Every baby cam, nanny cam would be illegal according to the same logic.
Actually, no; the "logic" is different. The Bush Administration, for example, has made their policy clear: The government has the right to unlimited, secret monitoring of citizens, but citizens have no right to monitor any government activities. All interesting government activities are classified, and you don't have clearance. But they no longer need a warrant or any other court permission to watch you or invade your property; they can Just Do It.
It seems that the New Hampshire police have taken the Bush policy to heart, and are applying it locally. There's a good chance that the Supreme Court will agree, though with a smaller margin than a year ago.
Anyway, a baby cam or nanny cam is still legal, at least if the nanny isn't a government employee. It's only when you aim your camera at a government agent that your action becomes illegal. They've been learning what you can do if you have a recording of their actions.
Must be nice. My school offically outlawed pinging(!), or the use of any other network utility, as "hacker tools". Our library blocks email, since it is inappropriate to scholarship. Computer Science and Physics both have (multiple) LANs whose lack of internet access makes it "legal" to play, though.
Typical. Sounds like the school administration is firmly against their students learning about computer networking. The CS and physics depts have a bit more sense, but are probably limited in what they can teach due to the admin blocking.
My account is at MIT, where there's an official "No firewalls" rule for the school as a whole. The intent is that their students should have maximum opportunity to learn about (and develop) network security tools first hand. One effect is that they can tell employers "Graduates of most other schools aren't permitted to get practical experience with network security, but our graduates have had full access to the network, and some of them have written the security tools that you're using."
This doesn't mean that everyone at the school is a security expert, of course. In most cases, it means that they just hire a student from one of the departments that deal with the topic. So the tech departments can not just give their students classroom instruction; students can also get jobs around the school working on real networks with unprotected Internet connections. They can thus learn how network security really works (or, sometimes, doesn't work).
An illustrative anecdote: I have an experimental web site that uses a number of open-source programs from other people. I keep all the source on the web site, of course. Last year, I got a message from a student at another school who was taking a course in network security. They had downloaded one of my progams, examined the source, and found a buffer overflow. An exploit was included to demo the problem. I did three things: I looked at the code, thought "Yup, it works," and fixed the bug. Then I sent back a reply thanking them for finding the problem. Then I sent a copy of their message and a pointer to my patched code to the program's author.
We might note that this successful bug fix depended on several things. First is the prof at the other school who was able to teach such a course without interference. And both schools' administrations didn't interfere with the students "hacking" my web site. And I had the source available on my web site for anyone to study. All of these are needed for such things to happen easily. But the most important is that the schools permit full and open network access, and don't do anything to block such "hacking" uses of their networks.
Unfortunately, most schools are like yours, and take steps to prevent this sort of learning and cooperation in finding problems. And, of course, something like this is usually totally impossible in any corporate setting. So it's not surprising that the most secure (and bug-free) software comes from academia instead of from the business world.
Actually, I'd say that your library's blocking is the most worrisome. This shows a profound misunderstanding of how scholarship works. Communication with colleagues has always been the most important factor in good scholarship. A new means of communication can only help scholarship, in any field. Any school that blocks communication is working against the very reason that they exist. Good librarians have widely adopted the Internet as a valuable new tool for their profession. It's only the poor librarians who treat it as a threat and try to block it.
IA training is mandatory for all users of DoD client machines, but the DoD networks have many other safeguards to protect information. As always, a security policy is only as strong as the people abiding by it, so IA training tries to lessen the risk of information leaking out due to poor information protection by the user.
Well, I think I'll keep a copy of this around to show people what "IA training" meant as recently as 2004. It should go a long way toward educating those who are overly enamored of the DoD's security measures.
Thus, in the "What is PSP...?" slide, we read that "[P2P] is risky! It bypasses security or control mechanisms."
Uh, really? All of them that I've used are trivially blocked by the feeblest of firewalls. Is the government's security really so bad that a default install of a P2P package (the only install most people ever do) can just make TCP connections to anywhere and start passing out secret documents? That's what this seems to be saying.
The reminder that "a security policy is only as strong as the people abiding by it" is quite true, of course. But really, does my home download of the latest knoppix or ubuntu iso via a torrent really constitute a threat to government security? If so, we're in much worse shape than I thought. I mean, I did some work on security software for the Air Force 20 years ago, so I saw enough of their cluelessness to be not overly impressed by the phrase "military security". But I haven't been involved since then, and I hadn't realized that things were as bad as this "educational" document implies.
If this was really part of an IA "educational" program, we're in sorry shape.
Bottom line is this: if people want it, we (or someone like us) will try to provide it. If people want it enough, that means competitive advantage.
If that economic theory were true, we'd have had our flying cars years ago.;-)
Fact is that the Big Guys have lots of ways of using the political and legal systems to block serious competition. Thus, in the case of flying cars, there's a simple legal block in place in places where most people live: There's a legal minimum altitude for aircraft over almost all cities. So even if you have a flying car, you can't take off or land in your driveway, because you'll be violating the minimum altitude ordinance. This and other laws are effective ways of discouraging the research from ever being done.
It's even easier with the Net. Several decades of experience have shown clearly that serious network development hardly ever happens unless the developers have effectively unlimited usage. If your developers have to think about minimizing the traffic during debugging, nothing ever gets debugged well enough to be usable. This is the main reason that there is so little independent software development using the cell-phone system. And most people's home Internet contracts are sufficiently restrictive to put a strong damper on "hobbyist" development.
I've been there. Luckily, I have an "alum" account at a school, and it's a login account in a department that encourages using the equipment for any "non-profit" purposes. I've tried developing net software at home, with several ISPs, and their reaction when I start running things other than a brower is so severe that I don't do it. I do all the work with my school account. I've even had a speakeasy account for the last year, and while it's nice to deal with people who can talk geek, I'm still too nervous from the discussions I've read of their actual (as opposed to marketing) policies that I do very little net testing from my home machines. So I do almost all my testing of new ideas from my school account.
I'd like to provide a number of things that people want, but based on my own personal funds and the restrictions on home Internet services, it doesn't seem likely that I'll ever do it on my own. No more likely than that I'll build that flying car that we've been wanting all these years.
Re:A New Core Class in College?
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PGP & GPG
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In my experience many/. posters think they understand cryptography but don't.
So if I were one such person, how would I know?
To paraphrase TFA, there's no real definition of "understand cryptography" (and if there were, it would probably be classified;-).
So, if you were to test whether I "understand cryptography", what tests would you apply?
I'd agree that a lot of people who think they understand cryptography could be fooling themselves. But, OTOH, it's easy to say that someone doesn't really understand. It would be useful if there were a way that a person could test their own understanding, and if there are holes, do something effective to increase their understanding. Just saying that someone doesn't understand isn't by itself a useful comment, no matter how true it might be.
It's also worth noting that many societies that accepted killing animals for food also have had rules for killing that usually amount to "do it as quickly and painlessly as you can manage". Thus both the Jewish kosher laws and the Muslim halal laws specify how an animal is to be killed, and the emphasis is on minimizing suffering. Some societies have required an apology, not because the animal will understand, but rather to remind yourself that you're killing one of God's creatures.
OTOH, I've occasionally had a bit of fun with vegetarians by describing how we treat wheat. We take hundreds or thousands of their sleeping babies, and we toss them live into a grinder. With rice, we take their babies, toss them into water, and boil them to death. With most nuts, we just crack the live babies open and eat them whole.
