Much of what you want is available for free in the game Vega Strike
Sure about that? Last time I checked out Vega Strike it was very consciously a Wing Commander: Privateer clone/homage/emulation, and that meant Wing Commander physics: absolute velocities, a 'speed limit', and afterburners. No Newtonian velocity addition at all. A mini-hyperdrive mode added to make navigation across solar systems in seconds somewhat more plausible, but still recognisably WC.
Travellin' through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy. Without precise calculations we could fly right through a Womp Rat or bounce too close to a Sarlacc pit.
And if you travel outside of your light-cone? (other then math breaking down)
Einstein cries, and Heisenberg smirks.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
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· Score: 1
To many who want conserve what they have, and not enough who want to move progressively forward.
Conserving what we have isn't a bad thing at all - in fact, it's a fundamental prerequisite for any genuine progress. At the moment, what we have in our industrial age (most highly visible in computing due to its insanely rapid timeframe) is a sort of contradictory destructive progress, where "advance" comes at the expense of breaking old stuff.
That's fine for a while - Moore's Law rocks! - but then you realise that if you're losing old stuff at the same rate as you're making new stuff, are you actually advancing? Or just running in place? And especially if the stuff you're losing is history and memory, perhaps we're risking doing ourselves a serious psychic injury.
I'm in my 30s and feel old. I still remember the freshness of the 1980s. The computer magazines and websites of the 2010s often seem to run on a three-year time horizon: if it happened before then, it's like it never was.
"Cloud computing"? They called it "thin clients" in the 1990s and "time sharing" in the 1970s.
And of course Microsoft were famously late to the GUI party, as the Mac and Amiga demonstrated. Even then, the first demonstration of a mouse was 1968.
It's nice that the PC world has finally grown up into the mainframe world, but please can we stop pretending that we're actually innovating and not just rediscovering a previous generation's inventions? And to actually stop for a bit and make sure that we keep stuff compatible (or rather, design stuff so that it can be kept compatible without being utterly broken): that would be golden. Thanks.
After that, they have to be able to parse at least three different image types (and image parsing libraries are a great place to look for vulnerabilities because they are complex and the data is hard to validate). And they have to be able to interact with the OS in some way to allow movie and audio playing. And flash. And Java Applets. And any other weird plugin.
All of these are certainly complex requirements which could understandably lead to bugs.
What it is not acceptable is for bugs in a data processing algorithm - say, image rendering - to even be able to lead to vulnerabilities.
There is no logical need, for example, for a JPEG parser to even conceivably trigger arbitrary code execution if the programmer makes an off-by-one error in an array subscript. It's simply irrelevant to the task of that code. It should be literally impossible to make a mistake in such code in such a way as to trigger code execution.
Because Internet programming is so complex that if vulnerabilities are not made impossible, they are a certainty, and a certain vulnerability times the size of the Internet mean even the smallest mistake is no longer tolerable. Humans simply can't work with that degree of precision, nor should they ever need to. This is exactly what we built computers for: to take over the repetitive drudge work which we can't do without error. So while a programmer can be assured to make errors, it's the job of the language to make it impossible for errors in data manipulation to lead to logically-unrelated weirdnesses like code execution.
Surely this isn't rocket Turing Machine science. We don't have to solve the halting problem to get rid of buffer overflows, do we?
Could it be that the job is simply to complex for most non-professionals
s/non//
I think reality is showing us that programming in the modern Internet's always-on, concurrent environment in non-thread-and-memory-safe languages is not merely difficult for amateurs, but impossible for even professionals to do safely.
I also think the answer will have to involving throwing out the von Neumann model, since we're manifestly living in a very non-von Neumann environment. Stuff happens all at once in a single giant massively-connected network of communicating processors (ie, the Internet) and we don't have any mainstream languages which even attempt to accurately model this. (Maybe Erlang?) We have Algol-descended languages based on the control-flow idea of 'do this thing, then that thing, in my private resource space', which is really efficient on one CPU, but into which we keep trying to shoehorn safety and concurrency and message-passing, and it's really not working, because you have to keep doing manually what the language is not designed to do and doesn't lend itself to doing. It sorta-works, but it creates huge potential for mistakes.
I think we need to start with replacing control-flow with data-flow completely and really pay attention to what the message-passing theorists in the 1970s were trying to say, and which OOP only partly implemented. The Internet is a message-passing network, but the software connected to it only half does message passing. We should go all the way.
They're not dumb, they just think a nuclear accident is an epic catastrophe.
As do I. Or at least, that the potential for epic fail in nuclear is a lot bigger than in anything else. When you're dealing with material which remains highly toxic for centuries, it seems like a little prudence would be in order.
