A lot of these prosecutions seem to hinge on a modification being marketed in a fashion that leaves its intended purpose open to interpretation.
While lawyers will of course always oil the wheels of litigatation regardless of commonsense, morality, ethics, or the laws of physics, one should at least make it a little bit harder for them wherever possible.
For example, in the case of the Xbox mod chip, if a company created and marketed a device with the single and sole purpose of allowing Linux to be booted natively on powerup, and supported this purpose with Xbox Linux distros on its website plus all the relevant FAQs, and with extra features in the bootstrap making the purpose plain (eg. kernel boot parameter storage) as well as displaying a prominent intended-use disclaimer, this would make litigating against the company significantly harder than at present.
I think people may have missed the point of this article, which is that Sun say that there is no workaround for the hole.
If it is true that the vulnerability is caused by a flaw in the input validation of a CGI (common gateway interface) script, and yet there is no workaround other than removing the Security Hardening Package, this implies that the CGI validation script (overflow.cgi) is not available for modification, so regardless of what license this is under, it's effectively not open source, otherwise there would be a workaround.
Well, we hardly need reminding of that in this forum, but perhaps somebody should make this point to ExtremeTech and to Sun. The CERT advisory rather oddly avoids this point as well, despite identifying the flawed component. It probably just shows that a company's inflexible procedures (package updates in this case) can effectively close even a theoretically open platform like the RaQ.
There are a number of fallacies being expressed in this thread.
The first is that, for some reason which is never explained, interaction with humans by going out and meeting them in the flesh is somehow good, while interacting with their chosen images in an online world is somehow bad. There are many reasons why this argument is threadbare, and there are even counterarguments to favor online interaction, but I'll point out just one fallacy that undermines it all: so-called "direct" interaction is actually nothing of the sort, it's just better-integrated electronic interaction with those people in your physical proximity. Your eyes and ears (both electronic signal interfaces) provide you with most of that alleged "direct" interaction unless you're in sexual contact, and that's no different online. The difference is primarily one of bandwidth and degree of integration with your senses; it's early days in that respect online, admittedly, but if your anti-online argument relies on those underdeveloped aspects of it then you have to admit that your argument will lose validity in the future as those things improve.
The second fallacy relates to bandwidth of interaction and its importance. The signals we receive are merely hints to our perceptual machinery, as our minds perform an immense amount of interpretation on the data that comes in. The extent of this internal processing is so collosal that we are easily immersed in virtual worlds when reading novels, and the bandwidth of incoming data there is absolutely minute, a tiny fraction of today's typical modem bandwidth. In a modern online MMRPG, the bandwidths involved are much closer to those in so-called "direct" interaction that those involved in reading, so the low-bandwidth argument is not convincing. In any case, I've yet to hear anyone trying to claim that reading is not worthwhile owing to low bandwidth compared to "direct" interaction with people.
And finally, since the topic of so many contributions has been addiction and loss of time that could better be spent in worthwhile personal development, it is worth pointing out an unstated or forgotten insincerity on the part of many people that criticize online worlds. Something like 85 percent of people in the developed world that come home after work or school and begin some form of entertainment (as opposed to more work), do so by turning on the television. This non-interactive medium spoon-feeds them brainless addictive pap for the masses for hours each day, almost entirely bypasses their intellectual machinery, wastes their time while creating nothing in which they can take pride, and certainly involves no worthwhile social interaction. The concept of a TV watcher somehow finding fault with people that inhabit an online world full to the brim with an intense interactive social fabric is so incongruous as to be funny.
PS. I come to this from the perspective of where things are going in a few decades' time. It wasn't so long ago that family and friends used to be puzzled by my inhabiting Internet communities like this one and many others --- "That's not real life, just gazing at a monitor, you shouldn't be wasting your time" was their (usually unstated) view. Now several of them use the Internet, and even inhabit their own online communities without any encouragement from me. Apparently there is "life" online as well, it turns out, haha. Well, it's early days still, I'll be the first to admit, but anyone that thinks of online worlds purely in terms of addiction and waste of time simply does not understand what the future holds.
What does it say about a company that allows paid on-staff nitwits free reign to say any stupid thing they want to.
It says that the company is in the business of hiring incompetents to save money, and then finds that they have have got exactly what they paid for.
A competent professional will in general not work (for long, anyway) under gagging orders, and will for the most part provide good support. But good support is not always comfortable for those "in control", because it often exposes the weaknesses created by management and other handwavers. Tough. Ultimately it's the company's senior people that have created its problems, and blaming the low-paid first-line support staff is the height of arrogance and misdirection of blame.
