...this new high-tech thing that actually measures mass. It's called a beam balance...
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. You get +1 Insightful for this. You're right, of course, but not many people would spot the distinction.
Although this post got to the top as "funny" it also shows insight. If the results were based on surveys (as appears to be the case) rather than on measured traffic, we would expect the big players to dominate, simply because they have name recognition. Yesterday I visited around fifty sites; today I remember yahoo/google, slashdot, ameritrade, sourceforge, colorforth, and borland. A fair fraction of these and almost all the ones I don't remember are the old "democratic" web. But if I had to answer a survey a week from now, the ones I would be sure I visited would be yahoo, slashdot, and ameritrade. A year from now, I might only remember yahoo. And in twenty years, I might quite confidently remember AOL.
Surveys aren't reliable.
But even if we look at traffic, I'm not sure we'd get a clear picture. True, the porn sites might show up, but I doubt that even they are as cluttered--uh, I mean "content packed"--as the top dog portals. When I load a single page from yahoo or MSN (or even slashdot) I get a lot more "traffic" than when I look at a page on somebody's personal site.
The point is: this sort of doomcasting is irrelevant. The power of the web comes mostly from the fact that we don't have a clear picture of what everyone is doing, where they are going, or why--even in aggregate.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As a final comment, note that the original article is by the guy that doesn't get Dilbert. His analytic credibility isn't high in my book. I suspect if he knew that 80% of what we breath is inert gas, he'd claim we were all suffocating and just too dumb to realize it.
If the U.S. system allows me to sit on deathrow for 20 years apealing my conviction for a murder that I did not commit, the same priviledge should be extended to Microsoft.
But your freedom would be strictly limited (e.g. you would be locked up) the whole time. For a corporation, the analog to sitting on death row would be...what? Taking them off the internet? Or just requiring them to use Windows?
Imagine their war room--one whole wall is a giant whiteboard, filled with a huge grid. Each week a top PR droid goes over and picks a blank cell. They make a few phone calls, and by the end of the week Eris has drawn a little golden apple in the cell.
I'll bet someone is on the phone right now, trying to get Ransome Love to say something ill-advised about fetchmail.
Eric Drexler is very much against the notion of Dry Nanotechnology
Ah, are you sure? I've never heard him say as much, and he seems to get along fine with people who are actively working on dry nanotech. How did you come to the claim that he is "very much against the notion"?
I don't think you should look at this as an attack directly on Drexler's work, but more of a bit of realism on the limits of nanotechnology. In a way, chemists (though probably not thinking about it this way) have been practicing nanotechnology for hundreds of years.
I think that's the root of most of the missconceptions; they haven't been practicing nanotechnology for hundreds of years, they have been putting things in tubes and shaking them. They have learned an awful lot in the process, but they have also picked up some amazing blind spots. The fact that "you can't assemble something that complex by putting the parts in a box and shaking" does not mean "you can't assemble something that complex, and it wouldn't work if you could."
This isn't a rebuttal of Drexler so much as an ignorant dismissal. The "problems" he finds with eutactic nanotech all seem to fall into a few buckets:
1) Assuming that everything is like silicon (e.g., the MEMS/stiction arguments). This is like arguing that skyscrapers are impossible based on the properties of beeswax.
2) Assuming that everything is like wet chemistry (e.g. all the comparisons to biology). He even tries to draw a dichotomy between these two.
3) General bad logic. The self-replication argument, for example, flows as follows: We don't know how to make anything that self-replicates at present; cells replicate; they do it by assembling things in a linear sequence, rather than 3d; therefore this is a serious problem for nanotech. Not only are all of these steps factually suspect (enzyme structure, for example, is very much a 3D proposition), they don't logically lead to the "conclusion".
4) Strawman arguments; saying things like "Machining and welding do not have counterparts at nanometer sizes" when no one claimed they did, or "There are no electric sockets at the nanoscale" when no one claimed there were.
