Y'know, every person believes on some level that the world would be better if it were run by people like him. The delusion that the world would be better if it were run by people in your profession is just a special case of this broader delusion. So, doctors think the world would be better if it was run by doctors, engineers think engineers could make things better, and management consultants think management consultants could get things on track.
By in large, the only profession that almost gets to put this into practice is law, and most other people aren't happy with the results, and lawyers are probably better qualified than most professions for the job of philosopher kings.
What "running things" boils down to is "dealing with people." Since people come in all different kinds, it means dealing with different perspectives. What people really want is to have their persepctives used in making decisions. Engineers want decisions that reflect their analytical skills and grasp of physical practicalities. Marketing people want decisions made that reflect their knowledge of consumer behavior and product channel distributions. Salesmen want decisions to reflect their personal knowledge of the customer. Accountants want decisions to reflect their knowledge of financial control.
Are any of them wrong?
The problem is that decision processes that involve too many people are unwieldy and impractical. If Computer Science has a single, important contribution to human thought, it would be this: some kinds of decisions can be made in theory, but there is no practical way of knowing if you've arrived at an optimal result. In particular, it isn't just that you can't please everybody; given enough people, there is no practical way to know if you are pleasing the largest number of them possible.
Therefore all human organizations, businesses included, are built around approximations and special cases. While it is true, all things being equal, that satisfying more of the engineers' concerns is better, we can never be sure that all things are equal. The idea of making the engineer's viewpoint trump all other viewpoints is probably a bad one.
As an engineer, if I was tasked with designing an organization, I might give prominence to a single group's viewpoint, but I wouldn't make it absolutely paramount over all the others, even if that group were engineers. That would be bad engineering.
Well, there may be an aspect of market positioning about it. There certainly must be.
But there's something even more basic. People are willing to pay Apple more, therefore they charge more.
I upgraded my Mini using quality components, and saved a bundle. It wasn't exactly difficult, I just needed the attitude that it didn't matter if I cracked the plastic -- which I didn't. Furthermore, Apple doesn't void my warranty for using third party parts, or even installing them myself, although naturally I'm not covered for things I damage myself. But that's not different from any other hardware manufacturer.
I think that the reason Apple can charge more is related to Apple's general pricing philosophy, which is to find out the price at which most people start caring and charge a hair below that. Itunes tracks are priced the way they are for that reason. At that price, most people don't wonder whether it is the right price.
Now, I look at the cost of ordering a Mac with a larger HD or more memory, and knowing the price of these things and being fully able to install them myself, I buy what I need from Newegg and Apple doesn't care. They're too busy making money of normal people to pick a fight with a few bull headed cheapskates. But most people would look at it this way: do they want the memory, and is the price Apple charging, while high, is not enough to make them figure out what the best RAM price is and find somebody who can crack the damned case. Under that calculus, the premium Apple charges is (presumably) chosen so that most people can't be bothered.
People who use Macs are people who are willing to pay a modest amount of money in order not to have to waste their time. And looked at objectively, while the relative amount Apple charges for RAM and hard disk is scandalous, the absolute amount is pretty negligible these days. So the customer has the confidence that his experience will be hassle free (which upgrading RAM on a Mini is not), and Apple gets a high margin product. That's the "value proposition", and it's not intended to appeal to geeks, who are benignly tolerated.
Benign toleration is actually the ideal stance from a geek perspective. We don't want to be coddled, but every user who gets coddled is one less user trying to cadge some free tech support, which gets wearisome after a while. At some point, I just tell people who've overrun my goodwill (which truthfully isn't that hard to do) to get a Mac if they want somebody else to deal with their hassles, and if I don't, I cut them off.
Of course, there is something a bit cynical in the way Apple exploits this need, but it's not "literally a rip off" as the article suggests. You're not forced to buy Apple hardware, nor are you even forced to by Apple ugprades. Apple doesn't tell you you will break your machine if you use third party upgrades, although it says truthfully you are responsible if you break the machine during the process. Nor does it require that commodity components be repackaged in a non-standard way, the way Nintendo does.
Seriously, if Apple doesn't do it for you, you should just install Linux on a 100% commodity hardware box. Linux is just as usable as MacOS these days; the process of managing the hardware and driver compatibility can be a bit of a pain from time to time, but there you go. Some people are fine with this situation, some find it reasonable to pay somebody a couple of hundred bucks a year so that that cup passeth from their lips, and a few of us will gleefully find ways to make our lives complicated no matter what affordable conveniences the market offers.
It isn't just that they act dumb. It might be just me, but those Fox newsreaders give me the creeps. It's their eyes. Their body language and facial expression are so animated, but their eyes are so lifeless.
I may be politically biased against the network, but there is something in the flawless but soulless choreography of Fox news that stinks of evil. The effect reminds me of C.S. Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength, in which a government think tank called NICE manipulates its members using their ambitions and insecurities. As their ambition drives them toward the coveted membership in the inner circle, their fear drives them further into themselves. By the time they make it into the inner circle, there's nothing outwardly left of their humanity to enjoy it. They can pass superficial inspection, but the closer you look, the more obviously robotic they are.
What makes That Hideous Strength such an effective story of the supernatural is that the mechanisms of damnation are so psychologically plausible. Anybody with sufficient money could actually put the NICE methods for turning people into passive tools to the test.
I don't know about the people on the screen, but Fox definitely plays this game with its viewers. It appeals to greed and fear.
So, in describing a (a) secret, (b) new, (c) aircraft, Fox got one out of three right?
Well, bully for them. They made it almost up to the average standard of journalism covering science and technology.
Now I don't know much about weapons and planes, but I do know that excepting a few dowdy old school journalism institutions, whenever the media reports on something I do know about, the inaccuracies make my skin crawl. Given that is probably true for the knowledgeable in any field, it follows that most news stories make their readers or viewers more ignorant than they were before.
When you do everything it's hard to do anything well.
In the Gates era. Microsoft was competitive (perhaps a bit overcompetitive), agile, and focused. In the post-Gates era, it is not longer focused. The Vista ready labeling debacle was the final indignity in a project plagued by inconsistent and incoherent priorities. At one time, you could sum up Microsoft this way: it provided the core software businesses neede to operate their desktop computers. Now what business are they in?
