Which is exactly what the questioner is worried about. His exec wants an indemnity. You don't get onw with Linux, because indemnities cost and Linux is, broadly speaking, free. As posted elsewhere, I don't actually think that indemnities are worth much. The gap between "the indemnity doesn't cover your case" and "we stole code - we're dead, and so is your indemnity" is so small that it is barely visible.
Invest the money you would have spent on an indemnity in your own GPL support/development team. If/when the issue comes up, get them to rewrite the infringing code. Meanwhile get/give other good code.
Do hackers really bother going round scribbling on completely open systems? Most of the totally open Wikis I have seen suffer occasionally from idiots, but rarely from maliciopus damage. There is just no thrill in breaking into something that is not at all protected. Obviously, there may be the occasional idion, but a rollback system, which can identify all the pages altered witin a time window and roll them back to before the attack, should make it relatively trivial to undo. A don't-post-too-fast system (like/., which requires 2 minutes between posts) should also limit damage.
What you say is true for maintainance documentation, but not for user documentation. One of the troubles with a lot of Linux projects is the lack of user documentation - until the project gets big enough to get the O'Reilly (or similar) book. There is a gap between the small project, supported by a maillist with the developers still on it, and the giant project which can support a proper book (and pay someone to write it).
A wiki would sound good to me. Thinking about the above poragraph, you need to think about if tghe time comes when a publisher offers to publish thw Wiki as a book - if someone will clean it up. On the one hand, that poewrson will want to be paid/get royalties to do it. On the other, they will be using other people's copyleft words, not as is the case for other books, writing about other people's copyleft code.
How much is the indemnity you get from the closed-source suppliers worth? Here is a story about users of Microsoft SQL Server possibly being sued for proprietary software incorrectly or inappropriately included by Microsoft in SQLSever.
Of coursse, this is at the start of litigation, and no-one knows how it will turn out. But isn't this exactly what your executive is worrying about happening with Open Source software? And this is from the Godzilla of them all, Microsoft.
No-one can make you perfectly safe from such claims - valid or invalid. But with open source, it shoudl be a lot easier to establish the truth of such allegations, because the source is available, and trackable, a long way back. If closed-source supplier A alleges that closed source supplier B has pirated code, you are into heavy calibre lawyers before source gets disclosed under court order. With open source, you go to the CVS tree, check earliest versions, check dates.... False claims should be seen off pretty quicly. And someone filing proprietary code as OS would be pretty visible (and spurned) within the community.
And if it turns out that you have been using some stolen code, with OS you at least have the option of throwing out only the stolen bits and rewriting them, whereas with closed source you are dependant upon your supplier doing that for you - if the lawsuit hasn't destroyed them, which it would do for a small company (and then where is your indemnity? At then end of the trail of unsecured creditors, I should think).
To summarise: such situations are much less likely to occur with Open rather than Closed source. If they do occur, that indemnity has a good chance of being waste paper. Meanwhile, you have paid out *a lot* in licence fees for a very threadbare security blanket.
Handhelds? Palm pilots? Cheapo "personal organisers?"? My cars electronic ignition has a "computer" inside. Large can of worms preparing to be opened here.
Has hard disk? Look for shops selling diskless computers and disks separately, and oferreing to screw them together for you. Will also hit (say) wab servers etc. How many PCs in a Blade server? Lots of CPU/disk/net interfaces, which is all you need to pirate. So each Blade CPU shouls pay levy, shouldn't it?
Simply that an unwrapped torus has the same properties as the Spacewars screen, and an unwrapped sphere does not. If it were a sphere, the top and bottom of the screen would be a single point. Space should distort as you approach the top, so that as you approach the top of the screen you fill all space, and you reappear not at the same point at the bottom of the screen but at its mirror image.
A toroidal space in 2D has two preferred axes - the X and Y axes of the Spacewars game. A sphere has no preferred axis. The microwave background seems to show preferred axis, which suggests that space may have such a preferred axis and hence possibly not a hypersphere.
The big different between RF and optical receives is that RF receivers (radios) are usually fairly omnidirectional, whereas optical receivers (eyes) are usually pretty directional. In part, this derives from the physics of the things - longer waves go turn more round obstacles, and tend to broadcast wide angle if their wavelength is similar in size to their aerial.
The way we use radio takes advantage of this - we don't have to aim the antenna for our car radio, and we prefer it that way so we can listen as we drive. This leads to a promiscuous sort of receiver, which is subject to interference. I think it is going a bit far to say thai is because of the legislative environment or technological background - it is because it is the way we *want* it to be.
At optical weavelengths, we *want* a directional, even a focussed, image - and our eyes produce it. In between, we tend to use directional transmissions with point-to-point microwave dishes.
However, the simple reflector style lens, depending upon newtoinian optics to fouca an image of the transmitter onto the receiver, is not the only way to receive a signal. People are already working on multi-aerial systems which take a "holographic" approach to reconstructing the signal. There was an article about one of them on/. a few months ago. These could very well lock onto the signal from a particular direction, and ignore signals on the same frequencey from a different direction.