This isn't exacty an objective or even rational rebuttal to Nanosystems or any of Drexler's other work; instead it seems to be an attempt at persuasion based on the author's knowledge of his own field and ignoring what Drexler actualy wrote.
Interestingly enough, at the time enough admins knew each other that most of the information on fixing the problem was spread by phone calls.
I used to miss the days when we'd all just call each other. Well, not all, even then of course, but if I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who might have an idea/patch/kludge/obscure document it pretty much felt like it.
Then I had the oportunity to work with the "technical" staff at a few ISPs, most of who seemed to have learned their problem solving skills by watching The Matrix about 137 times, and their user interaction skills from listening to rap. The idea that they might want to share information with other admins or (even worse) admit that they didn't know something by asking another admin a question was so abhorrent to then that I realized why those days are gone. And, when I reflect on who "everyone" is these days, I guess I'm glad.
Wow, you just sparked a real idea, mathematitions say its impossible to encode a large truly random sequences of bits, into something that the outcome plus the decomressor is smaller than the first bytes. But given enough computing power you could find the large random bits in pit, somewhere and simple have the decompressor know the how to compute pi, and the start and stop points of the random number?
Yes, but for a plain text on N bits, you'd in general need > log-base-2(N) bits to store the length, and > N bits to store the starting position (remember, you will likely have to search a long way before you find the pattern you want), so > N + log-base-2(N) bits.
This is a data expansion algorithm, not data compression.
If pi has all conceivable messages, pi must contain all of the US military's secrets, DeCSS, kiddie pr0n, violent and explicit sexual films beyond anyone's imagination and much much more. It must therefore be banned.
It must also contain all finite length MP3s. Therefore under the DMCA it already is banned.
The sad part is, I'm not joking. The DMCA is so absurdly broad that you could easily raise a cogent case for using it to ban the concept of Pi for this very reason.
I think he said "almost every number..." or something very like. There are, of course, some exceptions (such as the integers, and rational fractions, etc.) but they make up a very small subset of "the numbers," amost all of which are too lengthy to write in this margin.
Call me a skeptic, but I would have been much more impressed if they had moved one thing at a time. Instead, if you watch the video, you see them moving everything on the table at once, with no real pauses between steps, and most of the pieces in multiple squares at once. There is also considerable collective drift. The text speaks of accurate positioning of individual pieces, but that isn't what I saw.
The problem is that to produce proper intonation from any text requires that you understand the speaker's intent. In some cases you can not do this without understanding things such as:
1) the speaker's relation to the listeners (including, perhaps, people hidden from the putative "listener" being addressed, e.g. microphone);
2) the speaker's moral position on issues that may not be explicitly raised anywhere in the text;
3) the speaker's goals, short term, long term, publicly admited and deadly secret;
4) the speaker's education and state of sobriety, present focus of attention and recent emotional state;
4) the fact that something may have occured to the speaker as they were speaking and thus affected their voice;
...and so on and so forth.
Even people have a hard time doing this (thus the difficulty finding good actors out of all the wannabes), and people are specifically designed for this sort of task.
I stand by my claim: to generate speach with proper intonation from any text in general requires full AI.
Several people have been doubting that the SQL server bug is real, on the grounds that they would have seen it. While I don't know what the Russains found, I can report what my team discovered a few years ago on MS SQL 7.0; it sounds very like.
It appears (we had no access to the source, so I can't do better than that) that if you have a complex select statement, with several nested sub-selects, you can get SQL Server into a state where it caches the query plan (roughly, the "compiled version") of some of the sub-queries from one execution to the next. This query plan sometimes acts as if it (incorrectly) includes information derived from other sub-queries as if it was constant. If in a subsequent use the value of these stored "constants" has changed, the where-clauses can fail, causeing the loss of rows in the result set.
