as in much of the rest of the world, we don't seem to have anyone able to enforce such redundancy in the non-military "market".
New Yorkers are tough bastards. They'll piss and moan, but they're not super-hazard conscious...You can't be, and live in the City all the time, because you're far more likely to be killed by a manhole or a cracked out subway driver than any terrorist.
Just to point out that this wasn't hyperbole, there was that case a few years ago in which a New York woman was a few years agokilled by an electrified manhold cover. The testing that followed turned up hundreds of similar risky metal sheets on sidewalks throughout the city.
Of course, if this ordinance goes through, one of the followups will probably be to outlaw public ownership or use of voltmeters. Wouldn't want people to panic at the thought that they could be electrocuted for the mistake of walking down a mid-city sidewalk.
Here in Boston, we've only had a few dogs killed this way. No children so far. But I'd imagine the local authorities are looking at this story with interest. Maybe Boston can also block unauthorized use of hazard sensors like geiger counters or voltmeters.
He's lying. Everyone knows there's no farms in Jersey. All the land is either paved or polluted.
Huh? I can sorta see how paving a plot of land would prevent farming it. But how would being polluted be any sort of impediment to farming? Do you know anything at all about the soils that are routinely used for farming?
Anyway, once all the pollution sensors are outlawed (or restricted to loyal government employees who can be trusted to report the "correct" results), there will no longer be any polluted land.
With modern society having a distinct shortage of wild tigers roaming around eating the slow and stupid, there isn't any evolutionary pressure to become smarter.
Maybe not tigers, but we have a good supply of the most vicious predator on the planet, the one that has wiped out most of the other top predators: humans. And humans are still killing each other at rates comparable to (or greater than) what the non-human predators in previous millennia have ever achieved.
So Mother Nature still has a good differential survival rate to work with. We just don't understand clearly what the survival characteristics are. This is made clear by the ongoing argument that the educated classes are having fewer children, and are being outbred by the uneducated masses. This argument shows a profound misunderstanding of how the evolutionary process works. Humans have always had one of the lowest reproductive rates of all animals, and we've survived quite well relative to the other top predators. That in itself should be sufficient to debunk the "more children is better" argument.
The future probably belongs to those of us who are smart enough to keep out of the line of fire of the various gangs that are currently wandering around killing people. And as long as we have such gangs (going by whatever names are popular at the time), Ma Nature's selection process will continue to work. What the survivors will be like, we can only guess.
Now the Unix/Linux/GNU programmers manuals are fine pieces of documentation, no disrespect intended, but English language is stretching it a bit;-)
Well, just a few weeks ago, I saw yet another claim that COBOL lets you program in English. Compared to your typical COBOL code, the unix/etc manuals are practically conversational English. (For a rather specialized definition of "conversation".;-)
If anything, they should be using these sites to take down the offenders' pages and not the sites themselves.
Y'know, I've often wondered why people haven't been pointing that out. It would seem that for a copyright holder suing the person that points them to an infringer would be just a case of "shooting themselves in the foot". Why wouldn't they want someone to collect pointers to their copyrighted material, and make it easy to go after the infringer?
Maybe Warner is secretly in favor of copyright infringement, and it trying to shut down the search sites so that infringement can continue untracked. If so, there's some interesting economics going on here.
Pfft. That make your compiler and interpreter AI, too.
Nah; it just means that yet another sort of text processing has graduated from "intelligence" to "engineering". The computer field is full of examples of this. Thus, I remember back in the 1970s, the AI folks were proud of their software's ability to do list processing. I annoyed a few of them by saying that in 10 years, lists would be standard "systems programming" techniques, and not AI at all. Of course, that's exactly what happened. And now a number of languages have builtin lists, symbol tables, etc.
But an even bigger example: Back in 1850, the ability to add and multiply numbers was considered a proof of intelligence. It was one of the things that separated us humans from the "lower animals". Then someone invented a mechanical calculator. Arithmetic quickly went from a sign of intelligence to being merely a mechanical ability. The people who could do amazing feats of calculation went from highly intelligent to "idiot savant" in a generation of so. Nowadays, a tiny chip of electronics can do calculations that most "intelligent" people couldn't do back then (and mostly still can't). So it's now a very lowly mechanical attribute, not at all indicative of intelligence.