I think the frequencxy hopping bit is actually somewhat of a red herring. It doesn't generate new spectrum, it meakes better use of the spctrum we have. It gets rid of the wastage caused by blank safety space betwenn radio stations both in geographical space and in spectum space.
There does not need, actually, to be an embedding 4-space holding our 3-torus. Toroidal just describes the properties of space.
Go back to the Spacewars game described in the article. The space in which those shipe manoievered has the properties of a torus: there ere many independanc circles you could follow (all the verticals on the screen) which would each bring you back to your start point without crossing any other verticals. These correspond to going around inside the donus, passing (in out 3-space) through the hole.
There are also a load of horizontals with the same property. These correspond to going round the donut along the ring. Again, many parallel lines get back to their start point without crossing.
But this is a flat screen. Where is the hole in the donut? There is no hole, is is just that the space behaves as if there were a hole.
Another interesting point is that we reagd the donut as havin an orientation. it lies flat on the table, this its hoole vertical. But in the spacewars game, horizontal and vertical are interchangeable. The hole is no more, and bo less, above/below the screen than it is left/right of the screen. In fact the "hole" is the whole of 3 space *not* in the plane of the screen: everywhere that out little 2-d spaceship cannot reach even if we allow the screen surface logically to extend to infinity.
I feel it is an invasive technology that has the potential to cost you a bit of my freedom and anonymity.
There seems to be an awful lot of paranoia about this, and related, things. Sure, it is a potential surveillance and record keeping device. So are pen and paper and traditional, century old, photography. Just because Benetton/the CIA/the Mafia might possibly use them for surveillance, it doesn't mean that they will.
Remeber that the successfule police states - Tsarist Russia, Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, Iraq, N Korea and Comminist China today - have not depended on technology. They have depended upon having spies in every block, a complete and interlocking network of informers and informers on informers.
On of the criticisms of Western, and particularly US, unpreparedness for 9/11 was that it depended too much on technology. Intelligence agencies assumed that photo-reconnaisance, filtering emails, monitoring radio etc. would tell them everything. In fact, plots are hadtched by people talking to people, and "humint" has been unjustly neglected. This scare is the flip side of the same thing. Don't waste your time woprrying about what technology might possibly do. Worry about the political institutions might do with intelligence from whatever source. The new Department of Homeland Security is being given a lot of power. Well, OK, maybe the situation demands it. But is it getting the level of political oversight that it needs? Are the the checks and balances that were carefullly, expensively and IMO correctly (but I am a froeigner, so I don't count) built in to the Constitution being applied to this new department? From what I hear, recent anti-terrorist laws give the Executive an unprecedenteld level of power uncontrolled by the Legislature.
Don't get diverted by irrelevancies sucha s this RFID thing. It is a detail: if the Big Picture is right, any abuse of RFID will get stomped on quicly. If the Big Picture is wrong, RFID is only one of a thousand potential tools of oppression.
"Too good to be true" is heavily related to the evaluator's background in the subject matter.
And varies with time. Twenty years ago somebody was claiming to have a new holographic storage technology that would store 10 terabytes in one rack-mount unit. At the time, I said that it failed the "too good to be true" test. Today, it is "Where shall we ship it, and how are you going to pay" - 10Tb is off-the-shelf stuff
The same sort of thing was said about colour displays when they first came out. Why pay three times as much for colour when you can display anything any reasonable user wants on green-and white. It wasn't a problem at the time, but I would place a big bet that if the net had been around, people would have saud the only real use of colour was for porn.
In the abstract, the highest bandwith channel into the human brain is the eyes. Delivering different information to the two eyes must be capable of delivering more information that to just one eye. (Not twice as much - the vision system isn't built that way). And enabling extre information to be obtained by just moving the head would help those of us with working neck muscles (though I don't know if the proposed systems do this).
Even in software development, we already use three or more dimensions (X, Y, colour, typeface) to represent what is inherently a one-dimensional object - program source is naturally just a very long row of characters.
It will take some time to work out the possibilities, but I cannot think of any computer activity which you can definitively say will *not* benefit from a 3D display. It'll just take a while before people work out how to use it.
Possible page layout for print, which is inherently 2d. But ordinary "correspondence" word processors are being used to prepare documents which are never intended to printed, so can have linke etc. in them.
3D graphing for the accountants - better visualisation and planning.
Would a 3D organisation chart have a better chance of representing reality than a 2D one?
3D display of thread trees for newsreaders (and/.)?
3D display of conversations on IRC/chatrooms? Not quite sure how it would work, but there is room for ideas here.
3D family snaps. The only reason we don't have 3d snaps now is that the viewing equipment is too clunky - there have been stereo film cameras since the 1920s at least. If your website can show 3D snaps, it will only be milliseconds before manufacturers come out with stereo digital cameras. The technology is simple, and the cost is certainly not going to be prohubitive.
