and right after we got one of those, a huge set of heatsink fins for it. Mass deployment of clean fusion (assuming such a thing existed) might not generate CO2, but it would still pump a lot of excess heat into the atmosphere which could mess us up just as badly.
The web was what made the Metaverse age so rapidly. Take a MUD-like centralized world, which people were already familiar with, add on some graphics and you've got something that seems reasonably cool in 1993. But the web guys had already come up with a more promising foundation and were about to hit the mainstream over the head with it.
I used to think that too. In the 1990s it was inconceivable to me that one or two companies could become huge mega-players on the web in the way that Google have, and yet, here we are. And in the gaming world, consoles are still huge and World of Warcraft - liked every other centralised, proprietary, 3D MMO - still exists. Worse, Facebook and the Apple App Store are turning the clock back on the centralised->distributed timeline, and we're heading right back to that 1980s "single owned corporate walled garden" view of the Net.
Why hasn't a "3D Web" emerged? Why does each 3D game seem to reimplement the same protocol problems from scratch? Why don't all the MMOs converge as separate spaces within a unified virtual realm, like the Web sorta attempted to do, before it went down the Web 2.0 route? I really don't understand why. But I'm uneasy about the fork in the road we seem to be taking, back toward the past.
Also : I've never seen a pizza analogy on slashdot. I'm curious - what are they like?
They're a lot like stone soup analogies.
So, one poster says "This computer security situation is like stone soup. But what would make it more relevant would be if it were also like a pizza with a stone soup topping." And then another poster says "That is a good analogy, but it would be even better if it were also like a car made entirely of pizza with a stone soup topping..."
I really don't see what people are complaining about. Fast release cycles is what we want, right?
No, it really isn't. That's the heart of the problem.
Some web developers want fast release cycles so they can get to play with the latest, non-standardised, bleeding-edge HTML5 toys.
The rest of us who are web users think the browser is done, has been done for years, it works, we're using it every day to do real work and we just want the security patches to be fixed so we don't get rooted by this month's security exploit.
What would be super awesome would be if some open-source project somewhere worked out how to test their software for security bugs before release, so we don't even have to do the monthly-security-patch race. You know, using the exact same tools that the hackers use to find the bugs after release? It's obviously not impossible, or the hackers wouldn't be able to do it at all. But apparently despite it being perfectly possible to do, and despite not doing it causing the Internet to be full of botnets and fail, nobody in a position to do it seems to want to do this.
Instead of fixing the existing security holes, they want to experiment with changing the GUI and adding new nonstandard HTML features every five weeks. For some strange reason that doesn't quite thrill me.
I guess the notion of "release early, release often" is dead?
Once people are actually using your product, yes.
When a project is just an experimental research toy, nobody cares how fast your updates break everything. But when you're dealing with adults, stability is a feature, not a bug. I know it's old-fashioned and boring of us, but we like to use browsers to do our work, not just to admire the shiny go-faster stripes and try to work out where the gear shift lever is this week.
Intensify the forward batteries. I don't want anything to get through!
But sir, the triple-As are drained! We're cross-circuiting the D-cells with a nine-volt power converter right now but the thing which makes the swirly lights is going slow and Speak & Spell is showing random letters! If we don't find that wall socket right now -
Get Obi Wan to try and convince Spock that midichlorians exist. It'll end in bloodshed, red or green.
(pulls out tricorder, raises eyebrow)
"Fascinating. This lifeform appears to possess a symbiotic micichloronic parasite in its circulatory system which acts as a naturally evolved psionic amplifier. I speculate that this is the cause of its paranormal martial prowess. Perhaps if we were to obtain a sample of the creature's blood we could reverse the polarity of the neutron flux by rerouting the shield projection dish through a trilithium carbonite matrix- "
"Reverse my polarity you would, hmm? Reverse the shiny end of my lightsaber your red-shirted ensign up you shall! Yes!"
The fans of Star Wars (and I consider myself one - I have the originals on VHS) do not own the work.
