2) Ironically, net neutrality is what would restore fair competition to the market.
So where's the irony here? Irony means outcomes different from what is intended or expected. And "the market" can only exist if competitors are able to compete on equal terms. This is exactly what net neutrality is about, so there isn't any irony.
Almost everywhere, control of the "last mile", i.e., the link from an end-point to a comm carrier, is a legal monopoly. Thus, at my house Verizon "owns" the right to deliver telephony service. Nobody else can legally install a telephone connection to my house. There is also a TV-cable supplier, but that's also a legal monopoly. In much of the US, there isn't even this much competition, and only one comm carrier controls all access to every house.
If such a monopoly corporation is allowed to bias delivery of packets based on source or destination, there can be no "market". The monopoly corporation controls all communication, and can choose winners and losers according to its own criteria. Net neutrality simply means that the legal monopolist isn't permitted to discriminate in packet delivery based on the identity of the source or destination. The intent of this is to establish a market in services like the Internet where none exists otherwise.
Irony would mean that such discrimination by a monopolist would enhance a "market". But I haven't seen any argument that this would happen. All I've seen is the bogus argument that "the company that owns the wire should be able to do as they like with the traffic". In a situation where ownership of the wire is a legal monopoly, this is an anti-market argument. It gives the monopolist total, god-like control over the communications of all other players.
One explanation I've seen for why this issue has come up now is that most of the Internet is provided by telephone and television carriers, and the management of those monopolies have generally been clueless about the Internet. The phone companies have seen the Internet as a funny sort of phone service, and the TV-cable companies have seen the Internet as a new sort of broadcast service. But this management have started to wake up to the fact that they have something new, and they see the prospect of controlling this growing part of the economy. If permitted, this would essentially squash a large part of "the market" that is currently thousands (millions?) of small companies, and put it under the control of a handful of comm corporations. Net Neutrality is aimed an blocking this concentration of power by establishing a level playing field in Internet communications, thus allowing the growing Internet "market" to continue.
If Net Neutrality creates a "market", there's no irony, because this is what is intended, and it's what you'd expect if you deny large corporations the right to control commercial communication.
I always thought the 'legal bribery' part of USA politics was slightly ironic...but it isn't?
For some reason, this topic seems to have triggered a number of misuses of the term "ironic". The term properly refers to outcomes that are different what what was intended and/or expected. This doesn't apply at all here. Campaign contributions are intended to influence the the recipients' actions, and that's what happens, so there's no irony involved at all.
Giving money to influence behavior of government officials is called "bribery". Campaign contributions are legal (within certain limits). And they're intended to influence the recipient's governing behavior, so they're "bribery". So the phrase "legal bribery" is nothing but a simple definition of "campaign contribution".
If the answer is not very deep then you couldn't treat stuff like cervical cancer or colon cancer, because you can't stick electrodes (comfortably?) onto those body parts.
Well, I don't have a cervix, but I've been told by people who do that inserting things next to it and vibrating them can be quite pleasurable. I've also been told that some people do similar things with their colon, though I haven't personally tried this.
I mean, really; what's the problem with getting an electrode next to or inside a cervix or colon? I'd think the average doctor would have little trouble with this. If the frequencies involved cause pain, wouldn't a little local anesthetic handle it?
Parallel programming is indeed hard. The standard approach these days is to decompose the parallel problem into a definite set of serial problems. The serial problems (applets) can then be coded more-or-less as normal, usually using message-passing rather than direct calls to communicate with other applets.
Isn't this just a reinvention of the "unix approach" developed at Bell Labs over 30 years ago? For "applet" substitute "process", and you have unix terminology. Of course, we did have to wait a decade or so for the Berkeley people to invent an IPC method more flexible than the unix pipe.;-)
Making sure that everything is scheduled correctly does indeed take managerial skills.
Of course, you can just let the kernel process scheduler handle it, if you have one that's decent. There have been discussions about possible improvements by giving processes some hooks into the scheduler, to give the scheduler "hints" about how to do its job better, but I don't see this much implemented. It does seem mainly of interest to the real-time crowd.
In any case, this does seem to be an example of people re-inventing a problem by using different terminology, and refusing to recognize earlier (partial) solution because the words are different.
And one might also argue that the problem isn't really the difficulty of parallel programming; we knew decades ago that this was a problem and had (partial) solutions. The main real problem is that the known solutions all involve dividing a program up into multiple "objects" (i.e., processes) that run independently and have strong barriers to prevent stomping on someone else's data. But most software developers seem to love building huge monolithic programs that do everything they can think of, and indignantly reject the suggestion that their app should be a flock of little communicating processes. This is blatant policy in the MS and Mac worlds, of course. But it has also been adopted in recent years by many unix developers who sneer at the methods of previous generations, leading to the need of multi-GB memory for what used to be doable in a few MB.
Given all this, I don't expect rational solutions any time soon. Even if we get them, they'll be calmly ignored by most developers.
Have a new defense department in a building shaped like a circle. The theme of the building being what goes around, comes around.
Nah; that's not as good as the symbolism in the pentagon. My thought when I rad the story was how appropriate it was. They built it to match their previous plot of land. That goes along perfectly with the old observation that they're always fighting the previous war.
Military historians must have loved it. They covered their laughter with the story that it was in honor of the old pentagonal forts (built that way for good military reasons, not just to imprison demons). But they knew what it was really symbolizing.
Ron Paul says Osama bin Laden is delighted we invaded Iraq.
and from the sounds of it is thus the only person who was standing on that stage who is not an idiot.
Well, really it just means that he's the only one who's willing to take the gamble that stating the truth won't get him eliminated from the list of candidates. Chances are that lots of the others are at least somewhat aware of the realities of the Middle East, but they're betting that the American public doesn't want to hear about it. There's a lot of evidence to support this belief.
We are deliberately avoiding understanding our enemies under the guise of patriotism, and as a result we don't understand our enemies...
Speak for yourself. Fact is, ignorance is now quite inexcusable. A few decades ago, it was difficult for an American to learn much that was accurate about the rest of the world, especially the Middle East. Nowadays, the Internet gives us direct access to (what passes for) information from all the relevant parties. In particular, it's now trivially easy to find information about Islam, from as many viewpoints as you like. A minute or two googling will give you more links that you'll know what to do with, and you can read until you fall asleep. A lot of this information is biased, of course, since it's social, political and religious in nature. But it's not hidden. And there are some of us paying attention. (Even some who take time out to read/.;-)
A lot of us are also familiar with the Bush family and its extensive ties with various groups in the Middle East. We were also quite aware that when the current George Bush took office, he was already planning his war. This was hardly a secret to people who were paying attention. And a lot of us were aware of the ongoing bombing of Iraq during the Clinton years.