Yes - and porn. Porn probably makes more money directly than any other net activity. Whilst of course abhorring the worst kinds of porn, I don't see why people shouldn't enjoy, and sell profitably, "ordinary" porn. And if 3D makes people's porn experience better, who is hurt? It is not as if the porn isn't there in 2D already.
Imagine a surgeon performing surgery through the use of a 3D display...
I don't have to imagine, I've seen it. About 10 years ago at a TV exhibition in Tokyo, NHK (IIRC) had a demo of 3D HDTV - using glasses, 1920 line projection display in a pretty good quality viewing theatre. They had two films. The first was standard chocolate-box pretty pictures - brightly clad children playing, flowers, pretty girls dancing etc. Then, with very little warning, they switched to an experimental project on brain surgery, designed to let many surgeons see inside a minimal sugical incision. We we suddenly looking at a hole in someone's head, projected 6 feet wide in 3D. It was not fun - but it did show a serious advantage to 3D displays.
I wasn't say you should do it, just that if you react according to the (illegal) prejudice you expressed, you would actually be harming not helping yourself.
Your analogy doesn't work. A backdoor to a house is a back door, not a hole blown in the back. I use the back door for taking out the garbage, access to the garden. I didn't use any explosives to create it. I expect strangers to use the front door, but there is nothing illegitimate in using my very own back door. What locks I fit to it, of course, is another question.
The closest I have come to a back door is some undocumented commands used for debugging and for accessing very dangerous troubleshooting tools. Those tended to get revealed on an ad-hoc basis to FSEs and technically qualified customers. All fully known to management.
But if I was asked to take this joke of a "survey" I would make a point to call the hiring manager to make certain he knew the crap the HR department was putting the applicants through. If he agreed with it, I would simply scratch him or her off the list of potential employers.
Agreed entirely. In fact, I wouldn't bother the hiring manager. If this rubbish is going on, either s/he knows about it, in which case the organisation is run by fools, of s/he does not, in which case it is run by idiots. Either way, I don't want to be there.
Women, statistically speaking, are more likely to abandon their careers for family.
And men, statistically speaking, are likely to abandon their jobs for their careers. Men job-hop more than women - possibly because they are more career-oriented. So, unless you are concerned where your potential employee goes next, and you prefer them to go to a competitor than drop out of the job market, you are better off hiring women (on this single point, of stay at a single employer, alone I add hastily).
If gigabit ethernet were faster than scsi or ide, then why wouldn't ne have NAS drives inside the computer.
Because the overhead of IP processing is enormous compared to the overhead of scsi command processing.
Raw disks produce 30-60mbyte/sec, and climbing: say up to 500Mbit/sec. IU haven't seen any commercial NICs which can handle ram-to-ram transfers at this speed on desktop hardware. Scsi-160, nominalk throughput about 1280Mbit/sec, can handle this data rate without breaking into a sweat. Overheads for IP are going to be large fractions of a millisecond per packet (and a packet is 1.5 Mbit, or 9Mbit if you have jumbo packets). Scsi overheads are going to be tens of microseconds per transfer (probably per frame for video). Scsi just wins hands down - and IDE still beats the pants of NAS.
The only reason for NAS - and it is a good reason - is sharing.
Most Scsi disks do this sort of think internally if you give them lots of transfers to do. Furthermore, each drive knows about its own geometry and knows how to optimise for itself. This is significant, because the C/H/S trector tradeoffs are not what they used to be. Conventionally, a headswitch (changeing head on same cylinder)might be expected to be chapeaper than a short seek (changing cylinders on the same head. In fack, the skew between the head amounts to several tracks, so a head switch always includes a seversl-track seek, and it is porribly better to do another transfer that appears to be further away. And the drive knows what its *actual* rotational position is to optimise out rotational latency, not a theoretical position from a model which may not match the actual drive.
So if you have a Scsi drive, just give everything to the drive and let it get on with the job. I believe SATA drive also have the theoretical capability to to this, but most of them don't actually provide it yet.
When you have given what you can to the drive, think about multiple drives. Mirrors. Raid4/5, with the overhead of parity generation. Multiple filesystem vs striping.
I agree with you. While I want, and will support if I can, manned space flight, I think that the unmanned deep space probes are a second strand which actully delivers more value for money. We need to keep that second strand alive. And $300m expected total cost of the mission ($504m cap) is tiny compared to the spending on Shuttle/ISS.
Apart from anything else, the thinking about designes that *have* to work for 12 years and that you *can't* fix is, IMO, most healthy for NASA. Of course the jury is still out on Columbia, but if it turns out to be tile damage, that shuttle was doomed from liftoff: they had no way of fixing damaged tiles in orbit. NASA has got into the way of thinking that any componen only has to last one flight (Shuttle) or till the next resupply mission (ISS). The rest of the world doesn't work like that: woule you accept a car that needed new tires, an engine overhaul, and a massive safety check after each tankfull of fuel? The rest of the world works either on built to last the lifetime of the object, or at leas a long working life.