We went several rounds of reporting it to MS, bogged down on the "can you produce a simple case that exihibits the problem" phase, and wound you instituting coding guidlines to break such queries into multiple peices using temporary tables.
Consequently I know that there are at least some bugs that are not seen by most users, and am more willing to credit this report than I was before I heard the keywords "SQL server" "complex queries" and "missing data".
Of course, Microsoft's problem is that they bought into the government's arguement that the browsers and operating systems are legitimate markets to distinguish.
I think this was really Microsoft's argument to begin with. The starting assumption for anyone trying to market something is market segmentation:
Q: Do you sell soap and water?
A: Oh no, sir! We sell shampoo, and dish washing liquids, and body gels, and bubble solutions (you know, for kids!), and industrial grime removing agents, and inedable emlusifiers, and...
But then the internet came along, and someone in marketing realized that they could implicitly take credit for all that content, if they made it seem like it was "part" of their core product. So the company that makes edit, notepad, wordpad, word, wordview, etc. sudenly decided that there was no internet segment after all; the internet, they decided, was just part of Windows.
But the forgot to put on their turn signals when they reversed course, and now they get to tap dance.
I agree. My point was intended to cover the more general case: if a consumer audio can play it, then a drive can read it, copy it, etc. With a little software, it can by played as well, provided only that the consumer audio hardware doesn't contain some magic which would be O({some scary number}) to fake in software (e.g. strong encryption, with the key burned in the hardware).
For the particular case in question, it seems almost trivial; more like a minor repairing of the data rather than breaking a scheme.
>> Presumably the copy protection will be broken soon enough, so thats not really an issue.
> Its going to be very difficult to break "protection" on a CD that won't even be recognized by your CDROM drive as a real CD.
I can see how computer CD software might not recognize it as being a "good" format, but I can't see how the hardware would fail to read it, since the essentially same drive hardware is being used in both cases (the consumer black-box audio device and the computer). So breaking it would just be a matter of writing some software.
Now, this may be a problem since only major corporations can write software and none of them would be motiva--oh wait, I forgot, some scattered individuals write software too. So yeah, I suspect it will be broken.
IANAPBIPOIS (I am not a physicist, but I played one in school):
Actually, if you are quite close to the reactor when it fails, you are in some serious trouble. The plasma inside the Torus is at a very high temperature (I thought it approached Solar temps, but cannot confirm this). If it spills all over you, you are dead. I assume any commercial reactor would be contained in some way to prevent accidents of this sort.
You are right about the temperature, but containment is exactly the wrong solution. What you want is something that breaks away (in a controlled direction, say "up" would be nice). Remember that the quickest way to cool something really hot is to let it expand. (The second quickest way is of course to get venture capital.)
This applies to pretty much any concentration of free energy. You can burn gun powder safely in a small metal dish, but the same quantity in a small metal pipe makes a rocket or a bomb (or both) depending on how the ends are capped. With the plasma from a just-failed fussion reactor you're looking at something on the order of a lightning bolt. Set free, you have a big flash, a loud bang!, and a lot of people saying "What the fuck was that!?!?!"
Try to contain it, and you have a much louder boom, and a somewhat reduced number of people crying "Oh, the humanity!"
1. It doesn't matter how blank-boxed they are, as long as they are small and cheap?
2. There isn't a huge interest in hacking computers per se; rather, what we care about is modularity-for-the-buck? (I suspect this is the case for me: what I want are things I can buy for under $100US that can be hooked to other things in the same price range in some meaningful way to build (random-string (cons '(a gravity meter) '(an automatic bubble maker) '(a marsupial trap) '(a woodpecker conditioner) future-projects-list)).
3. Most people here only read every fifth thread these days?
I don't know what your culture is, but here in Scandinavia, it is not normal for young, healthy people to suddenly just die.
If you put aside the question begging terms (e.g. "healthy"), it certainly is normal for people to die at all ages. If everyone lived to be 79.5 years old and then suddenly just died, that would be weird. We don't like to think about it, but young people do in fact die.