Gates is griping about essentially is this: Microsoft products look like their built by a giant, complacent bureaucracy where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. This is the kind of thing Apple is good at, because it's run by a raving egomaniac product genius who damned well knows what the right and left hand are supposed to be doing, and which they'd better being doing if they don't want to catch hell. Apple gets the opposite sort of criticism; why doesn't product X do task Y as well? Why wasn't the original iPhone a platform like a PDA?
But Microsoft will never achieve the kind of product focus Apple has without shedding some businesses. I said this years ago, when Microsoft dodged the break-up bullet: they'd be better off in the long run being broken up, than trying to run a business that was all things to all people without illegal anti-competitive practices.
Indeed. It's almost as if A Brief History of Time had been chucked into a black hole. Fortunately, you can't keep a good book down, so it's bound to resurface... eventually.
But you're not off the hook. Not only is ignorance of the law not an excuse, having no way to discover what the law isn't an excuse either. The full rules regarding air travel aren't revealed to the traveling public, ostensibly for security reasons. Nonetheless the public and the airlines are expected to abide by the rules.
By that argument, since it is illegal to lie under oath in a trial, it's quite legal to lie to prosecutors and police investigating a crime. It's not legal, in case you are wondering -- it's called obstruction of justice.
Second, he never exactly lied, they merely "selectively observed" some facts, and "selectively neglected" others.
Which is also known as "lying". What you're doing is called "quibbling" by the way.
Now, if you raised the question, "Is lying to advance a policy necessarily illegal?" you'd have raised a rather interesting one. Of course it's not illegal, as the lawyers would say, "per se". It's not illegal in general for people to lie. But lies that cause damage are often crimes, in fact there are a host of crimes that involve lies that cause damage, libel for instance. Lies that represent a breach of duty are often crimes, for example if a lawyer doesn't tell you something about a contract you are entering because he has a hidden interest in something that harms you.
It's an interesting, interesting question. You don't want to hold politicians criminally liable for bad policies (or do we?). If advancing a bad policy is not a crime, and lying to advance a bad policy is not a crime, then probably lying to advanced a bad policy shouldn't be a crime.
However -- the issue here is war. The Constitution was designed to avert the issues that lead to the English Civil War. The power of the Sovereign (or in our case the Executive) to pursue war were a particular concern. The essence of the crime, if there was one, was in subverting a system which restrains the Executive's ability to make war at will.
Well, that's certainly the strongest kind of pro-operator overloading example there is, when the operator is being overloaded as a natural extension of its fundamental meaning. It makes perfect sense to do this, in the way it makes sense to overload plus for integers and reals.
On the other hand, that's not the only natural way to handle the situation you are talking about. Another way is to create a new language. Altogether, I'd rather do the kind of work you're talking about in Matlab or Octave. Or you could do something like Beanshell -- have an interpreted language that is closely tied to the underlying language and its libraries.
It's really a very narrow range of applications where extending something like C in this way is really the best approach.
We all know that young, inexperienced workers are often more creative than much older ones -- at least in very hard fields. For example in mathematics, it is the young who do most of the innovating. There may be a physical aspect to this, as the brain becomes less neurally flexible, but imagine for a moment. What if part of it may be that creativity is bound up with the struggle to expand one's mental horizons? What if once sufficiently expanded, consistency with the known territory becomes a constraint on finding new territory?
Now, instead of an individual, consider a society as a whole. What happens when the volume of knowledge of society grows to a point where the marginal value of exploring the known exceeds the marginal value of extending it? Specifically, I am thinking of an example. In the late twentieth century, people began to think much more about exploring the interdisciplinary topics. They began to think about questions like, does chemical engineering have applications to the design of cancer drugs?
I don't think science is in any danger of becoming less dynamic because because this is really just another fronteir. The connections between the knowledge we already have is a very productive place to explore. Given that more scientists are alive and working today than ever, there is plenty of old school and interdisciplinary work to go around. The demands of publication will make use of all the individual scientific creativity the world can supply.
Where we are in danger of a kind of societal senility is in political and ethical thought.
The Internet (along with other things) makes us stupider in these areas than ever, because personal progress in them depends on setting out to confirm what you already know, but failing. You can hate Jews, but if you have to live with them, work with them, and interact with them that hatred is going to be strained. The same goes for any group. You may hate liberals or conservatives, but in a pre-Internet environment you had to accommodate those viewpoints in your mental landscape.
But it feels so much nicer to get a pat on the back than a stick in the eye.
Yes, we have never as individuals had as much access to dissenting views, thanks to the Internet. But we've never had as much access to people who think just the way we do. Thanks to Internet search engine technology, it is now possible, as never before, to spend every waking moment confirming our own preconceptions, whether that is anti-semitism, ultra-right wing politics, socialism, religious fundamentalism, or whatever ism you can imagine. Rather than confronting the information that challenges our pet conspiracy theory, we can burrow into a comfortable sub-world where our opinions and beliefs are nearly always ratified.
The dynamism of how we see the world of affairs is what is danger of being lost, because it has never been easier to be intellectually lazy. There are more opportunities to expand our horizons than ever, but along with that greater convenience in choosing the same thing, over and over. There may be more kind of vegetables in the supermarket than our grandparents could name, but it's sooo easy to eat at McDonalds every day.
Well, there's no doubt in my mind that C++ is a language design tour de force. The question is whether its design objectives are the right ones.
They were probably the right objectives for the place (Bell Labs) and time (1979) it was conceived.
At the time, computers were inconceivably slow by today's standards. I worked at a small developer that had a very nice AT&T 3B2-400, which had a WE32000 microprocessor, which probably ran at about 10-15MHz; a half dozen programmers shared it.
As for the place, well, it was crawling with C programmers and C libraries, doing rather complex and important systems programming. Compatibility with C and proven C libraries would have been a huge thing.
So, an efficient, object oriented version of C was probably exactly what was needed.
I think that if there was any fault, it was the attempt to meet the goals of efficiency and compatibility with a language that implemented everything that (at the time was thought to be) necessary for programming in an object oriented style. Multiple inheritance carries too much baggage when all you want to do is to guarantee objects have a certain interface. Likewise, I think operator overloading is another example of trying to do too much. Yes, it makes programmer classes "first class citizens", but it really has no demonstrable practical benefit in my opinion. In situations where you need a special purpose language, it's probably better just to create one.
Still, that's hindsight. If you really understand all the things Stroustrup was trying to do, C++ is quite awe inspiring.
