How righteous! If there is a flame war here, you are just as guilty as I am if not more.
You did not respond to your original post with any further elaboration, but with an arrogant "Read it again, Slowly.".
If you indeed are a teacher, you should know better than to respond like that. You should rephrase and elaborate on what it was you did supposedly mean.
In your post, you have only responded in flames yourself. I did make a several points in my former post adressing what was wrong with your statements. You chose not to replied to these, why?
What is and is not a science is not something strictly defined. If it was, there would not be need for a philosophy of science.
There are definitions of science (Popperian falsificationism for instance) under which signficant areas of psychology (most notably psychodynamics) do not qualify. There is considerable debate in the psychological community today about the scientific rigor of certain methods, theories and therapies.
And for one who prides himself on being a published author, it can hardly be out of place to remark on grammar and spelling.
The parent mentioned that he believed a particular technology would *never* be cheaper than the current technology.
Then you didn't read the post you replied to. Yes I wrote it, and it said that certain, technologies will never reach a price over performance ratio that will allow them to completely replace the existing ones.
This is obvious.
No, I DO NOT believe that anything is possible. Nor is that implied in my post.
Yes it is implied. Perhaps you didn't mean to imply it, but that is something else. You are replying to a statement, "X is impossible" with: the statement "Science often shows impossible things to be impossible", without adressing the particular case in the least. It's a blanket argument, and as such one must assume that you feel this way generally.
It was impossible to reach the moon. It was impossible to go faster than the speed of sound. It was impossible for man to fly. It was impossible to navigate beyond the sight of land. There are countless examples.
There are countless examples of people wrongly stating that things are impossible. So? That's called false induction. That does not disprove what I wrote at all. By analogy, you could compile a big list of people wrongly stating "The city X is in the USA", and come to the conclusion that any statement about American geography is wrong.
This is apparently a random excuse to use the word "epistemology" I wonder if you even know what it means...
Yes I do. Apparently you don't, otherwise you wouldn't find it noteworthy.
Didn't you imply in your last flame that human psychology wansn't science? See, I was under the impression that it was.
Human psychology is, to a large extent, not a science, no. Again, perhaps you should take some courses in philosophy of science.
Do you even know what your [sic] talking about? I highly doubt it.
Yes, I do. I have a M.S. in physical chemistry, and about one year left until I recive my PhD in physics. Apart from that, yes I have studied courses both in psychology and philosophy of science. So, please tell me of your qualifications. Who are you to lecture me on science?
So who are you? Likely another Slashdot 14-year-old know-it-all.
1. You can never be sure of their moral alignment no matter how much money you pay him
That can equally well be applied to anyone. Most virus writers are kids who do a childish and stupid thing.
I fail to see how that could or should condemn the person for the rest of his life. Sure, if it had been a 45-year old who wrote this virus, I would definitely have a problem. But teenagers are kids. Kids grow up. I certainly know that I did, having done quite a lot of quite illegal stuff as a teenager.
Doing so would provide additional incentive to people who want to add "I wrote Monkey.B" to his resume to get their next job.
I doubt it. You're assuming here that the virus-writer is thinking about the consequences of his actions. If he was, he wouldn't be a virus writer to begin with.
Nobody wants to end up in a life in debt, and that is exactly where virus-writing will land you: Paying off damages for the rest of your life.
(Something which I think is more than steep punishment enough for a teenager.)
No, I understood your post all to well. And it's bullshit.
By saying "Science often makes the impossible possible", you are putting blind faith in science.
Which is a viewpoint which runs exactly contrary to what science is supposedly about: Reality, not faith.
You expressed a view which only illustrates that you, like most people want to believe anything is possible. Human nature finds impossibilities unsettling, like other concepts such as mortality and infinity.
Science isn't about finding what people want to find. It's about finding reality. In reality, some things are impossible. I'm not even going to get into epistemology here, but it is unreasonable to think otherwise. Especially in economic reality, which is what I was talking about.
