I agree that point (3) is a problem. Points (1) and (2) are technological issues that can be solved with time.
I think the "cruise missiles and container bombs" argument makes no sense, because these two delivery systems do not have the same potential as ICBMs. A cruise missile is basically a jet aircraft, and we already know how to shoot those down. They also take a relatively long time (i.e., hours) to arrive at their target, giving plenty of warning. As for container bombs, you could use them to attack a city, but you could never get one close enough to a hardened military installation to do significant damage. It would be an effective tool for terrorists, but totally worthless as a military strike. And it would be almost impossible to co-ordinate more than a few simultaneous container-bomb attacks.
By contrast, ICBMs can be used to attack any target in the world, take around 45 minutes from launch to impact, can be used in co-ordinated attacks of unlimited size, and cannot be stopped with existing technology.
The promise of missile defence is to make massive nuclear attack obsolete as a weapon of war. I think that is a worthwhile goal.
I agree, I don't think the problem of intercepting the missiles in space will be solved until the kill devices become as cheap and easy to launch as the decoys, which will probably not be for decades.
However, with existing technology it is trivial to distinguish real vehicles from decoys in the upper atmosphere, say 50 km up, because the light decoys will fall behind the heavy warhead. The energies and distances in this phase of flight mean that successful interception would still destroy the warhead without harming anything on the ground. This is the kind of environment that the article is talking about.
And, sure, missile defence has issues -- it is a fundamentally difficult problem. But I don't see an alternative. I find MAD extremely distasteful, and there have been enough near misses to discredit it as a permanent solution. Disarmament is probably hopeless: the past 15 years have seen unprecedented peace among nuclear-armed nations, yet proliferation is getting worse.
The problems take time and effort to solve, which is why I advocate missile defence research. I do agree that many current implementations suck, but this does not imply that the idea is impossible.
For those who oppose missile defence, I ask: The only other thing protecting you from nuclear attack is the fact that the United States is willing to commit an act of genocide to avenge your death. Does that make you sleep better at night? Especially since this does not protect you against mistakes, malfunctions, or insanity.
In 2000, I did Slackware 3.4 (I think... can't remember) on an ancient Toshiba 486-33 laptop with 8 MB of RAM, 200 MB of hard disk, and a 640x480 black-and-white screen. I used Slackware because it was the only package for which a base system (kernel + network) could be installed by floppy, which ended up being about twenty disks. Then I set up PLIP to transfer X Windows, GCC, and LaTeX, which all fit, amazingly enough.
I had grand visions of on-the-go computing with cheap hardware, but it was so slow and painful that the only thing I got from it was a good story for a Slashdot post about old machines.
If it were possible, within the limits of human technology, to take over the world with a computer virus, we would have seen some indication of it by now.
However, if the aliens had some kind of magic technology that overcame human limitations, using it to take over the world via a computer virus is kind of ridiculous. They could just take over the world directly.
And assuming that there are malicious aliens with technology far beyond ours, we're screwed anyway. So there is really no point in worrying about SETI security holes, or even about aliens in general.
Slashdot moderation bears very little resemblance to peer review.
Imagine that every slashdot comment got at least three moderations, and that each moderation involved not only a score but a written justification for the score, along with editing comments and questions for clarification.
Also imagine that you were expected to be a good moderator in exchange for the privilege of posting comments. And imagine that people's careers (including yours) hinged on timely and thoughtful reviews.
In reality, Slashdot moderation is much more like a popularity contest than a review. And items that have already been modded up are most likely to get further moderations, which is inherently unfair: the loudest voices are the ones that are most likely to get louder.
Re:Rationalizing pro-choiceism as trespass
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
Interesting argument... haven't heard of that one before.
The problem is that the fetus can't form intent to trespass, and (assuming consent) the mother is partly responsible for the fetus being there.
Also, the argument implicitly supposes that the fetus is a separate entity from the woman.
Your comment does not address the problem of freeloading.
Information only has value when it's used and built upon. Keeping it secret is pointless.
Your second sentence does not follow from the first. Keeping it secret means that the originator can use the information and build upon it in a way that does not surrender the secret.