This is happening everywhere where there are politicians, because the Internet and all computing and advances in communications are undermining the power that governments once had in being able to monitor and control their subjugate populations. The idiocy which you see is a response to their belated realization of the new freedoms which people have acquired over the last few years, their panicked attempt to regain control. All the bogeymen are being deployed, "Stop Terrorism", "Protect the Children", even "Safeguard your Culture" in many places.
So, since the highest level of security is so important to them, comply: use the strongest encryption possible, everywhere. This will of course also make your systems unbreachable and unmonitorable by them as well. Oh dear.:-)
Whether people believe or don't believe that this effect is real or non-existent is completely irrelevant. We have a perfectly good scientific method for distinguishing reality from fiction, and any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.
The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification, which may succeed or fail, or else it won't provide it, in which case it fails by default on the scientific front. Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.
If you work for a company where they care more about their image and liability than about how good your technical contribution is and how well you are helping the customer, it's time you got up and left, because it's clearly run by lawyers and image makers instead of by someone that does anything useful.
Wow, this was a blast from the past for me, as that was one of the first SF books I ever read -- thanks for the nostalgic memory:-)
In fact, "The City and the Stars" may have been the book that introduced me to the genre. It must be time for a reread though, as I seem to recall it as a sort of thinking person's Logan's Run, which surely must be wildly inaccurate and only just short of being an insult.:-)
As is the case with all fictional literature, the "best" is that which most effectively triggers, shapes, and gives life to the mental images which writing can only stimulate in our minds rather than convey directly.
Since minds are so different from individual to individual, and sometimes utterly so, there can never be a single "best". At most, the fact that any given book is seen as "best" by more people than any other simply means that there are more people with that particular mental makeup which allows that book to succeed. Quite often, this translates to those people inhabiting similar memespaces, which is very common especially in high-bandwidth communities both online and off.
So, which SF books best trigger my mental imagery at the present time? In several categories of subjective assessment:
Iain M. Banks's Culture novels
-- most convincing galactic future
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
-- most convincing human-level future
C.J. Cherryh's The Chronicles of Morgaine
-- most forceful and single-minded heroine
Peter F. Hamilton's The Nano Flower
-- most luscious yet unobstrusive image weaving
Walter Jon Williams's Aristoi
-- most distant yet still recognizable future
E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series
-- fastest delivery of mental images:-)
Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time
-- most endearing treatment of distant future
I'd expect a fairly good correlation with the "bests" of other SF readers on Slashdot, as the memespaces of the technical communities tend to be fairly cohesive. Ultimately though, it really doesn't matter, since "best" is a personal issue.
Provide at least one pair of filepaths which generate a hash collision under whatever scenario you care to specify, so that others can test and verify the resulting effect, even if it's probabilistic and requires billions of reruns to trigger -- no problem.
If the effect isn't seen by anyone else under any conditions, then the problem doesn't exist. Conversely, if it does happen under some repeatable conditions (even if only extremely rarely) then it *is* a problem, and will be fixed.
If you want to be constructive about it, take this issue out of mythology and onto firmer ground.
How does he deal with thrust imbalance?
on
To the Moon, Alice
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· Score: 4
As a close friend of Rocket Guy...
You might be the right person to ask this to then. How does he intend to prevent the rocket from going up and over and straight back down into the ground, or else up and around and around like a catherine wheel?
The mere fact that the rocket outlet is in front of the centre of mass of the vehicle does not guarantee anything at all about the direction of travel. If the thrust is sufficient but not perfectly balanced on the line between the centre of mass of the rocket and the gravitational centre of the Earth, the leading rocket can easily pull the whole vehicle up and around and down or into a rapid catherine wheel spin.
There could be absolutely nothing the pilot can do about this manually because the potentially huge inertial forces could pin him (or any mechanical devices) into immobility. And it could all happen so fast that he wouldn't have time to balance the upward thrust nicely.
They also have to guarantee delivery of the game in the same time-frame as the release of the next sequel.
I wonder if there is a penalty clause for late delivery in the agreement. If Microsoft's games hardware and software divisions are as tardy as their operating system brethren, the Matrix's famous "There is no spoon" will doubtless be echoed with funnier versions to keep us amused.
... but as to physics I recommend you read Intellectual Impostures (Alan Sokal + Jean Bricmont) for a pretty thorough debunking of radical subjectivism.
Debunk away all you like, but it still won't give us access to the actual structure of reality.
Sokal and Bricmont did well to debunk the more ridiculous ideas of that group of nutty philosophers, but no scientist that understands the nature of the scientific method would ever postulate the existence of an objective reality, except possibly when talking down to non-scientists. The idea runs counter to everything that's taught from Physics 101 upwards. Heck, we certainly don't teach students that electrons are real! Like everything else in the world of the physicist, they're just a model.