That would certainly be true if fans were merely passive, silent, consumers and produced no creative contributions to the world: no conventions, no fanfic, no cosplay, no unlicensed spinoffs, no doodles in high school exercise books. But since they do make such creative works, couldn't it be argued that they also own whatever they create, and every time they retell a story they literally make it their own? Acknowledging that truth would be problematic for the current copyright regime of course, since it doesn't believe that creativity can ever overlap or build on the works of others.
Certainly popular media could exist in a world where fans never created any derived artworks. But I think a work would struggle to gain social traction if nobody were allowed to "retell" it. There'd really be no fandom as such, and without an active fandom, who would buy DVD copies after the original theatrical release?
The problem comes when the original author and their merchandising partners also try to extend or "retell" their story - but they do a worse job of it than the unlicensed fans do. I've read better Star Wars parody fanfic than the entire Prequel Trilogy combined, and that just hurts.
pretty obviously forced- wedged in like a wrench in a cheesecake
Darnit, now I have to buy a new Internet to replace the one you just won.
Your actual comments are right, of course. I recommend The Secret History of Star Wars for a documentation of exactly how the story was tortured into its final shape.
except Lucas didn't barge into my home and remove my decaying old VHS tapes.
No, but if you tried to make your VHS experience available to other fans on a mass scale, you'd have legal copyright proceedings against you which could end in jail time. Is that any different?
Software code on the other hand is notoriously bad at working with code from other languages, sure there's language bindings and and various ways of making them somewhat talk to each other but the cost of mixing languages is huge. It's more like building bits and pieces of the system to work on optical signals and the rest on electrical signals, not like pounding one nail and screwing one screw into a board.
I agree that this is the situation with programming languages at the moment, but I'm constantly surprised that we continue to tolerate this lack of interoperability. Especially since the entire invention of "component programming" (COM, CORBA et al) was intended to help languages coexist. From my perspective, it's failed utterly to do this.
What I would like to see (and I admit that I'm dreaming) is a huge new shift of focus on the part of language designers: * AWAY FROM thinking of languages as "something which runs in a single process, perhaps with a VM or runtime, and interacts with an OS and set of libraries" * TOWARDS languages as "a standardised low-level interface for software components to communicate".
In other words, what I think we're missing with the state of computing at the moment is anything remotely approaching a standard software "signals bus" as in electronics. Generally, at least in the i386 world, we've assumed that a language is a thing which generates binary processor-native code, which calls OS hooks, but otherwise is not standardised in the least. The processor and OS do whatever isolation they can between these opaque lumps of executable binary code, but it's not much. The language runtimes each implement their own, mostly incompatible, ideas about "objects", and some grudgingly export and import something approaching COM/CORBA components, but there's really no way to mix-and-match objects between languages because we're still thinking in terms of large-granular processes running in a shared native-binary host with a shared filesystem.
Ultimately this doesn't seem like it will scale at all well to a system like the Internet. What it would be good to have would be a standardised, fine-grained way for software objects (for some standard definition of object, which doesn't really exist) to communicate safely... which is what COM/CORBA attempted and failed to do, and which the Web/SOAP/AJAX/Javascript seems to be trying to reimplement, fairly badly, at a much higher level.
tldr: I'd like to see an object-oriented language or meta-language which really adopted the idea of "object" as the sole organising principle, throwing away entirely any kind of executable package larger than an object, and allowed those objects to be scattered across the Internet or grouped inside a single process, and then optimised the communication for those differing scales without the programmer needing to know. Then each object could be implemented in a different language, and it would all still work.
The problem is each OO language has its own idea on even such fundamental principles as what an object is, what a method is, how inheritance works, and so on that it's not clear there could be any standard way of allowing diverse objects to connect. But I think it's where we need to get.
Remember kids, if your group declares that it has no real leadership, and is a decentralized collective of individuals that spontaneously gather together
... then it doesn't necessarily follow that the group is an entirely leaderless collective, because propaganda, slogans and sincere self-belief don't often match up with reality. Look at the history of popular movements for a bit. There are always informal circles inside circles, people more connected than others. The people who the rank and file consider spokespeople aren't always the ones who are really organising things behind the scenes. Things which appear to have "just spontaneously happened" often turn out to have underlying organisation which might be invisible to most of the people who turn up to the rallies. Nothing is ever a simple, smooth, flat collective, even (especially) in a highly idealised cultlike environment. There are leaders, and there are followers, and there are secrets.