Unfortunately, most of us with an interest in learning such stuff aren't going to be nominated as candidates by either of the dominant political parties. And I'd guess that most of the knowledgeable people are somewhat surprised that any candidate was allowed on stage at the Republican "debate" who was willing to say things like Ron Paul said. It was an "interesting" development.
Not that we expect him to last long, of course. The majority of Americans are deliberately ignorant of the issues, despite the growing ease of access to real information. And lots of them vote, giving us people like the Bushes.
Hmmm... It took quite a lot of poking around at random to find that "By default, join..." thing. And then there was the problem of making sense of it. It gave me the choice of "Automatic" and "Preferred networks". The obvious thing is "Automatic", since I want it to automatically join our home network. But it's "Preferred networks" that shows a list with the home network first in the list. The "Automatic" one doesn't give a list of networks to select from. So I changed the menu to "Preferred networks" and clicked on the home network name, which turned red. I also clicked "Apply Now", guessing that this might be needed. This got no visible response.
It's all puzzling and counterintuitive, and I probably wouldn't have ever stumbled across this (or understood that I should do anything). We'll see if it makes any noticeable difference in behavior. I wonder if this means that now it'll refuse to join any network when it's away from homes, on the grounds that the "preferred" network isn't visible? I guess I'll have to experiment with it a bit, and try to remember where these config windows are when I have problems in the future.
The logic behind all of this isn't at all obvious, and the Help stuff isn't very enlightening.
Suppose the parent has a gene G, with forms G1 and G2, and suppose that G1 is the normal form, while G2 is a recessive mutation in the parent (perhaps inherited from a grandparent). That is, the parent is G1G2, and only G1 is expressed. Natural selection can't select for/against G2, because it's recessive and not expressed.
But a parthenogenetic child could be G2G2, and would express the recessive gene. If it's harmful, the child will die. But if it's something good, the nature can now "select" in favor of the child, and that child's children will all have G2 (perhaps masked by another version of G).
The alternative, with sexual reproduction, is that eventually you get two G1G2 individuals who mate, and 1/4 of their children will be G2G2. In this case, parthenogenesis is a bit faster than sexual reproduction. OTOH, sexual reproduction between close relatives will also produce G2G2 offspring fairly quickly. This is why most populations do have a low level of inbreeding. It brings out recessives and lets them be selected for or against. People tend to notice the bad results of inbreeding, but any breeder will tell you that it's a useful way to bring out beneficial recessives.
He just said the problem with a clone, is it's a clone! No shit!
Actually, they said it's parthenogenesis, which (at least in vertebrates) is something different from cloning. A clone is something that is genetically identical to the parent, because it was produced by taking a (small population of) somatic cells and growing a new individual from them.
Parthenogenesis usually refers to producing a new individual from an unfertilized ovum. Sometimes the ovum duplicates all its chromosomes, giving offspring that is heterozygous in all genes and no genetic diversity at all. Sometimes the ovum fuses with a polar body, giving offspring that has (on the average) half the genetic diversity of the parent. In both cases, all the child's genes came from the mother, but they aren't usually genetically identical. The mother usually contains some gene variants that aren't in the child.
Actually, it's a translation error. 'Virgin' should instead be 'young woman', and the whole miracle-of-the-virgin-birth was made up by the Church based on this false translation.
Another explanation is: A common process in many languages has been the conversion of a word meaning "young woman" into a word that implies no sexual experience. For a modern example, in German the term "Jungfrau", which literally means "young woman", has the connotation of virginity. Some linguists have claimed that the same thing happened in late Latin. 2000 years ago, the term "virgo" supposedly referred simply to a young woman. Then it went through the usual process, and took on its modern meaning in Latin's descendants. This gave the church a miracle that hadn't been in the original Latin. But if this derivation is correct, it wasn't a mistranslation; it was a shift in meaning of a word in an old text.
I wonder how good the evidence is for this sort of explanation? After all, most old texts simple use words; they rarely give detailed definitions of words that (at the time) everyone understood. One possible bit of evidence I've read is that the biblical "prophecies" of the virgin birth were in Hebrew, and the term (bakhura) was used in other passages for women who were clearly not virgins. But I'm not an expert in the topic; others probably know more about this than I do.
In any case, I doubt that the sharks in question think there was anything remarkable about this particular virgin birth.
Sexual reproduction speeds up the process among complex organisms, but bacteria evolve very quickly without it.
Sure they do. Google for "Bacterial Conjugation". Of course, they don't have genitalia like we do, but they manage anyway. Pretty much all bacteria that have been studied in any depth have been found to use conjugation to exchange DNA. There's even "bacterial porn" online, videos of the conjugation process.
Actually, most of them only engage in sex occasionally, Mostly they reproduce by cloning (i.e., dividing). When they have several populations of clones intermingling, they produce lots of random mixtures of the different populations' genes in a big orgy of conjugation. Natural selection then decides which of these mixtures deserve to survive. The result is the same sort of pooling of beneficial genes that happens in us multi-cellular organisms during sex.
Someone buys a wifi access point and sets it up wrong. When they test it, they accidentally connect to their neighbor's wifi, it looks like everything is working and they surf away. Are you saying that, in Michigan, this is a felony?
Actually, we only know that it's a felony in Sparta, Michigan. It may or may not be legal in other parts of the state. But to be on the safe side, you might take care to turn off all comm equipment in your car when driving through the state on I-94 or I-75. This includes any of the fancy electronics that are starting to appear in newer cars. Some cars now know how to "call home" to the factory via wifi; others can fetch maps for your GPS gadget. If your car does this in the vicinity of Sparta or any other town with similar laws, you could be in bad trouble.
It could be useful to collect a list of places with similar draconian laws that your computer might violate without you knowing about it. Publishing such a list online could be a public service (and might cause enough public angst to get such laws overridden eventually).
If I recall my experiences using windows XP, doesn't it just automatically connect to any unsecured wireless connection that it finds?
I have a Mac Powerbook laptop, and it does the same thing. Sometimes it pops up a window asking "Do you want to be connected to the untrusted network <FOO>?" But usually it doesn't ask, and I have no idea why. I've also failed to find out how to make a network trusted; my home airport is usually trusted but sometimes not (and this seems true whether or not I have the password turned on or not). It also gives the same popup at random times when I'm away from home, but usually just connects without asking.
I wonder how many felonies I've committed with it? I mean, even at home, it sometimes connects to a neighbor's AP rather than mine. I have no idea whether that's legal in this town. And if this guy's experience is any clue, I might not learn the legal situation by asking the police.
That analogy holds right up to the point you send your first packet to their network. After that, you are no longer a passive spectator... When you ask yourself "am I allowed to use this network?", "I don't know" does not equal "yes".
Actually, if our legal system were rational, there would be a trivial answer: As soon as that packet is either accepted (and forwarded) or rejected (and bounced) by the AP, you'd know. If the packet was accepted, then the AP has in fact allowed you to use it. And it didn't do this by accident. It was explicitly programmed to behave that way. Or, more likely, the software has config setting saying whether to accept or reject packets from unregistered devices, and the AP's owner has set this to "accept". You should be able to tell the court "My packets were accepted and delivered; it's clear that I was in fact allowed to use the AP."