Unless someone can come up with a magic wand outside of physics with which we can poke about in reality's innards, then we're forever stuck in a (wonderful) cycle of modelling, testing and observation that operates through our only interface to reality, the various forces. It's like trying to probe atomic orbitals on a particular atom using a banana, except that I'm out in the disparity by 20 orders of magnitude at least.
Nope, there is no objective reality to be found whatsoever, at any price, and there may never be. The scientific models will become very good, but a model is not a reality, let alone objective.
The UK has a constitution. It's just not written and means essentially what Parliament says it means (no power of judicial review), which in turn equates into what the majority party says it means, which in turn equates to what Tony Blair says it means.
The EU commissioners are turning ever more into a bunch of corporate lackies. I'd like to say dinosaurs, but unfortunately there is no meteorite in sight yet.
Perhaps one of these insane laws they regularly bring in will tip the balance into revolt by member states, because the people never get to vote on any of this nonsense and one day it's going to be more than they can stand. We're quite good at removing the heads of leaders overawed by their own self-importance, if you look back in history. Unfortunately, in the UK we don't have a Constitution so it's difficult to fight anything on any basis, but perhaps the other EU states will not have that problem.
Prisoners are isolated for punishment... We are isolating ourselves for convience?
I think you may be missing the point entirely. We're isolating ourselves in order to forge liaisons and interact with others at our own personal convenience, rather than at the convenience of others. Amongst other things, it empowers us to interact with multiple people and multiple communities, increasing the level of human dialogue which you hold so dear. And before long, hopefully that dialogue won't be limited to conversing with humans alone. As machine IQ rises, old "natural" humanity will at some point become very second best for those desiring a fulfilling intellectual relationship.
Prior to technology, we had no option in any of this. Now we do.
Virtually all the evils of the world are the product of human will, not of technology. People use technology to cause suffering of course, but to blame the technology is obviously misguided; at worst the blame lies with particular toolmakers, and in every case it lies with the toolwielders. Once in a while something technical does break and causes suffering by itself, but compared to the suffering inflicted by Man that is utterly insignificant.
Was there less suffering before science and engineering started transforming the world in a big way? I don't think so.
Technology empowers everyone, including those that care not about the plight of others, but in the current makeup of the world that translates to vastly more good people being empowered than bad people. Whether or not that is a factor, you really can't look back over history (first removing the rose-tinted spectacles) and claim that human is good, technical is bad.
In technology there is ample promise for completely eradicating or bypassing or overcoming human evils --- ultimately by keeping everyone at arms length if all else fails. In human development, the chances of finding a viable solution of any sort seem to be rather less than zero.
Your response would have been interesting, except for the fact that you've based it on an utter falsehood, that there is an objective reality.
There is no objective reality, neither in physics nor in society:
(i) In physics, in the small we cannot even separate object from observer, and in the large it is impossible for us to get to know reality herself: all we can do is study her behaviour with probes (virtually all our daily interaction is electromagnetic, eg. physical or optical), create models of the idealized behaviour, and then think of that as "the reality". Well, of course it isn't, it's merely an idea that behaves like reality seems to. We have no means of discovering what reality really consists of, which is why science is interesting and open-ended.
(ii) In society, it goes even further than what the article described, in that not only is the corporate reality a fabricated one, but every human reality is. The Tibetan monk's reality is utterly different from that of the average westerner, and so is (as an example) mine, simply because I have made a point of not watching the telly and therefore not assimilating the bulk of media-manufactured reality. The one objective reality to which you allude simply does not exist.
One doesn't have to be a destructive nihilist to accept that objectivism is a figment of our imaginations --- that's just another type of fundamentalism, and all fundamentalisms tend to be destructive. But to reject the natural uncertainties of the world in favour of a comforting but mythical objective construct is to voyage into the self delusion of believing that everyone else inhabits your own mental universe.
The author of this article seems to have little idea of what he's talking about.
The UK experiments used FPGAs, and Starbridge uses FPGAs, but the novelty in the experimental work lies in the use of genetically evolving cell interconnection in the FPGAs, whereas Starbridge's FPGAs are reprogrammed on-the-fly in a completely deterministic manner, not unlike the Crusoe. The Starbridge FPGA hardware isn't mutating genetically, it's merely reconnecting functional units under the control of something like a JIT analyser/compiler to deal in the best way with the incoming instruction stream.
The author of the article has put two and two together and got five, making FPGAs look dangerous.
FPGAs are in thousands of products all around us. If they were mutating, we'd know about it PDQ!
Re:The difference between Science and politics
on
Excess Heat
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· Score: 2
Hey, if cold fusion actually worked, why aren't there any suns producing energy this way?