Communism, for example, started out as a "leaderless collective" with similar utopian everyone-is-equal ideals to those professed by Anonymous. The Russian experience with Bolshevism shows just how complicated the group dynamics can be in these sorts of movements. Lots and lots of turf wars, splinter factions, petty infights, de facto leaders, leadership coups. Heck, just look at your local university faculty to see the sorts of fights that go on. It's human social nature to create eddies and flows and turbulent vortexes.
I'd give the FBI a bit of credit for recognising how some of these things evolve. They've seen this before.
Anything the government can't understand or control is a security threat.
Pretty much, since the role of government is to understand and control the problems which are bigger than any smaller organisation to cope with.
Do you allow untrusted binary code from unknown sources that you don't understand and control to run on your server? No? You fascist tyrant, you. Code should be free! Romp, little botnets, romp! Replicate freely!
Slashdot Mirror
We still need an aneutronic microfusion generator
and right after we got one of those, a huge set of heatsink fins for it. Mass deployment of clean fusion (assuming such a thing existed) might not generate CO2, but it would still pump a lot of excess heat into the atmosphere which could mess us up just as badly.
Or if it's a Higgs, hide it in an inverse femtobarn.
The web was what made the Metaverse age so rapidly. Take a MUD-like centralized world, which people were already familiar with, add on some graphics and you've got something that seems reasonably cool in 1993. But the web guys had already come up with a more promising foundation and were about to hit the mainstream over the head with it.
I used to think that too. In the 1990s it was inconceivable to me that one or two companies could become huge mega-players on the web in the way that Google have, and yet, here we are. And in the gaming world, consoles are still huge and World of Warcraft - liked every other centralised, proprietary, 3D MMO - still exists. Worse, Facebook and the Apple App Store are turning the clock back on the centralised->distributed timeline, and we're heading right back to that 1980s "single owned corporate walled garden" view of the Net.
Why hasn't a "3D Web" emerged? Why does each 3D game seem to reimplement the same protocol problems from scratch? Why don't all the MMOs converge as separate spaces within a unified virtual realm, like the Web sorta attempted to do, before it went down the Web 2.0 route? I really don't understand why. But I'm uneasy about the fork in the road we seem to be taking, back toward the past.
Business model!
1. Note missing feature in Firefox
2. Write missing functionality; include carefully obfuscated security bug
And that explains the new Firefox 5-week release cycle.
Also : I've never seen a pizza analogy on slashdot. I'm curious - what are they like?
They're a lot like stone soup analogies.
So, one poster says "This computer security situation is like stone soup. But what would make it more relevant would be if it were also like a pizza with a stone soup topping."
And then another poster says "That is a good analogy, but it would be even better if it were also like a car made entirely of pizza with a stone soup topping..."
I really don't see what people are complaining about. Fast release cycles is what we want, right?
No, it really isn't. That's the heart of the problem.
Some web developers want fast release cycles so they can get to play with the latest, non-standardised, bleeding-edge HTML5 toys.
The rest of us who are web users think the browser is done, has been done for years, it works, we're using it every day to do real work and we just want the security patches to be fixed so we don't get rooted by this month's security exploit.
What would be super awesome would be if some open-source project somewhere worked out how to test their software for security bugs before release, so we don't even have to do the monthly-security-patch race. You know, using the exact same tools that the hackers use to find the bugs after release? It's obviously not impossible, or the hackers wouldn't be able to do it at all. But apparently despite it being perfectly possible to do, and despite not doing it causing the Internet to be full of botnets and fail, nobody in a position to do it seems to want to do this.
Instead of fixing the existing security holes, they want to experiment with changing the GUI and adding new nonstandard HTML features every five weeks. For some strange reason that doesn't quite thrill me.
