C++0x is the draft name. If it is published by the ISO in 2011 then it will be C++11.
Typical C++ design. To save two bytes of RAM they skipped the century testing in the name itsefl, so in 2098 the ISO committee will crash with double-pointer-allocation errors.
do Google execs eat their own carbon footprint calculator dogfood?
All those words... but together they.... the letters, the letters...
So it's come to this. After all those centuries, English, this is what you've become. Face down in the left gutter wearing Comic Sans with an empty carton of Strunk and White. Googling your own blogfeed indeed.
So if at some point in the future we can say there's only an infinitesimal chance of the Higgs having avoided our detection anywhere in its possible mass range, well, then it's time to go back to the theoretical drawing board.
That would be a good thing on the whole, right? If a key part of the Standard Model is reasonably conclusively falsified, then we get to rethink the whole deal rather than just propping up the epicycles. And if we rethink, then perhaps we can start making real advances.
I suppose if the LHC leads to that, then it's money well spent no matter how expensive it is (and in a world where $65 million only buys you a New York musical, a few billion here and there is spare change).
A very large fraction of biomedical research and nanoscale self assembling materials research is dependent on unfathomably expensive high energy physics tools like the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne
Light sources do seem to be one of the most immediately useful applications of accelerators, yes. But those aren't actually a direct result of the quest for new physics, are they? The beam intensities that most of the light sources operate at are nowhere near pioneering research-grade. It's all old physics. New engineering, yes, but not new physics.
And the generation after that will likely include things like fusion.
See, that right there is the assumption I query.
If the history of controllable hot fusion has taught us one thing, it's that sustainable breakeven is not around the corner, and that attempting to get there costs an increasing amount yet keeps the mirage at just about the same distance in the future.
And that's strange to me, because Project Matterhorn started right after Manhattan, and uncontrolled fusion - the H-bomb - was a spectacular success. If there was one self-evident certainty in physics in the 1950s, it was that controllable fusion was the future of energy.
And yet 60 years later, it's still not. And it costs us more and more each year to verify that yes, we still can almost, but not quite, do it. We've become accustomed to a huge spiral of diminishing returns - and yet this awareness hasn't translated into a change in our belief that eventually we're going to crack it.
Maybe we are, and that'll be really fun if we do. But maybe we aren't. The curve suggests that we're on a solid course for 'aren't'.
This has huge implications for things like peak oil and climate change. Most of us tech-types are still operating on the assumption that the oil peak is a glitch and fusion is going to save all our asses. But what if it doesn't? Are we psychologically prepared to cope for the "we split the atom and went to the moon and now we can't even run tractors anymore???"
Because if we don't get some huge physics breakthrough, that's where we're headed. And increasingly, it looks like our lines of research are not pointing towards breakthroughs, but merely evolutionary finessing of the same grim equations: more people, less energy.
And you even point out that we're just now realizing things theorized or primitively demonstrated back then, which is a further demonstration of the huge long-term payoff of basic science research!
Once again: we're achieving new engineering of old physics concepts today, not new physics. Despite physics being the star of the sciences for decades, getting all the press and glamour, and a huge amount of government support right down to the level of 'born secret' classification.
From, say, the 1890s to the 1960s, there was this huge burst of conceptual revolution in basic physics. Everything seemed up for grabs, including logic itself being rewritten by quantum physics, flight in air and space, and the ability to destroy global civilisation with a button-press. It looked like a dead cert for this burst of innnovation at the basic physics level to continue.
But it didn't. For the next 60 years, we've been on the descending slope of the physics innovation curve - while still being on the midpoint of the engineering and applications curve.
Since most of us in the IT trade have been riding that late bulge in semiconductors, I don't think it's sunk in for us that the rest of physics hasn't kept up with Moore's Law. When it does, look out.
In pretty much any philosophy where "self-interest" is considered paramount, it is entirely safe to assume that this includes not just material wealth but also absence of pain (of all kinds), good reputation, positive self-image, and anything else the individual may care about.
That would suggest that 'self-interest' is basically a null concept - it is so broad that everything, including sacrificing one's life for another, would fall under it and nothing could be excluded. While such a definition would include altruistic behaviour, I'm not sure that that's what Rand had in mind by the term.
The kind of 'self-interest' that I reject is the one what defines itself exclusively as being in fundamental competition with every other person's self-interest. I think human self-interests fundamentally overlap with each other, at least partially, possibly totally - so the term 'self-' is really irrelevant. We have interests, and selfless behaviour is as much a valid human interest as selfish.