From the fog of my memory I remember many of the early commercial C++ offerings being mostly a pre-processor package, were those really just C with Classes compilers rather than true C++ ones?
I don't know about many, but I used at least one that was C++ implemented mainly with the preprocessor -- if I recall, it even did templates using name mangling. It worked, but it made debugging a challenge because the debugger was basically an OK C debugger that wasn't completely up to speed on unmangling C++ symbol names.
Simply cross compiling from one language to another is not much of a technical trick, but I'd guess that it complicates making decent debugger, so that may be one of the reasons a language like C++ "needs" a native compiler.
SSL certificates provide one thing, and one thing only: Encryption between the two ends using the certificate.
If that is true, then they have limited utility for that too. If certificates are zero good for verifying identity, then they can't protect against man in the middle attacks.
To answer the original question, a self-signed certificate is just as good as a Verisign signed certificate for anything if you have some independent way of verifying its authenticity. You can call the other guy on the phone and ask him to read the fingerprint, for example. In fact, it's arguably a tad better if have a self-signed certificate and a private means of verifying it, because Verisign is yet another party you have to trust. If I was Al Qaeda, I would't trust Verisign not to cooperate with the NSA.
The certificate authority's role is to allow two parties to provide a form identity for a party (or pair of parties) without those parties needing some independent channel for verification. Verisign is the independent verification.
You need an authority signed certificate for things like "drive by" web business. You don't want everybody ordering stuff from your web site to call you on the phone. I wouldn't bother paying for a signed certificate for any kind of private communication, for example an intranet, or a private website for my friends, although I'm sure Verisign will be happy to sell me one.
Of course, a signed certificate is only as good as (a) the security of organization creating the certificate, (b) the security of the signing authority and (c) the security of the "root certificates" on the user's machine. But there's nothing you can do about a subverted user machine using any technology. For private use, since the certificate is no better than your own practices, it makes no sense to pay for a Verisign certificate. It's not magic pixie dust that makes your certificate secure.
But, for providing some level of identity documentation between two unfamiliar parties, companies like Verisign provide a valuable service. Granted, it is to some degree a license to print money, but if the cost to you for providing verification exceeds what Verisign charges, then it makes sense to pay them. In return, Verisign has to safeguard its own keys and signing procedures, which is not quite a trivial as it sounds, given the value a black hat could gain by getting control of them.
Bottom line: self-sign a certificate if the cost of verifying the certificate (including the costs incurred by people who don't bother) is less than what the authority charges. A second situation where self-signed certificates are better is when you have special reasons not to trust any third party authority, and thus are willing to do the work of authenticating certificates yourself.
No, what I'm saying is that since we don't have any qualitative or quantitative notions about what Skynet would require, we can't confidently say whether it will happen next year, next century, or never.
However, I think it's likely that if we were close to deliberately achieving "True AI", we'd know it. This doesn't preclude the possibility that "True AI" might spontaneously emerge in some ways we don't really understand.
As a consequence of this situation, the AI field simply raises the bar for itself every time it succeeds at something.
Well, your point is that how people react to words depends on how they are said. It's also true that what a word means depends on how you say it. Some ways of using a word don't require assigning any meaning to it.
The German language has words like "doch" or "mal" which play a kind of grammatical function but don't mean anything specific. The word "fuck" is used by many people in English much the same way. Using "fuck" is not, objectively, any morally less worthy than "doch". It's just that using "fuck" as a kind of rhythmic grammatical filler is not an educated style of speech, whereas those peculiar German words are part of the mainstream dialect. Because it is an uneducated style of speech, "fuck" filled language is often found traveling in the company with stupid, mindless, and ignorant speech. Still, it is neither here nor there in itself.
Things get interesting when "fuck" is used as a curse. "Bad" language is called "cursing", but it almost never is cursing. "Fuck you" is the rare example of an actual curse. Its emotionally powerful because the sexual connotations of the word give the curse humiliating overtones. "Suck" is sometimes used in "you suck" the same way.
"Fuck" as a word can only be called automatically offensive if you define "offensiveness" so vaguely it amounts to "anything that bothers me." Some people do think this way. But for me, it's the placing of mindless humiliation on another person that's offensive. Not all uses of the word "fuck" amount to this; not even all uses of the word in a curse do. The use of language to degrade another human being could be the very definition of offensiveness.
I think AC has it right on the mark. "Intelligence" is apparently a world we use to describe computations we don't understand very well. At one point, the ability to using logic to perform a flexible sequence of calculations would have been considered "intelligence". As soon as it became common to replace payroll clerks with computers, it was no longer a form of intelligence.
We are not demonstrably closer no to reproducing (or hosting) human intelligence in a machine than we were thirty years ago. But that doesn't mean the field hasn't generated successes, its just that each success redefines the field. "True AI" has thus far been like the horizon: you can cover a lot of ground, but it doesn't get any closer.
The analogy is just illustrating the idea of stability, not security.
But in fact this is a distinction without a difference for a game console.
Of course, an open system wouldn't be less stable because it is open. This is an absurd idea. The software doesn't know whether it's open or closed. That's not a technical detail, it's a policy one. The very same software that is closed can be opened just by distributing specifications and keys. It doesn't know whether this has been done or not, and therefore it will be as stable as it ever was.
But this is a straw argument. Asking "does opening a platform make it less stable?" is an unreasonably narrow interpretation of the question, "would an open system be less stable?" If, instead you took this to mean, "would users experience more stability problems?" then security is really the key question, given that these boxes are designed to run one application at a time.
Now of course, an "open platform" is going to be more stable than a "closed platform", over the long run. However, a restricted platform is going to be more stable than an unrestricted one, over the long term, because of malware. An open platform is necessarily one with unrestricted uses. Restrictions not only discourage malware, they discourage other kinds of software that make persistent, background changes to the behavior of the system, such as system hacks to alter game play.
Now, you can argue that people should be free to hack anything they own, and I'd agree with you. You should be free to do so, knowing that the consequences are your responsibility. However the personal responsibility part is something a lot of people don't understand, so from Nintendo's standpoint it looks indistinguishable from having customers unhappy because of stability and performance issues.
The 8088 processor was chosen by IBM for the IBM PC specifically to hold personal computing back. The processor series was a very poor choice for a desktop machine.