Nobody said that that's what they found, if anything. Unfortunately, now we'll never know what they did find, if anything, just because of the political dimension that this acquired.
Whether or not F&P did wrong or right, the real scientists in the world did themselves (and us) a disservice here.
The only thing that mattered was uncovering what was actually happening in those tests where excess heat was reported, nothing else. You can't prejudge the new on the basis of the old.
Why thought experiments are bull
on
Excess Heat
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· Score: 2
Tipler's homework problem is a good handle-cranking exercise for students, teaching them about known properties of standard models of nuclear physics. It won't help them though when those models need to be extended through progress in science. All it says is that, under the conditions and reactions investigated so far, neutrons have been seen to be emitted in said quantities. Fine, but please don't suggest that that is the whole story and that nuclear physicists can now retire.
Your item knocks down a straw man. F&P and everybody else on the proponent's side knew damn well that even if this was indeed fusion, no way was it fusion of the ordinary kind. Indeed, in many ways they brought their problems upon themselves by calling it any kind of fusion at all, rather than inventing a new name.
Unfortunately, as a result of that bad move and others, even if there was a new physical effect of some sort present (which is likely, given that knowledge in that area is far from complete), we'll now not discover it in this generation because nobody with a reputation worth preserving dares touch the subject with a barge pole anymore. That sucks.
Hooray, a blow against uncertainty in Science!
on
Excess Heat
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· Score: 2
Your arguments are so strong and persuasive that I think we can, from now on, dismiss the possibility of ever finding any new reactions or methods in the area of fusion research.
It's so refreshing to know that we'll no longer be troubled with all this terrible uncertainty about the future, since scientific investigation in nuclear issues is now closed. I guess there's no point talking about quarks and superstrings and other such balony, since who knows, it could one day lead towards understanding how to fuse nuclei without emitting neutrons, which we know is impossible, so any such fundamental research must be bad science too. Well done!
Those pesky F&P, I bet they were descendents of Galileo, the blighters!
The difference between Science and politics
on
Excess Heat
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· Score: 2
Unfortunately, your reply is in the same vein as all the other criticisms (on both sides) in this sorry tale. The whole affair has focussed on people, and what they did right and what they did wrong. Who the hell cares!?
For a true scientist, there should have been only one issue worth discussing in all of this mess, and that was the fact that a number of experiments (but not all) found an unattributed heat excess. To solve that mystery and hence attribute the heat to something old or something new would have been Science. Everything else was bollocks.
I've always intended to buy an Indrema when it comes out, and to support it in other ways.
However, I would NOT have designed it the way it was designed, because it's vastly too expensive that way through not leveraging existing designs and existing products. As Indrema say, they'd have to sell it for $500 to survive, and that's a silly business model if you ask me. But your hardware doesn't have have to be expensive to be powerful. Here's how I would have done it, riding on the back of the PC industry.
I would have defined a supported motherboard architecture based on an existing PC motherboard style, one that is already in production by several manufacturers.
I would have designed a "GPU slot specification" as no more than a raiser board plugging into the AGP connector to allow a plug-in AGP card to be oriented horizontally and to provide sockets for optional graphics-assist hardware. Ditto for a "PCI slot specification" raiser board.
I would have defined the "Indrema Hardware Specification" as a restriction on what can be plugged into the above, because a console must be free of the bugbear of PC games development, ie. the huge variation in PC hardware. Ditto for the "Indrema Software Specification" -- ie. only one specific Linux distribution should be supported by the games spec, and outside that you're on your own. (Actually, Indrema's current software spec seems quite good as it stands.)
I'd have made 1U and 2U enclosures (rack flaps extra) to hold the above in both diskless and disked versions respectively, and it's virtually ready for launch! Design and manufacturing costs would be vastly less than at present, and in effect most of the console hardware would be manufactured for them at a very low cost as a side-effect of the PC industry.
Needless to say, PC advocates would love a box like the above, in effect a thin PC for the hifi rack with the attributes of a games console but an open architecture. What the X-box should be but apparently won't be. Sigh.
If there are any venture capitalists listening, talk to John Gildred, and suggest the above approach. The risk would be much less than for bespoke hardware, and you could always sell the hardware off as very nice PCs in parallel with the gaming business.
If parents allowed their children into the adult parts of town, we'd call them irresponsible. Yet when it comes to the Internet, apparently they can ignore their responsibilities as parents and pass the blame on to others instead.
The Internet isn't a protected playground and it can never become one without becoming utterly emasculated. It is a faithful cross-section of all of humanity, without artificial barriers, and that is what makes it the largest and most valuable resource on the planet. The Internet may be in fashion with youngsters wanting to be adults, but if you're a parent it's NOT the place to let your youngsters roam freely before they are old enough to make their own decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of these prosecutions seem to hinge on a modification being marketed in a fashion that leaves its intended purpose open to interpretation.
