"If you want to roll a class in Warhammer Online that let's you mortgage a house and pay it off by running errands for cute fuzzy animals, you should play Animal Crossing not Warhammer."
In the grim future of Animal Hammer 40,000 there is only squirrels.
"There were about 100 files. He opened them all, and went through one by one. 11 files in, he finds a camera whose origin position and origin angle look down on E section. The HD stream hasn't been encoded for storage yet so he dumps the raw data for that camera, for that 1-minute interval around the call. At around 70MB per frame, it takes a few minutes to become available on the stream server. He streams it, manually seeks until it swings into the proper angle, and zooms in tightly on my seat. Sure enough, I'm texting. So it's definitely that Brian Gordon."
"Comparing not letting people use Twitter from inside the event to Nazis killing people is like an archetypal example of Godwin's Law."
I dunno - imagine if Leni Reifenstahl had had to contend with Twitter and liveblogging...
At rally. Mmm goosesteps. Now that's a lot of shovels! Production production production! Can this guy get any more Ballmer? Lock up your chairs. Fraktur, really? At least it's not Comic Sans. Burning swastikas are cute but the rotation effect is so overused. Lame.
A lot of documentation of the original 1947-era UFO sightings is now in the public domain.
This blogger has done a pretty good job of assembling a 1940s timeline, going into excruciating detail of all the military investigations in the early SIGN/GRUDGE era.
There's some pretty intriguing stuff there. It's by no means an open and shut case what those things were.
Yes, exactly. The X-Files was the first TV show I saw which 'got' the vibe of the conspiracy underground and managed to portray the strange mix of fact, conjecture, truth, outright lies, paranoia and contradiction which you get from doing serious study of the UFO phenomenon and related subjects. The show was at its best when it made no attempt to make anything make sense or add up and just generated a 'wtf' SF anthology feel. 'WHAT IF ALL the freaky things you've ever read in zines or on Usenet were, in fact, real...'
Remember, the MJ-12 papers (of dubious provenance) and Whitley Streiber's Communion surfaced in the 1980s. Moore's Philadelphia Experiment in the late 70s. Stan Deyo's Cosmic Conspiracy in 1978, just after Close Encounters. Lots of other stories had been circulating for some time. David Hatcher Childress' 'The Antigravity Handbook', for instance.
But for the most part, in the 80s, you couldn't really talk about the 'alien conspiracy' mythos even in entertainment without a snigger, or at least without a gung-ho humans-vs-aliens war movie feel. X-Files was the first show to really play the Area 51 underground vibe straight - and to a great extent, the only one to really even try to get it sort of halfway right.
" "Well I want a pony!" you reply "But you'll just have to deal with a limited OS because we can't have nice things because they keep installing viruses on their machine!" "
I've wondered recently how come we can't get a protocol like HTTP, but 1) not based on 'pages' but arbitrarily small/large and recursively nestable chunks of data, and 2) not pull and client-driven but publish/subscribe and persistent, where you'd attach to a data chunk and then be notified with the new value whenever that chunk changes. The rise of social services like Twitter and Facebook (and particularly the use of both by applications as a sort of generic publish-subscribe information bus) seems to be indicating that there is a need for such a thing, and building it on top of proprietary websites designed for other purposes entirely seems like a waste of time.
I'd like to get away from the 'client/server' approach of the Web back to the 'every endpoint is a host' of the underlying Net, because that's important for the end-to-end principle (and I think it was a big mistake to ever lose it). Moving just one step up the protocol stack from 'fire and forget datagram (IP)' to 'stream (TCP)' to 'subscribable chunk' seems like it would obviate the need for a lot of AJAX hackery. We could keep HTML as a display layer on top, but we really need a way to visualise and connect a whole lot of little tiny paragraph-size chunks of data - like, say, each post in a blog, each comment in a forum, each edit in a wiki, or each row in a table.