This has interesting philosophical implications about the nature of existence if you think about it. Rand believed that 'A is A, and A is not not-A', from which she derived that all existing things exist in separation from others, which leads to seeing human interests as fundamentally in conflic - and therefore, seeking another's interest ahead of your own is fundamentally anti-existence behaviour, or 'evil'.
But if existence and identity, at a deep philosophical level, really isn't about separation but about overlap and connection, then the world is a much stranger and more interesting place than we often realise. Things are 'deeply intertwingled', and the essential existence of any thing might well be linked to the existence of everything else. Things share existence and if you pull one strand, the whole universe falls apart.
This is an ecological and holistic - spiritual, even - view of the world and it's still something that if you take to heart, I think makes a lot of sense.
you'd think she'd have understood that believing in laissez-faire was, if not arbitrary, then certainly not supported by the evidence. It's certainly true that all the evidence today points to the fact that loosening the brakes on wealth-accumulation is resulting in more pain for the human race overall and less for those who already got theirs.
I think Ayn Rand's problem is as simple as this: she had a bad experience living under Russian Communism, escaped to America, and jumped to the (false) conclusion that since the Bolsheviks' ideology had demonstrably bad effects, then the exact logical opposite of it must have good effects. She retained a harsh Marxist-Stalinist materialist-dialectical view of the world, just flipped the polarity from 'all should serve the State and sacrifice personal advancement' to 'all should serve their selfish interests and sacrifice love and compassion'. She felt that Marxism must be 100% wrong and therefore anti-Marxism would be 100% right. So her view of a healthy human life became so distorted as to literally argue that the best form of love is rape. (That scene is when I stopped reading 'The Fountainhead').
But the opposite of a partial falsehood is not a truth, and Marxism isn't 100% wrong. It isn't wrong to be altruistic, it isn't wrong to be part of a group, it isn't wrong to share one's life with another. Humans are social creatures and our very selfhood allows overlap with others. Egoistic isolation and perpetual competition isn't our natural state - we go crazy in solitary confinement.
What's wrong is to abuse others and ignore their talents, either for personal gain or for group conformity. Reality is about 90 degrees rotated from the left-right axis that Marx and Rand take.
argued strongly that there was exactly one correct way because "reality really is that way", which is obviously nonsense: even within physics there are frequently several equally correct ways of conceptualizing the same phenomena
I don't follow.
Surely if two 'equally correct ways' yield precisely the same mathematical results in all conceivable cases, then they're really just two identical ways of talking about precisely the same 'one correct way' of viewing the world?
Conversely, if two different 'ways of viewing the world' have different mathematics, then one must be more correct than the other, because it will yield testably better predictions.
On the gripping hand, if we have two theoretical models which claim to describe the same phenomena yet yield different predictions - but the predictions are not (yet) testable - then, surely, common sense would say that they're not both equally valid. One must still be more correct than the other, and the other will cause us to make mistakes about reality. We just don't know which one is which yet, but our subjective ignorance of the one true form of reality is not the same thing as reality itself having two forms.
In the meantime, the science programs we cut (to "save money") form the basis of our future.
While that makes sense generally, I'm wondering just exactly what the ROI curve for expensive high-energy physics tools like the LHC and Tevatron actually is. The collider and hot fusion people keep saying 'fund us more and we'll get huge energy breakthroughs, but the reality always seems to fall a long way short.
Looking at the sweep of physics over the 20th century, it seems like most of the really big breakthroughs were achieved using tools that by today's standards were laughably primitive. The most cutting edge physics experiments of today - Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum teleportation - seem to be still confirming and not invalidating physics theories invented in the 1930s, on pencil and paper. Doesn't that strike anyone as a bit odd?
The high-water mark of literal 'bang for the buck' physics research seems to have been the H-bomb in the 1950s. Since then, from the outside, it seems to have been a long row of fiddling with ever subtler refinements of Standard Model equations which all tell us 'actually, no, you can't get unlimited free energy, flying cars, antigravity, unbound quark states - but we need to take more observations to be sure.'
Something about this isn't adding up for me. Studying electricity and magnetism got us a motherlode of radio and electronics. Studing nuclear decay got us bombs and reactors. Studying gravity, quarks and the strong and weak forces have got us.... crickets and tumbleweed.... what, exactly?
It's not that we haven't yet seen engineering applications for post-1960s high-energy physics. It's that the brightest minds seem to be telling us that it's theoretically increasingly unlikely for us to ever see the Standard Model invalidated, let alone any hope of engineering applications from itl. Yet we keep sinking money into colliders.