I would be more open to your reasoning if you were going to argue that the chance of failure is a lot less than we thought in the 1970s and that the evident corruption in the US commercial nuclear industry of the 1970s has been completely and finally addressed than if you merely argued that the consequences of a nuclear incident are, well, probably livable with and might not kill us all.
I for one don't think that the corruption has been addressed, or that the culture is likely to be fixed in the near future, as long as commercial nuclear remains in bed with military nuclear and all the DoD / DoE's culture of 'born secret' classification of essential data.
And intertwined with safety and secrecy is centralisation: both fission and fusion, at present, seem to lend themselves to large centralised plants. That seems counterproductive to a living democracy. Oil may be toxic but at least once extracted, it's distributed; you can be reasonably self-sufficient with a petrol can. A coil/oil/gas station is big and nasty, but current fission is bigger and nastier, so requires more security, more secrecy, and more process just to make it safe. Compared with, say, wind and solar, which can be distributed across the country much more easily.
Perhaps new, small reactors might change this equation. But I'm not confident, because the same big nuclear military contractors which built the last generation seem to be pushing these new ones (and it would hardly seem possible, given the strategic military implications of fissionables, for it to be otherwise).
What does "integral" mean? It means that the fuel is recycled on-site. The fuel in the IFR is in metallic, rather than ceramic form. It is simply re-smelted periodically (not the whole load, just a few rods' worth), and the slag is the only waste. The balance of the fuel plus a tiny bit of uranium or thorium in its natural state, is recast into pellets and returned to the reactor.
Let me get this straight. You're saying that in the IFR design, in the process of normal operation, globs of fissionable fuel are regularly melted down and recast?
And during this process, there's absolutely no chance of a criticality incident occurring?
Looking at government is always looking into the business end of a gun.
s/government/anyone-who-holds-a-gun.
In the USA, with all its pro-gun rhetoric, the person the business end of whose gun you're staring into may just as easily be a private individual or corporation than an employee of the vaguely-defined 'government'. Literally so, in the military-industrial complex: try to go visit the top secret aircraft testing facilities at Area 51 and the Camo Dudes who will greet you with varying degrees of impoliteness may be US nationals, but are officially employees of G4S, llc, headquartered in the United Kingdom.
But you're none the freer if it's a private gun pointed at you, are you?
But the stories that people want to read are not necessarily the most important stories, let alone the best examples of journalism.
There's a slight problem with this argument.
If the problem is that too many news outlets are producing only stories which people want to read - why are so many people saying that they are not seeing the stories they want to read?
But we don't have any test planets anywhere. We have some empty chunks of rock and gas in the Solar System which we would need to populate with self-contained domed cities before we could even begin doing any kind of 'test'.
Which, if we really wanted, we could build here on Earth for a lot cheaper.
Do you believe that the current environmental "stasis" (however incredibly brief it is, by any measure of geologic time) is somehow "good" and any deviation from this stasis is "bad"?
When millions of humans depend on the current geological state of affairs for food and fresh water and housing - yes.
Unless you think preventable megadeath is ethically neutral?
Most climate scientists agree that without the sun, the earth would be much colder.
But only a tiny persecuted minority of climate scientists turn this theoretical knowledge into a practical plan for change and build a device to blow up the sun.
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that a single man can alter 13,7 football fields within his lifetime through farming, mining, driving, building, etc.?
I'm sorry, I don't know your American units. What's that in rugby fields and cricket pitches?
In New Zealand, of course, the answer is 'well, duh - how else did all these rabbits, possums and gorse get here?'
The best reason to try this on the moon is that there is nowhere on Earth where the people on the surface wouldn't presume to own what was underneath the surface.
And this won't be the case even more severely on the moon? If companies start mining in space, who do you think is going to own the valuable stuff three kilometers under the lunar regolith? Hint: not the employees.
Where is a free-minded man to live? Where is the next frontier?
Answer: Anywhere but space.
In space today and for the forseeable future, not only does a large organisation in which you are a tiny cog own the very habitat volume you live in, they control the entire supply chain from Earth including your oxygen. And they can switch it off anytime you even look like thinking of violating your employment contract.
Good luck starting any kind of libertarian freehold under those conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Much of what you want is available for free in the game Vega Strike
Sure about that? Last time I checked out Vega Strike it was very consciously a Wing Commander: Privateer clone/homage/emulation, and that meant Wing Commander physics: absolute velocities, a 'speed limit', and afterburners. No Newtonian velocity addition at all. A mini-hyperdrive mode added to make navigation across solar systems in seconds somewhat more plausible, but still recognisably WC.
Travellin' through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy. Without precise calculations we could fly right through a Womp Rat or bounce too close to a Sarlacc pit.
Okay, it is exactly like dustin' crops.
Which is why the problem should be side-stepped, by leaving things to the OS.
