I actually came across ZKS several years ago when they first started publicizing the product. IIRC, this was how they addressed these concerns.
Each user has a pseudonym. If that pseudonym causes problems, it can be revoked, forcing the spammer to sign up again to spam again. Not really that much different than what any other ISP does, except that it is harder to prevent them from signing back up again.
Law enforcement issues: A packet can be traced by going to the first server in the chain and getting a subpeona for its logs, which will point to the next server in the chain, eventually pointing back to the sender. This would be problematic since the servers can be in different countries, but still theoretically possible. ZKS did not start up to make life easy for law enforcement, but to protect people from anyone, including law enforcement, who encroach on the their privacy.
There certainly will be abuses of ZKS, but that holds true of any system. The issue is whether or not a person should be allowed to interact with society on an anoymous level. I say yes. Police caught and convicted criminals long before there were DNA tests. They will still be able to do so without a trail of bloody footprints leading to the spammers door. If we give people tools such as ZKS, they can defend themselves from being attacked by spammers in the first place, rather than retaliating after the fact.
Meme theory looks at information as if it were a virus, capable of replicating and infecting others. The theory has its limitations, but is useful in this context.
A meme can be considered toxic if it causes you to do harm to yourself or others. You are immunized against a toxic meme if you can be exposed to it without acting on it. For instance, most people can be exposed to the potentially toxic bomb-making meme without blowing themselves up.
You can be inoculated against a particular meme by being exposed to a weakened version of it. For instance, you can be inoculated against the pyramid-scheme virus by having someone sit down and explain to you why pyramid schemes don't work.
You can also develop a resistance to a virus by repeated exposure to it. With the pyramid scheme virus, being inundated with pyramid-scheme emails--coupled with losing your shirt a few times--will probably confer immunity.
You can also prevent exposure in the first place. Done on a societal level, this is censorship.
As a society, we have a duty to prevent people from being harmed by toxic memes. The best method is inoculation. Censorship is rarely effective, especially in an electronic age, due to the incredible ease of information transfer. It is almost impossible to prevent someone from being exposed to a certain piece of information. If they haven't been inoculated against it, then they will be much more likely to be susceptible to the meme's toxic effects.
I remember as I was growing up my household had no pornographic materials. The subject was taboo and no one in my immediate family had anything as risque as a Cosmopolitan magazine in their house. Yet I came across my first Playboy magazine before I was eight, and I saw a number of other magazines with harder material long before I hit puberty and I was actually interested in the stuff. As to what impact this had on my character, I refuse to say;-)
The issue is complicated even more by disagreement over the definition of "toxic". A fundamentalist might feel that abortion constitutes a toxic meme, whereas a Pro-choice individual might feel otherwise.
All in all, you might want to minimize exposure to toxic memes for people who are particularly susceptible, but it is foolhardy to suppose that you can prevent ALL exposure. It is better to find ways to reduce the likelihood that they will act on those toxic memes.
Pinker's "The Language Instinct" is an outstanding introduction to some of the problems of linguistics. It also presents some theories as to the biological basis for language. One of his most interesting points explained the incredible difficulty in learning a new language after the age of nine or so.
Pinker feels that there is a portion of the brain that instinctively understands the possibility of grammar, and when learning a language (when young) the brain adapts to the particular grammar of a language. Children who have not been exposed to a language and yet must interact with others in the same situation will develop their own grammar and invent a vocabulary.
In other words, there isn't a "universal" grammar as such, but more of a "meta" grammar--rules for creating grammatical rules. Of course, the human mind doesn't follow these rules verbatim. Any language has a main set up grammatical rules, but there are numerous exceptions within the language that follow different rules. A universal translator might know the "meta" grammar, but it would still have to figure out the grammar for each particular language plus recognize the exceptions.
Something of a daunting task in and of itself, and we haven't even begun to talk about the problems of non-corresponding vocabulary, idioms, slang, jargon, language drift, etc., etc. I am not optimistic about the chances of a good universal translator coming around until we get a good AI that mimics the processes of the human brain. Unfortunately, such an AI would probably want coffee breaks.
Pinker has several other books out that I haven't had a chance to read yet, but they have gotten good reviews and I am sure that they would make excellent reads as well.