Go back, study some science, and some philosophy of science, and perhaps some human psychology and then try and realize what you are saying and why you are saying it.
And finally, the spin of a free electron is *meaningless*. It is only important in a bound states.
No. It still exists as a degree of freedom, and as such it has effects on the statistical thermodynamics of free electrons. (i.e. fermi-dirac vs. bose-einstein)
The SG experiment was applied to a beam of silver atoms, which have a single electron in their outer shell. It cannot be practically applied to a beam of free electrons
It is traditionally described as an electron beam.
Anyway, it's beside the point. IBM did not measure the spin of a free electron. The electron was in a bound state. Measuring and flipping the spins of bound electrons is not new. It's done all the time, in EPR for example.
It's true that being new is not enough to displace old. But if the new stuff is better and the price/performance ratio is good, it will displace the old products.
My point exactly.
But, my point is also that, for some technologies, the price/performance ratio will never become good enough to replace the older one.
No. The (traditional) SG experiment does not measure the spin of electrons bound to atoms. It measures the spin of a beam of electrons in a magnetic field. (If you're sitting in front of a CRT you have such a beam in front of you, behind the glass)
What IBM did here was flip the spin of an individual electron. That's what's new.
They did not determine the spin in three dimensions. (That is what they are referring to in your quote.) If you measure the Z component of an electron spin, you destroy the X and Y component information.
If you could, you would be in violation of the uncertainty principle. (and that would be remarkable indeed)
Personally.. I kind of doubt that they may ever become 'mainstream'. A quantum computer isn't an all-around "improved computer", it's a completely different paradigm.
So the question here is: Why would they replace traditional computers? There is no real reason to think that they will replace conventional computers, except for in the areas in which they are better. (and that's not likely to be every area)
Quantum computers are inherently much more complex than traditional ones. Thus, they will likely always be more expensive to build.
It's 2004, and we're still using internal-combustion automobiles. Cathode-ray tubes for data visualization. Nearly all elevators still use ordinary cables and breaks. We don't have nuclear reactors in our basements. And so on..
The moral here is: Just because a technology is better in some respect, does not mean it's going to replace an older one. Especially if it's not better in every respect, and not cheaper.
I'm paraphrasing here, but Kubrick said something to the extent of "If you walk away from seeing 2001 without any questions, then we failed." - Kubrick's style was to ask questions.
Clarke, on the other hand, always answered most if not all of his questions.
I've read all the "2001" books, and seen most Kubrick films. (All except the small ones made prior to "The Killing")
And IMHO, Kubrick is by far the greater artist of the two. Clarke not only 'answers' too many questions, he is a bit one-track. All the post-2001 books are really just rehashes of the same ideas. (In fact, almost ALL his books are rehashes of the same ideas, from "Childhoods end" to "Rama" to "2001"..)
So.. I'd say: Yes, Stanley Kubrick would probably have something different to say. And it'd probably be more interesting too.
I just wish people with that much determination would concentrate on fixing the bugs, instead of exploiting them... so much wasted talent.
Who are you talking about? The exploit-writers or the people finding vunerabilities. There are plenty of the latter who don't write exploits. In these recent cases that has been the case too. Not of an exploit being found in the wild, but of a vunerability to exploitation being found.
That said, the people finding vunerabilities are doing a good and useful job. It's often harder to find a bug than to fix one.
Buffer exploits are definitely in the category of being more difficult to anticipate than to fix. Usually adding a simple test is all that's need to fix them.
(Perhaps you haven't noticed, but practically all these vunerabilities are fixed within hours after being found.)
Even after all these years, CRT is still the standard. Amazing...
Amazing, why? What's so bad about them? It's a fundamentally simple design, which has had lots of room for improvement. -Like the internal combustion engine.
And like the combustion engine, that means there's a high barrier to get rid of them. So, while they are going to be replaced eventually.. it's hardly strange that they haven't been yet.