My comment refutes both points. It does not follow that a service-oriented company would be happy to open the source of their free software product. Quite the opposite; if I could read their source code, I might understand it well enough to compete with them for the service contract, and I didn't have to pay the overhead to hire a programmer to write it in the first place.
If there is no copyright, then only secret information has any value. No copyright means less sharing of source code, because why would you surrender your secret information and void its value?
I am aware of the FSF's position, but I have never heard a decent response to the above argument.
I have heard this argument before, and it ignores the fact that the binaries may be free, but nobody obliges you to share the source. Waiting for somebody to do something shady and/or illegal to release the Windows source is hardly a solution.
In a world free of copyright, the only value in information is secrecy, which would lead to much less information sharing.
The strongest argument in favor of copyright protection is the GPL.
Without copyright, there are no licenses, which is almost the same as using the BSD license. So the fact that open source projects tend to prefer GPL to BSD means that even open source advocates appreciate the value of copyright.
Ironically, Richard Stallman's greatest contribution may have been to illustrate the power of copyright protection.
I wouldn't classify JAXA as a minor space agency. However, it's not the first robotic landing on an asteroid. NEAR's landing is not in any dispute, as far as I know.
Let me firstly say that I like your show as entertainment. However, I do not like it as a form of true skepticism or as science. What you do is fun and interesting, but it is not rigorous. I'm thinking particularly of the time you tried to flip a taxi with a jet engine, which failed on your show, but which actually happened in real life. So it's not obvious that a failure on your show means anything.
My question is this: are you taking yourselves too seriously as "myth busters"? (And a suggestion: why not let a physics prof supervise some of your stunts?)
Dressing comfortably and dressing well are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to look great in jeans and t-shirt, if the jeans and t-shirt are stylish, just as it's possible to look like a dork while wearing a suit and tie, if the suit and tie came from Wal-Mart.
Geeks shouldn't be afraid to put thought into their clothes. Style is not completely mysterious, and though the rules can sometimes be subtle, they are learnable with a bit of effort. What's more, looking nice does wonders for your self-confidence and your authority with others, whether they are conscious of the effect or not. It doesn't even have to be expensive if you know where to look.
Also: Chicks dig it when you ask them to go clothes shopping with you. You get style advice, and they get to play with a life-sized Ken doll.
If Star Trek has taught us nothing else, it is that probes lost in space are a
badthing. And the fact that it's Japanese means that it's definitely going to come back and go apeshit.
Claims of increased disease rates, such as asthma, are inevitably fuzzy because they can have more than one cause and vary significantly from place to place. In many cases, it is difficult to say what exactly causes a disease, and it is possible that local combinations of factors are causing effects that are attributed to pollution. So such cost/benefit analyses are inevitably controversial and potentially misleading.
For example, some controversial estimates of casualties from Chernobyl ran into the hundreds of thousands, by counting everyone who died "prematurely" from cancer. However, many people die of cancer anyway; "prematurely" depends on definition; and the former USSR was already heavily polluted with non-radioactive contaminants. Other estimates claim that there is no causal link between the radiation and any increased mortality.
I am not saying that comprehensive are not possibly worthwhile. However, the reason why they don't appear is probably that the potential for criticism and abuse are tremendous.
This is the point though. I never said I couldn't get it to work, I said I was tired of getting punished for it. I don't enjoy wasting a lot of time futzing with kernel patches and hoping for the best, which seemed to happen every time I did a major upgrade. In short, the onus should not be on me to make it work -- the onus should be on the OS to work without my intervention.
Also, for the record, Linux doesn't suck. But I found I could get my command line fix with XP and Cygwin, without the hardware annoyances.
I gave up Linux mostly because I was tired of getting punished for having new hardware, which is often unsupported. Especially on laptops.
If you don't force the manufacturers to include their driver source in the kernel, you might get them to release actual drivers for their new hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that point (3) is a problem. Points (1) and (2) are technological issues that can be solved with time.