If humans are to one day completely understand how our own minds work then we cease to be 'intelligent'??
By the meaning of the word "Intelligence" as it is currently used - yes. That follows from my primary point that I do not believe that we actually know what we mean when we use the word. It is like "karma" or "virtue" - well understood, but without formal definition. Should we fully understand ourselves - not obviously possible - there would be no structure in which you could asy "intelligence" exists.
I think we have already reached that point. We have a machine that delivers us a result we cannont grok - it is called Mathematics. Feynman (who ought to know if anybody did) said that anybody who thinks they understand Quantum Mechanics doesn't understand Quantum Mechanics. We can run the equations and/or simulations and understand the result, but I don't think anybody really understand *why* the results are like that. All we know is that we put the initial conditions into a process that has previously proven to have worked, and gor out results that are plausible.
This just shows that we don't actualy know what we mean when we say "Intelligence". It just meant "What I am thinking about when I say Intelligence".
The Turing Test is not a pass-mark to achieve intelligence, it is an outside limit to stop argument. If something passes, completely, the Turing test, then you know you have intelligence. But that is asn extremely high benchmark. It is like saying that if you can outrun all known vehicles, I have to grant you are a fast runner. You *may* still be a fast runner when when you run a lot slower than that - but we will have to enter into a discussion about how fast is fast. Turing just set an endpoint - it it passes his test it is certainly intelligent.
There are two ways the Turing Text could be passed. One is via a special purpose machine to pass it - a human simulator. While of research interest, because building such a machine would tell us a lot about how we actually do work, this is unlikely to be a very useful machine, because it will replicate our weaknesses as well as our strengths. Why spend billions building what half an hours funa and a nine month wait can build. (One-way trips to the stars, perhaps?).
The other way is a general purpose machine which has learned how to copy humans perfectly. By any definition I can think of, this would be an awesomely intelligent machine because it would have learned to understand, and simulate, our minds by the power of pure intellect. Something like playing all the instuments in the orchestra at the same time.
While I think that the first class of machine may well be built in the fullness of time, It will not be very useful. I don't know whether the second class will ever be built - I doubt it.
Which brings us back to the "sub-Turing" class of intelligence. If Turing represents an upper limit to the grey area of where intelligence starts, there must be levels of achievement which would be regarded as intelligent by most, if not all, peoples judgement.
I then ask the question: what use is sub-Turing intelligence? Well, there are lots of tasks which we regard as needing intelligence which we would like to automate. In fact, some of them have already been automated. But when we automate them, we say "we know how that automaton works, so it can't be intelligence". Chess, for example - once regarded as the last test before the Turing test, now regarded as a nifty but essentially unimportant achievement.
We don't actually *know* what we mean when we say "Intelligence". Turing knew that, and provided an empirical rather than analytical test. However, I would say that "Intelligence" bears the same relationship to "Computer Science" as "Magic" does to "Technology" in Clarke's Law: "Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
"Any sufficiently advanced Computer Science is indistinguisahable from Intelligence" - Cawley's Law.
Or, to put it another way, Intelligence means "I don't understand how you thought that".
Which explains how Joe Luser thinks his computer is intelligent, whereas Bill Slashdot doesn't.
our signals just get stronger and more blanketing as time goes by
Not so. While the total amount of RF power we are emitting may be increasing, it is becoming progressively less comprehensible. Most signals are now compressed, and the function of compression is to remove from any signal the redundant information that says "this is a signal" when you don't know how it is coded. Essentially, compression makes a signal resemble noise, and the better the compression the closer it is to noise. Sure, you need some kind of sync mark to lock onto the stream, which could in principle be detected, but that is a very small fraction of the signal.
And we are tranmitting many more, much smaller signals. Instead of broadcasting tens or even hundreds of kilowatts from a hilltop to the universe at large, we are broadcasting a few tens of watts from orbit aimed straight at the earth, or sending it over cable, or broadcasting a few watts from cellphone masts or milliwatts from cellphones. The earths's RF output is raidly becoming indistinguishable from white noise, and from any reasonable distance will be swamped by the much bigger white noise generator nearby (the Sun).
There is therefore a shell, perhaps a hundred light years thick, of "detectable" transmissions expanding out from the earth, which is already trailing off. To put it another way, any aliens out there will have a hundred year window to look in in the right direction if they are to detect us by our unintentional transmissions.
Agree with the rest of your comment, though. The ides of aggressive/invasive aliens is purely to make good films/tv. You can't make a good drama out of civilisations getting in contact and just having a pleasant, though rather long drawn out, chat. But that is a far more likely outcome. Even if the cost is not orders of magnitude greater than any plausible benefit (the overwhelming likelihood, IMO), the likelihood of tehir being biologically compatible with us, our environment and our biological products is tiny. And if they don't want out biological products - there is a lot of rock out there to mine for mineral resources. Why try to mine the one bit that someone is sitting on?