While lawyers will of course always oil the wheels of litigatation regardless of commonsense, morality, ethics, or the laws of physics, one should at least make it a little bit harder for them wherever possible.
For example, in the case of the Xbox mod chip, if a company created and marketed a device with the single and sole purpose of allowing Linux to be booted natively on powerup, and supported this purpose with Xbox Linux distros on its website plus all the relevant FAQs, and with extra features in the bootstrap making the purpose plain (eg. kernel boot parameter storage) as well as displaying a prominent intended-use disclaimer, this would make litigating against the company significantly harder than at present.
I think people may have missed the point of this article, which is that Sun say that there is no workaround for the hole.
If it is true that the vulnerability is caused by a flaw in the input validation of a CGI (common gateway interface) script, and yet there is no workaround other than removing the Security Hardening Package, this implies that the CGI validation script (overflow.cgi) is not available for modification, so regardless of what license this is under, it's effectively not open source, otherwise there would be a workaround.
Well, we hardly need reminding of that in this forum, but perhaps somebody should make this point to ExtremeTech and to Sun. The CERT advisory rather oddly avoids this point as well, despite identifying the flawed component. It probably just shows that a company's inflexible procedures (package updates in this case) can effectively close even a theoretically open platform like the RaQ.
There are a number of fallacies being expressed in this thread.
The first is that, for some reason which is never explained, interaction with humans by going out and meeting them in the flesh is somehow good, while interacting with their chosen images in an online world is somehow bad. There are many reasons why this argument is threadbare, and there are even counterarguments to favor online interaction, but I'll point out just one fallacy that undermines it all: so-called "direct" interaction is actually nothing of the sort, it's just better-integrated electronic interaction with those people in your physical proximity. Your eyes and ears (both electronic signal interfaces) provide you with most of that alleged "direct" interaction unless you're in sexual contact, and that's no different online. The difference is primarily one of bandwidth and degree of integration with your senses; it's early days in that respect online, admittedly, but if your anti-online argument relies on those underdeveloped aspects of it then you have to admit that your argument will lose validity in the future as those things improve.
The second fallacy relates to bandwidth of interaction and its importance. The signals we receive are merely hints to our perceptual machinery, as our minds perform an immense amount of interpretation on the data that comes in. The extent of this internal processing is so collosal that we are easily immersed in virtual worlds when reading novels, and the bandwidth of incoming data there is absolutely minute, a tiny fraction of today's typical modem bandwidth. In a modern online MMRPG, the bandwidths involved are much closer to those in so-called "direct" interaction that those involved in reading, so the low-bandwidth argument is not convincing. In any case, I've yet to hear anyone trying to claim that reading is not worthwhile owing to low bandwidth compared to "direct" interaction with people.
And finally, since the topic of so many contributions has been addiction and loss of time that could better be spent in worthwhile personal development, it is worth pointing out an unstated or forgotten insincerity on the part of many people that criticize online worlds. Something like 85 percent of people in the developed world that come home after work or school and begin some form of entertainment (as opposed to more work), do so by turning on the television. This non-interactive medium spoon-feeds them brainless addictive pap for the masses for hours each day, almost entirely bypasses their intellectual machinery, wastes their time while creating nothing in which they can take pride, and certainly involves no worthwhile social interaction. The concept of a TV watcher somehow finding fault with people that inhabit an online world full to the brim with an intense interactive social fabric is so incongruous as to be funny.
PS. I come to this from the perspective of where things are going in a few decades' time. It wasn't so long ago that family and friends used to be puzzled by my inhabiting Internet communities like this one and many others --- "That's not real life, just gazing at a monitor, you shouldn't be wasting your time" was their (usually unstated) view. Now several of them use the Internet, and even inhabit their own online communities without any encouragement from me. Apparently there is "life" online as well, it turns out, haha. Well, it's early days still, I'll be the first to admit, but anyone that thinks of online worlds purely in terms of addiction and waste of time simply does not understand what the future holds.
What does it say about a company that allows paid on-staff nitwits free reign to say any stupid thing they want to.
It says that the company is in the business of hiring incompetents to save money, and then finds that they have have got exactly what they paid for.
A competent professional will in general not work (for long, anyway) under gagging orders, and will for the most part provide good support. But good support is not always comfortable for those "in control", because it often exposes the weaknesses created by management and other handwavers. Tough. Ultimately it's the company's senior people that have created its problems, and blaming the low-paid first-line support staff is the height of arrogance and misdirection of blame.
Don't think it's just America that's gone to pot.