So far, I haven't found a good way to make eating a fruit sound cruel. That's a plant's organ whose function is to be eaten by an animal (with the hope that the animal will deposit the seeds somewhere far from the parent, together with a pile of what to a plant is high-quality food). So I guess that when we're eating fruit, we're doing the right thing for the plant. But only if we swallow the seeds whole, which is easier with strawberries or raspberries than it is with apples or pears.
But this is getting a bit off topic. I haven't read any comments from RMS on killing and eating animals.
On the few occasions that I've been asked such leading questions, I've generally answered along the lines of "Certainly; I kill mosquitoes at every opportunity, but I've never yet killed a human."
Answering with such an extreme example generally leaves the questioner flustered, because I've implicitly conceded their false premise (humans aren't animals), and also admitted that I'm an unrepentant, vicious killer of dumb animals (mosquitoes). But they seem to understand that they aren't going to be very successful at protecting mosquitoes from my murderous actions.
It might be interesting to get them into a discussion of which animals are deserving of protections, and what the thresholds might be. But this has never happened. I'd guess that someone who asks "Should animals be treaded differently from humans" isn't likely to be really interested in the fine distinctions; they are asking a political question rather than an ethical question. But the question is sufficiently vague (and makes a factually invalid distinction, since humans are in fact animals) that it doesn't really lead to a discussion of how to apply concept of ethics to different species. So it's probably best to just attack the question by giving exactly the answer that the questioner wasn't expecting, and putting yourself firmly in the animal-killer class.
TFA used the biologists' term "neoteny", but didn't define it or give examples. It turns out that humans have a lot of examples of this evolutionary phenomenon.
Its basic meaning, of course, is the extension of "juvenile" characteristics into adulthood (or whatever the mature, reproducing stage of a species is called).
One of the curious examples in humans is the ability (mostly in Europeans) to digest milk as an adult. Most mammals, and most humans, lose the lactase enzyme as part of maturing.; But in "Caucasian" people, lactase production usually continues into adulthood. This is interesting because it's probably an adaptation to the domestication of cattle and goats. Usually when domestication is discussed, people are talking about modifications of the domesticated animals. In this case, it was a population of the dominant species that changed, so as better to exploit the domesticated species.
But my favorite example is that a number of scientists have proposed science itself as an example of neoteny in humans. The explanation is that science is fundamentally based on curiosity about the world, plus a willingness to explore and test rather than just accepting what society tells you. In most animals, including our primate relatives, curiosity and exploration are characteristics of juveniles. Adults have learned all they want to know about the world, and new things outside their experience are mostly causes of concern and fear. This is still true of most humans in most societies. But in many societies, there is an active scientific community that institutionalizes curiosity and learning new things, and many people remain working scientists (some of whom also drink milk;-) their entire lives.
Of course, there have been precursors of this throughout history. Many societies have produced explorers, sometimes in great numbers. The ancient Greeks, Phoenicians and Chinese did this, as did the later Norse and Arabs. Polynesia was settled by a whole society of them, as was North America a thousand or so years later. These were people willing to abandon the home they knew and face the challenge of learning to live in a strange new place. Normal, mature people stayed behind no matter how bad the situation was at home; only neotenic "adult children" would engage in such adventures. (Of course, not all went voluntarily, so this doesn't apply to all such emigrants.)
In any case, TFA does mention that academics, teachers and scientists are often "strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence...". I was disappointed that the author didn't mention that this is effectively a job requirement in any field that explores new ideas. Mature primates don't explore new things; only immature primates do that. So of course people in those professions are "immature". More properly, they are exhibiting a neotenic characteristic.
Also disappointing was the comment "... such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality." There is no conflict between these characteristics. The immense success of the scientific enterprise over the past few centuries, especially its success in improving our lot in life, is a good illustration that "wisdom" should imply recognizing the importance of both expertise and flexibility. Those two words succinctly describe what it takes to produce a good scientific result. You need the expertise to understand and judge the value of the data, and you need the flexibility to consider new ideas (no matter how wild) and systematically work out tests of their validity.
I've been to China, and you know what? They are planting trees LIKE CRAZY. Everywhere you look, they are putting in trees.... And they have planted A LOT of trees. You just can't imagine it, seriously. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world.
I remember back around 1970, there were some news stories about how in China, flies had almost disappeared over a couple of years. Why? Well, it seems that Chairman Mao had instructed the citizenry to start killing every fly they could. A billion Chinese did just that, and rapidly eradicated the pest.
Many of the writers observed that if an American president were to give such an order, Americans would start breeding flies. We would rapidly see fly-breeders associations that sponsored fly shows, where breeders would show off their creations. A few writers suggested that people in a number of other countries would react to such an edict from an American president in the same way.
It seems the Chinese population is still cooperative. I wonder how much longer this will last? If their government requests that they sell their cars and go back to bicycles to cut down on pollution, will the population go along? For that matter, will the auto makers and sellers go along?
(And has the fly population recovered over there?;-)
Bullshit.... Anyone can be a scientist by practicing the scientific method,...
Indeed; this is something well worth emphasizing. Of course, a scientific degree can be useful as a quick-and-dirty first step in estimating someone's knowledge in their degree subject. But that's not the definition of "scientist"; a scientist is someone who practices scientific methods. A degree won't tell you that.
The poster-child subject for this is astronomy, a field in which "amateurs" with no academic credentials routinely make important contributions. In this case, there's a simple explanation. Professional astronomers tend to spend much of their time working on data collected from the high-precision observatories. But astronomy is an "observational" science, and the field requires constant sky surveys to spot changes. This can't be done with the big telescopes, because they have a tiny field of view. Sky surveys are done with lower-power telescopes with larger fields of view, and they are cheap enough that many amateurs can easily afford one. Anyone can send an email message giving the coordinate of an interesting event. The guys at the big telescopes can focus on it to get the details, and the amateur usually gets credit for the discovery. Of course, you have to do a bit of study to learn how to contribute to this, but you can decide to do this on your own, without needing a degree or permission from any official body. (And we no longer have a threat from religion or politics if you contribute to astronomy.;-)
It turns out that to a similar situation exists in climatology. In addition to all the geological methods, an important part of the historical weather data comes from amateurs. This happened in many ways. For a long time, literate individuals with a long-term residence have collected weather-related information in private notebooks. Some of these (since about 1700) were actual temperatures. Others have been things like freeze/thaw dates of ponds or lakes, killing-freeze dates in their fields, observation dates of migrating birds, etc. These aren't as precise as temperatures, but over the years can be averaged to determine local climate. If you've been collecting any such data for your home location, you should keep it up, because your data will be useful to future climatologists. You can do this without a degree or permission from anyone. You might want to ask a meteorologist for advice, though, to maximise the value of your data.
An important part of science is having good data. Data collection can be done by anyone willing to invest in whatever training and equipment it takes. In the case of climate data, this can be as simple as a calendar, though a thermometer and a rain/snow gauge are also cheap and useful. Doing this may not make you a Newton or Einstein, but you can easily become a real "observational scientist" who contributes data for the theories of future Newtons and Einsteins.
Just try to make sure that your data is preserved after you die. Don't just keep it online or in electronic form; print it out and keep it in binders. Make sure that some likeminded people know that you have those binders and can collect them if "something happens" to you. One easy way to do this is to contact people in an appropriate field in a nearby college or university. (If you're a birder in North America, you are probably already giving your observations to the Audubon Society.;-)
Fact is, just about anyone can be a real (if minor) observational scientist in some field. But it might soak up a bit of your time.