Sigh. I hate it when other people show me up when I am being smug. But it in a weak attempt to salvage my self-esteem...
Accretion disks tend to lose matter to the center from collisions and tidal effects. Generally, a hotter disk implies higher energy collisions and a greater chance that matter will fall out of orbit. In very strong gravitational fields, matter will fall in from general relativistic effects. But no, I suppose that they aren't direct evidence of matter falling into anything.
Hawking radiation carries energy/mass away from a black hole even though it originates at the boundary, so it could be thought of as "escaping" the black hole. Or not, depending on how you look at it.
I admit that I should not have used singularity as a synonym for black hole. I was trying to follow the journalistic practice of not overusing a term and look where it got me;-)
I should not have used the buzz-word gravitons instead of the more correct term gravitational waves. I mentioned the possibility because of an experiment that hoped that two black holes in tight orbits would generate measureable gravitational waves. And because it sounded cool.
I meant to do that. I was just checking to see if anybody would catch my mistakes...
I always hate getting science news from the regular press because they use hyperbole to describe scientifically precise terms.
...direct evidence for the first time of matter being pulled into a black hole. Accretion disks, almost by definition, are direct evidence of matter being sucked into a massive object, black hole, neutron star, white dwarf, etc. What the article doesn't say is that accretion disks are so hot and dusty that we haven't been able to see what's going on inside them. The finding of Doppler-shifted light allows us to determine, experimentally as opposed to theoretically, the speed of matter within the disk.
...extremely strong gravity sucks in everything, including light. Light is not "sucked" into a black hole. It is red-shifted by the gravitational field. Any light that crosses the event horizon is red-shifted to undetectablity by the time it leaves the gravitational field. Light can also be "bent" by going near the strong gravitational field.
...gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape Current theory allows for Hawking radiation to escape, at a rate inversely proportional to mass. Black holes of small mass should lose energy so quickly that they explode.
...a million to a billion suns compressed into a tiny region. The "tiny region" is relative. The more massive the black hole, the greater the radius of the event horizon, and the more even the gravitational gradient at the event horizon. It is possible that our entire universe is contained within the event horizon of a gigantic black hole. Current theory has difficulty explaining what happens to matter inside the event horizon. The density of matter inside a super-massive black hole would not have to be that great.
...light is stretched, or red-shifted, as it speeds away from the Earth Light is not red-shifted as it "speeds away from the Earth", except for a very minor gravitational effect. Red (or blue) shifting is due entirely to the relative velocities of the observers.
...the light seemed to be moving at a clip of about 6.5 million mph... Since the speed of light is constant, one must assume that they mean the red-shift from the light indicated that the matter was moving along at this speed relative to "stationary" gas of the disk.
The only way scientists have been able to ``see'' them up to now is by looking at the accretion disks Or by observing the wobble of a star paired to a singularity. Other, so far unsuccessful, possibilities include observing gravitational lensing effects, and gravitons.
"How old are you in light-years?" "Why, about 30 feet."
Governments do compete, but they call it war. "Hot", physical wars like Vietnam, or "cold", economic wars of the Reagan era. They are monopolistic within a given geographic region, but social and economic pressures from other countries have a tremendous impact even in peace.
The United States is the Microsoft of the political arena. The U.S. uses its sheer economic force to coerce other political entities into following its ideologies and ignores pleas for change from even large consortiums of other countries.
Governments are like infrastructure, and citizens rarely have much more say in choosing their government than they do in choosing which highways go past their house. Even in democracies, most decisions are made by unelected bureaucrats and elected officials that represent so many people that the concept of representation is meaningless.
It would be kind of nice to be able to choose one's government like one chooses an ISP. People who wanted security could subscribe to a police state, whereas people who wanted more freedom and privacy could join a government that lets them take more risks. The possibility of this happening, in an on-line sense, is very real. When I go to make an on-line transaction with another entity (say, a person or business), we would agree first to an arbitrating agency that would enforce the rules of the transaction and collect a fee (tax) for enforcing those rules.
These choices are already here in the real world, as evidenced by people choosing to live in covenant-controlled communities with stricter rules than those supplied by the local government. Unfortunately, opportunities for people who wish less security and more personal control are rare.