They don't have to be advanced not to want to attack us, they just have to be sensible enough to know what is in their own best interests. And a species which failed that test is unlikely to have space-faring civilisation.
An Air France 747 overshot the runway at Tahiti and ended up in the sea. They spent something like $50m to repair it, much of it on the spot. It was almost brand new, so worth quite a lot. I heard, nonetheless, that it was regarded as pretty marginal whether to repair or scrap.
Slashdot Mirror
The InnoDB table type, which is now a part of the standard production release, supports transactions, row locking, and foreign keys.
Which is exactly what the questioner is worried about. His exec wants an indemnity. You don't get onw with Linux, because indemnities cost and Linux is, broadly speaking, free. As posted elsewhere, I don't actually think that indemnities are worth much. The gap between "the indemnity doesn't cover your case" and "we stole code - we're dead, and so is your indemnity" is so small that it is barely visible.
Invest the money you would have spent on an indemnity in your own GPL support/development team. If/when the issue comes up, get them to rewrite the infringing code. Meanwhile get/give other good code.
Do hackers really bother going round scribbling on completely open systems? Most of the totally open Wikis I have seen suffer occasionally from idiots, but rarely from maliciopus damage. There is just no thrill in breaking into something that is not at all protected. Obviously, there may be the occasional idion, but a rollback system, which can identify all the pages altered witin a time window and roll them back to before the attack, should make it relatively trivial to undo. A don't-post-too-fast system (like /., which requires 2 minutes between posts) should also limit damage.
What you say is true for maintainance documentation, but not for user documentation. One of the troubles with a lot of Linux projects is the lack of user documentation - until the project gets big enough to get the O'Reilly (or similar) book. There is a gap between the small project, supported by a maillist with the developers still on it, and the giant project which can support a proper book (and pay someone to write it).
A wiki would sound good to me. Thinking about the above poragraph, you need to think about if tghe time comes when a publisher offers to publish thw Wiki as a book - if someone will clean it up. On the one hand, that poewrson will want to be paid/get royalties to do it. On the other, they will be using other people's copyleft words, not as is the case for other books, writing about other people's copyleft code.
Of coursse, this is at the start of litigation, and no-one knows how it will turn out. But isn't this exactly what your executive is worrying about happening with Open Source software? And this is from the Godzilla of them all, Microsoft.
No-one can make you perfectly safe from such claims - valid or invalid. But with open source, it shoudl be a lot easier to establish the truth of such allegations, because the source is available, and trackable, a long way back. If closed-source supplier A alleges that closed source supplier B has pirated code, you are into heavy calibre lawyers before source gets disclosed under court order. With open source, you go to the CVS tree, check earliest versions, check dates.... False claims should be seen off pretty quicly. And someone filing proprietary code as OS would be pretty visible (and spurned) within the community.
And if it turns out that you have been using some stolen code, with OS you at least have the option of throwing out only the stolen bits and rewriting them, whereas with closed source you are dependant upon your supplier doing that for you - if the lawsuit hasn't destroyed them, which it would do for a small company (and then where is your indemnity? At then end of the trail of unsecured creditors, I should think).
To summarise: such situations are much less likely to occur with Open rather than Closed source. If they do occur, that indemnity has a good chance of being waste paper. Meanwhile, you have paid out *a lot* in licence fees for a very threadbare security blanket.
How do you define a taxable computer?
Handhelds? Palm pilots? Cheapo "personal organisers?"? My cars electronic ignition has a "computer" inside. Large can of worms preparing to be opened here.
Has hard disk? Look for shops selling diskless computers and disks separately, and oferreing to screw them together for you. Will also hit (say) wab servers etc. How many PCs in a Blade server? Lots of CPU/disk/net interfaces, which is all you need to pirate. So each Blade CPU shouls pay levy, shouldn't it?
Simply that an unwrapped torus has the same properties as the Spacewars screen, and an unwrapped sphere does not. If it were a sphere, the top and bottom of the screen would be a single point. Space should distort as you approach the top, so that as you approach the top of the screen you fill all space, and you reappear not at the same point at the bottom of the screen but at its mirror image.
A toroidal space in 2D has two preferred axes - the X and Y axes of the Spacewars game. A sphere has no preferred axis. The microwave background seems to show preferred axis, which suggests that space may have such a preferred axis and hence possibly not a hypersphere.
The big different between RF and optical receives is that RF receivers (radios) are usually fairly omnidirectional, whereas optical receivers (eyes) are usually pretty directional. In part, this derives from the physics of the things - longer waves go turn more round obstacles, and tend to broadcast wide angle if their wavelength is similar in size to their aerial.
/. a few months ago. These could very well lock onto the signal from a particular direction, and ignore signals on the same frequencey from a different direction.
The way we use radio takes advantage of this - we don't have to aim the antenna for our car radio, and we prefer it that way so we can listen as we drive. This leads to a promiscuous sort of receiver, which is subject to interference. I think it is going a bit far to say thai is because of the legislative environment or technological background - it is because it is the way we *want* it to be.
