One famous example of this, although not sure if its true, is Albert Einstein, who was apparently fascinated as a child by the 'invisible force' that moved the needle of a compass given to him by his grandfather.
You make some good points. I am reminded of how many people have died trying to make it to the top of Mt Everest, which is just a mountain, not nearly something as 'prestiguous' as another planet in these times. Also, consider how many sailors died crossing the oceans in older times trying to reach new/interesting/different continents. And yet there was no shortage of people who were willing to try.
The difference was in those days people had a higher tolerance for loss of lives. However as you point out, we still culturally have varying tolerance in different fields (e.g. soldiers/wars). Why not exploration? These things are hazardous, and it may turn out that the only way to successfully make worthwhile space exploration achievements is to go back to the 'old' explorer mentality: cheaper, riskier. In other words, it may not be economically feasible to do it the expensive, safe way.
Essentially, you lower the barrier of space exploration so that it is more accessible to more people. "Opening space exploration to the public", in a way. (Although not entirely; but then even the old sailing expeditions had to have decent funding in the old days).
Thinking further into the future (outside the solar system), there are downsides to doing it this way though: you lose some control over regulation of behaviour of the explorers. If the barriers to entry of exploring space become low enough, then many members of the general public will start exploring space, and the culture and ethics of these people will probably revert to 'frontier culture' ethics; far out of the reach of law enforcement, and with nobody watching them, people's morals decline somewhat. It won't be the high-moralled culture you see in the crew of Star Trek; there will probably be many people who will simply exploit any innocent, unsuspecting populations they come across on other planets. But this will probably happen anyway, no matter which pioneering methods we use. Space is probably too large to ever effectively police and regulate.
but then again, who'd kill someone with one of these??
I think its intended for law enforcement officials. So its more likely to merely be intended to make police more accountable and to prevent handguns stolen from police from being usable by criminals.
I'm sure pictures from these would 'leak' onto the internet sooner or later. I wonder where the bullet would be when the picture gets taken? Still leaving the barrel? In the air? Already hit its target?
How many points of failure do you need? This gun is ridiculous
Nonsense. Think about society as a whole: it is full of these "points of failure" that you are so worried about. Our society has become incredibly complex; anyone from 1000 years ago would look at it and say "how many points of failure do you need? This society is ridiculous". We rely every day on our complex electricity infrastructure to work all the time, and by and large, it does. We rely on our complex cars, with complex electronics and complex internal combustion engines to work properly all the time, and by and large, they do. Thousands of planes take off and land every day, relying not only on complex electronics and complex mechanical systems to function perfectly, but also on all the radio communications systems and the entire ground infrastructure to work properly all the time. And by and large, they do. We rely on Internet communications bandwidth systems, telecommunications systmes, radio communications systems, cellular phones, satellites orbiting the planet, electricity system etc, and all of these things have a complex hierarchy of dependencies on one another.
If everybody thought like you, we'd all still be driving around in horse-drawn carriages, have no aeroplanes, and use candles or paraffin to light our homes.
No chance anyone who trusts their life to a firearm would ever carry one of these.
Sure, whatever. I'll bet that 50 years from now, most new handguns will come equipped with all these features, standard. And you know what? By and large, they will work. And people will say "50 years ago they laughed at the idea of these things, ha ha, how shortsighted and primitive".
People also seem to forget that this is 'just the start'. 100 to 200 years ago, guns were a lot less reliable than they are now, but technology generally improves over time. The cameras will get smaller and more reliable, the electronics will get smaller and more reliable etc. Even if its not as reliable as a conventional handgun now, it will become more reliable. This sort of thing might very well be standard on most new handguns 50 years from now.
So what? This is intended to be used by law enforcement against criminals. Which do you think your average criminal has more access to: EMP weapons, or illegal (regular) hand-guns? Guess which of those two are more effective for use against law enforcement officials?
Well it may have been a bad analogy, but I still understood the analogy perfectly: even though I understand that there is no (known) way to further subdivide subatomic particles (which are not really particles but little fuzzy "clouds" of energy, but thats tangential). Point is, an analogy doesn't have to be perfect for it to be useful, if the people reading it are intelligent enough to extract the relevant meaning from the analogy. To attack the analogy even when its perfectly well understood is just nitpicking. I thought it was reasonable to assume that Fapestniegd probably did understand that his analogy wasn't entirely correct, but that he was using it anyway since it still had value.