Arithmetic is NOT a complete and consistent system. Embedding the peano axioms is sufficient for a formal system to meet the criterion of "sufficiently complex".
Maybe I've misunderstood, but didn't Gentzen prove that the Peano axioms are consistent?
Besides, this is still a moot point. Physics is not mathematics, regardless of what Wolfram thinks.
His viewpoint is not shared by most physicists, so however interesting it may be, you can't use it to say what physics is.
If you ask me, leaving empirical observation and entering into a world of pure mathematical abstraction will never advance physics.
No. Physics is built on postulates, basic assumptions about the world. These postulates can be expressed in mathematical terms, and using math you can evaluate the consequences. But it has nothing intrinsically to do with math, only with logic. Math is a system of logic.
And isn't math built on philosophy?
Math is built on logic. Logic is considered a field within philosophy. That doesn't really mean you can say math is built on philosophy.
And don't we still not have a good understanding of how gravity and electromagnetic radiation act?
No. These are two things that we happen to understand extremely well.
(take dark energy for one example, or the gravitational anomalies dealing with eclipses)
I'm not sure what the 'gravitational anomalites dealing with eclipses' is supposed to refer to. But you're completely off here. Just because you can't explain a phenomenon doesn't automatically mean there is something wrong with your fundamentals. It can also mean that you don't really understand what the phenomenon is. Dark matter is an excellent example of this.
So what we have is a complex system of symbology that is demonstrably incomplete?
Symbology? Obviously you don't know what you're talking about here. I think you mean either semiotics or symbolic logic.
And then you seem to refer to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Please explain what that has to do with physics. First, Gödel's theorem does not apply to all of mathematics. Arithmetic is a complete and consistent system.
Secondly, physics is not based on math. An inconsistency in your mathematical model does not imply one in the underlying physics.
That said, the answer seems to be no. The IETF can adopt a patent-encumbered method as a standard.
As you can see here, there appear to be quite a number of patents which may or may not relate to IETF standards. And you can see that in these cases, it appears that the IETF demands that the patent is licensed on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms".. whatever that means.
The summary should almost be modded flamebait for making such an obviously impossible statement like that.
So what's really up here? TFA says they demonstrated running a Linux Quake III on a OS X powerbook. (And they quote Rob Enderle praising this technology.. this is the guy who thinks SCO will win, which speaks loads for his credibility.)
Now, I haven't seen the source for Quake III, but I'm pretty certain it uses OpenGL, which the Mac has. OS X is also POSIX-compliant. So, most of the API calls done by Quake can already be done natively on OS X.
So what I guess they're doing here is translating API calls (like Wine) while emulating the processor core (like a real emulator).
That isn't anything new. For instance, I've written similar code for an Atari emulator, which can emulate an Atari hard-disc filesystem as a local directory through translating OS calls.
(Note: And that was far from the first time it'd been done either.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just a fellow who's defending myself
How righteous! If there is a flame war here, you are just as guilty as I am if not more.
You did not respond to your original post with any further elaboration, but with an arrogant "Read it again, Slowly.".
If you indeed are a teacher, you should know better than to respond like that. You should rephrase and elaborate on what it was you did supposedly mean.
In your post, you have only responded in flames yourself. I did make a several points in my former post adressing what was wrong with your statements. You chose not to replied to these, why?
What is and is not a science is not something strictly defined. If it was, there would not be need for a philosophy of science.
There are definitions of science (Popperian falsificationism for instance) under which signficant areas of psychology (most notably psychodynamics) do not qualify. There is considerable debate in the psychological community today about the scientific rigor of certain methods, theories and therapies.
And for one who prides himself on being a published author, it can hardly be out of place to remark on grammar and spelling.
The parent mentioned that he believed a particular technology would *never* be cheaper than the current technology.
Then you didn't read the post you replied to.
Yes I wrote it, and it said that certain, technologies will never reach a price over performance ratio that will allow them to completely replace the existing ones.