At optical weavelengths, we *want* a directional, even a focussed, image - and our eyes produce it. In between, we tend to use directional transmissions with point-to-point microwave dishes.
However, the simple reflector style lens, depending upon newtoinian optics to fouca an image of the transmitter onto the receiver, is not the only way to receive a signal. People are already working on multi-aerial systems which take a "holographic" approach to reconstructing the signal. There was an article about one of them on
I think the frequencxy hopping bit is actually somewhat of a red herring. It doesn't generate new spectrum, it meakes better use of the spctrum we have. It gets rid of the wastage caused by blank safety space betwenn radio stations both in geographical space and in spectum space.
There does not need, actually, to be an embedding 4-space holding our 3-torus. Toroidal just describes the properties of space.
Go back to the Spacewars game described in the article. The space in which those shipe manoievered has the properties of a torus: there ere many independanc circles you could follow (all the verticals on the screen) which would each bring you back to your start point without crossing any other verticals. These correspond to going around inside the donus, passing (in out 3-space) through the hole.
There are also a load of horizontals with the same property. These correspond to going round the donut along the ring. Again, many parallel lines get back to their start point without crossing.
But this is a flat screen. Where is the hole in the donut? There is no hole, is is just that the space behaves as if there were a hole.
Another interesting point is that we reagd the donut as havin an orientation. it lies flat on the table, this its hoole vertical. But in the spacewars game, horizontal and vertical are interchangeable. The hole is no more, and bo less, above/below the screen than it is left/right of the screen. In fact the "hole" is the whole of 3 space *not* in the plane of the screen: everywhere that out little 2-d spaceship cannot reach even if we allow the screen surface logically to extend to infinity.
There seems to be an awful lot of paranoia about this, and related, things. Sure, it is a potential surveillance and record keeping device. So are pen and paper and traditional, century old, photography. Just because Benetton/the CIA/the Mafia might possibly use them for surveillance, it doesn't mean that they will.
Remeber that the successfule police states - Tsarist Russia, Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, Iraq, N Korea and Comminist China today - have not depended on technology. They have depended upon having spies in every block, a complete and interlocking network of informers and informers on informers.
On of the criticisms of Western, and particularly US, unpreparedness for 9/11 was that it depended too much on technology. Intelligence agencies assumed that photo-reconnaisance, filtering emails, monitoring radio etc. would tell them everything. In fact, plots are hadtched by people talking to people, and "humint" has been unjustly neglected. This scare is the flip side of the same thing. Don't waste your time woprrying about what technology might possibly do. Worry about the political institutions might do with intelligence from whatever source. The new Department of Homeland Security is being given a lot of power. Well, OK, maybe the situation demands it. But is it getting the level of political oversight that it needs? Are the the checks and balances that were carefullly, expensively and IMO correctly (but I am a froeigner, so I don't count) built in to the Constitution being applied to this new department? From what I hear, recent anti-terrorist laws give the Executive an unprecedenteld level of power uncontrolled by the Legislature.
Don't get diverted by irrelevancies sucha s this RFID thing. It is a detail: if the Big Picture is right, any abuse of RFID will get stomped on quicly. If the Big Picture is wrong, RFID is only one of a thousand potential tools of oppression.
And varies with time. Twenty years ago somebody was claiming to have a new holographic storage technology that would store 10 terabytes in one rack-mount unit. At the time, I said that it failed the "too good to be true" test. Today, it is "Where shall we ship it, and how are you going to pay" - 10Tb is off-the-shelf stuff
The same sort of thing was said about colour displays when they first came out. Why pay three times as much for colour when you can display anything any reasonable user wants on green-and white. It wasn't a problem at the time, but I would place a big bet that if the net had been around, people would have saud the only real use of colour was for porn.
/.)?
In the abstract, the highest bandwith channel into the human brain is the eyes. Delivering different information to the two eyes must be capable of delivering more information that to just one eye. (Not twice as much - the vision system isn't built that way). And enabling extre information to be obtained by just moving the head would help those of us with working neck muscles (though I don't know if the proposed systems do this).
Even in software development, we already use three or more dimensions (X, Y, colour, typeface) to represent what is inherently a one-dimensional object - program source is naturally just a very long row of characters.
It will take some time to work out the possibilities, but I cannot think of any computer activity which you can definitively say will *not* benefit from a 3D display. It'll just take a while before people work out how to use it.
Possible page layout for print, which is inherently 2d. But ordinary "correspondence" word processors are being used to prepare documents which are never intended to printed, so can have linke etc. in them.
3D graphing for the accountants - better visualisation and planning.
Would a 3D organisation chart have a better chance of representing reality than a 2D one?
3D display of thread trees for newsreaders (and
3D display of conversations on IRC/chatrooms? Not quite sure how it would work, but there is room for ideas here.