I guess the notion of "release early, release often" is dead?
Once people are actually using your product, yes.
When a project is just an experimental research toy, nobody cares how fast your updates break everything. But when you're dealing with adults, stability is a feature, not a bug. I know it's old-fashioned and boring of us, but we like to use browsers to do our work, not just to admire the shiny go-faster stripes and try to work out where the gear shift lever is this week.
Intensify the forward batteries. I don't want anything to get through!
But sir, the triple-As are drained! We're cross-circuiting the D-cells with a nine-volt power converter right now but the thing which makes the swirly lights is going slow and Speak & Spell is showing random letters! If we don't find that wall socket right now -
There are 10,000+ imperial star destroyers. 3 can turn a standard earth sized planet into nothing but molten mayhem in about 12 hours.
The entire Starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet! It'd take 1,000 ships with more firepower than I've -
Isn't that a ship coming in?
beamed himself into the primary coolant loop of a starship
Which, as is standard for all Federation starships, was filled entirely with freshly-brewed beer.
This is because the future is awesome.
Get Obi Wan to try and convince Spock that midichlorians exist. It'll end in bloodshed, red or green.
(pulls out tricorder, raises eyebrow)
"Fascinating. This lifeform appears to possess a symbiotic micichloronic parasite in its circulatory system which acts as a naturally evolved psionic amplifier. I speculate that this is the cause of its paranormal martial prowess. Perhaps if we were to obtain a sample of the creature's blood we could reverse the polarity of the neutron flux by rerouting the shield projection dish through a trilithium carbonite matrix- "
"Reverse my polarity you would, hmm? Reverse the shiny end of my lightsaber your red-shirted ensign up you shall! Yes!"
They also remastered and added CGI to the original Star Trek series, yet trekkies aren't all up in arms.
I think that's because you can still get the originals on DVD. Maybe not on Blu-Ray? I don't know because I don't so much care about BD.
The fans of Star Wars (and I consider myself one - I have the originals on VHS) do not own the work.
That would certainly be true if fans were merely passive, silent, consumers and produced no creative contributions to the world: no conventions, no fanfic, no cosplay, no unlicensed spinoffs, no doodles in high school exercise books. But since they do make such creative works, couldn't it be argued that they also own whatever they create, and every time they retell a story they literally make it their own? Acknowledging that truth would be problematic for the current copyright regime of course, since it doesn't believe that creativity can ever overlap or build on the works of others.
Certainly popular media could exist in a world where fans never created any derived artworks. But I think a work would struggle to gain social traction if nobody were allowed to "retell" it. There'd really be no fandom as such, and without an active fandom, who would buy DVD copies after the original theatrical release?
The problem comes when the original author and their merchandising partners also try to extend or "retell" their story - but they do a worse job of it than the unlicensed fans do. I've read better Star Wars parody fanfic than the entire Prequel Trilogy combined, and that just hurts.
pretty obviously forced- wedged in like a wrench in a cheesecake
Darnit, now I have to buy a new Internet to replace the one you just won.
Your actual comments are right, of course. I recommend The Secret History of Star Wars for a documentation of exactly how the story was tortured into its final shape.
except Lucas didn't barge into my home and remove my decaying old VHS tapes.
No, but if you tried to make your VHS experience available to other fans on a mass scale, you'd have legal copyright proceedings against you which could end in jail time. Is that any different?
I care about this Alot.
Send it into the past. Once you get farther back than about 50 K-years, it'll be gone, but reusable.
And now you know what oil deposits are made of.
Used iPods.
Been doing the same 4 DECADES already
You've been doing virus removal for 40 years? I guess you got your start on OS/360!
Software code on the other hand is notoriously bad at working with code from other languages, sure there's language bindings and and various ways of making them somewhat talk to each other but the cost of mixing languages is huge. It's more like building bits and pieces of the system to work on optical signals and the rest on electrical signals, not like pounding one nail and screwing one screw into a board.