The 6809 was a far superior chip, good enough that a reasonably convincing Unix clone was available in 1980, the year IBM decided to create the "IBM PC". That was bad from their perspectives, because it would strengthen Unix as a competitor in the midrange business. You can still get OS-9 for embedded use or set-top box use. The 6809 shared many architectural features and philosophy with the much more powerful 68000 (which also appeared in an eight bit external bus form in 1982). This would have eased the transition to 32 bit computing, which also would have been a bad thing.
This, of course, is not Microsoft's fault. IBM didn't give a damn that the processor wasn't the best choice of a desktop OS, nor did they very much care about the fact that the "OS" they chose wasn't much more than a set of primitive libraries and provided no real hardware management at all. These were, in fact, desirable from their point of view. They wanted something quick, on which they could slap the IBM nameplate and make a lot of short term bucks selling expensive doorstops, along the way keeping Apple IIs out of businesses. They succeeded on all counts in the short term, which was all the term there was meant to be. The "IBM PC" would have been a technological dead end, it was in fact intended to be so, if it wasn't for the fact somebody ended up creating a killer app for all those doorstops: Lotus 1-2-3.
Windows 3 (ca. 1990) was a tremendous achievement, given what they had to work with. But it was technically far behind what was available at the time. MacOS 6 had been available for a couple of years, and it not only had a superior GUI, it had built in support for sound and networking (which didn't come on most PCs). There was, of course, OS-9. Even Microsoft had a better OS than Windows 3 on top of DOS, namely XENIX.
So it is true that Windows accelerated the usage of MS-DOS by the average user. But DOS itself, which was the underpinnings of Windows, held the user back. How many users had to learn the nuances of TSRs, extended memory vs. expanded memory etc? How many programers had to deal with non-productive technical details like thunks as they struggled to take advantage of 32 bit hardware with a sixteen bit operating system? How long was networking delayed by proprietary protocols shoehorned onto an operating system with no fundamental support for networking, when TCP/IP had already been existence for years?
All in all, its a mixed bag. Windows made a really bad computer with really bad system software a lot more tolerable for users, and Microsoft deserves credit for this. But they don't deserve credit for personal computing. The whole "IBM PC" and "DOS" enterprise set computing back almost a decade.
Consoles are computers. Computers you don't need to buy anti-virus or anti-spyware for. Remember the things that prompted the creation of web pop-up blockers? They were a direct result of the web being an open platform.
Removing the locks from your house won't make it fall down. But it will open your house to agents who might make it impossible to live in.
Of course, this is about Nintendo getting its cut of game revenues. But they aren't in the platform business, and dealing with the problems of such a business is a reasonable motivation not to encourage average users to treat the Wii as a platform. They don't really need to make it impossible, so they don't need to take a scorched earth approach to anybody who's installed homebrew games. They just have to make life a bit inconvenient, enough that Joe Average loses interest.
Well, it's an honor. It's recognition, which is nice, but which Hawking doesn't exactly need more of.
If Wayne Gretsky was denied membership in the Hockey Hall of Fame, it wouldn't diminish his stature one bit. He might be annoyed at not being inducted, but in truth it's the Hall of Fame that is diminished. If he had a reason to refuse membership, he could do so, knowing of course that he'd effectively have to be in it, because players of the era couldn't be honored without mentioning him.
As far as women are concerned, apparently Einstein had plenty of 'em, and he wasn't exactly physically attractive. I'm sure that if Hawking's equipment is functional, he could use it on a different woman every day if he wanted to. So he doesn't get more women, no. But a lesser luminary might. Consider if you are introduced to a woman as "Dr. So and So, who is a physicist" as opposed to "Sir So and So, the physicist." To the degree being a physicist might move you towards home base (or whatever the cricket equivalent is), I'd imagine the knighthood might get you a bit farther.
This is the kind of thinking that gets us into trouble.
Imagine that funding is like water, and it flows through various pipes. Now imagine users of funding for some particular purpose are hooked up through those pipes through small diameters hookups, because they are organized around the assumption that they have to make do with, say, 100 gallons/day. Their interior plumbing is all designed around using on that order of water a day.
Now, you tell them, "I'm going to give you 10,000 gallons per day, for the next month." They don't have time to reorganize their water usage; they can barely use more than 120 gallons per day, and even that would be a challenge in the short run. Even if they could reorganize to use 10,000 gallons per day, by the time they were close to finished they'd be back down to 100. So they rush to put safety releases that throw away 9,890 gallons. They realize that it's a shame that 9890 gallons are being wasted, but that way they at least get ten extra gallons to do something productive with. In truth, they'd be more productive if you offered them 120 gallons instead of 10,000 gallons, and they'll be lucky to get as much good done as if you'd left them alone.
Lest you think this is some kind of theoretical model, let me assure you I've been part of this kind of scenario, as a vendor working with low levels of government groups where the rubber meets the road, and having that work suddenly become a political priority.
Most of the groups saw no money, because it would have taken too long to figure out how to get it to them. Where they did, they couldn't use it to extend their programs, because it was a one time windfall, so they went on a buying spree, going for more expensive equipment even if less expensive would have served them better. Probably 95% of the money was diverted at higher levels where it was funneled to vendors who didn't have any specific domain expertise, but were equipped to absorb large amounts of federal funding rapidly. In some cases mid level organizations, unable to get the funding onto the ground fast enough, spent money on support systems for the lower level. This wasn't a bad strategy, but the people didn't know how much the things they were buying should cost, and didn't have time to find out. The results were sad, but predictable.
Even if getting 10x the work done costs 10x as much (which it may or may not), you can't get 10x the work done by spending 10x as much, much less 100x as much.
It would make more sense to take that 10x money and put it in escrow, dolling it out in a bell shaped curve over five years or so, peaking in year 3. If you had 100x the money, it would make sense to take it and create an endowment that ensured more money would be spent annually.
I'm a political liberal. I think the government should spend money on all kinds of important public priorities, such as public health, scientific research and so on. However, since supporting these priorities is important to me, I'm keenly aware that there isn't enough money to do everything we'd want. Every penny wasted on something, even if that thing is itself important, deprives another priority of a penny. Sometimes the priority starved can even be the priority on which the penny was spent.
The Federal Budget should be organized into an operational budget and a capital budget, and operational costs should be paid for out of current revenues. Capital expenses can be paid for out of deficit spending, but crash programs on capital expenses should be discouraged by limiting growth in any capital category to a fixed percentage, say 20%.