This is obvious.
No, I DO NOT believe that anything is possible. Nor is that implied in my post.
Yes it is implied. Perhaps you didn't mean to imply it, but that is something else. You are replying to a statement, "X is impossible" with: the statement "Science often shows impossible things to be impossible", without adressing the particular case in the least.
It's a blanket argument, and as such one must assume that you feel this way generally.
It was impossible to reach the moon. It was impossible to go faster than the speed of sound. It was impossible for man to fly. It was impossible to navigate beyond the sight of land. There are countless examples.
There are countless examples of people wrongly stating that things are impossible. So? That's called false induction. That does not disprove what I wrote at all. By analogy, you could compile a big list of people wrongly stating "The city X is in the USA", and come to the conclusion that any statement about American geography is wrong.
This is apparently a random excuse to use the word "epistemology" I wonder if you even know what it means...
Yes I do. Apparently you don't, otherwise you wouldn't find it noteworthy.
Didn't you imply in your last flame that human psychology wansn't science? See, I was under the impression that it was.
Human psychology is, to a large extent, not a science, no. Again, perhaps you should take some courses in philosophy of science.
Do you even know what your [sic] talking about? I highly doubt it.
Yes, I do. I have a M.S. in physical chemistry, and about one year left until I recive my PhD in physics.
Apart from that, yes I have studied courses both in psychology and philosophy of science. So, please tell me of your qualifications. Who are you to lecture me on science?
So who are you? Likely another Slashdot 14-year-old know-it-all.
1. You can never be sure of their moral alignment no matter how much money you pay him
That can equally well be applied to anyone. Most virus writers are kids who do a childish and stupid thing.
I fail to see how that could or should condemn the person for the rest of his life. Sure, if it had been a 45-year old who wrote this virus, I would definitely have a problem. But teenagers are kids. Kids grow up. I certainly know that I did, having done quite a lot of quite illegal stuff as a teenager.
Doing so would provide additional incentive to people who want to add "I wrote Monkey.B" to his resume to get their next job.
I doubt it. You're assuming here that the virus-writer is thinking about the consequences of his actions. If he was, he wouldn't be a virus writer to begin with.
Nobody wants to end up in a life in debt, and that is exactly where virus-writing will land you: Paying off damages for the rest of your life.
(Something which I think is more than steep punishment enough for a teenager.)
No, I understood your post all to well. And it's bullshit.
By saying "Science often makes the impossible possible", you are putting blind faith in science.
Which is a viewpoint which runs exactly contrary to what science is supposedly about: Reality, not faith.
You expressed a view which only illustrates that you, like most people want to believe anything is possible. Human nature finds impossibilities unsettling, like other concepts such as mortality and infinity.
Science isn't about finding what people want to find. It's about finding reality. In reality, some things are impossible. I'm not even going to get into epistemology here, but it is unreasonable to think otherwise. Especially in economic reality, which is what I was talking about.
Go back, study some science, and some philosophy of science, and perhaps some human psychology and then try and realize what you are saying and why you are saying it.
Leave science out of it!
Not liking words like "never" has nothing to do with science and everything to do with human psychology.
And finally, the spin of a free electron is *meaningless*. It is only important in a bound states.
No. It still exists as a degree of freedom, and as such it has effects on the statistical thermodynamics of free electrons.
(i.e. fermi-dirac vs. bose-einstein)
The spin of quarks has no know effect on magnetism and there are 6 different known types of spin on them.
Please provide a reference where it says quark spins have no effect on magnetism.
Quarks have charge, yes?
Quarks have spin, yes?
Thus, quarks have a magnetic moment. And following that, they must interact with magnetic fields.
The most obvious way to show this is to look at a proton. Protons have a magnetic moment.
(This is the basis of 1H-NMR and MRI)
The SG experiment was applied to a beam of silver atoms, which have a single electron in their outer shell. It cannot be practically applied to a beam of free electrons
It is traditionally described as an electron beam.