An electronic nation seems silly, but it could work as a collective bargaining unit for its members. It could start out by lobbying for policy changes in the various governments of its members. Get, say, 100 million people from around the world signed on, and I guarantee that you will be able to get pretty much any conventional government to sit down at the table to talk.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually came across ZKS several years ago when they first started publicizing the product. IIRC, this was how they addressed these concerns.
Each user has a pseudonym. If that pseudonym causes problems, it can be revoked, forcing the spammer to sign up again to spam again. Not really that much different than what any other ISP does, except that it is harder to prevent them from signing back up again.
Law enforcement issues: A packet can be traced by going to the first server in the chain and getting a subpeona for its logs, which will point to the next server in the chain, eventually pointing back to the sender. This would be problematic since the servers can be in different countries, but still theoretically possible. ZKS did not start up to make life easy for law enforcement, but to protect people from anyone, including law enforcement, who encroach on the their privacy.
There certainly will be abuses of ZKS, but that holds true of any system. The issue is whether or not a person should be allowed to interact with society on an anoymous level. I say yes. Police caught and convicted criminals long before there were DNA tests. They will still be able to do so without a trail of bloody footprints leading to the spammers door. If we give people tools such as ZKS, they can defend themselves from being attacked by spammers in the first place, rather than retaliating after the fact.
Meme theory looks at information as if it were a virus, capable of replicating and infecting others. The theory has its limitations, but is useful in this context.
;-)
A meme can be considered toxic if it causes you to do harm to yourself or others. You are immunized against a toxic meme if you can be exposed to it without acting on it. For instance, most people can be exposed to the potentially toxic bomb-making meme without blowing themselves up.
You can be inoculated against a particular meme by being exposed to a weakened version of it. For instance, you can be inoculated against the pyramid-scheme virus by having someone sit down and explain to you why pyramid schemes don't work.
You can also develop a resistance to a virus by repeated exposure to it. With the pyramid scheme virus, being inundated with pyramid-scheme emails--coupled with losing your shirt a few times--will probably confer immunity.
You can also prevent exposure in the first place. Done on a societal level, this is censorship.
As a society, we have a duty to prevent people from being harmed by toxic memes. The best method is inoculation. Censorship is rarely effective, especially in an electronic age, due to the incredible ease of information transfer. It is almost impossible to prevent someone from being exposed to a certain piece of information. If they haven't been inoculated against it, then they will be much more likely to be susceptible to the meme's toxic effects.
I remember as I was growing up my household had no pornographic materials. The subject was taboo and no one in my immediate family had anything as risque as a Cosmopolitan magazine in their house. Yet I came across my first Playboy magazine before I was eight, and I saw a number of other magazines with harder material long before I hit puberty and I was actually interested in the stuff. As to what impact this had on my character, I refuse to say
The issue is complicated even more by disagreement over the definition of "toxic". A fundamentalist might feel that abortion constitutes a toxic meme, whereas a Pro-choice individual might feel otherwise.
All in all, you might want to minimize exposure to toxic memes for people who are particularly susceptible, but it is foolhardy to suppose that you can prevent ALL exposure. It is better to find ways to reduce the likelihood that they will act on those toxic memes.
Pinker's "The Language Instinct" is an outstanding introduction to some of the problems of linguistics. It also presents some theories as to the biological basis for language. One of his most interesting points explained the incredible difficulty in learning a new language after the age of nine or so.
Pinker feels that there is a portion of the brain that instinctively understands the possibility of grammar, and when learning a language (when young) the brain adapts to the particular grammar of a language. Children who have not been exposed to a language and yet must interact with others in the same situation will develop their own grammar and invent a vocabulary.
In other words, there isn't a "universal" grammar as such, but more of a "meta" grammar--rules for creating grammatical rules. Of course, the human mind doesn't follow these rules verbatim. Any language has a main set up grammatical rules, but there are numerous exceptions within the language that follow different rules. A universal translator might know the "meta" grammar, but it would still have to figure out the grammar for each particular language plus recognize the exceptions.
Something of a daunting task in and of itself, and we haven't even begun to talk about the problems of non-corresponding vocabulary, idioms, slang, jargon, language drift, etc., etc. I am not optimistic about the chances of a good universal translator coming around until we get a good AI that mimics the processes of the human brain. Unfortunately, such an AI would probably want coffee breaks.