The tired old road analogy might help: If you're driving along, pass through an intersection, and continue on the road on the other side, how do you know if it's legal for you to drive there? Pretty much everywhere in the world, the same rule applies: If there's some sort of "no entry" or "private road" sign, then you probably shouldn't drive there. If there's no such sign restricting access, then you are allowed to drive there. Any court would interpret the lack of an explicit sign to mean that the public is permitted to use the road. The fact that someone (maybe the town, maybe a private owner) owns the road is irrelevant; you won't be arrested for driving on a road without signs that tell you the rules. We all understand that, without this rule, our road system would be unusable.
But someone else pointed out the magic word that makes this case an exception: "computer". We seem to be in a phase where, the instant a computer gets involved, all social and legal precedent goes out the window, and everything must be relearned from scratch. Any attempt to explain the precedent gets a "But that's different" reply, with no coherent explanation of what the difference is or why it matters. The mere presence of a computer invalidates everything you ever knew, and you have to fight all the old fights all over again.
But in a few centuries, it'll probably settle down, and computers (like roads, cars, etc.) will just be tools that are treated like all other tools.
We can hope that freedom of speech, communication, expression, whatever survive the relearning process...
(I do wonder what the court would say if the defendant here were to file an "entrapment" suit against the store owner. After all, there are a lot of open-access APs around. How is one to know while traveling whether any given AP is legally usable? This decision potentially makes it rather risky to just be a traveler in Michigan, especially now that cars are starting to come with onboard networks and comm equipment. It's just a matter of time until someone is arrested while driving along I-94 because their car used a local AP to talk to the factory or download a map.;-)
[T]he classic Chinese numeric notation is not as convenient as 'arabic' notation. But it's much less unwieldy than say Roman numerals, so I don't think it would have been an insumountable hurdle either.
Actually, classical Chinese numbers are only slightly worse than Arabic notation (which apparently developed in India but was spread by Arab traders who knew a good accounting system when they saw it). The Chinese notation was far better than any of the Western number notations that the Arabic notation supplanted, such as the Greek or Hebrew notation. Roman was probably the worst notation ever invented, and nobody ever really used it for accounting.
The basis of the Chinese system was symbols for 1 to 9, and symbols for powers of 10. To illustrate with ascii characters, the symbol for 10 looks like a large '+' sign, so we can use + for 10, H for hundred, T for thousand. We'd write the number 5347 as 5T3H4+7. Unused powers of 10 are omitted, so 2007 would be 2T7. 1024 would be T2+4 or 1T2+4. And so on. There are symbols for a few more powers of 10, and they can be chained to get higher powers of 10, so HT could be used for 100,000.
Nowadays, most numeric work in East Asia is done using the Western version of Arabic notation. But you also see a hybrid form that uses the Chinese 1-9 characters plus the Western 0. Converting between this notation and the traditional Chinese notation is essentially trivial and can be done as fast as you can write the numbers. But for arithmetic on paper, the Arabic form (or Arabic with Chinese digits) is a bit simpler than the traditional Chinese notation, since using 0 as a place holder results in correct alignment in columns of numbers, and the digits 1-9 are a bit faster to write than the Chinese digits.
An interesting aspect of the Chinese system is that the basic symbols have alternate "fancy" forms with a lot more strokes. These characters have the property that you can't add strokes to convert them to a different character. So they're an anti-tampering, fraud-proof way of writing numbers. I don't know of another numeric notation with this feature. Asian financial documents have historically used these fancy forms of numbers.
Actually, the Chinese and Arabic notations are the 3rd and 2nd easiest numeric notation that various societies have invented. A few years ago, Scientific American had an interesting article explaining the Mayan number system, and included an explanation of why it was a lot easier to use than the Arabic system. For example, instead of the big multiplication table that we memorized in school, the Mayan system really only needs one rule: 5x5=15. (This makes sense if you understand that they used base 20.) The rest of the rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying consist of the techniques for "carrying" and "borrowing", and are essentially similar to what you do with an abacus.
But I suppose we're stuck with the Arabic system. It's good enough, really, for the remaining uses where we don't bother with a computer.
The notable difference between Chinese and English (or most other written languages) is that several English characters combine to form syllables, which combine to form words (i.e., we use an alphabet). In Chinese, each character corresponds directly with a word (each character is a logogram).
Actually, this is pretty much a myth that originated from people with very little knowledge of Chinese language and writing. In all the Chinese languages ("dialects";-), most of the vocabulary is two-syllable words, as in English. Three-syllable words aren't uncommon. The writing system is actually a sort of syllabary, and the meaning of most two-character words can't be inferred from knowing what the syllables mean as standalone words.
It's similar to how lots of English words, e.g. "insight", can be parsed as two words ("in"+"sight"), but this doesn't really help you understand what the word actually means. Or, an example that shows how such things evolve is the English word "upstairs". If I say I'm going upstairs and take the elevator, did I lie to you? Of course not, because "upstairs" doesn't mean going up stairs. It did a few centuries ago, but hasn't meant that during the lifetime of anyone alive now. Similarly, proto-Chinese of N thousand years ago may have been mostly single-syllable words, but this hasn't been true for at least the few thousand years that we have readable examples of the writing system.
For a Mandarin example, which I'll write in pinyin (or pin1yin1;-) to get past the/. filters, consider the word zi4ran2. The zi4 syllable is a word, and means "from" or "since" (and is also used like "-ly" to form adverbs). The ran2 syllable is also a word, and basically means "correct" or "yes". The zi4ran2 combination means "nature" or "naturally". Like "insight", you might be able to kludge some sort of connection here, but in reality you just have to learn zi4ran2 as a separate word unrelated to its two syllables. It may have been a two-word idiom several thousand years ago; it's a two-syllable word now.
For an entertaining debunking of both this myth and a very common trope among Western pseudo-intellectuals and pop psychologists, read this article at languagelog. After chuckling at that particular bit of silliness about Chinese writing, you can find other articles there that go into the general problem in more detail. A number of experts in East-Asian linguistics regularly contribute to that blog, and they've been pushing for a campaign to debunk the nonsense that Westerners insist on saying about these languages.
Oh, well; I haven't yet heard any claim that Chinese doesn't have a word for "freedom". But I wouldn't be surprised. (Hint: the word starts with the same character as the above "zi4ran2", but has a different second character.;-)
I have found that many people do not share my point-of-view with regards to Palm OS, but I must personally say that I hated it. The interface was easy enough to deal with as a user, but as a developer, it was a nightmare. I am so glad to see Palm OS go and be replaced with Linux.