If we make this middleman protocol stateful, such that the equivalent of 'web proxy' for it is required to keep a cache and only transfer data into the internal network from outside when it changes... we could still keep a really simple, policy-free network, but reduce the insane amount of duplication of packets that we do now. If someone inside your home network pulls down a movie from a given URL, fine, it should get transferred once from your ISP's network to your home proxy/cache... and then sit on the cache there and not get re-downloaded. The same idea should work down to the level of individual Slashdot comments.
If we then add a very simple pure-functional language into this protocol, so that every 'chunk' could also be a function over other chunks, then we could get a generic RESTful computing model for mashups and the like.
Google Wave seems to be heading sort of in this direction, so maybe it might evolve into a generic replacement for the Web.
1. Cross-link Facebook, Slashdot, Twitter, Second Life, Google Earth 2. Create detailed 3D body model for all Slashdotters 3. Render 3D models to latex masks. 4. Render 3D models to simulated virtual environment 5. Capture, drug and equip Slashdotters with goggles 6. Replace real-world Slashdotters with robot duplicates. 7. Profit!
"That is a special case, yes, but I would assume that, with a collaborative work, when one person dissents to continued display or holding of that work, the other(s) can't over-rule them on that, and the content would have to be taken down/removed."
IANAL either, but it seems on a naive reading that that policy would be incompatible with Open Content such as the GFDL/cc-by-sa. Because the first rule of open content is that nobody gets to remove ANYTHING after it's published, 'privacy' or any other personal preference be damned. If it's published, it's published forever. So collaboration sites allowing privacy takedowns would have to not use Open Content licences, and therefore, any content produced by them would not be able to be imported into general sites like Wikipedia. That data is efffectively walled off forever.
Have we even touched on the copyright/licencing implications of Semantic Web style mashups of data? What if Facebook exports status updates as RDF and Wikipedia exports pages as RDF and some computer algorithmically links the two? What licence is the resulting RDF dataset under?
"If games were tv, then they would produce a pilot to test the audience, tear down the set, kill the actors and de-invent the camera. If the pilot happens to be liked, they start filming. One episode at the time. But no more pussy-footing about. They don't just tear down the set but nuke the state. Kill the actors entire lineage through time-travel and get god himself to remove light from the universe. "
"If games were tv, then they would produce a pilot to test the audience, tear down the set, kill the actors and de-invent the camera. If the pilot happens to be liked, they start filming. One episode at the time. But no more pussy-footing about. They don't just tear down the set but nuke the state. Kill the actors entire lineage through time-travel and get god himself to remove light from the universe. "
"Technology itself doesn't let you outrun who you are, so ultimately the same conflicts that make real life debate and conflict suck made Wikipedia suck as well."
In other words, Wikipedia has succeeded brilliantly at its goal: being an accurate repository of the world's knowledge.
"The world's knowledge" ALSO means "the world's disagreements over what constitutes knowledge", and that can't be reduced away by an encyclopedia, nor should it be.
"So even if they got a thousand people doing nothing else but verifying the Linux kernel, it would take then 60 years to finish."
And all the time lots of highly motivated black hats are banging on that code looking for holes, and while the 'good guys' have to be right in every one of those 10,000,000 lines, the bad guys have to only find ONE flaw.
So the probability of anyone running Linux getting 0-day pwned is... ?
Sorry, this cowboy approach of unverifiable code just isn't acceptable any more. We need to do better.
"Formal verification does not tackle conceptual bugs. What it does is prove that the implementation conforms to the specification."
I think I understand the concept, but what I don't get is why our compilers don't just do this already. Why do we tolerate toolchains which *aren't* trustworthy?
It seems to me that if we just moved to declarative languages - like, say, Prolog, or maybe a cleaned-up modern version - we could simply say 'a valid HTML conversation is: bla bla bla' and then just say 'an HTML conversation occurs here...' and the compiler can do the rest.
It doesn't seem to me to be rocket science. We seem to go out of our way to dump more work on the programmer than needed. Programming should be a matter of defining interfaces or constraints, surely.
"I've had formally proven algorithms fail when they encounter the real world. Niggling things like floating point round-off errors, etc., means that you can't even prove x+x = 2x in floats."