Anyway, it's beside the point. IBM did not measure the spin of a free electron. The electron was in a bound state. Measuring and flipping the spins of bound electrons is not new. It's done all the time, in EPR for example.
It's true that being new is not enough to displace old. But if the new stuff is better and the price/performance ratio is good, it will displace the old products.
My point exactly.
But, my point is also that, for some technologies, the price/performance ratio will never become good enough to replace the older one.
No. The (traditional) SG experiment does not measure the spin of electrons bound to atoms. It measures the spin of a beam of electrons in a magnetic field.
(If you're sitting in front of a CRT you have such a beam in front of you, behind the glass)
What IBM did here was flip the spin of an individual electron. That's what's new.
They did not determine the spin in three dimensions. (That is what they are referring to in your quote.) If you measure the Z component of an electron spin, you destroy the X and Y component information.
If you could, you would be in violation of the uncertainty principle. (and that would be remarkable indeed)
so now that we can spin one electron, it wont be long before we can do the same to the trillions and trillions of them, right? wrong assumption.
Really? Because spinning trillions and trillions of electrons is easy. Just apply a big magnetic field. That's very old news indeed.
The novelty here is the manipulation of a single electron spin. That is difficult and remarkable. Manipulating lots of them is easy.
Personally.. I kind of doubt that they may ever become 'mainstream'. A quantum computer isn't an all-around "improved computer", it's a completely different paradigm.
So the question here is: Why would they replace traditional computers? There is no real reason to think that they will replace conventional computers, except for in the areas in which they are better.
(and that's not likely to be every area)
Quantum computers are inherently much more complex than traditional ones. Thus, they will likely always be more expensive to build.
It's 2004, and we're still using internal-combustion automobiles. Cathode-ray tubes for data visualization. Nearly all elevators still use ordinary cables and breaks. We don't have nuclear reactors in our basements. And so on..
The moral here is: Just because a technology is better in some respect, does not mean it's going to replace an older one. Especially if it's not better in every respect, and not cheaper.
That's not quite right either. If you have two electrons and nothing else the lowest energy state will be one up and one down.
In a molecular system, this is not necessarily the case. (Otherwise things wouldn't be magnetic)
All it does is make an attack "more" difficult, but nowhere near impossible
Yes. Exactly like every other security system ever designed.
Your point is?
Personally, I think he would.
I'm paraphrasing here, but Kubrick said something to the extent of "If you walk away from seeing 2001 without any questions, then we failed." - Kubrick's style was to ask questions.
Clarke, on the other hand, always answered most if not all of his questions.
I've read all the "2001" books, and seen most Kubrick films.
(All except the small ones made prior to "The Killing")
And IMHO, Kubrick is by far the greater artist of the two. Clarke not only 'answers' too many questions, he is a bit one-track. All the post-2001 books are really just rehashes of the same ideas.
(In fact, almost ALL his books are rehashes of the same ideas, from "Childhoods end" to "Rama" to "2001"..)
So.. I'd say: Yes, Stanley Kubrick would probably have something different to say. And it'd probably be more interesting too.
As a former Watcom user (albeit one with fond memories) there's OpenWatcom too.
I just wish people with that much determination would concentrate on fixing the bugs, instead of exploiting them ... so much wasted talent.
Who are you talking about? The exploit-writers or the people finding vunerabilities. There are plenty of the latter who don't write exploits. In these recent cases that has been the case too. Not of an exploit being found in the wild, but of a vunerability to exploitation being found.
That said, the people finding vunerabilities are doing a good and useful job. It's often harder to find a bug than to fix one.
Buffer exploits are definitely in the category of being more difficult to anticipate than to fix. Usually adding a simple test is all that's need to fix them.
(Perhaps you haven't noticed, but practically all these vunerabilities are fixed within hours after being found.)
Am I the only one who is gets a bit freaked out by theme parks?