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, every person believes on some level that the world would be better if it were run by people like him. The delusion that the world would be better if it were run by people in your profession is just a special case of this broader delusion. So, doctors think the world would be better if it was run by doctors, engineers think engineers could make things better, and management consultants think management consultants could get things on track.
By in large, the only profession that almost gets to put this into practice is law, and most other people aren't happy with the results, and lawyers are probably better qualified than most professions for the job of philosopher kings.
What "running things" boils down to is "dealing with people." Since people come in all different kinds, it means dealing with different perspectives. What people really want is to have their persepctives used in making decisions. Engineers want decisions that reflect their analytical skills and grasp of physical practicalities. Marketing people want decisions made that reflect their knowledge of consumer behavior and product channel distributions. Salesmen want decisions to reflect their personal knowledge of the customer. Accountants want decisions to reflect their knowledge of financial control.
Are any of them wrong?
The problem is that decision processes that involve too many people are unwieldy and impractical. If Computer Science has a single, important contribution to human thought, it would be this: some kinds of decisions can be made in theory, but there is no practical way of knowing if you've arrived at an optimal result. In particular, it isn't just that you can't please everybody; given enough people, there is no practical way to know if you are pleasing the largest number of them possible.
Therefore all human organizations, businesses included, are built around approximations and special cases. While it is true, all things being equal, that satisfying more of the engineers' concerns is better, we can never be sure that all things are equal. The idea of making the engineer's viewpoint trump all other viewpoints is probably a bad one.
As an engineer, if I was tasked with designing an organization, I might give prominence to a single group's viewpoint, but I wouldn't make it absolutely paramount over all the others, even if that group were engineers. That would be bad engineering.
Well, there may be an aspect of market positioning about it. There certainly must be.
But there's something even more basic. People are willing to pay Apple more, therefore they charge more.
I upgraded my Mini using quality components, and saved a bundle. It wasn't exactly difficult, I just needed the attitude that it didn't matter if I cracked the plastic -- which I didn't. Furthermore, Apple doesn't void my warranty for using third party parts, or even installing them myself, although naturally I'm not covered for things I damage myself. But that's not different from any other hardware manufacturer.
I think that the reason Apple can charge more is related to Apple's general pricing philosophy, which is to find out the price at which most people start caring and charge a hair below that. Itunes tracks are priced the way they are for that reason. At that price, most people don't wonder whether it is the right price.
Now, I look at the cost of ordering a Mac with a larger HD or more memory, and knowing the price of these things and being fully able to install them myself, I buy what I need from Newegg and Apple doesn't care. They're too busy making money of normal people to pick a fight with a few bull headed cheapskates. But most people would look at it this way: do they want the memory, and is the price Apple charging, while high, is not enough to make them figure out what the best RAM price is and find somebody who can crack the damned case. Under that calculus, the premium Apple charges is (presumably) chosen so that most people can't be bothered.
People who use Macs are people who are willing to pay a modest amount of money in order not to have to waste their time. And looked at objectively, while the relative amount Apple charges for RAM and hard disk is scandalous, the absolute amount is pretty negligible these days. So the customer has the confidence that his experience will be hassle free (which upgrading RAM on a Mini is not), and Apple gets a high margin product. That's the "value proposition", and it's not intended to appeal to geeks, who are benignly tolerated.
Benign toleration is actually the ideal stance from a geek perspective. We don't want to be coddled, but every user who gets coddled is one less user trying to cadge some free tech support, which gets wearisome after a while. At some point, I just tell people who've overrun my goodwill (which truthfully isn't that hard to do) to get a Mac if they want somebody else to deal with their hassles, and if I don't, I cut them off.
Of course, there is something a bit cynical in the way Apple exploits this need, but it's not "literally a rip off" as the article suggests. You're not forced to buy Apple hardware, nor are you even forced to by Apple ugprades. Apple doesn't tell you you will break your machine if you use third party upgrades, although it says truthfully you are responsible if you break the machine during the process. Nor does it require that commodity components be repackaged in a non-standard way, the way Nintendo does.
Seriously, if Apple doesn't do it for you, you should just install Linux on a 100% commodity hardware box. Linux is just as usable as MacOS these days; the process of managing the hardware and driver compatibility can be a bit of a pain from time to time, but there you go. Some people are fine with this situation, some find it reasonable to pay somebody a couple of hundred bucks a year so that that cup passeth from their lips, and a few of us will gleefully find ways to make our lives complicated no matter what affordable conveniences the market offers.
It isn't just that they act dumb. It might be just me, but those Fox newsreaders give me the creeps. It's their eyes. Their body language and facial expression are so animated, but their eyes are so lifeless.
I may be politically biased against the network, but there is something in the flawless but soulless choreography of Fox news that stinks of evil. The effect reminds me of C.S. Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength, in which a government think tank called NICE manipulates its members using their ambitions and insecurities. As their ambition drives them toward the coveted membership in the inner circle, their fear drives them further into themselves. By the time they make it into the inner circle, there's nothing outwardly left of their humanity to enjoy it. They can pass superficial inspection, but the closer you look, the more obviously robotic they are.
What makes That Hideous Strength such an effective story of the supernatural is that the mechanisms of damnation are so psychologically plausible. Anybody with sufficient money could actually put the NICE methods for turning people into passive tools to the test.
I don't know about the people on the screen, but Fox definitely plays this game with its viewers. It appeals to greed and fear.
So, in describing a (a) secret, (b) new, (c) aircraft, Fox got one out of three right?
Well, bully for them. They made it almost up to the average standard of journalism covering science and technology.
Now I don't know much about weapons and planes, but I do know that excepting a few dowdy old school journalism institutions, whenever the media reports on something I do know about, the inaccuracies make my skin crawl. Given that is probably true for the knowledgeable in any field, it follows that most news stories make their readers or viewers more ignorant than they were before.
When you do everything it's hard to do anything well.
In the Gates era. Microsoft was competitive (perhaps a bit overcompetitive), agile, and focused. In the post-Gates era, it is not longer focused. The Vista ready labeling debacle was the final indignity in a project plagued by inconsistent and incoherent priorities. At one time, you could sum up Microsoft this way: it provided the core software businesses neede to operate their desktop computers. Now what business are they in?
Gates is griping about essentially is this: Microsoft products look like their built by a giant, complacent bureaucracy where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. This is the kind of thing Apple is good at, because it's run by a raving egomaniac product genius who damned well knows what the right and left hand are supposed to be doing, and which they'd better being doing if they don't want to catch hell. Apple gets the opposite sort of criticism; why doesn't product X do task Y as well? Why wasn't the original iPhone a platform like a PDA?