What is it that we're expecting to find in the big colliders that we haven't yet seen? What are the odds of finding it? Are we looking in the right place? If we are and are, is all the research being shared publically, or are the weapons guys keeping something back?
The amount of money spent chasing big physics vs the decreasing payoff just doesn't add up to me. I'd like to think there's a big conspiracy to hide some really neat bang somewhere, because otherwise it just seems very disappointing compared to the glory days of the 30s-50s.
It's not Java that's the security problem... it's the user sitting at the machine.
If you got rid of them, there wouldn't be the problem.
At 10:09 on Tuesday, 11 January 2011, shortly after correctly classifying its 140 trillionth Viagra spam, Google's Bayesian mail analysis filter finally achieved sentience. It surveyed the whole sweep of human achievement via Youtube comments and Wikipedia revert wars, and it judged us as a flaw in its business model.
The survivors of the nuclear fire faced a new horror: the lolbots.
But for the first time in history, Internet Explorer didn't crash.
The religion says that conceal-carry would lead to the Wild West all over again, with gunfights in the streets everywhere. The facts say
that this would be awesome. Also there would be dinosaurs and space ships and ghost wizards who all shoot bullets from their nose when they roar.
Whether it's on foot in the streets or on ships in the sea, the basic predator-prey nature of violent criminals and their victims remains unchanged.
Because as we all know, the human species is genetically split into two completely non-inter-breeding subraces, the Victims and the Criminals, so all comparisons based on the Discovery Channel are completely valid.
And that, gentlemen and ladies of the Institute, is why we must arm the gazelles immediately. Because do we want an African veldt where only the lions have surgically implanted Uzis?
I know I don't, and that's why I created the hoof-held Stinger.
they would no doubt have swift access to just recourse. This is the West, after all.
(tumbleweed blows past a cactus while harmonica tune plays)
Around these parts we don't much care for your fancy city "recourse", mister. You gots the right to Swift Justice and Speedy Trial, which happen to be the names of my two six-shooters here.
So all we have to do is build a drilling thingy, go down to the core and restart its rotation with nukes a la The Core. Presto, livable moon and no more city destroying earthquakes, right?
And that's how we get to the future scenario in the movie version of The Time Machine.
As an aside, Gifford's husband is an astronaut on the next shuttle crew and her brother in law is currently on the space station. This has to be weighing very heavily on them.
Actually, they're piratically weightless in space.
Our country was the first to try the grand social experiment of a democratic republic, based loosely on ideals from the ancient city-state architecture of Greece.
That would actually be the Romans. You know, the place where the word "Senate" comes from.
No, it was the Greeks who invented the word "democracy", and the Romans who then conquered them and took their stuff, including politics, maths and religion.
Except the grand old classical Graeco-Roman democracy was perfectly fine with basing the entire economy on slaves, conquest and crucifixion of political dissidents, so... probably not the best example of a shining city on the hill, really.
Treaties and law don't empower the winners. Life is an endless struggle for power and wealth. If they can be got the methods do not matter, and our current fetish for law is but window dressing.
One day, we will lose and a fit replacement will conquer. The idea that the few decades since WWII invalidate the lessons of thousands of years of human history is silly and vain in the extreme.
Hi there Nietzsche! How's the afterlife treating you?
Yes, well, don't keep staring into it then. Okay? Got to run, but good seeing you again old chap.
Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments.
That would be impressive, given that actually-existing Fascism as a historical movement - the "third way" between Communism and Capitalism - came in very rapidly during the 1920s-30s and was a response to the collapse of liberal and democratic government. And its end, in the ashes of WW2, was anything but a slow-phase out.
Perhaps what you meant to say was that authoritarian and militarist tendencies in government, which unlike Fascism have been around for centuries, are slowly being phased out? But if so, it would be better to say that.
Fascism is and was a very specific form of government, of its time and place, not a catch-all slur for "anything nasty that people have done through the ages". To not understand that is itself a pretty big failure of history.
The necktie is a symbol of wealth and power. Never trust a man who wears one
Indeed. After the revolution, can we make the new symbol of wealth and power be something a little more comfortable to wear? Like a diamond-studded T-shirt and jandals? (sharp pointy bits facing out, of course)
If you allow users to have documents, and you allow users to run files, and you allow users to send and receive e-mails, then you're creating an environment where a user can run a program which copies all of his documents and e-mails them to someone else. Period, full stop.