Pinker has several other books out that I haven't had a chance to read yet, but they have gotten good reviews and I am sure that they would make excellent reads as well.
Sigh. I hate it when other people show me up when I am being smug. But it in a weak attempt to salvage my self-esteem...
;-)
Accretion disks tend to lose matter to the center from collisions and tidal effects. Generally, a hotter disk implies higher energy collisions and a greater chance that matter will fall out of orbit. In very strong gravitational fields, matter will fall in from general relativistic effects. But no, I suppose that they aren't direct evidence of matter falling into anything.
Hawking radiation carries energy/mass away from a black hole even though it originates at the boundary, so it could be thought of as "escaping" the black hole. Or not, depending on how you look at it.
I admit that I should not have used singularity as a synonym for black hole. I was trying to follow the journalistic practice of not overusing a term and look where it got me
I should not have used the buzz-word gravitons instead of the more correct term gravitational waves. I mentioned the possibility because of an experiment that hoped that two black holes in tight orbits would generate measureable gravitational waves. And because it sounded cool.
I meant to do that. I was just checking to see if anybody would catch my mistakes...
Accretion disks, almost by definition, are direct evidence of matter being sucked into a massive object, black hole, neutron star, white dwarf, etc. What the article doesn't say is that accretion disks are so hot and dusty that we haven't been able to see what's going on inside them. The finding of Doppler-shifted light allows us to determine, experimentally as opposed to theoretically, the speed of matter within the disk.
Light is not "sucked" into a black hole. It is red-shifted by the gravitational field. Any light that crosses the event horizon is red-shifted to undetectablity by the time it leaves the gravitational field. Light can also be "bent" by going near the strong gravitational field.
Current theory allows for Hawking radiation to escape, at a rate inversely proportional to mass. Black holes of small mass should lose energy so quickly that they explode.
The "tiny region" is relative. The more massive the black hole, the greater the radius of the event horizon, and the more even the gravitational gradient at the event horizon. It is possible that our entire universe is contained within the event horizon of a gigantic black hole. Current theory has difficulty explaining what happens to matter inside the event horizon. The density of matter inside a super-massive black hole would not have to be that great.
Light is not red-shifted as it "speeds away from the Earth", except for a very minor gravitational effect. Red (or blue) shifting is due entirely to the relative velocities of the observers.
Since the speed of light is constant, one must assume that they mean the red-shift from the light indicated that the matter was moving along at this speed relative to "stationary" gas of the disk.
The only way scientists have been able to ``see'' them up to now is by looking at the accretion disks
"How old are you in light-years?" "Why, about 30 feet."Or by observing the wobble of a star paired to a singularity. Other, so far unsuccessful, possibilities include observing gravitational lensing effects, and gravitons.
Governments do compete, but they call it war. "Hot", physical wars like Vietnam, or "cold", economic wars of the Reagan era. They are monopolistic within a given geographic region, but social and economic pressures from other countries have a tremendous impact even in peace.
The United States is the Microsoft of the political arena. The U.S. uses its sheer economic force to coerce other political entities into following its ideologies and ignores pleas for change from even large consortiums of other countries.
Governments are like infrastructure, and citizens rarely have much more say in choosing their government than they do in choosing which highways go past their house. Even in democracies, most decisions are made by unelected bureaucrats and elected officials that represent so many people that the concept of representation is meaningless.
It would be kind of nice to be able to choose one's government like one chooses an ISP. People who wanted security could subscribe to a police state, whereas people who wanted more freedom and privacy could join a government that lets them take more risks. The possibility of this happening, in an on-line sense, is very real. When I go to make an on-line transaction with another entity (say, a person or business), we would agree first to an arbitrating agency that would enforce the rules of the transaction and collect a fee (tax) for enforcing those rules.
These choices are already here in the real world, as evidenced by people choosing to live in covenant-controlled communities with stricter rules than those supplied by the local government. Unfortunately, opportunities for people who wish less security and more personal control are rare.
An electronic nation seems silly, but it could work as a collective bargaining unit for its members. It could start out by lobbying for policy changes in the various governments of its members. Get, say, 100 million people from around the world signed on, and I guarantee that you will be able to get pretty much any conventional government to sit down at the table to talk.
Pie-in-the-sky stuff, though.