I think the "cruise missiles and container bombs" argument makes no sense, because these two delivery systems do not have the same potential as ICBMs. A cruise missile is basically a jet aircraft, and we already know how to shoot those down. They also take a relatively long time (i.e., hours) to arrive at their target, giving plenty of warning. As for container bombs, you could use them to attack a city, but you could never get one close enough to a hardened military installation to do significant damage. It would be an effective tool for terrorists, but totally worthless as a military strike. And it would be almost impossible to co-ordinate more than a few simultaneous container-bomb attacks.
By contrast, ICBMs can be used to attack any target in the world, take around 45 minutes from launch to impact, can be used in co-ordinated attacks of unlimited size, and cannot be stopped with existing technology.
The promise of missile defence is to make massive nuclear attack obsolete as a weapon of war. I think that is a worthwhile goal.
I agree, I don't think the problem of intercepting the missiles in space will be solved until the kill devices become as cheap and easy to launch as the decoys, which will probably not be for decades.
However, with existing technology it is trivial to distinguish real vehicles from decoys in the upper atmosphere, say 50 km up, because the light decoys will fall behind the heavy warhead. The energies and distances in this phase of flight mean that successful interception would still destroy the warhead without harming anything on the ground. This is the kind of environment that the article is talking about.
And, sure, missile defence has issues -- it is a fundamentally difficult problem. But I don't see an alternative. I find MAD extremely distasteful, and there have been enough near misses to discredit it as a permanent solution. Disarmament is probably hopeless: the past 15 years have seen unprecedented peace among nuclear-armed nations, yet proliferation is getting worse.
The problems take time and effort to solve, which is why I advocate missile defence research. I do agree that many current implementations suck, but this does not imply that the idea is impossible.
For those who oppose missile defence, I ask: The only other thing protecting you from nuclear attack is the fact that the United States is willing to commit an act of genocide to avenge your death. Does that make you sleep better at night? Especially since this does not protect you against mistakes, malfunctions, or insanity.
In 2000, I did Slackware 3.4 (I think ... can't remember) on an ancient Toshiba 486-33 laptop with 8 MB of RAM, 200 MB of hard disk, and a 640x480 black-and-white screen. I used Slackware because it was the only package for which a base system (kernel + network) could be installed by floppy, which ended up being about twenty disks. Then I set up PLIP to transfer X Windows, GCC, and LaTeX, which all fit, amazingly enough.
I had grand visions of on-the-go computing with cheap hardware, but it was so slow and painful that the only thing I got from it was a good story for a Slashdot post about old machines.
The basic argument is this:
If it were possible, within the limits of human technology, to take over the world with a computer virus, we would have seen some indication of it by now.
However, if the aliens had some kind of magic technology that overcame human limitations, using it to take over the world via a computer virus is kind of ridiculous. They could just take over the world directly.
And assuming that there are malicious aliens with technology far beyond ours, we're screwed anyway. So there is really no point in worrying about SETI security holes, or even about aliens in general.
Slashdot moderation bears very little resemblance to peer review.
Imagine that every slashdot comment got at least three moderations, and that each moderation involved not only a score but a written justification for the score, along with editing comments and questions for clarification.
Also imagine that you were expected to be a good moderator in exchange for the privilege of posting comments. And imagine that people's careers (including yours) hinged on timely and thoughtful reviews.
In reality, Slashdot moderation is much more like a popularity contest than a review. And items that have already been modded up are most likely to get further moderations, which is inherently unfair: the loudest voices are the ones that are most likely to get louder.
Interesting argument ... haven't heard of that one before.
The problem is that the fetus can't form intent to trespass, and (assuming consent) the mother is partly responsible for the fetus being there.
Also, the argument implicitly supposes that the fetus is a separate entity from the woman.
Your comment does not address the problem of freeloading.
Information only has value when it's used and built upon. Keeping it secret is pointless.
Your second sentence does not follow from the first. Keeping it secret means that the originator can use the information and build upon it in a way that does not surrender the secret.
My comment refutes both points. It does not follow that a service-oriented company would be happy to open the source of their free software product. Quite the opposite; if I could read their source code, I might understand it well enough to compete with them for the service contract, and I didn't have to pay the overhead to hire a programmer to write it in the first place.
If there is no copyright, then only secret information has any value. No copyright means less sharing of source code, because why would you surrender your secret information and void its value?
I am aware of the FSF's position, but I have never heard a decent response to the above argument.