Today, the ability to "understand" English or other human languages, i.e. the ability to do something purposeful and useful in response to information in a human language, is considered to require a good degree of intelligence. But this is mostly because so far, only we humans can do it well. When we finally see the technical breakthroughs that allow computers to "understand" our languages, the result won't be the reclassification of computers as intelligent. Rather, the ability to do this will join arithmetic as a mere "mechanical" ability.
Machines will never be "intelligent", because anything they can do will be classified as "mechanical", and no longer a sign of intelligence.
Just sounds like text processing to me, which Perl (and most scripting/shell languages) are designed for.
Exactly right. And that was what I thought when I wrote the code I described. Any competent perl (or python or...) programmer should be able to do something similar. So it's no longer AI; it's software engineering. Or maybe just "coding".
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Sub designers, aircraft...cars...chairs...these guys/gals are supposed to have studied things like fish, birds, trees and insects for reasons why, and why not, long before they were hired to actually build things.
True, but it might be noted that we made very little progress in flying until some people gave up on trying to mimic birds, and tried other approaches. The first actual "flight" by humans was in the early 1800s, with hotter-than-air balloons. Then around 1900, a few experimenters started to get the hang of wings, and figured out that what worked was to separate the lift generation from the propulsion. Nature never came up with this scheme, but it's technically easier (if you know how to make a rotary motor or a jet engine) than nature's scheme of using wings for both functions.
Similarly, submarines look superficially like fish, but don't really work the same way. Fish use their fins for both steering and propulsion, while submarines use fins only for steering, with a propeller for propulsion. The similar shapes are only for streamlining, which does work the same for everything that needs it.
Usually, nature's solutions to problems are good models. But in cases like fish and birds, it has turned out to work better to give up on them and work from first principles. We're only now starting to produce machines that fly and swim like birds and fish, and they are little more than toys. Our non-natural solutions have turned out to work better for our purposes than what nature found.
We might also note that nature did discover a rotary motor, in the form of bacterial flagellae. We even have them in some of our cells. (Trivia question: Which cells are those?) But nature never figured out how to adapt them to larger, multi-cellular organisms. Maybe on some other planet, but not on this one. Nature also discovered jet propulsion, and uses it under water but not in the air. We know how to do both of these things on a larger scale, and we have used them to solve problems in ways that the evolutionary process hasn't found.
All very true, but you missed the fact that when they started out, Hawaii and Alaska were closer. Today's Hawaiian Islands are the end of a long chain of seamounts that stretch out nearly to the Aleutians, with the seamounts getting older as you go northwest. We don't know when those plovers started this migration, but it was some millions of years in the past, when the end of the Hawaiian chain was one of those older seamounts that was then an island. It could have even been back when the islands were barely offshore from the then supercontinent of Laurasia (though it should be mentioned that we don't know this).
So their ancestors that started this migration had an easier job of it. As the islands slowly drifted out to sea, each generation would be selected for the survivors that were able to make a slightly longer flight.
Environmental change, in this case the effect of a moving geological "hot spot", must be taken into account to fully explain a lot of evolutionary events. That's one way you can get results that seem impossible in today's world, especially things like the colonization of remote islands like Hawaii by species that can't cross the open ocean.
Let's face it, nobody has the slightest idea what Mohammed looked like, no more than anyone knows what Jesus looked like.
;-)
So pictures of Mohammed should be removed because they can't possibly be accurate. The only place where it might be appropriate to keep them would be in an article specifically about images of Mohammed.
Similarly for pictures of Jesus and other such ancient characters. Unless we actually have an image created during their lifetime, they have little value in anything claiming to be historically accurate.
OTOH, if it's a history of art, then I suppose anything goes. (Though recently we have had a few problems with museums showing "artistic" images of Jesus.
External burner + XO laptop is cheaper than two other laptops, even if you have to replace the burner and XO two or three times on the trip.
...
So how do you go about replacing a stolen XO in the wilds of Tibet or Amsterdam or wherever? They're not exactly sitting there on the shelves of the neighborhood computer store.