Same here. Back before Y2K I had a PalmOS gadget, and put in a lot of hours trying to produce some nontrivial software for it, but eventually I gave it up as a lost cause. It was obviously designed for someone much, much smarter than me.;-)
More recently, partly due to a job I had, I got my hands on a blackberry, and tried to develop a few apps for it. Same thing: Near total failure. Much puzzled effort; little to show for it except a few crummy prototypes that mostly crashed the system. I got really good at rebooting.
I don't think I'll bother again until I can get my hands on a linux-based gadget. And it'll have to be "unlocked", so I can actually work with it. I've sent my email to the openmoko folks, but they haven't responded. I suppose they're swamped. The iPhone looked promising until the news came out that it was effectively locked against people like me. I'd like to get my hands on a OLPC gadget, too, but it's not obvious how.
Otherwise, I don't see how to break into the handheld-computer software biz. Without actual experience and a few programs to show people, I can't get a job in the field, due to the usual "You can't do it until after you've already done it" rules in most companies. So I have to do it on my own, but the little gadgets are all locked and so poorly documented that I can't get started.
There's gotta be a million of us programmers wanting to do things with these little gadgets, so you'd think that "the Market" would have taken care of this problem, but it doesn't seem to...
One further question: Will any of these input methods handle, say, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese?
Presumably PDA users in Asia and the Middle East have software that can handle their languages. But I've never seen them for sale here in the US, and when I ask salesmen about it, they get this baffled "Why would you use anything but English?" look.
(Earlier, I replied to a message in another topic by giving a link to a site that is mostly in Japanese. There are actually interesting and useful things on the Web - and in the world - that aren't in English.;-)
One could make the same observation about linux, which is actually just one implementation of the POSIX standard. There are others, with names like Sys/V, Solaris, and minix. Linux and minix are two open-source implementations of POSIX, which isn't surprising considering that both originated as CS projects at universities. But POSIX itself isn't open-source, because technically it has no source; it only has a published specification.
The TRON family of OS kernels was similar from the start. It's "just a specification". The first implemenation, by Dr. Sakamura's students, was open source, as you'd expect from a university project. As with POSIX, the TRON family of specs has a number of implementations, and they vary in their openness.
If you read the various docs about TRON's history, you'll find that the problems with closed, proprietary software were understood well from the beginning. But, of course, you can't prevent the desire of manufacturers to capture and privatize industry standards. This has been and will be an ongoing battle.
We can expect that in safety situations, various countries will pass laws that enforce the open policy of TRON. We have a lot of computer-industry history telling us that it's just too dangerous to trust our lives to software that can't be examined by anyone but a few employees of the manufacturer. Corporations routinely use such secrecy to hide known flaws and deny them when "accidents" happen. Ask the medical people for lots of bad examples.
There is an extensive archive of TRON specs and source code at the Sakamura Lab, web site. This isn't nearly all the source, of course, and a lot of it is in Japanese (which I can't read very well;-). They do seem to have complete source for some versions of ITRON and various higher layers.
Hey, that's why he asked you. He didn't know how it was spelled, and figured that it was faster to ask on/. than to use the spell-checker that seems to come with every every editor these days.
(And I don't think I'll tell him, either. Maybe eventually someone will take pity and spell it right.;-)
The automotive industry has made it easier to fix cars by making them largely self-diagnosing (if you know what to look for, of course, they're not always correct and "MISFIRE IN BANK 1 CYLINDER 2" doesn't tell you what caused the problem) but they've made it much harder to customize them by moving the workings of the vehicle from the physical world, where they are exposed, to a black box.
Yeah, this is a case of a familiar phenomenon: When a computer is introduced into something, all precedent goes out the window, the cry "That's different!" is heard repeatedly, and people have to relearn decades or centuries of lessons all over. It's true that auto makers have gotten away with hiding some of their newer vehicles' behavior inside onboard computers. But I'll bet that they won't get away with this for long.
One reason is that vehicle functioning is in fact a life-and-death situation. People die in vehicles, and sometimes it's because those vehicles failed. We're starting to see stories of cars dying on high-speed highways, and it turns out that a piece of software was the culprit. This is ultimately worse than a mechanical failure, because software doesn't wear out. If it dies, it had a bug from the start, and the bug was finally activated in a critical situation. People aren't gonna tolerate this for long.
And there are signs that it's already happening. One of the best is that many of those black boxes are running the ITRON RT OS, which was developed in Japan over a decade ago - and which is Open Source. The IEEE is standardizing on JTRON, its own spec for the TRON OS, as the industry standard for real-time systems.
Manufacturers will still want to keep their own added software proprietary and secret, of course, as long as they can get away with it. But customers will become aware that their lives may depend on that software, and that's likely to put a lot of pressure on the manufacturers to make that software open to analysis by people without a financial interest (only a personal safety interest) in the software.
Similar things are happening in the medical field. Medical stuff didn't used to be secret. Protected by patent, yes, but part of a patent is publishing the details. Now that there is a growing population of medical computers, we're seeing the advent of secret, proprietary medical software. Again, people's lives depend on this software. The medical field is struggling with this problem right now. The end result, if rationality prevails, will also be that medical software must be open for examination by outsiders. Our lives will depend on it.
Time to once again introduce the old comparison with the auto industry. Every auto manufacturer automatically makes and sells full shop manuals for their vehicles. They accept this, and understand that if they didn't, they wouldn't sell many vehicles. Few customers would want to buy a car that can't be repaired by anyone but the manufacturer. Granted, they might not want a shop manual themselves, but they expect that their friendly local independent mechanic would be able to get one.
So why would computer customers be stupid enough to buy computer systems whose inner workings are hidden and inaccessible to anyone not working for the manufacturer? This doesn't make any sense, and we should expect that eventually users will wise up, as they long ago did with vehicles.
It's especially baffling that people are purchasing software that is so full of "exploits", and when a new bit of malware appears, users have to wait for the software's manufacturer to come out with a patch. You wouldn't tolerate this with other purchases, why would you accept it with software? Just as you expect your local mechanic to have repair information available, you should expect that your local software hackers would have access to the information to fix problems. That is, they should have access to your software's source.
It's especially baffling that, if I want a failing gadget to be fixable, someone would call my attitude a "religion". If the term applies at all, it should be applied to the people who accept the idea that "there are mysteries" behind their purchases, and we mere mortals shouldn't be permitted access to the inner workings of the universe. That's what a "religion" is. The idea that things in our world should be open to examination by us isn't religion; it's rationality and science, which is the opposite of religion.
Or, in the case of manufactured articles like cars or operating systems, it's just good engineering.
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2) Ironically, net neutrality is what would restore fair competition to the market.
So where's the irony here? Irony means outcomes different from what is intended or expected. And "the market" can only exist if competitors are able to compete on equal terms. This is exactly what net neutrality is about, so there isn't any irony.