In any case, the argument will be decided in the next 10-50 years by nature: either conditions will continue to deteriorate, and you will be forced to agree that there is a problem, or they won't, and you can crow about how you were right all along.
Heh. You have more faith in human reason than I do. It's more likely that, long after the issue is settled, we'll still have an ongoing political debate, and we won't be doing much about whatever the problem has escalated into.
This is why there's a growing number of people saying that we shouldn't waste time trying to fight global warming. No matter what the evidence, our political and economic systems are going to keep barging ahead with their current behavior. So the question "How can we prevent or reverse it?" may be irrelevant; a more practical question is "How can we prepare for the changes that are ahead?"
The first step, of course, is getting good scientific information on what's happening, and we're doing a lot of that (with only occasional obstruction from politicians and businessmen). The information, including what predictions are possible, should be made available to those who want to know, and we're doing that, too (with a lot of obfuscation by the deniers and the simply illogical).
But there's really no way that humans can be "forced to agree" on anything. That's not what we're like. Even when Mother Nature hits us over the head, as She has done innumerable times in the past, we usually attribute a disaster to an angry god, and carefully ignore the evidence around us as to what actually happened.
What I noticed is that they don't even mention the system(s) that they managed to penetrate. Are my linux and Mac laptops vulnerable?
Of course, experience says that when a media article on such problems just says "computers", they are almost always talking about Microsoft software. But we shouldn't assume this, since non-MS systems have occasionally had vulnerabilities. And lately, we've read of a number of problems with "smart phones", including some not running MS software.
Driver problems have often been a worry for linux users, since so many devices have only a Windows driver that you have to use with ndiswrapper. This means that linux could inherit Windows problems like buffer overflows.
I wonder why they aren't naming the vulnerable systems?
Are they afraid that if they give us specifics, we'll fix the problems?
Download Kubuntu and Ubuntu and compare 'em yourself.
I finally decided to check Ubuntu out, downloaded the lastest ISO for the live CD, and tried it on a few Windows boxes that are sitting around unused. It failed in similar ways on all of them. It would go through a lot of familiar-looking startup stuff, and finally get to the pretty brown rectangle with the logo in the upper right. At that point, I could verify that moving the mouse around caused the pointer to make similar motions on the screen (thus showing that both the mouse and X windows are basically sane). I could also do the CTL-Fn to switch to a dumb-terminal screen, one of which showed the usual boot log. Frobbing the keyboard got echoes of what I types, but no responses otherwise.
But I never got past that on any of them. I never saw any login prompt, or any GUI thingy that responded to keyboard or mouse events. I'd sit there poking at things, wondering "OK; what do you want me to do now?" Eventualy the screen would go black, and that was it.
Is there somewhere documentation that will get a newbie (who's used unix and linux for 25 years or so;-) past this point to something useful?
The PCs in question were of different ages, from different sources, so it doesn't seem like they'd all have the same problem. Or maybe they do; I don't see any way to even start diagnosing the actual problem (since the only keyboard/mouse stuff that works is moving the pointer around).
Maybe Kubuntu would work better? I am generally more of a KDE partisan; maybe Ubuntu somehow detected that and decided not to cooperate...
Heh. This article was actually the first clue I've ever read that CORBA was anything but hype. I've run across the acronym a zillion times, but before today, I'd never actually read anything that got through my thick skull that it was a communication protocol, much less what problems it was designed to solve. Same with pretty much anyone that I worked with. When management pushed it on us (complete with the management-friendly hype but not much more), the reaction of the developers was usually "Hey, that's great; we'll look for places that we can use it effectively." Of course, not really having any idea what it did or how to use it effectively, we never found any places that we could use it. The obtuse examples didn't help; reading code that doesn't make sense without uderstanding what it's supposed to do isn't a very good way to convince your typical developer that it's something they want to use.
In any case, there's not a lot of implementing you can do with just an acronym and management-level hype for "documentation".
Thirdly, it was never compatible.
Sort of a problem for something designed to solve cross-platform communication problems. (If that's actually what it was supposed to do; I'm still not sure about that.;-)
I got the idea from TFA that it was a protocol developed mostly by a number of vendors. Are there any cases where this has worked? All the successful standards that I know of were developed with a large government and/or academic contingent, usually both. Companies generally try to hide their secrets from competitors, which is somewhat of a problem when you're trying to get competitors' products to work together. Granted, Sun and Apple are semi-exceptions, but even there, trying to get them to work out a common protocol is just asking for indefinite bureaucratic delays. (That's a voice of experience talking there; again there might be exceptions that I don't know of.)
I liked the comment in TFA that one of the problems was that Microsoft didn't adopt CORBA. My immediate thought was "Well, duh!" Of course, the XML crowd has been showing signs of nervousness about MS's involvement, especially when the news gets out that MS is applying for patents on XML encodings.
I've often thought that one of the main reasons for the Internet's success is that it was developed (by government and academic developers) for several decades before either IBM or Microsoft noticed it.
It sorta reminds me of a comment I read once from a biologist, to the effect that one of the major adaptive constraints on birds is that they have to somehow prevent predators from noticing their nests until the babies can fly.
For example, 200 year old lava flows have been dated to be 3 billion years old by the potassium-argon dating method.
Yes; this is an example of why scientists usually treat single-method dates as preliminary. Most dating methods can be contaminated in one or more ways, giving an erroneous date. But different methods have different kinds of possible contaminations, and the errors are usually wildly different. So you use several different methods. If some of them give the same date, that's evidence that those methods didn't suffer from contamination and are probably reliable. Even then, applying yet another independent dating method is always in order. When you get enough of them, you find that several indicate about the same date, while no two of the rest agree. The subset that agree are probably the correct date. (And all the dates should have error bars.;-)
Lava is one of the more difficult things to date accurately. The high temperatures during flow often melts the substrate, adding contaminants from below and adding random errors to the apparent dates. Also, gases like argon tend to bubble out of hot lava, decreasing the end product of decay and increasing the apparent age given by the K-Ar test.
Lava is a clear case where several dating methods are needed, due to the high probability of contamination during the lava flow. A single test is only useful in cases like this, where the writer is looking for a bogus date as a way of discrediting the science to lay readers. Scientists just read it and laugh.
I am not a fundie but there has to be a reliable way to date something. Otherwise scientists would not claim things like the age of the ducks in the article or any scientific paper.
Uh, no; there doesn't have to be a reliable way to date something. There are a great many ways of dating old things. Usually, scientists consider a date determined by a single method to be preliminary and requiring verification. The verification usually happens by using several different methods. If they all come up with a similar date, that is considered good support for the date.
Most of the methods used by paleontlogists are based on various sorts of decay processes, mostly the decay of radioactive isotopes. Taken singly, each of these has ways that that the samples can be contaminated, giving a bad date. But different chemical elements or compounds have different kinds of contamination that produce different kinds of dating errors. If you use N different dating methods, it's unlikely that all would be contaminated in such a way as to produce the same error. So if all N (or N-1) give the same date, that implies that there's little or no contamination, and the date is reliable.
The first scientific papers dealing with a new discovery often have tentative dates due to the use of a single dating method. But with new fossil beds, once good fossils have been excavated, it's routine to apply several different dating methods to pin down the fossils' ages more precisely.