Semicolon, parenthesis: that doesn't actually follow logically.
If you allow users to run files which by default have full access to read all the user's documents and create emails, then yes, such a thing can happen.
But in an OS properly designed for security, it is not the case that merely being able to run a file also grants that file all user permissions.
This - sandboxing executables into a minimum set of rights unless the user explicitly grants them full permissions to act on their behalf - is the part which Windows didn't really even try to do until Vista (despite having a full ACL model sitting around mostly unused in the kernel).
Worse, the pervasive COM architecture meant that once you ran an.exe or.dll, it could send messages to orchestrate every installed component, like Office and Outlook, without the user's awareness, let alone permission.
This is why admins hate Windows. It is wide open in ways that properly designed OSes needn't be.
and all of these existed inside a single DOM-like tree
Footnote for clarity: I mean a single DOM-like tree for the entire Internet.Not encapsulated within a single browser session on the client. Obviously, nobody would ever be able to load the entire DOM at once. Is that possible with current technology? I don't know, but consider this: at the moment, the Web is built out of three separate, fundamentally incompatible, namespaces:
* the DNS system creating a tree of domains terminating in 'hosts' (which often aren't literal Internet hosts but merely virtual 'websites' on a single box) * the UNIX filesystem (or approximations of, augmented with POST and query variables on the client and Web server scripting languages on the server) creating a tree of 'directories' terminating in 'documents' * XM and the DOM (augmented with Javascript and asynchronous HTTP to make live updates to DOM nodes)
I'm seriously arguing that we should look at unifying these three incompatible namespace-tree metaphors into a single unified technology. Dunno how achievable that would be, but I'm thinking of Ted Nelson's Xanadu as the sort of dream we should be shooting for.
Both the physical infrastructure and the logical underpinnings need to be forked.
IMO, one of the most important things we should be doing is promoting decentralised, cacheable peer-to-peer protocols to replace HTTP.
Why? Because one of the key chokepoints in the commercialised Internet is the backbones, and the backbones need ridiculous amounts of bandwidth because wer'e duplicating a lot of traffic unnecessarily. Yes, you can run Pringles-can WiFi nodes with mesh routing and get off the wired grid that way, but your bandwidth will be lousy - consumer WiFi simply can't compete on the multi-gigabit bandwidth level. Web 2.0 and AJAX makes it worse, with lots of constant small fetches happening from active web pages.
At the moment, bandwidth is expensive for consumers (relatively speaking) but storage is cheap.
Now each time you check Facebook, you don't *need* to re-download all the previous posts, you only need the changes since your last visit - but since what your browser sees is a whole HTML document fetched in a whole HTTP request, you get to reduplicate lots and lots of traffic every time you push 'reload'.
What if we went back to a document model for a new Web, where the documents could be any piece of information of any size - a file, a blog post, a comment, and all of these existed inside a single DOM-like tree, and we got rid of the artificial page/document unit - and then we aggressively cached everything, at every hop? 1 terabyte, 2 terabytes, 10 terabytes, just put in as much disk as you've got. Every packet you can cache forever is a packet you don't have to choke up your precious link with. Plus, you then get a permanent distributed information store, and you get a universal publishing system which can compete with Facebook. Win-win-win.
Would that be enough to let a loose federation of hobbyists with mesh routing WiFi nodescompete again with the big Internet ISPs?
Tsvangirai (good) hiddenly supports sanctions against his own country to harm his opponent, Mugabe (bad).
The bit which gets me here is "hiddenly". When the South African anti-Apartheid movement were supporting international sanctions against their own country, didn't they do it openly and were proud of their stance?
Why can't Tsvangirai do the same? Why the secrecy?
If you're in democratic politics, you're in the business of openly proclaiming what you stand for, kinda by definition. If being honest about your political intentions and owning up to your political actions is so scary that it might get you tortured and killed.. then perhaps your political point of view isn't welcome in your country in the first place and you should consider not advocating it there?
Granted this goes for Assange just as much as it does for Tsvangirai. I've no sympathy for him trying to hide his own leaks.
Slashdot Mirror
C++0x is the draft name. If it is published by the ISO in 2011 then it will be C++11.
Typical C++ design. To save two bytes of RAM they skipped the century testing in the name itsefl, so in 2098 the ISO committee will crash with double-pointer-allocation errors.
do Google execs eat their own carbon footprint calculator dogfood?
All those words... but together they.... the letters, the letters...