Well of course. That's the whole reason why we're skeptical of formal models. I mean, if you're assuming something like 'a float is a real', or even 'a machine int is an unbounded integer' then of course you'll get the wrong answer. Any axioms proven about a mathematical integer which don't take into account boundary conditions and representations - the REAL semantics of the machine object as opposed to the pretend play semantics of a simplified mathematical toy version - don't necessarily apply to an int16, an int32, or an int64. And that's where programming, as opposed to mathematics, comes into play.
So 1) why not model it correctly the first time?
2) can you prove the correctness of your formal model? If not, it's just another source of bugs.
3) therefore, isn't all this 'formal methods' jazz just shorthand for 'write the whole program in a pure-functional language and be done with it'?
"Of course the same cannot be said of the socialists fighting objectivism."
What fight does socialism (an economic philosophy based on objective analysis of historical data trends) have with objective reality?
And why did Randite big-O Objectivism ally itself - of all economic faiths - with *capitalism*, when capitalist economics is based purely on the idea of SUBJECTIVE value: that things are ONLY and always worth "whatever people will pay for them in the current market"?
Capitalism is nothing BUT subjectivism taken to its logical extreme. It's the socialists who hold to an objective theory of value: that a human life is worth something in real terms even if the 'market' chooses to decide otherwise.
That's the huge irony with Rand. Or contradiction, if you prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay Transputers!
"Some 20 years from now, the confirmation hearings for supreme court justice nominations will get to be really interesting. "
Senator, let me ask you just this one question: Are you now -- or have you ever been -- a tank for the Horde?
"But if any of the above were represented on Wikipedia as fact, how would you--not knowing any better--separate out the "bullshit"?"
Would you be in a position where knowing such a fine level of detail would matter?
If you are, then it's a fair bet that you will have consulted multiple references.
"If you want to roll a class in Warhammer Online that let's you mortgage a house and pay it off by running errands for cute fuzzy animals, you should play Animal Crossing not Warhammer."
In the grim future of Animal Hammer 40,000 there is only squirrels.
CHAOS SQUIRRELS.
"Use a different file manager, and your problems are gone."
I'm sorry, but 'swap out the standard system shell to work around braindead behaviour' is an automatic OS DESIGN FAIL.
You just don't bypass Explorer in production environments. Not optional.
... do not go together unless you are Carrie-Anne Moss.
what's a vcr?
A Babylon 5 character.
"There were about 100 files. He opened them all, and went through one by one. 11 files in, he finds a camera whose origin position and origin angle look down on E section. The HD stream hasn't been encoded for storage yet so he dumps the raw data for that camera, for that 1-minute interval around the call. At around 70MB per frame, it takes a few minutes to become available on the stream server. He streams it, manually seeks until it swings into the proper angle, and zooms in tightly on my seat. Sure enough, I'm texting. So it's definitely that Brian Gordon."
I would so watch that movie. Or TV series.
"Comparing not letting people use Twitter from inside the event to Nazis killing people is like an archetypal example of Godwin's Law."
I dunno - imagine if Leni Reifenstahl had had to contend with Twitter and liveblogging...
At rally. Mmm goosesteps.
Now that's a lot of shovels!
Production production production! Can this guy get any more Ballmer? Lock up your chairs.
Fraktur, really? At least it's not Comic Sans.
Burning swastikas are cute but the rotation effect is so overused. Lame.
A lot of documentation of the original 1947-era UFO sightings is now in the public domain.
This blogger has done a pretty good job of assembling a 1940s timeline, going into excruciating detail of all the military investigations in the early SIGN/GRUDGE era.
There's some pretty intriguing stuff there. It's by no means an open and shut case what those things were.
Yes, exactly. The X-Files was the first TV show I saw which 'got' the vibe of the conspiracy underground and managed to portray the strange mix of fact, conjecture, truth, outright lies, paranoia and contradiction which you get from doing serious study of the UFO phenomenon and related subjects. The show was at its best when it made no attempt to make anything make sense or add up and just generated a 'wtf' SF anthology feel. 'WHAT IF ALL the freaky things you've ever read in zines or on Usenet were, in fact, real...'