:-)
This is happening everywhere where there are politicians, because the Internet and all computing and advances in communications are undermining the power that governments once had in being able to monitor and control their subjugate populations. The idiocy which you see is a response to their belated realization of the new freedoms which people have acquired over the last few years, their panicked attempt to regain control. All the bogeymen are being deployed, "Stop Terrorism", "Protect the Children", even "Safeguard your Culture" in many places.
So, since the highest level of security is so important to them, comply: use the strongest encryption possible, everywhere. This will of course also make your systems unbreachable and unmonitorable by them as well. Oh dear.
Whether people believe or don't believe that this effect is real or non-existent is completely irrelevant. We have a perfectly good scientific method for distinguishing reality from fiction, and any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.
The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification, which may succeed or fail, or else it won't provide it, in which case it fails by default on the scientific front. Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.
If you work for a company where they care more about their image and liability than about how good your technical contribution is and how well you are helping the customer, it's time you got up and left, because it's clearly run by lawyers and image makers instead of by someone that does anything useful.
Wow, this was a blast from the past for me, as
that was one of the first SF books I ever read
-- thanks for the nostalgic memory
In fact, "The City and the Stars" may have been
the book that introduced me to the genre. It must
be time for a reread though, as I seem to recall
it as a sort of thinking person's Logan's Run,
which surely must be wildly inaccurate and only
just short of being an insult.
As is the case with all fictional literature, the
:-)
"best" is that which most effectively triggers,
shapes, and gives life to the mental images which
writing can only stimulate in our minds rather
than convey directly.
Since minds are so different from individual to
individual, and sometimes utterly so, there can
never be a single "best". At most, the fact that
any given book is seen as "best" by more people
than any other simply means that there are more
people with that particular mental makeup which
allows that book to succeed. Quite often, this
translates to those people inhabiting similar
memespaces, which is very common especially in
high-bandwidth communities both online and off.
So, which SF books best trigger my mental imagery
at the present time? In several categories of
subjective assessment:
Iain M. Banks's Culture novels
-- most convincing galactic future
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
-- most convincing human-level future
C.J. Cherryh's The Chronicles of Morgaine
-- most forceful and single-minded heroine
Peter F. Hamilton's The Nano Flower
-- most luscious yet unobstrusive image weaving
Walter Jon Williams's Aristoi
-- most distant yet still recognizable future
E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series
-- fastest delivery of mental images
Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time
-- most endearing treatment of distant future
I'd expect a fairly good correlation with the
"bests" of other SF readers on Slashdot, as the
memespaces of the technical communities tend to
be fairly cohesive. Ultimately though, it really
doesn't matter, since "best" is a personal issue.
Let's be scientific about this.
Provide at least one pair of filepaths which generate a hash collision under whatever scenario you care to specify, so that others can test and verify the resulting effect, even if it's probabilistic and requires billions of reruns to trigger -- no problem.
If the effect isn't seen by anyone else under any conditions, then the problem doesn't exist. Conversely, if it does happen under some repeatable conditions (even if only extremely rarely) then it *is* a problem, and will be fixed.
If you want to be constructive about it, take this issue out of mythology and onto firmer ground.
As a close friend of Rocket Guy ...
You might be the right person to ask this to then. How does he intend to prevent the rocket from going up and over and straight back down into the ground, or else up and around and around like a catherine wheel?
The mere fact that the rocket outlet is in front of the centre of mass of the vehicle does not guarantee anything at all about the direction of travel. If the thrust is sufficient but not perfectly balanced on the line between the centre of mass of the rocket and the gravitational centre of the Earth, the leading rocket can easily pull the whole vehicle up and around and down or into a rapid catherine wheel spin.
There could be absolutely nothing the pilot can do about this manually because the potentially huge inertial forces could pin him (or any mechanical devices) into immobility. And it could all happen so fast that he wouldn't have time to balance the upward thrust nicely.
The time to think about this is now.
They also have to guarantee delivery of the game in the same time-frame as the release of the next sequel.
I wonder if there is a penalty clause for late delivery in the agreement. If Microsoft's games hardware and software divisions are as tardy as their operating system brethren, the Matrix's famous "There is no spoon" will doubtless be echoed with funnier versions to keep us amused.
... but as to physics I recommend you read Intellectual Impostures (Alan Sokal + Jean Bricmont) for a pretty thorough debunking of radical subjectivism.
Debunk away all you like, but it still won't give us access to the actual structure of reality.
Sokal and Bricmont did well to debunk the more ridiculous ideas of that group of nutty philosophers, but no scientist that understands the nature of the scientific method would ever postulate the existence of an objective reality, except possibly when talking down to non-scientists. The idea runs counter to everything that's taught from Physics 101 upwards. Heck, we certainly don't teach students that electrons are real! Like everything else in the world of the physicist, they're just a model.