If you have to ask, you're not '3133t' enough. At least, that seems to be attitude from the slashdot editors, which I think is really childish. I didn't know who Larry Niven is either.
Maybe this is nothing to worry about by itself. But if it does turn out that the underlying cause of the change does happen to be man-induced climate change, those climate changes may have serious consequences. So its important that we study and try to understand this stuff anyway.
I have a Pentium 166 (64 MB RAM, 2GB HD) running RedHat 6.1 w kernel 2.2 set up as a dial-up router, running squid as a web proxy (with sleezeball to block ads), plus a bit of file sharing and a remote X desktop with icewm over VNC. I am pondering loading RH 8.0 onto the machine, but quite frankly, the current system works, and it works well and fast.
Oh please, if you all feel so strongly about tyrannic China, then why don't we see a boycott of Chinese products? Take a look around you and see how many products you use all the time that were "made in China". My Microsoft mouse, my Logitech mouse, my keyboard at work, some of the parts inside my computer, my Microcom modem etc, all made or assembled in China. Americans don't want to support China's tyranny, but they don't feel so strongly about it that they will stop buying China's cheaper products as a protest.
Thanks, but have done already, and its as optimal as it gets. I've gotten rid of all the excess junk (e.g. Office startup stuff), and I've turned off all unnecessary services. Unfortunately, if you run Windows, you need to have crap like anti-viruses installed, and some of the other software that I'm also required to run at work bogs down the machine.
But the kernel can say, OK, the user is trying to press a button
Just to preempt those people who are about to jump down my throat because "the kernel is not supposed to know about things like buttons", I know that, but thats not what I meant. I was speaking on a more abstract / higher level, but obviously this can still be implemented in terms of lower down OS things, e.g. the Win32 message queue and HWND system: the "OS" *does* know when, for example, when mouse click messages are posted to the DefWndProc of an HWND, and it does know which process is associated with that HWND, etc. In the Linux OS design view, this isn't part of the kernel, no. But in Windows, this is just one layer above what Linux people would classify as being "the kernel"; in Windows there is a lower degree of separation between the two.
Its not just a UI issues; it does relate to the kernel in that the kernels job is to manipulate process priorities and give CPU cycles where they "should best be given". This is actually best done at the kernel level, and NOT the GUI level, because the GUI does not know about the other non-GUI processes is "competing with". I've felt for a long time that something like this should be done in both Windows AND Linux.
Windows is TERRIBLE at this. Consider the following scenario, which most here who here run Windows XP will be able to identify with. You boot up, you've just logged in. The task bar is there on the screen, the start button there, you click on it. And nothing happens. You wait. Still nothing happens. You wait some more. You start to get annoyed and click the start button a few more times. The hard disk is grinding away while Windows XP does all sorts of "invisible stuff" in the background. The computer is about as responsive as a brick. Then after anything from 20 seconds to a minute, the start menu suddenly opens and closes rapidly in quick succession a half dozen times.
THIS IS NOT HOW COMPUTERS SHOULD BEHAVE. Its pathetic. This is a perfect example of the necessity of this. The task bar process doesn't know about all those other background processes hogging CPU after you log in; there is no elegant way for it to magically know when to set its priority temporarily high, and for how long. But the kernel can say, OK, the user is trying to press a button, we must respond, and temporarily boost the start bar (explorer.exe) process and block the others.
On desktop machines (i.e. not servers), user input is the most important thing. If the user presses a button, something must happen. The kernel should be continually shifting priorities around to where the user is focusing his/her input.
Many years back, before the "dot com boom" collapse, many affiliates were pay for impression. After a while, it became pay per click. Now most of them now only pay for actual *sales*, but it is still the advertiser's choice. I was at commission junction until very recently, and they actually dropped pay-per-view totally a year or so ago - most advertisers were pay-for-sales (not even for click throughs, had to be an actual sale). Last month they decided to start charging a $10 monthly (admin/penalty) fee for "non-performers", i.e. affiliates who were not generating actual sales. Since I was one of them I closed my account. I was basically just costing them money (as ads are delivered off their own servers) and not bringing in sales, so I don't blame them for introducing this. Basically its been getting tougher and tougher to make money off banner ads.