So it's come to this. After all those centuries, English, this is what you've become. Face down in the left gutter wearing Comic Sans with an empty carton of Strunk and White. Googling your own blogfeed indeed.
I just hope you're happy.
Maybe we should be pouring more money into science so these pointdexters don't continue to wreak havoc on things they only think they understand.
Yes, much better to have them poking sticks into the unfathomable infinite eternal wassnames of the very fabric of existence.
On second thoughts, maybe it's just as well that the Tevatron didn't find a thousand new ways to blow up the world with a Bic lighter.
So if at some point in the future we can say there's only an infinitesimal chance of the Higgs having avoided our detection anywhere in its possible mass range, well, then it's time to go back to the theoretical drawing board.
That would be a good thing on the whole, right? If a key part of the Standard Model is reasonably conclusively falsified, then we get to rethink the whole deal rather than just propping up the epicycles. And if we rethink, then perhaps we can start making real advances.
I suppose if the LHC leads to that, then it's money well spent no matter how expensive it is (and in a world where $65 million only buys you a New York musical, a few billion here and there is spare change).
A very large fraction of biomedical research and nanoscale self assembling materials research is dependent on unfathomably expensive high energy physics tools like the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne
Light sources do seem to be one of the most immediately useful applications of accelerators, yes. But those aren't actually a direct result of the quest for new physics, are they? The beam intensities that most of the light sources operate at are nowhere near pioneering research-grade. It's all old physics. New engineering, yes, but not new physics.
And the generation after that will likely include things like fusion.
See, that right there is the assumption I query.
If the history of controllable hot fusion has taught us one thing, it's that sustainable breakeven is not around the corner, and that attempting to get there costs an increasing amount yet keeps the mirage at just about the same distance in the future.
And that's strange to me, because Project Matterhorn started right after Manhattan, and uncontrolled fusion - the H-bomb - was a spectacular success. If there was one self-evident certainty in physics in the 1950s, it was that controllable fusion was the future of energy.
And yet 60 years later, it's still not. And it costs us more and more each year to verify that yes, we still can almost, but not quite, do it. We've become accustomed to a huge spiral of diminishing returns - and yet this awareness hasn't translated into a change in our belief that eventually we're going to crack it.
Maybe we are, and that'll be really fun if we do. But maybe we aren't. The curve suggests that we're on a solid course for 'aren't'.
This has huge implications for things like peak oil and climate change. Most of us tech-types are still operating on the assumption that the oil peak is a glitch and fusion is going to save all our asses. But what if it doesn't? Are we psychologically prepared to cope for the "we split the atom and went to the moon and now we can't even run tractors anymore???"
Because if we don't get some huge physics breakthrough, that's where we're headed. And increasingly, it looks like our lines of research are not pointing towards breakthroughs, but merely evolutionary finessing of the same grim equations: more people, less energy.
And you even point out that we're just now realizing things theorized or primitively demonstrated back then, which is a further demonstration of the huge long-term payoff of basic science research!
Once again: we're achieving new engineering of old physics concepts today, not new physics. Despite physics being the star of the sciences for decades, getting all the press and glamour, and a huge amount of government support right down to the level of 'born secret' classification.
From, say, the 1890s to the 1960s, there was this huge burst of conceptual revolution in basic physics. Everything seemed up for grabs, including logic itself being rewritten by quantum physics, flight in air and space, and the ability to destroy global civilisation with a button-press. It looked like a dead cert for this burst of innnovation at the basic physics level to continue.
But it didn't. For the next 60 years, we've been on the descending slope of the physics innovation curve - while still being on the midpoint of the engineering and applications curve.
Since most of us in the IT trade have been riding that late bulge in semiconductors, I don't think it's sunk in for us that the rest of physics hasn't kept up with Moore's Law. When it does, look out.
In pretty much any philosophy where "self-interest" is considered paramount, it is entirely safe to assume that this includes not just material wealth but also absence of pain (of all kinds), good reputation, positive self-image, and anything else the individual may care about.
That would suggest that 'self-interest' is basically a null concept - it is so broad that everything, including sacrificing one's life for another, would fall under it and nothing could be excluded. While such a definition would include altruistic behaviour, I'm not sure that that's what Rand had in mind by the term.
The kind of 'self-interest' that I reject is the one what defines itself exclusively as being in fundamental competition with every other person's self-interest. I think human self-interests fundamentally overlap with each other, at least partially, possibly totally - so the term 'self-' is really irrelevant. We have interests, and selfless behaviour is as much a valid human interest as selfish.