Unless someone can come up with a magic wand outside of physics with which we can poke about in reality's innards, then we're forever stuck in a (wonderful) cycle of modelling, testing and observation that operates through our only interface to reality, the various forces. It's like trying to probe atomic orbitals on a particular atom using a banana, except that I'm out in the disparity by 20 orders of magnitude at least.
Nope, there is no objective reality to be found whatsoever, at any price, and there may never be. The scientific models will become very good, but a model is not a reality, let alone objective.
The UK has a constitution. It's just not written and means essentially what Parliament says it means (no power of judicial review), which in turn equates into what the majority party says it means, which in turn equates to what Tony Blair says it means.
In other words, the UK has no constitution.
The EU commissioners are turning ever more into a bunch of corporate lackies. I'd like to say dinosaurs, but unfortunately there is no meteorite in sight yet.
Perhaps one of these insane laws they regularly bring in will tip the balance into revolt by member states, because the people never get to vote on any of this nonsense and one day it's going to be more than they can stand. We're quite good at removing the heads of leaders overawed by their own self-importance, if you look back in history. Unfortunately, in the UK we don't have a Constitution so it's difficult to fight anything on any basis, but perhaps the other EU states will not have that problem.
Prisoners are isolated for punishment... We are isolating ourselves for convience?
I think you may be missing the point entirely. We're isolating ourselves in order to forge liaisons and interact with others at our own personal convenience, rather than at the convenience of others. Amongst other things, it empowers us to interact with multiple people and multiple communities, increasing the level of human dialogue which you hold so dear. And before long, hopefully that dialogue won't be limited to conversing with humans alone. As machine IQ rises, old "natural" humanity will at some point become very second best for those desiring a fulfilling intellectual relationship.
Prior to technology, we had no option in any of this. Now we do.
Too much technology
There is no basis for your premise whatsoever.
Virtually all the evils of the world are the product of human will, not of technology. People use technology to cause suffering of course, but to blame the technology is obviously misguided; at worst the blame lies with particular toolmakers, and in every case it lies with the toolwielders. Once in a while something technical does break and causes suffering by itself, but compared to the suffering inflicted by Man that is utterly insignificant.
Was there less suffering before science and engineering started transforming the world in a big way? I don't think so.
Technology empowers everyone, including those that care not about the plight of others, but in the current makeup of the world that translates to vastly more good people being empowered than bad people. Whether or not that is a factor, you really can't look back over history (first removing the rose-tinted spectacles) and claim that human is good, technical is bad.
In technology there is ample promise for completely eradicating or bypassing or overcoming human evils --- ultimately by keeping everyone at arms length if all else fails. In human development, the chances of finding a viable solution of any sort seem to be rather less than zero.
Your response would have been interesting, except for the fact that you've based it on an utter falsehood, that there is an objective reality.
There is no objective reality, neither in physics nor in society:
(i) In physics, in the small we cannot even separate object from observer, and in the large it is impossible for us to get to know reality herself: all we can do is study her behaviour with probes (virtually all our daily interaction is electromagnetic, eg. physical or optical), create models of the idealized behaviour, and then think of that as "the reality". Well, of course it isn't, it's merely an idea that behaves like reality seems to. We have no means of discovering what reality really consists of, which is why science is interesting and open-ended.
(ii) In society, it goes even further than what the article described, in that not only is the corporate reality a fabricated one, but every human reality is. The Tibetan monk's reality is utterly different from that of the average westerner, and so is (as an example) mine, simply because I have made a point of not watching the telly and therefore not assimilating the bulk of media-manufactured reality. The one objective reality to which you allude simply does not exist.
One doesn't have to be a destructive nihilist to accept that objectivism is a figment of our imaginations --- that's just another type of fundamentalism, and all fundamentalisms tend to be destructive. But to reject the natural uncertainties of the world in favour of a comforting but mythical objective construct is to voyage into the self delusion of believing that everyone else inhabits your own mental universe.
The author of this article seems to have little idea of what he's talking about.
The UK experiments used FPGAs, and Starbridge uses FPGAs, but the novelty in the experimental work lies in the use of genetically evolving cell interconnection in the FPGAs, whereas Starbridge's FPGAs are reprogrammed on-the-fly in a completely deterministic manner, not unlike the Crusoe. The Starbridge FPGA hardware isn't mutating genetically, it's merely reconnecting functional units under the control of something like a JIT analyser/compiler to deal in the best way with the incoming instruction stream.
The author of the article has put two and two together and got five, making FPGAs look dangerous.