A large site like/. might be able to charge specific advertisers a flat rate or a rate based on number of views, but its not really the case for ordinary affiliate programs these days. But I don't know what/. does. I'm currently just blocking (most of) their ads using sleezeball on a squid proxy on one of my Linux boxes. Its amazing how few regular expressions you need to block the majority of ads on the internet!
Overall, the way I see it, is that if its MS its bad. Otherwise it's good.
This is not entirely unreasonable: if you work fairly regularly with Microsoft systems, you will sooner or later begin to realise that Microsoft quite simply has an amazing ability to completely screw up almost everything that they try to do. They regularly take nice ideas and turn them into completely shit, broken implementations. I think what you're seeing in a portion of the/. crowd is merely that sense of dread in knowing "oh crap, here is something else that they are going to screw up".
For example, cops here are dicks, but when's the last time you had to pay one off to stop him from mugging you?
Well its not like that sort of thing is even common in Senegal either. And its not as if US doesn't have corruption or racism problems (a la Rodney King) in their police force. And America is FULL of people trying to bilk people all over the world out of their money with scams - I know, I get their spam in my inbox almost every day. Corporate corruption is rife too; its not as if Enron was an exception. Enron was only exceptional for its size. The US has corruption on ALL LEVELS. This is how it works in every country in the world, no country is special or morally superior in any way. I will grant that certain types of corruption will have lower percentages in the US than in some other countries, but all of it is still everyday occurring stuff.
There is so much dirt on both sides here, it really isn't worth it to start a mud-fight, we could both be drudging up muck for a long time about the US and various other countries, which is a silly exercise, and certainly not constructive. I'm not attacking the US, I'm just saying that the US certainly can't be claimed to be a role model when it comes to these things.
Do you think that not having broadband in ones home makes one a "charity case"? Or were you just joking and I missed it? Or are you really suggesting that charity (in general) should never be provided to other countries?
Slashdot Mirror
One famous example of this, although not sure if its true, is Albert Einstein, who was apparently fascinated as a child by the 'invisible force' that moved the needle of a compass given to him by his grandfather.
You make some good points. I am reminded of how many people have died trying to make it to the top of Mt Everest, which is just a mountain, not nearly something as 'prestiguous' as another planet in these times. Also, consider how many sailors died crossing the oceans in older times trying to reach new/interesting/different continents. And yet there was no shortage of people who were willing to try.
The difference was in those days people had a higher tolerance for loss of lives. However as you point out, we still culturally have varying tolerance in different fields (e.g. soldiers/wars). Why not exploration? These things are hazardous, and it may turn out that the only way to successfully make worthwhile space exploration achievements is to go back to the 'old' explorer mentality: cheaper, riskier. In other words, it may not be economically feasible to do it the expensive, safe way.
Essentially, you lower the barrier of space exploration so that it is more accessible to more people. "Opening space exploration to the public", in a way. (Although not entirely; but then even the old sailing expeditions had to have decent funding in the old days).
Thinking further into the future (outside the solar system), there are downsides to doing it this way though: you lose some control over regulation of behaviour of the explorers. If the barriers to entry of exploring space become low enough, then many members of the general public will start exploring space, and the culture and ethics of these people will probably revert to 'frontier culture' ethics; far out of the reach of law enforcement, and with nobody watching them, people's morals decline somewhat. It won't be the high-moralled culture you see in the crew of Star Trek; there will probably be many people who will simply exploit any innocent, unsuspecting populations they come across on other planets. But this will probably happen anyway, no matter which pioneering methods we use. Space is probably too large to ever effectively police and regulate.
but then again, who'd kill someone with one of these??
I think its intended for law enforcement officials. So its more likely to merely be intended to make police more accountable and to prevent handguns stolen from police from being usable by criminals.
I'm sure pictures from these would 'leak' onto the internet sooner or later. I wonder where the bullet would be when the picture gets taken? Still leaving the barrel? In the air? Already hit its target?
How many points of failure do you need? This gun is ridiculous
Nonsense. Think about society as a whole: it is full of these "points of failure" that you are so worried about. Our society has become incredibly complex; anyone from 1000 years ago would look at it and say "how many points of failure do you need? This society is ridiculous". We rely every day on our complex electricity infrastructure to work all the time, and by and large, it does. We rely on our complex cars, with complex electronics and complex internal combustion engines to work properly all the time, and by and large, they do. Thousands of planes take off and land every day, relying not only on complex electronics and complex mechanical systems to function perfectly, but also on all the radio communications systems and the entire ground infrastructure to work properly all the time. And by and large, they do. We rely on Internet communications bandwidth systems, telecommunications systmes, radio communications systems, cellular phones, satellites orbiting the planet, electricity system etc, and all of these things have a complex hierarchy of dependencies on one another.