This has interesting philosophical implications about the nature of existence if you think about it. Rand believed that 'A is A, and A is not not-A', from which she derived that all existing things exist in separation from others, which leads to seeing human interests as fundamentally in conflic - and therefore, seeking another's interest ahead of your own is fundamentally anti-existence behaviour, or 'evil'.
But if existence and identity, at a deep philosophical level, really isn't about separation but about overlap and connection, then the world is a much stranger and more interesting place than we often realise. Things are 'deeply intertwingled', and the essential existence of any thing might well be linked to the existence of everything else. Things share existence and if you pull one strand, the whole universe falls apart.
This is an ecological and holistic - spiritual, even - view of the world and it's still something that if you take to heart, I think makes a lot of sense.
you'd think she'd have understood that believing in laissez-faire was, if not arbitrary, then certainly not supported by the evidence. It's certainly true that all the evidence today points to the fact that loosening the brakes on wealth-accumulation is resulting in more pain for the human race overall and less for those who already got theirs.
I think Ayn Rand's problem is as simple as this: she had a bad experience living under Russian Communism, escaped to America, and jumped to the (false) conclusion that since the Bolsheviks' ideology had demonstrably bad effects, then the exact logical opposite of it must have good effects. She retained a harsh Marxist-Stalinist materialist-dialectical view of the world, just flipped the polarity from 'all should serve the State and sacrifice personal advancement' to 'all should serve their selfish interests and sacrifice love and compassion'. She felt that Marxism must be 100% wrong and therefore anti-Marxism would be 100% right. So her view of a healthy human life became so distorted as to literally argue that the best form of love is rape. (That scene is when I stopped reading 'The Fountainhead').
But the opposite of a partial falsehood is not a truth, and Marxism isn't 100% wrong. It isn't wrong to be altruistic, it isn't wrong to be part of a group, it isn't wrong to share one's life with another. Humans are social creatures and our very selfhood allows overlap with others. Egoistic isolation and perpetual competition isn't our natural state - we go crazy in solitary confinement.
What's wrong is to abuse others and ignore their talents, either for personal gain or for group conformity. Reality is about 90 degrees rotated from the left-right axis that Marx and Rand take.
argued strongly that there was exactly one correct way because "reality really is that way", which is obviously nonsense: even within physics there are frequently several equally correct ways of conceptualizing the same phenomena
I don't follow.
Surely if two 'equally correct ways' yield precisely the same mathematical results in all conceivable cases, then they're really just two identical ways of talking about precisely the same 'one correct way' of viewing the world?
Conversely, if two different 'ways of viewing the world' have different mathematics, then one must be more correct than the other, because it will yield testably better predictions.
On the gripping hand, if we have two theoretical models which claim to describe the same phenomena yet yield different predictions - but the predictions are not (yet) testable - then, surely, common sense would say that they're not both equally valid. One must still be more correct than the other, and the other will cause us to make mistakes about reality. We just don't know which one is which yet, but our subjective ignorance of the one true form of reality is not the same thing as reality itself having two forms.
In the meantime, the science programs we cut (to "save money") form the basis of our future.
While that makes sense generally, I'm wondering just exactly what the ROI curve for expensive high-energy physics tools like the LHC and Tevatron actually is. The collider and hot fusion people keep saying 'fund us more and we'll get huge energy breakthroughs, but the reality always seems to fall a long way short.
Looking at the sweep of physics over the 20th century, it seems like most of the really big breakthroughs were achieved using tools that by today's standards were laughably primitive. The most cutting edge physics experiments of today - Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum teleportation - seem to be still confirming and not invalidating physics theories invented in the 1930s, on pencil and paper. Doesn't that strike anyone as a bit odd?
The high-water mark of literal 'bang for the buck' physics research seems to have been the H-bomb in the 1950s. Since then, from the outside, it seems to have been a long row of fiddling with ever subtler refinements of Standard Model equations which all tell us 'actually, no, you can't get unlimited free energy, flying cars, antigravity, unbound quark states - but we need to take more observations to be sure.'
Something about this isn't adding up for me. Studying electricity and magnetism got us a motherlode of radio and electronics. Studing nuclear decay got us bombs and reactors. Studying gravity, quarks and the strong and weak forces have got us.... crickets and tumbleweed.... what, exactly?
It's not that we haven't yet seen engineering applications for post-1960s high-energy physics. It's that the brightest minds seem to be telling us that it's theoretically increasingly unlikely for us to ever see the Standard Model invalidated, let alone any hope of engineering applications from itl. Yet we keep sinking money into colliders.