But Microsoft will never achieve the kind of product focus Apple has without shedding some businesses. I said this years ago, when Microsoft dodged the break-up bullet: they'd be better off in the long run being broken up, than trying to run a business that was all things to all people without illegal anti-competitive practices.
A developer doesn't have a choice about whether a feature is used if he is doing maintenance.
Indeed. It's almost as if A Brief History of Time had been chucked into a black hole. Fortunately, you can't keep a good book down, so it's bound to resurface... eventually.
But you're not off the hook. Not only is ignorance of the law not an excuse, having no way to discover what the law isn't an excuse either. The full rules regarding air travel aren't revealed to the traveling public, ostensibly for security reasons. Nonetheless the public and the airlines are expected to abide by the rules.
By that argument, since it is illegal to lie under oath in a trial, it's quite legal to lie to prosecutors and police investigating a crime. It's not legal, in case you are wondering -- it's called obstruction of justice.
Which is also known as "lying". What you're doing is called "quibbling" by the way.
Now, if you raised the question, "Is lying to advance a policy necessarily illegal?" you'd have raised a rather interesting one. Of course it's not illegal, as the lawyers would say, "per se". It's not illegal in general for people to lie. But lies that cause damage are often crimes, in fact there are a host of crimes that involve lies that cause damage, libel for instance. Lies that represent a breach of duty are often crimes, for example if a lawyer doesn't tell you something about a contract you are entering because he has a hidden interest in something that harms you.
It's an interesting, interesting question. You don't want to hold politicians criminally liable for bad policies (or do we?). If advancing a bad policy is not a crime, and lying to advance a bad policy is not a crime, then probably lying to advanced a bad policy shouldn't be a crime.
However -- the issue here is war. The Constitution was designed to avert the issues that lead to the English Civil War. The power of the Sovereign (or in our case the Executive) to pursue war were a particular concern. The essence of the crime, if there was one, was in subverting a system which restrains the Executive's ability to make war at will.
Which means ... if you distribute documents in Word format, the terrorists will have won.
Geez, could the last presidential election have been almost four years ago?
But it is not generally useful. It is a feature of the language everyone has to deal with for a tiny minority of users.
It would make more sense to maintain a fork of the language for numerical applications.
Well, that's certainly the strongest kind of pro-operator overloading example there is, when the operator is being overloaded as a natural extension of its fundamental meaning. It makes perfect sense to do this, in the way it makes sense to overload plus for integers and reals.
On the other hand, that's not the only natural way to handle the situation you are talking about. Another way is to create a new language. Altogether, I'd rather do the kind of work you're talking about in Matlab or Octave. Or you could do something like Beanshell -- have an interpreted language that is closely tied to the underlying language and its libraries.
It's really a very narrow range of applications where extending something like C in this way is really the best approach.
We all know that young, inexperienced workers are often more creative than much older ones -- at least in very hard fields. For example in mathematics, it is the young who do most of the innovating. There may be a physical aspect to this, as the brain becomes less neurally flexible, but imagine for a moment. What if part of it may be that creativity is bound up with the struggle to expand one's mental horizons? What if once sufficiently expanded, consistency with the known territory becomes a constraint on finding new territory?
Now, instead of an individual, consider a society as a whole. What happens when the volume of knowledge of society grows to a point where the marginal value of exploring the known exceeds the marginal value of extending it? Specifically, I am thinking of an example. In the late twentieth century, people began to think much more about exploring the interdisciplinary topics. They began to think about questions like, does chemical engineering have applications to the design of cancer drugs?
I don't think science is in any danger of becoming less dynamic because because this is really just another fronteir. The connections between the knowledge we already have is a very productive place to explore. Given that more scientists are alive and working today than ever, there is plenty of old school and interdisciplinary work to go around. The demands of publication will make use of all the individual scientific creativity the world can supply.
Where we are in danger of a kind of societal senility is in political and ethical thought.
The Internet (along with other things) makes us stupider in these areas than ever, because personal progress in them depends on setting out to confirm what you already know, but failing. You can hate Jews, but if you have to live with them, work with them, and interact with them that hatred is going to be strained. The same goes for any group. You may hate liberals or conservatives, but in a pre-Internet environment you had to accommodate those viewpoints in your mental landscape.
But it feels so much nicer to get a pat on the back than a stick in the eye.
Yes, we have never as individuals had as much access to dissenting views, thanks to the Internet. But we've never had as much access to people who think just the way we do. Thanks to Internet search engine technology, it is now possible, as never before, to spend every waking moment confirming our own preconceptions, whether that is anti-semitism, ultra-right wing politics, socialism, religious fundamentalism, or whatever ism you can imagine. Rather than confronting the information that challenges our pet conspiracy theory, we can burrow into a comfortable sub-world where our opinions and beliefs are nearly always ratified.
The dynamism of how we see the world of affairs is what is danger of being lost, because it has never been easier to be intellectually lazy. There are more opportunities to expand our horizons than ever, but along with that greater convenience in choosing the same thing, over and over. There may be more kind of vegetables in the supermarket than our grandparents could name, but it's sooo easy to eat at McDonalds every day.
Well, there's no doubt in my mind that C++ is a language design tour de force. The question is whether its design objectives are the right ones.
They were probably the right objectives for the place (Bell Labs) and time (1979) it was conceived.
At the time, computers were inconceivably slow by today's standards. I worked at a small developer that had a very nice AT&T 3B2-400, which had a WE32000 microprocessor, which probably ran at about 10-15MHz; a half dozen programmers shared it.
As for the place, well, it was crawling with C programmers and C libraries, doing rather complex and important systems programming. Compatibility with C and proven C libraries would have been a huge thing.
So, an efficient, object oriented version of C was probably exactly what was needed.
I think that if there was any fault, it was the attempt to meet the goals of efficiency and compatibility with a language that implemented everything that (at the time was thought to be) necessary for programming in an object oriented style. Multiple inheritance carries too much baggage when all you want to do is to guarantee objects have a certain interface. Likewise, I think operator overloading is another example of trying to do too much. Yes, it makes programmer classes "first class citizens", but it really has no demonstrable practical benefit in my opinion. In situations where you need a special purpose language, it's probably better just to create one.