Actually, I'm curious. My wife and I got a couple recently, and are going on a trip. We plan to take them along, though so far we haven't gotten very fluent in using them. I'm wondering if we could successfully use them to copy our pictures to a few SD cards. I don't seem to see the docs explaining how to do it
Yeah; and I'd respond with "You're both right." It's probably true that we (i.e., the majority of
Much of the American computer geek population has a strong libertarian streak, which is hardly the social ideology of most of the top levels of the US government. In particular, computer geeks tend to strongly favor open communication, especially those of us whose livelihoods are based on it. But the Bush administration has a strong policy of imposing secrecy on nearly everything they do, and punishing "whistle blowers" who expose internal government activity to the public. And the big companies in the movie and recording industries have taken to prosecuting people who practice open communication.
They push a story out about Iran's Intenet being down, everyone who's interested in Iran pings their servers to death, HomeLand Security (TM) captures that information and monitors you for the rest of your life because after all, you must be a terrorist if you are pinging Iran :-)
.ir domain. But then I thought that their little lists now probably include 90% of the Silicon Valley population, at least 50% of Boston's Route 128 population, and a good part of the students at every university with an engineering school. In other words, their lists probably haven't grown much at all. ;-)
Yeah, that occurred to me as I fired off the pings, traceroutes, and web connections to hosts in the
Remember when it came out in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack that US government agencies had recordings of much of the phone traffic by the organizers of the attack. But they hadn't listened to them or translated them because they didn't have nearly enough people competent in Arabic. Similar things have happened at various times in the past, as the spy agencies collected so much data on their own population that they couldn't possibly dig much useful out of it in time to do anything meaningful. Most of the data on the public is only useful after the fact, if then.
If everybody is a suspect, then nobody is a suspect, really. And the US government has reached the point where pretty much the entire population is suspect. The TSA has made that clear. Those of us with any sense understand this, and go about our lives, only occasionally making it clear that we now have about as much respect for our own government as it has for us.
My favorite personal example was some years back, when I was hired for a job that involved working with various international networking standards bodies. One bit of absurdity was that everything we did was published openly, but we still had to get a "secret" clearance (the lowest level). During their interviews, I was pointedly asked if I'd ever belonged to any organization supported by a foreign government. With as straight a face as I could manage, I told them that I'd been a long-time member of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, with a subtle emphasis on that Royal. It was fun watching them try to hide their responses to this. And despite this membership, I did get the clearance. I didn't actually publish everything that I did, though; that would have bored the readers to death. But some of the code may still be floating around out there. And I was disappointed that they never asked me for any inside reports about the RSCDS. Boston is a real hotbed of Scottish Country Dance activity.
So, how many fscking cables do they have and can they please tell us exactly how many have to go down before I can't ping a single thing in Iran? I don't wanna go through this on the next 12 cables . . .
Y'know; it's really, really hard to cut the lines that go via satellites.
Of course, China did recently shoot up one of their own satellites, leaving zillions of pieces of shrapnel in orbit for at least the next several decades. Maybe we should add them to the list of suspects.
... Step 3: Have everyone ping Iranian servers to death to prove story wrong ...
;-)
Heh. I read that while having a few traceroutes running in other windows, testing times to a few sites in Iran. All of them do pretty well from here (Boston) as far as the sites in New York, Amsterdam, and Turkey, with ping times mostly under 200 ms. Then the packets go to numbered machines without DNS addresses, and the ping times jump to over 500 ms. I'd thought that this was probably a sign of satellite hops, but now I wonder. Maybe it's just that we've slashdotted all the routers. Ya think?
The government site at www.iran.ir doesn't repond to pings, but it does respond on port 80 in the usual manner. It is sorta slow, but firefox doesn't time it out.
I don't read Farsi, so I can't tell much about what it says. There are some familiar faces at the upper left, though.
My favorite part of the bill is the final line, which reads:
And be it remembered that these noted problems had been long since given up by scientific bodies as insolvable mysteries and above man's ability to comprehend.
This, along with the rest of the math in the bill, makes it clear that the authors were the sort that only "believe" in rational numbers. Of course, by that time mathematicians already had a pretty good hold on the rest of the real numbers, and there wasn't any mystery at all about the existence of numbers that weren't the ration of two integers. The only real mystery here is why they preferred the approximation 3.2 rather than 3.1. Not that either is good enough for engineers, who routinely used 3 places as the minimal precision if you don't want to be laughed out of the room.