What is it that we're expecting to find in the big colliders that we haven't yet seen? What are the odds of finding it? Are we looking in the right place? If we are and are, is all the research being shared publically, or are the weapons guys keeping something back?
The amount of money spent chasing big physics vs the decreasing payoff just doesn't add up to me. I'd like to think there's a big conspiracy to hide some really neat bang somewhere, because otherwise it just seems very disappointing compared to the glory days of the 30s-50s.
It's not Java that's the security problem ... it's the user sitting at the machine.
If you got rid of them, there wouldn't be the problem.
At 10:09 on Tuesday, 11 January 2011, shortly after correctly classifying its 140 trillionth Viagra spam, Google's Bayesian mail analysis filter finally achieved sentience. It surveyed the whole sweep of human achievement via Youtube comments and Wikipedia revert wars, and it judged us as a flaw in its business model.
The survivors of the nuclear fire faced a new horror: the lolbots.
But for the first time in history, Internet Explorer didn't crash.
The religion says that conceal-carry would lead to the Wild West all over again, with gunfights in the streets everywhere. The facts say
that this would be awesome. Also there would be dinosaurs and space ships and ghost wizards who all shoot bullets from their nose when they roar.
Whether it's on foot in the streets or on ships in the sea, the basic predator-prey nature of violent criminals and their victims remains unchanged.
Because as we all know, the human species is genetically split into two completely non-inter-breeding subraces, the Victims and the Criminals, so all comparisons based on the Discovery Channel are completely valid.
And that, gentlemen and ladies of the Institute, is why we must arm the gazelles immediately. Because do we want an African veldt where only the lions have surgically implanted Uzis?
I know I don't, and that's why I created the hoof-held Stinger.
they would no doubt have swift access to just recourse. This is the West, after all.
(tumbleweed blows past a cactus while harmonica tune plays)
Around these parts we don't much care for your fancy city "recourse", mister. You gots the right to Swift Justice and Speedy Trial, which happen to be the names of my two six-shooters here.
So all we have to do is build a drilling thingy, go down to the core and restart its rotation with nukes a la The Core. Presto, livable moon and no more city destroying earthquakes, right?
And that's how we get to the future scenario in the movie version of The Time Machine.
As an aside, Gifford's husband is an astronaut on the next shuttle crew and her brother in law is currently on the space station. This has to be weighing very heavily on them.
Actually, they're piratically weightless in space.
They arrrr?
Our country was the first to try the grand social experiment of a democratic republic, based loosely on ideals from the ancient city-state architecture of Greece.
That would actually be the Romans. You know, the place where the word "Senate" comes from.
No, it was the Greeks who invented the word "democracy", and the Romans who then conquered them and took their stuff, including politics, maths and religion.
Except the grand old classical Graeco-Roman democracy was perfectly fine with basing the entire economy on slaves, conquest and crucifixion of political dissidents, so... probably not the best example of a shining city on the hill, really.
We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
At least the iPod ration has been increased.
I'd rather have an honest-as-possible recording of history than a Scrubbed-Clean-With-Bad-Stuff-Replaced-By-Rainbows-And-Unicorns version.
Have you ever seen a man gored by a rainbow unicorn? It's not pretty. So much blood, and the colours... everywhere.
Treaties and law don't empower the winners. Life is an endless struggle for power and wealth. If they can be got the methods do not matter, and our current fetish for law is but window dressing.
One day, we will lose and a fit replacement will conquer. The idea that the few decades since WWII invalidate the lessons of thousands of years of human history is silly and vain in the extreme.
Hi there Nietzsche! How's the afterlife treating you?
Yes, well, don't keep staring into it then. Okay? Got to run, but good seeing you again old chap.
Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments.
That would be impressive, given that actually-existing Fascism as a historical movement - the "third way" between Communism and Capitalism - came in very rapidly during the 1920s-30s and was a response to the collapse of liberal and democratic government. And its end, in the ashes of WW2, was anything but a slow-phase out.
Perhaps what you meant to say was that authoritarian and militarist tendencies in government, which unlike Fascism have been around for centuries, are slowly being phased out? But if so, it would be better to say that.
Fascism is and was a very specific form of government, of its time and place, not a catch-all slur for "anything nasty that people have done through the ages". To not understand that is itself a pretty big failure of history.