FPGAs are in thousands of products all around us. If they were mutating, we'd know about it PDQ!
Hey, if cold fusion actually worked, why aren't there any suns producing energy this way?
Nobody said that that's what they found, if anything. Unfortunately, now we'll never know what they did find, if anything, just because of the political dimension that this acquired.
Whether or not F&P did wrong or right, the real scientists in the world did themselves (and us) a disservice here.
The only thing that mattered was uncovering what was actually happening in those tests where excess heat was reported, nothing else. You can't prejudge the new on the basis of the old.
Tipler's homework problem is a good handle-cranking exercise for students, teaching them about known properties of standard models of nuclear physics. It won't help them though when those models need to be extended through progress in science. All it says is that, under the conditions and reactions investigated so far, neutrons have been seen to be emitted in said quantities. Fine, but please don't suggest that that is the whole story and that nuclear physicists can now retire.
Your item knocks down a straw man. F&P and everybody else on the proponent's side knew damn well that even if this was indeed fusion, no way was it fusion of the ordinary kind. Indeed, in many ways they brought their problems upon themselves by calling it any kind of fusion at all, rather than inventing a new name.
Unfortunately, as a result of that bad move and others, even if there was a new physical effect of some sort present (which is likely, given that knowledge in that area is far from complete), we'll now not discover it in this generation because nobody with a reputation worth preserving dares touch the subject with a barge pole anymore. That sucks.
Your arguments are so strong and persuasive that I think we can, from now on, dismiss the possibility of ever finding any new reactions or methods in the area of fusion research.
It's so refreshing to know that we'll no longer be troubled with all this terrible uncertainty about the future, since scientific investigation in nuclear issues is now closed. I guess there's no point talking about quarks and superstrings and other such balony, since who knows, it could one day lead towards understanding how to fuse nuclei without emitting neutrons, which we know is impossible, so any such fundamental research must be bad science too. Well done!
Those pesky F&P, I bet they were descendents of Galileo, the blighters!
Unfortunately, your reply is in the same vein as all the other criticisms (on both sides) in this sorry tale. The whole affair has focussed on people, and what they did right and what they did wrong. Who the hell cares!?
For a true scientist, there should have been only one issue worth discussing in all of this mess, and that was the fact that a number of experiments (but not all) found an unattributed heat excess. To solve that mystery and hence attribute the heat to something old or something new would have been Science. Everything else was bollocks.
I've always intended to buy an Indrema when it comes out, and to support it in other ways.
However, I would NOT have designed it the way it was designed, because it's vastly too expensive that way through not leveraging existing designs and existing products. As Indrema say, they'd have to sell it for $500 to survive, and that's a silly business model if you ask me. But your hardware doesn't have have to be expensive to be powerful. Here's how I would have done it, riding on the back of the PC industry.
I would have defined a supported motherboard architecture based on an existing PC motherboard style, one that is already in production by several manufacturers.
I would have designed a "GPU slot specification" as no more than a raiser board plugging into the AGP connector to allow a plug-in AGP card to be oriented horizontally and to provide sockets for optional graphics-assist hardware. Ditto for a "PCI slot specification" raiser board.
I would have defined the "Indrema Hardware Specification" as a restriction on what can be plugged into the above, because a console must be free of the bugbear of PC games development, ie. the huge variation in PC hardware. Ditto for the "Indrema Software Specification" -- ie. only one specific Linux distribution should be supported by the games spec, and outside that you're on your own. (Actually, Indrema's current software spec seems quite good as it stands.)
I'd have made 1U and 2U enclosures (rack flaps extra) to hold the above in both diskless and disked versions respectively, and it's virtually ready for launch! Design and manufacturing costs would be vastly less than at present, and in effect most of the console hardware would be manufactured for them at a very low cost as a side-effect of the PC industry.
Needless to say, PC advocates would love a box like the above, in effect a thin PC for the hifi rack with the attributes of a games console but an open architecture. What the X-box should be but apparently won't be. Sigh.
If there are any venture capitalists listening, talk to John Gildred, and suggest the above approach. The risk would be much less than for bespoke hardware, and you could always sell the hardware off as very nice PCs in parallel with the gaming business.
If parents allowed their children into the adult parts of town, we'd call them irresponsible. Yet when it comes to the Internet, apparently they can ignore their responsibilities as parents and pass the blame on to others instead.
The Internet isn't a protected playground and it can never become one without becoming utterly emasculated. It is a faithful cross-section of all of humanity, without artificial barriers, and that is what makes it the largest and most valuable resource on the planet. The Internet may be in fashion with youngsters wanting to be adults, but if you're a parent it's NOT the place to let your youngsters roam freely before they are old enough to make their own decisions.
In its danger lies its strength.