One of my favorite bits of mathematical humor is the many cases where they have taken criticisms and turned them into terminology. Thus, when it was realized that numbers like e and pi couldn't be written as ratios of integers, there were a lot of dummies who didn't accept this, and attacked the rationality of the people who did. The response of mathematicians was to say, in essence, "Hey, they call us irrational; that's a good word. Let's call the numbers that our critics believe in as 'rational', and the numbers that they don't believe in as 'irrational'. They'll be happy, and we'll have handy words for talking about these two kinds of numbers."
It happened again when people started talking about square roots of negative numbers (and engineers found practical uses for them in the real world). There were the usual criticisms, to the effect that negative numbers don't have square roots, and it's stupid to talk about things that don't exist. The natural (;-) reaction of the mathematicians was to first be bemused by the very idea that any kind of numbers have any sort of real existence. Then they adopted the critics' words as terminology, with 'real' numbers the sort that the critics accepted, and 'imaginary' numbers the kind that produced negative numbers when multiplied by themselves. That must have really played with the critics' minds. "Oh, you want to talk about real numbers; that's room 12A, just along the corridor. We're talking about imaginary numbers here. Stupid git."
Of course, there's the even more basic concept of 'natural' numbers, i.e., positive integers. It's clear from most most languages' words for numbers that most people historically have only dealt with this sort of number. Even today, many US high-school kids have a certain resistance to the idea that they have to learn about fractions, which strike them as 'unnatural' and pointless. So mathematicians adopted 'natural' as a subtle jab at the irrational attitude of the ignorant masses.
At least this bill's authors had enough understanding to accept rational numbers as real, though they classified irrational numbers like pi as "insolvable mysteries". It is sad (and funny) that as late as 1897 this sort of ignorance could actually make an appearance in a legislative body and apparently be taken as anything but a lame joke.
There have been other bills like this in the past, though as far as I've read, none of them has ever actually been passed, or even voted on. Anyone know of a case where one reached a vote?
It seems that once again, we have a case of a big company with control of a distribution channel and an effective monopoly in a lot of its market areas, who is claiming the lion's share of the sales price of a "work of art". In an earlier story today, we read about the RIAA's latest attempt to give artists even less of the sales price of a CD. The writer's strike comes from the fact that writers mostly get no money at all from even legal network downloads.
It's perhaps not so unusual that an ISP/cable company would see this as an opportunity. Why should they let those recording companies and movie studios get to claim all the profits without sharing them with the artists? An ISP also has a monopoly in most localities, so they should also be able claim monopoly rents from the studios, right?
I wonder if the folks involved in the Congressional "net neutrality" discussion are paying attention? Probably, because they'd see an opportunity for big personal profit ("campaign contributions") from the companies involved. To the detriment of both artists and audience, but they're just a bunch of, uh, customers, y'know.
I genuinely believe that geeky kids get more upset these days by having to pay for mp3s than they do if their president lies to them in order to start a war for his self interest.
;-)
get some perspective.
Well, one perspective is that they differ only in the details. The most famous example of this perspective is Clausewitz's remark that war is just a continuation of diplomacy by other means. Others have observed that the same principle applies in business, where there are various persuasion tactics ranging from misleading advertising, "industry standard" contracts and legal threats to actions like mayhem and murder of competitors. Which are used are determined not by any morality or ethics, but by what the local government permits.
With both the Bush gang, and the RIAA, the motive behind their actions are essentially the same: power and profit. In both cases, they openly say that they consider themselves just businessmen, trying to maximize their profit. Bush, Cheney et al have done this by fomenting a war, as a way of channeling funding to their crowd's companies such as Haliburton. The RIAA uses shady legal tactics and bribery of politicians to control the distribution of funds away from artists and into their corporate coffers.
You can obviously argue that wholesale killing of innocent bystanders is something different from suing grannies. But to the top managers of these enterprises, this isn't really their concern. Businessmen have often used tactics like extortion, torture and killing when the legal system permits it. Bush's people are allowed to kill to get their way, so they do that. The RIAA is constrained by government regulation (criminal law) from doing this, but they are allowed to use the legal system as they have been doing, so they do. In each case, they're merely using the most extreme persuasion techniques that the legal system permits them to use. If the RIAA knew they could torture or kill people with impunity, that's what they would be doing.