The problem with terms like "healthy" is that they smuggle in assumptions. You, for example, clearly assume that the set of all healthy people does not include anyone who is going to drop dead in the next twenty four hours or so. While I admit that it is unlikely for any particular healthy person to drop dead, it must happen in some cases. (Or, if you absolutely refuse to accept that, then you must admit that these people weren't healthy when they got up that morning, because in fact they did die, which would contradict your definition of "healthy". You can't have it both ways.)
So the question here is, do a larger fraction of the people in a given condition die if we look only at those who drink Red Bull vs. the whole set. Otherwise the logic is as vapid as saying "Three people with hair died, therefore hair kills people."
It isn't that hard to figure the expected death rate among red bull drinkers (expected death rate w/o Red Bull times % of population drinking Red Bull), and ask yourself, is what we are seeing higher than we'd expect? I'll bet it's not.
It would be very odd if no one who drank Red Bull ever died. But for some reason our culture always treats death as an annomoly, which must therefore have a proximate cause.
In the longterm, the per capita death toll is exactly 1.
Slashdot Mirror
*laugh*
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. Under this system, I hereby give you +1 Funny.
--MarkusQ
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. You get +1 Insightful for this. You're right, of course, but not many people would spot the distinction.
-- MarkusQ
Surveys aren't reliable.
But even if we look at traffic, I'm not sure we'd get a clear picture. True, the porn sites might show up, but I doubt that even they are as cluttered--uh, I mean "content packed"--as the top dog portals. When I load a single page from yahoo or MSN (or even slashdot) I get a lot more "traffic" than when I look at a page on somebody's personal site.
The point is: this sort of doomcasting is irrelevant. The power of the web comes mostly from the fact that we don't have a clear picture of what everyone is doing, where they are going, or why--even in aggregate.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As a final comment, note that the original article is by the guy that doesn't get Dilbert. His analytic credibility isn't high in my book. I suspect if he knew that 80% of what we breath is inert gas, he'd claim we were all suffocating and just too dumb to realize it.
But your freedom would be strictly limited (e.g. you would be locked up) the whole time. For a corporation, the analog to sitting on death row would be...what? Taking them off the internet? Or just requiring them to use Windows?
-- MarkusQ
Uh, I think this was a joke people. Fred was a longtime proponent of steady state (as opposed to big bang) cosmologies.
-- MarkusQ
Imagine their war room--one whole wall is a giant whiteboard, filled with a huge grid. Each week a top PR droid goes over and picks a blank cell. They make a few phone calls, and by the end of the week Eris has drawn a little golden apple in the cell.
I'll bet someone is on the phone right now, trying to get Ransome Love to say something ill-advised about fetchmail.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Ah, are you sure? I've never heard him say as much, and he seems to get along fine with people who are actively working on dry nanotech. How did you come to the claim that he is "very much against the notion"?
-- MarkusQ
I think that's the root of most of the missconceptions; they haven't been practicing nanotechnology for hundreds of years, they have been putting things in tubes and shaking them. They have learned an awful lot in the process, but they have also picked up some amazing blind spots. The fact that "you can't assemble something that complex by putting the parts in a box and shaking" does not mean "you can't assemble something that complex, and it wouldn't work if you could."
In a sense, their knowledge works against them.
-- MarkusQ
1) Assuming that everything is like silicon (e.g., the MEMS/stiction arguments). This is like arguing that skyscrapers are impossible based on the properties of beeswax.
2) Assuming that everything is like wet chemistry (e.g. all the comparisons to biology). He even tries to draw a dichotomy between these two.
3) General bad logic. The self-replication argument, for example, flows as follows: We don't know how to make anything that self-replicates at present; cells replicate; they do it by assembling things in a linear sequence, rather than 3d; therefore this is a serious problem for nanotech. Not only are all of these steps factually suspect (enzyme structure, for example, is very much a 3D proposition), they don't logically lead to the "conclusion".