This whole topic is a serious scientific field in it own right. Explaining how it all works would take several years of intensive study.
One funny thing about all these "missing link" reports is that this critter is dated to around 100 to 110 million years. But Archaeopterix is generally dated to around 140 million years (give or take 5 million). Some of the Chinese proto-bird fossils are slightly older than that. So this new fossil can't be a "missing link" between birds an earlier dinosaurs.
Of course, the scientific reports don't seem to use the phrase "missing link". The significance is mostly that it's a high-quality new bird fossil, and it seems to be an early example of a bird much like modern ducks and geese. So that group of birds apparently split off fairly early. DNA studies may verify this, but it's useful to have fossil evidence. Not much is reliably known about the relationships between groups of birds, and every chunk of evidence counts.
One basic problem is that birds don't fossilize very well. Their bones are fragile, and birds generally don't die in places that lead to good fossilization. They are a major part of our world, though, so it's nice to find what evidence we can about how they developed.
Still, we could use less media attention to missing links, and more attention to the real meaning of new fossils. (How's that for a nice oxymoron?;-)
Yes indeed; I've worked on a number of projects where that 5-line "solution" would be counted as 5 times better than your silly one-line version. And it's also a good example of why you'd want C or perl rather than whatever silly language you used. Then you can write:
Operating systems are Microsoft's core competency.
No, marketing operating systems are Microsoft's core competency. There's a subtle difference here, but it's important. It explains why MS has generally gotten away with such crappy systems. They have a bigger marketing budget than all those other pipsqueak companies combined, so they don't need a quality product. They only need the budget to convince customers that they have a quality product.
The delays, no matter how well explained, are still delays; and are continuing evidence of Microsoft's incompetence in the area of operating system development.
Hey, you agree with me; operating systemss aren't their core competence.;-)
Really; if you have the marketing budget, you don't need technical competence. It doesn't gain you any additional sales, so why bother? I mean, look at all those small companies that are technically competent. Do you want to be like them?
If MS has the guts to burn 10 Billion - 20 Billion on getting a new OS paradigm on to every plattform on the planet and do a good job at the same time they'll maybe make it.
It's perhaps worth mentioning that this was essentially IBM's approach back in the early days of "desktop" computers around 1980. There was this flock of little upstarts challenging IBM's growing stranglehold on the computer business by building small, cheap computers. IBM actually had a desktop computer, and it got very good reviews from its users. (What was it's 4-digit number? I've forgotten, but it was pretty good.;-) Their problem was that, due to their development rules, they couldn't sell it for less than $50,000 and recover their development costs. And they couldn't sell more than a handful at that price.
So they farmed the job out to one of those startups, run by Bill Gates and a few of his buddies, handed them a few hundred million for marketing, and didn't impose the IBM development rules on them. The result was crap compared to any of the CP/M desktops, but with a marketing budget greater than the operating budgets of all the upstarts combined, the result was what IBM wanted.
Microsoft has understood the lesson of this from the start, and put their money into marketing rather than quality product. Until now, maybe. If the reports of their growing development rules and costs are true, they may be going the way of IBM. They'll produce a good system for the first time in their history, but to avoid going bankrupt from the cost, they'll have to get a very good price for it, and only the wealthiest (and stupidest) will pay that price. If this is true, we're seeing a repeat of the IBM/Microsoft story from a quarter century ago.
Of course, IBM didn't die. In fact, they completed their conquest of the "mainframe" market, which was willing to buy IBM no matter what the cost. They completely own that field, and development has pretty much come to a halt. Due to MS's market clout, we could see the same outcome. They will own the "desktop", and further development in that market will grind to a halt. They'll still sell to the "MS at any cost" market. But it won't matter to most of us, because we'll more and more consider "desktop" computers relics of a previous age. We'll stop worrying about making new systems "compatible with the desktop" (i.e., clones of MS's systems), just as 25 years ago we stopped worrying about whether our little computers were IBM compatible (and we didn't bother with PL/I or JCL;-).
So what should we call the new thing we're building while ignoring IBM and Microsoft? "Web 2.0" seems to be out (and wasn't very good anyway), but the new thing will certainly be Net-based. Any good suggestions for a name that will supercede "desktop"? Maybe we need a catchy two-syllable name for the software going into the OLPC project. Push for making it a truly distributed, comm-based system without any central control, so the comm companies and local governments can't take it over as they're doing with the Web. We can base it on zillions of small components, so a company that refuses to follow standards can't make any inroads. The "new paradigm" will be as outside Microsoft's world view as PC/DOS was outside IBM's world view.
Look at the debate over the Bell Curve or Holocaust revisionism... they aren't even allowed to publicly state their positions.
So what part of the world do you live in, that these are blocked?
Here in the US, quick visits to amazon.com and bn.com show that both the hardcover and paperback editions of The Bell Curve are in print and being sold openly. The paperback edition has an amazon rank of about 19,000; not a best-seller, but it's definitely not being suppressed.
And Holocaust Denial is trivially easy to find online. Those sites aren't being blocked by anything in this part of the world. If they are in your area, you might look into ways of bypassing your local firewalls.
Of course, there is lots of criticism of both of these, both in print and online. This is as it should be. And the critics also get criticized, and so on.
But from where I'm looking around, there's no sign at all that either is being effectively suppressed.
OTOH, we have had a bit of a fuss in the past year over the way that the US government has suppressed the results of some climate studies, primarily by requiring "editing" of some papers to weaken or eliminate conclusions that disagree with the Bush team's policies. And on the third hand, they did fail spectacularly to hide this editing from those who were interested.
Does "open-minded" in this context mean suggestible?
Quite likely. I've seen the phrase "closed-minded" applied to scientists, on the grounds that they refuse to accept anything without good evidence. In particular, you tend to hear this usage from religious folks, especially the new-age type.
Look for proprietary Microsoft "extensions" in the near future.
Near future? How about right now?
I've been experimenting with a few DNS servers. Just yesterday I got a notice from the author of one of them that he was working on a problem that caused it to not resolve www.microsoft.com. Today he sent the mailing list his diagnosis of the bug. It turned out to be a case of MS's DNS servers blatantly violating some clear statements in the appropriate RFC.
For those who are interested (or care;-), he pointed to section 3.7 of RFC1034, which says that the answer section of a DNS packet contains records that "directly answer the query". For a while now, the answer section of MS's DNS packets have contained information that belongs in the "additional" section.
This is a gratuitous, and totally nonsensical violation of the standard. And you can bet that the guys who wrote the code knew exactly what they were doing. It's not a "bug"; it's an intentional violation which has to have been planned for some time, because www.microsoft.com seems to resolve on older MS systems.
It's also yet another case where the implementer basically shrugged and said "Well, since Microsoft.com is so popular, I have to change my code to not follow the standards so that microsoft.com may resolve."
Presumably the maintainers of other DNS servers will do the same, perhaps with less politic explanations. Meanwhile, MS's support people will be saying "If you'd been using Microsofs DNS software, you wouldn't have this problem and it would've worked."
Slashdot Mirror
Every baby cam, nanny cam would be illegal according to the same logic.
Actually, no; the "logic" is different. The Bush Administration, for example, has made their policy clear: The government has the right to unlimited, secret monitoring of citizens, but citizens have no right to monitor any government activities. All interesting government activities are classified, and you don't have clearance. But they no longer need a warrant or any other court permission to watch you or invade your property; they can Just Do It.