See Russia for a nice example of how this works. Russia has been a "free and unregulated market" for over a decade now. It's open knowledge that extortion, torture and murder are now standard business practice in Russia, and the reason is simple: The government has stopped regulating such actions when done by businesses. At the other extreme, business in much of Europe is now suffering from the fact that some of them have actually been prosecuted for bribing politicians. In the US, political bribes are called "campaign contributions", and they're legal. So corporations like the RIAA might not be able to send in thugs to rough up "pirates", but at least they can pay money to politicians to get the laws changed so that more money gets channeled away from the artists and into the corporate coffers. And so far, they haven't been punished for scatter-shot lawsuits, so they use that tactic.
Actually, of course, there are a lot of politicians and businessmen with functional morals and/or ethics. But we're not talking about that kind of people here; we're talking about big, successful trade organizations and big, successful governments. These are usually not constrained by anything except the punishments they might receive for their actions. And that's really the only thing that explains differences in their tactics.
(It can be fun to look at "perspectives".
Open Source is *not* about innovation, it's about building solid products. In general, the only thing truly innovative about Open Source software is the Open Source model itself.
/., right? ;-)
;-), you can only resize a window with the lower right corner. So if you want to enlarge a window on the top or left, you must first move the pointer to the title bar and move the window's upper left corner, then move the pointer to the lower right and move it to where it was before. This is twice as much hand motion as on any other system. In this case, MS Windows is usually a lot faster, but experienced unix/linux users have usually discovered how to do the job with even less hand motion that either of the "market leaders".
Well, the first may be true, but the vaunted "Open Source Model" is actually not the least bit innovative. It's just the centuries-old model of scientific advance via open publication. Software people pretend that they invented something new, but all they really did was "innovate" new terminology for the process that has made modern science such a force for improvement. And that process goes back centuries.
An informative approach here is to distinguish the common use of "innovation" from "invention". When someone actually creates something that's conceptually new, that's usually called "invention". If you look closely at how "innovation" is used, it's mostly a marketing term meaning "making small, cosmetic changes to something that already exists".
And in this sense, the Open Source crowd has been tremendously "innovative". This is an ongoing complaint from their critics, though it's usually expressed as "Open Source gives me too many choices and I don't want to waste my time doing all that configuring and twiddling options". We've heard that criticism here on
Something I've gotten involved in a few times is the basic time-and-motion studies of computer GUIs. Invariably, the "open" packages, mostly based on X-Windows, win these tests hands down. It usually takes a bit of configuring and learning how to use things, but when you do, the open-source tools are almost always faster to use.
Some of the examples are downright silly. Thus, on the vaunted Mac GUI (which I'm using to type this
Examples like this abound. And the reason is that the X-Windows package actively encourages experimenting with different window managers. I've long since lost track of how many such window managers exist, and most of them have several different schemes that a user can configure for doing common actions. In the X-Windows arena, there are a lot of people who will happily bend your ear for hours on the relative merits of the zillions of ways of doing almost anything on a computer screen.
In the MS and Apple worlds, very little of this "innovation" has happened, because the companies keep tight control of their platforms. This means that innovation is only permitted from within the company. Customers who have ideas (good or bad) about the design have very little effect, because they are rarely heard by the people who are allowed to experiment.
Not that this has much effect on "the Market", of course, since that's mostly determined by who has the highest marketing budget. So most computer "innovation", even though it's done out of sight by people working on "open" systems, doesn't much see the light of day until one or the other of the two big software companies notices and copies the innovations. This often takes years after the initial invention, because managers at Microsoft and Apple don't pay much attention to experiments within the Open Source community.
Thus, some day the good folks at Apple will suddenly realize the value of thin resize handles along the edges and at the corners of windows. They'll announce it with the usual fanfare, and they'll get credit for another "innovation" in their great GUI. The people who actually invented the idea 20 or 30 years ago will never be noticed.
I am posting on dialup. There is no competition in the local "broadband" market, so the one provider charges too much. And the phone company cannot be arsed to extend their DSL coverage the 2-3 blocks necessary to reach my house.
...
It's even weirder at our house. Verizon "owns" the phone line, and some years back, I checked with them about DSL. They said we're too far away for DSL. So I checked with speakeasy, and they said "Sure, we can do it". We've had speakeasy service now for a couple of years, and it works fine over Verizon's wires. They're even unix/linux-friendly, and have knowledgeable CS people, and don't block ports.