4) Strawman arguments; saying things like "Machining and welding do not have counterparts at nanometer sizes" when no one claimed they did, or "There are no electric sockets at the nanoscale" when no one claimed there were.
This isn't exacty an objective or even rational rebuttal to Nanosystems or any of Drexler's other work; instead it seems to be an attempt at persuasion based on the author's knowledge of his own field and ignoring what Drexler actualy wrote.
-- MarkusQ
I used to miss the days when we'd all just call each other. Well, not all, even then of course, but if I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who might have an idea/patch/kludge/obscure document it pretty much felt like it.
Then I had the oportunity to work with the "technical" staff at a few ISPs, most of who seemed to have learned their problem solving skills by watching The Matrix about 137 times, and their user interaction skills from listening to rap. The idea that they might want to share information with other admins or (even worse) admit that they didn't know something by asking another admin a question was so abhorrent to then that I realized why those days are gone. And, when I reflect on who "everyone" is these days, I guess I'm glad.
-- MarkusQ
Yes, but for a plain text on N bits, you'd in general need > log-base-2(N) bits to store the length, and > N bits to store the starting position (remember, you will likely have to search a long way before you find the pattern you want), so > N + log-base-2(N) bits.
This is a data expansion algorithm, not data compression.
-- MarkusQ
It must also contain all finite length MP3s. Therefore under the DMCA it already is banned.
The sad part is, I'm not joking. The DMCA is so absurdly broad that you could easily raise a cogent case for using it to ban the concept of Pi for this very reason.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
1) the speaker's relation to the listeners (including, perhaps, people hidden from the putative "listener" being addressed, e.g. microphone);
2) the speaker's moral position on issues that may not be explicitly raised anywhere in the text;
3) the speaker's goals, short term, long term, publicly admited and deadly secret;
4) the speaker's education and state of sobriety, present focus of attention and recent emotional state;
4) the fact that something may have occured to the speaker as they were speaking and thus affected their voice;
Even people have a hard time doing this (thus the difficulty finding good actors out of all the wannabes), and people are specifically designed for this sort of task.
I stand by my claim: to generate speach with proper intonation from any text in general requires full AI.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Welcome to karma caphood.
"Yeah, right!"
"Officer, it is clear to me that you are in fact the one who is inebriated."
"I found it that way. Honest."
"Now, nothing has really changed since the last contract, we just cleaned up a few details; Please sign and return ASAP."
"But Billy got one...why can't I? Please?"
"Would you like to move to the sofa?"
I don't buy it for a minute. To do what they claim would require real AI(tm).
-- MarkusQ
It appears (we had no access to the source, so I can't do better than that) that if you have a complex select statement, with several nested sub-selects, you can get SQL Server into a state where it caches the query plan (roughly, the "compiled version") of some of the sub-queries from one execution to the next. This query plan sometimes acts as if it (incorrectly) includes information derived from other sub-queries as if it was constant. If in a subsequent use the value of these stored "constants" has changed, the where-clauses can fail, causeing the loss of rows in the result set.
We went several rounds of reporting it to MS, bogged down on the "can you produce a simple case that exihibits the problem" phase, and wound you instituting coding guidlines to break such queries into multiple peices using temporary tables.
Consequently I know that there are at least some bugs that are not seen by most users, and am more willing to credit this report than I was before I heard the keywords "SQL server" "complex queries" and "missing data".
-- MarkusQ
I think this was really Microsoft's argument to begin with. The starting assumption for anyone trying to market something is market segmentation:
Q: Do you sell soap and water?
A: Oh no, sir! We sell shampoo, and dish washing liquids, and body gels, and bubble solutions (you know, for kids!), and industrial grime removing agents, and inedable emlusifiers, and...