How does sidestepping an illegality make it no longer illegal?
And if you travel outside of your light-cone? (other then math breaking down)
Einstein cries, and Heisenberg smirks.
To many who want conserve what they have, and not enough who want to move progressively forward.
Conserving what we have isn't a bad thing at all - in fact, it's a fundamental prerequisite for any genuine progress. At the moment, what we have in our industrial age (most highly visible in computing due to its insanely rapid timeframe) is a sort of contradictory destructive progress, where "advance" comes at the expense of breaking old stuff.
That's fine for a while - Moore's Law rocks! - but then you realise that if you're losing old stuff at the same rate as you're making new stuff, are you actually advancing? Or just running in place? And especially if the stuff you're losing is history and memory, perhaps we're risking doing ourselves a serious psychic injury.
I'm in my 30s and feel old. I still remember the freshness of the 1980s. The computer magazines and websites of the 2010s often seem to run on a three-year time horizon: if it happened before then, it's like it never was.
"Cloud computing"? They called it "thin clients" in the 1990s and "time sharing" in the 1970s.
Virtual machines? 1972, IBM.
And of course Microsoft were famously late to the GUI party, as the Mac and Amiga demonstrated. Even then, the first demonstration of a mouse was 1968.
It's nice that the PC world has finally grown up into the mainframe world, but please can we stop pretending that we're actually innovating and not just rediscovering a previous generation's inventions? And to actually stop for a bit and make sure that we keep stuff compatible (or rather, design stuff so that it can be kept compatible without being utterly broken): that would be golden. Thanks.
After that, they have to be able to parse at least three different image types (and image parsing libraries are a great place to look for vulnerabilities because they are complex and the data is hard to validate). And they have to be able to interact with the OS in some way to allow movie and audio playing. And flash. And Java Applets. And any other weird plugin.
All of these are certainly complex requirements which could understandably lead to bugs.
What it is not acceptable is for bugs in a data processing algorithm - say, image rendering - to even be able to lead to vulnerabilities.
There is no logical need, for example, for a JPEG parser to even conceivably trigger arbitrary code execution if the programmer makes an off-by-one error in an array subscript. It's simply irrelevant to the task of that code. It should be literally impossible to make a mistake in such code in such a way as to trigger code execution.
Because Internet programming is so complex that if vulnerabilities are not made impossible, they are a certainty, and a certain vulnerability times the size of the Internet mean even the smallest mistake is no longer tolerable. Humans simply can't work with that degree of precision, nor should they ever need to. This is exactly what we built computers for: to take over the repetitive drudge work which we can't do without error. So while a programmer can be assured to make errors, it's the job of the language to make it impossible for errors in data manipulation to lead to logically-unrelated weirdnesses like code execution.
Surely this isn't rocket Turing Machine science. We don't have to solve the halting problem to get rid of buffer overflows, do we?
Could it be that the job is simply to complex for most non-professionals
s/non//
I think reality is showing us that programming in the modern Internet's always-on, concurrent environment in non-thread-and-memory-safe languages is not merely difficult for amateurs, but impossible for even professionals to do safely.
I also think the answer will have to involving throwing out the von Neumann model, since we're manifestly living in a very non-von Neumann environment. Stuff happens all at once in a single giant massively-connected network of communicating processors (ie, the Internet) and we don't have any mainstream languages which even attempt to accurately model this. (Maybe Erlang?) We have Algol-descended languages based on the control-flow idea of 'do this thing, then that thing, in my private resource space', which is really efficient on one CPU, but into which we keep trying to shoehorn safety and concurrency and message-passing, and it's really not working, because you have to keep doing manually what the language is not designed to do and doesn't lend itself to doing. It sorta-works, but it creates huge potential for mistakes.
I think we need to start with replacing control-flow with data-flow completely and really pay attention to what the message-passing theorists in the 1970s were trying to say, and which OOP only partly implemented. The Internet is a message-passing network, but the software connected to it only half does message passing. We should go all the way.
I do all my googling with Bing nowadays.
They're not dumb, they just think a nuclear accident is an epic catastrophe.
As do I. Or at least, that the potential for epic fail in nuclear is a lot bigger than in anything else. When you're dealing with material which remains highly toxic for centuries, it seems like a little prudence would be in order.
I would be more open to your reasoning if you were going to argue that the chance of failure is a lot less than we thought in the 1970s and that the evident corruption in the US commercial nuclear industry of the 1970s has been completely and finally addressed than if you merely argued that the consequences of a nuclear incident are, well, probably livable with and might not kill us all.
I for one don't think that the corruption has been addressed, or that the culture is likely to be fixed in the near future, as long as commercial nuclear remains in bed with military nuclear and all the DoD / DoE's culture of 'born secret' classification of essential data.