A month or so ago, just for yuks, I checked with Verizon again. They told me that we can't get DSL, because we're too far away. Speakeasy's DLS goes over a line leased from Verizon, of course, since Verizon is the local monopoly. Verizon can't (or more likely won't) supply DSL on their line, but at the moment they're required by law to lease it to other companies. It turns out that two of those companies (Covad and speakeasy) are collaborating to do with Verizon's line what Verizon can't be "arsed" to do.
OTOH, Verizon is actively pushing their FIOS in our neighborhood. One aspect to this is that they don't have to lease their fibre to other ISPs. Another aspect is that when they install FIOS, they routinely pull the copper, making service like what Covad and speakeasy provide no longer possible. So the apparent conclusion is that they are using FIOS to terminate the "obsolete" copper-based phone service, where they are no longer permitted a monopoly. Since they are permitted a monopoly over fibre, they are pushing to eliminate the medium in which there is competition, and replace it with fibre, where they can legally lock out competitors.
Funny how "the Market" works in telecommunications
Besides, your analogy is completely misleading. What if it's 2 lambs and a wolf voting on what's for dinner?
Well, if it's in the US, the wolf simply issues a "signing statement" stating that the outcome of the vote doesn't apply to wolves.
Not tinfoil hat time, either. Just the U.S. government doing what it does best - tapping into and monitoring our enemies'(and everyone else's) communications. Just one more reason to not use the Net for anything that requires secrecy.
;-)
Nah; you just have to accept the advice that the internet security folks have been saying again and again, at least from the early 1980s, and probably a lot earlier: The only way to have secrecy is end-to-end encryption. And you can't rely on any builtin encryption; you have to install it yourself. Preferably from the source code, because if you use any vendor's binaries, you have no idea what may be hidden inside them.
This is not some sort of clever or paranoid advice. It's the ongoing from all the security folks from the beginning.
(Well, OK; except for the ones who have something they want to sell you.
Google doesn't say "Don't go here because this site looks spammy" they just say "Don't go here" by putting those results at the bottom of the page.
Actually, google does something very much like that. I've seen a number of search results that have one or more sites labeled with their "This site may harm your computer" warning. This means that their search code has detected malware on the site. It's interesting that this sometimes shows up in the first page of matches. So they're not actually using it as part of the page rank. They sort the results by their ranking scheme, give you a warning, and then let you decide whether to look at the page.
Hmmm ... I just noticed that I once again have mod points. This has been happening 2 or 3 times a week for a while. But I've never, ever been invited into the Cabal. I wonder why this might be.
Make sure the two aren't going down into the same underground conduit.
The canonical example of this was the incident on the morning of 12 December 1986, when the Internet/ARPAnet had seven trunk lines connecting New England to the rest of the US. But all seven lines passed through a single conduit between Newark (NJ) and White Plains (NY). A worker cut the conduit and severed all the cables inside.
This is used as a textbook example of why the layered architecture of such systems shouldn't be absolute. Without software that is able to look at all the layers and compare them, you can't prevent people from making mistakes like this. You need a way for management software to peek into both the network level and the hardware level, and throw a warning if redundancy has been subverted in ways like this.
And a big part of the problem is that major infrastructure suppliers like the phone and cable companies consider this "Someone Else's Problem". They are strongly motivated to minimize their costs, which includes minimizing the hardware and eliminating redundancy. As long as there are profits at stake, such problems can't be solved without an outside actor that can enforce redundancy. Here in the US, as in much of the rest of the world, we don't seem to have anyone able to enforce such redundancy in the non-military "market".
New Yorkers are tough bastards. They'll piss and moan, but they're not super-hazard conscious...You can't be, and live in the City all the time, because you're far more likely to be killed by a manhole or a cracked out subway driver than any terrorist.
Just to point out that this wasn't hyperbole, there was that case a few years ago in which a New York woman was a few years agokilled by an electrified manhold cover. The testing that followed turned up hundreds of similar risky metal sheets on sidewalks throughout the city.
Of course, if this ordinance goes through, one of the followups will probably be to outlaw public ownership or use of voltmeters. Wouldn't want people to panic at the thought that they could be electrocuted for the mistake of walking down a mid-city sidewalk.
Here in Boston, we've only had a few dogs killed this way. No children so far. But I'd imagine the local authorities are looking at this story with interest. Maybe Boston can also block unauthorized use of hazard sensors like geiger counters or voltmeters.