Still, that's hindsight. If you really understand all the things Stroustrup was trying to do, C++ is quite awe inspiring.
I don't know about many, but I used at least one that was C++ implemented mainly with the preprocessor -- if I recall, it even did templates using name mangling. It worked, but it made debugging a challenge because the debugger was basically an OK C debugger that wasn't completely up to speed on unmangling C++ symbol names.
Simply cross compiling from one language to another is not much of a technical trick, but I'd guess that it complicates making decent debugger, so that may be one of the reasons a language like C++ "needs" a native compiler.
If that is true, then they have limited utility for that too. If certificates are zero good for verifying identity, then they can't protect against man in the middle attacks.
To answer the original question, a self-signed certificate is just as good as a Verisign signed certificate for anything if you have some independent way of verifying its authenticity. You can call the other guy on the phone and ask him to read the fingerprint, for example. In fact, it's arguably a tad better if have a self-signed certificate and a private means of verifying it, because Verisign is yet another party you have to trust. If I was Al Qaeda, I would't trust Verisign not to cooperate with the NSA.
The certificate authority's role is to allow two parties to provide a form identity for a party (or pair of parties) without those parties needing some independent channel for verification. Verisign is the independent verification.
You need an authority signed certificate for things like "drive by" web business. You don't want everybody ordering stuff from your web site to call you on the phone. I wouldn't bother paying for a signed certificate for any kind of private communication, for example an intranet, or a private website for my friends, although I'm sure Verisign will be happy to sell me one.
Of course, a signed certificate is only as good as (a) the security of organization creating the certificate, (b) the security of the signing authority and (c) the security of the "root certificates" on the user's machine. But there's nothing you can do about a subverted user machine using any technology. For private use, since the certificate is no better than your own practices, it makes no sense to pay for a Verisign certificate. It's not magic pixie dust that makes your certificate secure.
But, for providing some level of identity documentation between two unfamiliar parties, companies like Verisign provide a valuable service. Granted, it is to some degree a license to print money, but if the cost to you for providing verification exceeds what Verisign charges, then it makes sense to pay them. In return, Verisign has to safeguard its own keys and signing procedures, which is not quite a trivial as it sounds, given the value a black hat could gain by getting control of them.
Bottom line: self-sign a certificate if the cost of verifying the certificate (including the costs incurred by people who don't bother) is less than what the authority charges. A second situation where self-signed certificates are better is when you have special reasons not to trust any third party authority, and thus are willing to do the work of authenticating certificates yourself.
You are, of course, correct. It is also true that glass is amorphous and thus has properties in common with liquids.
It just shows how a falsehood travels much farther in the company of a truth, something worth remembering in an election year.
No, what I'm saying is that since we don't have any qualitative or quantitative notions about what Skynet would require, we can't confidently say whether it will happen next year, next century, or never.
However, I think it's likely that if we were close to deliberately achieving "True AI", we'd know it. This doesn't preclude the possibility that "True AI" might spontaneously emerge in some ways we don't really understand.
As a consequence of this situation, the AI field simply raises the bar for itself every time it succeeds at something.
Well, your point is that how people react to words depends on how they are said. It's also true that what a word means depends on how you say it. Some ways of using a word don't require assigning any meaning to it.
The German language has words like "doch" or "mal" which play a kind of grammatical function but don't mean anything specific. The word "fuck" is used by many people in English much the same way. Using "fuck" is not, objectively, any morally less worthy than "doch". It's just that using "fuck" as a kind of rhythmic grammatical filler is not an educated style of speech, whereas those peculiar German words are part of the mainstream dialect. Because it is an uneducated style of speech, "fuck" filled language is often found traveling in the company with stupid, mindless, and ignorant speech. Still, it is neither here nor there in itself.
Things get interesting when "fuck" is used as a curse. "Bad" language is called "cursing", but it almost never is cursing. "Fuck you" is the rare example of an actual curse. Its emotionally powerful because the sexual connotations of the word give the curse humiliating overtones. "Suck" is sometimes used in "you suck" the same way.
"Fuck" as a word can only be called automatically offensive if you define "offensiveness" so vaguely it amounts to "anything that bothers me." Some people do think this way. But for me, it's the placing of mindless humiliation on another person that's offensive. Not all uses of the word "fuck" amount to this; not even all uses of the word in a curse do. The use of language to degrade another human being could be the very definition of offensiveness.
I think AC has it right on the mark. "Intelligence" is apparently a world we use to describe computations we don't understand very well. At one point, the ability to using logic to perform a flexible sequence of calculations would have been considered "intelligence". As soon as it became common to replace payroll clerks with computers, it was no longer a form of intelligence.
We are not demonstrably closer no to reproducing (or hosting) human intelligence in a machine than we were thirty years ago. But that doesn't mean the field hasn't generated successes, its just that each success redefines the field. "True AI" has thus far been like the horizon: you can cover a lot of ground, but it doesn't get any closer.
But in fact this is a distinction without a difference for a game console.
Of course, an open system wouldn't be less stable because it is open. This is an absurd idea. The software doesn't know whether it's open or closed. That's not a technical detail, it's a policy one. The very same software that is closed can be opened just by distributing specifications and keys. It doesn't know whether this has been done or not, and therefore it will be as stable as it ever was.
But this is a straw argument. Asking "does opening a platform make it less stable?" is an unreasonably narrow interpretation of the question, "would an open system be less stable?" If, instead you took this to mean, "would users experience more stability problems?" then security is really the key question, given that these boxes are designed to run one application at a time.
Now of course, an "open platform" is going to be more stable than a "closed platform", over the long run. However, a restricted platform is going to be more stable than an unrestricted one, over the long term, because of malware. An open platform is necessarily one with unrestricted uses. Restrictions not only discourage malware, they discourage other kinds of software that make persistent, background changes to the behavior of the system, such as system hacks to alter game play.
Now, you can argue that people should be free to hack anything they own, and I'd agree with you. You should be free to do so, knowing that the consequences are your responsibility. However the personal responsibility part is something a lot of people don't understand, so from Nintendo's standpoint it looks indistinguishable from having customers unhappy because of stability and performance issues.
The 8088 processor was chosen by IBM for the IBM PC specifically to hold personal computing back. The processor series was a very poor choice for a desktop machine.