Sure, there is this nice image of happiness and friendliness.. but it's also obviously fake and false. (Even as a 7-year old at disneyland, I felt it)
At the same time, there are guards and surveillance cameras everywhere, not to mention the rigorous safety measures.
It's like being inside a Soviet propaganda movie or something.
And that was before they started tagging people. I can't say I'm surprized.
Yeah, guilt by association is fun.
Since your computer most likely contains parts made in China, I suppose you're a strong supporter of the communist regime there?
Even after all these years, CRT is still the standard. Amazing...
Amazing, why? What's so bad about them?
It's a fundamentally simple design, which has had lots of room for improvement. -Like the internal combustion engine.
And like the combustion engine, that means there's a high barrier to get rid of them.
So, while they are going to be replaced eventually.. it's hardly strange that they haven't been yet.
You know.. the JDK (1.4.1 linux) is 73 megs on my machine..
Did it get 6 times bigger between v1.4.1 and 1.5.0 ?
Arithmetic is NOT a complete and consistent system. Embedding the peano axioms is sufficient for a formal system to meet the criterion of "sufficiently complex".
Maybe I've misunderstood, but didn't Gentzen prove that the Peano axioms are consistent?
Besides, this is still a moot point. Physics is not mathematics, regardless of what Wolfram thinks.
His viewpoint is not shared by most physicists, so however interesting it may be, you can't use it to say what physics is.
If you ask me, leaving empirical observation and entering into a world of pure mathematical abstraction will never advance physics.
You are wrong.
But isn't physics built on math?
No. Physics is built on postulates, basic assumptions about the world. These postulates can be expressed in mathematical terms, and using math you can evaluate the consequences. But it has nothing intrinsically to do with math, only with logic. Math is a system of logic.
And isn't math built on philosophy?
Math is built on logic. Logic is considered a field within philosophy. That doesn't really mean you can say math is built on philosophy.
And don't we still not have a good understanding of how gravity and electromagnetic radiation act?
No. These are two things that we happen to understand extremely well.
(take dark energy for one example, or the gravitational anomalies dealing with eclipses)
I'm not sure what the 'gravitational anomalites dealing with eclipses' is supposed to refer to. But you're completely off here. Just because you can't explain a phenomenon doesn't automatically mean there is something wrong with your fundamentals. It can also mean that you don't really understand what the phenomenon is. Dark matter is an excellent example of this.
So what we have is a complex system of symbology that is demonstrably incomplete?
Symbology? Obviously you don't know what you're talking about here. I think you mean either semiotics or symbolic logic.
And then you seem to refer to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Please explain what that has to do with physics. First, Gödel's theorem does not apply to all of mathematics. Arithmetic is a complete and consistent system.
Secondly, physics is not based on math. An inconsistency in your mathematical model does not imply one in the underlying physics.
Patents are always a monopoly.
That said, the answer seems to be no. The IETF can adopt a patent-encumbered method as a standard.
As you can see here, there appear to be quite a number of patents which may or may not relate to IETF standards. And you can see that in these cases, it appears that the IETF demands that the patent is licensed on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms".. whatever that means.
The summary should almost be modded flamebait for making such an obviously impossible statement like that.
So what's really up here? TFA says they demonstrated running a Linux Quake III on a OS X powerbook.
(And they quote Rob Enderle praising this technology.. this is the guy who thinks SCO will win, which speaks loads for his credibility.)
Now, I haven't seen the source for Quake III, but I'm pretty certain it uses OpenGL, which the Mac has. OS X is also POSIX-compliant. So, most of the API calls done by Quake can already be done natively on OS X.
So what I guess they're doing here is translating API calls (like Wine) while emulating the processor core (like a real emulator).
That isn't anything new. For instance, I've written similar code for an Atari emulator, which can emulate an Atari hard-disc filesystem as a local directory through translating OS calls.
(Note: And that was far from the first time it'd been done either.)