And intertwined with safety and secrecy is centralisation: both fission and fusion, at present, seem to lend themselves to large centralised plants. That seems counterproductive to a living democracy. Oil may be toxic but at least once extracted, it's distributed; you can be reasonably self-sufficient with a petrol can. A coil/oil/gas station is big and nasty, but current fission is bigger and nastier, so requires more security, more secrecy, and more process just to make it safe. Compared with, say, wind and solar, which can be distributed across the country much more easily.
Perhaps new, small reactors might change this equation. But I'm not confident, because the same big nuclear military contractors which built the last generation seem to be pushing these new ones (and it would hardly seem possible, given the strategic military implications of fissionables, for it to be otherwise).
It had a sodium fire, but that was due to a bad design on a temperature sensor rather than anything to do with sodium itself as a coolant.
Other than that liquid sodium explodes on contact with water...
But fortunately there'll never be another fire in a sodium reactor!
What does "integral" mean? It means that the fuel is recycled on-site. The fuel in the IFR is in metallic, rather than ceramic form. It is simply re-smelted periodically (not the whole load, just a few rods' worth), and the slag is the only waste. The balance of the fuel plus a tiny bit of uranium or thorium in its natural state, is recast into pellets and returned to the reactor.
Let me get this straight. You're saying that in the IFR design, in the process of normal operation, globs of fissionable fuel are regularly melted down and recast?
And during this process, there's absolutely no chance of a criticality incident occurring?
Looking at government is always looking into the business end of a gun.
s/government/anyone-who-holds-a-gun.
In the USA, with all its pro-gun rhetoric, the person the business end of whose gun you're staring into may just as easily be a private individual or corporation than an employee of the vaguely-defined 'government'. Literally so, in the military-industrial complex: try to go visit the top secret aircraft testing facilities at Area 51 and the Camo Dudes who will greet you with varying degrees of impoliteness may be US nationals, but are officially employees of G4S, llc, headquartered in the United Kingdom.
But you're none the freer if it's a private gun pointed at you, are you?
But the stories that people want to read are not necessarily the most important stories, let alone the best examples of journalism.
There's a slight problem with this argument.
If the problem is that too many news outlets are producing only stories which people want to read - why are so many people saying that they are not seeing the stories they want to read?
And PARC got their ideas from Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos. The 1960s were a groovy time.
But we don't have any test planets anywhere. We have some empty chunks of rock and gas in the Solar System which we would need to populate with self-contained domed cities before we could even begin doing any kind of 'test'.
Which, if we really wanted, we could build here on Earth for a lot cheaper.
It's a space... .... giant eel thing?
The Emperor has gone too far this time.
And The Curse of Fatal Death was of course scripted by the current showrunner, which explains a few things.
How is that proposed mosque next to ground zero coming along?
Never mind the mosque - how's the replacement skyscraper at Ground Zero coming along? Is it going to be another nine years?
Will people ever learn that correlation does not imply causation?
No, but it's strongly correlated with it.
Do you believe that the current environmental "stasis" (however incredibly brief it is, by any measure of geologic time) is somehow "good" and any deviation from this stasis is "bad"?
When millions of humans depend on the current geological state of affairs for food and fresh water and housing - yes.
Unless you think preventable megadeath is ethically neutral?
You can't just move on! You have to Censure And Move On!
Most climate scientists agree that without the sun, the earth would be much colder.
But only a tiny persecuted minority of climate scientists turn this theoretical knowledge into a practical plan for change and build a device to blow up the sun.
And they called me mad at the Institute!
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that a single man can alter 13,7 football fields within his lifetime through farming, mining, driving, building, etc.?
I'm sorry, I don't know your American units. What's that in rugby fields and cricket pitches?
In New Zealand, of course, the answer is 'well, duh - how else did all these rabbits, possums and gorse get here?'
It takes quite a bit of arrogance to believe that humanity can change the Earth's climate that much, that fast.
Does it also take arrogance to believe that humanity could have put bootprints on the Moon? But we did.
We've learned to do quite a lot this last century, for better or worse. Perhaps we should take notice of how much power we do have.
The best reason to try this on the moon is that there is nowhere on Earth where the people on the surface wouldn't presume to own what was underneath the surface.
And this won't be the case even more severely on the moon? If companies start mining in space, who do you think is going to own the valuable stuff three kilometers under the lunar regolith? Hint: not the employees.
Where is a free-minded man to live? Where is the next frontier?
Answer: Anywhere but space.
In space today and for the forseeable future, not only does a large organisation in which you are a tiny cog own the very habitat volume you live in, they control the entire supply chain from Earth including your oxygen. And they can switch it off anytime you even look like thinking of violating your employment contract.
Good luck starting any kind of libertarian freehold under those conditions.