It seems that the New Hampshire police have taken the Bush policy to heart, and are applying it locally. There's a good chance that the Supreme Court will agree, though with a smaller margin than a year ago.
Anyway, a baby cam or nanny cam is still legal, at least if the nanny isn't a government employee. It's only when you aim your camera at a government agent that your action becomes illegal. They've been learning what you can do if you have a recording of their actions.
Must be nice. My school offically outlawed pinging(!), or the use of any other network utility, as "hacker tools". Our library blocks email, since it is inappropriate to scholarship. Computer Science and Physics both have (multiple) LANs whose lack of internet access makes it "legal" to play, though.
Typical. Sounds like the school administration is firmly against their students learning about computer networking. The CS and physics depts have a bit more sense, but are probably limited in what they can teach due to the admin blocking.
My account is at MIT, where there's an official "No firewalls" rule for the school as a whole. The intent is that their students should have maximum opportunity to learn about (and develop) network security tools first hand. One effect is that they can tell employers "Graduates of most other schools aren't permitted to get practical experience with network security, but our graduates have had full access to the network, and some of them have written the security tools that you're using."
This doesn't mean that everyone at the school is a security expert, of course. In most cases, it means that they just hire a student from one of the departments that deal with the topic. So the tech departments can not just give their students classroom instruction; students can also get jobs around the school working on real networks with unprotected Internet connections. They can thus learn how network security really works (or, sometimes, doesn't work).
An illustrative anecdote: I have an experimental web site that uses a number of open-source programs from other people. I keep all the source on the web site, of course. Last year, I got a message from a student at another school who was taking a course in network security. They had downloaded one of my progams, examined the source, and found a buffer overflow. An exploit was included to demo the problem. I did three things: I looked at the code, thought "Yup, it works," and fixed the bug. Then I sent back a reply thanking them for finding the problem. Then I sent a copy of their message and a pointer to my patched code to the program's author.
We might note that this successful bug fix depended on several things. First is the prof at the other school who was able to teach such a course without interference. And both schools' administrations didn't interfere with the students "hacking" my web site. And I had the source available on my web site for anyone to study. All of these are needed for such things to happen easily. But the most important is that the schools permit full and open network access, and don't do anything to block such "hacking" uses of their networks.
Unfortunately, most schools are like yours, and take steps to prevent this sort of learning and cooperation in finding problems. And, of course, something like this is usually totally impossible in any corporate setting. So it's not surprising that the most secure (and bug-free) software comes from academia instead of from the business world.
Actually, I'd say that your library's blocking is the most worrisome. This shows a profound misunderstanding of how scholarship works. Communication with colleagues has always been the most important factor in good scholarship. A new means of communication can only help scholarship, in any field. Any school that blocks communication is working against the very reason that they exist. Good librarians have widely adopted the Internet as a valuable new tool for their profession. It's only the poor librarians who treat it as a threat and try to block it.
IA training is mandatory for all users of DoD client machines, but the DoD networks have many other safeguards to protect information. As always, a security policy is only as strong as the people abiding by it, so IA training tries to lessen the risk of information leaking out due to poor information protection by the user.
...?" slide, we read that "[P2P] is risky! It bypasses security or control mechanisms."
Well, I think I'll keep a copy of this around to show people what "IA training" meant as recently as 2004. It should go a long way toward educating those who are overly enamored of the DoD's security measures.
Thus, in the "What is PSP
Uh, really? All of them that I've used are trivially blocked by the feeblest of firewalls. Is the government's security really so bad that a default install of a P2P package (the only install most people ever do) can just make TCP connections to anywhere and start passing out secret documents? That's what this seems to be saying.
The reminder that "a security policy is only as strong as the people abiding by it" is quite true, of course. But really, does my home download of the latest knoppix or ubuntu iso via a torrent really constitute a threat to government security? If so, we're in much worse shape than I thought. I mean, I did some work on security software for the Air Force 20 years ago, so I saw enough of their cluelessness to be not overly impressed by the phrase "military security". But I haven't been involved since then, and I hadn't realized that things were as bad as this "educational" document implies.
If this was really part of an IA "educational" program, we're in sorry shape.
Bottom line is this: if people want it, we (or someone like us) will try to provide it. If people want it enough, that means competitive advantage.
;-)
If that economic theory were true, we'd have had our flying cars years ago.
Fact is that the Big Guys have lots of ways of using the political and legal systems to block serious competition. Thus, in the case of flying cars, there's a simple legal block in place in places where most people live: There's a legal minimum altitude for aircraft over almost all cities. So even if you have a flying car, you can't take off or land in your driveway, because you'll be violating the minimum altitude ordinance. This and other laws are effective ways of discouraging the research from ever being done.
It's even easier with the Net. Several decades of experience have shown clearly that serious network development hardly ever happens unless the developers have effectively unlimited usage. If your developers have to think about minimizing the traffic during debugging, nothing ever gets debugged well enough to be usable. This is the main reason that there is so little independent software development using the cell-phone system. And most people's home Internet contracts are sufficiently restrictive to put a strong damper on "hobbyist" development.
I've been there. Luckily, I have an "alum" account at a school, and it's a login account in a department that encourages using the equipment for any "non-profit" purposes. I've tried developing net software at home, with several ISPs, and their reaction when I start running things other than a brower is so severe that I don't do it. I do all the work with my school account. I've even had a speakeasy account for the last year, and while it's nice to deal with people who can talk geek, I'm still too nervous from the discussions I've read of their actual (as opposed to marketing) policies that I do very little net testing from my home machines. So I do almost all my testing of new ideas from my school account.
I'd like to provide a number of things that people want, but based on my own personal funds and the restrictions on home Internet services, it doesn't seem likely that I'll ever do it on my own. No more likely than that I'll build that flying car that we've been wanting all these years.
In my experience many /. posters think they understand cryptography but don't.
;-).
So if I were one such person, how would I know?
To paraphrase TFA, there's no real definition of "understand cryptography" (and if there were, it would probably be classified
So, if you were to test whether I "understand cryptography", what tests would you apply?
I'd agree that a lot of people who think they understand cryptography could be fooling themselves. But, OTOH, it's easy to say that someone doesn't really understand. It would be useful if there were a way that a person could test their own understanding, and if there are holes, do something effective to increase their understanding. Just saying that someone doesn't understand isn't by itself a useful comment, no matter how true it might be.
It's also worth noting that many societies that accepted killing animals for food also have had rules for killing that usually amount to "do it as quickly and painlessly as you can manage". Thus both the Jewish kosher laws and the Muslim halal laws specify how an animal is to be killed, and the emphasis is on minimizing suffering. Some societies have required an apology, not because the animal will understand, but rather to remind yourself that you're killing one of God's creatures.
OTOH, I've occasionally had a bit of fun with vegetarians by describing how we treat wheat. We take hundreds or thousands of their sleeping babies, and we toss them live into a grinder. With rice, we take their babies, toss them into water, and boil them to death. With most nuts, we just crack the live babies open and eat them whole.
So far, I haven't found a good way to make eating a fruit sound cruel. That's a plant's organ whose function is to be eaten by an animal (with the hope that the animal will deposit the seeds somewhere far from the parent, together with a pile of what to a plant is high-quality food). So I guess that when we're eating fruit, we're doing the right thing for the plant. But only if we swallow the seeds whole, which is easier with strawberries or raspberries than it is with apples or pears.