But then the internet came along, and someone in marketing realized that they could implicitly take credit for all that content, if they made it seem like it was "part" of their core product. So the company that makes edit, notepad, wordpad, word, wordview, etc. sudenly decided that there was no internet segment after all; the internet, they decided, was just part of Windows.
But the forgot to put on their turn signals when they reversed course, and now they get to tap dance.
-- MarkusQ
For the particular case in question, it seems almost trivial; more like a minor repairing of the data rather than breaking a scheme.
-- MarkusQ
> Its going to be very difficult to break "protection" on a CD that won't even be recognized by your CDROM drive as a real CD.
I can see how computer CD software might not recognize it as being a "good" format, but I can't see how the hardware would fail to read it, since the essentially same drive hardware is being used in both cases (the consumer black-box audio device and the computer). So breaking it would just be a matter of writing some software.
Now, this may be a problem since only major corporations can write software and none of them would be motiva--oh wait, I forgot, some scattered individuals write software too. So yeah, I suspect it will be broken.
-- MarkusQ
Actually, if you are quite close to the reactor when it fails, you are in some serious trouble. The plasma inside the Torus is at a very high temperature (I thought it approached Solar temps, but cannot confirm this). If it spills all over you, you are dead. I assume any commercial reactor would be contained in some way to prevent accidents of this sort.
You are right about the temperature, but containment is exactly the wrong solution. What you want is something that breaks away (in a controlled direction, say "up" would be nice). Remember that the quickest way to cool something really hot is to let it expand. (The second quickest way is of course to get venture capital.)
This applies to pretty much any concentration of free energy. You can burn gun powder safely in a small metal dish, but the same quantity in a small metal pipe makes a rocket or a bomb (or both) depending on how the ends are capped. With the plasma from a just-failed fussion reactor you're looking at something on the order of a lightning bolt. Set free, you have a big flash, a loud bang!, and a lot of people saying "What the fuck was that!?!?!"
Try to contain it, and you have a much louder boom, and a somewhat reduced number of people crying "Oh, the humanity!"
-- MarkusQ
1. It doesn't matter how blank-boxed they are, as long as they are small and cheap?
2. There isn't a huge interest in hacking computers per se; rather, what we care about is modularity-for-the-buck? (I suspect this is the case for me: what I want are things I can buy for under $100US that can be hooked to other things in the same price range in some meaningful way to build (random-string (cons '(a gravity meter) '(an automatic bubble maker) '(a marsupial trap) '(a woodpecker conditioner) future-projects-list)).
3. Most people here only read every fifth thread these days?
-- MarkusQ
If you put aside the question begging terms (e.g. "healthy"), it certainly is normal for people to die at all ages. If everyone lived to be 79.5 years old and then suddenly just died, that would be weird. We don't like to think about it, but young people do in fact die.
The problem with terms like "healthy" is that they smuggle in assumptions. You, for example, clearly assume that the set of all healthy people does not include anyone who is going to drop dead in the next twenty four hours or so. While I admit that it is unlikely for any particular healthy person to drop dead, it must happen in some cases. (Or, if you absolutely refuse to accept that, then you must admit that these people weren't healthy when they got up that morning, because in fact they did die, which would contradict your definition of "healthy". You can't have it both ways.)
So the question here is, do a larger fraction of the people in a given condition die if we look only at those who drink Red Bull vs. the whole set. Otherwise the logic is as vapid as saying "Three people with hair died, therefore hair kills people."
-- MarkusQ
Why can't the press learn a little baysian reasoning?
</rhetorical>
It isn't that hard to figure the expected death rate among red bull drinkers (expected death rate w/o Red Bull times % of population drinking Red Bull), and ask yourself, is what we are seeing higher than we'd expect? I'll bet it's not.
It would be very odd if no one who drank Red Bull ever died. But for some reason our culture always treats death as an annomoly, which must therefore have a proximate cause.
In the longterm, the per capita death toll is exactly 1.
-- MarkusQ