If everybody thought like you, we'd all still be driving around in horse-drawn carriages, have no aeroplanes, and use candles or paraffin to light our homes.
No chance anyone who trusts their life to a firearm would ever carry one of these.
Sure, whatever. I'll bet that 50 years from now, most new handguns will come equipped with all these features, standard. And you know what? By and large, they will work. And people will say "50 years ago they laughed at the idea of these things, ha ha, how shortsighted and primitive".
People also seem to forget that this is 'just the start'. 100 to 200 years ago, guns were a lot less reliable than they are now, but technology generally improves over time. The cameras will get smaller and more reliable, the electronics will get smaller and more reliable etc. Even if its not as reliable as a conventional handgun now, it will become more reliable. This sort of thing might very well be standard on most new handguns 50 years from now.
So what? This is intended to be used by law enforcement against criminals. Which do you think your average criminal has more access to: EMP weapons, or illegal (regular) hand-guns? Guess which of those two are more effective for use against law enforcement officials?
They actually posted a *link* to a *PowerPoint* document in a Slashdot article! Worse yet, no one seems concerned.
Noone reads the articles, so they probably didn't even notice. OK, *I* didn't notice.
Well it may have been a bad analogy, but I still understood the analogy perfectly: even though I understand that there is no (known) way to further subdivide subatomic particles (which are not really particles but little fuzzy "clouds" of energy, but thats tangential). Point is, an analogy doesn't have to be perfect for it to be useful, if the people reading it are intelligent enough to extract the relevant meaning from the analogy. To attack the analogy even when its perfectly well understood is just nitpicking. I thought it was reasonable to assume that Fapestniegd probably did understand that his analogy wasn't entirely correct, but that he was using it anyway since it still had value.
*sigh*.
I think you but completely and utterly missed my point. Basic pre-teen reading skills ..
If you have to ask, you're not '3133t' enough. At least, that seems to be attitude from the slashdot editors, which I think is really childish. I didn't know who Larry Niven is either.
Maybe this is nothing to worry about by itself. But if it does turn out that the underlying cause of the change does happen to be man-induced climate change, those climate changes may have serious consequences. So its important that we study and try to understand this stuff anyway.
I have a Pentium 166 (64 MB RAM, 2GB HD) running RedHat 6.1 w kernel 2.2 set up as a dial-up router, running squid as a web proxy (with sleezeball to block ads), plus a bit of file sharing and a remote X desktop with icewm over VNC. I am pondering loading RH 8.0 onto the machine, but quite frankly, the current system works, and it works well and fast.
How is it ironic? Almost every technology ever created by man has had the potential to be used for both good and evil. No surprise here.
Redhat supported tyrannic mainland China
Oh please, if you all feel so strongly about tyrannic China, then why don't we see a boycott of Chinese products? Take a look around you and see how many products you use all the time that were "made in China". My Microsoft mouse, my Logitech mouse, my keyboard at work, some of the parts inside my computer, my Microcom modem etc, all made or assembled in China. Americans don't want to support China's tyranny, but they don't feel so strongly about it that they will stop buying China's cheaper products as a protest.
Under "who we are": "The final name is clearly very unlikely to be Roogle. I'm in the process of "de-rooglizing" the look and feel presently."
I suppose that if you live in the US, then the "default" would be to assume American if not specified. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
If it's not ready for input it shouldn't show the start button as clickable.
Indeed!
Thanks, but have done already, and its as optimal as it gets. I've gotten rid of all the excess junk (e.g. Office startup stuff), and I've turned off all unnecessary services. Unfortunately, if you run Windows, you need to have crap like anti-viruses installed, and some of the other software that I'm also required to run at work bogs down the machine.
But the kernel can say, OK, the user is trying to press a button
Just to preempt those people who are about to jump down my throat because "the kernel is not supposed to know about things like buttons", I know that, but thats not what I meant. I was speaking on a more abstract / higher level, but obviously this can still be implemented in terms of lower down OS things, e.g. the Win32 message queue and HWND system: the "OS" *does* know when, for example, when mouse click messages are posted to the DefWndProc of an HWND, and it does know which process is associated with that HWND, etc. In the Linux OS design view, this isn't part of the kernel, no. But in Windows, this is just one layer above what Linux people would classify as being "the kernel"; in Windows there is a lower degree of separation between the two.