But this is getting a bit off topic. I haven't read any comments from RMS on killing and eating animals.
"should animals be treated differently to humans"
On the few occasions that I've been asked such leading questions, I've generally answered along the lines of "Certainly; I kill mosquitoes at every opportunity, but I've never yet killed a human."
Answering with such an extreme example generally leaves the questioner flustered, because I've implicitly conceded their false premise (humans aren't animals), and also admitted that I'm an unrepentant, vicious killer of dumb animals (mosquitoes). But they seem to understand that they aren't going to be very successful at protecting mosquitoes from my murderous actions.
It might be interesting to get them into a discussion of which animals are deserving of protections, and what the thresholds might be. But this has never happened. I'd guess that someone who asks "Should animals be treaded differently from humans" isn't likely to be really interested in the fine distinctions; they are asking a political question rather than an ethical question. But the question is sufficiently vague (and makes a factually invalid distinction, since humans are in fact animals) that it doesn't really lead to a discussion of how to apply concept of ethics to different species. So it's probably best to just attack the question by giving exactly the answer that the questioner wasn't expecting, and putting yourself firmly in the animal-killer class.
TFA used the biologists' term "neoteny", but didn't define it or give examples. It turns out that humans have a lot of examples of this evolutionary phenomenon.
;-) their entire lives.
...". I was disappointed that the author didn't mention that this is effectively a job requirement in any field that explores new ideas. Mature primates don't explore new things; only immature primates do that. So of course people in those professions are "immature". More properly, they are exhibiting a neotenic characteristic.
Its basic meaning, of course, is the extension of "juvenile" characteristics into adulthood (or whatever the mature, reproducing stage of a species is called).
One of the curious examples in humans is the ability (mostly in Europeans) to digest milk as an adult. Most mammals, and most humans, lose the lactase enzyme as part of maturing.; But in "Caucasian" people, lactase production usually continues into adulthood. This is interesting because it's probably an adaptation to the domestication of cattle and goats. Usually when domestication is discussed, people are talking about modifications of the domesticated animals. In this case, it was a population of the dominant species that changed, so as better to exploit the domesticated species.
But my favorite example is that a number of scientists have proposed science itself as an example of neoteny in humans. The explanation is that science is fundamentally based on curiosity about the world, plus a willingness to explore and test rather than just accepting what society tells you. In most animals, including our primate relatives, curiosity and exploration are characteristics of juveniles. Adults have learned all they want to know about the world, and new things outside their experience are mostly causes of concern and fear. This is still true of most humans in most societies. But in many societies, there is an active scientific community that institutionalizes curiosity and learning new things, and many people remain working scientists (some of whom also drink milk
Of course, there have been precursors of this throughout history. Many societies have produced explorers, sometimes in great numbers. The ancient Greeks, Phoenicians and Chinese did this, as did the later Norse and Arabs. Polynesia was settled by a whole society of them, as was North America a thousand or so years later. These were people willing to abandon the home they knew and face the challenge of learning to live in a strange new place. Normal, mature people stayed behind no matter how bad the situation was at home; only neotenic "adult children" would engage in such adventures. (Of course, not all went voluntarily, so this doesn't apply to all such emigrants.)
In any case, TFA does mention that academics, teachers and scientists are often "strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence
Also disappointing was the comment "... such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality." There is no conflict between these characteristics. The immense success of the scientific enterprise over the past few centuries, especially its success in improving our lot in life, is a good illustration that "wisdom" should imply recognizing the importance of both expertise and flexibility. Those two words succinctly describe what it takes to produce a good scientific result. You need the expertise to understand and judge the value of the data, and you need the flexibility to consider new ideas (no matter how wild) and systematically work out tests of their validity.
I've been to China, and you know what? They are planting trees LIKE CRAZY. Everywhere you look, they are putting in trees. ... And they have planted A LOT of trees. You just can't imagine it, seriously. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world.
;-)
I remember back around 1970, there were some news stories about how in China, flies had almost disappeared over a couple of years. Why? Well, it seems that Chairman Mao had instructed the citizenry to start killing every fly they could. A billion Chinese did just that, and rapidly eradicated the pest.
Many of the writers observed that if an American president were to give such an order, Americans would start breeding flies. We would rapidly see fly-breeders associations that sponsored fly shows, where breeders would show off their creations. A few writers suggested that people in a number of other countries would react to such an edict from an American president in the same way.
It seems the Chinese population is still cooperative. I wonder how much longer this will last? If their government requests that they sell their cars and go back to bicycles to cut down on pollution, will the population go along? For that matter, will the auto makers and sellers go along?
(And has the fly population recovered over there?
No PhD = not a reputable scientist.
Bullshit.
Indeed; this is something well worth emphasizing. Of course, a scientific degree can be useful as a quick-and-dirty first step in estimating someone's knowledge in their degree subject. But that's not the definition of "scientist"; a scientist is someone who practices scientific methods. A degree won't tell you that.
The poster-child subject for this is astronomy, a field in which "amateurs" with no academic credentials routinely make important contributions. In this case, there's a simple explanation. Professional astronomers tend to spend much of their time working on data collected from the high-precision observatories. But astronomy is an "observational" science, and the field requires constant sky surveys to spot changes. This can't be done with the big telescopes, because they have a tiny field of view. Sky surveys are done with lower-power telescopes with larger fields of view, and they are cheap enough that many amateurs can easily afford one. Anyone can send an email message giving the coordinate of an interesting event. The guys at the big telescopes can focus on it to get the details, and the amateur usually gets credit for the discovery. Of course, you have to do a bit of study to learn how to contribute to this, but you can decide to do this on your own, without needing a degree or permission from any official body. (And we no longer have a threat from religion or politics if you contribute to astronomy.
It turns out that to a similar situation exists in climatology. In addition to all the geological methods, an important part of the historical weather data comes from amateurs. This happened in many ways. For a long time, literate individuals with a long-term residence have collected weather-related information in private notebooks. Some of these (since about 1700) were actual temperatures. Others have been things like freeze/thaw dates of ponds or lakes, killing-freeze dates in their fields, observation dates of migrating birds, etc. These aren't as precise as temperatures, but over the years can be averaged to determine local climate. If you've been collecting any such data for your home location, you should keep it up, because your data will be useful to future climatologists. You can do this without a degree or permission from anyone. You might want to ask a meteorologist for advice, though, to maximise the value of your data.
An important part of science is having good data. Data collection can be done by anyone willing to invest in whatever training and equipment it takes. In the case of climate data, this can be as simple as a calendar, though a thermometer and a rain/snow gauge are also cheap and useful. Doing this may not make you a Newton or Einstein, but you can easily become a real "observational scientist" who contributes data for the theories of future Newtons and Einsteins.
Just try to make sure that your data is preserved after you die. Don't just keep it online or in electronic form; print it out and keep it in binders. Make sure that some likeminded people know that you have those binders and can collect them if "something happens" to you. One easy way to do this is to contact people in an appropriate field in a nearby college or university. (If you're a birder in North America, you are probably already giving your observations to the Audubon Society.
Fact is, just about anyone can be a real (if minor) observational scientist in some field. But it might soak up a bit of your time.
In any case, the argument will be decided in the next 10-50 years by nature: either conditions will continue to deteriorate, and you will be forced to agree that there is a problem, or they won't, and you can crow about how you were right all along.