I agree that this is the situation with programming languages at the moment, but I'm constantly surprised that we continue to tolerate this lack of interoperability. Especially since the entire invention of "component programming" (COM, CORBA et al) was intended to help languages coexist. From my perspective, it's failed utterly to do this.
What I would like to see (and I admit that I'm dreaming) is a huge new shift of focus on the part of language designers:
* AWAY FROM thinking of languages as "something which runs in a single process, perhaps with a VM or runtime, and interacts with an OS and set of libraries"
* TOWARDS languages as "a standardised low-level interface for software components to communicate".
In other words, what I think we're missing with the state of computing at the moment is anything remotely approaching a standard software "signals bus" as in electronics. Generally, at least in the i386 world, we've assumed that a language is a thing which generates binary processor-native code, which calls OS hooks, but otherwise is not standardised in the least. The processor and OS do whatever isolation they can between these opaque lumps of executable binary code, but it's not much. The language runtimes each implement their own, mostly incompatible, ideas about "objects", and some grudgingly export and import something approaching COM/CORBA components, but there's really no way to mix-and-match objects between languages because we're still thinking in terms of large-granular processes running in a shared native-binary host with a shared filesystem.
Ultimately this doesn't seem like it will scale at all well to a system like the Internet. What it would be good to have would be a standardised, fine-grained way for software objects (for some standard definition of object, which doesn't really exist) to communicate safely... which is what COM/CORBA attempted and failed to do, and which the Web/SOAP/AJAX/Javascript seems to be trying to reimplement, fairly badly, at a much higher level.
tldr: I'd like to see an object-oriented language or meta-language which really adopted the idea of "object" as the sole organising principle, throwing away entirely any kind of executable package larger than an object, and allowed those objects to be scattered across the Internet or grouped inside a single process, and then optimised the communication for those differing scales without the programmer needing to know. Then each object could be implemented in a different language, and it would all still work.
The problem is each OO language has its own idea on even such fundamental principles as what an object is, what a method is, how inheritance works, and so on that it's not clear there could be any standard way of allowing diverse objects to connect. But I think it's where we need to get.
So are you proposing that the only way we will know for sure that an atom bomb will kill a large number of people is to drop one on Texas?
New Mexico, actually, as it turned out.
Remember kids, if your group declares that it has no real leadership, and is a decentralized collective of individuals that spontaneously gather together
... then it doesn't necessarily follow that the group is an entirely leaderless collective, because propaganda, slogans and sincere self-belief don't often match up with reality. Look at the history of popular movements for a bit. There are always informal circles inside circles, people more connected than others. The people who the rank and file consider spokespeople aren't always the ones who are really organising things behind the scenes. Things which appear to have "just spontaneously happened" often turn out to have underlying organisation which might be invisible to most of the people who turn up to the rallies. Nothing is ever a simple, smooth, flat collective, even (especially) in a highly idealised cultlike environment. There are leaders, and there are followers, and there are secrets.
Communism, for example, started out as a "leaderless collective" with similar utopian everyone-is-equal ideals to those professed by Anonymous. The Russian experience with Bolshevism shows just how complicated the group dynamics can be in these sorts of movements. Lots and lots of turf wars, splinter factions, petty infights, de facto leaders, leadership coups. Heck, just look at your local university faculty to see the sorts of fights that go on. It's human social nature to create eddies and flows and turbulent vortexes.
I'd give the FBI a bit of credit for recognising how some of these things evolve. They've seen this before.
. Hatred begets hatred, thus neatly closing the loop.
And providing a clean-burning, sustainable energy source for future generations!
The average citizen should be more worried about bankers and the cops than about Anonymous.
So you're absolutely certain your password wasn't on any of the lists that have been released? Good for you.
Anything the government can't understand or control is a security threat.
Pretty much, since the role of government is to understand and control the problems which are bigger than any smaller organisation to cope with.
Do you allow untrusted binary code from unknown sources that you don't understand and control to run on your server? No? You fascist tyrant, you. Code should be free! Romp, little botnets, romp! Replicate freely!
famed and acclaimed scientists from "science"
Is fame and acclaim the same thing as scientific verifiability?
Just a thought.