Almost everywhere, control of the "last mile", i.e., the link from an end-point to a comm carrier, is a legal monopoly. Thus, at my house Verizon "owns" the right to deliver telephony service. Nobody else can legally install a telephone connection to my house. There is also a TV-cable supplier, but that's also a legal monopoly. In much of the US, there isn't even this much competition, and only one comm carrier controls all access to every house.
If such a monopoly corporation is allowed to bias delivery of packets based on source or destination, there can be no "market". The monopoly corporation controls all communication, and can choose winners and losers according to its own criteria. Net neutrality simply means that the legal monopolist isn't permitted to discriminate in packet delivery based on the identity of the source or destination. The intent of this is to establish a market in services like the Internet where none exists otherwise.
Irony would mean that such discrimination by a monopolist would enhance a "market". But I haven't seen any argument that this would happen. All I've seen is the bogus argument that "the company that owns the wire should be able to do as they like with the traffic". In a situation where ownership of the wire is a legal monopoly, this is an anti-market argument. It gives the monopolist total, god-like control over the communications of all other players.
One explanation I've seen for why this issue has come up now is that most of the Internet is provided by telephone and television carriers, and the management of those monopolies have generally been clueless about the Internet. The phone companies have seen the Internet as a funny sort of phone service, and the TV-cable companies have seen the Internet as a new sort of broadcast service. But this management have started to wake up to the fact that they have something new, and they see the prospect of controlling this growing part of the economy. If permitted, this would essentially squash a large part of "the market" that is currently thousands (millions?) of small companies, and put it under the control of a handful of comm corporations. Net Neutrality is aimed an blocking this concentration of power by establishing a level playing field in Internet communications, thus allowing the growing Internet "market" to continue.
If Net Neutrality creates a "market", there's no irony, because this is what is intended, and it's what you'd expect if you deny large corporations the right to control commercial communication.
I always thought the 'legal bribery' part of USA politics was slightly ironic...but it isn't?
For some reason, this topic seems to have triggered a number of misuses of the term "ironic". The term properly refers to outcomes that are different what what was intended and/or expected. This doesn't apply at all here. Campaign contributions are intended to influence the the recipients' actions, and that's what happens, so there's no irony involved at all.
Giving money to influence behavior of government officials is called "bribery". Campaign contributions are legal (within certain limits). And they're intended to influence the recipient's governing behavior, so they're "bribery". So the phrase "legal bribery" is nothing but a simple definition of "campaign contribution".
If the answer is not very deep then you couldn't treat stuff like cervical cancer or colon cancer, because you can't stick electrodes (comfortably?) onto those body parts.
Well, I don't have a cervix, but I've been told by people who do that inserting things next to it and vibrating them can be quite pleasurable. I've also been told that some people do similar things with their colon, though I haven't personally tried this.
I mean, really; what's the problem with getting an electrode next to or inside a cervix or colon? I'd think the average doctor would have little trouble with this. If the frequencies involved cause pain, wouldn't a little local anesthetic handle it?
[T]he NeoOffice website warns users to expect problems and bugs ...
Hey, MS Office doesn't include such warnings. So obviously, MS Office doesn't have problems or bugs.
Parallel programming is indeed hard. The standard approach these days is to decompose the parallel problem into a definite set of serial problems. The serial problems (applets) can then be coded more-or-less as normal, usually using message-passing rather than direct calls to communicate with other applets.
;-)
Isn't this just a reinvention of the "unix approach" developed at Bell Labs over 30 years ago? For "applet" substitute "process", and you have unix terminology. Of course, we did have to wait a decade or so for the Berkeley people to invent an IPC method more flexible than the unix pipe.
Making sure that everything is scheduled correctly does indeed take managerial skills.
Of course, you can just let the kernel process scheduler handle it, if you have one that's decent. There have been discussions about possible improvements by giving processes some hooks into the scheduler, to give the scheduler "hints" about how to do its job better, but I don't see this much implemented. It does seem mainly of interest to the real-time crowd.
In any case, this does seem to be an example of people re-inventing a problem by using different terminology, and refusing to recognize earlier (partial) solution because the words are different.
And one might also argue that the problem isn't really the difficulty of parallel programming; we knew decades ago that this was a problem and had (partial) solutions. The main real problem is that the known solutions all involve dividing a program up into multiple "objects" (i.e., processes) that run independently and have strong barriers to prevent stomping on someone else's data. But most software developers seem to love building huge monolithic programs that do everything they can think of, and indignantly reject the suggestion that their app should be a flock of little communicating processes. This is blatant policy in the MS and Mac worlds, of course. But it has also been adopted in recent years by many unix developers who sneer at the methods of previous generations, leading to the need of multi-GB memory for what used to be doable in a few MB.
Given all this, I don't expect rational solutions any time soon. Even if we get them, they'll be calmly ignored by most developers.
Have a new defense department in a building shaped like a circle. The theme of the building being what goes around, comes around.
Nah; that's not as good as the symbolism in the pentagon. My thought when I rad the story was how appropriate it was. They built it to match their previous plot of land. That goes along perfectly with the old observation that they're always fighting the previous war.
Military historians must have loved it. They covered their laughter with the story that it was in honor of the old pentagonal forts (built that way for good military reasons, not just to imprison demons). But they knew what it was really symbolizing.
Ron Paul says Osama bin Laden is delighted we invaded Iraq.
...
/. ;-)
and from the sounds of it is thus the only person who was standing on that stage who is not an idiot.
Well, really it just means that he's the only one who's willing to take the gamble that stating the truth won't get him eliminated from the list of candidates. Chances are that lots of the others are at least somewhat aware of the realities of the Middle East, but they're betting that the American public doesn't want to hear about it. There's a lot of evidence to support this belief.
We are deliberately avoiding understanding our enemies under the guise of patriotism, and as a result we don't understand our enemies
Speak for yourself. Fact is, ignorance is now quite inexcusable. A few decades ago, it was difficult for an American to learn much that was accurate about the rest of the world, especially the Middle East. Nowadays, the Internet gives us direct access to (what passes for) information from all the relevant parties. In particular, it's now trivially easy to find information about Islam, from as many viewpoints as you like. A minute or two googling will give you more links that you'll know what to do with, and you can read until you fall asleep. A lot of this information is biased, of course, since it's social, political and religious in nature. But it's not hidden. And there are some of us paying attention. (Even some who take time out to read
A lot of us are also familiar with the Bush family and its extensive ties with various groups in the Middle East. We were also quite aware that when the current George Bush took office, he was already planning his war. This was hardly a secret to people who were paying attention. And a lot of us were aware of the ongoing bombing of Iraq during the Clinton years.
Unfortunately, most of us with an interest in learning such stuff aren't going to be nominated as candidates by either of the dominant political parties. And I'd guess that most of the knowledgeable people are somewhat surprised that any candidate was allowed on stage at the Republican "debate" who was willing to say things like Ron Paul said. It was an "interesting" development.