3D family snaps. The only reason we don't have 3d snaps now is that the viewing equipment is too clunky - there have been stereo film cameras since the 1920s at least. If your website can show 3D snaps, it will only be milliseconds before manufacturers come out with stereo digital cameras. The technology is simple, and the cost is certainly not going to be prohubitive.
Yes - and porn. Porn probably makes more money directly than any other net activity. Whilst of course abhorring the worst kinds of porn, I don't see why people shouldn't enjoy, and sell profitably, "ordinary" porn. And if 3D makes people's porn experience better, who is hurt? It is not as if the porn isn't there in 2D already.
I don't have to imagine, I've seen it. About 10 years ago at a TV exhibition in Tokyo, NHK (IIRC) had a demo of 3D HDTV - using glasses, 1920 line projection display in a pretty good quality viewing theatre. They had two films. The first was standard chocolate-box pretty pictures - brightly clad children playing, flowers, pretty girls dancing etc. Then, with very little warning, they switched to an experimental project on brain surgery, designed to let many surgeons see inside a minimal sugical incision. We we suddenly looking at a hole in someone's head, projected 6 feet wide in 3D. It was not fun - but it did show a serious advantage to 3D displays.
I wasn't say you should do it, just that if you react according to the (illegal) prejudice you expressed, you would actually be harming not helping yourself.
Your analogy doesn't work. A backdoor to a house is a back door, not a hole blown in the back. I use the back door for taking out the garbage, access to the garden. I didn't use any explosives to create it. I expect strangers to use the front door, but there is nothing illegitimate in using my very own back door. What locks I fit to it, of course, is another question.
The closest I have come to a back door is some undocumented commands used for debugging and for accessing very dangerous troubleshooting tools. Those tended to get revealed on an ad-hoc basis to FSEs and technically qualified customers. All fully known to management.
Agreed entirely. In fact, I wouldn't bother the hiring manager. If this rubbish is going on, either s/he knows about it, in which case the organisation is run by fools, of s/he does not, in which case it is run by idiots. Either way, I don't want to be there.
And men, statistically speaking, are likely to abandon their jobs for their careers. Men job-hop more than women - possibly because they are more career-oriented. So, unless you are concerned where your potential employee goes next, and you prefer them to go to a competitor than drop out of the job market, you are better off hiring women (on this single point, of stay at a single employer, alone I add hastily).
Because the overhead of IP processing is enormous compared to the overhead of scsi command processing.
Raw disks produce 30-60mbyte/sec, and climbing: say up to 500Mbit/sec. IU haven't seen any commercial NICs which can handle ram-to-ram transfers at this speed on desktop hardware. Scsi-160, nominalk throughput about 1280Mbit/sec, can handle this data rate without breaking into a sweat. Overheads for IP are going to be large fractions of a millisecond per packet (and a packet is 1.5 Mbit, or 9Mbit if you have jumbo packets). Scsi overheads are going to be tens of microseconds per transfer (probably per frame for video). Scsi just wins hands down - and IDE still beats the pants of NAS.
The only reason for NAS - and it is a good reason - is sharing.
Most Scsi disks do this sort of think internally if you give them lots of transfers to do. Furthermore, each drive knows about its own geometry and knows how to optimise for itself. This is significant, because the C/H/S trector tradeoffs are not what they used to be. Conventionally, a headswitch (changeing head on same cylinder)might be expected to be chapeaper than a short seek (changing cylinders on the same head. In fack, the skew between the head amounts to several tracks, so a head switch always includes a seversl-track seek, and it is porribly better to do another transfer that appears to be further away. And the drive knows what its *actual* rotational position is to optimise out rotational latency, not a theoretical position from a model which may not match the actual drive.
So if you have a Scsi drive, just give everything to the drive and let it get on with the job. I believe SATA drive also have the theoretical capability to to this, but most of them don't actually provide it yet.
When you have given what you can to the drive, think about multiple drives. Mirrors. Raid4/5, with the overhead of parity generation. Multiple filesystem vs striping.
Get coffee..
I agree with you. While I want, and will support if I can, manned space flight, I think that the unmanned deep space probes are a second strand which actully delivers more value for money. We need to keep that second strand alive. And $300m expected total cost of the mission ($504m cap) is tiny compared to the spending on Shuttle/ISS.
Apart from anything else, the thinking about designes that *have* to work for 12 years and that you *can't* fix is, IMO, most healthy for NASA. Of course the jury is still out on Columbia, but if it turns out to be tile damage, that shuttle was doomed from liftoff: they had no way of fixing damaged tiles in orbit. NASA has got into the way of thinking that any componen only has to last one flight (Shuttle) or till the next resupply mission (ISS). The rest of the world doesn't work like that: woule you accept a car that needed new tires, an engine overhaul, and a massive safety check after each tankfull of fuel? The rest of the world works either on built to last the lifetime of the object, or at leas a long working life.
By the meaning of the word "Intelligence" as it is currently used - yes. That follows from my primary point that I do not believe that we actually know what we mean when we use the word. It is like "karma" or "virtue" - well understood, but without formal definition. Should we fully understand ourselves - not obviously possible - there would be no structure in which you could asy "intelligence" exists.