Remember, the MJ-12 papers (of dubious provenance) and Whitley Streiber's Communion surfaced in the 1980s. Moore's Philadelphia Experiment in the late 70s. Stan Deyo's Cosmic Conspiracy in 1978, just after Close Encounters. Lots of other stories had been circulating for some time. David Hatcher Childress' 'The Antigravity Handbook', for instance.
But for the most part, in the 80s, you couldn't really talk about the 'alien conspiracy' mythos even in entertainment without a snigger, or at least without a gung-ho humans-vs-aliens war movie feel. X-Files was the first show to really play the Area 51 underground vibe straight - and to a great extent, the only one to really even try to get it sort of halfway right.
" "Well I want a pony!" you reply "But you'll just have to deal with a limited OS because we can't have nice things because they keep installing viruses on their machine!" "
Thank you, you've just made Jonathan Zittrain's point exactly.
Except he thinks this is a bad development and can still be changed.
I've wondered recently how come we can't get a protocol like HTTP, but 1) not based on 'pages' but arbitrarily small/large and recursively nestable chunks of data, and 2) not pull and client-driven but publish/subscribe and persistent, where you'd attach to a data chunk and then be notified with the new value whenever that chunk changes. The rise of social services like Twitter and Facebook (and particularly the use of both by applications as a sort of generic publish-subscribe information bus) seems to be indicating that there is a need for such a thing, and building it on top of proprietary websites designed for other purposes entirely seems like a waste of time.
I'd like to get away from the 'client/server' approach of the Web back to the 'every endpoint is a host' of the underlying Net, because that's important for the end-to-end principle (and I think it was a big mistake to ever lose it). Moving just one step up the protocol stack from 'fire and forget datagram (IP)' to 'stream (TCP)' to 'subscribable chunk' seems like it would obviate the need for a lot of AJAX hackery. We could keep HTML as a display layer on top, but we really need a way to visualise and connect a whole lot of little tiny paragraph-size chunks of data - like, say, each post in a blog, each comment in a forum, each edit in a wiki, or each row in a table.
If we make this middleman protocol stateful, such that the equivalent of 'web proxy' for it is required to keep a cache and only transfer data into the internal network from outside when it changes... we could still keep a really simple, policy-free network, but reduce the insane amount of duplication of packets that we do now. If someone inside your home network pulls down a movie from a given URL, fine, it should get transferred once from your ISP's network to your home proxy/cache... and then sit on the cache there and not get re-downloaded. The same idea should work down to the level of individual Slashdot comments.
If we then add a very simple pure-functional language into this protocol, so that every 'chunk' could also be a function over other chunks, then we could get a generic RESTful computing model for mashups and the like.
Google Wave seems to be heading sort of in this direction, so maybe it might evolve into a generic replacement for the Web.
1. Cross-link Facebook, Slashdot, Twitter, Second Life, Google Earth
2. Create detailed 3D body model for all Slashdotters
3. Render 3D models to latex masks.
4. Render 3D models to simulated virtual environment
5. Capture, drug and equip Slashdotters with goggles
6. Replace real-world Slashdotters with robot duplicates.
7. Profit!
"That is a special case, yes, but I would assume that, with a collaborative work, when one person dissents to continued display or holding of that work, the other(s) can't over-rule them on that, and the content would have to be taken down/removed."
IANAL either, but it seems on a naive reading that that policy would be incompatible with Open Content such as the GFDL/cc-by-sa. Because the first rule of open content is that nobody gets to remove ANYTHING after it's published, 'privacy' or any other personal preference be damned. If it's published, it's published forever. So collaboration sites allowing privacy takedowns would have to not use Open Content licences, and therefore, any content produced by them would not be able to be imported into general sites like Wikipedia. That data is efffectively walled off forever.
Have we even touched on the copyright/licencing implications of Semantic Web style mashups of data? What if Facebook exports status updates as RDF and Wikipedia exports pages as RDF and some computer algorithmically links the two? What licence is the resulting RDF dataset under?