He's lying. Everyone knows there's no farms in Jersey. All the land is either paved or polluted.
Huh? I can sorta see how paving a plot of land would prevent farming it. But how would being polluted be any sort of impediment to farming? Do you know anything at all about the soils that are routinely used for farming?
Anyway, once all the pollution sensors are outlawed (or restricted to loyal government employees who can be trusted to report the "correct" results), there will no longer be any polluted land.
With modern society having a distinct shortage of wild tigers roaming around eating the slow and stupid, there isn't any evolutionary pressure to become smarter.
Maybe not tigers, but we have a good supply of the most vicious predator on the planet, the one that has wiped out most of the other top predators: humans. And humans are still killing each other at rates comparable to (or greater than) what the non-human predators in previous millennia have ever achieved.
So Mother Nature still has a good differential survival rate to work with. We just don't understand clearly what the survival characteristics are. This is made clear by the ongoing argument that the educated classes are having fewer children, and are being outbred by the uneducated masses. This argument shows a profound misunderstanding of how the evolutionary process works. Humans have always had one of the lowest reproductive rates of all animals, and we've survived quite well relative to the other top predators. That in itself should be sufficient to debunk the "more children is better" argument.
The future probably belongs to those of us who are smart enough to keep out of the line of fire of the various gangs that are currently wandering around killing people. And as long as we have such gangs (going by whatever names are popular at the time), Ma Nature's selection process will continue to work. What the survivors will be like, we can only guess.
Now the Unix/Linux/GNU programmers manuals are fine pieces of documentation, no disrespect intended, but English language is stretching it a bit ;-)
;-)
Well, just a few weeks ago, I saw yet another claim that COBOL lets you program in English. Compared to your typical COBOL code, the unix/etc manuals are practically conversational English. (For a rather specialized definition of "conversation".
If anything, they should be using these sites to take down the offenders' pages and not the sites themselves.
Y'know, I've often wondered why people haven't been pointing that out. It would seem that for a copyright holder suing the person that points them to an infringer would be just a case of "shooting themselves in the foot". Why wouldn't they want someone to collect pointers to their copyrighted material, and make it easy to go after the infringer?
Maybe Warner is secretly in favor of copyright infringement, and it trying to shut down the search sites so that infringement can continue untracked. If so, there's some interesting economics going on here.
;-)
...."
Note that I said "I remember back in the 1970s", but I only said "Back in 1850" without claiming to remember it.
Though I am reminded of that old song that starts "I was born about 10,000 years ago,
Pfft. That make your compiler and interpreter AI, too.
...) programmer should be able to do something similar. So it's no longer AI; it's software engineering. Or maybe just "coding".
;-)
Nah; it just means that yet another sort of text processing has graduated from "intelligence" to "engineering". The computer field is full of examples of this. Thus, I remember back in the 1970s, the AI folks were proud of their software's ability to do list processing. I annoyed a few of them by saying that in 10 years, lists would be standard "systems programming" techniques, and not AI at all. Of course, that's exactly what happened. And now a number of languages have builtin lists, symbol tables, etc.
But an even bigger example: Back in 1850, the ability to add and multiply numbers was considered a proof of intelligence. It was one of the things that separated us humans from the "lower animals". Then someone invented a mechanical calculator. Arithmetic quickly went from a sign of intelligence to being merely a mechanical ability. The people who could do amazing feats of calculation went from highly intelligent to "idiot savant" in a generation of so. Nowadays, a tiny chip of electronics can do calculations that most "intelligent" people couldn't do back then (and mostly still can't). So it's now a very lowly mechanical attribute, not at all indicative of intelligence.
Today, the ability to "understand" English or other human languages, i.e. the ability to do something purposeful and useful in response to information in a human language, is considered to require a good degree of intelligence. But this is mostly because so far, only we humans can do it well. When we finally see the technical breakthroughs that allow computers to "understand" our languages, the result won't be the reclassification of computers as intelligent. Rather, the ability to do this will join arithmetic as a mere "mechanical" ability.
Machines will never be "intelligent", because anything they can do will be classified as "mechanical", and no longer a sign of intelligence.
Just sounds like text processing to me, which Perl (and most scripting/shell languages) are designed for.
Exactly right. And that was what I thought when I wrote the code I described. Any competent perl (or python or
Google for "SMOP".