I have heard this argument before, and it ignores the fact that the binaries may be free, but nobody obliges you to share the source. Waiting for somebody to do something shady and/or illegal to release the Windows source is hardly a solution.
In a world free of copyright, the only value in information is secrecy, which would lead to much less information sharing.
Do you want to replace the copyright system with private contracts that achieve the same effect? If so, it's hard to argue that copyright is dying.
The strongest argument in favor of copyright protection is the GPL.
Without copyright, there are no licenses, which is almost the same as using the BSD license. So the fact that open source projects tend to prefer GPL to BSD means that even open source advocates appreciate the value of copyright.
Ironically, Richard Stallman's greatest contribution may have been to illustrate the power of copyright protection.
I wouldn't classify JAXA as a minor space agency. However, it's not the first robotic landing on an asteroid. NEAR's landing is not in any dispute, as far as I know.
Let me firstly say that I like your show as entertainment. However, I do not like it as a form of true skepticism or as science. What you do is fun and interesting, but it is not rigorous. I'm thinking particularly of the time you tried to flip a taxi with a jet engine, which failed on your show, but which actually happened in real life. So it's not obvious that a failure on your show means anything.
My question is this: are you taking yourselves too seriously as "myth busters"? (And a suggestion: why not let a physics prof supervise some of your stunts?)
Yeah, I remember all those white pages with black text and blue links. Back when every nerd had to have a personal web site.
I may be a nerd, but I like to think of my page design as "clean" and "fast-loading", thank you very much.
Hey, I'd sell out too, if anybody was buying.
Dressing comfortably and dressing well are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to look great in jeans and t-shirt, if the jeans and t-shirt are stylish, just as it's possible to look like a dork while wearing a suit and tie, if the suit and tie came from Wal-Mart.
Geeks shouldn't be afraid to put thought into their clothes. Style is not completely mysterious, and though the rules can sometimes be subtle, they are learnable with a bit of effort. What's more, looking nice does wonders for your self-confidence and your authority with others, whether they are conscious of the effect or not. It doesn't even have to be expensive if you know where to look.
Also: Chicks dig it when you ask them to go clothes shopping with you. You get style advice, and they get to play with a life-sized Ken doll.
C'est un sig. Tu est vachement stupide (et plus stupide qu'un vache aussi).
Je vous presente a Magritte.
Lrn2RdFlBks. UGtMrFrmIt
"Learn to read, fullbacks"? I hardly think it's fair to blame college sports.
But they cost a lot more than a book.
In India, I hear they give you a free sysadmin with your coffee at Starbucks.
If Star Trek has taught us nothing else, it is that probes lost in space are a bad thing. And the fact that it's Japanese means that it's definitely going to come back and go apeshit.
Claims of increased disease rates, such as asthma, are inevitably fuzzy because they can have more than one cause and vary significantly from place to place. In many cases, it is difficult to say what exactly causes a disease, and it is possible that local combinations of factors are causing effects that are attributed to pollution. So such cost/benefit analyses are inevitably controversial and potentially misleading.
For example, some controversial estimates of casualties from Chernobyl ran into the hundreds of thousands, by counting everyone who died "prematurely" from cancer. However, many people die of cancer anyway; "prematurely" depends on definition; and the former USSR was already heavily polluted with non-radioactive contaminants. Other estimates claim that there is no causal link between the radiation and any increased mortality.
I am not saying that comprehensive are not possibly worthwhile. However, the reason why they don't appear is probably that the potential for criticism and abuse are tremendous.
This is the point though. I never said I couldn't get it to work, I said I was tired of getting punished for it. I don't enjoy wasting a lot of time futzing with kernel patches and hoping for the best, which seemed to happen every time I did a major upgrade. In short, the onus should not be on me to make it work -- the onus should be on the OS to work without my intervention.
Also, for the record, Linux doesn't suck. But I found I could get my command line fix with XP and Cygwin, without the hardware annoyances.
I gave up Linux mostly because I was tired of getting punished for having new hardware, which is often unsupported. Especially on laptops.
If you don't force the manufacturers to include their driver source in the kernel, you might get them to release actual drivers for their new hardware.