Not that we expect him to last long, of course. The majority of Americans are deliberately ignorant of the issues, despite the growing ease of access to real information. And lots of them vote, giving us people like the Bushes.
Hmmm ... It took quite a lot of poking around at random to find that "By default, join..." thing. And then there was the problem of making sense of it. It gave me the choice of "Automatic" and "Preferred networks". The obvious thing is "Automatic", since I want it to automatically join our home network. But it's "Preferred networks" that shows a list with the home network first in the list. The "Automatic" one doesn't give a list of networks to select from. So I changed the menu to "Preferred networks" and clicked on the home network name, which turned red. I also clicked "Apply Now", guessing that this might be needed. This got no visible response.
It's all puzzling and counterintuitive, and I probably wouldn't have ever stumbled across this (or understood that I should do anything). We'll see if it makes any noticeable difference in behavior. I wonder if this means that now it'll refuse to join any network when it's away from homes, on the grounds that the "preferred" network isn't visible? I guess I'll have to experiment with it a bit, and try to remember where these config windows are when I have problems in the future.
The logic behind all of this isn't at all obvious, and the Help stuff isn't very enlightening.
Yeah; that's exactly what can happen.
Suppose the parent has a gene G, with forms G1 and G2, and suppose that G1 is the normal form, while G2 is a recessive mutation in the parent (perhaps inherited from a grandparent). That is, the parent is G1G2, and only G1 is expressed. Natural selection can't select for/against G2, because it's recessive and not expressed.
But a parthenogenetic child could be G2G2, and would express the recessive gene. If it's harmful, the child will die. But if it's something good, the nature can now "select" in favor of the child, and that child's children will all have G2 (perhaps masked by another version of G).
The alternative, with sexual reproduction, is that eventually you get two G1G2 individuals who mate, and 1/4 of their children will be G2G2. In this case, parthenogenesis is a bit faster than sexual reproduction. OTOH, sexual reproduction between close relatives will also produce G2G2 offspring fairly quickly. This is why most populations do have a low level of inbreeding. It brings out recessives and lets them be selected for or against. People tend to notice the bad results of inbreeding, but any breeder will tell you that it's a useful way to bring out beneficial recessives.
He just said the problem with a clone, is it's a clone! No shit!
Actually, they said it's parthenogenesis, which (at least in vertebrates) is something different from cloning. A clone is something that is genetically identical to the parent, because it was produced by taking a (small population of) somatic cells and growing a new individual from them.
Parthenogenesis usually refers to producing a new individual from an unfertilized ovum. Sometimes the ovum duplicates all its chromosomes, giving offspring that is heterozygous in all genes and no genetic diversity at all. Sometimes the ovum fuses with a polar body, giving offspring that has (on the average) half the genetic diversity of the parent. In both cases, all the child's genes came from the mother, but they aren't usually genetically identical. The mother usually contains some gene variants that aren't in the child.
Actually, it's a translation error. 'Virgin' should instead be 'young woman', and the whole miracle-of-the-virgin-birth was made up by the Church based on this false translation.
Another explanation is: A common process in many languages has been the conversion of a word meaning "young woman" into a word that implies no sexual experience. For a modern example, in German the term "Jungfrau", which literally means "young woman", has the connotation of virginity. Some linguists have claimed that the same thing happened in late Latin. 2000 years ago, the term "virgo" supposedly referred simply to a young woman. Then it went through the usual process, and took on its modern meaning in Latin's descendants. This gave the church a miracle that hadn't been in the original Latin. But if this derivation is correct, it wasn't a mistranslation; it was a shift in meaning of a word in an old text.
I wonder how good the evidence is for this sort of explanation? After all, most old texts simple use words; they rarely give detailed definitions of words that (at the time) everyone understood. One possible bit of evidence I've read is that the biblical "prophecies" of the virgin birth were in Hebrew, and the term (bakhura) was used in other passages for women who were clearly not virgins. But I'm not an expert in the topic; others probably know more about this than I do.
In any case, I doubt that the sharks in question think there was anything remarkable about this particular virgin birth.
Sexual reproduction speeds up the process among complex organisms, but bacteria evolve very quickly without it.
Sure they do. Google for "Bacterial Conjugation". Of course, they don't have genitalia like we do, but they manage anyway. Pretty much all bacteria that have been studied in any depth have been found to use conjugation to exchange DNA. There's even "bacterial porn" online, videos of the conjugation process.
Actually, most of them only engage in sex occasionally, Mostly they reproduce by cloning (i.e., dividing). When they have several populations of clones intermingling, they produce lots of random mixtures of the different populations' genes in a big orgy of conjugation. Natural selection then decides which of these mixtures deserve to survive. The result is the same sort of pooling of beneficial genes that happens in us multi-cellular organisms during sex.
Someone buys a wifi access point and sets it up wrong. When they test it, they accidentally connect to their neighbor's wifi, it looks like everything is working and they surf away. Are you saying that, in Michigan, this is a felony?
Actually, we only know that it's a felony in Sparta, Michigan. It may or may not be legal in other parts of the state. But to be on the safe side, you might take care to turn off all comm equipment in your car when driving through the state on I-94 or I-75. This includes any of the fancy electronics that are starting to appear in newer cars. Some cars now know how to "call home" to the factory via wifi; others can fetch maps for your GPS gadget. If your car does this in the vicinity of Sparta or any other town with similar laws, you could be in bad trouble.
It could be useful to collect a list of places with similar draconian laws that your computer might violate without you knowing about it. Publishing such a list online could be a public service (and might cause enough public angst to get such laws overridden eventually).
If I recall my experiences using windows XP, doesn't it just automatically connect to any unsecured wireless connection that it finds?
I have a Mac Powerbook laptop, and it does the same thing. Sometimes it pops up a window asking "Do you want to be connected to the untrusted network <FOO>?" But usually it doesn't ask, and I have no idea why. I've also failed to find out how to make a network trusted; my home airport is usually trusted but sometimes not (and this seems true whether or not I have the password turned on or not). It also gives the same popup at random times when I'm away from home, but usually just connects without asking.
I wonder how many felonies I've committed with it? I mean, even at home, it sometimes connects to a neighbor's AP rather than mine. I have no idea whether that's legal in this town. And if this guy's experience is any clue, I might not learn the legal situation by asking the police.
That analogy holds right up to the point you send your first packet to their network. After that, you are no longer a passive spectator ... When you ask yourself "am I allowed to use this network?", "I don't know" does not equal "yes".
...
;-)
Actually, if our legal system were rational, there would be a trivial answer: As soon as that packet is either accepted (and forwarded) or rejected (and bounced) by the AP, you'd know. If the packet was accepted, then the AP has in fact allowed you to use it. And it didn't do this by accident. It was explicitly programmed to behave that way. Or, more likely, the software has config setting saying whether to accept or reject packets from unregistered devices, and the AP's owner has set this to "accept". You should be able to tell the court "My packets were accepted and delivered; it's clear that I was in fact allowed to use the AP."