The 6809 was a far superior chip, good enough that a reasonably convincing Unix clone was available in 1980, the year IBM decided to create the "IBM PC". That was bad from their perspectives, because it would strengthen Unix as a competitor in the midrange business. You can still get OS-9 for embedded use or set-top box use. The 6809 shared many architectural features and philosophy with the much more powerful 68000 (which also appeared in an eight bit external bus form in 1982). This would have eased the transition to 32 bit computing, which also would have been a bad thing.
This, of course, is not Microsoft's fault. IBM didn't give a damn that the processor wasn't the best choice of a desktop OS, nor did they very much care about the fact that the "OS" they chose wasn't much more than a set of primitive libraries and provided no real hardware management at all. These were, in fact, desirable from their point of view. They wanted something quick, on which they could slap the IBM nameplate and make a lot of short term bucks selling expensive doorstops, along the way keeping Apple IIs out of businesses. They succeeded on all counts in the short term, which was all the term there was meant to be. The "IBM PC" would have been a technological dead end, it was in fact intended to be so, if it wasn't for the fact somebody ended up creating a killer app for all those doorstops: Lotus 1-2-3.
Windows 3 (ca. 1990) was a tremendous achievement, given what they had to work with. But it was technically far behind what was available at the time. MacOS 6 had been available for a couple of years, and it not only had a superior GUI, it had built in support for sound and networking (which didn't come on most PCs). There was, of course, OS-9. Even Microsoft had a better OS than Windows 3 on top of DOS, namely XENIX.
So it is true that Windows accelerated the usage of MS-DOS by the average user. But DOS itself, which was the underpinnings of Windows, held the user back. How many users had to learn the nuances of TSRs, extended memory vs. expanded memory etc? How many programers had to deal with non-productive technical details like thunks as they struggled to take advantage of 32 bit hardware with a sixteen bit operating system? How long was networking delayed by proprietary protocols shoehorned onto an operating system with no fundamental support for networking, when TCP/IP had already been existence for years?
All in all, its a mixed bag. Windows made a really bad computer with really bad system software a lot more tolerable for users, and Microsoft deserves credit for this. But they don't deserve credit for personal computing. The whole "IBM PC" and "DOS" enterprise set computing back almost a decade.
This is where analogies get you messed up.
Consoles are computers. Computers you don't need to buy anti-virus or anti-spyware for. Remember the things that prompted the creation of web pop-up blockers? They were a direct result of the web being an open platform.
Removing the locks from your house won't make it fall down. But it will open your house to agents who might make it impossible to live in.
Of course, this is about Nintendo getting its cut of game revenues. But they aren't in the platform business, and dealing with the problems of such a business is a reasonable motivation not to encourage average users to treat the Wii as a platform. They don't really need to make it impossible, so they don't need to take a scorched earth approach to anybody who's installed homebrew games. They just have to make life a bit inconvenient, enough that Joe Average loses interest.
Well, it's an honor. It's recognition, which is nice, but which Hawking doesn't exactly need more of.
If Wayne Gretsky was denied membership in the Hockey Hall of Fame, it wouldn't diminish his stature one bit. He might be annoyed at not being inducted, but in truth it's the Hall of Fame that is diminished. If he had a reason to refuse membership, he could do so, knowing of course that he'd effectively have to be in it, because players of the era couldn't be honored without mentioning him.
As far as women are concerned, apparently Einstein had plenty of 'em, and he wasn't exactly physically attractive. I'm sure that if Hawking's equipment is functional, he could use it on a different woman every day if he wanted to. So he doesn't get more women, no. But a lesser luminary might. Consider if you are introduced to a woman as "Dr. So and So, who is a physicist" as opposed to "Sir So and So, the physicist." To the degree being a physicist might move you towards home base (or whatever the cricket equivalent is), I'd imagine the knighthood might get you a bit farther.
This is the kind of thinking that gets us into trouble.
Imagine that funding is like water, and it flows through various pipes. Now imagine users of funding for some particular purpose are hooked up through those pipes through small diameters hookups, because they are organized around the assumption that they have to make do with, say, 100 gallons/day. Their interior plumbing is all designed around using on that order of water a day.
Now, you tell them, "I'm going to give you 10,000 gallons per day, for the next month." They don't have time to reorganize their water usage; they can barely use more than 120 gallons per day, and even that would be a challenge in the short run. Even if they could reorganize to use 10,000 gallons per day, by the time they were close to finished they'd be back down to 100. So they rush to put safety releases that throw away 9,890 gallons. They realize that it's a shame that 9890 gallons are being wasted, but that way they at least get ten extra gallons to do something productive with. In truth, they'd be more productive if you offered them 120 gallons instead of 10,000 gallons, and they'll be lucky to get as much good done as if you'd left them alone.
Lest you think this is some kind of theoretical model, let me assure you I've been part of this kind of scenario, as a vendor working with low levels of government groups where the rubber meets the road, and having that work suddenly become a political priority.
Most of the groups saw no money, because it would have taken too long to figure out how to get it to them. Where they did, they couldn't use it to extend their programs, because it was a one time windfall, so they went on a buying spree, going for more expensive equipment even if less expensive would have served them better. Probably 95% of the money was diverted at higher levels where it was funneled to vendors who didn't have any specific domain expertise, but were equipped to absorb large amounts of federal funding rapidly. In some cases mid level organizations, unable to get the funding onto the ground fast enough, spent money on support systems for the lower level. This wasn't a bad strategy, but the people didn't know how much the things they were buying should cost, and didn't have time to find out. The results were sad, but predictable.
Even if getting 10x the work done costs 10x as much (which it may or may not), you can't get 10x the work done by spending 10x as much, much less 100x as much.
It would make more sense to take that 10x money and put it in escrow, dolling it out in a bell shaped curve over five years or so, peaking in year 3. If you had 100x the money, it would make sense to take it and create an endowment that ensured more money would be spent annually.
I'm a political liberal. I think the government should spend money on all kinds of important public priorities, such as public health, scientific research and so on. However, since supporting these priorities is important to me, I'm keenly aware that there isn't enough money to do everything we'd want. Every penny wasted on something, even if that thing is itself important, deprives another priority of a penny. Sometimes the priority starved can even be the priority on which the penny was spent.
The Federal Budget should be organized into an operational budget and a capital budget, and operational costs should be paid for out of current revenues. Capital expenses can be paid for out of deficit spending, but crash programs on capital expenses should be discouraged by limiting growth in any capital category to a fixed percentage, say 20%.