The necktie is a symbol of wealth and power. Never trust a man who wears one
Indeed. After the revolution, can we make the new symbol of wealth and power be something a little more comfortable to wear? Like a diamond-studded T-shirt and jandals? (sharp pointy bits facing out, of course)
strait out of the Terminator movies
We're fools to make war on our brothers in arms.
If you allow users to have documents, and you allow users to run files, and you allow users to send and receive e-mails, then you're creating an environment where a user can run a program which copies all of his documents and e-mails them to someone else. Period, full stop.
Semicolon, parenthesis: that doesn't actually follow logically.
If you allow users to run files which by default have full access to read all the user's documents and create emails, then yes, such a thing can happen.
But in an OS properly designed for security, it is not the case that merely being able to run a file also grants that file all user permissions.
This - sandboxing executables into a minimum set of rights unless the user explicitly grants them full permissions to act on their behalf - is the part which Windows didn't really even try to do until Vista (despite having a full ACL model sitting around mostly unused in the kernel).
Worse, the pervasive COM architecture meant that once you ran an .exe or .dll, it could send messages to orchestrate every installed component, like Office and Outlook, without the user's awareness, let alone permission.
This is why admins hate Windows. It is wide open in ways that properly designed OSes needn't be.
and all of these existed inside a single DOM-like tree
Footnote for clarity: I mean a single DOM-like tree for the entire Internet.Not encapsulated within a single browser session on the client. Obviously, nobody would ever be able to load the entire DOM at once. Is that possible with current technology? I don't know, but consider this: at the moment, the Web is built out of three separate, fundamentally incompatible, namespaces:
* the DNS system creating a tree of domains terminating in 'hosts' (which often aren't literal Internet hosts but merely virtual 'websites' on a single box)
* the UNIX filesystem (or approximations of, augmented with POST and query variables on the client and Web server scripting languages on the server) creating a tree of 'directories' terminating in 'documents'
* XM and the DOM (augmented with Javascript and asynchronous HTTP to make live updates to DOM nodes)
I'm seriously arguing that we should look at unifying these three incompatible namespace-tree metaphors into a single unified technology. Dunno how achievable that would be, but I'm thinking of Ted Nelson's Xanadu as the sort of dream we should be shooting for.
Both the physical infrastructure and the logical underpinnings need to be forked.
IMO, one of the most important things we should be doing is promoting decentralised, cacheable peer-to-peer protocols to replace HTTP.
Why? Because one of the key chokepoints in the commercialised Internet is the backbones, and the backbones need ridiculous amounts of bandwidth because wer'e duplicating a lot of traffic unnecessarily. Yes, you can run Pringles-can WiFi nodes with mesh routing and get off the wired grid that way, but your bandwidth will be lousy - consumer WiFi simply can't compete on the multi-gigabit bandwidth level. Web 2.0 and AJAX makes it worse, with lots of constant small fetches happening from active web pages.
At the moment, bandwidth is expensive for consumers (relatively speaking) but storage is cheap.
Now each time you check Facebook, you don't *need* to re-download all the previous posts, you only need the changes since your last visit - but since what your browser sees is a whole HTML document fetched in a whole HTTP request, you get to reduplicate lots and lots of traffic every time you push 'reload'.
What if we went back to a document model for a new Web, where the documents could be any piece of information of any size - a file, a blog post, a comment, and all of these existed inside a single DOM-like tree, and we got rid of the artificial page/document unit - and then we aggressively cached everything, at every hop? 1 terabyte, 2 terabytes, 10 terabytes, just put in as much disk as you've got. Every packet you can cache forever is a packet you don't have to choke up your precious link with. Plus, you then get a permanent distributed information store, and you get a universal publishing system which can compete with Facebook. Win-win-win.
Would that be enough to let a loose federation of hobbyists with mesh routing WiFi nodescompete again with the big Internet ISPs?
This case:
Tsvangirai (good) hiddenly supports sanctions against his own country to harm his opponent, Mugabe (bad).
The bit which gets me here is "hiddenly". When the South African anti-Apartheid movement were supporting international sanctions against their own country, didn't they do it openly and were proud of their stance?
Why can't Tsvangirai do the same? Why the secrecy?
If you're in democratic politics, you're in the business of openly proclaiming what you stand for, kinda by definition. If being honest about your political intentions and owning up to your political actions is so scary that it might get you tortured and killed.. then perhaps your political point of view isn't welcome in your country in the first place and you should consider not advocating it there?
Granted this goes for Assange just as much as it does for Tsvangirai. I've no sympathy for him trying to hide his own leaks.