The tired old road analogy might help: If you're driving along, pass through an intersection, and continue on the road on the other side, how do you know if it's legal for you to drive there? Pretty much everywhere in the world, the same rule applies: If there's some sort of "no entry" or "private road" sign, then you probably shouldn't drive there. If there's no such sign restricting access, then you are allowed to drive there. Any court would interpret the lack of an explicit sign to mean that the public is permitted to use the road. The fact that someone (maybe the town, maybe a private owner) owns the road is irrelevant; you won't be arrested for driving on a road without signs that tell you the rules. We all understand that, without this rule, our road system would be unusable.
But someone else pointed out the magic word that makes this case an exception: "computer". We seem to be in a phase where, the instant a computer gets involved, all social and legal precedent goes out the window, and everything must be relearned from scratch. Any attempt to explain the precedent gets a "But that's different" reply, with no coherent explanation of what the difference is or why it matters. The mere presence of a computer invalidates everything you ever knew, and you have to fight all the old fights all over again.
But in a few centuries, it'll probably settle down, and computers (like roads, cars, etc.) will just be tools that are treated like all other tools.
We can hope that freedom of speech, communication, expression, whatever survive the relearning process
(I do wonder what the court would say if the defendant here were to file an "entrapment" suit against the store owner. After all, there are a lot of open-access APs around. How is one to know while traveling whether any given AP is legally usable? This decision potentially makes it rather risky to just be a traveler in Michigan, especially now that cars are starting to come with onboard networks and comm equipment. It's just a matter of time until someone is arrested while driving along I-94 because their car used a local AP to talk to the factory or download a map.
[T]he classic Chinese numeric notation is not as convenient as 'arabic' notation. But it's much less unwieldy than say Roman numerals, so I don't think it would have been an insumountable hurdle either.
Actually, classical Chinese numbers are only slightly worse than Arabic notation (which apparently developed in India but was spread by Arab traders who knew a good accounting system when they saw it). The Chinese notation was far better than any of the Western number notations that the Arabic notation supplanted, such as the Greek or Hebrew notation. Roman was probably the worst notation ever invented, and nobody ever really used it for accounting.
The basis of the Chinese system was symbols for 1 to 9, and symbols for powers of 10. To illustrate with ascii characters, the symbol for 10 looks like a large '+' sign, so we can use + for 10, H for hundred, T for thousand. We'd write the number 5347 as 5T3H4+7. Unused powers of 10 are omitted, so 2007 would be 2T7. 1024 would be T2+4 or 1T2+4. And so on. There are symbols for a few more powers of 10, and they can be chained to get higher powers of 10, so HT could be used for 100,000.
Nowadays, most numeric work in East Asia is done using the Western version of Arabic notation. But you also see a hybrid form that uses the Chinese 1-9 characters plus the Western 0. Converting between this notation and the traditional Chinese notation is essentially trivial and can be done as fast as you can write the numbers. But for arithmetic on paper, the Arabic form (or Arabic with Chinese digits) is a bit simpler than the traditional Chinese notation, since using 0 as a place holder results in correct alignment in columns of numbers, and the digits 1-9 are a bit faster to write than the Chinese digits.
An interesting aspect of the Chinese system is that the basic symbols have alternate "fancy" forms with a lot more strokes. These characters have the property that you can't add strokes to convert them to a different character. So they're an anti-tampering, fraud-proof way of writing numbers. I don't know of another numeric notation with this feature. Asian financial documents have historically used these fancy forms of numbers.
Actually, the Chinese and Arabic notations are the 3rd and 2nd easiest numeric notation that various societies have invented. A few years ago, Scientific American had an interesting article explaining the Mayan number system, and included an explanation of why it was a lot easier to use than the Arabic system. For example, instead of the big multiplication table that we memorized in school, the Mayan system really only needs one rule: 5x5=15. (This makes sense if you understand that they used base 20.) The rest of the rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying consist of the techniques for "carrying" and "borrowing", and are essentially similar to what you do with an abacus.
But I suppose we're stuck with the Arabic system. It's good enough, really, for the remaining uses where we don't bother with a computer.
The notable difference between Chinese and English (or most other written languages) is that several English characters combine to form syllables, which combine to form words (i.e., we use an alphabet). In Chinese, each character corresponds directly with a word (each character is a logogram).
/. filters, consider the word zi4ran2. The zi4 syllable is a word, and means "from" or "since" (and is also used like "-ly" to form adverbs). The ran2 syllable is also a word, and basically means "correct" or "yes". The zi4ran2 combination means "nature" or "naturally". Like "insight", you might be able to kludge some sort of connection here, but in reality you just have to learn zi4ran2 as a separate word unrelated to its two syllables. It may have been a two-word idiom several thousand years ago; it's a two-syllable word now.
;-)
Actually, this is pretty much a myth that originated from people with very little knowledge of Chinese language and writing. In all the Chinese languages ("dialects";-), most of the vocabulary is two-syllable words, as in English. Three-syllable words aren't uncommon. The writing system is actually a sort of syllabary, and the meaning of most two-character words can't be inferred from knowing what the syllables mean as standalone words.
It's similar to how lots of English words, e.g. "insight", can be parsed as two words ("in"+"sight"), but this doesn't really help you understand what the word actually means. Or, an example that shows how such things evolve is the English word "upstairs". If I say I'm going upstairs and take the elevator, did I lie to you? Of course not, because "upstairs" doesn't mean going up stairs. It did a few centuries ago, but hasn't meant that during the lifetime of anyone alive now. Similarly, proto-Chinese of N thousand years ago may have been mostly single-syllable words, but this hasn't been true for at least the few thousand years that we have readable examples of the writing system.
For a Mandarin example, which I'll write in pinyin (or pin1yin1;-) to get past the
For an entertaining debunking of both this myth and a very common trope among Western pseudo-intellectuals and pop psychologists, read this article at languagelog. After chuckling at that particular bit of silliness about Chinese writing, you can find other articles there that go into the general problem in more detail. A number of experts in East-Asian linguistics regularly contribute to that blog, and they've been pushing for a campaign to debunk the nonsense that Westerners insist on saying about these languages.
Oh, well; I haven't yet heard any claim that Chinese doesn't have a word for "freedom". But I wouldn't be surprised. (Hint: the word starts with the same character as the above "zi4ran2", but has a different second character.
I have found that many people do not share my point-of-view with regards to Palm OS, but I must personally say that I hated it. The interface was easy enough to deal with as a user, but as a developer, it was a nightmare. I am so glad to see Palm OS go and be replaced with Linux.
;-)
...