"If games were tv, then they would produce a pilot to test the audience, tear down the set, kill the actors and de-invent the camera. If the pilot happens to be liked, they start filming. One episode at the time. But no more pussy-footing about. They don't just tear down the set but nuke the state. Kill the actors entire lineage through time-travel and get god himself to remove light from the universe. "
That's exactly how they make movies, you know.
"If games were tv, then they would produce a pilot to test the audience, tear down the set, kill the actors and de-invent the camera. If the pilot happens to be liked, they start filming. One episode at the time. But no more pussy-footing about. They don't just tear down the set but nuke the state. Kill the actors entire lineage through time-travel and get god himself to remove light from the universe. "
That's exactly how they make movies, you know.
What competition?
"Technology itself doesn't let you outrun who you are, so ultimately the same conflicts that make real life debate and conflict suck made Wikipedia suck as well."
In other words, Wikipedia has succeeded brilliantly at its goal: being an accurate repository of the world's knowledge.
"The world's knowledge" ALSO means "the world's disagreements over what constitutes knowledge", and that can't be reduced away by an encyclopedia, nor should it be.
Seems to be working just fine to me.
"So even if they got a thousand people doing nothing else but verifying the Linux kernel, it would take then 60 years to finish."
And all the time lots of highly motivated black hats are banging on that code looking for holes, and while the 'good guys' have to be right in every one of those 10,000,000 lines, the bad guys have to only find ONE flaw.
So the probability of anyone running Linux getting 0-day pwned is... ?
Sorry, this cowboy approach of unverifiable code just isn't acceptable any more. We need to do better.
"Formal specification languages are designed with the idea that one should be able to reason about them in mind "
And why are our general-purpose programming languages NOT designed to be reasoned about?
That's a bug, surely. Why do we put up with it?
"Formal verification does not tackle conceptual bugs. What it does is prove that the implementation conforms to the specification."
I think I understand the concept, but what I don't get is why our compilers don't just do this already. Why do we tolerate toolchains which *aren't* trustworthy?
It seems to me that if we just moved to declarative languages - like, say, Prolog, or maybe a cleaned-up modern version - we could simply say 'a valid HTML conversation is: bla bla bla' and then just say 'an HTML conversation occurs here...' and the compiler can do the rest.
It doesn't seem to me to be rocket science. We seem to go out of our way to dump more work on the programmer than needed. Programming should be a matter of defining interfaces or constraints, surely.
"I've had formally proven algorithms fail when they encounter the real world. Niggling things like floating point round-off errors, etc., means that you can't even prove x+x = 2x in floats."
Well of course. That's the whole reason why we're skeptical of formal models. I mean, if you're assuming something like 'a float is a real', or even 'a machine int is an unbounded integer' then of course you'll get the wrong answer. Any axioms proven about a mathematical integer which don't take into account boundary conditions and representations - the REAL semantics of the machine object as opposed to the pretend play semantics of a simplified mathematical toy version - don't necessarily apply to an int16, an int32, or an int64. And that's where programming, as opposed to mathematics, comes into play.
So 1) why not model it correctly the first time?
2) can you prove the correctness of your formal model? If not, it's just another source of bugs.
3) therefore, isn't all this 'formal methods' jazz just shorthand for 'write the whole program in a pure-functional language and be done with it'?
So why not just do that instead?
"Of course the same cannot be said of the socialists fighting objectivism."
What fight does socialism (an economic philosophy based on objective analysis of historical data trends) have with objective reality?
And why did Randite big-O Objectivism ally itself - of all economic faiths - with *capitalism*, when capitalist economics is based purely on the idea of SUBJECTIVE value: that things are ONLY and always worth "whatever people will pay for them in the current market"?
Capitalism is nothing BUT subjectivism taken to its logical extreme. It's the socialists who hold to an objective theory of value: that a human life is worth something in real terms even if the 'market' chooses to decide otherwise.
That's the huge irony with Rand. Or contradiction, if you prefer.
Check your premises!
He's all up in your bizanz?