I think we have already reached that point. We have a machine that delivers us a result we cannont grok - it is called Mathematics. Feynman (who ought to know if anybody did) said that anybody who thinks they understand Quantum Mechanics doesn't understand Quantum Mechanics. We can run the equations and/or simulations and understand the result, but I don't think anybody really understand *why* the results are like that. All we know is that we put the initial conditions into a process that has previously proven to have worked, and gor out results that are plausible.
This just shows that we don't actualy know what we mean when we say "Intelligence". It just meant "What I am thinking about when I say Intelligence".
The Turing Test is not a pass-mark to achieve intelligence, it is an outside limit to stop argument. If something passes, completely, the Turing test, then you know you have intelligence. But that is asn extremely high benchmark. It is like saying that if you can outrun all known vehicles, I have to grant you are a fast runner. You *may* still be a fast runner when when you run a lot slower than that - but we will have to enter into a discussion about how fast is fast. Turing just set an endpoint - it it passes his test it is certainly intelligent.
There are two ways the Turing Text could be passed. One is via a special purpose machine to pass it - a human simulator. While of research interest, because building such a machine would tell us a lot about how we actually do work, this is unlikely to be a very useful machine, because it will replicate our weaknesses as well as our strengths. Why spend billions building what half an hours funa and a nine month wait can build. (One-way trips to the stars, perhaps?).
The other way is a general purpose machine which has learned how to copy humans perfectly. By any definition I can think of, this would be an awesomely intelligent machine because it would have learned to understand, and simulate, our minds by the power of pure intellect. Something like playing all the instuments in the orchestra at the same time.
While I think that the first class of machine may well be built in the fullness of time, It will not be very useful. I don't know whether the second class will ever be built - I doubt it.
Which brings us back to the "sub-Turing" class of intelligence. If Turing represents an upper limit to the grey area of where intelligence starts, there must be levels of achievement which would be regarded as intelligent by most, if not all, peoples judgement.
I then ask the question: what use is sub-Turing intelligence? Well, there are lots of tasks which we regard as needing intelligence which we would like to automate. In fact, some of them have already been automated. But when we automate them, we say "we know how that automaton works, so it can't be intelligence". Chess, for example - once regarded as the last test before the Turing test, now regarded as a nifty but essentially unimportant achievement.
We don't actually *know* what we mean when we say "Intelligence". Turing knew that, and provided an empirical rather than analytical test. However, I would say that "Intelligence" bears the same relationship to "Computer Science" as "Magic" does to "Technology" in Clarke's Law: "Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
"Any sufficiently advanced Computer Science is indistinguisahable from Intelligence" - Cawley's Law.
Or, to put it another way, Intelligence means "I don't understand how you thought that".
Which explains how Joe Luser thinks his computer is intelligent, whereas Bill Slashdot doesn't.
Not so. While the total amount of RF power we are emitting may be increasing, it is becoming progressively less comprehensible. Most signals are now compressed, and the function of compression is to remove from any signal the redundant information that says "this is a signal" when you don't know how it is coded. Essentially, compression makes a signal resemble noise, and the better the compression the closer it is to noise. Sure, you need some kind of sync mark to lock onto the stream, which could in principle be detected, but that is a very small fraction of the signal.
And we are tranmitting many more, much smaller signals. Instead of broadcasting tens or even hundreds of kilowatts from a hilltop to the universe at large, we are broadcasting a few tens of watts from orbit aimed straight at the earth, or sending it over cable, or broadcasting a few watts from cellphone masts or milliwatts from cellphones. The earths's RF output is raidly becoming indistinguishable from white noise, and from any reasonable distance will be swamped by the much bigger white noise generator nearby (the Sun).
There is therefore a shell, perhaps a hundred light years thick, of "detectable" transmissions expanding out from the earth, which is already trailing off. To put it another way, any aliens out there will have a hundred year window to look in in the right direction if they are to detect us by our unintentional transmissions.
Agree with the rest of your comment, though. The ides of aggressive/invasive aliens is purely to make good films/tv. You can't make a good drama out of civilisations getting in contact and just having a pleasant, though rather long drawn out, chat. But that is a far more likely outcome. Even if the cost is not orders of magnitude greater than any plausible benefit (the overwhelming likelihood, IMO), the likelihood of tehir being biologically compatible with us, our environment and our biological products is tiny. And if they don't want out biological products - there is a lot of rock out there to mine for mineral resources. Why try to mine the one bit that someone is sitting on?
They don't have to be advanced not to want to attack us, they just have to be sensible enough to know what is in their own best interests. And a species which failed that test is unlikely to have space-faring civilisation.
An Air France 747 overshot the runway at Tahiti and ended up in the sea. They spent something like $50m to repair it, much of it on the spot. It was almost brand new, so worth quite a lot. I heard, nonetheless, that it was regarded as pretty marginal whether to repair or scrap.