Its not just a UI issues; it does relate to the kernel in that the kernels job is to manipulate process priorities and give CPU cycles where they "should best be given". This is actually best done at the kernel level, and NOT the GUI level, because the GUI does not know about the other non-GUI processes is "competing with". I've felt for a long time that something like this should be done in both Windows AND Linux.
Windows is TERRIBLE at this. Consider the following scenario, which most here who here run Windows XP will be able to identify with. You boot up, you've just logged in. The task bar is there on the screen, the start button there, you click on it. And nothing happens. You wait. Still nothing happens. You wait some more. You start to get annoyed and click the start button a few more times. The hard disk is grinding away while Windows XP does all sorts of "invisible stuff" in the background. The computer is about as responsive as a brick. Then after anything from 20 seconds to a minute, the start menu suddenly opens and closes rapidly in quick succession a half dozen times.
THIS IS NOT HOW COMPUTERS SHOULD BEHAVE. Its pathetic. This is a perfect example of the necessity of this. The task bar process doesn't know about all those other background processes hogging CPU after you log in; there is no elegant way for it to magically know when to set its priority temporarily high, and for how long. But the kernel can say, OK, the user is trying to press a button, we must respond, and temporarily boost the start bar (explorer.exe) process and block the others.
On desktop machines (i.e. not servers), user input is the most important thing. If the user presses a button, something must happen. The kernel should be continually shifting priorities around to where the user is focusing his/her input.
Many years back, before the "dot com boom" collapse, many affiliates were pay for impression. After a while, it became pay per click. Now most of them now only pay for actual *sales*, but it is still the advertiser's choice. I was at commission junction until very recently, and they actually dropped pay-per-view totally a year or so ago - most advertisers were pay-for-sales (not even for click throughs, had to be an actual sale). Last month they decided to start charging a $10 monthly (admin/penalty) fee for "non-performers", i.e. affiliates who were not generating actual sales. Since I was one of them I closed my account. I was basically just costing them money (as ads are delivered off their own servers) and not bringing in sales, so I don't blame them for introducing this. Basically its been getting tougher and tougher to make money off banner ads.
A large site like /. might be able to charge specific advertisers a flat rate or a rate based on number of views, but its not really the case for ordinary affiliate programs these days. But I don't know what /. does. I'm currently just blocking (most of) their ads using sleezeball on a squid proxy on one of my Linux boxes. Its amazing how few regular expressions you need to block the majority of ads on the internet!
Overall, the way I see it, is that if its MS its bad. Otherwise it's good.
This is not entirely unreasonable: if you work fairly regularly with Microsoft systems, you will sooner or later begin to realise that Microsoft quite simply has an amazing ability to completely screw up almost everything that they try to do. They regularly take nice ideas and turn them into completely shit, broken implementations. I think what you're seeing in a portion of the /. crowd is merely that sense of dread in knowing "oh crap, here is something else that they are going to screw up".
For example, cops here are dicks, but when's the last time you had to pay one off to stop him from mugging you?
Well its not like that sort of thing is even common in Senegal either. And its not as if US doesn't have corruption or racism problems (a la Rodney King) in their police force. And America is FULL of people trying to bilk people all over the world out of their money with scams - I know, I get their spam in my inbox almost every day. Corporate corruption is rife too; its not as if Enron was an exception. Enron was only exceptional for its size. The US has corruption on ALL LEVELS. This is how it works in every country in the world, no country is special or morally superior in any way. I will grant that certain types of corruption will have lower percentages in the US than in some other countries, but all of it is still everyday occurring stuff.
There is so much dirt on both sides here, it really isn't worth it to start a mud-fight, we could both be drudging up muck for a long time about the US and various other countries, which is a silly exercise, and certainly not constructive. I'm not attacking the US, I'm just saying that the US certainly can't be claimed to be a role model when it comes to these things.
Do you think that not having broadband in ones home makes one a "charity case"? Or were you just joking and I missed it? Or are you really suggesting that charity (in general) should never be provided to other countries?
West African nations are renowned on all levels for political/economic corruption.
Not to be nitpicky, but this is different from the USA, how, exactly?