Heh. You have more faith in human reason than I do. It's more likely that, long after the issue is settled, we'll still have an ongoing political debate, and we won't be doing much about whatever the problem has escalated into.
This is why there's a growing number of people saying that we shouldn't waste time trying to fight global warming. No matter what the evidence, our political and economic systems are going to keep barging ahead with their current behavior. So the question "How can we prevent or reverse it?" may be irrelevant; a more practical question is "How can we prepare for the changes that are ahead?"
The first step, of course, is getting good scientific information on what's happening, and we're doing a lot of that (with only occasional obstruction from politicians and businessmen). The information, including what predictions are possible, should be made available to those who want to know, and we're doing that, too (with a lot of obfuscation by the deniers and the simply illogical).
But there's really no way that humans can be "forced to agree" on anything. That's not what we're like. Even when Mother Nature hits us over the head, as She has done innumerable times in the past, we usually attribute a disaster to an angry god, and carefully ignore the evidence around us as to what actually happened.
What I noticed is that they don't even mention the system(s) that they managed to penetrate. Are my linux and Mac laptops vulnerable?
Of course, experience says that when a media article on such problems just says "computers", they are almost always talking about Microsoft software. But we shouldn't assume this, since non-MS systems have occasionally had vulnerabilities. And lately, we've read of a number of problems with "smart phones", including some not running MS software.
Driver problems have often been a worry for linux users, since so many devices have only a Windows driver that you have to use with ndiswrapper. This means that linux could inherit Windows problems like buffer overflows.
I wonder why they aren't naming the vulnerable systems?
Are they afraid that if they give us specifics, we'll fix the problems?
Download Kubuntu and Ubuntu and compare 'em yourself.
;-) past this point to something useful?
...
I finally decided to check Ubuntu out, downloaded the lastest ISO for the live CD, and tried it on a few Windows boxes that are sitting around unused. It failed in similar ways on all of them. It would go through a lot of familiar-looking startup stuff, and finally get to the pretty brown rectangle with the logo in the upper right. At that point, I could verify that moving the mouse around caused the pointer to make similar motions on the screen (thus showing that both the mouse and X windows are basically sane). I could also do the CTL-Fn to switch to a dumb-terminal screen, one of which showed the usual boot log. Frobbing the keyboard got echoes of what I types, but no responses otherwise.
But I never got past that on any of them. I never saw any login prompt, or any GUI thingy that responded to keyboard or mouse events. I'd sit there poking at things, wondering "OK; what do you want me to do now?" Eventualy the screen would go black, and that was it.
Is there somewhere documentation that will get a newbie (who's used unix and linux for 25 years or so
The PCs in question were of different ages, from different sources, so it doesn't seem like they'd all have the same problem. Or maybe they do; I don't see any way to even start diagnosing the actual problem (since the only keyboard/mouse stuff that works is moving the pointer around).
Maybe Kubuntu would work better? I am generally more of a KDE partisan; maybe Ubuntu somehow detected that and decided not to cooperate
First of all it's a lot of hype.
;-)
Heh. This article was actually the first clue I've ever read that CORBA was anything but hype. I've run across the acronym a zillion times, but before today, I'd never actually read anything that got through my thick skull that it was a communication protocol, much less what problems it was designed to solve. Same with pretty much anyone that I worked with. When management pushed it on us (complete with the management-friendly hype but not much more), the reaction of the developers was usually "Hey, that's great; we'll look for places that we can use it effectively." Of course, not really having any idea what it did or how to use it effectively, we never found any places that we could use it. The obtuse examples didn't help; reading code that doesn't make sense without uderstanding what it's supposed to do isn't a very good way to convince your typical developer that it's something they want to use.
In any case, there's not a lot of implementing you can do with just an acronym and management-level hype for "documentation".
Thirdly, it was never compatible.
Sort of a problem for something designed to solve cross-platform communication problems. (If that's actually what it was supposed to do; I'm still not sure about that.
I got the idea from TFA that it was a protocol developed mostly by a number of vendors. Are there any cases where this has worked? All the successful standards that I know of were developed with a large government and/or academic contingent, usually both. Companies generally try to hide their secrets from competitors, which is somewhat of a problem when you're trying to get competitors' products to work together. Granted, Sun and Apple are semi-exceptions, but even there, trying to get them to work out a common protocol is just asking for indefinite bureaucratic delays. (That's a voice of experience talking there; again there might be exceptions that I don't know of.)
I liked the comment in TFA that one of the problems was that Microsoft didn't adopt CORBA. My immediate thought was "Well, duh!" Of course, the XML crowd has been showing signs of nervousness about MS's involvement, especially when the news gets out that MS is applying for patents on XML encodings.
I've often thought that one of the main reasons for the Internet's success is that it was developed (by government and academic developers) for several decades before either IBM or Microsoft noticed it.
It sorta reminds me of a comment I read once from a biologist, to the effect that one of the major adaptive constraints on birds is that they have to somehow prevent predators from noticing their nests until the babies can fly.
Nobody has 1.2 kids, or 0.4 cars.
;-)
My favorite statistic is the observation that the average adult has one breast and one testicle.
(The actual number is slightly less than one, but it's pretty close.
For example, 200 year old lava flows have been dated to be 3 billion years old by the potassium-argon dating method.
;-)
Yes; this is an example of why scientists usually treat single-method dates as preliminary. Most dating methods can be contaminated in one or more ways, giving an erroneous date. But different methods have different kinds of possible contaminations, and the errors are usually wildly different. So you use several different methods. If some of them give the same date, that's evidence that those methods didn't suffer from contamination and are probably reliable. Even then, applying yet another independent dating method is always in order. When you get enough of them, you find that several indicate about the same date, while no two of the rest agree. The subset that agree are probably the correct date. (And all the dates should have error bars.
Lava is one of the more difficult things to date accurately. The high temperatures during flow often melts the substrate, adding contaminants from below and adding random errors to the apparent dates. Also, gases like argon tend to bubble out of hot lava, decreasing the end product of decay and increasing the apparent age given by the K-Ar test.
Lava is a clear case where several dating methods are needed, due to the high probability of contamination during the lava flow. A single test is only useful in cases like this, where the writer is looking for a bogus date as a way of discrediting the science to lay readers. Scientists just read it and laugh.
I am not a fundie but there has to be a reliable way to date something. Otherwise scientists would not claim things like the age of the ducks in the article or any scientific paper.
Uh, no; there doesn't have to be a reliable way to date something. There are a great many ways of dating old things. Usually, scientists consider a date determined by a single method to be preliminary and requiring verification. The verification usually happens by using several different methods. If they all come up with a similar date, that is considered good support for the date.
Most of the methods used by paleontlogists are based on various sorts of decay processes, mostly the decay of radioactive isotopes. Taken singly, each of these has ways that that the samples can be contaminated, giving a bad date. But different chemical elements or compounds have different kinds of contamination that produce different kinds of dating errors. If you use N different dating methods, it's unlikely that all would be contaminated in such a way as to produce the same error. So if all N (or N-1) give the same date, that implies that there's little or no contamination, and the date is reliable.
The first scientific papers dealing with a new discovery often have tentative dates due to the use of a single dating method. But with new fossil beds, once good fossils have been excavated, it's routine to apply several different dating methods to pin down the fossils' ages more precisely.
This whole topic is a serious scientific field in it own right. Explaining how it all works would take several years of intensive study.