Same here. Back before Y2K I had a PalmOS gadget, and put in a lot of hours trying to produce some nontrivial software for it, but eventually I gave it up as a lost cause. It was obviously designed for someone much, much smarter than me.
More recently, partly due to a job I had, I got my hands on a blackberry, and tried to develop a few apps for it. Same thing: Near total failure. Much puzzled effort; little to show for it except a few crummy prototypes that mostly crashed the system. I got really good at rebooting.
I don't think I'll bother again until I can get my hands on a linux-based gadget. And it'll have to be "unlocked", so I can actually work with it. I've sent my email to the openmoko folks, but they haven't responded. I suppose they're swamped. The iPhone looked promising until the news came out that it was effectively locked against people like me. I'd like to get my hands on a OLPC gadget, too, but it's not obvious how.
Otherwise, I don't see how to break into the handheld-computer software biz. Without actual experience and a few programs to show people, I can't get a job in the field, due to the usual "You can't do it until after you've already done it" rules in most companies. So I have to do it on my own, but the little gadgets are all locked and so poorly documented that I can't get started.
There's gotta be a million of us programmers wanting to do things with these little gadgets, so you'd think that "the Market" would have taken care of this problem, but it doesn't seem to
One further question: Will any of these input methods handle, say, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese?
;-)
Presumably PDA users in Asia and the Middle East have software that can handle their languages. But I've never seen them for sale here in the US, and when I ask salesmen about it, they get this baffled "Why would you use anything but English?" look.
(Earlier, I replied to a message in another topic by giving a link to a site that is mostly in Japanese. There are actually interesting and useful things on the Web - and in the world - that aren't in English.
One could make the same observation about linux, which is actually just one implementation of the POSIX standard. There are others, with names like Sys/V, Solaris, and minix. Linux and minix are two open-source implementations of POSIX, which isn't surprising considering that both originated as CS projects at universities. But POSIX itself isn't open-source, because technically it has no source; it only has a published specification.
;-). They do seem to have complete source for some versions of ITRON and various higher layers.
The TRON family of OS kernels was similar from the start. It's "just a specification". The first implemenation, by Dr. Sakamura's students, was open source, as you'd expect from a university project. As with POSIX, the TRON family of specs has a number of implementations, and they vary in their openness.
If you read the various docs about TRON's history, you'll find that the problems with closed, proprietary software were understood well from the beginning. But, of course, you can't prevent the desire of manufacturers to capture and privatize industry standards. This has been and will be an ongoing battle.
We can expect that in safety situations, various countries will pass laws that enforce the open policy of TRON. We have a lot of computer-industry history telling us that it's just too dangerous to trust our lives to software that can't be examined by anyone but a few employees of the manufacturer. Corporations routinely use such secrecy to hide known flaws and deny them when "accidents" happen. Ask the medical people for lots of bad examples.
There is an extensive archive of TRON specs and source code at the Sakamura Lab, web site. This isn't nearly all the source, of course, and a lot of it is in Japanese (which I can't read very well
... a logical, yet higher-integral-accuracy temperature measurement.
Hey, let's have none of that around here.
Next you're going to expect that we RTFA before replying.
By which they mean anything above about 40K.
(That's about -230C for the physics-impaired.)
(and around -380F for SI-impaired American readers.
can you spell hypocrit?
/. than to use the spell-checker that seems to come with every every editor these days.
;-)
Yes. You, apparently, can not.
Hey, that's why he asked you. He didn't know how it was spelled, and figured that it was faster to ask on
(And I don't think I'll tell him, either. Maybe eventually someone will take pity and spell it right.
The automotive industry has made it easier to fix cars by making them largely self-diagnosing (if you know what to look for, of course, they're not always correct and "MISFIRE IN BANK 1 CYLINDER 2" doesn't tell you what caused the problem) but they've made it much harder to customize them by moving the workings of the vehicle from the physical world, where they are exposed, to a black box.
Yeah, this is a case of a familiar phenomenon: When a computer is introduced into something, all precedent goes out the window, the cry "That's different!" is heard repeatedly, and people have to relearn decades or centuries of lessons all over. It's true that auto makers have gotten away with hiding some of their newer vehicles' behavior inside onboard computers. But I'll bet that they won't get away with this for long.
One reason is that vehicle functioning is in fact a life-and-death situation. People die in vehicles, and sometimes it's because those vehicles failed. We're starting to see stories of cars dying on high-speed highways, and it turns out that a piece of software was the culprit. This is ultimately worse than a mechanical failure, because software doesn't wear out. If it dies, it had a bug from the start, and the bug was finally activated in a critical situation. People aren't gonna tolerate this for long.
And there are signs that it's already happening. One of the best is that many of those black boxes are running the ITRON RT OS, which was developed in Japan over a decade ago - and which is Open Source. The IEEE is standardizing on JTRON, its own spec for the TRON OS, as the industry standard for real-time systems.
Manufacturers will still want to keep their own added software proprietary and secret, of course, as long as they can get away with it. But customers will become aware that their lives may depend on that software, and that's likely to put a lot of pressure on the manufacturers to make that software open to analysis by people without a financial interest (only a personal safety interest) in the software.
Similar things are happening in the medical field. Medical stuff didn't used to be secret. Protected by patent, yes, but part of a patent is publishing the details. Now that there is a growing population of medical computers, we're seeing the advent of secret, proprietary medical software. Again, people's lives depend on this software. The medical field is struggling with this problem right now. The end result, if rationality prevails, will also be that medical software must be open for examination by outsiders. Our lives will depend on it.
Time to once again introduce the old comparison with the auto industry. Every auto manufacturer automatically makes and sells full shop manuals for their vehicles. They accept this, and understand that if they didn't, they wouldn't sell many vehicles. Few customers would want to buy a car that can't be repaired by anyone but the manufacturer. Granted, they might not want a shop manual themselves, but they expect that their friendly local independent mechanic would be able to get one.
So why would computer customers be stupid enough to buy computer systems whose inner workings are hidden and inaccessible to anyone not working for the manufacturer? This doesn't make any sense, and we should expect that eventually users will wise up, as they long ago did with vehicles.
It's especially baffling that people are purchasing software that is so full of "exploits", and when a new bit of malware appears, users have to wait for the software's manufacturer to come out with a patch. You wouldn't tolerate this with other purchases, why would you accept it with software? Just as you expect your local mechanic to have repair information available, you should expect that your local software hackers would have access to the information to fix problems. That is, they should have access to your software's source.
It's especially baffling that, if I want a failing gadget to be fixable, someone would call my attitude a "religion". If the term applies at all, it should be applied to the people who accept the idea that "there are mysteries" behind their purchases, and we mere mortals shouldn't be permitted access to the inner workings of the universe. That's what a "religion" is. The idea that things in our world should be open to examination by us isn't religion; it's rationality and science, which is the opposite of religion.
Or, in the case of manufactured articles like cars or operating systems, it's just good engineering.