One funny thing about all these "missing link" reports is that this critter is dated to around 100 to 110 million years. But Archaeopterix is generally dated to around 140 million years (give or take 5 million). Some of the Chinese proto-bird fossils are slightly older than that. So this new fossil can't be a "missing link" between birds an earlier dinosaurs.
;-)
Of course, the scientific reports don't seem to use the phrase "missing link". The significance is mostly that it's a high-quality new bird fossil, and it seems to be an early example of a bird much like modern ducks and geese. So that group of birds apparently split off fairly early. DNA studies may verify this, but it's useful to have fossil evidence. Not much is reliably known about the relationships between groups of birds, and every chunk of evidence counts.
One basic problem is that birds don't fossilize very well. Their bones are fragile, and birds generally don't die in places that lead to good fossilization. They are a major part of our world, though, so it's nice to find what evidence we can about how they developed.
Still, we could use less media attention to missing links, and more attention to the real meaning of new fossils. (How's that for a nice oxymoron?
Fur? Don't pengiuns have feathers?
;-)
Yeah, but penguins also have narrow, pointy beaks.
Tux was actually based on Opus, not on any real penguin.
Yes indeed; I've worked on a number of projects where that 5-line "solution" would be counted as 5 times better than your silly one-line version. And it's also a good example of why you'd want C or perl rather than whatever silly language you used. Then you can write:
;-)
if (CorrectPassword(input))
{
allowlogin = TRUE;
}
else
{
allowlogin = FALSE;
}
This is 8 lines rather than 5, so it's 60% "better".
You just don't understand Proper Software Development Methodology.
Operating systems are Microsoft's core competency.
;-)
No, marketing operating systems are Microsoft's core competency. There's a subtle difference here, but it's important. It explains why MS has generally gotten away with such crappy systems. They have a bigger marketing budget than all those other pipsqueak companies combined, so they don't need a quality product. They only need the budget to convince customers that they have a quality product.
The delays, no matter how well explained, are still delays; and are continuing evidence of Microsoft's incompetence in the area of operating system development.
Hey, you agree with me; operating systemss aren't their core competence.
Really; if you have the marketing budget, you don't need technical competence. It doesn't gain you any additional sales, so why bother? I mean, look at all those small companies that are technically competent. Do you want to be like them?
If MS has the guts to burn 10 Billion - 20 Billion on getting a new OS paradigm on to every plattform on the planet and do a good job at the same time they'll maybe make it.
;-) Their problem was that, due to their development rules, they couldn't sell it for less than $50,000 and recover their development costs. And they couldn't sell more than a handful at that price.
;-).
...
It's perhaps worth mentioning that this was essentially IBM's approach back in the early days of "desktop" computers around 1980. There was this flock of little upstarts challenging IBM's growing stranglehold on the computer business by building small, cheap computers. IBM actually had a desktop computer, and it got very good reviews from its users. (What was it's 4-digit number? I've forgotten, but it was pretty good.
So they farmed the job out to one of those startups, run by Bill Gates and a few of his buddies, handed them a few hundred million for marketing, and didn't impose the IBM development rules on them. The result was crap compared to any of the CP/M desktops, but with a marketing budget greater than the operating budgets of all the upstarts combined, the result was what IBM wanted.
Microsoft has understood the lesson of this from the start, and put their money into marketing rather than quality product. Until now, maybe. If the reports of their growing development rules and costs are true, they may be going the way of IBM. They'll produce a good system for the first time in their history, but to avoid going bankrupt from the cost, they'll have to get a very good price for it, and only the wealthiest (and stupidest) will pay that price. If this is true, we're seeing a repeat of the IBM/Microsoft story from a quarter century ago.
Of course, IBM didn't die. In fact, they completed their conquest of the "mainframe" market, which was willing to buy IBM no matter what the cost. They completely own that field, and development has pretty much come to a halt. Due to MS's market clout, we could see the same outcome. They will own the "desktop", and further development in that market will grind to a halt. They'll still sell to the "MS at any cost" market. But it won't matter to most of us, because we'll more and more consider "desktop" computers relics of a previous age. We'll stop worrying about making new systems "compatible with the desktop" (i.e., clones of MS's systems), just as 25 years ago we stopped worrying about whether our little computers were IBM compatible (and we didn't bother with PL/I or JCL
So what should we call the new thing we're building while ignoring IBM and Microsoft? "Web 2.0" seems to be out (and wasn't very good anyway), but the new thing will certainly be Net-based. Any good suggestions for a name that will supercede "desktop"? Maybe we need a catchy two-syllable name for the software going into the OLPC project. Push for making it a truly distributed, comm-based system without any central control, so the comm companies and local governments can't take it over as they're doing with the Web. We can base it on zillions of small components, so a company that refuses to follow standards can't make any inroads. The "new paradigm" will be as outside Microsoft's world view as PC/DOS was outside IBM's world view.
C'mon, we need a catchy new name
Look at the debate over the Bell Curve or Holocaust revisionism ... they aren't even allowed to publicly state their positions.
So what part of the world do you live in, that these are blocked?
Here in the US, quick visits to amazon.com and bn.com show that both the hardcover and paperback editions of The Bell Curve are in print and being sold openly. The paperback edition has an amazon rank of about 19,000; not a best-seller, but it's definitely not being suppressed.
And Holocaust Denial is trivially easy to find online. Those sites aren't being blocked by anything in this part of the world. If they are in your area, you might look into ways of bypassing your local firewalls.
Of course, there is lots of criticism of both of these, both in print and online. This is as it should be. And the critics also get criticized, and so on.
But from where I'm looking around, there's no sign at all that either is being effectively suppressed.
OTOH, we have had a bit of a fuss in the past year over the way that the US government has suppressed the results of some climate studies, primarily by requiring "editing" of some papers to weaken or eliminate conclusions that disagree with the Bush team's policies. And on the third hand, they did fail spectacularly to hide this editing from those who were interested.
Does "open-minded" in this context mean suggestible?
Quite likely. I've seen the phrase "closed-minded" applied to scientists, on the grounds that they refuse to accept anything without good evidence. In particular, you tend to hear this usage from religious folks, especially the new-age type.
Look for proprietary Microsoft "extensions" in the near future.
;-), he pointed to section 3.7 of RFC1034, which says that the answer section of a DNS packet contains records that "directly answer the query". For a while now, the answer section of MS's DNS packets have contained information that belongs in the "additional" section.
Near future? How about right now?
I've been experimenting with a few DNS servers. Just yesterday I got a notice from the author of one of them that he was working on a problem that caused it to not resolve www.microsoft.com. Today he sent the mailing list his diagnosis of the bug. It turned out to be a case of MS's DNS servers blatantly violating some clear statements in the appropriate RFC.
For those who are interested (or care
This is a gratuitous, and totally nonsensical violation of the standard. And you can bet that the guys who wrote the code knew exactly what they were doing. It's not a "bug"; it's an intentional violation which has to have been planned for some time, because www.microsoft.com seems to resolve on older MS systems.
It's also yet another case where the implementer basically shrugged and said "Well, since Microsoft.com is so popular, I have to change my code to not follow the standards so that microsoft.com may resolve."
Presumably the maintainers of other DNS servers will do the same, perhaps with less politic explanations. Meanwhile, MS's support people will be saying "If you'd been using Microsofs DNS software, you wouldn't have this problem and it would've worked."